Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

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. 

 

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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.

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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."

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"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.” 

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“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.  

 

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 “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.

 -30-

 

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

-30-

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.

-30-

 

 

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.

-30-

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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How Modern USia Became a Shithole of Serfdom and Slavery

The Sneeringly Genocidal Trump/Pence Agenda Celebrates the Final Victory of the One Percenters' 84-Year Effort to Perpetuate Capitalism by Imposing JesuNazism on a Politically Defenseless Moron Nation

 

MASTURBATED TO MINDLESSNESS by the maliciously deceptive Mainstream Media propaganda machine after being moronated to submissiveness in public schools deliberately rendered dysfunctional by the JesuNazis in service to their Capitalist oberführers, the vast majority of USians – intellectually paralyzed by the suppression of critical thinking skills  and induced ignorance – have repeatedly failed to recognize the ugly reality of our boiled-frog reduction to serfdom and slavery.

They foolishly try to convince themselves all is well. They cling to the Big Lie of “our democracy” and the even Bigger Lie the Trump/Pence Regime's apocalypse-mongering is nothing more than rhetoric, and by some trick of self-deception, when they go to bed at night they do not fall asleep wondering if they will never again awake – if before morning they will be reduced to naught but heart-wrenching shadows  or radioactive ash on an unspeakably poisoned wind. They cling pathetically to their own optimism, refusing to recognize their submissiveness as an ultimate and potentially suicidal form of folly.

Obviously, whether from ignorance or delusion or the momentary psychosis of denial, they reject the serial significance of what will someday – if our species somehow survives – be recognized as the five most pivotal events in the USian Empire's sordid political history. These are the Bankers' Plot (1933-1934); the post-plot merger of Capitalism and fanatical Christianity (1934-present*); the long decade of political murders  (1963 to 1974); the Reichstag Fire rerun of 9/11 (as I have been calling it at least since 2013);  and now finally the fulfillment of the Bankers' Plot goal of a permanently fascist United States  achieved for the One Percent by the 2016 election.

The sequence of historical events cited above proves the advent of the Trump/Pence Regime is the climax of a subversive process that unites at least three generations of Capitalism's most morally imbecilic plutocrats. These events are the exclamation points – the beware signs – in an infinitely damning progression that details the nation's passage from the New Deal's illusion of representative democracy to the JesuNazi truth of the Trump/Pence victory. But the Moronic Majority overlooks – or more likely is too cowardly to acknowledge – the climactic nature of the 2016 presidential election and how it ended forever any rational notion of the U.S. as a “sweet land of liberty.”

I can (sort of) understand how some ignoramus might ignore our Capitalist overlords' love affair with white-supremacist fascism despite the fact it has been evident since the 1930s. Though the stealth fascism of the pre-Bush-II past always victimized USian minorities, the white majority remained mostly immune to its brutality and was therefore mostly ignorant of its atrocities. Such trends and their associated atrocities are carefully excluded from the so-called “American narrative.” But the more overt fascism that characterized the Bush II and Obama presidencies and finally exploded into the stark, ever-intensifying JesuNazi horrors perpetrated by the Trump/Pence Regime now assaults the entire Working Class regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. Yet the Moronic Majority still refuses to acknowledge  what has been done to us, much less react appropriately to the regime's ever-intensifying malevolence.

As Henry Giroux reports, the Trump/Pence victory “has accelerated a culture of cruelty, a machinery of terminal exclusion and social abandonment that wages a war on undocumented immigrants, poor minorities of color and young people.” In other words – words even the notably courageous and outspoken Giroux dare not say – we are now as conquered and subjugated as the people of France were beneath the jackboots of the German Nazis. This is not hyperbole; apart from the persecution of the Jews, the of the German occupation of France took at least two years to achieve its final zero-tolerance brutality.  The magnitude of the atrocities by which we are brutalized will likewise intensify ad infinitum just as they did in France – until the stench of putrescence becomes the sole/soul definition of our existence.

_________________

*For extensive documentation of this deliberately obscured chapter of USian history, go here.

 

 

***

 

The Remainder of This Issue Measures Our Descent into Despotism:

 

Tax Policy Remains the Most Terriftying Proof of Genocidal Intent. “The Democrats are not seeking to rally popular opposition to a brazen tax giveaway to the super-rich. Rather, they are appealing to the Republicans to let them participate in the grubby legislative horse-trading.”  Because there are a number of relevant Marxist and/or Left-leaning analyses of the tax measure that's emerging from the Trump/Pence Congress, each analysis with varied focus, I have provided links to most of them, for which see here,  here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Probably the few people of color who helped vote the Trump/Pence Regime into power did so because Wikileaks' disclosure of (more) Clinton treachery rendered them vulnerable to seduction by Trump's oft-repeated pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – like Obama's “change we can believe in,” another of Capitalism's obviously premeditated Big Lies. Most if not all of these minority Trumpster-dunces, now facing calculatedly genocidal cuts in the programs that keep them alive, will say “fuck the elections they're meaningless” and never vote again.

In this context let us always remember one of the many functions of the broken Trump/Pence promises – like their precursor in Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer – is to discredit the entire electoral process and demoralize the electorate so thoroughly, fewer and fewer people bother to vote, a tactic the success of which is proven by declining voter turnout throughout the nation.  That's another of the ways Capitalism conditions us to react with the same submissiveness that defines serfs, slaves and conquered peoples – the only thing you know for sure is your life is going to get worse.

New Tax Plan Fulfills Intent of 1933 Bankers Plot. During the holiday news lull, the better mass media catches its breath by reporting on the back story of how the fascists and their JesuNazi stormtroopers conquered and subjugated the United States, which given the conquest's apocalyptic implications is the most important back story in human history. “The new U.S. tax plan is a scam—a corporate coup—that benefits a few rich and powerful Americans who make the most and want to pay the least. They are the owners of our country, the plutocrats and oligarchs that run this nation and tell politicians what to do.” Hence the renewed significance of a Bankers' Plot book by Sally Denton, The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right (Bloomsbury Press: 2012)

 

 

Why Capitalism Means Homelessness for Millions. The Capitalists regard homelessness as a weapon. They brandish it to warn us we must submit to their brutality or be flung into homelessness ourselves. See also: a photographer, himself homeless, documents its grim realities.

Skyrocketing Rents Prompt Demonstrators to Disrupt Landlord Convention and enables a Democratic (sic) legislator to grandstand as a supporter of rent control when in fact there is absolutely no chance such legislation will ever be enacted. That's because the Washington State Democratic (sic) Party and its Republican counterpart are each wholly owned subsidiaries of the rip-off real estate industry. Once again we see the Democrats at work on the project assigned them by our Capitalist overlords, bolstering false hope to strangle the evolution of revolutionary consciousness.

Congressman Sics Cops on Complaining Constituents in an atrocity that tells us all we need to know about the relationship between people and politicians that now defines the ever-more-subjugated USian Homeland. 

 

 

Anti-Abortion Thugs Scare Off Half a Clinic's Patients. Thousands of JesuNazis swarm North Carolina reproductive care facility.  See also: “Willfully Protecting the Monsters”; plus an interesting conjecture on the probable illegality of Pence's publicly-stated policy of “never dine alone with a woman”; a report that makes me wonder whether the refusal of newsroom bosses to answer questions about anti-sexual-harassment policies reflects tacit approval of harassment; and a wishful-thinking analysis that suggests the women's outcry could be (though I gravely doubt it) the beginning of something larger.

 

 

Hatred of Mother Nature as the Ultimate Misogyny: The link between Capitalism's rape of the environment and violations of women's rights is increasingly undeniable. “The 2016 murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres – who was leading the struggle of her indigenous community to oppose the construction of a dam on their sacred river in Honduras – showed how deadly the risks can be.” 

 

 

Beware Trump's Volunteer Gestapo. U.S. prosecutors are using video shot secretly by the fascist media group Project Veritas as evidence in the felony trials of people mass-arrested during Inauguration Day protests.

 

 

House Bill Would Effectively Outlaw Sanctuary States and Municipalities. “The Stopping Lawless Actions of Politicians (SLAP) Act of 2017 would penalize state or local officials who 'knowingly ignore a request from the Federal Government' to turn over suspected undocumented immigrants through fines up to $1 million and five years in federal prison.”

 

 

Censorship Intensifies as Google Hires 10,000 Workers to Purge You Tube. Another example of how yesteryear's creeping fascism has become today's JesuNazism.

Media Ratings Battle Is Another Form of Censorship that serves the One Percent by imposing Twitterized sensationalism of trivial news and suppression of vital reports on Trump/Pence atrocities.

 

Censorship of RT and Sputnik Escalates USian Moronation. “The fact is the political establishment is scared to death that more and more people are abandoning their corporate media, and does not want you hearing outside perspectives.” 

Significantly, One of the Suppressed Stories is the  Volgograd State Medical University's clinical trials of a non-addictive drug claimed to out-perform morphine as a pain-killer. Obviously the USan prescription drug lords, who are as morally imbecilic as their street-corner counterparts, have no incentive for such research because it would eliminate the obscene profits they reap from opiate addiction. See also “The Russia-gate hysteria has spread beyond simply a strategy for neutralizing Donald Trump or even removing him from office into an excuse for stifling U.S. dissent that challenges the New Cold War” just as 9/11 rationalizes the total-surveillance state that goes far beyond fulfillment of Hitler's most tyrannical dreams.

Class Warfare Heats Up as Bourgeois Bicyclists Battle Industrial Workers: a microcosm of environmental conflict divides a Seattle neighborhood. (Aside: I have witnessed this struggle firsthand. The obnoxiously arrogant bikesters, smug with their Ayn Rand sense of entitlement, make no secret of the hatred and contempt they feel for the hard-working truck drivers with whom they so often clash. Clearly the bikesters are oblivious – or more likely indifferent – to the fact Capitalist privilege is the antithesis of environmental consciousness. Which by some weird twist of free association brings to mind the plague of similarly bourgeois tree-spikers, self-proclaimed “environmental activists”  whose slogan is “kill a logger, save a tree.” [For those unfamiliar with logging, most of the work today is done with gasoline-powered chainsaws. These saws are named after their blades, which look like bicycle chains with steel teeth attached. When a chainsaw blade hits a spike, the chain often breaks. Then it warbles through the air fast as a bullet, decapitating or maiming anyone it hits.] Such is class consciousness in the JesuNazi era.)

 

Greedy Restaurateurs Have Developed Software to cheat states out of sales taxes and no doubt fuck their employees out of tips and wages too. 

Puerto Rican Situation Report: the regime's genocidal abandonment and shock-doctrine exploitation of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands continues unabated. See also: hurricane reduces more than half the Puerto Rican population  to the government's outrageously inadequate statistical definition of poverty.

USia as the Empire of the Big Deception: “Having established global hegemony, the US treats every deal as an Indian treaty — to be binding only for the other side.”

USian Biblical Malevolence Invalidates Comparisons to Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War. Not mentioned in this disturbing analysis of deteriorating U.S.-Russian relations, JesuNazism's Biblical malevolence is nevertheless the primary enabler in Trump/Pence Regime's wishful apocalypse-mongering.

 

Planning for the “Obliteration” of North Korea: In what amounts to the convening of a war council, the Canadian government will host a US-led international meeting on North Korea early next year. See also here, here and here.

 

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NOTE: There will be no Dispatches next week [10-16 December 2017]. Not only is this the week I edit and produce the monthly newsletter for the senior housing complex in which I dwell; it is also the week of my annual, always-adversarial audit by the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, the bureaucratic purpose of which is to enforce neoliberal austerity – aka genocide – by reducing or eliminating the stipends and services that keep me alive. The spreadsheet-completion, form-filling and other paperwork preparations for this invariably unpleasant encounter with Capitalist governance typically take three whole days, with a fourth day consumed by the actual DSHS interrogation. Publication of Dispatches is planned resume the week beginning December 17. My apology to readers for any inconvenience.

 

*********

Meanwhile Here are Three Petitions I Urge You to Sign:

– By UltraViolet, demanding MGM release footage that reportedly reveals the depth of Trump's racism shows him far exceeding his “grab-em-by-the-pussy misogyny.”

– By Unite Here Local 8 demanding protection of hotel domestic workers against sexual predators;

– By UltraViolet demanding continuation of the free birth control provided by Obamacare.

Unite Here's fight inspired me, a still-active National Writer's Union member, to reinforce my signature with a comment:

“The hotel bosses' retaliatory defense of the men who sexually harass and assault hotel housekeepers makes these maliciously male-supremacist executives co-perpetrators. Hence they should be prosecuted and convicted accordingly, thus forever identified as the sex-crime accomplices they truly are.”

And I was similarly inspired to respond to an UltraViolet tweet:

“Patriarchy = moral imbecility = Capitalism = Nazism, and now with the US become a thermonuclear JesuNazi empire, patriarchy is almost certainly our species' extinction. Thus the righteous anger of woman is literally humanity's last defense against the looming apocalypse.”

LB/30 November-7 December 2017 (with contributions from PF and TigerLille).

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Apocalypse Is Inevitable; So Let's Fuck the Ecology for Profit

Given the Trump/Pence Regime's Fanatical Commitment to Fulfilling Biblical Prophecies of Human Extinction, Its Genocidal Social Policies and All-Out War on the Environment Make Terrifyingly Perfect Sense

 

OUR LIVES ARE NOW DARKENED by what I believe to be the most ominous conjunction of events ever to threaten our species.

Forget the looming environmental apocalypse or the Trump/Pence Regime's maliciously genocidal destruction of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and any other such necessities for human survival in the Neoliberal slave-plantation of the United States; the terrifying truth is all humans whether at home or abroad may be too short-lived for any such policies to matter.

But that truth, horrible as it is, offers the only logical explanation of the regime's sneering brutality. Its perpetrators believe these are the End Times prophesied by the Bible, and that as their sadistic god's designated destroyers, they can savage us at will. What do humanitarianism or environmentalism or the popular will matter in a world they obviously intend to reduce to a bug planet?

Verily, it's as if the regime's secret slogan is “Loot and Rape and Kill Now Because Tomorrow We're All Dead.”

North Korea's launch of a missile that could target most of the USian imperial homeland including Washington D.C. and New York City interacts with the Trump/Pence Regime's nuke-the-world-to-bring-back-Jesus madness and escalates the probability of World War III to near 100-percent certainty. That's because – due to North Korea's geography –  (scroll down), Trump's threatened annihilation of the country by thermonuclear “fire and fury” would be as much an attack on China and Russia as on North Korea itself. See also “How the U.S. Bombed Russia in 1950.”

Meanwhile Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin's decision to put Russian industry on a wartime footing – a decision obscured, ironically enough, by the USian Thanksgiving holiday and further suppressed by USian Mainstream Media censorship – proves the Russian government is now convinced World War III is inevitable.

The Trump/Pence entourage, contrary to its seductive pre-election Big Lies, and as unequivocally proven by its unprecedented increase in the imperial war machine budget, has obviously believed in the inevitability of World War III – and its theological necessity – from long before Trump's first day in office. Not that Trump/Pence enabler Hillary Clinton would have been any better, for Republicans and Democrats alike serve the One Percenters' apocalyptic agenda.  

Meanwhile the USian empire's domestic subjects – led by those who continue publicly pimping the Big Lie of “our democracy” – remain in clinical denial of the terminally theocratic Trump/Pence horror that threatens all humanity with extinction – a reality so terrifying, now even some of the Mainstream Media propaganda machine is beginning to edge toward acknowledging it.

 

New Study Puts Puerto Rican Death Toll at “Nearly 1,100,” 20 times higher  than the Trump/Pence Regime's bullshit figure of only 55 deaths.

 

Again the Not-So-Secret Fundamentalism of the Empire's Ruling Cabal shows its apocalyptic support for its Islamic counterpart.

 

Meanwhile the Imperial Politicians Demonstrate Their Biblical Commitment to rape, sexual harassment and misogyny in general by making rules that marginalize or silence their female victims.

 

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Predictably, the Regime Continues Its Subjugation of the USian Homeland, the better to fatten the imperial war machine for one last apocalyptic Big Bang. Analyses of the contents of the proposed budget include its genocidal impact on seniors and disabled people;  its equally genocidal attack on the African-American community;  its oh-so-sneaky approval of Christian theocracy; and a pair of usefully informative Marxist overviews of the proposals here and here. Also,  Common Dreams  has some valuable information on the budget and the closely related topic of taxation, but its 600-to-900-character URLs are (intentionally?) a prohibitive pain in the ass to convert to live-links.

The Fate of Baltimore's Sparrows Point, Once Home of the Nation's Largest Steel Mill, exemplifies the sort of sweatshop economy the Trump/Pence Regime will perpetuate  – that is, should our species somehow manage to survive the government's Biblical apocalypse-mongering. Meanwhile Amazon's so-called CamperForce exemplifies the wretched lot to which We the (Ever-More-Subjugated) People have already been reduced. See also how Amazon imposes de facto slave labor on England. 

 

Anti Trump/Pence Resistance Continues, Albeit to Little or No Avail because the regime has already made it clear it doesn't give a flying fuck about public opinion. See updates here, here, here, and here. But please ignore the obnoxiously positive tone by which some of these reports attempt to reassure us the hard work of revolution isn't necessary – in other words, that we should merely wait submissively for the apocalypse.

 

Censorship Updates: Suppression of Vital Information revealed at the University of Oklahoma  and glaringly apparent in the Mainstream Media propaganda machine's non-coverage of the net neutrality fight. Meanwhile a ruling that “threatens reporters’ ability to maintain the confidentiality of their sources and gather the news without being surveilled” is on (probably fruitless) appeal to the Gorsuch Court.

 

Hate Crime Updates: With Trump/Pence Encouragement of White Supremacy, Asian Americans are again a target. Also an analysis of what the regime's deliberately limited hate-crime statistics actually tell us.

 

Nurse Fired for Expressing Not-Uncommon Response to White Supremacy: “Every white woman raises a detriment to society when they raise a son...Someone with the HIGHEST propensity to be a terrorist, rapist, racist, and domestic violence all-star. Historically every son you had should be sacrificed to the wolves.” (Emphasis as in original.)

 

An Indicative History Lesson from World War II.

 

LB/29 November 2017 (with contributions from TigerLille).

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Capitalism Has Reduced Thanksgiving* to a Day of Self-Deceit

With a Sneeringly Genocidal Federal Budget Threatening All of Us,
We Should Be Rising Up in Fury, Not Bowing in Craven Submission

YES, BUDGETS ARE BORING, unless they contain – as the proposed 2018 federal budget surely does – death threats to entire groups of people. Even then they are a huge pain in the ass to properly cover because proper coverage requires hours (and often entire days) of wonkishly scrutinizing line-item minutiae.

Nevertheless, be not dismayed; I have chosen here the least-wonkish, most informatively readable reports on the proposed 2018 federal budget I could find. Why? Because for many of us, this budget will literally be a matter of life and death – more likely the latter.

Though it is absurd to imagine we can stop the intended killing by any means short of revolution, we may indeed reduce the death toll – perhaps even substantially – by vehement protest, which I most emphatically recommend. At the very least we will be forewarned of the budget's disastrous impact in time to construct whatever collective and individual preparations we might be able to organize to protect our communities, our families and ourselves.

In whatever form this budget is finally enacted, the Ayn Rand ethos of the Trump-Pence Regime guarantees it will be the most deliberately vicious budget of my lifetime – and possibly the most deliberately vicious budget in the entire post-slavery history of the United States. That's because the neoliberal malice of Congress long ago defined the federal budget as a weapon for inflicting slow-motion mass-murder on those of us condemned as “surplus population” – that is, those of us who are poor and/or old and/or disabled and/or chronically unemployed and therefore no longer exploitable for Capitalist profit.

Thus the budget proposal's weaponized finances remain the lead story on Dispatches, just as its related tax measures were in last week's curiously obstructed DfD anthology, “Tax Reform Is Capitalism's Newest Euphemism for Genocide,”  the posting of which was first delayed by the temporary emotional paralysis evoked by the death of a half-sibling and then kept off the Tacoma Communists Facebook page by a vexing technical glitch that may or may not be of hostile origin.

Since then, I've found a comprehensive analysis of Republican budget proposals that shows how the tax bills and all its other “deadly details” savage the entire Working Class with “what amounts to a one-two punch – huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, to be paid for by even deeper cuts to social programs.” This analysis appeared the day after the Trump/Pence Regime announced its intention of slashing Medicaid, Food Stamps and other social services to pay for hurricane relief, including in abandoned Puerto Rico, where the unofficial death toll already approaches 900.

There is also unequivocal proof of Neoliberalism's financial success. The USian poverty rate is again soaring, thrusting inequality  to what – though nobody else dares say it – may well be the greatest and most unbridgeable such chasm in our species' entire history.

 

***

 

THE VAST AND EVER-WIDENING distance between poverty and wealth defines both our own powerlessness and the omnipotence of our Capitalist overlords.

It is exemplified by a detailed report in The Guardian that reveals – perhaps more succinctly than anything I have yet read – the properly terrifying malevolence  of the monsters who now rule the United States.

In yet another of the monsters' “hurry-up-and-die message” to those of us who are poor and/or elderly and/or disabled, they have ended the subsidy that enabled lowest-income people to have telephone service.  Because loss of telephone service is loss of access to emergency services, the end of this funding will undoubtedly murder many of its victims, especially those who are elderly and/or medically disabled, which – let there be no doubt – is clearly the Trump/Pence intent.

Nor can the Democratic (sic):Party protest without laying bare its own elemental hypocrisy, for the Democrats did the same thing to Washington state's poor in 2015.

Such are the circumstances that inflict bottomless despair. And because such despair is the defining characteristic of our time, deaths by drug overdose – at least 65,000 and climbing daily – thus become part of the arithmetic of deadliness that measures the aforementioned distance, with each corpse, each insensate mass of dead and rotting flesh, each remnant of what was once a woman or a child or a man, each fatality “part and parcel of capitalism's war against life itself.” (If you go to no other URL in this edition of Dispatches, please go to this one: it is as fine and angry a prose poem of resistance as any I have read.)

 

***

 

THROUGHOUT THE YEARS of my boyhood and early manhood there was always rational hope the USian judiciary would intervene against the worst forms of Capitalism, ameliorating its malevolence with modern humanitarian* interpretations of USian law as in Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board of Education. But these hopes are now slain, probably forever and unquestionably for the foreseeable future, by the Trump/Pence Regime's intent to pack all federal judicial vacancies with JesuNazis and other sorts of fascists and white supremacists –  a packing facilitated by the unyielding refusal of the Republican Congress to allow Obama any lesser-evil judicial appointments. Hence the dearth of lesser-evil judges who might at least have been depended on to soften this regime's tyrannies.

All of which makes it anything but a non sequitur to insert at this point Paul Craig Roberts' denunciation of the United States as the ultimate Moron Nation. Roberts' text is viewable as a budgetary footnote, but it could serve equally well as a prelude to next six linked reports, all of which detail the Neoliberal war against education  that has already succeeded in reducing us to the most ignorant  pseudo-citizenry** in the industrial world.

Additional details on the avowedly anti-intellectual process of moronation and its consequences include a scathing report on how the Trump/Pence Regime's malice is specifically aimed at college students; a provocative new essay by Diane Ravitch;  disclosure that fully half the nation's college students are so poor they don't have enough to eat; and the infinitely dismal collegiate truth of 21st Century Capitalism: that in an economy defined by the neoliberal intent to forcibly reduce the population without resorting to the out-of-fashion and therefore embarrassing methodology of death camps, not even a doctorate is a guarantee of employment.

With this last condition I have some indicative personal experience. No, not as a doctorate; despite verbal skills that test in the uppermost tenth of the topmost one percent and a solid 3.5 collegiate grade-average, it took me an 18-year, six-school financial struggle merely to earn a BA degree (interdisciplinary studies; Fairhaven College: 1976). Thus the most important (i.e., most embittering) lesson taught me by academia was that graduate school was so far beyond my fiscal reach, it was masochistic to even fantasize about it. Moreover, from the perspective of prospective bosses, it turned out my BA itself was worthless. As an infuriatingly smug personnel specialist told me in 1982, the fact it took me so long to graduate was absolute proof I wasn't “serious about doing college-level work” – never mind I had already answered her “why 18 years” interrogation by explaining the vindictive miserliness of the Vietnam Era GI Bill and the openly contemptuous denial of familial aid that was my lot as my family's one and only Despised Child.

 

***

 

AT THIS POINT WE again encounter the extended relevance of Roberts' essay, now as an epitaph for what Capitalism has almost certainly turned into a death planet. Predictably following the war-starting protocols of the Third Reich,  it turns out the de facto Fourth Reich was planning false-flag attacks to start World War III at least as early as 1962.  At least a dozen such attacks – most intended to start lesser wars or facilitate fascist coups – have been perpetrated or at least planned by the U.S., including the Gulf of Tonkin incident used to justify expanding its imperialistic presence in Vietnam into a full-scale war.

The British Ministry of Defense, which is just a tad more forthright than its USian Defense Department counterpart in terms of publicly acknowledging Capitalism's apocalyptic horrors, has meanwhile described “various doomsday scenarios,”  among them “the end of the world, or at least of humanity.”

Nor – despite public assurances to the contrary – can any one dissident general stop an USian president from launching thermonuclear Armageddon.  And that report, depressing as it is, omits in classic politically correct fashion any mention at all of the religious fanaticism that would make thermonuclear apocalypse a dead certainty once it were ordered. The terrifying truth is the highest levels of the imperial war machine's chain of command are ruled by JesuNazi fanatics who not only believe in Jesus as their “personal savior” but are push-the-button certain the apocalypse will bring about his return to Earth – their fanaticism ensuring that once the Deadly Decider decides for Death, the best our Mother Earth can expect is survival as a bug planet.

Then there's the less dramatic but potentially just as apocalyptic poisoning of the planet by Fukushima. “Is the decision to hold the Olympics in Japan in 2020 a foolish act of insanity and a crude attempt to help cover up the ravages of radiation?” As the report points out, this question must be asked because “Japan is a totalitarian corporate state where corporate interests are protected from liability by layers of subcontractors and by vested interests of powerful political bodies and extremely harsh state secrecy laws. As such, it is believed that nuclear safety and health issues, including deaths, are under-reported and likely not reported at all in most cases.”

And let us not forget the other manifestations of Capitalism's deadly hatred of the environment, the direct legacy of its Christian origin in the belief “environmental is of the Devil” and our sole soul purpose here is to earn our way to Heaven or doom ourselves to Hell if we fail. The resultant atrocities include the lead-poisoning plague that is now obviously nationwide.  ”Beyond the 71 water systems in Michigan that have recorded higher-than-Flint lead levels,” says the linked report, “a Reuters investigation found that children in nearly 4,000 communities across the United States have recorded lead levels more than twice those found in Flint at the height of the crisis.”

Tragically, the defeat of California in a water-rights fight shows the states – however well intentioned – are powerless to stop the Trump/Pence Regime's atrocities. 

Meanwhile the Keystone pipeline,  just as predicted,  is spilling thousands of barrels of oil via unreported and under-reported leaks.   

***

 

NEWS OF ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS – news that's always under-reported and sometimes totally suppressed – brings us full circle back to Roberts' Moron Nation essay, this time as the introduction to five reports on the unprecedented imposition of censorship by USian Mainstream Media in fulfillment of its late-Capitalist role as the for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

The chief executive of Google's parent company now brags of its close cooperation with the government to censor any Leftist criticism of the Empire, its Capitalist overlords and their financial fiefdoms. Chris Hedges' details another aspect of the censorship campaign,  while Black Agenda Report helps us brace ourselves for another succession of Trump/Pence atrocities with what amounts to an obituary for Net Neutrality and much else in the telephonic realm. An earlier Truthout story on the same subject is here.

An equally oppressive aspect of the new regime of USian censorship is disinformation, a primary example of which is the neo-McCarthy demonizing of minority activists as foreign agents. “Donna Brazile didn’t even try and run from the Democrat plantation, but she is being treated like a runaway slave for just having the temerity to question Massa Clinton.”

As Hedges says, “put the censorship campaigns together and the message is clear.” Left-wing critics, already under attack by the seemingly omnipotent forces of capitalist governance, will be silenced. And since the Trump-Pence Regime long ago made it obvious 'Net Neutrality is doomed no matter the overwhelming magnitude of its public support, there ends, probably forever, the usefulness of social media as a tool of resistance.

Unfortunately, because we have become so helplessly dependent on social media's implicitly despotic technology – despotic because it enables our overlords to censor us or switch us off literally any time they choose – there's not fuck-all we can do to fight back.

Such are the methods by which Moron Nation is perpetuated. With the death of the neutral Internet, the process of moronation becomes unstoppable. Moron Nation prevails. Thus in all probability our species dies, whether with an apocalyptic bang or a stupefied whimper it matters not; dead is dead.
_________________

* USian ”Thanksgiving” is a compound of Big Lies and lesser deceptions. Its true origin, now emphatically denied by USian Christianity, is the pagan harvest-feast that was typically celebrated as part of what we now call Hallowe'en. (Note how Canada – far less despotically Christian than the U.S. – has therefore preserved more of its original significance.)  Given the holiday's true history, it should be renamed “Genocide Day” and celebrated as a national day of shame and mourning.

**”Humanitarian” rather than “progressive” because the latter has been befogged to meaninglessness by at least two kinds of etymological abuse, specifically the mindless overuse encouraged by language fads and the premeditated theft of the term by the Democratic (sic) Party as part of the verbal deceptions by which it conceals its support for and collaboration with the more blatant fascism of the Republican Party.

***”Pseudo-citizen” because one is a citizen only if one is granted the rights of citizenship as spelled out in documents such as the U.S Constitution or the Four Freedoms and encouraged to behave accordingly. But these are the very rights and freedoms we here in the United (police) States are now methodically denied. Thus “citizen” in its present-day USian usage is part of the Big Lie of “our democracy.” Were we truth-speakers, we would describe ourselves not as “citizens” but as people conquered and subjugated by global Capitalism, i.e., “subjects.”

*********

 

And Yet There Remain a Few Glimmers of Hope...

 

Will Organized Labor Rise Again? It may already be happening. Millennials are discovering unionism is “the way we enforce democracy.”  Abusive charter-school bosses, low pay and wretched working conditions are sparking unionization campaigns in the very realm the Capitalists hoped would serve as a model for destroying unions. Similarly motivated efforts  are gaining headway in the Mainstream Media propaganda machine. And the Teamsters Union won a precedent-setting victory against the prescription drug lords at McKesson.

 

Tacoma Acknowledges It's Racist History. “In late September of (1885) all of the Chinese residents in Tacoma were told by city officials to leave town by Nov. 1 or 'face the consequences.' Many Chinese, fearful for their lives, left as quickly as they could, but slightly more than 200 remained in the city by the deadline date. On Nov. 3, a mob led by Tacoma’s mayor, the fire chief and other city leaders rounded up nearly all of the remaining Chinese residents and drove them out of town with only a few hours’ notice... The businesses and homes of the Chinese were ransacked and looted by the mob, and two days after the Chinese were expelled all of their homes were burnt to the ground.” Now, 132 years later, a collaboration between present-day Chinese-American residents and the Tacoma Art Museum addresses this dark period in the city's history in what is hoped will be a belated healing.

 

Redneck Revolt Expands Its Anti-Racist, Anti-Capitalist Organizing. Good news from folks the Republican and Democratic (sic) parties – and especially the Democrats' pseudo-Leftist sycophants – love to hate.

 

An Outspoken Feminist Seeks the Mexican Presidency, challenging the Hispanic cult of Macho. She is said to be the first such candidate in Mexico's history.

Censorship as Hilarious Hypocrisy: a British bakery is forced to apologize for portraying the Baby Jesus as a sausage pastry.  (Never mind the ritual cannibalism implicit in “this is my body; this is my blood.”)

Remembering an Important Writer Obscured by Patriarchal Prejudice: Louise Bryant's reporting on the Russian Revolution  is as relevant now as it was a century ago. Alas, like Gerda Taro's groundbreaking photographs of the Spanish Civil War, male supremacy had thrust it into the realm of the forgotten.

LB/16-24 November 2017 (with contributions from TigerLille and PF).

-30-

 

Tax Reform Is Capitalism's Newest Euphemism for Genocide

HR-1 Blitzkrieg Confirms Magnitude of Neoliberal Murderousness.
But How Can We the People Fight Its Lightening-Fast Enactment?

FOR THE FIRST TIME in a journalism career that began in November 1956, I have no choice but to lead a story with “what the fuck?” – that ultimate admission of ignorance, taken-abackedness and shock-doctrine powerlessness such ignorance is maliciously induced to sustain.

Despite innumerable reassurances the House vote would be put off until next week, HR-1, the House effort at deliberately genocidal “tax reform” – that is, the elimination of myriad tax deductions We the (piss-drenched) People at the lower levels of Neoliberal trickle-down economics depend on to stay alive – was speed-passed earlier today (16 November 2017) and is now in the hands of the Senate.

There it will be combined with the as-yet unnamed, unnumbered senatorial effort to achieve the same goal, exterminating those of us deemed “surplus” and/or “disposable” by our economic overlords and killing us in ways guaranteed to obscenely increase their already pornographic wealth.

While the Senate measure will undoubtedly differ from the so-called “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” shat forth by the House, it will be every bit as intentionally murderous,  with the debate over reconciling the two versions' differences nothing more than (yet another) Big Lie to distract us from the fact both versions have the same deadly intent of eliminating as many of us as possible while extracting maximum Capitalist wealth from our victimization.

Such is genocide in an era in which death camps have become unfashionable even as their function remains critical to the success of Capitalist governance.

***

DESPITE THE OVERALL LACK of reliable details and analysis – reports from the usually reliable leftish web sites are heavy on rhetoric but light on facts – I can call upon my 61 years experience as a news reporter to state with absolute certainty that “tax reform” aka slow-motion genocide is being imposed on us with such death-blow swiftness precisely because its coup-de-grace speed and momentum eliminate almost entirely the possibility of mobilizing effective resistance.

Indeed, given this “tax reform” project's unprecedented savagery, I cannot but wonder if its perpetrators have somehow raised Vlad Tepes,  Elizabeth Bathory and the Marquis de Sade – and maybe Reinhard Heydrich  and Ted Bundy – from their graves to write the legislation. Given his connections to the Republican Party hierarchy, Bundy would be particularly appropriate as an adjunct to the GOPorkers' death-dealing “tax reform” effort.

Bottom line, this so-called “tax reform” campaign is undoubtedly the most brazenly vicious legislative effort ever considered by the federal government in my lifetime – and maybe in all U.S. history.

Half its horror is its deceptiveness. While at the moment it is Republican Party viciousness that assaults us, that fact is too often used by the Mainstream Media propaganda machine to distract us from the underlying fact the same morally imbecilic savagery – the defining characteristic of Neoliberal economics – is enthusiastically shared by the Democratic (sic) Party.

Doubt me? Note for example Obamacare's intentionally murderous method for cutting Medicare costs by limiting the number of times a heart patient can be hospitalized – an ongoing effort the success of which is measured by its five percent increase in cardiac deaths.

Still think the Democrats are the good guys? Then consider Obama's death-dealing, Big-Lie-enhanced assault on the food-stamp program  (see also here) and the Clintons' deadly destruction of the welfare system,  rationalized in part by Hillary's blatantly racist Big Lie welfare dependency was breeding generations of “super predators.” 

Such is the always oppressive, too often deadly reality of “our democracy.”

 

***

 

BELOW, WITH MY APOLOGY for how long it has taken me to rewrite this post to accommodate the surprise passage of HR-1 and dig up the additional resources, are the best links I could find on HR-1 itself; on its Senate sequel (that is, on the probable content of the final legislation Trump will ram down our throats); and what – if anything – we might be able to do to ameliorate our victimization:

On HR-1: Regardless of its fate in the Senate, its contents are relevant because they reveal the genocidal malice of the One Percent.

Analyses of how it would radically expand the ranks of homeless people by ending the construction of affordable housing – particularly the sort of tax-subsidized senior housing in which I am living out my final years – are here and here, with a much more detailed analysis here.

HR-1's intentionally deadly impact on our access to healthcare is described here.

Meanwhile CounterPunch's analysis is here, a disappointing work that reflects the bourgeois bias of its author Jack Rasmus by including only a “short list” of the devastation that would be inflicted on us, the 99 Percent – a few paragraphs obviously added as a concession to the publisher's need to appear “progressive.” Mostly Rasmus merely rants on ad nauseam about what we real leftists already know too well: how Congress intends to (again) reward the One Percenters and their wholly owned Ruling Class executives and professionals who – like latter-day Adolf Eichmanns – obediently (and ever more lucratively) whore for the plutocrats whose unspeakable wealth makes them the real rulers of the world.

Also note the Republican summary of HR-1, which gloatingly states most of its axe-blow eliminations of deductions would begin on 1 January 2018.

On “tax reform” in the Senate: the most relevant analysis I could find, not surprisingly from the World Socialist Web Site, is here. It required I wait until 2:12 a.m. today (17 November) to include it in this report, but the delay was entirely worth while. Here is a paragraph that shows why:

“The bill is a measure by and for the oligarchy that controls both major parties and rules the country, in alliance with the military and the intelligence agencies. This reality was reflected in the response on Wall Street. All three major stock indexes soared, with the Dow Jones Industrial Index closing up by 187 points. The markets recorded their biggest one-day gains since September.”

And another, with the beginning sentence of a third graf:

“Ryan failed to explain why he and his fellow Republican leaders were rushing such a transformative measure through Congress without so much as a public hearing in either the House or Senate, and utilizing expedited procedures to circumvent a Democratic filibuster in the Senate so as to allow the Senate bill to be passed by a simple majority.”

“The Democrats, for their part, are carrying out their typical half-hearted and two-faced opposition. They themselves are calling for a massive cut in corporate taxes...” 

The rest of the what-happens-in-the-Senate material is again too heavy on rhetoric and way too light on data. The best of it is here, the link rendered uncertain by the new Common Dreams practice of obstructing the sharing of its reports by hiding them behind impossibly long URLs, for example the 786 characters of “speed-passed earlier today” (way above) or the 802 characters of “best report.” This necessitates converting these impossibly fragile links to tiny URLs, a process that because of the unprecedented length of the links is often time-consuming and at best vexing. (My thanks to the TinyURL website for its free and invaluable service.)

Other relevant reports are here  and here.

How then are we to fight back? Like the military version of Shock and Awe – the USian equivalent of the German Nazi Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg –  the One Percent's intent is to inflict maxim damage before we can muster an adequate defense. Given the speed and depth of the assault, this is a battle we will almost certainly lose, but we dare not surrender lest the enemy discredit us as hopelessly weak – another of the assault's obvious purposes.

In other words, these are truly desperate times. My suggestion is therefore that we employ not only the routine tactics of contacting even the anti-tax-cut senators by letter or telephone and demonstrating or picketing in appropriate locales, but that we offer maximum cooperation with any and all organizations that are attempting to resist the “tax reform” onslaught – whether or not they publicly admit its undeniably genocidal purpose. While we should recognize the obvious pitfalls that lurk in any such united-front effort – co-optation and infiltration are of course the worst hazards – we should also understand that such a circumstance offers us a unique opportunity for anti-capitalist consciousness raising.

Indeed, that's why I included the above reminder that it's not just the Republicans we have to fight – that both parties (which are in ugly truth mere factions of a single Capitalist party) – are, like their Nazi and fascist antecedents, the sworn enemies of any genuine people's democracy.

 

*********

 

BEFORE THE HOUSE passed HR-1, I had accumulated 68 news items from which to choose the stories I would feature in this week's Dispatches. This is the normal amount of reading and research for each week's edition, but I was sidetracked first by the emotional trauma of a family tragedy and then by the shock of HR-1's passage. (Yes, I had foolishly believed the sources, public and private, who were certain there would be no action on the measure until next week.) Hence I am choosing only the most relevant of these 68 items, stories that cannot wait until next week, in all only four news reports, plus two petitions I heartily recommend you sign:

 

Another Killer Cop Gets Another Predictable Acquittal. Officer charged in Freddie Gray case will remain on the job. 

 

GOPorkers Put Ronnie's Top Union-Buster in Command at NLRB: how Trump fulfills his promises to USian workers. 

 

Another White Cop, Another Dead Person of Color: the authoritiesclaim the victim called the police on himself and  suggest it was suicide.

 

DC Cops Busted Journalist to Seize His Film for use as evidence in ongoing felony trials of innocent victims of Inauguration Day mass arrest. 

Color of Change Petition: Justice for Meek Mill. “Have you heard about the judge who sent Meek Mill to prison? She's notorious for cruel and harsh sentences against Black people in Philadelphia. And she's shown extreme personal bias in Meek Mill's case. She needs to recuse herself from the case. That's why I signed this petition to demand she be removed from the case. Will you sign it too?”

UltraViolet Petition: Protect Mila Kunis, who who is under attack by Mike Pence supporters for her public support of Planned Parenthood.

 

LB/17 November 2017 (with contributions from TigerLille and PF).

-30-

Another Week's Bold Battles against Minions of Malevolence

Misogyny Exemplifies the Patriarchal Putrescence at Capitalism's Core

HARVEY WEINSTEIN, WITH the help of key Democratic (sic) Party associates, employed ex-Israeli spooks and other private-investigators – psychological goon squads protected by judicial sleight-of-hand – in a failed effort to threaten his accusers into submissive silence. The unfolding story is especially relevant for the revealing glimpse it gives us of the depth of anti-woman hatefulness at the core of patriarchy and its favorite son Capitalism. The New Yorker's investigative report  reveals the details of Weinstein's breathtakingly vast effort to assail his accusers' credibility, while The Daily Caller exposes the connections of Weinstein and his allies to the demonstrably hypocritical  Clinton machine and the Democratic (sic) Party apparatus in general.

(Note: The Daily Caller is an openly fascist publication, revealed as such by the fact the pro-JesuNazi demagogue Ann Coulter  [see also here ] is its lead opinion columnist. While my citation of TDC material exemplifies the usefulness of the fascist and/or JesuNazi Mainstream Media in exposing ugly truths routinely suppressed by the Mainstream Media faction that serves the Democratic [sic] Party, it also provides an opportunity to show how the alleged rivalry between these media factions helps maintain the illusion of USian “freedom of the press” – a key deception in preserving the far more malignant Big Lie of “our democracy.” My advice? Read these sources mindful of their primary functions in maintaining the aforementioned Big Lie, but never forget they are useful sources of information about the nature and methodology of Capitalist governance as it inevitably metamorphoses into JesuNazi tyranny in the U.S. and other forms of fascism elsewhere.)

 

The Late American Indian Movement (AIM) Activist Dennis Banks served as a grunt in Vietnam, where he witnessed the USian Empire employing the same sort of terrorism it had used against his ancestors. After he returned home and encountered more of the same, he realized the irrefutable truth of the USian brand of Nazism in action: whatever the white supremacists were eager to do to people in other countries they were equally eager to do “to continue the genocide against the indigenous community.”

 

How Congressional Surrender Made the President the New Führer. That's my description, far more accurate than the euphemistic (and therefore implicitly submissive) language used in this report.  Yes, the Tom Dispatch writer follows the deliberately deceptive liberal practice of trying to seem radical while avoiding any call to revolution, but his text is nevertheless worth reading for its accurate summation of imperial history.

 

The Ongoing Persecution of Anti-Trump/Pence Demonstrators: felony trials in these Washington D.C. cases begin this month, with upwards of 200 people – many of them non-demonstrators caught up in the Nazi-style sweep – facing decades in the slave-pens of the USian prison system as retaliation for the illegal acts of a few anarchists.  See also an earlier but more detailed report on the D.C. mass arrests here, Meanwhile, this report on prosecutorial sleight-of-hand  provides a microcosm of the tactics that will undoubtedly be used to maximize convictions. 

 

Piss Off der Führ...ah, er, the President, Become Unemployable Forever. All this woman did was express her disapproval  by giving the finger to one of the president's invasive convoys, but she was fired in retaliation for that single act of defiance. As to her future, note what Colin Kaepernick's permanent unemployability proves about the fate of those who dare defy the Trump/Pence Regime. (With apologies for the “our democracy” Big Lie peddled by columnist Leonard Pitts.)

 

Los Angeles Mass Arrests Were Intended to Suppress Dissent. The headline tells the story, with more details here.

 

T/P Regime Finally Ends Persecution of Woman Who Dared Laugh at Sessions. Again the head tells the story, with details in the linked report. 

 

JesuNazis Sneak Fetal Personhood into Republican Tax Plan  in yet another theocratic effort to make all abortions illegal. See also here.

 

Capitalist Parties Dissolve into Factional Fights. The soap opera continues, but the details are both informative and entertaining. Go here and here.

 

In a Microcosm of These Fights, Senator's Assailant May Face Years in Prison. Local authorities are contemplating felony charges and Trump/Pence Regime authorities are looking to file federal charges against retired anesthesiologist Rene Boucher, who is accused of assaulting Sen. Rand Paul. The two are next-door neighbors in a gated community exclusively for millionaires and above, which means their antagonism epitomizes the warfare within the Imperial One Percent and its cadre of professional and executive harlots. Paul is a fanatical social Darwinist – more details here – and Boucher is a Democrat, but both are members of the cadre of Ruling Class professionals who shamelessly whore for Capitalism.

 

Citing Capitalist Savagery, Majority of Younger USians Prefer Communism or Socialism. Alas, the vital question – are they willing to join and sustain the necessary revolution – remains unanswered by this anti-Communist poll. From the report: “The data on attitudes toward socialism, which confirms other surveys with similar findings, is all the more extraordinary given that opposition to capitalism is excluded from the mass media.”

 

The End, Forever, of USian Due Process? How Special Counsel Muller has nullified attorney-client privilege is a warning to us all.

 

Why the Future is Either Chinese or Nonexistent. Unless the USian Empire acts upon its JesuNazi ethos of Better Dead than Red and so destroys the world, “there is no reason to doubt that China will surpass the U.S. as the planet’s most important economic center long before 2049...The Chinese build African ports and railroads, while the U.S. builds drone bases.” Many more details here.

 

How JesuNazi Oppression Warps Our Sexuality. The “most serious determinant of the sexual well-being of our youth” are the negative attitudes with which we approach it.

 

Hashtag #MeToo Teaches Us Speaking Out Is a Genuinely Revolutionary Act, a blow against the compulsory silence that is the patriarchy's most potent weapon – a lesson as relevant in all other forms of economic and political rebellion as it is in the liberation struggles of women and minorities.

 

Another Police-State Perversion of the USian Mainstream Media Adds Twitter to the private, for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. (That's Goebbels in the accompanying photo.)

 

Sergeant La David Johnson a Victim of the Poverty Draft. “Any discussion about Sergeant Johnson ought to point out that he was a victim of the poverty draft. Before enlisting he worked at Walmart, a sure path to continued poverty or to the dubious odds offered by the army.”

 

Rebels Are Not Always Working-Class Heroes: two critical assessments of the Catalan independence movement, here and here.

 

A Washington State First Nation Exemplifies New Eco-Leadership, using its totem-pole exhibit to defy Capitalism by raising environmental consciousness.

 

In Compellingly Poetic Prose, Christy Rodgers pens a poignant prophecy relevant to that environmental consciousness and thus too important to ignore.  

 

Homeless People in Seattle Demand Recognition as Fully Human,  with my apology for the misleading Popular Resistance headline: the protesters did not “take over” city hall; they were invited there as showpieces by the politicians.

 

The Capitalist Present May Be the Most Stressful Time in Human History: “fifty-nine percent said they can't remember a worse time in the nation's history...Women who took the survey reported higher levels of stress than men, and black and Latino males had a higher average stress level than their white counterparts. Black respondents also expressed far less optimism  about the path the country is on than white respondents; 72 percent disagreed that the country could have a strong future, while only 55 percent of whites disagreed with the sentiment.” Me, I fear even the Black respondents are way too optimistic.

 

Perhaps as an Ultimate Yardstick of Our Despair, an USian woman bedded down with a predatory python, unaware the seven-foot snuggly snake was actually measuring her to determine if she could be swallowed as its next meal.

 

“The Analysis of Speeches, Debates, and Various Documents demonstrates that Trump stands out from other politicians as being very low in analytic thinking. However, he represents the next step in a trend wherein most Presidents and presidential candidates have been becoming less analytic. Trump may be an anomaly, but he is also a part of a long-developing presidential pattern.” So says a psychological study, the full text of which is censored by an $11.95 pay wall.

 

Yet Another Killer Cop (Predictably) Acquitted. A jury acquitted Wayne Isaacs, an officer with the New York City Police Department (NYPD), of murder and manslaughter after he gunned down unarmed Delrawn Small in Brooklyn on July 4, 2016. Since both killer and victim are African-American, the atrocity exemplifies the judicial immunity that maximizes police violence.

 

Protecting Capitalist Savagery, Congress Bolsters the USian Police State. “The aim of this campaign is to claim that social conflict within the United States arises not from the scale of social inequality (which is) greater than in any other country in the developed world, but rather from the actions of 'outside agitators' working for the Kremlin.”

 

Two Black Agenda Reports on Democratic (sic) Treachery show us the Hillary Regime's euphemistic fascism would have been scarcely more than a dishonest version of the Trump/Pence Regime's JesuNazism. Go here and here.

 

But Are Deceptive Demos a Bit Better Than Openly Despotic Fascists? As predicted, a big majority of New Yorkers say yes, electing Mayor Bill de Blasio to a second term despite his many broken promises. (Another example of how our revolutionary impulses are relentlessly suffocated by declining expectations.)

 

Giroux Documents What We as 99 Percenters Already Know: that the atrocities in the Middle East, in Puerto Rico and Las Vegas are products of the same mindset. “ At the beginning of the 21st century, we have seen the emergence of a new kind of politics of death, the effects of which extend from the racist response to Hurricane Katrina to the lead poisoning of thousands of children in Flint, Michigan, and dozens of other cities...People who are Black, Brown, poor, disabled or otherwise marginalized are now excluded from the rights and guarantees accorded to fully fledged citizens of the republic...their efforts to mobilize...met with murderous police crackdowns and deportations...With the election of Trump, the politics of disposability and the war against democracy have taken on a much harder and crueler edge...a snapshot of how war culture and violence merge.”  (Well worth reading.)

 

Working Class Peoples as (Yet Another) Endangered Species: As demonstrated by the aftermaths of hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Irma and Maria, plus the wildfires that ravaged the western US, the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals refuse to acknowledge the causes or the consequences of the increasingly devastating effects of climate change. And – due entirely to neoliberal malevolence – we Working Class folk are invariably the people who are most ruinously afflicted.  Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, teachers are arrested for protesting the neoliberal closure of the public schools.

 

Most of Us Know the Demos Swept the Off-Year Elections, but journalistic principles nevertheless require linking to a comprehensive national report. That said, nothing will change save radical escalation of anti-socialist identity politics, especially efforts to forcibly disarm the 99 Percent,  particularly in Washington state,  where the Democratic (sic) Party will now use its recapture of the state Senate to try to fulfill its long-term goal of outlawing and confiscating all semi-automatic firearms and radically expanding the class of firearms-ownership prohibitions to include all opponents of Capitalism.

 

Germany, Feeling Abandoned and Perhaps Even Threatened by the Trump/Pence Regime, contemplates rearming for offensive warfare.  (Can you say “blitzkrieg”?)

 

Korean Crisis Update: Trump uses South Korean parliament as “the stage for a display of choreographed war propaganda.”  Meanwhile a related story is seemingly ignored by Mainstream Media. Go here for current details and background on the empire's potebtially apocalyptic warmongering against Korea and also against  Iran.

 

Self-Education: an Informative Short Course on Middle Eastern History, with emphasis on the imperialistic ploys that led to the present-day Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, is available here.

 

In the USian Homeland, Even the Telebots Are Racists: a New York City school system robo-call repeatedly mistakes the N-word as an African-American student's first name.

 

Dialectic Materialism Is Our First Accurate Description of What Is and how things actually are. A most relevant essay by Susan Babbit. “Cubans discovered, or rediscovered, the ancient truth that human beings know the world dialectically. We know, not just intellectually, but by feeling the effects of the world, bodily.”

 

An Anthology on the 100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution, without which we socialists would have no rational hopefulness at all. Inspiring reading here, here, here and here, with the Better-a-Dead-Planet-Than-a-Red-Planet retaliatory Capitalist loathing of the 99 Percent evidenced here.

LB/1-8 November 2017 (with contributions from from TigerLille and PF).

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