Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

“My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior…as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people” -- Adolf Hitler (1922)*

 Collage by Loren Bliss copyright 2009. Reproduction without written permission forbidden. (Click on collage to view it  full frame.)

 **

(This week’s work is posted a day early to accommodate the Feast of Conquest Harvest known as Thanksgiving. My apology to those First Nations peoples, ancestral and living, who rightfully find the holiday offensive.)

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Could Sarah Palin be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler -- returned in female form to seek once more the enslavement of the entire human species?

Or -- given a godless, random, exclusively material universe -- could Palin simply have been thrust by some unknown thermodynamic coincidence onto an eerily parallel pathway?

In either case, is my collage -- despite its long-overdue payback for the vicious Palinoid attacks on President Barack Obama -- mere aesthetic hyperbole? Or is it yet another proof of the vision attributed to art and artists by Jungian psychology and McLuhan semiotics?

Obviously, time will tell.

But the similarity of patterns evidenced by Palin’s political relationship to the aged John McCain and Hitler’s to Paul von Hindenburg -- healthy young fanatics paired with sickly elder conservatives -- is terrifying. It was military-hero von Hindenburg’s death that brought Hitler to power, just as military-hero McCain’s death would have brought Palin to power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_von_Hindenburg

Consider too the fact that most Germans regarded Hitler as a joke -- that is, until amidst the despair of economic ruin and the hopelessness of political deadlock comparable to our own, they began embracing Hitler’s fanatical eloquence as the one empowering expression of their own anger and bitterness.

In which context please reflect carefully on the following:

To understand how easily Sarah Palin could be the next president, we need only look to another vice presidential candidate widely denounced by the liberal elite when he was announced in 1952 - Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon became president by mobilizing resentment of the working class against elites. By framing elites as talking down to the poor and working class, Sarah Palin, with the right slick ad men, could mobilize that same type of sentiment against the elitist "eggheads" of the Democratic Party. (From “Ivy League Liberal Elitism Will Make Sarah Palin President”: Truthout, 11 November 2009.)

http://www.truthout.org/1111099

Meanwhile the fanatical Christianity Palen outspokenly represents becomes ever more powerful:

Already this month, the Catholic bishops pushed their religious doctrine into the House version of the health care bill and the Catholic Archdiocese in D.C. threatened to cut off services to the homeless if the D.C. Council passed the current version of the same-sex marriage bill.

Adding to that, today in the nation’s capital, Roman Catholic, evangelical and Orthodox leaders released the “Manhattan Declaration,” which addressed how they believe abortion, marriage and religious liberty should be treated in the United States. The declaration essentially calls for the narrow theological views favored by these groups to be binding on all… (From “Praying for Theocracy: Across the Country, Groups Seek to Impose Religious Law”: The New York Times via Americans United for Separation of Church and State, 20 November 2009.)

http://blog.au.org/2009/11/20/praying-for-theocracy-across-the-country-groups-seek-to-impose-religious-law/

Lastly, let us disprove forever the spurious notion Hitler was anti-Christian:

Through subterfuge and concealment, many of today's Church leaders and faithful Christians have camouflaged the Christianity of Adolf Hitler and have attempted to mark him an atheist, a pagan cult worshipper, or a false Christian. However, from the earliest formation of the Nazi party and throughout the period of conquest and growth, Hitler expressed his Christian support to the German citizenry and soldiers. (From “The Christianity of Hitler revealed in his speeches and proclamations”: nobeliefs.com, 27 February 1997, rev. 3 June 2006.)

 

http://nobeliefs.com/speeches.htm

No Beliefs is a website dedicated to skeptical investigation of shibboleths and sacred cattle, including the world’s established religions. Its home page, always worthy of exploration, is here:

http://nobeliefs.com/index.htm

LB/24 November 2009

*Hitler,  speech in Munich, 12 April 1922 (“The Christianity of Hitler,” ibid.)

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"Clear-minded, cautious...the wanderer comes to an inn."*

Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2009

***

More of the calculated deception implicit in the slogan “change we can believe in” is revealed by comparing two official statements -- one contradicting the other -- each from the federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The first statement, prominently displayed on the CMS website for at least several weeks (and still there as of tonight, 18 November 2009), is entitled “Health Insurance Reform Reality Check” and is presented as a signed assertion from President Barack Obama: “Whether or not you have health insurance right now, the reforms we seek will bring security and stability that you don’t have today. This isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives. This is about people’s businesses. This is about our future.” (Boldface added for emphasis.)

http://www.healthreform.gov/

The second statement, still not available on the CMS site despite its release four days ago (and therefore obviously being suppressed by CMS and its parent organization, the Department of Health and Human Services), is contained in a 31-page CMS report entitled “Estimated Financial Effects of the ‘America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009’ (H.R. 3962) as Passed by the House on November 7, 2009.”

Authored by CMS Chief Actuary Richard S. Foster, the report states on Page 9 that H.R. 3962 “would reduce (Medicare Advantage) rebates to plans and thereby result in less generous benefit packages. We estimate that in 2014, when the MA provisions would be fully phased in, enrollment in MA plans would decrease by about 64 percent (from its projected level of 13.2 million under current law to 4.7 million under the proposal).” (Bf again added for emphasis.)

Foster calculates $201 billion would be slashed from Medicare Advantage -- nearly a third of the $570.6 billion by which the table on Page 2 indicates the entire Medicare program is to be reduced.

Thanks to The Hill, the full text of the Foster report is available here:

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/67791-cms-house-health-bill-will-hike-costs-289b

The Hill's summary of the CMS findings is here:

http://thehill.com/images/stories/news/2009/november/weekend111309/cmsactuarynumbers.pdf

Beyond the political smokescreen of euphemisms, the siphoning of $570.6 billion from Medicare to finance health care “reform” is forcible redistribution of income. Typical of monopoly capitalism, it is redistribution of income from the poor to the rich -- the huge windfalls to Big Business and Wall Street guaranteed by mandatory insurance.

Worse, the proposed destruction of Medicare Advantage -- which provides 54 percent of us who are lower income ($30,000 annually or less) with our only way around the exclusionary co-pays and deductibles of un-supplemented Medicare -- is literally a death sentence.

So much for “security and stability.”

Page 8 of the Kaiser Foundation report linked below summarizes the demographics of MA:

http://www.kff.org/medicare/upload/7801.pdf

I cannot tell you how much it pains me to say this, but in this instance the DemocRats are lying and the GOPorkers are speaking partial truth. Health care “reform” is indeed being financed at the expense of those of us -- elderly or disabled (and in my case both) -- who depend on Medicare to keep ourselves alive. And by denial of care, the proposed “reforms” will indeed kill some of us.

No wonder the public is so frightened. No wonder public anger is so easily misdirected by GOPig demagogues.

Thus the futility of “hope” -- utterly predictable once we awaken to the truth of class struggle, to its ultimate revelations of the United States as a single-party state with only one purpose: the expansion and protection of capitalism -- absolute power and unlimited profits for the ruling class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us.

***

No I am not overlooking the fight against Stupak-Pitts. But Rep. Bart Stupak -- elevated to Monarch of Misogyny by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the cabal of Christian fanatics known as The Family -- has already declared that health care reform is dead without his nullification of Roe v. Wade for all but the nation’s wealthiest women. And Stupak, who represents rural Northern Michigan, a region of unique natural beauty where the inhabitants are obviously as theocratically vicious as they are in the Deep South, has enough support in both houses of Congress to have the last word.

Again reasoning objectively from the class-struggle premise of one party/one national purpose, my prediction is that Stupak will thus give the DemocRats the rationale they need to kill health reform -- so they can pretend to have served their constituents while in actuality they serve their Big Business masters.

You read it here first.

Stupak also radically advances the spread of Christian theocracy. Already proven in the South to be the ultimate barrier not only against unionism but humanitarian activism of any kind -- never forget the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan is “the Saturday Night Men’s Bible Study Class” -- Christian theocracy is now the slave-opiate with which the ruling class wants to brain-police the entire nation.

Meanwhile the best reporting on health care reform -- actually on the betrayal of health care reform -- has been by Jane Hamsher’s Firedoglake.

Her site, with its unfolding analysis of the Senate measure just announced by Majority Leader Harry Reid, is here:

http://news.firedoglake.com/

***

While I try to limit my weekly blog posts to approximately 1000 words -- the above runs about 830 words -- this has been an exceptionally busy week. The next two items originally appeared elsewhere, but I believe they belong here too. Therefore I beg your indulgence.

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It seems to me the most salient element of the Teabagger story has yet to be told.

This is the story of how the Democratic and Republican parties are seemingly collaborating to ensure "change we can believe in" never goes beyond the abject powerlessness implicitly affirmed by the adoption of "hope" as a viable political slogan.

The story begins with the fact today's U.S. working-class citizens have legitimate grievances that have worsened steadily since the untimely end of the Kennedy Administration 46 years ago.

These grievances include the ever-more-apparent extermination-by-neglect policies at the core of the U.S. health care system; the constant fear so generated amongst lower-income, elderly and disabled people (I am all three); the outsourcing and downsizing of our jobs; foreign wars that have no purpose beyond functioning as profit-centers for Big Business; and now the brazenly Antoinette savagery of bailing out the ruling class while abandoning all the rest of us to "jobless recovery" -- foreclosure, eviction, homelessness, sickness and thus ultimately forcible population-reduction by economically imposed death.

Adding real and potentially very explosive fuel to this metaphorical fire is the increasing recognition we are hopelessly imprisoned in a neo-manorial economy -- the reason that here below the salt only the most deluded PollyAnnas still believe there will ever be any meaningful recovery of lost jobs.

Normally -- as the Democrats did with the New Deal in 1932 and pretended to do again during the 2008 election campaign -- they would have ridden this groundswell of wretchedness and rational anxiety to huge electoral mandates for radical change.

Instead, the Democrats' expressed just enough generalized protest to win the vote but since then have worked relentlessly to limit if not obstruct the very change they seemed to promise.

The result is an unprecedented and growing backlash, the Teabagger phenomenon that for its demagogic figurehead should properly be re-labeled Palinism: hard-Right expression of working-class fears and anger that normally would have been voiced by the Left as condemnations of ruling-class greed and agitation for definitively humanitarian reforms.

No more. The remarkable silence of the Democrats has given the Right an opportunity unprecedented in U.S. history to seize the time and pervert it to anti-humanitarian purposes.

Cunningly -- and predictably -- the Palinoids are thus redirecting a huge measure of working-class rage from its proper target and hurling it against the only possible measures by which the causative problems might have been ameliorated if not resolved.

The immediate and obvious consequence is the revitalization of the Republican Party: the increasing probability the GOP will regain enough Congressional seats next year to end -- effectively forever -- any possibility of real health care reform (now hopelessly obstructed by the Democrats’ decision to combine the abortion and health-reform fights), or Employee Free Choice (the one measure that would have genuinely re-empowered the working class but has already been reduced to meaninglessness by behind-the-scenes betrayals).

Given these facts -- that is, given (A), the undeniable extent to which the Democrats are truly enabling their alleged opponents and (B), the extent to which this enablement serves Big Business and Wall Street at Main Street‘s expense -- what emerges into ever-clearer focus is a charade of bipartisanship that functions solely to advance the ultimate goal of monopoly capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the ruling class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us.

Thus the Teabaggers are manipulated -- much as were the people of Weimar Germany -- to collaborate in their own further disempowerment by mobilizing in support of their oppressors.

While the implicit pattern is obvious to anyone with a working knowledge of labor relations or history -- and (precisely as the above demonstrates) is not all that difficult to explain -- the fact it remains an untold story is perhaps the most damning proof yet of the harlotry to which U.S. mass media has been reduced.

http://crosscut.com/2009/11/13/mossback/19363/

(Crosscut, which honored the above response as an “Editor’s Pick” -- many thanks -- is an online daily that serves the bourgeoning metropolis on the eastern shore of Puget Sound. The publication is nationally significant as a leading part of journalism’s nonprofit avante garde.)

***

And now for a bit of cultural revelation originally disseminated via my private mailing list as a commentary on an unusually well-done author-interview published in a rather surprising place:  

I attended the University of Tennessee with Cormac McCarthy in 1959. Then and again after I finished the 17-month slog of Korean duty that completed the active-duty part of a six-year U.S. Army enlistment and I returned to Knoxville to work as reporter/photographer for a couple of daily newspapers c. 1962-1965, McCarthy and I ran in approximately the same crowd.

La vie bohéme was never without deadly risk in Tennessee, not just Ku Klux Klan country but the viciously racist Scopes Trial theocracy where Christians first made it a crime to teach evolution even at the college level -- ultimate proof of the ugly truth behind the label by which the Klan was known throughout the South: “the Saturday Night Men’s Bible Study Class.”

This omnipresent threat, hardly ever acknowledged aloud but always at the back one’s mind, is of course the reason why -- in all such realms (and invariably to the sneering disapproval of the pretentiously pacifist art/lit aristocracies of New York, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle) -- intimacy with the works of Lao Tzu, Diane di Prima, Dorothea Lange and Clyfford Still is typically accompanied (as McCarthy’s own work attests) by parallel intimacy with the works of Colt, Winchester, Remington and Smith&Wesson.

In the years I knew him, Cormac still went by the name of Charley, and all the rest of us -- at least all the males -- envied him the superb Irish tenor in which he sang not only a substantial repertoire of traditional British ballads but some very fine Appalachian-tragedy songs of his own making and in either case instantly aroused every heterosexual woman within earshot (and even a few lesbians) to such erotic readiness all he needed do had he chosen to commence consummation was gesture with his eyes toward bower or bedroom.

As a woman with whom I myself was very close once confessed, “every time I hear Charley sing it makes me want to tear off all my clothes and just fuck him senseless”: a true Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cocksman -- though as far as I know he was always faithfully monogamous.

But even after all his literary and film successes, the interview linked below is the only one I've ever seen that captures something of the real Cormac McCarthy, including the keenly observant, outrageously wry sensibility that fuels his genuinely Homeric skill as a storyteller.

While I am no fan of The Wall Street Journal -- even before Murdoch, its editorial page malevolence toward workers marked it as a ruling-class-only equivalent of der Voelkischer Beobachter -- this piece on McCarthy, though a bit stilted (no doubt due to the fact the reporter never quite got over being intimidated by the presence of The Great Writer), is nevertheless damn well worth reading:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html

(More thanks to Crosscut, which in a representative example of its editors’ cosmopolitan sense of relevance linked to this WSJ story last week.)

LB/18 November 2009

*Headline quote: I Ching -- “56th Hexagram, Six in the second place” (Wilhelm/Baynes translation; Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XIX: 1967)

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Stupak-Pitts: War against Women and Human Sexuality

Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 1971, 1974, 1986

*

Too often overlooked in the rightfully escalating outrage over Stupak-Pitts is the measure’s revelation of the terrifying extent to which Christian zealotry is transforming the United States into a Bible-based theocracy.

Indeed only now nearly a week after Stupak’s enactment is there widespread realization that it effectively nullifies Roe v. Wade for all women save those with unlimited wealth -- the pampered, Antoinette-like handmaidens of the ruling class who have enough money to buy safe abortion even were it illegal.

But the ugly truth is that Stupak-Pitts is only part of a growing body of (deliberately?) under-reported successes by which tyranny-loving Christian fanatics are gaining control over the nation’s political processes -- a coup proven by the fact the near-total abolition of a basic reproductive freedom is now apparently the unavoidable prerequisite of health care reform.

Another ugly truth -- that the two parties are increasingly indistinguishable -- is reflected in the House majority that imposed Stupak. The vote was 240-194; 64 of the pro-theocracy votes, 26.6 percent, were cast by DemocRats, so spelled to distinguish them from those Democrats who at least pretend fealty to New Deal principles.

Meanwhile the zealots -- I use that and “fanatics” to sidestep paralyzing squabbles over theologically real but politically meaningless distinctions between “fundamentalist” and “evangelical” -- have again demonstrated how capitalism subverts constitutional democracy.

Surely -- given the fanatics’ lavish financing by Big Business -- this is no coincidence. The ruling class long ago figured out how to restructure the marketplace to eliminate our constitutional rights. Malls prohibit demonstrations; outsourcing destroys unions; tax-base inequalities re-impose school segregation; media downsizing imposes de facto censorship.

The same methodology is applied to working-class sexual freedom. Birth control becomes ever more impossibly expensive; sexual minorities are maliciously denied the economic indulgences granted heterosexual marriage.

Now -- if Stupak survives the Senate (and there is every reason to assume it will) -- abortion will literally be priced out of working-class reach.

But only rarely do we recognize the global war of which Stupak is part -- the patriarchal reaction against new, implicitly matriarchal paradigms of freedom that began taking shape during the 1960s.

Here are two superb books on the topic: for those interested in history and archaeology, the long-suppressed evidence disclosed in The Great Cosmic Mother (Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor; HarperCollins: 1991); for those more attuned to the creative process, riddles wisely expounded via The White Goddess (Robert Graves; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1966).

Suffice it to say that what the late Walter Bowart labeled “revolution in consciousness” -- this during the tempestuous summer of 1967 -- was all of that and a great deal more.

***

The reactionary magnitude of Christian zealotry and the malevolence of its agenda is thoroughly documented in a book entitled The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet; HarperCollins:2008).

Stupak-Pitts is primarily the spawn of The Family -- a clandestine, fanatically Christian cabal that increasingly dominates U.S. government and governance at every level.

The Family’s national influence seems akin to what the Ku Klux Klan had throughout the South (where the Klan was appropriately known as “the Saturday Night Men’s Bible Study Class”), or what the oppressively secret Opus Dei organization had in Fascist Spain.

Indeed it is the South -- where ever-more-fanatical Protestantism enforces the region's anti-woman, anti-labor, anti-homosexual, anti-intellectual bigotry and functions as the brain police for Big Business -- that apparently provides The Family with its model society, the system of theocracy-protected tyranny it seeks to impose on the entire United States.

Thus The Family serves the sole remaining U.S. purpose: the propagation of monopoly capitalism -- absolute power and unlimited profits for the ruling class -- the total subjugation of all the rest of us.

Stupak (and all restrictions like it) arise from the fact that, per Genesis, the zealots condemn women -- and female sexuality in particular -- as eternal wellsprings of rebellion: Eve as the Original Agitator, incarnate in Maeve and Boudicca and Jeanne d'Arc and La Pasionaria and the infinitely courageous women who boiled out of the Lesnoy Textile Works in Petrograd on 8 March 1917 to start the Russian Revolution.

For all of this and so much more -- even for the flowers Allison Krause dared hand the National Guardsmen the day before they gunned her down at Kent State -- Stupak is the patriarchy’s revenge.

As perhaps these links will clarify:

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/11/10/the-incredibly-long-arms-of-the-stupak-amendment-your-large-employer-insurance-plan-is-not-safe/ http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/09-6#comment-1339320

In the report linked immediately below, The Nation’s Emily Douglas inexplicably omits The Family from her indictment of those responsible for Stupak-Pitts. Thus -- despite the fact U.S. rank-and-file Catholicism is about 62 percent pro-choice -- she implicitly blames Catholics for the amendment's passage: a display of bias that is both misleading and unfair.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/10-6

***

Meanwhile another dimension of Christian fanaticism is seemingly revealed by a local 2009 election result in Pierce County, Washington. Pierce County voters rejected Referendum 71 -- electoral affirmation of everything-but-marriage domestic partnership -- and did so by a 52-48 majority.

This outcome is not only contrary to the measure’s overall statewide approval but is glaringly unique in Pugetopolis, the six-county metropolitan area (Pierce County plus Thurston, King, Snohomish, Skagit and Whatcom counties; the cities of Tacoma, Olympia, Seattle, Everett and Bellingham) on the eastern side of Puget Sound.

The result seems all the more perplexing given that other Pierce County results show the local defeat of R-71 was not due to any broader metastasis of reactionary values.

But R-71 is formal repudiation of homophobia and, to a lesser degree, the rejection of fanatical Christian hostility to all non-marital sexuality. The taboos so revoked are -- like opposition to women’s rights and reproductive freedom -- religious issues.

Hence the connection to Stupak-Pitts.

Given the huge presence of military personnel in the Pierce County electorate due to Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base, the probability is the anomalous defeat of R-71 is additional confirmation the U.S. military has adopted the most relentlessly intolerant dogmas of Christianity -- the Crusader mentality Bush Administration theocrats sought to make mandatory throughout the armed services.

Thus the Pierce County R-71 results point also to the likelihood that -- despite President Obama’s assertions to the contrary -- opposition from within the military means there will be no repeal of Don’t Ask /Don’t Tell: not now, not ever.

These links document and discuss the take-over of the U.S. armed services by Christian zealots:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488 http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/05/onward-christ-1.html http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/

LB/11 November 2009

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EXTRA: GOPorker/DemocRat Health Reform a Trojan Horse

 
Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 1967

***

If you know something of the tabooed history of humanity -- that for our first hundred thousand years or so we were a matriarchal, communistic species -- you probably suspect, as I do, the real story of the Trojan War was that Troy was the last outpost of Minoan Civilization -- the realm increasingly viewed, whether in or out of academia, as the last true civilization of Planet Earth.

If you hold these views you probably also have at least contemplated the possibility Helen fled Sparta motivated not just by lust for Paris but by a fierce desire to live where women yet retained the timeless freedom and authority they had hitherto known throughout human experience, perhaps most notably in the civilization formerly centered on Knossos. However you imagine the prelude, there is little doubt that in response to Helen's reassertion of the Minoan principles of female self-determination, the Greeks -- long ago converted to patriarchy -- mobilized to stamp out women’s independence presumably forever by destroying Troy and all its inhabitants.

The Trojan Horse was of course the Greeks’ ultimate secret weapon: hence the relevance of these facts to what was done to us in Congress yesterday and last night.

Passage of House Resolution 3962, the health care “reform” bill amended into a form as maliciously oppressive as any scheme that breached the walls of Troy, exemplifies again the bitter truth the sole purpose of government and governance in the United States is the propagation and expansion of monopoly capitalism -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the ruling class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us.

H.R. 3962 also demonstrates how President Obama, for whom I voted, has brought us not to the liberation of a resurrected New Deal but rather to the bondage of a New Plantation.

While approval of the legislation is indeed a historical landmark, its only victors are the monopoly capitalists and the Christian theocrats -- that is, the ruling class and its ideological brain police.

Assuming the measure’s most oppressive parts survive the Senate to achieve presidential signature into law -- and it is all but certain they will -- here are its results:

• Monopoly capitalism is permanently enriched (and therefore infinitely empowered) by the monstrous profits generated through our enslavement on the New Plantation of pay-or-prison mandatory insurance;

• Roe v. Wade is effectively nullified by the measure's repeal of reproductive freedom for all women save those who are very rich -- the jeweled, silk-and-fur-bedecked Marie Antoinette handmaidens of the capitalists;

• Genuine health care reform remains obstructed by capitalist/theocrat control of the electoral and legislative processes, which finally penetrates our national Smiley Face delusions and forces us -- too late -- to recognize our enslavement has become inescapable;

• Christian theocracy’s fanatical opiate-of-the-masses stranglehold on the working class, infinitely bolstered by the re-subjugation of women implicit in the de facto repeal of Roe v. Wade, intensifies to the point it too becomes eternal -- that is, until the human species (or at least the United Estates of New Plantation America) cease to exist.

The longer-term consequences are tragically evident in the parallel histories of other nations:

• H.R. 3962’s near-total prohibition of economic support for reproductive freedom once more reduces U.S. working-class women to chattel, thereby (again) crushing all challenges to patriarchy -- the clandestine purpose of all restrictions on women‘s rights.

• The restoration of slavery implicit in mandatory insurance reduces all U.S. working class peoples to the abject powerlessness of Medieval serfs and therefore to the alienation, hopelessness and potential violence characteristic of any number of pre-revolutionary societies, for example Louis XVI's France or Tsarist Russia.

Welcome to Slave Nation. Yes, one of the unspoken horrors of mandatory health insurance is its theoretically limitless expansion of the harsh requirement -- already routinely inflicted on welfare recipients -- that you accept any available work regardless of the wage: thus a college graduate who has fallen on hard times is reduced to the de facto slavery of minimum-wage labor in the stench of urban sweatshops or the sweltering fields of agro-business plantations.

Now too we begin to glimpse the reason why the DemocRats (as opposed to Real Democrats) so quickly surrendered to the GOPorkers in the fight over Employee Free Choice.

Thus government and governance at every level is again repositioned to become ever more relentlessly tyrannical -- ever more undeniably the goon squad for monopoly capitalism -- which is of course the real and horribly legitimate undertow of fear the GOPigs are distorting into terrifyingly pre-pogromic mobilizations.

Again the analogy to the Trojan Horse -- and why the cheering that accompanied the H.R. 3962’s passage is truly obscene.

***

The following are among the better humanitarian analyses of H.R. 3962 -- provocatively objective analyses published here precisely because the ruling class does not want us to consider their implications.

Rep. Denis Kucinich of Ohio -- a man whose forcible disarmament schemes I vehemently oppose -- is nevertheless the one Democrat who was brave enough to vote against H.R. 3962 precisely because of its unprecedented escalation of class warfare. His official Congressional website says nearly all that need be said about the measure’s economic savagery: “This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street..."

http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=153995

Shortly before the 240-194 vote approving the measure's anti-choice provisions demonstrated both the omnipotence and misogynistic savagery of U.S. Christian theocracy, Jane Hamsher dared note how the feminist movement’s official silence not only (once more) proves its aristocratic hostility to working class women but demonstrates how hopelessly in thrall it is to the DemocRats (again as differentiated from the few remaining Real Democrats).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/naral-and-planned-parenth_b_349596.html

Another point the formidably competent Hamsher makes -- she is one of today’s best most incorruptible political reporters -- is the extent to which Obama himself engineered the methodical perversion of both House and Senate health care measures, transforming them from genuine humanitarian reforms into gargantuan bonuses for capitalism. Other aspects of this betrayal -- which reveals Obama as not just an implacable theocrat but one far more Machiavellian than Bush -- are documented in these links:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/taylor-marsh/in-pelosis-house-64-democ_b_349769.html

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/politics/143797/how_does_a_religious_cult_have_the_clout_to_delay_health_care_vote

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/reproductivejustice/143160/supposed_progressive_obama_religious_leader_uses_health_care_debate_for_anti-abortion_views

To understand the extent to which we have been betrayed -- the extent to which “change we can believe in” was never anything more than a Big Lie to attract our humanitarian votes -- please read the above linked reports thoroughly and contemplatively.

As Sartre and Camus each observed, recognition of our powerlessness is the first step toward empowerment.

LB/9 November 2009

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Random Dispatches from a Greed-Despoiled Dreamland

 
Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 1984 & 2009

***

The most heartening election results in the entire nation last night came from the state of Washington, where voters trounced a double-headed Christofascist effort to oppress various minorities -- people who are homosexual, impoverished, elderly and/or disabled -- with a pair of policies based on theocratic hatefulness.

Referendum 71 achieved 52-48 voter affirmation of last spring’s legislative decision expanding domestic partnerships to provide all the legal protections of matrimony.

Initiative 1033, which would have slashed state, local and school-district tax collections severely enough to cripple the public schools and effectively destroy already hard-pressed social-services, was beaten back 56-44.

While the primary beneficiaries of R-71 are lesbians and gays, such unions are also beneficial to other couples, especially elderly folks denied marriage by the intricacies of retirement finances. Though it is too early to determine how much impact the senior vote had on the 52-48 outcome, pre-election polling data indicated it was overwhelmingly supported by women, including women in the oldest demographic categories.

Both measures were Palinoid spawn, products of the same Big Business-financed, theocracy-minded GOPorker lynch-mob the DemocRats are cravenly letting run amok -- obstructing health care reform, eliminating women’s reproductive rights, restricting sexual freedom, revoking working class liberties, targeting lower-income people for extermination by neglect, and in general prohibiting any and all of our pursuits of happiness -- the goons’ ongoing success irrefutable proof that “change we can believe in” was never anything but a Big Lie.

Save perhaps here in Washington state.

I have had years of love-hate relationships with this place. Its populace is hopelessly crippled by xenophobia and anti-intellectuality; its urban public transport is permanently trapped in the Big Oil/Big Automotive abyss of anti-transit 1967 as a result; and yet in many realms -- among them the metaphysical -- it is a wellspring of discovery and rediscovery and innovation: -- this in a landscape so poignantly beautiful I long ago confessed that, “autumn here will someday surely kill me with its dark and dreadful loveliness.”

Best of all it is an electorate where now after last night I am once again fiercely proud to number myself amongst the voters.

***

I cannot say too often that health care reform without a strong public option and better yet a Canadian-style single payer system is no “reform” at all.  

Moreover, just as Rep. Dennis Kucinich said earlier today, the inclusion of mandatory pay-or-imprisonment insurance makes it the diametrical opposite of “reform.”  But not even Kucinich, a Real Democrat (as opposed to DemocRat) from Ohio, dared call it what it is -- our enslavement by the insurance industry and thus the re-imposition of slavery on the United States.

Not that I am the least bit surprised by the resurrection of forcible servitude: as also cannot be repeated too often, the sole purpose of the United States -- a purpose ever more apparent the further we get from 22 November 1963 -- is the relentless propagation of capitalism: absolute power for the ruling class, the total subjugation of all the rest of us.

As for the death of "health care reform" and its replacement by the New Slavery, I who (of course) voted for Obama now wonder if that was the secret Demo/Porker intent from the very beginning.

How dreadfully ironic, and how ironic on so very many levels.

***

The following disturbing admission about health care reform comes from the AFL/CIO Alliance for Retired Americans via the 30 October issue of its “Friday Alert”:

“Both the House and the Senate bills would cut subsidies currently given by the government to insurance companies under the private Medicare Advantage prescription drug program.”

Medicare Advantage provides lower-income elderly and disabled people (I am both) with our only way around the viciously exclusionary co-payments of the un-supplemented Medicare program that is now falsely labeled “Original Medicare.”

Because nearly 42 percent of all MA members have incomes of less than $25,000 per year, this woefully under-reported assault on MA is in reality the newest offensive in the post-Kennedy war on the poor.

While some MA programs have been abused by insurance profiteers, many other such programs -- for example that of the non-profit Group Health Cooperative in which I have been enrolled for the past dozen years (I actually joined the co-op in the early 1970s) -- provide life-saving services at far less cost than “Original Medicare.”

Note that a Group Health doctor-visit co-pay is $15 (cash, check or plastic), while an “Original Medicare” co-pay for the same service is at least $100, cash only -- and no admission if you don’t have the money.

DemocRats and GOPorkers alike are lying -- lying far more blatantly than usual -- about these impending cutbacks, and their caste-peers in Big Business Media are furthering the fabrications and disinformation.

Hence I am assembling some facts on this matter -- true facts from reliable sources -- which I hope to post long before health care (whether reform of or enslavement by) comes up for final Congressional votes.

Such data probably won’t stop the real-time savaging of low-income seniors (I doubt it coincidental that DemocRat silence lets the GOPorkers articulate our legitimate fears), but at least we will know from which direction the executioner will swing his axe.

***

Were I not a regular reader of women's sites I would remain ignorant of a new rebellion against the 40-year ruling class effort to reduce us all to perfect imbecility -- to imprison us all in the mental SuperMax of Moron Nation.

The revolt, long overdue, is being agitated by Barbara Ehrenreich through her newest book, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. 

Which -- if one defines “America” as a synonym for economic democracy -- it surely has.

The review linked above says Ehrenreich analyzes in detail the near impossibility of mobilizing against oppression if we are always being told suffering is a “gift” -- whether of randomness, karma, fate or some sadistic divine. Though I have not yet read this book, I surely will, for I reached the same conclusion years ago.

Indeed to my mind perhaps the most obnoxiously oppressive “American” reflex of all time is the pathologically idiotic practice of sticking a Smiley Face on disaster and then demanding everybody genuflect to its vacuous grin.

Imagine a nail-pierced bloody naked Jesus twisting in convulsions on a splintery cross, its Roman proclamation of crime (Iesus Nazarenus·Rex Iudaeorum) replaced by a smirking “Have a Happy Day” button: an appropriate image precisely because the suffering-as-gift hypothesis is one of the chief toxins of Christianity.

Just as ole Karl said, “opiate of the masses.”

LB/4 November 2009

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