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INTRODUCTION

  • DISPATCHES FROM DYSTOPIA, dispatchesfromdystopia.net, which evolved during the past eight years from the less sharply focused "Outside Agitator's Notebook," has become precisely what this blog's new title and domain name describes. It is an ongoing anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-Capitalist testimony from the Dystopia that Capitalism has made of our world. It's epicenter is the post-humanitarian United States of America: our species' self-inflicted Moron Nation and its empire of global-conquest malevolence, the de facto Fourth Reich, the true birthdate of which will eventually be recognized – if indeed our species somehow miraculously survives the present era – as 22 November 1963. ¶Dispatches thus chronicles our relentless subjugation by Capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery and – just as Capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism – as it now matures into a Nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the details of what is occurring, DfD shows how ours is a Dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's Zieg-Heil-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the genocidal, ultimately ecocidal atrocities the Capitalist Ruling Class perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “Exceptionalism.” ¶Why “USian” rather than American? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or Nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist USiaNazi enslavement. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which Capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, too each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – Nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn. ¶But what then is Capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, its only possible offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), Capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation, filth, deadly danger of untreated disease and constant fear of enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care. ¶Ultimately Capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male One Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of Capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under Capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of Nazi governance. Not that We the (formerly exempt) People should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the Capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all the Capitalist victim realms abroad. ¶Moreover our plight is of our own making. We the People long ago surrendered to our Capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the Capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp. ¶Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by Capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide.  ¶Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly Nazi puppet government. And now, in the person of Donald Trump and his appointees, the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, the people who by their prideful ignorance and hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world. But in these times our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the Capitalist “education” system; by Capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the physical and psychic terrorism of Capitalism's manufactured crises. ¶Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. And as it says in a breathtakingly apt, wrenchingly poignant anthem grown increasingly popular far beyond its video-game origin, “shadows fall and hope is gone; steel your heart; the dawn will come.”

For More Information...

Links relevant to Introduction

Fire Survivors

  • After the Demonstration Failed
    These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including two books in progress and all the associated research. Some of these photos shown here escaped the flames because they were with me in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the One Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost and what might have been. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

  • Goddess emergent (1), 1968 (blue variant c. 2009)
    In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfilment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

Graffiti: a Sampler

  • Gun Graffiti
    When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the mammalian practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Faces of the Fight

  • Health Care For All!
    Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of health care reform's opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally set for Lakewood City Hall, the event was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

RELEVANT WEBSITES

  • Americans United for Separation of Church and State
    A vital website that is often our only source of accurate information about the terrifying effort to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States.
  • Best Site for Suppressed Assassination Facts
    The late Mae Brussell was our most relentless researcher into the murder of President John Kennedy and many other such outrages. Her legacy is a damning list of the USian Empire's darkest secrets.
  • Best, Most Thorough Documentation on the CIA's Destruction of the 1960s Counterculture
    Ms. Brussel outdid herself in her nobody-dares-publish-it investigative report exposing how the CIA's Operation Chaos destroyed the 1960s Counterculture. (My assumption is the Agency, with its Ivy-League analysts and their knowledge of pagan mythology, recognized the Counterculture's anti-patriarchal, resurrection-of-the-Goddess direction, understood it as a far greater threat to Capitalism than Marxism and responded with the murderous efficiency inherited from Gestapo predecessors.)
  • Communist Labor Party
    Communism as it is evolving in the United States after the murder of the American Dream and the slaying of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.
  • Communist Labor Party's Harry Bridges Club (Facebook)
    Communism as it is evolving in Tacoma, Washington.
  • Consortium News
    Superb reporting and analysis. Founder/Editor Robert Parry exposed Reagan's Iran-Contra scheming and has been persecuted by the capitalists ever since.
  • der Spiegel
    Mainstream German newspaper that is often a valuable source of news about Western European politics.
  • Global Research
    A genuinely independent news site -- neither definitively Left nor Right -- that often covers stories suppressed by U.S. Mainstream Media, which (let us never forget), is owned by the same One Percenters who own the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties and thereby control all U.S. governance at every level.
  • Gun Owners of America
    Fanatically hard-Right (and often ChristoFascist as well), it is nevertheless the best source for information about the One Percent's efforts to forcibly disarm the U.S. 99 Percent.
  • International Marxist Archive
    All of Marxism's defining texts defiantly uploaded to the Internet by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as its final contribution to humanity's eternal struggle for economic democracy -- without which there is no democracy at all.
  • Popular Resistance
    A daily newsletter featuring essential tactical and strategic analysis plus vitally informative reports of news suppressed by the "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Rewire
    Probably the most in-depth coverage of women's issues, LGBTQ issues and general human rights issues available on the U.S. Internet today, bolstered by decidedly professional reportage and editing.
  • RT
    Formerly "Russia Today," it accurately covers U.S. news the "mainstream media" propaganda machine routinely suppresses. Its notable work includes the nation's best coverage of the Occupy Movement (2011-2012), and the ongoing struggles of Black Lives Matter, Water Protectors and other such groups against the Empire's now-openly-fascist policies of homeland governance.
  • Second Amendment Foundation
    Unmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.
  • Socialist Worker
    An informative Marxist website in the United States, with news reporting and analysis that is usually far superior to anything fed us by capitalism's "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Southern Poverty Law Center
    Best source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, ChristoFascist and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.
  • TASS, the Russian Wire Service
    Vital reading, especially now that the USian Empire's plans for global conquest have rekindled the so-called Cold War.
  • Theocracy Watch
    Cornell University's in-depth source on the escalating campaign to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the USian Homeland. It is flawed only by its refusal to recognize the Democratic (sic) Party's mostly clandestine collaboration with the openly theocratic Republicans -- a collaboration revealed in frightening detail by Jeff Sharlet's "The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" (Harper: 2008).
  • TruthOut
    Generally reliable crowd-funded news site sometimes featuring cogent sociological analysis by Henry Giroux. Discussion thread's potential limited by Discus, which discourages posting of comments written off-site.
  • Ultra Violet
    Perhaps the most powerful racially integrated gender-equality organization in the United States.
  • World Socialist Web Site
    The day's news, typically with the most in-depth Marxist analysis available on the U.S. Internet -- this despite constant interference by the Empire's privatized, for-profit censorship apparatus.
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War on Seniors

22 March 2018

18-22 March 2018: Could "Russiagate" Be a Red Herring to Distract from a Domestic Scandal That's Infinitely Worse?

Demonstrator 1971 better print  This image feels as relevant now as it did when I made it in 1971. (Photo by Loren Bliss © 1971, 2018)

*****

AN EXPATRIATE NEW YORKER acutely aware (as many New Yorkers are) of the multiple connections that link organized crime (Cosa Nostra, the Irish mob, the Russian mob, etc. ad nauseam) to the construction industry, the political establishment and capitalism in general, I cannot but wonder if the so-called "Russiagate" investigation is perhaps a red herring to distract from an infinitely more disturbing story of homegrown corruption and malfeasance.

Something of this sort is indeed implied by Coleen Rowley's thought-provoking Consortiumnews.com essay "McCabe: a War on (or in) the FBI," especially her reminder that  "both presidential campaigns (were) under under serious criminal investigation in the weeks before the 2016 election."

Certainly both candidates have been linked to organized crime in ways that -- including even the Democratic (sic) Party's Geraldine Ferraro fiasco in 1984* -- have no precedent in my lifetime, which began in 1940 and includes 30 years on daily and weekly newspapers and monthly international trade journals.

For a revealing trip through a genuinely astounding number of under-reported or suppressed stories, merely Google, without the quotation marks here grammatically mandated for clarity, "trump mafia connections"; "clinton mafia connections"; and "clinton dixie mafia connections."

The Trump material contains a BillMoyers.com report by Todd Gitlin that questions why allegations of Trump's criminal connections are so often suppressed or at best downplayed. This Google anthology also includes a wealth of other damning reports.

While the Clinton material is mostly from rightist sources -- which means it should be carefully fact-checked rather than discarded out of hand -- I found three bits of gold amidst the dross. One was published by The Progressive Review on 17 December 2017, "The Clinton stories the media didn't cover" (caps and lower case as in original). The second appeared in The (NY) Daily News of 30 October 2016, "Bill and Hillary Clinton lead diabolical, influence-peddling organized crime syndicate, FBI's former NYC boss says" (caps and lc as in original). The third, a sort of overview of the Empire as a global crime syndicate, is "The Bush-Clinton Mafia," in Counterpunch on 16 March 2015.

Thus my "Russiagate" conjecture: that it is a fake scandal behind which is concealed what is perhaps the most diabolical, most terrifying, most potentially apocalyptic scandal in our species' history -- that of an entire empire become nothing more than the loot-collector (aka "bag man") for organized crime.

Indeed the application of Occam's Razor suggests this is the one most likely explanation of the myriad horrors that have befallen us all.
__________________
*Note also Ferraro's son's involvement in the cocaine trade on a level that probably would not have been possible without mob connections.

*****               

Internet Censorship Partly Driven By Mainstream Media Profiteering

"Google announced Wednesday that it is partnering with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times and other major news outlets to reinforce their monopoly over news coverage by blocking independent news organizations...the latest step in a protracted campaign on the part of the major technology companies, working with the Democratic Party and the US intelligence agencies, to censor the Internet."

*****    

Death for Drug Dealing: Sessions Makes It Official

"Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed states in a memo released Wednesday to pursue the death penalty in certain drug-related cases as an answer to the opioid epidemic—a plan President Trump first announced this week in New Hampshire."

*****                 

Supreme Court Will Determine if Christians Can Legally Lie to Women

"As the U.S. Supreme Court begins hearing  NIFLA v. Becerra on Tuesday, we need to remember what is at stake. This is a case that could redefine accountability regarding providing false medical information and misleading women about their reproductive health choices, all in the name of religious freedom."

*****         

Hypocritical Christians Gleefully Forgive Trump's Boasts of Sin

"With the sexual harassment allegations against Trump covered regularly in the news, the question is why 'values voters' are now willing to disregard character when it formerly held center stage in their proclamations and voting decisions...what is (now) more important than Trump's personal life and personality are his...anti-abortion stances, his promotion of a white Christian nation, his rabid anti-immigration position and his anti-Islamic fervor." Comment: once again, in the JesuNazi U.S. as in Nazi Germany, we see that fanatical bigots will follow their Führer no matter how monstrous his behavior.

*****      

Will Wisconsin's Newest Attack on Impoverished People Go Nationwide?

"Critics and supporters of Wisconsin's new policies (targeting low income people) agree that they could have implications outside of the state, especially now that Walker's politics are reflected in the White House."

*****            

Naomi Klein at "Democracy Now" on Puerto Rico's Escalating Class War 

"Six months since Hurricane Maria battered the island of Puerto Rico, the island is the site of a pitched battle between wealthy investors -- particularly from the technology industry -- and everyday Puerto Ricans fighting for a place in their island's future." Comment: Klein dare not say it, lest she be openly persecuted as an enemy of the state, but perhaps -- due to this clash of clearly defined, irremediably hostile ideologies (Ayn Rand moral imbecility versus community-based socialism) -- the Second American Revolution will start in Puerto Rico.

*****                

Fascists Recapturing El Salvador Via Elections

"Already beset by an antagonistic judiciary, a right-wing majority in the legislature, and a hostile corporate media, the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) enter the 2019 presidential campaign with a discontented base and an invigorated opposition as right-wing elites reclaim power throughout the region...(with all FMLN's gains) imperiled and as-yet-unrealized parts of their program, like the partial decriminalization of abortion...set back by years."

*****           

More on the Murder of Marielle Franco and Why It Is Internationally Significant

"The assassination of Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco sent huge crowds of outraged mourners into the streets of Brazil, the western hemisphere’s “blackest” nation, where more than half of the 210 million inhabitants describe themselves as preto (black) or pardo (partly African). The 38 year-old member of the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) and her driver were ambushed by hit men firing police-issued (ammunition). See also: "The fact is that, consistent with its ugly history, Brazil maintains a regime of racial terror that does not differ from the (U.S. and South African) past and present system of racial domination." And this: "By murdering activists who were striving to cross into mainstream politics, the assassins send a message that...landless people should avoid becoming leaders." Comment: I cannot but wonder to what extent these murders are encouraged -- and perhaps even ordered -- by U.S. imperial authorities. 

*****            

Though Europe Seems to March Rightward, It's Not (Yet) Goose-Stepping

"Center-left parties all over Europe bailed out banks and financial speculators, while inflicting ruinous austerity measures on their own populations to pay for it. It became difficult for most people to distinguish between the policies of the center-right and the center-left."

*****

Sanders, in Major Turnabout, Condemns U.S. Imperialism and War-Mongering 

"In a wide-ranging speech viewed by more than 11,000 people from over 30 countries, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on (18 March) commemorated the 15th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq by highlighting its devastating consequences and issuing an urgent call for a global agenda that pursues 'peace, not war' and 'development, not destruction.'" Comment: This appears to be a substantial turn-about for Sanders, who has been repeatedly (and legitimately) criticized by the Real Left for his support of U.S. imperialism and warmongering. If the turn-about is genuine, it could mark the beginning of a new age in U.S. politics. That's why it's reported here. See also: "The Sanders 'hope'...is so fierce because Capitalism has become a hopeless place."

*****          

At Last, the AIPAC Sacred Cow is No Longer Sacred

“...criticisms (of AIPAC, the leading Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) are finally showing up in the mainstream press...Notable among them is a report in The Washington Post...saying that AIPAC was born to rally American Jews to stand shoulder to shoulder behind Israeli “lies” about a massacre of Palestinians, back in 1953. And two angry pieces in the Jewish press decrying AIPAC’s blackout policy on coverage of its gatherings.”

*****          

As Predicted, Democrats Betray, Abandon DACA Immigrants 

"Congressional Democratic leaders have decided that there will be no protection for DACA recipients—the young undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children—in the omnibus budget bill that must pass the House and Senate by midnight Friday night." Comment: Once again the Democratic (sic) Party reveals itself as nothing more than a band of betrayers.

*****   

How the Democrats Betrayed New Jersey's Teachers

"The struggle of Jersey City teachers exposes the role of the Democratic Party, which supports the assault on teachers and public education no less than the Republicans. At issue is a bill, known as Chapter 78, which forces public employees to pay up to 35 percent of their medical insurance premiums and eliminates fully funded pensions for future teachers. It was passed with the backing of the Democratic-controlled state legislature in 2011."

*****               

Trump's EPA Is as Genocidally Racist as the Rest of His Regime

"The case of the Arrowhead Landfill in Uniontown (Alabama) is tragically just one of countless examples of environmental racism: the tendency for Black, Latinx and Native communities to face disproportionate amounts of pollution and hazardous conditions."

*****       

New Details On Our Subjugation by the Big Lie of U.S. "Democracy"

"In what was fated by the Great Recession and by the wealth- and power-serving performance of the centrist, arch-neoliberal Obama administration to be an anti-establishment election, the PPC (Permanent Political Class) Democrats’ strategy was a formula for the installation of a malignant and moronic white-nationalist atop the world’s most powerful nation."

*****                  

Hospital Refuses Dying Man Treatment, Has Him Arrested for Trespassing

"'With a heart rate of 116 and complaining of an excruciating headache, my nephew, Marconia Kessee, was turned away from the hospital and arrested by the Norman Police Department for trespassing,” Michael Washington said. “Two hours later my nephew laid upon the cold concrete floor naked and dead.'" Comment: once more we see how U.S. healthcare as a privilege of wealth, depicted here in genocidal action.  The same thing might have happened to me in 1963 at the hands of the Ayn Rand Christians who run the Oak Ridge (Tenn.) Hospital of the Methodist Church: I was dying of pneumonia -- temperature 105F and delerious -- but the hospital refused to admit me because I did not have written proof of insurance. However my then-girlfriend saved my life by contacting my editor, who forcefully intervened on my behalf and compelled the hospital to admit and treat me.  Point being, what was done to Mr. Kessee is not an anomaly. It is in fact the U.S. norm -- and the Ruling Class will do everything in its power to keep it that way, not the least because it's (another) post-deathcamp method for getting rid of "surplus people."

*****              

Authorities Say Austin Bomber's Motives Remain Unclear

"...without more information about (the Austin package bomber's) motive...it’s impossible to know how (his home-schooled, evangelical white Christian) background influenced his violence, if it was an influence at all." See also: "It is well known by now that 'terrorism' is often used by American officials as a dog whistle to refer to acts of political violence carried out by Muslims or by minorities, and that typically white violence of a terroristic sort is characterized by other adjectives (the poor things often seem to be off their meds or at most involved in 'hate crimes.')   Comment: lack of information on the bomber's motives is thus hardly surprising.

*****          

Tacoma Approves Defense Fund for Undocumented Immigrants 

"In response to growing community concerns about Tacoma residents facing deportation, the Tacoma City Council authorized the creation of a Deportation Defense Fund to assist with their legal defense services...(and) the City of Tacoma made an initial allocation of $50,000...(while) local community efforts (have raised) an additional $2,000." Comment: as sometimes happens, Tacoma, Washington walks the walk as well as talks the talk.

*****         

Social Worker Says Biggest Challenge Is Now Saving Seniors from Homelessness

"(Seattle) social worker Denise Malm’s newest agenda is keeping her elderly clients out of homelessness." Comment: when you're old and poor, gentrification is just another word for genocide.

*****     

An Interesting and Informative Report on Cuban Self-Government

"Voting on March 11 for Cuba’s National Assembly was newsworthy mostly because the body, which convenes on April 19, is charged with selecting a new Cuban President. Current President Raul Castro has served the two five-year terms he is allowed. The new president will be Cuba’s first with no personal participation in struggles leading to the victory of Cuba’s 1959 revolution. Castro’s departure signifies a generational transfer of political leadership." Comment: now, as the Empire escalates its efforts to re-enslave Cuba, is when we will learn whether Cuban socialism  is strong enough to withstand the onslaught.

*****         

Approaching the Apocalypse I: Flirting with Thermonuclear Extinction

"if some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of Homo sapiens, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before nuclear weapons) and NWE (the nuclear weapons era). The latter era, of course, opened on August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but — so the evidence suggests — not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts."   Comment: I am no fan of Chomsky, the Empire's token socialist, but in this essay he is right on.

*****            

Approaching the Apocalypse II: The Democrats Won't Save Us

"It is obvious that the Democrats will provide some relief to a disturbed populace. This relief will be largely symbolic, but not wholly...If the world was to run as is with Democrats in place of Republicans we would still become extinct in the near future. If not by nuclear annihilation, then by climate change. Inequality would continue to grow. War, police and prisons would continue to increase. Millions of refugees would still be left to die. Our entire ecosystem and our means to live would still crumble. The other animals within this ecosystem would still be defined by the profit they can create for the human race. We all know this. Every best selling novel these days is about the apocalypse or the post-apocalypse..."

*****                        

Busting the Myths: Early American History We Need to Know

"...in 1763, at the close of the French and Indian War, the vast majority of colonists saw themselves as Englishmen and Englishwomen, invested in and proud of their British Empire. "How did (at least some) North American colonists evolve from a proud celebration of empire into (a) riotous, rebellious mob?...It’s an important question, actually, and it deals with an issue hardly mentioned in standard textbooks."

*****         

White Supremacy Nullified: Some Early Britons Were Probably Dark Skinned

"A new genetic analysis of DNA from the Cheddar Man fossil, excavated in 1903 from Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England, suggests that at least some of the early modern human inhabitants of the British Isles had a mixture of traits different from later populations...includ(ing) dark skin, curly dark brown hair, and blue or green eyes...(These findings are) is consistent with other recent research which indicates...(skin color) is actually controlled by a multiplicity of genes, leading to a wide range of phenotypic expressions, and that simplistic racial classifications based on skin tone are scientifically invalid.  See also: "...racial conceptions regarding skin color and its supposed marking of distinct groupings of human beings have no scientific foundation." Comment: yet another reason the JesuNazis despise science and hate scientists. 

LB/18-22 March 2018

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Posted at 11:57 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Censorship, Current Affairs, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, JesuNazism, Nazism, fascism, Memoirs, Photography, Religion, Science, War on Disabled People , War on Minorities, War on Poor People, War on Seniors , War on Women , Web/Tech, Weblogs | | Comments (0)

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16 March 2018

11-15 March 2018: Mothering the Revolution (See Story Below)

*****   *****   *****   *****   *****  

Trump-Pests Blaring: More on JesuNazi Infestation in Tacoma Area

Making a JesuNazi Banner - CopyRocky Place of Patriot Front at work on a JesuNazi Banner. (Photo courtesy of Unicorn Riot)

   *

By Ryley Knowles
WASHINGTON FRONT TWEETED on 4 March that Patriot Front had once again been in Seattle, sometime late at night on 3 March. Washington Front posted two photographs that show five Patriot Front members holding up a blue banner that reads “Reclaim America” while waving four highway-safety flares.

This “Reclaim America” flash demo marks the fourth time Patriot Front has been active in Seattle. Assuming there was a sixth unseen person who took the photograph, we can say there are at least six active Patriot Front members in Washington state.

On 5 March, The (Tacoma) News Tribune reported that Patriot Front posters were found on the campus of Tacoma Community College, Tacoma, Washington. On the same day stickers for Identity Evropa, another white nationalist organization, were found in University of Washington, Tacoma. Patriot Front’s postering of downtown Tacoma and the surrounding area had occurred two weeks earlier.

Both Washington Front and Patriot Front Tweeted about the hit on Tacoma Community College. However, Patriot Front did not mention the Seattle flash demo on it’s official Twitter.

In 2017, Patriot Front was active every few months in Washington state. In 2018, Patriot Front seems to aiming for the rate of at least two propaganda attacks per month.

Also on 5 March, Unicorn Riot released an in-depth report on Patriot Front, which included leaked online chat logs and audio recordings. The chat logs and audio were taken from Patriot Front’s Front and Center server on Discord, a voice and text chat service for gamers.

On Front and Center, two users, Goodest_Boy and Rocky Place mention Washington, Gig Harbor, Tacoma, and Port Orchard, with pictures from posterings in Gig Harbor and at Olympic College in Bremerton. In addition, they posted pictures showing them creating the banner used during the banner hangings in Gig Harbor and Bellevue.

Goodest_Boy shared a picture of himself, hiding his face behind one of his propaganda posters.

Rocky Place identifies as a Christian, is rabidly anti-Semitic, and mentions work as a substitute teacher. Connor MA expresses hope to become a full time teacher and use that position to spread fascist ideas.

On 10 November 2017, Rocky Place wrote, “I'm showing the most kiked movie I've ever seen to a bunch of middle schoolers and I hate it...it is very depressing. But I hope as real teacher I will have more power to change to the curriculum.”

*****

  

Elsewhere, Frantic Fascists Fanatically Flay Freedom (i.e., U.S. Politics as Usual)

"U.S. ruling class politics under late stage capitalism and imperial decline...have nothing to offer the masses of people except unrelenting austerity at home and endless wars abroad...(which is why) We will have to fight to keep them from blowing us all up in rich man's despair."

*****                

"President Trump’s nomination of CIA Deputy Director Gina Haspel to be the new director returns the country to the bad old days of torture and secret prisons." See also: "Placing herself firmly on the far-right end of this spectrum on Tuesday was Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.), daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney...tweeted a proud defense of the CIA's euphemistically-named torture program."

*****   

"...the central purpose of the campaign by the tech giants, the US government and the mass media to censor the Internet...is the suppression of...the way workers have used the Internet to organize their struggles..."

***** 

"If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state...Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced."

*****    

'"President Trump now seeks to activate (the Secret Service), one of our federal government's most secretive law enforcement agencies to depress and discourage minority voter participation in our midterm elections'...(mobilizing his potential modern-day Gestapo by a) 'provision quietly inserted in a Homeland Security Department reauthorization bill.'" See also: "More than a dozen top election officials across the country are raising concerns about a provision in a Homeland Security Department reauthorization bill that would allow President Trump to dispatch Secret Service agents to polling places." And this: "to have federal agents showing up in largely Hispanic areas...The potential for mischief...is enormous."

*****

"Raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have increased drastically since Donald Trump moved into the White House (and)... A number of these high-profile arrests are particularly despicable, from news that ICE seized a woman after she reported her husband for domestic abuse, to the arrest of a handicapped girl just out of surgery." Comment: a pogrom by any other name.

*****  

"Escalating the attack on immigrant communities and anyone who would stand with the undocumented, the Trump administration announced in March that it would sue the state of California for providing legal sanctuary to undocumented immigrants."

*****

"President Donald Trump's recent threats to execute drug dealers are reportedly materializing in his final plan to combat the opioid addiction epidemic...thereby (escalating the regime's policy of) targeting low-income and black communities." Comment: we cannot but wonder if this foretells the regime's intended policy toward licensed dealers in legal marijuana states.

 

*****      

 

 

Is It a Coup -- or Just a Foul Nesting-Place for Wanton Warbirds? 

"..in this millennial moment of encroaching authoritarianism, the mindset and language of the coup is...being employed from inside the White House..."  Comment: is there any difference between de facto rule by a cabal of generals and a military coup? A vital analysis of present-day Imperial politics.

*****    

"President Trump('s)...generals – Mattis, Kelly, and McMaster – are all hyper-interventionists bent on perpetual American exceptionalist hegemony...(who see) only two countries standing in the way of a new Pax Americana: China and Russia."  

*****              

 

"Change We Can Believe In": the Democrats Out-Warmonger the Republicans

"...as soon as the announcement (of talks between Trump and North Korea's Kim) was made...Hillary Clinton, whose miscalculations and hubris put Trump in the White House...whose miscalculations and hubris put Trump in the White House...warned of danger should Trump speak to Kim. She was joined by Democratic hawk pundit Rachel Maddow who sputtered her disapproval of a possible rapprochement...Elizabeth Warren, another faux progressive, added her disapproval...(Clinton and fellow Democrats are) motivated by fear of a Trump success but...(like the Republicans are) also firm believers in American imperialism."

*****  

"The root cause of the unending string of mass violence in America lies in the capitalist system and the nightmarish world that it has created"...(that's why) protests addressed to the Democratic and Republican Parties will fall on deaf ears." Comment: an excellent, thought-provoking analysis.

*****

 

Genocide by Poisoned Water: After Flint, Is Standing Rock Next?

"...preliminary hearings continue to expose the basic truth that a massive social crime was perpetrated against the population of Flint, carried out by both political parties and significant sections of the corporate and financial elite...to enrich private contractors and wealthy bondholders." Comment: white-supremacist Capitalism in genocidal action, whether Democratic (sic) or Republican. 

*****

"The Standing Rock Tribe argues in a report that thousands of barrels of oil a day could leak into the Missouri River and not be detected by the company's equipment... (thereby poisoning the tribe's) water supply."  Comment: the unspoken genocidal intent in the pipeline's route thus becomes undeniable.

*****  

 

Capitalism: Why There's No "Care" in U.S. "Healthcare"

"...with $700 billion per year now being pumped into the Pentagon by U.S. taxpayers, military spending consumes 54 of the federal discretionary budget...(and) the military’s share will surge to 65 percent by fiscal 2023...(which) with the huge budget deficits that will be produced by the GOP tax cuts for the wealthy...will almost certainly lead to devastating slashes in federal spending for education, healthcare, parks and recreation facilities, food distribution, jobs, infrastructure, and other public programs." Comment: the fact this is in sneering defiance of the "2 out of 3" USians who "Oppose Increasing U.S. Military Spending" is merely more proof the whole notion of USian "democracy" is the biggest Big Lie in human history.

*****  

"...current pharmaceutical pricing agreements between insurers and drug manufacturers have saddled people living with serious or long-term illnesses (such as diabetes) with the cost of keeping premiums lower for everyone else." Comment: post-deathcamp genocide for those of us who are sick, big discounts for those who are healthy -- another manifestation of Capitalism's healthcare as a privilege of wealth rather than socialism's assertion it is a universal human right.

*****

"Medicare households spend a higher proportion of their incomes on health care coverage, services, and drugs than non-Medicare households...nearly 60 million older adults and people with disabilities each year...the vast majority (of whom) cannot afford to pay more for care. In 2016, half of all beneficiaries had incomes below $26,200, and one-quarter had incomes below $15,250."

***** 

"For the general population, the flu represents a serious health concern. But for (homeless people) -- who deal with higher rates of chronic illness, fewer resources and crowded conditions in shelters -- catching the flu can be a matter of life or death." Comment: Need I say "genocide" one more time?

*****

 

And Lest We Delude Ourselves "It Cannot Happen Here"...

"In 1944, Eva Mozes Kor and her family were transported by cattle car to the Auschwitz concentration camp...torn away from her parents and all but one of her siblings, whom she never saw again...Eva and her twin sister Miriam were...transferred to the hands of Joseph Mengele, the notorious doctor of Auschwitz." (With thanks to TigerLille1.) Two comments: this is why Israel's present-day brutality. though unforgivable, is also understandable; it is also why, any time our fellow USians try to soothe themselves with the master-race dogma of exceptionalism, we should forcefully remind them of the Tuskegee Experiment. 

*****     

 

 

Dystopian Miscellany: Racism, Corruption, Death and Doom

"Since 1968, the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has collected...Data on disparities in discipline...(proving)  Black students are twice as likely to be expelled...(as) white children...also twice as likely as white students to be disciplined by law enforcement." Comment: anyone who doubts the malicious magnitude of USian white supremacy need only look at how Black children are methodically victimized by the nation's schools, where 80 percent of the teachers are white and -- assuming statistics from the 2016 elections hold true -- nearly two-thirds of whom are conscious racists.

*****    

"Under Mayor Rudy Guiliani, (fines for jaywalking) went up from $2 to $50 and, under current Mayor Bill de Blasio, went up to $250...disproportionately target(ing) people of color."

*****    

"A Truthout investigation points toward powerful forces in the (Washington) state government actively collaborating with the Department of Defense." See also: earlier Truthout story linked in January (scroll down to "Urgent: Olympia Democrats Consider Granting Imperial Military Commanders Absolute Authority Over State's Land Use Policies.") Comment: that is why we are literally the most target-rich environment in the imperial homeland – and why millions of us will die, instantly if we are lucky, slowly and horribly by radiation poisoning if we are not, in any nuclear exchange.

*****      

"More information has emerged in recent days shedding light on the man accused of shooting three employees of a nonprofit after taking them hostage at a veterans home in the affluent Napa Valley town of Yountville, in Northern California on Friday."

*****    

"Humans must leave Earth in the next 200 years if we want to survive...(warned) Professor Stephen Hawking in the months before his death...(Hawking) believed that life on Earth could be wiped out by a disaster such as an asteroid strike, AI (artificial intelligence) or an alien invasion." (With thanks to TigerLille1.) See also: "in addition to being brilliant, Hawking was funny."

*****     

 

A Global Sisterhood Mobilizes to Save Us from Ourselves
Women May Have Birthed the First Civilizations; Now -- with Patriarchy and Capitalism Threatening Our Existence -- Women May Be Mothering Our Future 

Precisely as one would expect under patriarchy and its misogynistic descendants -- among them Abrahamic Religion, Capitalism, fascism, Nazism and JesuNazism -- to hypothesize that the original face of human society was female is to invite condemnation as a heretic by academics and men of god alike. But we heretics nevertheless persist, bolstered by increasingly supportive evidence, which provides an optimistic context for the events reported in the following post-International-Women's-Day anthology:

"Thousands of women met in Zapatista territory (to organize) against capitalist and patriarchal society."  For more details, see: "the meeting was open to 'all rebellious women around the world' who 'struggle against the patriarchal and chauvinist capitalist system.'"

*****  

"Drawing on...(the example of) Latin American feminist movements, we should ask how the abuses of power identified by #MeToo are part of a larger constellation of violence and coercion...(and) would it be possible to find a common cause between low wage, mostly Black and migrant, university housekeepers facing an abusive and violent manager and female students on the same campus facing high rates of sexual assault?"

*****   

"Let’s take #MeToo where it hasn’t gone: to speak for the girls, boys, women, and men raped due to US Wars..."  

*****

"More than 5 million workers have taken part in Spain’s first nationwide 'feminist strike..." 

*****          

"We’ve done better with our daughters but still find ourselves right here, where male puberty opens a lifelong season of sexual aggression, and girls struggle for the voice to call it off...the enlightened new pope...says he’s sorry, but women still can’t lead his church, or control our reproduction. In heterosexual weddings, religious or secular, the patriarch routinely 'gives' his daughter to the groom, after which she’s presented to the audience as 'Mrs New Patriarch,' to joyous applause...(as) most modern brides still embrace the ritual erasure of their identities, taking the legal name of a new male head of household, as enslaved people used to do when they came to a new plantation owner."  Comment: Heartfelt applause and a clinched-fist salute to Ms. Kingsolver for her recognition of the patriarchal savagery at the very core of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), and therefore at the very core of Capitalism and its apocalyptic assault on our Mother Earth.

*****  

"When superstorms make landfall, they often exacerbate existing inequities...(forcing women to)...pay a higher price during a storm and in its aftermath, with their lives and then with their labor."  Comment: more to the point, such disasters bring out the worst aspects of patriarchy and -- by the courage and resilience of women -- demonstrate for us the best aspects of matriarchy and underscore the evidence that supports the hypothesis women mothered the first civilizations.

*****        

"Never before in German history have two governing parties been led by women. The country's political stability will now hinge on the relationship between Andrea Nahles and Angela Merkel. Comment: Will these women adopt the malicious savagery of patriarchy, as Hillary Clinton has so obviously done? Or will their partnership energize, however subtly, a transformation of German society? We should watch carefully what obtains...

******

 

And, Yes, Beyond the Women's Realm, a Few Candles Do Flicker

"Venezuela's state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) is suing several U.S. energy trading firms for allegedly bribing corrupt officials and rigging bid proceedings, the corporation's defense lawyer has announced."

*****

“The (Koch Brothers') event was one big bait and switch...gospel music, then...praise (for) the everlasting goodness of oil and gas...exploiting the ignorance many communities have about climate change...(But some Black Christians liken) that gospel concert to the Biblical story of Judas accepting 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus...(and for them) environmentalism has become a biblical mission.” Comment: even in church, our Black comrades lead the way.

*****  

"Ultimately, efforts like Fight for $15 will be successful (only) to the extent that they shed the ideology of reform and the misconception that justice can be achieved solely by working within the existing political and economic system." Comment: now even the bourgeois pseudo-Left has begun to recognize the need for revolution. 

*****    

"While gun control was a major focus...some of the...most spirited walkout organizing came from youth who were more concerned with the conditions that incubate intra-community violence, and how those conditions are maintained and enforced by the state." Comment: thus are minds opened to the necessity for socialist revolution.

*****  

"While the Parkland shooting (at a wealthy, mostly white high school)  has dominated national headlines...far less coverage was (provided by unmistakably racist media) to the death of (an African-American student named) Courtlin Arrington." Comment: racism in the Mainstream Media propaganda machine is as oppressive as racism every else in the  white supremacist United States -- precisely why the foregoing alternative media coverage is so vital, and precisely why it is being targeted not just by the regime but by the regime's Capitalism owners.

*****     

"Implicit in the First Amendment is a fundamental belief that the governed are far more capable than the government of distinguishing truth from falsehood..." Comment: vital history we all need to know.

***** 

 

Book Review

"In Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (AK Press: 2017)...Shane Burley offers examples of successful intersectional movements to counter the growing scourge...(in the following excerpt, focusing) on two counter-fascist campaigns, one in Oregon and one in Wyoming." 

LB/15 March 2018

  -30-

Posted at 01:08 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Civilian disarmament , Current Affairs, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, JesuNazism, Nazism, fascism, Memoirs, Photography, Religion, War on Disabled People , War on Minorities, War on Poor People, War on Seniors , War on Women , Web/Tech, Weblogs | | Comments (2)

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08 March 2018

1-8 March 2018: Russia May Have Saved Us All (Story Below)

***   ***   ***   ***   ***

JesuNazis Blighting Tacoma-Seattle Area Since Trump/Pence Victory

Fascist posters map 8 Mar 18 image - Copy
MAP KEY: (1)-Vanguard America posters, Bellevue College, Bellevue, 13 March 2017 (2)-Vanguard America posters, statue of Lenin, Seattle, 1 June 2017; (3)-Vanguard America posters, newspaper honor boxes in Seattle, 17 June 2017; (4)-Matthew S. Holland recruits for Vanguard America and harasses customers and security, Kitsap Mall, Silverdale. 9 Sept.2017; (5)-Patriot Front posters, Olympic College, Bremerton, 6.October 2017; (6)-Patriot Front posters, Port Orchard City Hall, Port Orchard, 8 Nov. 2017; (7)-Patriot Front banner hanging, I-90 overpass, Bellevue, 16 Nov. 2017; (8)-Patriot Front posters, Gig Harbor, 17 Nov. 2017; (9)-Patriot Front posters, statue of Lenin, Seattle; 3 Dec. 2017; (10)-Patriot Front posters, University of Washington, Seattle, 4 Dec. 2017; (11)-Patriot Front posters, Gig Harbor 30 Jan. 2018; (12)-Patriot Front posters, Gig Harbor, 08 Feb. 2018; (13)-Patriot Front posters, Tacoma, 19 Feb. 2018. (Map annotations and key by Ryley Knowles)

By Ryley Knowles
AT THE END of February the white Christian nationalist group Patriot Front posted their propaganda in Tacoma, Washington, but this was only the most recent of an ongoing series of incidents in Western Washington that began roughly a year ago -- not long after the Trump/Pence victory brought fascists of all sorts scurrying like roaches from under the proverbial woodwork. Here's a chronology: 

  • Washington Front, Patriot Front’s Washington-based twitter, was launched on November 2016. The group's Twitter profile contains a link to Patriot Front’s website http://bloodandsoil.com/.  

  • On 13 March 2017, Vanguard America (the original group that Patriot Front splintered off from) left posters at Bellevue College, Bellevue.

  • On 1 June 2017, the statue of Lenin in Seattle was papered with Vanguard America posters.

  • On 17 June 2017, Seattle was hit a second time. Vanguard America posters were left in the honor boxes of The Stranger, a liberal Seattle-based alternative newspaper.

  • On 9 Sept. 2017 at the Kitsap Mall in Silverdale, Washington, a 28 year old man named Matthew S. Holland was arrested for harassing a female customer about her “green card” and threatening to kill a security guard. Holland told police he was a white supremacist and recruiting for Vanguard America (misreported in one source as “Vanguard National”). Holland is currently on trial in Kitsap County for two counts of malicious harassment. For more details, go here,  here and here. 

  • By 6 Oct. 2017, Vanguard America had officially changed their name to Patriot Front. The new Patriot Front posters were pasted up around the campus of Olympic College, Bremerton.

  • On 8 Nov. 2017, Patriot Front posters were put up in Port Orchard City Hall, in Port Orchard, Washington.

  • On 16 Nov. 2017, Patriot Front members hung a banner advertising their website bloodandsoil.com on the I-90 overpass in Bellevue, Washington.

  • On 17 Nov. 2017, Patriot Front posters were found in Gig Harbor, Washington.

  • On 3 Dec. 2017, Seattle’s statue of Lenin was postered for the second time in 2017, this time with Patriot Front’s new colors.

  • On 4 Dec. 2017, Seattle’s University of Washington was hit with Patriot Front posters.

  • On 30 Jan. 2018, Patriot Front targeted Gig Harbor again, postering a parking garage.

  • On 8 Feb. 2018, Patriot Front hit Gig Harbor a third time. Neither Washington Front nor the Patriot Front boasted on Twitter about this incident, but it was reported and photographed by a concerned Gig Harbor citizen.

Around this same time, due to some unspecified terms-of-use violation, Twitter suspended Patriot Front's account. Patriot Front then deleted their Twitter @FrontPatriot and made a new Twitter @PatriotFront_.

*****          

More on the Looming JesuNazi Threat and the Response of Targeted People

"California police investigating a violent white nationalist event worked with white supremacists in an effort to identify counter-protesters...sought the prosecution of activists with 'anti-racist' beliefs,' court documents show...also (revealing) officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity," (With thanks to TigerLille1)

*****                 

"Since Trump took office, Black citizens have been increasingly arming themselves, a practice rooted in the long Black radical tradition of armed self defense and articulated in Robert F. Williams’s Negroes With Guns (Wayne State University Press: 1998)." Comment: here's the real reason so many closeted white-supremacist USians support forcible civilian disarmament. Once again, let us all follow the leadership of our Black comrades.

*****

The Origin of Neoliberalism as the Newest Brand of Fascism

"In a short span of time in the 1970s, dozens of think tanks were established across the western world and billions of dollars were spent proselytizing the tenets of the Powell Memo in 1971, which galvanized a counter-revolution to the liberal upswing of the Sixties...to eliminate democratic government by downsizing, privatizing, and deregulating it. Proponents of neoliberalism recognize that the state is the last bulwark of protection for the common people against the predations of capital. Remove the state and they’ll be left defenseless."    

*****                

How Neoliberalism -- as Intended -- Hastens Capitalism's Transition to Fascism

"...the corporate-owned Democrats have furthered and supported Donald Trump every step of the way...(trying to) act like the “Resistance,” but...trying desperately to prop him up, make him stronger, give him every power a unitary executive can have. See also, "...House Democrats were urged to ignore Medicare for All as a viable solution to the nation’s healthcare woes." Comment: more proof (if indeed any is needed) the Democratic (sic) Party -- in Nazi-like obedience to its Capitalist masters -- has truly become the party of the Big Lie, the role it has played since Obama's "change we can believe in," the biggest, most injurious Big Lie in USian political history. 

*****       

"...the FBI uses Geek Squad employees to flag illegal material when people pay Best Buy to repair their computers...potentially circumvent(ing) computer owners' Fourth Amendment rights."  

*****

"With respect to homeownership, unemployment, and incarceration, America has failed to deliver any progress for African Americans over the last five decades." Comment: Capitalism -- another synonym for white supremacy -- in malevolent action.

*****      

 

Have the Russians Saved Our Species and Our Mother Earth?

"(Putin's) speech must be sending chills and panic through the Pentagon, neocons, intelligence agencies and all those involved in military and foreign policy in the United States...(he revealed that) Russia, while spending ten percent of what the US spends on the military...(has developed) new weapons systems that the US military cannot defend against...(and urged) the United States (to) stop the threats, stop the exceptionalism and get serious about creating a world where people work together for sustainable human development." See also: "...the (Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty defiantly  abandoned by the Bush II regime had) introduced a significant degree of stability for 30 years." And this: "Putin has opened the door for the two countries to negotiate...Now it is up to the U.S. to respond."   Comment: to repeat what the first report states,"checkmate" indeed, an example of what happens when an aggressively anti-intellectual nation whose national sport is (snore) baseball foolishly declares itself the enemy of a much older, passionately intellectual nation whose national sport is chess. That said, the Russians' apparent resurrection of MAD -- Mutually Assured Destruction -- may force the U.S. to cooperate with the rest of the world rather than nuke and/or pollute us all death. If so, history will no doubt judge it was Mother Russia saved our species and Mother Earth, which most assuredly prompts the psycho-metaphysical question, could the implicit sisterhood of two such mothers be mere coincidence?

*****             

"In talks between top-level South Korean officials and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Monday, North Korea reportedly indicated its readiness to engage in negotiations over denuclearisation and the termination of its nuclear weapons programs."  See also: "...a grassroots coalition of more than 200 anti-war organizations and activists sent an open letter (pdf) to President Donald Trump on Thursday calling on his administration to... (cancel) planned U.S.-South Korea military exercises." Comment: I cannot but wonder if these developments anticipate positive consequences from what might be termed "the Putin effect" on the United States.

*****             

"More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network's obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window...continually piling up the dry tinder of hostility toward Russia...(thereby intensifying) the odds of a cataclysmic blowup between the world's two nuclear superpowers." Comment: as the report strongly implies but does not dare say outright, the network is speaking with the vengeful, infinitely malicious tongue of Hillary Clinton, who had she been elected president, would already be  attempting to fulfill her apocalyptic, thermonuclear Goldwater Girl fantasy of being the first-ever conqueror of Russia,

*****                

"Mexico’s leftist candidate in the upcoming presidential elections in July, is leading the polls as other candidates face accusations of corruption and voters are fed up with establishment politics."

*****

Dystopian Miscellany: Horrors on Sea and Land, in Medicine and Family Law 

"(Sailors aboard the) USS Ronald Reagan...the American Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier whose crew pitched in to help victims of the March 11, 2011 Tsunami and earthquake in Japan, then found themselves under the radioactive plume from the stricken coastal nuclear reactors at Fukushima...have come down with unexplained illnesses. Some have died. And many are suing."

*****             

"With the opioid crisis growing ever more dire, what is the significance of the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) recent decision to ban the herb Kratom... a generally safe, cheap and effective alternative (pain killer) in comparison to the treatments offered by the pharmaceutical industry."

*****                 

"Insys Therapeutics, a major pharmaceutical company, has spent over $500,000 fueling the opposition to marijuana legalization in the United States...(but) has received preliminary approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration for Syndros, a synthetic marijuana drug."

*****         

"...almost 20 years to the day after President Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act into law...(which) put America first in the world in the legal destruction of families...the only country in the world that routinely pays people to adopt children whose birth parents want desperately to raise them...and turn thousands of children who will never be adopted into legal orphans, dooming them to remain in foster care until they come of age." See also: "the practice of separating families has now become an unstated, yet critical, part of the Trump administration’s immigration policy."

*****             

"Iowa Senate Republicans on Wednesday advanced what amounts to a total abortion ban—a bill the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Iowa called unconstitutional."

*****           

"Congressional Republicans could further empower Trump official Valerie Huber to...turn the nation's affordable birth control program into a bastion of abstinence." 

*****                                    

HR 620, the ADA Education and Reform Act...will change key provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), shifting the burden of accessibility from businesses to people with disabilities." Comment: another (entirely predictable) expression of Capitalism's genocidal malice toward disabled people. 

*****

"...anthropogenic – really Capitalogenic – climate change (CCC) has clearly emerged as the biggest issue of our or any other time in human history and Donald Trump and the Republican Party have shown themselves to be militantly dedicated to the Greenhouse Gassing-to-death of life on Earth – a crime that promises to surpass all others in the ruling classes’ long rap sheet." Comment: this is no doubt why the Mainstream Media propaganda machine -- the One Percenters' for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda -- consistently downplays the urgency of the threat and the corollary fact the Capitalists are, in every sense of the word, traitors to our species who are profiting obscenely from their betrayal of our Mother Earth.    

*****

"The recent Oxfam scandal duplicates the corruption and abuse replete in (international 'relief') organizations...Look busy, but get as little done as possible. Ensure that donor money keeps pouring in. And continue to prop up a system that ensures that international elites live in colonial style---luxurious homes with large pools on the mountain overlooking the slums of Port-au-Prince---with 'third world' faces as their exotic backdrops. It's colonialism through and through, with the cellophane wrapping of 'relief aid' stamped upon it."

*****

"The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has revealed that there are thousands of still-unreleased government files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Back in December, NARA claimed that only 86 files had yet to be made public."

***** 

"...billionaire West Virginia Governor Jim Justice signed into law a bipartisan agreement announced earlier in the day by legislators to end the nine-day strike by teachers and other public school employees across the state...(though the) agreement, which the unions endorsed and are claiming as a victory, is a betrayal of the courageous struggle by 33,000 school workers." See also: "...the deal reached to end the strike... does nothing to address teachers’ central demand—an end to escalating health care costs through the Public Employee Insurance Agency (PEIA) that effectively wipe out any pay raises...(which) will be funded by deep cuts to social programs.

*****  

 

Why the JesuNazis (and all other Capitalists) Despise Public Education 

"To be sure, the story of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students is a story about the benefits of being a relatively wealthy school district at a moment in which public education is being vivisected without remorse or mercy."

*****  

But at Least There's Some Heartening News from the Soviet of Washington*

"(Seattle) Mayor Jenny Durkan...said “statements and actions that were alleged to be made by (Sound Transit) CEO (Peter Rogoff) raise the issue of racial bias and insensitivity as well as other workplace harassment issues...other board members said they remained confident in his overall leadership and his ability to address the concerns...(but)...Durkan and Seattle City Councilmember Rob Johnson voted against (him).

*****

"Washington has become the first state to enact a law to enforce net neutrality protections following a federal rollback late last year...(but the action is largely symbolic because) the FCC's vote in December approved a provision that prohibits states from enacting their own net neutrality rules." Comment: the campaign to restore net neutrality is at its core a campaign against Capitalist censorship. Hence, given JesuNazi control of the Supreme Court, Congress and the presidency, the campaign will almost certainly fail, but its magnitude proves beyond argument the extent to which USian "democracy" is among history's biggest Big Lies.

*****

"(Washington state) Governor Jay Inslee...vetoed a bill that would’ve shielded the emails, text message, calendars and other records of legislators from public scrutiny...(acting in response to) widespread public pressure against the legislation, which lawmakers ramrodded through both (legislative) houses." Comment: rumor has it the vetoed measure was intended to protect legislators against sexual harassment accusations (scroll down to "And If There's a Hereafter..."). Meanwhile Inslee's veto exemplifies the fact that in a very few of the 50 U.S. states, there remain functional elements of democratic process. Thus the question is whether these vestiges will provide the platform for successful anti-Capitalist rebellion before the JesuNazis (aka Republicans) and their Democratic (sic) Party enablers complete their state-level destruction of what they have already obliterated nationally.
__________________
*The name "Soviet of Washington" was hung on the Evergreen State by its high-ranking federal detractors in response to its Harry Bridges and IWW radicalism during the first half  of the 20th Century including the general strike in Seattle 6-11 Feb. 1919.  

*****                 

Useful, Informative Analysis for Medicare Recipients

"New Medicare Rights Analysis: what the recent budget deal means for people on Medicare." Comment:  good news and bad news, more of the former than the latter, but the latter including the likelihood of higher prices and fees.

*****     

Relevant History: International Women's Day, Spanish Civil War

"Women at the turn of the 20th century were not only seeking to address gender inequity but social class inequality as well...(International Womens' Day) grew out of the need for better working conditions for women in industrially developing countries who were entering the job market in unprecedented numbers." See also: "...the U.S. government doesn't...recognize (International Women's Day) as an official holiday, unlike 26 nations that include Afghanistan, Cuba, Laos, Russia and Uganda." Comment: lest we forget, IWD is the day the Russian Revolution began, started  by the 5000 women of Petrograd's Lesnoy Textile Works, who walked off the job in a wildcat strike to protest the firing of their union organizers.     

*****                      

"Frances Perkins was an American sociologist and workers-rights advocate...the first woman cabinet member in the nation’s history...as Secretary of Labor, she championed many groundbreaking government policies...that helped bring the country out of the Great Depression." Comment: a history well worth reading.

*****          

"Captured or Killed: the Irish Anti-Fascist Fighters at the Aragon Front." Comment: let us learn from their example.

*****

Book Reviews

"The Trump administration’s assault...is growing more fierce, both in Washington, D.C., and on the streets...Into this maelstrom stepped Victor Narro and his book, Living Peace, Connecting Your Spirituality With Your Work for Justice (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform: 2014)...a guide, an inspiration and a reminder that rights organizations’ tough daily tasks have a higher purpose.” Comment: while such a work may be psychologically useful in helping us cope with the stresses relentlessly inflicted by the literally unspeakable horrors of the looming apocalypse, any lingering notion there is a benevolent personal god is proven utterly absurd by the very circumstances that precipitate our trauma. If indeed there is any sort of deity at all, he (or more likely she) has unquestionably turned against humanity. damning us to extinction and reducing our Mother Earth to a bug planet, no doubt in retribution for the planet having dared spawn such an irredeemably murderous, ultimately self-destructive species as ourselves. Significantly, the book is also censored by price: Amazon lists it, a paperback, at $ 37.78 new, $35.25 used – surely one of the most prohibitively expensive paperbacks in publishing history, and yet another smirking message that even such imaginary solace as it might provide is greedily denied us by Neoliberal (i.e., implicitly fascist) Capitalism.  

*****    

"Every kid has a childhood story of a creepy old neighbor next door...imagine that that neighbor is Adolf Hitler...Edgar Feuchtwanger...5 years old when he first laid eyes on the future führer...chronicles his 10 years of living across the street from a man who would become the modern definition of evil in his new memoir, Hitler, My Neighbor: Memoirs of a Jewish Childhood, 1929-1939 (Other Press, New York: 2017)." Comment: Liesl Bradner's review is itself worth reading, especially for its cautionary history of perpetually resurgent U.S. Nazism.

LB/8 March 2018

                                                                         -30-

 

     

 

Posted at 11:15 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Civilian disarmament , Current Affairs, Healthcare, History, JesuNazism, Nazism, fascism, Memoirs, Religion, War on Disabled People , War on Minorities, War on Poor People, War on Seniors , War on Women , Web/Tech, Weblogs | | Comments (3)

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22 February 2018

14-21 February 2018: Darkness of Dystopia, Flares of Defiance

'Hate Speech' Posters Spearhead JesuNazi Offensive in Tacoma Area

Nazi Poster Tacoma 18 Feb 18 - Copy
One of the JesuNazi posters pasted on walls and utility poles in Tacoma. (Photograph by KD © 2018.)

*

By Ryley Knowles
THE WHITE NATIONALIST GROUP Patriot Front has slapped up recruiting posters at seven locations in Tacoma, Washington. Photographs of the posters -- see example above -- were published on 18 February in Washington Front, Patriot Front’s Twitter for their Washington-state activities.

Patriot Front is a white supremacist group that, according to its website and manifesto, believes  America belongs exclusively to its white European settlers. The group is based in Texas and led by 19-year-old Thomas Ryan Rousseau.

Spawned by the neo-Nazi organization Vanguard America, Patriot Front was formed in the wake of the ‘Unite The Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on 11 and 12 August 2017.

James Fields Jr, who is accused of driving his car into a group of anti-fascist protesters at the rally and murdering Heather Heyer,  was photographed marching only a few feet  from Thomas Ryan Rousseau earlier that day. Rousseau claims Fields was not a Patriot Front member and had merely asked to march with them.

Patriot Front has plastered its propaganda in Washington state three times this year. The first two incidents were in Gig Harbor, a coastal town about one mile from Tacoma. Each poster asks, “Will your speech be hate speech?” -- with the phrase ‘hate speech’ partially erased. One was pasted on a utility shed near the Tacoma Dome. The others are on utility poles in or around the downtown Tacoma area.

The posters feature Patriot Front’s iconography, a stylized fasces similar to that used by Italian fascists under Mussolini. It is surrounded by thirteen stars and promotes their website, bloodandsoil.com. “Blood and soil” is a German Nazi slogan, popularized by Adolph Hitler,  that sums up the goals of a white ethnostate: an aggressively militarized nation with a racially exclusive  population.

(Dispatches welcomes Ryley Knowles, a freelance journalist who lives in the Pacific Northwest, to our expanding roster of contributors.)

*****

(Editor's Note: when italicized and enclosed by quotation marks, the following texts are indicative passages taken directly from their hyperlinked URLs. Each passage is limited to less than 200 words in compliance with present U.S. copyright law.)

*****

More on the JesuNazi Onslaught in the Pacific Northwest and Elsewhere

"...the Atomwaffen Division, a tiny paramilitary neo-Nazi group that has been linked to the suspects in at least five killings in the United States. It is among the most violent groups on the far-right...Researchers believe that some cells are based in Texas and Florida, (with)...others in Washington, near the Seattle area, and Richmond, Va. But details about the group are difficult to confirm." Comment: the unfettered existence of armed and openly murderous groups such as Atomwaffen -- too often protected by the U.S. authorities at all levels -- is precisely why all genuine Leftists should regard any weakening of the Second Amendment as a matter of life and death and therefore oppose "gun control" as a euphemism for forcible disarmament of the proletariat. Regardless of our particular ideologies -- Marxist, democratic socialist, anarchist, even reformist -- we are all equally in jeopardy of the JesuNazis adding our names to their kill lists. In which context note the lessons taught us by the Deacons for Defense.     

*****     

"Federal prosecutors and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in Washington, DC, colluded with far-right groups in cases against anti-Trump protesters, a recently filed lawsuit alleges. Filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) last week, the lawsuit against DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and Karl Racine in the US Attorney's office seeks information about the relationship between the prosecutors and police and right-wing political groups.'The police here are really serving the political goals of these far-right organisations,' Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director and constitutional rights lawyer at PCJF, told Al Jazeera. 'We are seeing a pattern of this taking place around the country,' she said. 'While there have always been members of police departments who have acted out in abusive and racist behaviour against the civilian population, we're now seeing it at an institutional level.'"

*****

"(To build a) philosophical fascist system that was more appealing to Baby Boomers raised on New Left and post-colonial rhetoric...far-right philosophers...decided to reframe fascist values and ideas in the language of popular national liberation struggles...Organizations like Identity Evropa have already been doing this for almost two years,  focusing primarily on college-age men...Operation Homeland will expand that pool, becoming another organization that will work as an independent organization and movement." Comment: the USian culture of "manufactured illiteracy" and violent anti-intellectuality has already guaranteed the fascists' success. The question now is how to resist a toxic infestation that's spreading like deadly nightshade in an abandoned garden.    

*****            

"While men debated in legislative chambers and listened to challenges on the bench, women headed to school cafeterias, playgrounds and PTA meetings, doing the bulk of the behind-the-scenes work of supporting the politics of segregation. White women organized precinct gatherings to pressure their politicians to uphold Jim Crow laws. They transformed their homes into centers of bureaucratic efficiency — copying fliers, assigning neighborhoods for petition drives and scheduling protest shifts at elementary schools and bus garages. It was also women who shaped the way segregation, white supremacy and ideas about racial identity were knitted into the fabric of their communities." Comment: White women are nearly as hatefully racist as white males. For example, note that 53 percent of white women -- including 45 percent of white women with college degrees -- voted the JesuNazi Trump/Pence Regime into the White House.

*****       

"Trump is worse than almost anyone imagined, and while his critics across the ideological spectrum have begun to go after him, they rarely focus on how dangerous he is, hesitant to argue that he is not only the enemy of democracy, but symptomatic of the powerful political, economic and cultural forces shaping the new US fascism."

*****

On the Absolute Necessity of Revolutionary Leadership by Oppressed Minorities

"...the Combahee River Collective Statement...made a case for understanding how racism, sexism, class oppression, and homophobia are all connected:...'If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression'...when it comes to electoral politics, even 'progressive' leaders too often leave out those whose lives fall at the intersections of discrimination, such as poor black women or undocumented LGBTQ youth. Under the Trump administration, these groups are meanwhile overtly targeted...White-dominated, ostensibly “progressive” feminism...continues to miss the mark on respecting and centering those women who arguably have the most to lose, such as women of color, transgender women and trans women of color in particular...We can see this disregard...in their voting patterns today, from the 57% of white women who voted for Trump...to the 63% of white women in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election who voted for Roy Moore...” Comment: how many times must it be said we cannot make a successful revolution unless we follow the leadership of those who are the most oppressed and therefore have the most to gain by throwing off the shackles of patriarchy, racism and sexism implicit in Capitalism?

*****

"Amid the #MeToo movement across the country, the formation of the Silence Breakers, first reported by Crosscut, and their public appearances this week have brought home the reckoning with how women are treated inside the City of Seattle. But the group’s discussions have also gone beyond sexual harassment, folding in concerns about intimidation, toxicity and racial discrimination in the workplace." Comment: once again the Big Lie of "progressive Seattle" is laid bare by its victims of class warfare, misogyny and racism.

*****                      

"I’m too weary from watching well-meaning souls on TV who talk earnestly about gun control without admitting what we all know in some dank corner of our souls: the prime source of mass murder in this world, whether it’s in the tree-lined small towns of America or the hamlets of Viet Nam or the drone-blasted deserts of Yemen, is racism. Racism armed with napalm, racism kitted out with bump-stocks and huge magazines, racism poisoning the waters of Flint—the pathogens float easily around the country and the globe, like windblown dandelion puffs. It’s the only disease that is terminal for other people, not one’s-self."

*****

...we live in a racist country that hasn’t figured it out yet. And it’s always important to bring attention to it, even if it angers some people." Comment: hear, hear!

*****              

Trump/Pence Genocide Scheme Now Criminalizes Humanitarianism

"Based on data, No More Deaths reports that water jugs were destroyed more than twice a week on average. In other words, border patrol are condemning people to death and punishing those who stand in the way of this homicide...Also in the file of punished good deeds: feeding the homeless. This too has been an ongoing attempt at government sanctioned slow homicide. Between 2013 and 2015 alone, 26 cities passed food-sharing bans..." Comment: The USian Empire's methodology of post-deathcamp genocide goes far beyond deliberately murderous cuts in socioeconomic stipends and services and includes making humanitarianism itself a crime, especially when the humanitarianism's intended beneficiaries are targeted minorities.

*****

"The (Trump/Pence Regime's) changes at the Department of Health and Human Services represent 'rapid destruction of so much of the progress on LGBT health,' said Kellan Baker, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who worked with HHS on LGBT issues for nearly a decade. It’s only a matter of time before all the gains made under the Obama administration are reversed...Christian conservatives are noticing, and specifically praising, the reversals..." Comment: JesuNazi theocracy marches on.

*****

"Lambda Legal filed a federal lawsuit against Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The suit was filed on behalf of a same-sex couple who says they were denied the opportunity to serve as foster parents for refugee youth because, according to the lawsuit, they don't 'mirror the Holy Family'...Lambda's lawsuit claims that HHS—a federal agency currently run by Republican donor and pharmaceutical exec Alex Azar—is violating the Constitution by allowing USCCB to impose a religious test on applicants."

*****

"Bad Bureaucracies Are Fraying the Social Safety Net." The headline tells the story. Comment: the author carefully omits any acknowledgement of the bad bureaucrats who deliberately design the bad bureaucracies to function as weapons of oppression. These include the real "Welfare Queens" -- the regally powerful, mostly white female welfare executives whose primary function is to justify -- often by the dictates of white bourgeois feminism -- the imposition of elaborate schemes for denial of stipends and services. Equally culpable are the legions of caseworkers who for various ideological reasons, typically religious fanaticism and/or reactionary politics, consider themselves gatekeepers rather than aid-facilitators.  

*****

"...20 percent of US children live in families with incomes below 50 percent of the national median income. In the Nordic countries, the same number is 3.6 percent to 6.7 percent depending on the country...But that’s not the only peculiar thing about America’s income distribution for children...While the Nordic distribution looks like a bell curve with the overwhelming majority of kids clustered near the middle, the American distribution is a pyramid." Comment: The pyramid in question, with our overlords and their Ruling Class executives, professionals, bureaucrats, generals and politicians at the top and everyone else beneath their boot-heels at the bottom, is the classic portrait of Capitalist tyranny. It is also a classic portrait of "trickle-down" economics, with the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals congratulating themselves and smirking with malicious glee as they piss on all the rest of us and wantonly befoul our Motherland the Earth.

*****          

"'Shame': 12 Democrats Join With House GOP to Attack Americans With Disabilities Act." The headline tells the story. Comment: none of the 12 were from Washington state.

*****        

"A concrete analysis of the explosive contradictions of contemporary capitalist globalization demonstrates that...the paternalistic 'pro-immigrant' discourse of corporate liberals and the multicultural elite (does not challenge) the structures allowing for the exploitation and oppression of immigrants and migrant workers."

*****                             

"Interviews with scores of state officials, legal-services advocates and labor specialists indicate that the failure to enforce minimum wages touches every corner of the country, but is especially acute in the six states that have no investigators probing wage violations at all."

*****         

"The Washington Post has long had a hostile attitude toward unions, which it expresses in both its opinion and news sections."

*****                      

"Instead of urgent relief and uplift, most people in Obama's America were confronted with stagnating or worsening conditions at work, growing debts and a rising cost of living, alongside ongoing injustices such as police brutality and mass deportations. The groundswell of hope and optimism gave way to painful disillusionment and demoralization, which paved the way for the Trump disaster. But the road to Trump was long and winding, extending back over the reigns of two Bushes, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter--through a 40-year ruling class offensive to constrict the conditions of working class existence, which came to be known by the name of 'neoliberalism.'" Comment: a broader perspective on how and why the Trump/Pence Regime is fulfilling the inevitable transformation of U.S. Capitalism into JesuNazism, a metamorphosis that began with the Bankers' Plot of 1933-34.  

*****     

"...on Thursday, the (Federal Communications Commission) will finally publish its rule to revoke network neutrality protections...the repeal will be published on the Federal Register, the official ledger of federal agency rules. It will become the rule of the land 60 days after publication, upon which time internet service providers will be able to block or throttle access to websites or charge websites a fee to reach users at faster speeds." Comment: the result will be economic and technological censorship that is intentionally devastating to minorities. Precisely as demonstrated by the fact polls show 83 percent public support for net neutrality -- this in contrast to the failed and therefore demonstrably delusional efforts to reverse this particularly odious manifestation of the Trump/Pence Regime's malevolently JesuNazi tyranny -- the notion the U.S. is governed by "democratic process" is thus proven to be one of the most devastating Big Lies in Capitalism's arsenal of weaponized deceptions.  

*****       

Will the Capitalists Victimize Us with Another (Profit-Taking) Recession?    

"Trump’s multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for business, investors and the wealthiest 1 percent, plus his annual trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, plus his phony real estate industry handouts that parade as infrastructure spending together will lead the U.S. economy into recession, most likely in early 2019. Here’s the scenario:"

*****        

'''Many analysts pointed to a seemingly unusual cause for the (stock market) turbulence: rising wages'...No, it’s not an 'unusual' cause at all. When we start doing better—when wages start going up–Wall Streeters shit themselves. This is the norm. They only celebrate when we’re fucked, when workers don’t have the ability to demand better wages, better treatment, health care, coffee breaks and less handsy bosses. Stock markets around the world panic when the workers are strong."

*****                

"The events of the past two weeks, with the largest fall in markets since the crisis of 2008, raising the spectre of an even bigger disaster than that of a decade ago, have provided a damning exposure of (Capitalism's) entire ideological framework...The lie, which forms the basis of all bourgeois economics, that somehow the growth of capitalist economy can, at least in the long run, provide the road to advancement for the mass of humanity, the working class, the producers of all wealth, has been exposed. It has been laid bare by the fact that signs of economic growth and a growing movement of workers against the decline in living standards have raised the prospect of a new financial disaster, even more serious than that of a decade ago."

*****

The Empire Revises Its Big Lies of War Mongering to Target Russia

"The indictments (of 13 Russian nationals) are primarily aimed at providing The New York Times, Washington Post, and major broadcast media outlets with fodder for their claim of massive Russian involvement in US politics...The campaign has been used to justify a regime of Internet censorship and condition the population for war against Russia...The American population does not need Vladimir Putin to undermine 'public confidence in democracy.' After all, as Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights said after a visit to the United States last year, 'There is no other developed country where so many voters are disenfranchised … and where ordinary voters ultimately have so little impact on political outcomes.'" Update: more details of the fraud, including how it duplicates the Big Lie that justified the neo-colonial conquest of Iraq, are here.   

*****                         

Relevant Miscellany: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly and Sometimes the Inspiring

"Anti-choice protest tactics are on trial in New York amid a marked uptick in violence against abortion providers and clinics."

*****       

"Oxfam, a confederation of charitable organizations focused on alleviating global poverty, is reeling under reports that staff members in several parts of the world engaged in sexual misconduct, including using underage prostitutes. Allegations of a cover-up (have) worsened the situation." Comment: patriarchy in action, whether Abrahamic or otherwise, in which context remember that the artificial hierarchy imposed by male supremacy is the ideological grandfather of Capitalism. 

*****                      

"Khudoberdi Nurmatov, a journalist and LGBT activist who was detained by Russian authorities last year for violating migration laws, was granted (Russian) court permission to go to Germany after he faced deportation back to his native Uzbekistan...He originally migrated to Russia in order to escape imprisonment and persecution." Comment: Whether in the name of Uzbeki Islam or Russian Orthodoxy, Nurmatov is a victim of Abrahamic religion and its defining hatreds of women, LGBTQ people and non-believers. Kudos to modern-day Germany for giving him sanctuary.

*****

"Thomas, as a crucial vote on the Supreme Court, holds incredible power over women’s rights, workplace, reproductive, and otherwise. His worldview, with its consistent objectification of women, is the one that’s shaping the contours of what’s possible for women in America today, more than that of just about any man alive, save for his fellow justices. And given the evidence that’s come out in the years since, it’s also time to raise the possibility of impeachment...because of the lies he told, repeatedly and under oath, saying he had never talked to Hill about porn or to other women who worked with him about risqué subject matter." Comment: the impeachment of Justice Thomas could help save us from JesuNazism, especially in a post-Trump/Pence environment.   

*****            

History Lesson: Colonial Massachusetts Was Ruled by a Christian Taliban

"There were many subgroups that certainly didn’t enjoy life in early Colonial Massachusetts: religious dissidents, agnostics, free thinkers and, well, assertive women. We’ve all heard of the infamous Salem Witch Trials, but nearly four decades earlier the widow Ann Hibbins* was executed, hung for witchcraft, after having the audacity to complain that hired carpenters had overcharged her for a remodeling job on her house...All told, 344 citizens were accused of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts...Here there was a direct connection between the Puritan religion and the cruelty seen in the Pequot War and King Philip’s War. In the Pequot War, Massachusetts militiamen attacked a native fort at Mystic, Connecticut, and through fire and fury burned alive 400 to 700 Indians, mostly women and children. The survivors were sold as slaves...From the 'City on a Hill' it is but a short journey to Manifest Destiny and the conquest of a continent..." Comment: and it's an equally short journey from the white supremacist rationale for continental conquest to the "master race" concept of "American Exceptionalism" that fuels the Empire's apocalyptic schemes of JesuNazi world conquest today. Once again, welcome to the Fourth Reich.  
_________
*The text erroneously misspells the victim's name as "Higgins," obviously -- given the proximity of 'b' and 'g' on the standard keyboard,  a typographical error. Hence my correction.

*****                

More History, This Time as Archaeology

"Archeological finds show that Slavs have been living in Crimea for five millennia."

*****

A Challenge, Especially for Believers in the Big Lie of "Democratic Process"

Which of these two movements will achieve approved of its demands, and which will fail abysmally? The renewed push for so-called "gun control" (actually the newest manifestation of the fearful, 20th Century effort by the Capitalist Ruling Class to impose forcible civilian disarmament on a proletariat increasingly inclined toward socialist revolution)? Or the growing demand for "Improved Medicare for All" (actually the newest manifestation of a 70-year, life-and-death struggle between those of us who favor healthcare as a human right versus the deliberately genocidal Ruling Class policy of retaining healthcare as a privilege of wealth)? While present-day support for each movement is difficult to track -- polls show variations in wording of the relevant questions produce different, sometimes widely varying results -- available results (see here and here) suggest each movement is favored by approximately 60 percent of the electorate. But which -- if either -- movement will win?  My guess is the advocates of forcible disarmament will win at least moderate victories, especially in the imposition of regulations that will further restrict firearms ownership amongst the regime's targeted minorities, while the advocates of healthcare as a human right will suffer yet another total defeat. Such is U.S. Capitalism as it metamorphoses into JesuNazism. 

LB/21 February 2018

-30-       

 

Posted at 12:47 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Civilian disarmament , Current Affairs, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, JesuNazism, Nazism, fascism, Memoirs, Photography, Religion, Science, Visual art, War on Disabled People , War on Minorities, War on Poor People, War on Seniors , War on Women , Web/Tech, Weblogs | | Comments (1)

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14 February 2018

Dystopia Dominates, but There's Some Good News Too

Imperial Warmongering Continues; Cubans Thrive as Puerto Ricans Suffer     

"The Trump administration’s new National Defense Strategy is being touted as a sea change in U.S. foreign policy, a shift from the 'war on terrorism' to 'great power competition,' a line that would not be out of place in the years leading up to World War I...The problem with designating 'great powers' as your adversaries is that they might just take your word for it and respond accordingly."  

*****

"How absurd — remove an elected president with a military coup to restore democracy? Does that pass the straight face test? This refrain of Rubio and Tillerson seems to be the nonsensical public position of US policy. The US has been seeking regime change in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998. Trump joined Presidents Obama and Bush before him in continuing efforts to change the government and put in place a US-friendly oligarch government."

      *****     

"The arrival of 415 members of the U.S. Air Force in Panama has been described by social organizations and media outlets as a 'silent invasion'...a strategic move to carry out military action in Venezuela."

                      *****                    

"...the Bush administration went to war with Afghanistan on October 7, 2001...Lacking a stated reason to be in Afghanistan, the US stayed. And the US is still there. And the US is complicit in the deaths of a million or more Afghans, and complicit in the forced exodus of more than five million Afghans, and complicit in the devastation of Afghanistan culturally, politically, militarily, and economically. Only US delusions survive more or less intact."

            *****         

"Ignoring Calls for Peace Effort, Pence Refused to Engage With North Koreans at Olympic Games": the headline tells the whole story as USian warmongering continues. Why? Because war is  the Empire's most dependably profitable export.

   *****

"Cuba was hit by Hurricane Irma, a category 5 hurricane, on September 8, 2017. Two weeks weeks later, on September 20th, Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, a category 4 hurricane.  In Cuba, the electricity was restored to the entire island within a few weeks.  In Puerto Rico, over four months after Maria nearly 40 percent of the island is still without power. The scandal-plagued response to the hurricane on the part of the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments exposes the operation of disaster capitalism at its worst."

     *****

               

More Genocide and Oppression; Workers Unionize; Antifa Mobilizes

"The White House...calls for $1.7 trillion in cuts to crucial safety net programs over the next decade -- including $237 billion in cuts to Medicare alone." Comment: cuts of this magnitude -- also a $300+ billion cut to Medicaid; a $213 billion cut to food stamps; a $21 billion cut to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF); and a $72 billion cut to disability programs -- are intended to facilitate mass murder without the controversy associated with death camps, which have become unfashionable. Yet few dare call it genocide. 

         ***** 

"Life expectancy in the US has fallen for the second year in a row...educational performance weakened, social divides (including income inequality) widened, middle class incomes stagnated, and poverty rates exceeded those of most rich countries..." Comment: again, few dare say it, but the declining life expectancy is obviously post-deathcamp genocide in action.

           *****   

"If the Democrats were alarmed by Trump’s obscene tax cuts, they and all their 2018 congressional candidates would be campaigning on a (sincere) promise to repeal them, not just a few parts of them. (They’re longtime champions of corporate tax cuts, so they won’t want to disturb them much if at all.) They would also be promising to repeal the obscene Bush tax cuts that Barack Obama and his Democratic congressional majority extended in 2010."

                   *****          

"Trump is only a symptom of the economic, political and ideological rot at the heart of casino capitalism, with its growing authoritarianism and social and political injustices that have been festering in the United States with great intensity since the late 1970s. It was at that point in US history when both political parties decided that matters of community, the public good, the general welfare and democracy itself were a threat to the fundamental beliefs of the financial elite and the institutions driving casino capitalism...(and thereby imposed) a climate of terror and repression that is the essence of fascism."

                  *****         

"The system would remain in place even if the Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as if foreshadowed in the timidity of the current Democratic proposals for reform."

                             *****                    

Hilton Stamford workers defeated the company's vicious anti-union campaign by voting 110 to 5 for the union. "Beyond the life-changing victory for the workers and their families, the Stamford hotel workers used an organizing formula different from anything most unions use today, ferociously overcoming the challenges most unions face." Comment: Bypassing union bureaucracies and returning to the worker-to-worker organizing model of the 1930s, the Hilton Stamford workers achieved the allegedly impossible -- thereby providing a vital lesson for the entire 99 Percent.

              *****     

"The centrality of self-defense can never be forgotten when we discuss 'aggressive' responses to fascism. Fascism is inherently aggression, inherently violence, inherently death."

                      *****            

"The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called 'alt-right'...the movement as it’s known today can largely be traced back to 2012 and 2013 when two major events occurred: the killing of the black teenager Trayvon Martin and the so-called Gamergate controversy where female game developers and journalists were systematically threatened with rape and death."

                 *****      

"Staffers at Seattle's most prominent National Public Radio affiliate are getting a union. In a card check this week, KUOW reporters, producers, and other staffers overwhelmingly elected to join SAG-AFTRA, a union representing radio and TV journalists across the country...At the heart of their fight: making sure KUOW staff can afford to live in the increasingly expensive city they cover."

                        *****             

"Washington, DC, police and federal prosecutors have been collaborating with notorious right-wing groups known for fascist statements and using doctored videos to ambush their targets in an attempt to convict and jail protesters from President Trump's inauguration...There is a long history of police working with right-wing groups to subvert the organizing and speech rights of social justice groups.

                       *****            

"A statewide meeting of the American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV) and the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) in Flatwoods on Sunday announced that county-by-county balloting showed overwhelming support throughout the state for a teachers’ strike...West Virginia teachers, (are) now paid 48th lowest out of 50 states in the United States..."

                        *****             

Burlington, Vermont community members mustered with one day's notice on February 10 to break up a hatefest by the white supremacist group known as Patriot Front.

                         *****             

"A new anti-fascist website tracks the location and activities of people affiliated with Daily Stormer, one of the largest neo-Nazi websites in the United States. Launched on January 28, FashMaps is an activist-run initiative that seeks to inform local communities about the presence and gatherings of neo-Nazis in their area."

                  *****    

"When West Virginia House of Delegates candidate Lissa Lucas decided to take a stand against Big Oil's pernicious political influence last week by rattling off the names of state lawmakers receiving massive campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, she was swiftly and forcefully silenced...forcibly removed from the hearing by security."                    

                  *****    

"Five people were arrested at a College Republicans rally on the University of Washington campus Saturday that attracted a large crowd of protesters..The UW student Republicans invited conservative group Patriot Prayer to speak at their 'Freedom Rally' in Red Square...They were joined by several members of the Proud Boys, a group that has been referred to as alt-right, as well as Patriot Prayer supporters and conservative students. Some of those attending the rally wore red caps with President Donald Trump’s slogan 'Make America Great Again' on them." Comment: bad reporting -- or more likely censorship -- mostly concealed the political affiliations of those who were arrested. But perusal of a half-dozen news reports indicated the only people taken into custody were anti-fascists. Which is precisely what one would anticipate, given the clandestine cop-JesuNazi alliance).

                      *****        

"The White House...released a disappointing package of...transportation budget cuts, including once again advancing plans to gut Amtrak’s long-distance services by cutting $757 million from the annual Amtrak grant."

                           *****            

The headline tells the story: "Theater Died So Athletics Could Live at Washington State University." Comment: another example of how Capitalist academia collaborates in the making of Moron Nation.

                            *****             

"In 35 states, it’s legal for cops to detain and have sex with someone in their custody. Is your state one of them?" (See map: Washington state is not.)

                *****

Why Jackson, Mississippi May Not Be as Progressive as Claimed 

Alternet tells us "Cooperation Jackson is one of the most important stories for those of us struggling for social justice, for human emancipation and self-determination, and for a solidarity economics as a base for working class political struggle and the fight against the systematic economic strangulation."  But Black Agenda Report reveals that Jackson's mostly Black police force is nearly as murderous as its white racist forerunners: "In the last few months Jackson's supposedly radical mayor has lifted residency requirements for city police officers, and remained silent on a wave of officer involved shootings." Comment: while the Alternet piece is typical of what one might expect from a white/reformist website, the BAR essay includes a thought-provoking and therefore vital analysis of the causes of crime and the relation of USian cops to the imperial homeland's many oppressed peoples.     

                              *****            

Acts of Love: from a Mother, for Creatures of Our Motherland the Earth

"Romy McCloskey's late mother said butterflies were a sign she would always be with her. Decades later, those words inspired McCloskey to perform a remarkable act": successfully repairing the broken wing of a Monarch butterfly. Note: perhaps eerily, some Celtic myth regards butterflies as the souls of the dead.

                        *****      

Telling Our Stories: Some Notes on Effective AgitProp Techniques

THE WEBSITE POPULAR RESISTANCE, one of our better sources of real news (and therefore relentlessly censored by the Google Gestapo), ran a piece on 12 February entitled “Understanding How Media Protects the Status Quo.” It cited several examples of deliberately distorted reporting, particularly in picture captions, but failed to focus as closely as it might have on a few simple but demonstrably effective tactics to prevent or at least minimize such distortions. Hence I posted the following response, here slightly edited and somewhat enlarged for clarity:  

(Note: readers will need to open the link to the original article, as my remarks refer to photographs therein.)  

Speaking as an elderly media professional (55-plus years behind typewriter, keyboard and camera, a dozen significant editorial awards and commendations, picture credits including Paris Match and Newsweek) -- the points about clear messaging on protest banners and picket signs cannot be stressed too emphatically, particularly in a realm wherein the anti-intellectual, anti-historical, anti-political agenda of Capitalism and corporate-run schools has made near-illiteracy a tragic proletarian norm.  

Every protest group should therefore include an editorial collective. Its primary purpose would be to make sure the protest's message is expressed with maxim impact -- without any misspelled or misused words -- and when necessary to provide individuals to serve as press contacts, thereby avoiding inflammatory remarks by agent provocateurs and misrepresentation by dunderheads. The collective would also document the demonstration itself, preferably with both video and still photography, thereby providing a record of events that could prove decisive in combating hostile propaganda.


Rule of thumb, banners and picket signs should be so succinct that when they are photographed, no explanatory caption is needed. In this context, note the second picture from the top in the “Status Quo” article: the “No 2 SROS” picket signs are utterly incomprehensible to anyone not intimately familiar with the protest, and perfectly exemplify the sorts of slogans that should be avoided at all costs.

This of course also requires photographers who can recognize and capture telling images, a task at which the photographers of the first three images in this report not only failed, but failed abysmally. Had those images been brought to me when I was a city editor and/or a news and picture editor, I'd have dropped them in the garbage and rebuked their makers for wasting my time and their film.  

Turning again to the second (“No 2 SROS”) photo, the photographer's ultimate error was failing to focus on the large yellow banner in the picture's lower left corner, the message on which, “Get Cops Out Of Schools,” could have told the whole story in one memorable image. 

Rule of thumb, photographers should always strive to include the reportorial five Ws -- who, what, when, where, why (and sometimes how) -- in their images. I know this is not always possible, but I also know embracing it as a conscious purpose always leads to better pictures.  

By contrast, the bottom two pictures in this report are at least adequate. The next to the last picture is actually quite good, though better framing would have made it more immediately obvious the protest was aimed at the bank. The last image is excellent protest portraiture but needs an explanatory caption to put it in context. Again, more thoughtful framing might have helped.

That said, the overall quality of USian photojournalism today is disgraceful. This is no doubt in large measure because corporate-censored academia, aware that real photojournalism is always at least implicitly anti-Capitalist, is suppressing the work of our greatest photojournalists -- e.g., Gene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Jacob Riis, et al. But if you're not exposed to the masters and their masterworks -- and I who taught photography in two colleges am astounded by the number of younger photographers who tell me they have been denied such access -- you'll never be able to achieve the requisite mastery yourself. And that inability -- not the photographer's fault but the result of an especially insidious form of censorship -- is precisely what serves our JesuNazi overlords.

The other factor in the present-day dearth of USian photo quality is the extent to which dependence on technology has replaced visual mindfulness. Just as fully automatic firearms discourage careful aiming, so do fully automatic cameras discourage mindful image selection and careful composition.

Lastly, as a veteran of the alternative press of the late 1960s and early-to-middle 1970s, I cannot but bristle at the name "Unicorn Riot." It is the most damning example of self-discrediting I have yet encountered. It says -- indeed it shrieks -- "don't take us seriously." But given the organization's overt connections to the anarchist movement (which serves the Ruling Class both as the Empire's most effective agent provocateurs and by reinforcing Capitalism's vicious anti-intellectualism), given too the organization's less obvious connections to the Democratic (sic) Party and its pseudo-Left mechanism of reinforcing Capitalism by co-optation and betrayal, perhaps the self-discrediting function of its name is part of Unicorn Riot's mission.  

LB (with contributions from TigerLille1)/15 February 2018  

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Posted at 11:02 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, Film, History, Memoirs, Photography, Religion, Science, Visual art, War on Disabled People , War on Minorities, War on Poor People, War on Seniors , War on Women , Weblogs | | Comments (0)

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10 February 2018

Dispatches Lives! Here by Permission Is the Full Text of Black Agenda Report's Thought Provoking Essay on Intersectionality

FIRST, MY DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO the tech support women at Typepad, my blog server, for showing me how to bypass my dead word processing system and assemble, edit and write Dispatches directly on my website at dispatchesfromdystopia.net.  Without such expert help -- especially that most recently provided by Anna D. -- I would remain but a lost child in the alien, glitch-haunted forests of Pancomputerdemonium. (The Nurdly consensus is I was not hacked; instead, attempting to run Open Office 4.1.1 in Windows 10, I was yet another of the innumerable victims in Microfuck's ongoing war against open-source software.) Hence this special, catch-up edition of Dispatches, including much of what was to have been 8 February's post but was lost in the WP demise. 

 

***

NOW LET'S GET TO WORK.  As friends, Communist Labor Party comrades and even some kinfolk will attest, I have argued for many years we USian whites will never overthrow Capitalism until we not only join in heartfelt solidarity with our minority sisters and brothers but fully accept minority leadership and thereby take to heart the pivotal lessons, strategic and tactical, these seasoned veterans of extended class-struggle are uniquely qualified to teach us all. 

Nor is my stance unique. In the personal sense it was shaped by my late father -- ironically a skilled  teacher despite the psychological brutality and sadism that made him an abysmally unfit parent -- who fervently believed the 20th Century Civil Rights Movement would, in his words,  "force the United States to at long last live up to its democratic potential." (A few years later, I would for a time hold the same view of the Women's Liberation Movement, believing its original Marxism could save us from Capitalism's march toward fascism.) But my pivotal moment in this thinking was shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Canadian media laid bare a purported Committee for State Security (KGB) estimate of U.S. revolutionary potential in the late 1960s. It concluded that amongst most USian whites, the vast majority of whom were from comfortable bourgeois or petite bourgeois backgrounds, revolution was no more than a passing fad, while within the viciously oppressed African-American, Hispanic and First Nations communities, as well as within a tiny segment of the white Working Class, revolution was correctly viewed as a matter of survival. Hence while the KGB analysts evaluated the revolutionary potential of the Caucasian community as near absolute zero, it rated the revolutionary potential of the minority communities as quite high, though it simultaneously concluded these communities were of themselves too small to qualify for clandestine Soviet assistance.

(Note I write of this KGB analysis from memory; the reportage in question, which appeared in print c. 1992-1993, as I recall in Maclean's Magazine, has either never been referenced on the Internet or has been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole, though I suspect it could yet be confirmed by any researcher who had access to a major Canadian library.)

In any case, the implicit conclusion is obvious: either we whites learn to listen to our Black, Hispanic and First Nations sisters and brothers, or we remain slaves forever.  After all, is not listening the first step toward building solidarity? Thus the following, the best (i.e., most thought-provoking) essay on intersectionality I have yet read, reprinted in full with permission from its author, Black Agenda Report Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon, to whom my most sincere thanks.                           

 

Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism, Part 2

By Bruce A. Dixon

WHEN I TOOK A swipe at intersectionality last week, declaring that it was a hole, that afro-pessimism was a shovel and it was high time to stop digging, some friends and comrades were displeased. As far as they were concerned, questioning intersectionality amounted to a frontal attack on the place of women in the struggle against capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire, utterly inconsistent with my own politics and that of Black Agenda Report. I also threw some rocks at afro-pessimism, which I labeled the nappy headed step child of intersectionality, to the disappointment of its defenders, some of them friends and comrades too. Additionally neither group admits to understanding why I lumped them together, so I’m taking this opportunity to clarify both critiques and what joins them.

"The second intersectionality according to Smith, is rooted in post-structuralism which categorically rejects socialism and class analysis..."

Intersectionality is a termed coined by California law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 in her attempt to convince her fellow officers of the court to refine anti-discrimination law by incorporating the recognition of multiple overlapping oppressions into anti-discrimination law. While the term hasn’t made much headway the last three decades in the arguments of lawyers or the decisions of judges, it’s become a pervasive buzzword with multiple meanings in the realms of politics and the nonprofit industrial complex.

Nowadays, and perhaps from the start, as Sharon Smith explains in an indispensable August 2017 Socialist Worker article titled “A Marxist Case for Intersectionality ,” there are two separate, distinct and mutually incompatible intersectionalities. The first, she says is firmly in the camp of the real left, those who oppose and aim to overthrow capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire – not two or three out of four but all four. This tradition, which puts intersectionality in the context of class analysis and class struggle goes back at least to Claudia Jones in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and the Cohambee River Collective in the 1970s, although neither of these ever heard or uttered the word “intersectional.” The second intersectionality according to Smith, is rooted in post-structuralism which categorically rejects socialism and class analysis, and downgrades the importance of class struggle at most to something coequal in importance with ageism, ableism and speciesism. With no anchor in class struggle, and emphasizing the oppressed experience of individuals and non-class groups this kind of intersectionalism acts to perpetuate the division of the US left and wannabe left into squabbling constituency groups vying for attention, funding and acknowledgement of whose cause is the most righteous. With neither the means nor the inclination to contend for power, this intersectionalist emphasis on individual experience and deeds has given rise to atrocities like callout culture .

Unfortunately this second version of intersectionality is nearly hegemonic among self defined radicals and even liberals in the academy. Since it’s vigorously promoted by sectors of corporate media and the funders of the nonprofit industrial complex , it’s likely to remain so for the forseeable future. Worse still, since class conscious and class oriented formations neither dominate or even figure prominently in the US left, the class struggle intersectionalists are seriously handicapped at playing the game they say they want to play. Add to this the fact that some left feminists doggedly insist on using the same name for themselves as the anti-socialist, anti-class struggle intersectionalists who have a far broader reach and bigger microphones, and we have what can only be described as a hot mess.

"...the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric to deceive the unwary..."

Zoologists identify about a hundred species of birds they call brood parasites . A brood parasite lays its egg in the nest of a host species, and it counts on fooling the host mom into hatching, feeding and raising the hostile alien offspring. Evolution has engineered the parasite chick to out-eat, out-compete or simply butcher its nest mates. The parasite chicks often grow bigger than both parents put together while still being fed in the nest. In the context of the real left, the community of those aiming to overthrow capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire – not two or three out of four but all four, the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric and branding to deceive the unwary and ensnare many bright, serious and sincere leftists into defending and promoting its fundamentally hostile project.

Melissa Harris-Perry was lauded as a leading intersectionlist at the same time she aggressively defended the government’s right to intercept and record every email, text message, phone call and electronic brain fart on the planet and store them for future inspection. DemocracyNow, which has given more air time to intersectionality than perhaps anybody, refused to cover the lynching and ethnic cleansing of black Libyans during Obama’s 2012 war on that unhappy country even though they had a correspondent on the ground. To this day DemocracyNow dependably spouts US propaganda justifying Obama’s and Trump’s war on Syria. Angela Davis gets credit for being a leading proponent of intersectionality too, even though like hordes of other intersectionalists, she lost her mind over Barack Obama. All these people are examples of intersectionalists, with bigger audiences and far more visibility than left feminists are likely to achieve any time soon. When bona fide left feminists defend the word intersectionality and call themselves intersectional they confuse the lazy, the naive or unwary, they surrender their own credibility to the anti-socialist intersectionalists, and they provide protective cover to the eggs of these brood parasites. It doesn’t have to work that way.

In the natural world brood parasites have been around for millions of years, long enough for hosts to evolve defenses against them. Birds defensively mark their eggs and their chicks to distinguish them from hostile parasites. Sometimes they stand watch to sound the alarm at the presence of intruders and strange eggs, and more. These are lessons left feminists might do well to emulate. You defeat a brood parasite not by adopting its name, but by making it easier, not harder to distinguish the parasite from the real thing. Real left feminists will never get as many professorships, grants, media outlets and TED Talks as the anti-socialist intersectionalists. They invented the term anyway, for their own reasons not yours. Get over it. The real left can't get intersectionality back and there was never a time when they had exclusive possession of it anyhow. Claudia Jones and the Cohambee comrades made themselves perfectly well understood without it.

There’s no shortage of sharp, erudite left feminists who can if they want, come up with some new terminology that will allow ordinary people to distinguish between the anti-socialist intersectionalist project and authentic left feminism without a six paragraph discourse on postmoderism and post-structuralism. We cannot wait on natural selection to take care of this for us. At the risk of being that cis het guy who offers unsolicited advice to woman comrades, I respectfully suggest this is something that needs to happen real soon.

"Like the dominant version of intersectionality afro-pessimism is pretty explicitly anti-socialist and anti-class struggle..."

I said last week that afro pessimism was a stepchild of intersectionality. Like the dominant version of intersectionality, afro-pessimism is pretty explicitly anti-socialist and anti-class struggle. It’s about centering (the woke intersectional word for putting something first and last and ignoring all else) the totality of anti-blackness, the permanent war against black bodies, black aspirations, black lives, black livelihoods and black dreams. Sounds a lot like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Like intersectionality, afro-pessimism is not a theory. Like intersectionality, it only describes and does not explain. Like the prevailing flavor of intersectionality, it enjoys considerable support in the academy and mimics enough “woke” rhetoric to deceive the unwary into imagining afro-pessimism is some new kind of emancipatory project, that it prescribes or informs solutions and strategies to tackle real world stuff, even though its foremost proponent Frank Wilderson says it does not.

The only instance where afro pessimism seems to have anything prescriptive to say about how struggle ought to be conducted in the real world is afro-pessisms’s consistent disparagement of the possibility of achieving anything in coalition with anybody who ain’t black. It’s never worked before, the afro-pessimists say, trotting out a long historical list of times and places white “allies” turned tail and defected from the cause of their black compatriots. But since in just about every instance neither the fickle white allies nor the black formations in question were class-based, class oriented or led by the working class it’s hard to see how things could have turned out differently. It’s a problem the Green Party, which I’m part of, has to this day. If the state, the media and the so-called economy are contraptions a particular class uses to rule the rest of us, how do you contend for power when you don’t have a class analysis, or even recognize the importance of class? Nobody can be a dependable ally, a steady rock on either side of an alliance contending for power without a class analysis and an understanding of how power is exercised.

Clearly, the afro-pessimist injunction against working with non-blacks is a prescription for impotence. People of African descent are 13% of the US population. Slavery didn’t end until the political moment when a plurality of white people sided with blacks to end it. Reconstruction folded only when that plurality was shrunken, disarmed and shattered. Jim Crow also ended at the political moment that a plurality of whites took the same side as blacks to kill it. But afro-pessimists, even the ones who talk about reparations, rule coalitions off the table period exclamation point. How they plan to achieve that without cultivating and working with non-black political partners is anybody’s guess. But I misspoke-- Afro-pessimists do not plan. They engage, they propose, they put on a show making the point that nobody is or ever was as oppressed as they are, all in the same self-involved spirit of post structuralist intersectionality. Their shtick isn’t even unique; there’s a queer pessimist discourse that sounds a lot like Frank Wilderson or Ta-Nehisi Coates on whatever drug is the opposite of speed.

Tellingly there was no queer pessimism in the early 1980s, when gay men (and even greater numbers of straight black women) were dying like flies from then untreatable HIV-AIDS. People were too busy fighting for their lives then, just as our own ancestors in the 1950s, the 40s, and prior decades had no time for anything like afro-pessimism when Africans in America could be lynched with impunity and Jim Crow was an everyday reality. Queer pessimism only emerged after drug therapies enabled people to live decades with HIV-AIDS. Similarly afro-pessimism only surfaced after enough black faces got comfy spots in the academy.

A few years ago a young comrade in school somewhere told me his professor was insisting that Europeans colonized Africa and maybe the Americas too not because they wanted land, slaves, gold and empire, but because they feared and/or envied the sexual potency of all those outa control black bodies. After I stopped laughing, I assured my young friend this was errant nonsense and I didn’t think about it any more. Now I know this is part of a concept Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson and other afro-pessimist academics call, presumably with straight faces, “libidinal economy .”

Ta Nehisi Coates has fashioned a lucrative and prestigious career out of that stuff, although I doubt he would call himself an afro-pessimist. Nice work if you can get it. I really believe the afro-pessimist shtick is about one-upping Coates. It’s working well for him, maybe it will work for them too.

(Bruce A. Dixon  can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)georgiagreenparty.org., also via Twitter @brucedixon.)  

 

*****

"(An) intra-Korean deal could open a new path to negotiations between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs and a final settlement of the Korean War—if Donald Trump is willing to take such an off-ramp from the crisis. But it’s not just Kim Jong Un who has taken the diplomatic initiative to open such a path out of the crisis. Moon Jae-in has been working to advance such a compromise since he was inaugurated as South Korean president last May." (Significantly, any reportage on the Moon proposal...has thus far been suppressed by the war-mongering U.S. mainstream media propaganda apparatus.)

*****

Another example of U.S. law enforcement helping JesuNazis and other white supremacist groups  target anti-fascist activists and anti-Trump/Pence Regime protesters.

*****

Seventy-three Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 36 Democratic Senators joined with Republicans...to pass a two-year spending bill that does nothing to protect immigrant communities and throws undocumented 'Dreamers' under the bus." NOTE: Amongst these Democrats, who by their votes have abandoned all pretense of being anything other than fascists,  white-supremacist imperialists (and therefore JesuNazi sympathizers), are Washington state's Senator Patty Murry and Rep. Denny Heck.

  *****   

"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a notice outlining extraordinary plans by the social media company to monitor all the postings and messages of its users, censor independent journalism, and use artificial intelligence (AI) to report users to the police and intelligence agencies."

*****

"From its earliest establishment in America, capitalism has been guilty of enriching its private fortunes out of the most savage robbery of the Negro people and the most ruthless exploitation of the labor power of Negro working people, both during the era of chattel slavery, and throughout the span of the century since emancipation."

*****

"The most cynically brilliant outcome of the ‘blame Russia’ campaign has been to neuter left activism by focusing the attack on Donald Trump rather than the interests he represents. As evidence, the proportion of Goldman Sachs alumni in Mr. Trump’s administration approximates that in Mr. Obama’s and what was expected for Mrs. Clinton’s. If the problem is Donald Trump, then the solution is ‘not Trump.’ However, if the problem is that the rich substantially control American political outcomes, how would electing ‘not Trump’ bring about resolution?"

                 *****                

"What were more than 7,000 'doughboys' (U.S. soldiers) doing in Siberia at the end of the First World War?"

          *****         

"The political crisis in South Africa derives from the failure of Zuma and the leadership of the ANC to actually oust white monopoly capital from the commanding heights of the economy, after nearly a quarter century in nominal power. Instead, they have fatted a new class of Black bourgeoisie, most of them ANC-connected, as junior partners with the white monopolists through the government’s Black Economic Empowerment policies." 

 *****

"Elizabeth’s New Life Center is part of 'a collaborative effort within the state of Ohio to provide abstinence education to students through in-school programming,' according to the organization’s website. It is the regional coordinator for the 'Ohio Adolescent Health Centers' collaborative program and had received four years of funding from the Ohio Department of Health in 2011. A Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion case study on the collaborative notes that it uses 'sexual risk avoidance strategies' and is paid for 'with federal funding provided through the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant (aka Title V).' Comment: JesuNazi theocracy marches on.

*****

Recovered from the hitherto-lost text of 8 February 2018:

“These days, Trump mocks Schumer as "Cryin' Chuck" on Twitter and Schumer paints Trump as an unreasonable negotiator who "won't take yes for an answer." But the two have had a close working relationship over years that belies whatever harsh words they exchange today. One example: Schumer has received more donations from Trump across his career than any other sitting member of Congress.” 

***** 

“A quiet coup d’état has taken place in Connecticut. The legislature has effectively turned over control of the state to Wall Street.”

***** 

“...white people who are more prejudiced toward black people are also significantly more opposed to welfare.” 

*****

“In the U.S. the absolute majority of the working masses, deprived of elementary rights to survival, are hovering in the abyss of nightmare.” 

***** 

“Which is more frightening? The destruction of the environment and the climate that sustain human civilization as we have known it? Or the collapse of democracy and the rise of endless war and fascism?” 

***** 

“(The Trump/Pence Regime) has announced that as of January 31 it will stop distributing food and water to residents of Puerto Rico...Politically, the short shrift Trump has given Puerto Rico in the face of the ruinous intensity of Hurricane Maria only adds to the evidence of his bigotry. This will... help him with the white nationalists he has clasped close to his chest.” 

*****

 “When Puerto Rico’s governor Ricardo Rosselló announced last week his plan to privatize the nation’s largest electric utility, he justified the move as a remedy to the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe being inflicted upon the population... (the utility) was deliberately run into the ground, starved of resources, and allowed to mire in corruption. Meanwhile American capital, abstaining from investment in the productive forces of Puerto Rico, instead offered indebtedness, fully conscious that this would lead toward default and set the stage for the looting of public property.”

***** 

“Consumed with a Coke versus Pepsi ideological battle, framed within an uncontested arena of historicized nationalism, most Americans, and the political parties to which they owe allegiance, are magnificently unprepared to grapple with their nation’s irrelevance in defending them from the unfolding realities of our geo-historical moment; even less, to comprehend the apparent acts of war being waged by non-human forces – forces with which we must now find an accommodation.”

***** 

“What Trump and his GOP backers want is ethnic cleansing.”

***** 

“This new narrative of FBI integrity and neutrality is predicated on the assumption that most of the public has forgotten or is unaware of the notorious history of the FBI and its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was a racist anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer. He shared his obsessive anti-communism and anti-Semitism with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Gestapo chief, who Hoover corresponded with personally and kept on the FBI’s mailing list right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.” 

***** 

“Tobacco changed the entire dynamic of colonization and control in North America. Finally, there was money to be made. The Englishmen shipped the newest vice eastward and pulled a handsome profit in return. Our beloved forefathers were early drug dealers...soon 'blackness' became inseparably associated with slavery and the lowest of social classes.”

***** 

“It’s unclear exactly how many kids in the U.S. are malnourished, but there’s some disturbing evidence: A quarter of toddlers don’t receive enough iron, 1 in 5 children are obese, 1 in 6 households with children are food-insecure, and over half of infants participate in the federal Women, Infants, and Children program for supplemental nutrition.”

*****

“An outspoken neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier is set to become the Republican nominee for an Illinois congressional seat.” 

***** 

“Nearly one in three disabled undergraduate women experiences sexual violence.” 

***** 

“The Trump administration approved Indiana’s request requiring some Medicaid recipients to work to get benefits on Friday, meaning thousands of people in the state could soon be without health insurance...Indiana is the second state whose Medicaid changes have been approved, following Kentucky in January. A handful of other states have also sought federal permission to amend their Medicaid programs, from adding work rules to mandating drug tests.” Comment: Obviously, an example of the Capitalist/JesuNazi post-deathcamp methodology of genocide.  

***** 

“Republican Congressman Invited a Holocaust Denier to Be His Guest at the State of the Union Address.” Comment: the headline tells the whole story: like the proverbial birds of a feather, Nazis flock together.  

 

*****

 “In 2016, 45 million people did not fill their prescriptions because of cost, half of them are becoming even sicker because they do not have access to medication. Please sign this petition in support of common sense policies to lower drug prices in America and expand access to lower cost medication from pharmacies in other countries.” NOTE: I am not so foolish as to believe the Capitalists and their JesuNazi puppets can be swayed by petition, but I nevertheless post this item because the prohibitive cost of prescription drugs is another perfect example of the post-deathcamp methods of genocide employed our overlords.

***** 

IN MEMORIAM: a statue of Hungarian-born U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, was unveiled Thursday in Budapest as those attending praised the man known for his advocacy of democracy and human rights around the world.

LB (with help from TigerLille1)/ 8-10 February 2018.

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Posted at 10:46 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Current Affairs, History, Memoirs, Religion, Science, Visual art, War on Disabled People , War on Minorities, War on Poor People, War on Seniors , War on Women , Web/Tech, Weblogs | | Comments (1)

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02 February 2018

USian Empire's Capitalist Healthcare Horror Turns Personal

AS REGULAR READERS KNOW, I was badly injured in a household accident on 7 January 2018. Since then, the effort to get adequate care for the injuries inflicted by that accident has thrust me into an eye-opening struggle with Kaiser-Permanente, which took over Washington state's Group Health Cooperative last year.

This fight is significant to Dispatches because it exemplifies the deadly obstacles that confront us all in a realm wherein healthcare is permanently defined as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.

Significantly, though I joined GHC as a voting member nearly 45 years ago, I never once found it necessary to challenge its policies or personnel to obtain needed care. Indeed – in perfect health at the time I joined – my membership was more than anything a political statement, endorsement of the co-op as the closest approximation to socialized medicine USian Capitalism will ever allow. For that reason – never mind the pathetic self-deception that proclaims healthcare-as-a-human-right to be achievable without full-fledged revolution –  I voted against the KP takeover and will lament the death of GHC and its former, implicitly socialist idealism for as long as I remain alive.

Though KP is allegedly a non-profit organization, its unwritten but nevertheless obvious policy – that health care is indeed a privilege of wealth rather than a human right – is no different from the policy of the Empire itself and the policies of the Empire's more brazenly murderous for-profit medical monopolies.

Indeed KP has often been accused of concealing for-profit operations behind a non-profit disguise. Quoth Wikipedia:

“Kaiser has had disputes with its employees' unions, repeatedly faced civil and criminal charges for falsification of records and patient dumping, faced action by regulators over the quality of care it provided, especially to patients with mental health issues, and has faced criticism from activists and action from regulators over the size of its cash reserves.”

See also here,  here, here, here, here and here.

KP's 2013 executive salary schedule – with then Chairman George C Halvorson paid $10.2 million per year and his five immediate underlings garnering an additional $13.6 million annually – is here.

The 2013 data is the most recent I could find. But it nevertheless exemplifies the class warfare that defines what passes for “healthcare” – whether for-profit or (allegedly) non-profit – here in the Imperial Homeland. Thus a few millionaire Capitalist elitists dictate the fates of millions of 99 Percenters – nearly half of us now reduced to permanent official poverty as USian Capitalism inevitably metamorphoses into JesuNazism. Thus too millionaire executives profit obscenely from genocidal denial of care to the needy (see again the above links).

Such are the policies expressed by the email a KP medical assistant (MA) sent me on the morning of 31 January 2018:

The reason you can't refill mupirocin is because your insurance want (sic) pay for a refill until 2/28/2018. Are you use (sic) the medication as directed three times daily?

Mupirocin is a powerful antibiotic ointment vital to the treatment of the chronic leg ulcers inflicted by congestive heart failure. Prior to the accident, my own ulcers were nearly healed, but those on my left leg were ripped open by the associated fall. The result is a complex of weeping, bleeding, extremely painful, wretchedly slow-healing wounds in an area about five inches long by about three inches wide halfway between my left ankle and my left knee.

Nor is my confidence in KP care-quality enhanced by the MA's glaring illiteracy.

 

***

 

OBVIOUSLY BY HER QUESTION the MA was attempting to lay the foundation for a hostile claim I am misusing the prescription, but the fact of the matter is I was unavoidably under-using it, not just because of KP's unconscionable delays in fulfilling its promises of providing adequate home health care, but – in recognition of KP's medication-rationing protocols – to extend the prescription as long as possible.

Rather than thrice daily, I use the Mupirocin only once per day because it is only once per day someone – more often a volunteer Communist Labor Party comrade than a KP nurse – is available to change the dressings on my leg ulcers. (The lingering results of the hip, thigh, buttocks, upper leg and aggravated back injuries of 7 January 2018 make it impossible for me to bend over enough to change these dressings myself.)

Of course I had mentioned these circumstances to several KP registered nurses and to at least one KP urgent care MD, all of whom recognized it as the best that can be done under the circumstances. Each of these individuals indicated their approval of my efforts and cautioned me to watch for signs of infection.

Proof of their recognition should therefore be available in the medical records (i.e., “charts”) another KP employee assures me are kept in such meticulous detail, they prove my allegedly “always adversarial” attitudes toward health care personnel even during the approximately 45 adversary-free years I was a Group Health voting member.

Not only does this particular assistant lie on behalf her superiors; she also therefore implicitly threatens me with knowingly false revisions of my medical records to support these lies.

More importantly however – and my doctor surely knows this as well as the moral imbeciles who dictate KP operational policy – this denial of antibiotics is tantamount to a death sentence. By his own implicit assertions, the fact I am denied Mupirocin refills until 28 February means infection of my ulcerated leg(s) becomes unavoidable, which in turn means the possibility of of death by sepsis soars into the realm of extreme probability.

Not that I am surprised. Such denial of care and treatment is the favored means of genocide under the New American Holocaust by which Capitalism is ridding itself of its “surplus” population: those of us deemed, whether because of disability, chronic poverty, old age, racial or sexual minority status or some combination of all these factors to be no longer sufficiently exploitable for profit and therefore no longer worthy of life.

There is also the fact that – just as I feared (and despite KP's many now-obviously false reassurances to the contrary) – the supplemental pain medications I was prescribed to help me cope with the off-the-scale pain of the 7 January injuries have in fact been added to my strictly rationed monthly anti-pain prescription, the mildest of the opiates. As a consequence I am denied access to any effective pain medication for the next two months. Never mind that monthly prescription originated from the diagnosis provided by the MD attending my spinal MRI at St. Joseph Hospital five years ago, who described my spinal arthritis as the worst such case she had ever seen, with every vertebrae arthritically inflamed.

Though the worst of the constant pain inflicted by the 7 January injuries is now seemingly behind me, the aggravated back problems, the bruises on my left buttocks and upper leg and the ulcers on my lower leg remain disabling. The ulcers also inflict, typically at four or five minute intervals, a moment of shooting or throbbing pain that spikes to a seven or eight and occasionally even to an abscessed-tooth nine on the one-to-10 medical pain scale.

Even without the accident, the back pain will be there as always, sometimes minor, sometimes debilitating, a few days each month so severe as to leave me bedridden – which means until KP finally renews my anti-pain prescription, I have no choice but to cling to my few remaining tablets for only the most dire emergencies.

This also means that to minimize discomfort, I have no choice but to spend as much time as possible in bed. My physical therapist will undoubtedly object to my choice of a bed-ridden state, but the pain-pill prohibition leaves me no other alternative.

 

***

 

WHAT IS TOO OFTEN OVERLOOKED in the debate over USian healthcare is that here in the One Nation Under God, insurers and government bureaucrats alike enforce not only Capitalism's deliberately murderous policy of healthcare as a privilege of wealth, but also the savagely punitive dogma of Christianity and its sadistic deity that suffering should never truly be alleviated because it is a cosmic declaration its victim is the Christian god's enemy and is therefore being punished accordingly.

Thus the brazen act of perversion unique to Capitalist medicine: turning the Hippocratic Oath into an oath of bottomless hypocrisy.

Want an alternative? Imagine a healthcare system owned and managed not by Capitalist millionaires – socioeconomic predators whose wealth proclaims their moral imbecility – but by fellow 99 Percenters in accordance with the Marxist principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

Meanwhile the JesuNazi realities of the Fourth Reich make it obvious We the People will never achieve healthcare as a human right unless we make it ours by revolution – yet another proof our very survival demands we rise up and overthrow our Capitalist overlords.

 

***

 

HEALTHCARE  UPDATE: No doubt in response to my disclosure I had engaged a lawyer to escalate my struggle against KP, I was granted the Mupirocin refill late on 31 January. As my lawyer says, “in an adversarial situation” – which USian healthcare invariably is – “one always has to be one's own advocate.”

 

*****

 

BECAUSE OF THE HOURS and energy consumed by my fight with KP, I am abbreviating the preparation of this week's Dispatches by application of a new format. Rather than the conventional headlines and text, I'm providing what in journalism used to be called “bang quotes” or “money quotes” – one or two sentences that exemplify or paraphrase the content of a story and include a link to its full text. Quotation marks around these sentences indicate they are taken directly from their respective texts; lack of quotation marks indicates my own paraphrasing. Ergo:

“...the current president is turning demands from anti-immigrant hate groups, groups that have ties to the eugenics movement and openly advocated for heavily restricting immigration levels in order to maintain a white majority, into U.S. immigration policy.”

 

*****

"...largely ignored by the mass media, the reign of terror by police officers continues to rage across the United States. The entire state apparatus, from local cops to immigration agents, has been unleashed by the Trump administration to beat, maim and kill with impunity.”

 

*****

“The grotesque visage of Trump is the true face of politicians such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.”

 

*****

“In our 'booming' economy most American workers nearing retirement age have little or no savings, and Social Security pays an average of only $14,000 per year, which is less than the poverty threshold for an adult with one child. Many 75-year-olds consider themselves lucky to have jobs at Walmart.”

 

*****

 

“If you want to see real fascism in action, look at what these people have been up to. Somebody leaves water in the desert for undocumented immigrants, and the Border Patrol pours it all out and then arrests the guy.”

*****

 

“Chuck Smith, CEO of Equality Texas, told Rewire that the United States is experiencing an 'epidemic of violence' targeting LGBTQ people.”

 

*****

“A quiet coup d’état has taken place in Connecticut. The legislature has effectively turned over control of the state to Wall Street.”  Note: what the ruling class can do to Connecticut, it obviously can do to any other state as well – a rather badly written report that therefore bears reading.)

 

*****

“...billionaire casino mogul, Trump ally, and Republican National Committee (RNC) finance chairman Steve Wynn, has been sexually abusing his employees for over a decade.”


*****

The Capitalists – always theologizing from their Better Dead than Red fanaticism – are now literally gambling with our entire species.

 

*****

“Profits made from slavery were higher than those of all other industries, banks, railroads, combined”.


*****

“On January 16, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen told the Senate Judiciary Committee that, at her department's request, federal prosecutors are 'reviewing what avenues might be available' to arrest and prosecute mayors of sanctuary cities for harboring unauthorized immigrants.” Question: Is this a tactical prelude to the mass arrests and concentration-camp confinement by which the regime intends to persecute legal marijuana users?

*****

Perpetuating the Big Lie: how the Democratic (sic) Party intends to ensure JesuNazi victory in this fall's elections.

*****

“The coming weeks will show whether the U.S. intelligence establishment (the FBI/CIA/NSA, AKA the Deep State) will be able to prevent its leaders from being held to account.”

 

*****

As long as we remain in denial about how unspeakably bad things are, our circumstances will only get worse.

*****

"Bernie knows that in the days when America was not only the greatest military power, but also the greatest economic power, we actually took care of many of our white people. How else could an Empire run?”

*****


In remembrance of the Bear River Massacre, Jan. 29, 1863. “All of the social ills of struggling tribal communities today are connected by a common thread, and we must remember and understand why: Indigenous peoples have suffered brutality and compound traumas at the hands of settler colonialists and the United States government, with little to no time or space to heal, no acknowledgment or compassion from the masses, no admission of the crimes which began in 1492...we must never forget. The road to Auschwitz was paved with indigenous blood.”

*****

Book review: “Hari’s Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions (Bloomsbury) zeroes in the social change that is needed to restore better relationships on the job, in families, and in the neighborhoods we call home. The book is part memoir, part investigative report and part expose of the ways consumers have been hoodwinked into relying on medication to relieve emotional distress.”

 

*****

Incomprehensible essay of the week. Note: A working intellectual all my adult life, I nevertheless cannot even begin to understand Rob Urie's impenetrable boast of esoteric (and therefore probably meaningless) knowledge. But I have posted a link to it anyway, just in case someone might find it at least minimally relevant.

*****

Worth watching: World Socialist Web Site Chairperson David North interviewed by Chris Hedges.

LB/ 1 February 2018

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Posted at 02:02 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, History, Memoirs, Religion, Science, War on Disabled People , War on Minorities, War on Poor People, War on Seniors , War on Women , Weblogs | | Comments (1)

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26 January 2018

Even After a Year of Nightmares Come True, It Seems None Dare Admit the Ultimate Horror of the Trump/Pence Regime: That Its Seizure of Our Species' Most Malevolently Apocalyptic Empire Is Tantamount to Nazi Conquest of the Entire World

FACE IT, PEOPLE: the Empire's global thermonuclear omnipotence and its better-dead-than-Red moral imbecility means that 72 years after the presumably victorious end of World War II, the Nazis have in fact conquered our entire planet.

And until we acknowledge this as-yet unspeakable fact, our efforts to build an effective resistance movement will forever be undone by our craven refusal to confront the admittedly horrific truth of our circumstances.

The pivotal question of our time – by far the most potentially apocalyptic of all human eras – is whether we will remain lost in our present fog of self-deluding euphemisms and/or inescapably trapped by our Big Lies of outright denial and thus in either case paralyzed by the deliberately suppressed, none-dare-say-it-aloud JesuNazi reality of the Trump/Pence Regime and the viciously white-supremacist, fanatically Christian tyranny by which it has already captured 24 of the 50 U.S. state governments.

We should never allow ourselves to be deceived by the fact China, Russia, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and a few other nations continue to courageously defy the USian global Fourth Reich. Here again the awful truth is that all these allegedly independent nations combined possess nothing approaching the thermonuclear might of the United States and its imperial subject-nations in Europe and the Middle East. Nor have Russia, China et al developed effective countermeasures to neutralize the JesuNazi fanaticism we know will prompt the Donald or his successors to nuke Earth to a bug planet were defeat ever to threaten the One Empire Under God.

In which context Hitler's final remarks are especially revealing. 

The combination of the death of the Soviet Union and Wall Street's permanent nullification of the People's Republic of China means there is – at least at present – literally no effective antidote to the JesuNazi takeover of the USian empire and its resultant global conquest. It is a process that illustrates perfectly how Capitalism inevitably metamorphoses into fascism. It was begun in 1934 by the never-prosecuted, too-rich-to-jail Bankers' Plot conspirators. It resumed in post-war 1945 when the closet fascists in the federal government and their more outspokenly fascist overlords in Big Business granted sanctuary to legions of German Nazi war criminals.  And after 11 years of political murders* set the U.S. on an irreversibly pro-fascist course, the process was finalized by the Democratic (sic) Party's clandestine (but now obvious) efforts to ensure the Trump/Pence victory. The result was the ultimate and probably permanent triumph of JesuNazism, the uniquely Christian, theocratic, white-supremacist form of fascism that now defines the United States and its global empire.

In other words, the Trump/Pence Regime is anything but an anomaly. It is in fact the logical outcome of an 83-year effort by at least three consecutive generations of our One Percent overlords, first their failed effort to make the United States the dominant partner in what became the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, next their overwhelmingly successful effort to make the USian Empire what it is today, the global Fourth Reich.

Which brings me to a point on which there is enormous disagreement within the real (i.e., Marxist) Left: whether the support of a foreign power is one of the essential prerequisites of successful revolution. Arguing from the evidence provided by history, I maintain there are four such prerequisites: ideological solidarity and discipline; charismatic leadership; technological mastery; and foreign support (as by Bourbon France in the U.S. Revolution; as by the German Empire in the Russian Revolutions of 1917; as by the Soviet Union in the North Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions; as by Cuba in the ongoing Venezuelan and Mexican revolutions.) Others disagree, often vehemently, arguing for example that the French Revolution of 1789 and the present-day Venezuelan and Mexican revolutions illustrate the potential of success even without significant foreign support.

Interestingly enough, a recent poll shows 58 percent of the Russian citizenry  favors restoration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

While I have long recognized and applauded the revolutionary potential of U.S. minority communities, I have no illusions about my fellow USian whites, the vast majority of whom are too malevolently self-centered, racist, sexist, cowardly and/or ignorant to dependably participate in even the mildest forms of protest. Hence I fear that without another Russian Revolution – that is, without re-creation of the U.S.S.R., the old Comintern and most of all the Red Army – there is no hope, now or ever, of escaping the JesuNazi tyranny of what thanks to USian total surveillance and drone strikes is in fact becoming Concentration Camp Earth.

And even with Soviet renewal, our only hope would lie in the genuinely miraculous prospect a re-radicalized Soviet military might somehow avert the thermonuclear, better-dead-than-Red apocalypse by which the Empire intends to murder the entire planet if USian hegemony is ever seriously threatened.

Yes that is how bad it is – infinitely worse, infinitely more hopeless, than anything in previous human history. And given the maliciously paralytic legacies of identity politics –  especially the obnoxiously shallow socioeconomic irrelevancies force-fed to audiences in today's Moron Nation as “sexy” (i.e., “revolutionary”) art  – I frankly doubt our species, or for that matter the habitability of our planet, will survive.

As I said via Reader Supported News, “what we are witnessing in the Trump/Pence Regime is (A)-the end, forever, of the United States as we knew it; (B)-in all probability the end, forever, of Mother Earth as we knew her and (C)-at the very least, the final victory of Nazism over Homo sapiens sapiens and therefore the end of whatever might have remained of our species' potential benevolence. And no, there is not one scintilla of rational hopefulness remaining to us – not as long as our moral imbecile president is allowed to keep his Christian End Times finger on the thermonuclear and/or environmental apocalypse buttons. We have reached that point in our nationhood wherein we literally have nothing left to lose save our own lives...”

__________________

*Lest we forget: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1963); Malcolm X (1964); Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., (1968); Presidential Candidate and Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy (1968); Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (1969); Allison B. Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer (Kent State University, 1970); Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green (Jackson State College, 1970); and Karen Silkwood (1974).



*****



Is USian JesuNazism – at Least as Malevolent as German Nazi Anti-Semitism – to Be the Ultimate Form of Moron Nation Governance?

DESPITE MY EYE-OPENING EXPERIENCES as a civil rights activist (1963-1964); despite my invariably unpleasant and occasionally violent encounters with racism as a “race traitor” who dared have public love affairs with Black women in 1966, 1970 and 1979; and despite the examples of white Christian bigotry I repeatedly witnessed as a near-lifelong member of the working press, I doubt I recognized the true magnitude of USian race hatred until a Pew Poll revealed that fully 77 percent of the Caucasian citizenry refused to acknowledge the murderous racism expressed by the Bush Regime's genocidal abandonment of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

I was, like most native-born USians, reflexively loathe – even in the face of decades of utterly damning evidence – to admit the now obviously irremediable influence of white supremacy on Moron Nation's ever-more-definitive politics of moral imbecility.

But subsequent disclosures, as here and here, have since convinced me the USian JesuNazi white majority is even more murderously bigoted than its German Nazi forebears. Never mind that death camps have become unfashionable; the same deadly purpose is fulfilled – with far less potential for public outrage – by the USian policy of deliberately genocidal cuts in health care, reproductive medicine, affordable housing, unemployment compensation, food stamps and all other social services.  

The 85-year, multi-generational persistence of such efforts proves that white racism, like German Nazi antisemitism,  cannot be unlearned; it can only be outlawed, severely punished and (perhaps) thereby eventually exterminated.

Obviously the same is true of the theocratic Christian fanaticism that provides the “Jesu” element in JesuNazism.

Thus what we face here in the Trump/Pence Homeland is a unique combination of class war, race war and religious war – a one-two-three punch that is obviously history's final answer to Benjamin Franklin's famous challenge to all future USian generations: “a republic, if you can keep it,” which clearly we could not, most likely not only to our own national demise but to the doom of our species and our planet as well.



*****



Urgent: Olympia Democrats Consider Granting Imperial Military Commanders Absolute Authority Over State's Land-Use Policies

THANKS TO TRUTHOUT for scooping the world on the Washington State legislature's House Bill 2341, a hitherto-unreported Democratic (sic) Party stealth dictatorship measure that would grant military commanders absolute, unchallengeable authority over land use anywhere in the state including on all private property.

Critics of HB2341 note it “blatantly violates several of the most basic, well understood, and important provisions of the Washington and United States Constitutions.”

Thus it (again) reveals the Democrats' role as co-conspirators in the imposition of unabashed JesuNazi tyranny on the USian Homeland.

Sponsored by Federal Way Representative Kristine Reeves (D-30th) and endorsed by Democratic (sic) Governor Jay Inslee, the outrageously oppressive measure is almost certain to become law.

Amongst the unlimited powers it would give local military commanders is the right to arbitrarily prohibit marijuana farming anywhere in Washington state even were it otherwise legal under state and federal law.

Which surely makes me wonder: is HB2341 yet another example of the back-room collaboration between Democrats and Republicans to ensure the permanence of JesuNazi governance?

 

*****

 

Personal Note: On the Perverse Blessings of Temporary Disability

AS MOST READERS KNOW, a momentary lapse into astonishing (and astonishingly painful) stupidity on the evening of 7 January left me home-bound with badly torn hip ligaments, a massively bruised pelvis and buttocks-to-ankle hematoma.

While these injuries are healing a bit more quickly than anticipated, the seemingly lesser afflictions of presumably healed congestive heart failure leg-ulcers torn open by the fall have become so disabling, I remain not only a prisoner in my own dwelling but an indescribably thankful recipient of regular in-home wound care.

While most of this genuinely caring care is generously provided by Communist Labor Party comrades and a few neighbors to all of whom I am endlessly grateful, some of it is of necessity provided by medical professionals. This latter mode of treatment has left me owing Kaiser-Permanente a non-negotiable debt that already tops $170 and will therefore in all probability eventually bankrupt me.

(Last year K-P bought out Group Health Cooperative, which had been my Washington state health insurer since 1972.)

Though I have (of course) applied to K-P for financial aid, the genocidal realities of Neoliberal Capitalism – in which health care is permanently defined as a privilege of wealth rather than as a human right – means that despite my sub-poverty Social Security pension, my aid request will most likely be denied.

That said, the immobility and relative isolation forced on me by these now stubbornly weepy leg ulcers has given me a genuine bonus of contemplative hours out of which I have formulated my realistically pessimistic estimate of our nation's, species' and planet's future.

While it is true that as I near my 78th birthday, I have forever abandoned any and all rational hope of ever again witnessing any genuinely revolutionary or even reformist progress here inside the ever-more-tyrannical Fourth Reich, it is also true I yet refuse to be defined by victimization and trauma, which means I remain as committed as ever to making whatever small contributions I might yet make to the process of revolution.

Hence by 1 February I hope to have Dispatches back on its weekly schedule.

As Jean Paul Sartre  discovered for himself during the French Resistance, to continue the struggle even when it seems hopeless can become an ultimate act of personal liberation.  

LB/25 January 2018.

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Posted at 10:46 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, Film, History, Memoirs, Music, Religion, Science, Visual art, War on Disabled People , War on Minorities, War on Poor People, War on Seniors , War on Women , Weblogs | | Comments (1)

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28 December 2017

As Capitalism Becomes Ever More Undeniably Evil, Will the USian PseudoLeft Evolve True Revolutionary Consciousness?

Admitting How Fiercely We Hate Our Oppressors Is Neither Ideology nor Ideological Discipline, but It Is the First Step toward Liberation


THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA MACHINE, owned as it is by the same moral imbeciles who own the USian Empire's economic and political systems and all their global subsidiaries, long ago became the for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

Exemplifying how Capitalism's momentum invariably thrusts it toward fascism, Mainstream Media was headed in that direction even under the independent ownership that characterized most USian newspapers and broadcast outlets during the years of my later teens and earlier manhood, 1956 through about 1980 or thereabouts.

While the only meaningful difference between local Capitalists and their global counterparts has never been more than the geographical limits of their greed, the socioeconomic interactions characteristic of local ownership exercised enough moral restraint on publishers that in most instances, mass media did not metastasize into its present-day malignancy until the news monopolies took over.

Microcosms of empires and imperial tyranny, the monopolies quickly ended any pretense of accountability to local audiences or even to local elites. Soon afterward the monopolists' suppressed or co-opted the various unions and other organizations that had previously guaranteed print, radio and television journalists a modicum of editorial independence.

During the same period, the monopolies' overwhelming financial power leveraged the collegiate journalism schools to impose the gate-guard functions that guarantee the press corps remains forever purged of any trace of revolutionary or even reformist consciousness.

Hence by 1983, when the destruction by probable arson of a 24-year book project and all the rest of my life's work flung me into the post-traumatic clinical depression that ended my career as a Mainstream Media staff member (though I would continue as a freelancer for many more years), my staff-job employability was already doomed by the spread of the ideologically lockstep journalism mandated by the monopolies wherever they bought out formerly independent publications and broadcasters.

While newspaper journalism was originally a haven for bright and articulate but un-colleged people of blue-collar or lower-income backgrounds and often therefore subtly reflected our Left-populist, pro-union, even socialist bias, the monopolists were determined to purge or suppress all such viewpoints and replace them with bourgeois conformity.

Thus from the monopolists' perspective, by the mid-1970s there were already three strikes against me: firstly, I had entered journalism at age 16 via the formerly traditional Working Class route of a job as a copyboy; secondly, as if to underscore my Working Class status, chronic poverty had denied me a bachelor's degree until my 36th year (by which time I had already held a half-dozen editorships, two of them significantly award-winning); and thirdly – whether as editor, reporter or photographer – my battles against my employers' protocols of internal censorship had earned me the reputation of a troublemaker and chronic dissident. In short our corporate uberführers regarded me as not just a member of the Working Class decidedly unwelcome in the relentlessly bourgeois exclusivity of the monopoly newsroom, but – because of my commitment to unions and other such expressions of proletarian humanitarianism – a subversive as well, probably (tsk, tsk) even a clandestine Communist.

The rationalizations by which I tried to accommodate the monopolists' implicitly fascist regimes and the comparable efforts I witnessed amongst my colleagues were – as I recognize now (though only in several decades' retrospect) – early and therefore indicative (if not actually prophetic) variants on the “lesser of two Evils” meme that has defined the politics of the Imperial Homeland since its pretense of democratic process was murdered in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Because most of us had mortgages and car-loan debts and families to support, we either surrendered or – if we were very lucky (that is, wealthy enough to afford such detours) – we pursued alternative careers.

As did I, thanks to the Vietnam Era GI Bill and the fact my second (and avowedly final) attempt at matrimony had ended without financial obligation. What I sought was a new career as a geologist, a choice encouraged by enthusiastic support from my professors and bolstered by a dean's-list grade-point-average.  But then the Nixon Regime's malicious curtailment of the GI Bill's educational stipends ended my academic aspirations just as it did so many others, and I re-discovered an ugly truth I had first learned as a teenager: that here in the United States, professorial endorsement is meaningless in the quest for scholarship money unless you also have the endorsements of business executives and churchmen – which for me (as for nearly all other offspring of severely dysfunctional families), are no more accessible than the bridal suite of Buckingham Palace. Hence, albeit with radically diminished expectations, I returned to journalism.

In other words, I am intimately familiar with the history of USian Mainstream Media from the 1950s through the present.

All of which is prefatory to the fact that since the advent of the Trump/Pence Regime and its implicit declaration of the USian Empire as the Fourth Reich, I have observed a heartening effort on the part of a few of our journalists to slyly resurrect the pre-monopoly practice of occasionally speaking truth to power. The truth-speakers – actually more whisperers than talkers-aloud – are mostly in what is commonly regarded as elitist or alternative media, the PseudoLeftist mechanism by which our overlords maintain the Big Lie of “our democracy.” The laudably subversive elements in this sort of journalism, initially almost imperceptibly subtle, have slowly intensified until now, as in the following examples, they have become unmistakable in their fosterage of the hatred that will perhaps at long last induce an otherwise cravenly submissive population to rise up against its oppressors. Here are three laudable examples, complete with passages that exemplify their rebelliousness:

“The Language of a Dictatorship,” by Masha Gessen, of The New Yorker. Reporting on the adulation heaped on Trump by his coterie of sycophants, she notes such speeches “are usually given (only) in dictatorships...This is what we observed in Washington on Wednesday, and it’s the scariest part of Trump’s big tax triumph.”

“They Cheered When This Tax Bill Passed: Always Remember That,” by Truthout's William Rivers Pitt, who advises us to prepare ourselves...”in whatever way best suits. The thing that is about to happen...will be beyond your worst expectations.”

“Will the Resistance Win in 2018?” This, the best and most telling example saved for last, is by Amanda Marcotte of Salon: “Maybe we win. Maybe we don't. Most likely we get some victories but lose much that we hold dear...much of the damage done – to our economy, our democracy, our planet, our collective mental health – will be permanent. So we have to learn to love the fight itself, not because we are winning, but because we are fighting...Let's resolve to help the people who need help, instead of trying to save people who don't want to be saved. That clarity of mind and purpose will serve us well in the dark days ahead, which won't end anytime soon.”

Yes, of course I understand these sorts of journalistic deviations are allowed only because of strategic battles within the Capitalist Ruling Class and the monolithic tyranny it hides behind the charade of two names, the brazen JesuNazis of the Republican Party versus the euphemism-cloaked fascists of the Democratic (sic) Party. But this is nevertheless the first time probably since World War II I have seen even a tiny segment of USian mass media devote energy and space to teaching us to hate our enemy with even more intensity than the enemy hates us – and though that is neither ideology nor ideological discipline, it nevertheless bodes well for the cause of revolution. Especially if the JesuNazis use their now proven omnipotence to silence their Ruling Class foes – as they surely will (for this is precisely what the original Nazis did in Germany even before they begin silencing everyone else).

 

*********

 

Moral Imbecilic Congressional Plutocrats Expedite Deaths of USian Children. From the report: “Alabama parents whose children depend upon AllKids – the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)  – received devastating notices. The program would stop enrolling children as of January 1... furthermore, the entire program will be terminated on February 1 should Congress fail to earmark funding for CHIP. Alabama was the first state to announce enrollment freezes and possible closure, but a total of 9 million children are threatened nationwide by the failure of Congress to provide new funding for the program for the fiscal year that began October 1.”

 

Oklahoma Predictably Chooses Genocide as its Expression of Christian Love: The JesuNazi-governed state is attempting to terminate the in-home care that sustains the lives of 20,000 disabled and elderly people.

 

More Such Christian Love Expressed by Catholic-Owned Seattle Hospital in its discrimination against a transsexual man.  As I noted on the report's comment thread: “Make no mistake, the burgeoning expansion of hospitals owned by the Catholic Church (and by other fanatical Christian organizations) is itself part of the longstanding effort – now radically intensified by encouragement, funding and assistance from the Trump/Pence Regime and its rubber-stamp Congress – to reduce the United States to zero-tolerance Christian theocracy. This includes the total disempowerment of women by criminalization not only of abortion but all other forms of birth control and recriminalization not only of LGBTQ sexuality but any and all sexual activity outside of marriage.” As to Seattle's alleged tolerance, see the anti-LGBTQ hatefulness expressed elsewhere on the same comment thread.

 

JesuNazi-Owned KOMO Suppresses Murder Suspect's Nazi Connections. From the report: “The Washington Post reported...the same story the same day as KOMO. But (WaPo's) headline provided an important piece (of) information: “A teen is charged with killing his girlfriend’s parents. They had worried he was a neo-Nazi...the parents of the suspect's girlfriend...pushed for the two to break up their relationship. On Thursday, December 21, the mother texted a friend that the 'outspoken Neo Nazi' was out of their lives. The next day, she was dead. And her husband was also dead. And the suspect was almost dead – he shot himself and is now in critical condition. But if he survives, he will be charged with the murder of two white Americans The New York Times identified as anti-fascists.”

 

Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford Predicts the One Percent's Downfall. From the text: “The orgy of class thievery just completed on Capitol Hill has alarmed and outraged three-quarters of the public...and the full import of the crime has not yet set in. The oligarchs have no shame, and revel in the ease with which the system allows them to plunder. The ghouls of Wall Street believe they are basking in the glow of the ultimate 'creative destruction' – the elimination of all constraints on capital – and that they are invincible. Donald Trump tweets that this is so from his hegemonic toilet seat. The rich cannot help but push the rest of our noses in the dirt, and that – plus the inherent contradictions of capitalism in fatal decline – will be their undoing.” Wishful thinking, because history proves such an overthrow requires the four prerequisites of revolution (see below), all of which We the People tragically lack – but changes at home and abroad may well provide them, though the process could take decades, which means our liberation is ultimately dependent on whether the apocalypse-minded JesuNazis nuke the world into a bug planet before we can achieve liberation.

 

On Learning from 1917 How to Agitate a New Revolution: Advice well worth reading given us by Socialist Worker, much of its text focused on Vladimir Lenin's paraphrasing of Rosa Luxemburg: “The truth that reforms are possible only as a by-product of a movement that is completely free of all the narrowness of reformism has been confirmed a hundred times in world history.”

 

The Ku Klux Kunning of Trumpian Truculence. Like the flamboyant flasher who brandishes his dick and thumps it on the lecturn to highlight his sermons to congregations of fellow exhibitionists, Trump the Tyrant ensures the ongoing loyalty of his JesuNazi followers by uttering blatantly white-supremacist comments whenever the opportunity arises. Thus his denunciations of Haitians and Nigerians.

 

My Comment-Thread Remarks on Other Websites. One of the great pleasures I have regained as a result of the death of the senior-housing-facility newsletter I founded five years ago – a monthly publication I faithfully served as editor, writer, photographer, designer, typesetter and general flunky – is that now since the newsletter has been killed by lack of money for printing, I again have time to post well-reasoned responses to material on other websites. Below are links to four such dialogues, complete with indicative titles and excerpts:

 

On Fomenting Revolution Even Without Its Four Prerequisites: First we must abandon the spurious notions of “reform” and “resistance” and replace them with the realization that our only alternative is revolution – that either we rise up, overthrow Capitalism and replace it with socialism or we die, whether as individuals or a species. Secondly we need to recognize that history proves all successful revolutions have four prerequisites. These are (1)-unifying ideology and supportive ideological discipline; (2)-organization and leadership able to elude nullification by the surveillance and death-squad apparatuses of the Capitalist state; (3)-access to and ability to employ the latest technologies, especially including those of the military; and (4)-the assistance, both clandestine and overt, of a major foreign power. Thirdly we must recognize that none of these prerequisites exist in today's USian Empire, which at least since 1945 has been deliberately (and successfully) structured to exclude them. Indeed it was their absence – particularly the absence of items (1) and (2) – that nullified the Occupy Movement's revolutionary potential. It was a nullification all the more tragic because Occupy fervently acknowledged our desperate need for revolution – that revolution is in fact the only way we will ever save ourselves from Capitalism's inevitable and nearly complete metamorphosis into fascism and its inevitably apocalyptic consequences – but without the ideology and guidance that might have been provided by the Soviet Union, Occupy had absolutely no idea how to go about making revolution happen. Which brings us back to the question first asked by V. I. Lenin amidst the Tsarist Russian tyranny of 1902, Что делать? – Shto dyehlat, “what is to be done?”

 

On the Environmental Mandate: Revolution as Our Sole (and Soul) Survival: Excellent wake-up call from (John Bellamy) Foster, but nevertheless missing one vital point: that without the resurrection of the Soviet Union in eco-Marxist form (or the emergence of some comparable, equally powerful Marxist nation with a new Red Army and the capability of decisive global subversion), there is absolutely no chance humanity will overthrow Capitalism...The “exterminism” Mr. Foster cites, undefined in the (comment thread's parent text), is the Capitalist plan to reduce the human population by Neoliberal genocide until the entire planet duplicates the antebellum South: a global network of corporate plantations ruled by the zero-tolerance savagery of a tiny white male aristocracy with just enough of the rest of us bred and worked to death as slaves to keep the Market functioning – the ultimate fulfillment of the murderous moral imbecility advocated by Ayn Rand in her fictionalizations of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

 

On the Fate of a Species That Seemingly Cannot Learn from Itself: At the very best we are doomed to environmental apocalypse as long as there is such a thing as Capitalism...Far more likely is our extinction by thermonuclear apocalypse, which we would be facing no matter who won the presidency, Hillary, who in defiance of history intended to be the first ever conqueror of Russia and China, or Trump, who has already launched a domestic Holocaust and – in service to his fanatical JesuNazi masters – intends to being about the end of the world by nuking North Korea.

 

On the New Evidence Linking the CIA to the Murder of President Kennedy: You described the Central Intelligence Agency as “one of the dirtiest Black operatives on the planet,” which is ok, but the truth is it is the dirtiest, not the least because of its employment of Nazi war criminals who facilitated the continuation of the bottomless horrors imposed on humanity by the Third Reich, especially the Abwehr and the Gestapo – always with the applause and assistance of the fathers and grandfathers of the same U.S. Capitalists who have since turned this nation into the de facto Fourth Reich.

 

And a New Year's Gift to Make the Russophobes Reconsider Their Warmongering even as it makes the rest of us smile (and perhaps even gasp with awe).

LB/27 December 2017.

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Posted at 03:07 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Current Affairs, History, Memoirs, Music, Religion, War on Disabled People , War on Minorities, War on Poor People, War on Seniors , War on Women , Weblogs | | Comments (3)

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20 December 2017

House Democrats Unconditionally Surrender to Trump, Join Republicans in No-Impeachment-Ever Pact, Defiantly Uniting Both Parties in Implicit Declaration of Neoliberal Dictatorship

Engineered by Trump/Pelosi Collaboration, the Deliberately Under-Reported Decision Kills Any Hope of Judicial or Legislative Relief from Capitalism's Murderous Greed and JesuNazism's Genocidal Malice


EVEN ALTERNATIVE MEDIA seems loathe to admit the pivotal significance of the Democratic (sic) Party's deliberately under-reported unconditional surrender to the Trump/Pence Regime at the start of the weekend on Friday 15 December.

The brazen bipartisanship of the Democrats' no-impeachment-ever pact with the Republicans was certainly the most glaringly indicative, breathtakingly abject Congressional surrender in all the nearly 78 years of my lifetime. It was probably the most cravenly submissive act since Congress concluded in 1934 the Bankers' Plot conspirators were too rich to jail and thereby enabled the One Percent's subsequent and now utterly victorious 83-year campaign to convert the United States into the de facto Fourth Reich.

In any case there is no question the Democrats' no-impeachment-because-Trump-is-our-man-too vote – and that is precisely its message – was maliciously scheduled to take maximum advantage of the fact at this time of year (and especially on Fridays), most USians are distracted from politics, whether by the anticipated lusts of weekend frolic, the sublimated lusts of holiday shopping or – most likely – by the wrenching realization this will this be their bleakest midwinter holiday season thus far, with the tombstone above the corpse of their personal American Dreams reminding each of them that every subsequent holiday will be progressively more wretched until they themselves are buried in the same graveyard as their aspirations.

So now it's “Happy Holidays 2017” as we anticipate being murdered by genocidal tax “reform.” Soon it will be “Happy New Year 2018,” when we will begin dying from the saber-cuts and axe-blows to the stipends and services that hitherto kept us alive.

While such seasonal preoccupations are surely one reason to blame for why so many USians were oblivious to the vote itself, the more telling reason is that outside Washington D.C., the Mainstream Media propaganda machine mostly ignored or downplayed the story. The alternative press in the person of Reader Supported News tried to compensate for the news dim-out by running the story on Monday 18 December, but its failure to comprehend the vote's pivotal significance has no explanation beyond alternative media's decidedly counter-revolutionary penchant for reflexively peddling false hope as the dopiate of the USian masses.

Apparently not even RSN's formidable William Boardman (for whose work see my first paragraph's first link) was allowed to acknowledge the Democratic (sic) Party has now – with a very real fuck-you contemptuousness on a par with Marie Antoinette's probably apocryphal “let them eat cake” – effectively admitted its members are part of the morally imbecilic, relentlessly malignant and therefore infinitely Evil imperial plutocracy that now seeks to rule the world by economic conquest, by cultural if not physical genocide and above all else by thermonuclear terror. That's what really happened last Friday: 128 Democrats stopped denying the fact their primary domestic and foreign policy goals are identical to those of the Republicans, never mind the GOPorkers were their alleged adversaries in the cruel charade of “our democracy.” But now with our subjugation nearly complete, that charade is no longer necessary, and in the ever-escalating brutality of late Capitalism's inevitable metamorphosis into fascism, the Democrats seem quite content to publicly embrace their erstwhile alleged enemies, thereby declaring themselves open for the business of bribery and opening their bank accounts (especially the secret ones offshore or in Switzerland) to the tsunami of blood-money with which the Capitalists reward political, professional and executive co-conspirators.

Quoth Boardman in the piece linked above: “A majority of Democrats...have now gone on record in opposition even to debating Trump’s behavior on its merits. Those Democrats, 128 of them, mostly white-privileged, have voted in tacit support of the racism, bigotry, and prejudice streaming from the Trump administration. Led by Nancy Pelosi, these 128 Democrats (including all the party leadership except James Clyburn) have taken a public pass on discussing real issues of conscience with national importance. Only 58 Democrats voted with conscience...”

In other words – the words not even Boardman dared utter – the no-impeachment vote is the declaration by our Capitalist overlords and their vassals of perpetual plutocratic unity in the One Percenters' wholly owned One Party of Two Names. Its underlying message is we are so thoroughly conquered and subjugated, our masters no longer feel any need to disguise the Neoliberal bipartisan solidarity that's behind their manipulative malice. Never mind they already made their contempt for us glaringly obvious in “change we can believe in,” the most deceptive Big Lie in USian presidential history, and equally evident in Obama the Orator's shape-shift to Barack the Betrayer.

Just as there was no revolutionary great awakening sparked by Obama's deceptions, neither will there be any such reaction to Friday's vote. As infuriating as all these outrages may seem to those of us who are aware of the class war – i.e., the war we have most assuredly lost – the fact remains Moron Nation is already so benightedly submissive, not even a brass-knuckled Ruling-Class fist shattering the teeth in its Working-Class mouth will awaken it to its victimhood. That's at least partly due to the blindness sustained by paralytically optimistic works of counter-revolutionary propagandists such as Rebecca Solnit, who strings together a meaningless and/or judicially tenuous litany of victories that allegedly prove we are winning but in fact demonstrate the magnitude of our powerlessness, or Rebecca Gordon, who has obviously forgotten how the German Nazis permanently disproved “the moral power of international law”  and how their USian Empire descendants have since one-upped them by forever disproving the baby-blanket notion “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” As 525 years of genocide perpetrated by European imperialism, Capitalism and particularly the USian Empire itself demonstrate far more conclusively than any other body of evidence, “the arc of the moral universe” – if indeed there is such a thing – bends not toward justice, but toward maximum tyranny and zero-tolerance subjugation.

In this context the submissiveness of the Moronic Majority is especially vexing to me because priority one amongst the looming atrocities mandated by the Trump/Pence Regime's newly imposed tax law is the genocidal extermination of all of us the One Percenters and their political, professional and managerial whores condemn as “surplus” workers – that is, those of us, self included, who are considered throw-away people, cast off because we are damned as too elderly, too disabled and/or too chronically impoverished to be exploitable for profit. But since death camps are no longer in fashion, We the People are to be thinned like any other herd of working animals, exterminated by the slower though every bit as deadly methodology of genocide by abandonment, i.e., the termination of the life-sustaining stipends and services provided by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and a variety of other programs including the already slain Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

That the silent submissive paralysis of the earmarked victims is like that of the Auschwitz inmates who without resistance let themselves be rounded up and gassed is merely more terrible proof of how successful our overlords have been at turning our entire nation into a total surveillance concentration camp and indoctrinating all of us with the concentration-camp mentality. The Democrats' no-impeachment vote is, like the Congressional tax measure itself, additional proof of the nearly complete reduction of USia to a concentration-camp nation – yet another unmistakable declaration the One Party's owners will no longer abide any major deviations from the JesuNazis' biblically ordained agenda of murder and deprivation. Hence I am now convinced – just as our masters seem to be – the Moronic Majority whether Hillaryite or Trumpanoid is so thoroughly subjugated, even the public re-establishment of death camps would not prompt it to rise up angry in effective rebellion.



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ONLY ONE DEMOCRAT from Washington state dared vote against the Democratic (sic) Party's declaration of solidarity with the Republican Party. This is 7th District (Seattle and vicinity) Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who indicatively says nothing whatsoever  on her website about the vote. Her five colleagues, Derek Kilmer, Suzan DelBene, Rick Larsen, Adam Smith and Denny Heck, all voted with the no-impeachment-ever Democratic (sic) majority to endorse the fanatically Christian white supremacist, misogynist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant hatefulness that fulfills the darkest intentions of the Bankers' Plot conspirators and forever defines the Republicans as the JesuNazi descendants of Germany's original Nazis. Thus the Third Reich is reanimated here in the USian homeland by an undeclared but terrifyingly real Fourth Reich whose moral imbecility jeopardizes our species' survival and threatens to reduce Earth to a bug planet. But – to reiterate – no matter how many goddamned times this must be said, it seems only a tiny few will ever acknowledge what these motherfuckers are doing to us, much less respond accordingly.

 

 

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Woman with Stage 4 Cancer Ousted by Senator after she dared ask him why he supports legislation that will kill her by denying her care. Yet another eye-opening example of the “let them eat cake” viciousness of the nation's elected officials, in this instance U.S. Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada.



Is “Me Too” a Revolution or an Unrecognized Ritual of Christian Repentance? Such a question would probably never have occurred to me had I not sequentially read “The Great American Sex Panic of 2017” followed immediately by “'End Times' prophets beg Trump to give Americans one last chance to repent.”  But the genuinely terrifying Trump/Pence Regime's threat to nuke the world did indeed precede the sex scandal by several months, which makes me wonder if the confession-like denunciations of the rapists and molesters were somehow triggered by our looming (and now probably unavoidable) extinction by thermonuclear apocalypse. A Marxist analysis of the scandal's dynamics and apparent purpose is here, with a provocative retort by the actress Minnie Driver here, Meanwhile the JesuNazi Roy Moore continues demonstrating an apparent belief he will somehow be raptured into the Senate, while Erica Smiley analyzes the socioeconomic sources of the Christian fanaticism that put the Trump/Pence Regime into office and threatens us all with zero-tolerance theocracy.



How Identity Politics Protects Neoliberals from Legitimate Criticism: Examples of how Democratic (sic) identity politics “continue to be used as a weapon to derail progressives whose record of commitment to racial justice, gender equality, and LGBT issues has historically eclipsed that of the Democratic Party itself.”



JesuNazi Sessions Resurrects Discredited Anti-Planned-Parenthood Video as he weighs federal criminal investigation into fetal tissue charges already proven bogus.

 

Black Democrats as Neoliberal Imperialist Enablers. “There is no stopping the rot in the Democratic Party. When the elected representatives of Black America, historically the most pro-peace and social justice-oriented constituency in the country, enlist en mass in the War Party, it is obvious that they are (thrust there by) outside forces.”



Seattle Weaponizes Bike Racks to Oust Houseless Folks. Again the allegedly “progressive” Emerald City demonstrates the malicious cunning of its bourgeois hypocrisy.

 

Washington State Democrats Will Target Gun Owners. With the legislature and the governor's mansion now under Democratic (sic) Party control, an anti-Trump vendetta against firearms owners looms large.  But what the vindictively anti-gunowner Democratic (sic) leadership refuses to recognize is how many of the state's Democratic (sic) voters own firearms, especially in rural areas. (Note: the two forcible disarmament measures cited in the foregoing report, which is dated January 2017, have already been resurrected for the 2018 session, but anti-gunowner fanatics also intend to repeal the state's pro-Second-Amendment preemption law,  which would mean the end of statewide concealed pistol licenses.

 

Cornel West Implies Ta Nehisi Coats Is Neoliberal Race Traitor. Normally I am reluctant to take sides in ideological struggles within the Black community, but Neoliberalism aka Ayn Rand economics is the morally imbecilic foundation of the new fascism,  which – given how Coats' is ascending to national leadership – makes West's damning comments especially relevant.

 

Sessions Continues to Plot Anti-Marijuana Blitzkrieg. The JesuNazis are terrified by how marijuana nullifies fanatical Christian brainwashing. Hence the Trump/Pence Regime's JesuNazi attorney general yearns to attack legal-pot states – probably by using federal troops for mass arrests – but thus far Congress is still keeping this Trump/Pence attack dog on a short leash.

 

Apocalyptic Abandonment of Puerto Rico Continues: Thanks to the Trump/Pence Regime's combination of Neoliberal malice and white-supremacist hatefulness,  at least one million Puerto Ricans are surviving without modern necessities of sewer, water, electricity and schools.

 

USian Houselessness* Soars as Capitalist Savagery Intensifies. Three reports, here, here and here, on the plight of class-war victims reduced to de facto refugees in their own homeland. (*With thanks to  Kate Corvan for this more accurate term to describe the women, children and men dispossessed by Capitalist aggression.)

 

JesuNazi Point Man Scott Walker to Weaponize Food Stamps. Like all fascists, the Wisconsin governor believes food-stamp recipients are lazy drug addicts and should be punished accordingly.

 

Alien Probe or Wandering Space Junk? Scientific American reports on an intergalactic anomaly  as feds admit too many fighter pilots have encountered so many UFOs,  the Air Force now regards such craft as “Advanced Aerospace Threats.” 

 

Another Example of the Imbecility of Hope. I take to a comment thread to criticize the pathetically foolhardy belief the net neutrality fight can still be won, prompting an interesting discussion with other posters.

 

Trump's Would-Be Gestapo Guy Versus Congress. This story is undoubtedly well known by now, but Charles Pierce's sarcastic reporting is nevertheless worth reading.

 

In Retrospect: Musical Discovery Soothes Sadness, a Dispatches from 2011, written shortly after the apparent loss of my three main film cameras, a pair of M2 Leicas and one M4 Leica, all of which I had shipped to a service facility for long-overdue maintenance. This vital equipment was eventually recovered, serviced and returned. Three months later, the advent of Occupy Tacoma summoned me back to photojournalism. In 2014 I would finally switch to digital photography. Contemplative prose, with most of the URLs – traditional (and traditionally Pagan) folk songs every one – still active and well worth visiting.

LB/20 December 2017 (with contributions from from TigerLille and Kate Corvan.)


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Posted at 11:29 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Current Affairs, History, Memoirs, Music, Photography, Religion, Science, War on Disabled People , War on Minorities, War on Poor People, War on Seniors , War on Women , Weblogs | | Comments (2)

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