Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

NOTE THAT NOWHERE in the following – and probably never once in this entire blog since its beginning thanks to TypePad last year – have I used the term “progressive” save as part of a quotation lifted from some outside source.

What this has to do with the Madison Rebellion will be evident when we consider how – if it is to succeed – it must spread far beyond its self-proclaimed “progressive” birth-parents and supporters.

Meanwhile suffice it to say I avoid the label “progressive” because it has become not only meaningless with overuse but socioeconomically exclusionary – a class-identity buzzword that typically denotes an academic and/or professional caste that is frequently as snobbish as any secret society of the capitalist aristocracy.

Indeed to blue-collar ears “progressive” often brings to mind the well-documented Vietnam Era hatred of the draft-exempt gentry for those of us who served. It also evokes the equally notorious malice the ecology elite harbors for loggers and commercial fishers. Each is the sort of anti-solidarity hatefulness the capitalists foster at every opportunity and genuine Leftists forever strive to heal and transcend.

Hence in place of “progressive” I use “humanitarian” – literally “devoted to promoting the welfare of humanity” (Webster) – this not only to define what we on the Left are about, but to contrast our egalitarian and democratic values with the tyrannical anti-values of capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for its Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

*****

Truthout, which no longer allows me to post comments on its website but now claims this is due to technical problems rather than banishment, has published an unusually insightful essay by Rich Broderick entitled “The Death of Capitalism: Is Scott Walker Helping Build a 'Better World'?”

Here's a sample of Mr. Broderick's lucid writing:

“From its beginnings in 16th and 17th century England and Holland, capitalism has depended upon a minimum 3 percent accumulated growth rate year in and year out. If growth exceeds that 3 percent – as it has lately in China and India – so much the better.”

“But if the rate of growth falls below 3 percent, even for one or two quarters, capitalism, which, like the stock market, is absolutely dependent upon a faith that defies logic and anesthetizes memory, begins to sputter. Each time that faith is shaken, it becomes harder and harder to restore.

“Of course any organic system that cannot live without endless growth is ultimately doomed. Critics sometimes like to refer to capitalism as a cancer; they are closer to the truth than perhaps they realize. Another name for endless growth is malignancy. In the end, a malignant entity cannot help but cannibalize its host body. This is the process we see at work today, both in the implosion of the 'American Dream' and in the spreading destruction of the global ecosystem upon which all life depends.”

The full text of the essay – which I heartily recommend we read in full – is here:

http://www.truth-out.org/the-death-capitalism-is-scott-walker-helping-build-a-better-world68079

*****

Were I still allowed to post comments on Truthout, I'd have written that the one great flaw in Mr. Broderick's closing argument – he suggests the demonstrations that started in Madison and have now spread across the country presage “the peaceful transformation of...the United States of America into a better world for all its citizens” – is his failure to recognize the immutable reality of Moron Nation.

When I coined the term, probably in 2006, I was prompted by at least five breathtaking symptoms of national stupidity, phenomena that prove the extent to which we are (deliberately) dumbed down or – as I prefer – moronated.

These five symptoms include:

(1)-the cult of idiot celebrity (picture Britney Spears and Sarah Palin running against one another for the presidency, the presidential debates a contest between Britney's belch and Sarah's wink, the voter turnout the highest in national history); (2)-the failure of our public schools (the fact that U.S. citizens are now the most ignorant people on Earth); (3)-the parallel failure of Ruling Class Media (the fact we are the most ill-informed people on Earth); (4)-our savage anti-intellectuality (a conditioned reflex as apparent on the Left as on the Right); and (5)-the toxic wellspring of it all: our malevolently self-righteous moral imbecility (the fact the capitalist ethos of infinite greed as maximum virtue – of limitless selfishness as ultimate good – has been so effectively propagated by the Ruling Class it has become the core coda of the entire U.S. population).

Ergo: Moron Nation – the ultimate barrier to a “better world.”

*****

Though it is heresy to acknowledge it, anyone who has spent more than a couple of years in the working press – especially anyone who has covered politics, social services and education – knows our national credo of infinite greed and limitless selfishness is becoming as commonplace amongst politicians and bureaucrats and even their receptionists as it is (and always has been) amongst banksters and tycoons. The difference is only in scale: the banksters and tycoons target the entire planet, while the politicians and bureaucrats target far smaller realms.

Indeed this signature combination of capitalist greed and Ayn Rand selfishness has become the binding unum of the e pluribus, the one anti-value that unites the many. It is now the defining characteristic of the nation as a whole.

In a terrifyingly real sense, the gang-banger with the fist-sized solid-gold dollar-sign dangling from his solid gold neck-chain is the common denominator of us all.

Thus the notorious transfer of national wealth: amongst the capitalist elite, salaries that since 1970 have already soared by somewhat more than 500 percent even as the average income of the rest of us is methodically shrunken – for some workers as much as 60 percent; thus too the parallel transfer of wealth amongst welfare bureaucrats, a nest-feathering increase in administrative costs of 5,390 percent even as stipends and services to the poor were reduced by at least 66 percent through 1990 and are now being slashed to absolute zero.

The incomparable Paul Krugman writes of wealth transfer in detail here:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15923.htm

Alas while Mr. Krugman's data provides the most vivid illustration I have yet seen of how the capitalists gloatingly victimize us every one, nothing in his report covers how the wannabe-capitalist bureaucrats maliciously victimize those over whom they exercise increasingly tyrannical authority.

Mr. Krugman's silence on this matter is in keeping with what may be the greatest taboo in modern U.S. journalism, the seemingly absolute prohibition against disclosure of the ugly truth every competent journalist knows: the fact that increasingly in government as ever in business, the operant slogan is “fuck you I've got mine” – the reason the notoriously heavy-handed New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has long been a dark archetype of all government agencies.

Under these circumstances – the consequence of the metastases of Ruling Class values throughout the entire Working Class (which these days is literally every one of us who is not part of the capitalist aristocracy) – we workers are often as viciously self-serving as the capitalists themselves. This means achievement of any sort of socialist consciousness – and therefore any kind of workable socialism – is impossible in the United States.

Which is precisely as the Ruling Class intended. Indeed the deliberate indoctrination of all classes in greed and selfishness is the most diabolically effective form of brain-policing in human experience – undeniable proof of the capitalist aristocracy's evil genius.

Greed and selfishness combine into suicidal fantasy – “but under capitalism I might get lucky and win big” – an obstacle to socialism more lethally prohibitive than all the bayonets and death squads in the world.

Never mind the increasingly undeniable fact that some new localized environmentally centered yet-to-be-expostulated form of libertarian socialism offers our species its ONLY chance for long-term survival.

Therefore the one question we should be asking about the rebellion that began in Madison is not whether its solidarity will spread beyond so-called “progressives” and even beyond the endangered Middle Class. It is instead whether the spread of that solidarity will evolve an antidote to greed and selfishness and elitism, whether it will give birth to a new humanitarian conscience to replace our national moral imbecility.

More to the point, it's whether that evolution will mother a greater solidarity that goes far beyond Middle Class socioeconomic identity to encompass all of us who are capitalism's victims, potential or real, in the workforce and out, regardless of race or ethnicity or gender or sexual preference, regardless of whether we are old and disabled or young and jobless and yes even gangbanger angry.

Yet the greatest heresy a journalist of today might commit is open admission of what is undoubtedly the one most damning revelation about the United States: the fact the anti-government fears and grievances of the rank-and-file Right are every bit as legitimate as the anti-Wall Street fears and grievances of the rank-and-file Left.

And without that admission there is little chance We the People will (again) recognize our common bondage – and our common bonds.

Nevertheless I fervently hope the Madison Uprising is the birth tremor of a new and unprecedentedly fierce humanitarian paradigm, the sudden Jungian/McLuhanesque evolution of effective opposition to the New Paradigm of capitalist governance and its Shock Doctrine, the deadly principles of which must be repeated until they are everywhere recognized: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us. 

It would surely brighten my final years to witness and perhaps even participate in such a national humanitarian reawakening – a nonviolent rebellion that might at long last fulfill the capitalist-betrayed potential of our own American Revolution.

But given the evidence of my own nearly 71 years (and especially the past 48 years of our national history) – which even to an agnostic like me proves the metaphorical truth of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Original Sin (the notion we humans are irreparably flawed) – I remain terribly afraid to give myself over to much optimism.

I do however recognize the decision of the cops to openly side with the protestors is unprecedented – perhaps as pivotal a turn of events as the decision of the soldiers and Cossacks to side with the striking women of the Lesnoy Textile Works in Petrograd on 8 March 1917: the spontaneous act of solidarity that began the Russian Revolution.

Meanwhile – in mind if not in body (my absence due to the fact the organizers of local solidarity-with-Madison protests remain haughtily indifferent to the many of us capitalism has already deprived of transportation) – I stand with my union sisters and brothers.

*****

A terrible cold that's making the rounds in Tacoma and possibly elsewhere is said by a growing number of medical people to be the worst such ailment they've ever encountered – and it is surely the most miserable, most long-lasting cold I've suffered in all my nearly 71 years.

Its dismal duration is about ten weeks. I caught it the first week in December and was sick until the beginning of February. Now thanks to the immune-system destruction inflicted by a necessary course of dental antibiotics, I have the cold again and can look forward to being more-or-less sick for another ten weeks: a total of 20 weeks – or nearly six months – stolen from my life by this invisible bug that came from Goddess knows where.

I have never ever been so naggingly ill for so infuriatingly long.

The affliction – I'm told my symptoms are typical – starts with a sudden and excruciatingly painful sore throat plus what would be pneumonia-class chest congestion save that its accompanying fever is never more than one degree.

Next comes a wracking cough that hacks up seemingly endless quantities of phlegm. It is by far the most physically exhausting, muscularly painful cough I've ever experienced.

Then as the bronchial symptoms (seem to) diminish, you develop the worst sinus congestion imaginable, a head full of mucoid cement that makes nasal breathing impossible and restful sleep therefore but a fond memory – a condition no extant medication can relieve.

Finally after maybe 10 or 12 days you start feeling notably better. But then, just as you think you might be getting well, the entire sequence – sore throat, chest congestion, wrenching cough, sinus congestion yet never a fever above one degree Fahrenheit – starts all over again.

I just learned a few hours ago the bug is viciously contagious, apparently (and utterly contrary to conventional cold viruses) even when its victim has no fever, which means it is probably just as well the denial of transport prevented me from attending a solidarity-with-Madison demonstration in Olympia yesterday.

Meanwhile the affliction has turned the apartment building in which I live into a Petri dish – conditions so dire management recently posted a memo asking sick tenants to please remain in their apartments and avoid interacting with anyone else.

Again this is unprecedented – something the like of which I had never experienced or even imagined.

I'm told the bug also has a malevolent tendency to morph into pneumonia or strep throat and sometimes both at once. Hence the grave warning from medical authorities to watch your temperature if you are one of its victims – that if your fever suddenly spikes, you need to seek a doctor's care immediately lest your next bed be a mortuary slab.

Which leaves me wondering about the bug itself. Is this an early Gaian volley against H. sapiens sapiens? Is it some ancient virus released from polar ice by terminal climate change? Or did it come from a test-tube?

If the last, was it an accident? Or is it intended to facilitate the elimination of those of us who are elderly, disabled or unemployed and therefore no longer exploitable for capitalist profit?

The possibility of such horrors might have been unthinkable even a year ago. But now that we are witnessing the true savagery of the capitalists and their hirelings, the unthinkable is quickly becoming the undeniable, as in the assistant attorney general who called for the Capitol Building in Madison to be cleared, a la Kent State University and Jackson State College in 1970, with “live ammunition” and “deadly force.”

For which – if you missed MSNBC's superb reporting of this newest revelation of capitalist thinking – go here:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/indiana-official-jeff-cox-live-ammunition-against-wisconsin-protesters

LB/27 February 2011

-30-

My father Donald Read Bliss inside his house-trailer in Knoxville, Summer 1969, the last time I saw him alive. Leica M4, 35mm f/2 Summicron probably wide open; Tri-X in UFG at 1200 ASA. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image for full-frame view.) 

*

AS I CONFRONT the inevitable sadness and regret associated with the 40th anniversary of my father's death, I am struck by how the pro-union demonstrations in Madison and elsewhere would surely win his approval just as the Civil Rights Movement did.

Meanwhile these new North American mobilizations of resistance to deliberately inflicted economic crises already fill me with enormous hopefulness we may have at last begun to shake off our Moron Nation submissiveness.

Yet I also see clearly how the DemocRats – the class-cowards who sat silently on the sidelines until they were goaded into action by MSNBC's Ed Schultz – are already attempting to co-opt Wisconsin's solidarity and pervert it to their own Machiavellian schemes.

It was this very sort of treachery – specifically DemocRat support for the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act – that prompted my father to support the outspoken New Deal advocate Henry Wallace over the ideologically backsliding political hack Harry Truman in 1948.

Hence my hopefulness is restrained by an equal measure of fear that hope itself will once again be proven not audacity but imbecility, precisely as Barack the Betrayer and so many other DemocRats have so notoriously proven it already.

As Obama has schooled us, these days we're on our own: the protection of the Wall Street banksters and the Big Business tycoons is now openly first on the political agenda whether the politician is DemocRat or GOPorker.

In the face of such tyranny, writing or even thinking about politics is nothing more than mental masturbation. It was precisely for this reason I began the year promising to direct my energies elsewhere, mostly to photography and memoirs, also to bits of volunteer work for my neighborhood association and my fellow seniors.

Nevertheless it seems events beyond my control have once again refocused my attention on political matters – this time (and really for the first time since the murder of Robert F. Kennedy on 5 June 1968) – with a dreadfully fragile but nevertheless undeniable maybe-we-can-still-prevail optimism.

All of which is more than anything else the legacy of my dead father, the influence of his teachings, the fact that (as we shall see) he continued to live his political beliefs as best he could – to “walk the walk” as the popular cliché puts it – long after he had given up all hope humanity would ever achieve the utopia he had envisioned in his youth.

For me this is the ultimate intersection of political and personal.

*****

My father's name was Donald Read Bliss. He was born into privilege and comfort on 4 July 1910 and died – a Bostonian exiled to the hard and bigoted isolation of Knoxville, Tennessee – alone in bed at approximately 4:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on 20 February 1971.

Told at age 28 the damage inflicted by childhood rheumatic fever had left him but five years to live, he proved the doctors wrong and lived to age 60. He was killed – apparently in his sleep (though it is said one is always awakened by the pain and terror implicit in one's final moments) – by a combined stroke and heart attack.

As befits our family's mostly Celtic ancestry – and though I was nearly 3,000 miles away in Bellingham, Washington – he announced his departure by appearing briefly at the foot of my own bed. My female companion, a young Irishwoman, saw him even more clearly than I. So did my dog Dingo, who howled as I never heard him howl before or since and whose howling seemed, for just an instant (and as my companion would later confirm), to blend with another far more eldritch cry of lamentation.

Though a boarding-school boyhood had left him ill suited for parenting, my father was by far the best teacher I ever knew. His knowledge and understanding of history and historical processes seemed to have no peer – not even amongst the presumably learned professors I encountered en route to an interdisciplinary BA degree that included a substantial component of history and the broader studies of history now labeled humanities.

Indeed I suspect had the Great Depression not intervened, my father might have become a history professor himself. I have no doubt the study of history and its associated technologies were his greatest passions.

His intellect and determination were breathtaking. Even shrunken as his personal fortunes were by the Crash of 1929, he rose to a district directorship in the War Production Board c. 1945. Yet by the end of his life his workplace had shrunk – through no fault of his own – to an Esso service-station franchise on the outskirts of Knoxville.

In the intervening years, 1950 through 1966, he had been the only mortgage banker in East Tennessee (and probably in the entire South) courageous enough to lend money to credit-worthy African American families for buying houses in white neighborhoods. He also defied a “Christian” bankers' boycott and arranged the financing that built Knoxville's first Tennessee Valley Unitarian-Universalist Church.

Knowing as I do from my own bitter firsthand experience the true vindictiveness of the South, I do not doubt my father's straited end-of-life circumstances were Ruling Class vengeance for his brave contributions to the causes of civil rights and spiritual diversity.

*****

Politically my father was a New Deal Democrat in public and an unapologetic Marxist at home.

By the time I was in high school he had taught me what now in the long retrospect of my own old age I recognize as perhaps the most politically useful lesson of all: how to shed our Moron Nation blinders thus to see the carefully hidden elements of class-struggle that govern all human life.

It was upon this foundation that subsequent teachings in my native New York City – especially the free Manhattan James Baldwin so accurately immortalized as Another Country – made it undeniably clear capitalism should be regarded as nothing more than an ultimately pointless rat race whether one is a Marxist or merely an avowed bohemian like myself.

Indeed it is a prime legacy of a youth so blessedly shaped by such powerfully eye-opening influences I now write instinctively from the premise the capitalist economy is the ultimate behaviorists' rat maze even unto its favorite rat-starter – the device that sets us all running – which of course and no matter whether we are rodent or human is abject terror: in our human circumstances our terrible fears of unemployment and hunger and foreclosure and homelessness and the dread sum of them all the ultimate pissbum-in-a-doorway degradation of inescapable poverty and its associated pariahdom.

Another accurate analogy to capitalism is of course the workplace as stockyard with its executives as the herdsmen whose cattle-prods eventually drive us under the executioners' hammers so that even our remains are turned to Ruling Class profit: such is the system in which infinite greed is elevated to maximum virtue and absolute selfishness proclaimed the ultimate good.

It is also thanks to my father I knew – long before it became the common knowledge of today – the promises of the rat-masters are never to be believed: that for anyone outside the tiny capitalist aristocracy, there was always the huge danger we will be thrown under the proverbial bus just as we are now being flung by DemocRats and GOPorkers alike.

Which of course is what is provoking the events unfolding in Madison in front of the state capitol building – a place that with its architecture of arrogance and its piled snow is an eerie reminder of the Winter Palace in Petrograd maybe 1905 but surely not quite 1917.

But at least for now the astonishing rebellion of organized labor in Wisconsin and elsewhere is promising to be the strongest anti-depressant I have known in this lifetime.

And could it be, as seems apparent from the television coverage, the activists are boldly reclaiming the color red? If so, they are rescuing red from its hard-right revisionist kidnappers and restoring it to its former age-old status as the ultimate blood-of-workers banner of economic democracy and humanitarianism.

To paraphrase Dylan: something is happening, and we don't know what it is.

*****

On 27 April 2010 I wrote and posted here and on Facebook an essay that asked what seemed to me an obvious question: “Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke to Hated Public Services?”

The piece acquired a tiny bit of notoriety amongst my readers because Facebook not only suppressed it almost instantly but severed the link between itself and TypePad, my blog server, so that any subsequent new material in Outside Agitator's Notebook would no longer appear on Facebook without special effort on my part.

That was the onset of a long dismal sequence of troubles with Facebook that culminated a few weeks ago in the (deliberate?) compromising of sufficient information phish-fraudsters were able to send their would-be victims messages seemingly from me. The messages led directly into phish-traps from which Microsoft-programmed computers would then be electronically looted of all security information including bank passwords and – once so emptied – subsumed in bot-nets for further criminal activities.

Though I am no longer shackled to Bill Gates, many of my friends still are, which means my only ethical move was to do as I did – leave Facebook immediately and presumably forever – which of course has severely diminished my already small readership, no doubt exactly as intended.

Even so (and with both an uplifted fist and an uplifted finger to the Ruling Class) here below is that essay again, its core question – is the economic collapse intended to be the final battle of the class war? – answered beyond dispute by the policies that are provoking the Wisconsin Uprising and kindred resistance throughout capitalism's United Estates.

Without the teachings of my father, it is not a question I'd have known enough to ask.

*****

As if I am being warned against over-optimism, the ears of my mind again hear the voice of my father predicting economic conditions in the United States will eventually become so savage, its victims will welcome the Red Army as the citizens of Paris welcomed the allies in August 1944: that is, as an army of liberation.

Thank you, Dad, for teaching me to question authority and most of all to think.

It is one of the great regrets of my life I was unable to attend your memorial service, though I believe you understood what certain other family members never will: that I was a college student, subsisting literally from hand to mouth on the punitively tiny Vietnam Era G.I. Bill and whatever other financial crumbs I could scrounge – that I was truly broke.

I think you know too Dad the Veterans Emergency Loan Fund at Western Washington State College had already run dry that quarter, which meant my only alternative was to try to beg the necessary travel money from my mother – the same woman who so despised us both she vindictively destroyed your American Houses career in 1943 and tried to murder me in 1945.

Predictably she not only refused the loan but hid her hatefulness, as she nearly always did, behind her singularly venomous brand of Christianity: “If it's god's will you go to your father's funeral, god will provide” and of course her god – who is a malevolent and sadistic god – merely granted my mother another psychological triumph: just as she hoped, my absence from the service provoked an everlasting familial schism.

Most of all Dad may this long-overdue eulogy help you rest in peace.

*****

Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke To Hated Public Services?

WHAT IF THE destruction of governmental services is in fact the clandestine purpose behind the economic collapse?

Too far fetched to consider?

Look at our national history.

Note how in the United States the capitalist Ruling Class relentlessly opposes government social services – public education, transit, health care, welfare, unemployment and disability compensation – and has done so since their inception.

Whenever possible, the Ruling Class uses its ownership of the political process to ensure such services never come into being.

When that tactic fails – as it did during the New Deal – the Ruling Class targets the services with relentless wars of attrition, as in the campaign to privatize Social Security.

Or the Ruling Class co-opts some genuinely humanitarian effort, as it did in its perversion of health care reform into the implicit slavery and unimaginably huge windfall profits of mandatory insurance – potentially the greatest forcible transfer of wealth from people to plutocrats ever recorded.

These days – with the politicians of both parties in unabashed servitude to the Ruling Class (hence my use of the labels DemocRat and GOPorker) – such efforts appear unstoppable: so much so the final legacy of our era may well be the death of U.S. constitutional democracy.

But until now the associated warfare has been so low-keyed – and so methodically downplayed by Ruling Class media – it was imperceptible save to its designated victims: a circumstance enormously facilitated by the national cult of self-obsession that ensures our imprisonment in Moron Nation.

Again consider our history.

During the 1930s and for several years beyond the end of World War II, the U.S. had the best, most widespread public transport in the world. Even smaller cities – witness Roanoke, Virginia and Bellingham, Washington – had electrically powered trolley systems, what today is called "light rail."

But all that was deliberately swept away – not by accident, but by governmental collaboration with the Ruling Class to ensure our permanent enslavement by Big Oil and Big Automotive.

Whether by compulsory automobile ownership – the ultimate example of slaves conditioned to love their bondage – or by transit systems wedded to buses, we are now inescapably shackled to vehicles powered by fossil-fueled, internal-combustion-engines.

The initial victims – those of us who could not afford automobiles – complained bitterly. Indeed we still complain. But because we are impoverished – that is, because we are demonstrably unprofitable (and therefore deemed unworthy of capitalist exploitation) – our complaints are dismissed as irrelevant.

Much the same thing happened when millions of the poorest and most disabled people were flung off welfare by intentionally murderous welfare cutbacks. Many DemocRats and GOPorkers applauded the savagery as “reform.” The remainder of the non-welfare population was indifferent. Few imagined they might someday need the very safeguards that had been so heartlessly – and permanently – destroyed.

Likewise when reversal of the indisputably real post-Sputnik education reforms began the process of moronation – the post-Kennedy dumbing down that has made us the most ignorant people on earth.

Teachers protested; so did the better students. No one else listened.

Now of course the economic collapse and its subsequent Great Recession have inflicted a reduction of tax revenues so severe it has no precedent. This in turn has radically accelerated not just public school closures but the termination of all categories of social services.

The revenue shortfall is so huge – so devastating – it threatens to eliminate any governmental function that does not directly serve the goals of capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, the total subjugation of all the rest of us.

Predictably, the military budget thus continues to be obscenely fattened even as every other budget is methodically starved.

Conditioned as we are to regard The Economy as a god-like entity beyond human control – conditioned too to regard the Ruling Class as stupid and bumbling – it seldom occurs to us to focus on how cleverly the so-called "collapse" escalates the seven-decade war on social services, perhaps to its final anti-humanitarian triumph.

No, you say. Not possible; not even the most diabolically greedy Wall Streeters would dare torpedo the economy merely to sink the governmental services they so notoriously despise. Besides, capitalists are not that bright...

Ah but note how these presumptively dimwitted  capitalists destroyed the seemingly all-powerful Soviet Union, how they have concentrated their holdings into monopolies now more powerful than any government in human history, how their capitalist edicts now shape even the minutiae of everyday life.

Indeed perhaps capitalism's most successful stratagem of all has been convincing us the capitalists themselves are boorish dunces.

Meanwhile it becomes ever more undeniable – note the charges against Goldman Sachs – the alleged “collapse” was deliberately engineered.

And now the slow attrition of social services has become a rout.

Meanwhile the one principle that would combine all these facts in razor-edged symbiosis has been suppressed by the most relentless campaign of intellectual censorship and criminal taboo this nation has ever known.

What principle is that?

The historic truth of class struggle: the law of cause and effect applied to human societies, for the discovery of which all thanks to Karl Marx and Frederich Engels:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

Outsourcing industry and downsizing the workforce – permanent Jobless Recovery – gave the Ruling Class a financial bonus of a magnitude inconceivable to most of us: picture a convoy of Brinks trucks long enough to ring the earth at the equator.

Now the downsizing of social services – first gradual, now cataclysmic – adds still more to the capitalists' already unthinkable wealth.

Note too how the Ruling Class gradually freed itself from taxation, thereby guaranteeing that – once it pulled the plug on the American Dream – it was already exempt from the New Deal-type assessments that would be essential to rebuild the job market.

"Cunning" is understatement.

Factor in the looming double-apocalypse of petroleum bankruptcy and terminal climate change, and you have the perfect motive for grab-it-and-run looting: hence “collapse.”

Post-Katrina New Orleans is thus in every sense of the word a portrait of our future: the destiny to which – if the capitalist Ruling Class has its way – We the People have already been damned.

If I prayed – which because I regard prayer as an adult version of letters to Santa Claus I do not – I would pray that I am wrong.

LB/20 February 2011 (“Economic Collapse” originally published 27 April 2010)

(-30-)

Note: These are the quips of outside agitation I've posted so far this week on various websites. The last comment – which points out the parthogenetic father/son relationship between Christianity and capitalism – was suppressed by Truthout and seems to have gotten me permanently banished from its ranks of commentators even as its moderators are increasingly tolerant of obvious fascists and other Hard-Rightists.

*

The most disturbing element of this utterly predictable atrocity in Wisconsin is the astonishing number of people who are shocked by it, even on Common Dreams.

Apparently Moron Nation is far larger than I imagined; apparently there is such Obamanoid denial that even the (alleged) Left does not grasp that the American Experiment in constitutional democracy has been slain by capitalism – and with it the American Dream of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Nor will either the Dream or the Experiment ever be resurrected. The capitalists will never allow it. 

Wake up, people! We are ruled by a New Paradigm: absolute power and unlimited profit for the capitalist elite, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

What used to be the United States is now the United Estates of Wall Street and Big Business; what used to be our Constitution is but toilet paper for the banksters and tycoons and the two parties – DemocRat and GOPorker – that are their wholly owned subsidiaries.

As for Wisconsin, the state so many call "progressive" is the state that sent Joseph McCarthy to the U.S. Senate: Joseph McCarthy the closest approximation of Heinrich Himmler the U.S. had spawned until now, this everlasting New Dark Age spreading from the infinite darkness beneath the ObamaBush.

Meanwhile all that is different about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is that he dares reveal what the moneyed aristocracy intends to do with those who are earmarked for slavery on the Big Plantation and with all the rest of us who – because we are no longer exploitable for profit – are targeted for extermination by abandonment and neglect.

Will Walker prevail? Or will he be – as Hitler and Mussolini were – abandoned by the capitalist ruling class for prematurely revealing the hideous truth of the capitalist ethos: infinite greed as maximum virtue, absolute selfishness as ultimate good.

Either way it is clear "we the people" will do nothing.

Too many of us love our servitude, and all of us know in our hearts the deadly price of resistance.

We know if we were to take to the streets here as the Egyptians did, the government would drop all pretense of democracy; it would be Tienanmen Square all over again, and the subsequent arrests like something orchestrated by Hitler himself.

Thus the unfolding lesson of Wisconsin, its message the dreadful truth that – as under the (presumably) fictional Borg – resistance is futile.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/02/14-3#comment-form

*****

Unfortunately for all of us here below the salt, Obama – Barack the Betrayer on "Outside Agitator's Notebook" – is indeed another Reaganoid: a closet Republican who won election by waving the false flag of "hope" and brandishing the Big Lie of "change we can believe in."

That the GOPorker noise machine now makes the DemocRats' trickle-down Reaganomic savagery seem "moderate" is merely part of the great deception that has replaced the American Experiment in constitutional democracy.

http://crosscut.com/2011/02/11/politics-government/20626/Mr.-Obama%2C-you-re-no-Ronald-Reagan/?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c533fab8b1-Crosscut_E_mail_2_11_20112_11_2011&utm_medium=email

(A thread from 11 February – a fight over the Ronald Reagan adulation cult – revisited because the controversy was still raging four days later.)

*****

Capitalism and Christianity are born of the same toxic patriarchal seed: the hierarchy of the select and the damned – the elite saved by god or rewarded by capital (the latter a metaphor for god), all the rest of us punished by the physical hell of subjugation and/or the metaphysical hell of damnation – and in every case our lot (allegedly) predestined by divine will. The Nazi concepts of übermenschen and üntermenschen are spawn of the same source. 

This is why the capitalist aristocracy is now methodically imposing fundamentalism on the entire nation: its message of individual powerlessness "under god" is the greatest deterrent to economic democracy and humanitarian activism ever discovered.

Hence too the necessity of ensuring the enforcement agencies are suitably indoctrinated: just as the Ku Klux Klan was colloquially known throughout the South as "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class," so is the U.S. military being turned into a new organization of Teutonic Knights – those mercenary Crusaders who Christianized Europe by sword and burning-stake and whose modern-day counterparts are now abroad learning the skills of murder and torture they will soon be employing here at home.

http://www.truth-out.org/christian-flag-folding-ceremony-reveals-official-sanction-church-state-violations-military67748

(Where is Aleksandr Nevskiy now that we need him?)

LB/16 February 2011

WHAT AM I? A photographer who also writes, or a writer who also photographs, or some hermaphroditic – or perhaps more appropriately hermapholiterate – combination of both?

It's an old and vexing problem, a helluva thing to still be asking myself at the approach of my 71st birthday. Though probably two-thirds of my lifetime income is from writing and editing, my picture credits sound a lot more impressive.

The latter include sales to Newsweek, Paris-Match, Newsday, The New York Times and of course United Press International, for whom I was a stringer almost continuously from 1963 until 1982.

Additionally I was the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, which was one of the best alternative weeklies ever published. I was also the social-documentarian who portrayed the people and Manhattan neighborhoods served by Beth Israel Hospital's free clinic program. At last count I had six gallery shows to my credit too.

For the sake of fairness, I should disclose that my camera work garnered only one press-association news photography award – this as compared to a half-dozen such honors for reporting and column-writing plus a couple more for general and/or photographic excellence to publications I helped edit – but the photography side of that particular scoreboard is less than indicative because I never considered myself as much a news photographer as a sociologist with a camera, more interested in zeitgeist than breaking stories.

In any case the preponderance of the objective evidence plus a lot of supportive experience on the Great Hamster Wheel of Life under Capitalism has always bolstered my sense of myself as a photographer first and a writer only second – if even that.

Moreover (and maybe most of all) photography for me is passion and sensuality – choreographies of light sculpted in alchemical silver – while writing seldom transcends my struggles with dyslexia and my constant terror some clinically characteristic mistake might make me look as if I am an idiot.

Thus for me it is a rare moment when the act of writing acquires sufficient Zen momentum to lift it above mere intellectual exercise and into the easy mindfulness from which I typically photograph, a state close kin to satori – that momentary death of ego wherein all distinctions vanish into an omnipresent now of ineffable oneness: not only am I the witness of a kindergarten child running to embrace his teacher but I am the camera and the film and child himself and the teacher herself and the energy and luminescence of our mutual existence until the quiet exclamation of the shutter resurrects ego and my left brain goes, “O wow man that was a Zen experience” (The End).

Yes this describes a real photograph, a cover for The Seattle Sun.

Perhaps the easiest way to explain the distinction between the two states visual and verbal is that when I am photographing I usually feel real and complete; by contrast when I am writing I typically feel not only fragmented but fraudulent: as if am playing a role that has no foundation in personal reality.

Nor does the Hamster Wheel of Life provide any therapeutic resolution.

My late father nurtured my photographic talent with gifts of cameras on my 12th, 14th and 16th birthdays but frequently told me he also thought I was by far the best writer amongst his three sons – all of us professional wordsmiths – which given his bluntly and often harshly critical nature was high praise indeed.

A dear friend, herself a top-level editor at Viking Press during the 1960s, said my photography was “so far out on the cutting edge there aren't words to describe it” but regarded my writing ability as “mediocre at best.”

My stepmother contemptuously trashed both involvements at every opportunity – “why don't you get a job in business and stop trying to be different from everybody else?” – and my mother invariably belittled my words and pictures with genuinely hateful disdain: “when are you going to go back to college and do something worthwhile with your life?” (never mind – no thanks to any of my parents – I already had my BA, paid for by G.I. Bill stipends earned during a Regular Army enlistment).

I never dared tell anyone – certainly not the Viking Press editor, not even the late Cicely Nichols (who intended to mother my “mediocre” writing into suitable accompaniment for my Goddess-emergent sandwiches and other camera work in “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer”) – that after you've encountered the Muse, nothing else really matters.

Yes the Muse is that intoxicating, for an earthly sample of which ignore the obnoxious master of ceremonies and the hokey special effects and listen to this woman singing a relic of our pagan past:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5f9eZR51Sw

For those unfamiliar with the breathtakingly ancient liturgical roots of British folk music, what is happening is a lay of magic: the singer as if possessed by the Goddess herself is telling us that despite “a young man's scorn,” she will never be denied: “so don't you bid me farewell here, no farewell I receive,” and that – perhaps in a far more antique version of the prophecy in “The Partisan” as sung by Leonard Cohen – “the snows they melt the soonest when the winds begin to sing.”

Meanwhile back here on the Wheel there remains not just the lesser personal conflict between writing and photography but also the greater political conflicts of a time in which betrayal and atrocity and yes Moron Nation outrage are the new and unavoidable norms.

Perhaps it is only coincidence that as the greater conflict intensifies within our society, the lesser conflict within myself seems to be resolving itself now that I am sufficiently exiled and blacklisted I can write as I please with no deadline pressure other than the biological clock of incipient mortality – liberations that do indeed seem to be letting a touch of Zen creep into the act of writing.

It is a very different Zen from the Zen of Photography, which is nearly identical to the Zen of Archery, but its Zenlyness is confirmed by the increasing frequency with which I lose myself (including all the various aches and spasms of old age) in an almost-trance perhaps analogous to the ego-less psychodynamics of action-painting, albeit my dance purely mental and its images of course made from words rather than paints – yet like action-painting the final form and content not determined (and perhaps not even known) until revealed by the end.

This is all so new to me I have not yet learned to trust it, which – apart from the fact this was my winter of bacterial discontent – is why there have been such huge gaps in my postings here: I write a piece in a 16-hour frenzy then spend weeks even months agonizing over every sentence, every punctuation mark, a process in which my friend Joy Kidstry is helpful beyond all measure – and certainly beyond my ability to adequately express gratitude.

But I also make fairly regular, often brief comments on other websites' story-generated threads.

And it came to me yesterday afternoon thanks to an intense conversation with Melinda Mohn – a singer, composer and musician with whom I became friends long ago and just recently reconnected – that these too might be well worth sharing: legitimate material for updating this site far more frequently.

Though I have posted such items here before, it was typically only when they were essays of some length. Now though as an experiment I will post all such comments, complete (of course) with links to the articles that spawned the threads  of which my comments are part.

What follows – very slightly revised for stand-alone clarity – is a weekend's worth of hopefully provocative remarks.

*****

"Urbanist creed"? Please don't make me laugh.

Were "we the people" not already disenfranchised – and now facing methodical reduction to an inescapably wretched neo-serfdom – the points raised by Roger Valdez would be relevant.

Particularly since the Klanish coterie of local xenophobes and bigots – mostly in Seattle and Tacoma – continues its relentless war against the increasingly urban reality of Pugetopolis.

That said, this entire thread is a damning demonstration of denial and even dementia.

The notion we are still allowed to "determine what kind of lives we want" is as big a Big Lie as "change we can believe in."

Two pretty young women I overheard on the bus a several weeks ago understand our plight perfectly.

(I was not eavesdropping but had been forced to the bench seat that spans the very back of the bus because a gaggle of grotesquely obese and arguably irresponsible breeders with filthy-blanket perambulators and squalling stinky-diaper infants and clusters of Wal-Mart bags and no doubt an easy-read Teabagger pamphlet or two in their suitcase-sized purses had seized all the front seats theoretically reserved for elderly and disabled people including aged cripples like myself.)

The two young women were already in the two-person seat immediately ahead of and below the bench-seat that was now mine by default after my ouster from the crip-and-geezer section; unless I had stuck my fingers in my ears there was no way I could have avoided hearing their conversation.

One young woman, a blonde with long straight hair neatly pinned up beneath a gray wool knit stocking cap fetchingly embroidered with maroon reindeer, said she was terribly worried about her older brother, an honor student who had expected to go to college but – because of huge cuts in financial aid – had realized his only options were to join the military or suffer a lifetime of chronic unemployment because there will never again be any public money for education.

“He's all, 'if I have to face death I want the best training there is,' and last week he joins the Marines. I so have nightmares he'll get killed but he goes, 'there's no jobs never again I'm dead anyway.'”

The other woman shook her copper-colored curls and said she felt sorry for boys because they have no other choices but “at least if we look hot enough maybe we can marry rich men.”

That sort of cynical realism amongst people so young – earlier conversation had made it clear both women are high-school seniors – used to be unheard of outside the ghettos. But now even the middle class understands hope is not “audacity” but imbecility.

Such is the new American truth.

Wake up, people. Capitalism allows self-determination only to its ruling elite. The rest of us, whether urban or rural, are allowed no meaningful choices at all.

The American Dream is dead beyond resuscitation. The American Experiment in constitutional democracy has been betrayed beyond restoration.

And though it pains me to say it (not the least because I am in part an unabashed urbanist myself), Mr. Valdez's discussion of an “urbanist creed” is thus reduced to the usefulness of a pipe organ on a sinking ship.

http://crosscut.com/2011/02/10/urban/20603/Urbanist-creed:-What-do-we-want-for-the-places-we-live--/?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0ff38abd04-Crosscut_E_mail_2_10_20112_10_2011&utm_medium=email

*****

Three bitter truths:

(1)-The draft was NOT abolished because Nixon was a man of peace; it was abolished because the Ruling Class was (correctly) terrified the draft was training a future revolution (exactly as it did in Tsarist Russia);

(2)-For this reason, the draft will never be reinstated;

(3)-Unlike a draft military, the All Volunteer Force is by definition a mercenary force, which means it will ALWAYS reliably follow the orders of its paymasters, even unto turning its guns on U.S. citizens.

http://www.truth-out.org/rich-mans-war-and-a-poor-mans-fight67666

*****

Thank you, John Carlson, for the biggest Big Lie I've ever seen in Crosscut:

"But the old man had it right. Better days were ahead."

Better days for whom? Surely not for working Americans -- we who haven't had a real raise since 1973; we who are now abandoned as surplus humans no longer exploitable for profit; we who are the victims of the trickle-down (urinate-on-the-poor) Reagonomics that yet poison the darkness here beneath the ObamaBush.

To praise Ronald Reagan is to praise the traitorous zoo-keeper who maliciously opened the cages of an economic Jurassic Park and loosed the tyrannosaurs of capitalism to savage us all; to applaud Reagan is to applaud the Happy Face executioner who killed the American Dream and slew the American Experiment in constitutional democracy; to cheer him is to cheer the New Paradigm by which the United States has forever become the neo-feudal United Estates – absolute power and unlimited profit for the capitalist elite, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

http://crosscut.com/2011/02/11/politics-government/20626/Mr.-Obama%2C-you-re-no-Ronald-Reagan/?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c533fab8b1-Crosscut_E_mail_2_11_20112_11_2011&utm_medium=email

*****

Irony as history:

The one great-power ally of the American Revolution -- the ally that enabled victory over the British -- was pre-Revolutionary France, the France of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the House of Bourbon.

How ironic the United States that defeated the British solely because of Bourbon support is now the neo-feudal United Estates -- the modern reincarnation of pre-Revolutionary France.

http://www.truth-out.org/robin-hood-dead67679

LB/13 February 2011

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MOST EVERYONE WHO reads this blog knows I avoid writing about Pacific Northwest politics unless they're either local examples of national conflicts or particularly egregious demonstrations of the truth behind Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's admission Washington state is a favorite Ruling Class rat lab – a proving ground where techniques of subjugation are refined for use against everybody else. 

But the outspokenly malicious downsizing of a local transit system by the voters' overwhelming rejection of a negligible sales-tax increase Tuesday undoubtedly falls into both categories.

It reflects not only Moron Nation's poisonous envy of union members and its disturbingly Nazi-like hatred of lower-income peoples, but how easily the virus of such hatefulness is disseminated through a population already long notorious for its “don't Californicate Washington/we don't wanna be like Jew York” xenophobia now further inflamed by capitalism's signature economic terrorism.

Thus were  pogroms organized by the Okhrana, the Tsar's dread secret police; thus were lynch mobs instigated by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States; thus was Krystallnacht spawned by the Nazis in presumably civilized Germany.

And the vindictive downsizing of Pierce Transit – like the nationwide war on government services of which it is part – is indeed a kind of socioeconomic lynching.

Its victims are those of us now increasingly blamed for the economic collapse: not the Wall Street banksters and Big Business tycoons whose criminal conspiracies forever ended the American Dream, but we who are elderly, disabled or permanently unemployed (and therefore no longer exploitable for capitalist profit); or we whose union membership enables us to successfully resist such exploitation.

(Disclosure: I am an elderly, disabled and officially retired journalist who remains an active member of the National Writers Union AFL/CIO.)

Considering that Pierce Transit serves a big segment of a population so fanatically opposed to public transport that in the past 43 years it has defeated five of seven regional transit measures (a record that seemingly has no precedent anywhere on Earth), the agency nevertheless does a truly admirable job of providing bus service to Tacoma and parts of Pierce County.

Though its schedules are woefully minimal by the public-transport-as-a-civil-right standards of my native New York City and the Northeast in general, Pierce Transit was the first operator on the planet to fuel its buses with compressed natural gas. The remarkably farsighted price-contract it negotiated at the time (1986) held down fares for more than 20 years in an era of runaway fuel costs – a management triumph the local News-Tribune stubbornly refuses to acknowledge.

Unlike the opposition to transit characteristic of The Seattle Times, which is an expression of the region's nasty xenophobia, TNT's anti-transit bias is a subset of its malevolent anti-unionism. As long as Pierce Transit remains a union shop – its workers are robustly represented by Amalgamated Transit Union Local 758 – TNT's editors will continue to demonize it. Indeed the McClatchy-owned daily is the most scab-minded rag I have encountered anywhere including the systematically scabby South.

Thus – though the sales tax increase that would have saved bus service in Tacoma and Pierce County was minuscule (only three pennies on a ten dollar purchase) – TNT reacted with predictable worker-bashing hatefulness via a 20 January editorial:

“The agency has imposed some economies on itself, including a substantial squeezing of its administrative costs. But its employee compensation packages – by far the largest part of its budget – bear no relationship to reality. Its standard health plan falls into the 'Cadillac' category, and most of its workers have enjoyed generous pay increases right on through the worst economy in 60 years.”

Full text of the demagougic diatribe is available here, though registration for all such links may be required:

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/01/20/1509426/come-back-pierce-transit-with.html

The reportorial disinformation campaign that followed the editorial denunciation would have made Josef Goebbels proud.

Its core deception was repeatedly describing the proposed three-tenths-of-one-percent tax increase as a “50 percent tax increase,” a deliberately confusing technicality based on the fact an additional three cents on a ten dollar purchase would have amounted to a 50 percent hike in the transit authority's tiny share of the nine percent sales tax.

As no doubt intended, TNT's shameless agitation soon yielded a baleful bonus of racism, poor-bashing and anti-union invective.

Here are five representative comments from the online thread generated by TNT's 31 January report, “Pierce Transit tax faces a rare foe,” linked here:

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/01/30/1524114/pierce-transit-tax-faces-a-rare.html

“If this thing (is defeated), it will probably be comfortable to go to South Hill Mall once again. The last time I was there the place was chock-a-block full of hood-rat gangsta' wanna' be punkasses with more being delivered every ten minutes by Pierce Transit. The Mall employees told me they are an unmitigated negative, never spending a dime and spending their afternoon harassing the few customers they had not succeeded in running off.”

“As far as the routes in town not running as often, people are just going to have to learn to wait, like they used to. If you're getting around on someone else's dime the correct response should be 'thank you,' not 'what took you so long?'

“Your bus ride should not be subsidized by my non-rider tax follars !!” (sic)

“I for one cant pay anymore. Im already paying for everybodys medical and welfare and my family cant aford anymore entitlement programs. Its just too f*^c&@ing much. Im sorry, Id like to, but enough is enough. ” (sic x 9)

“Any measure that gets this much Union support is an automatic 'NO' on my ballot.”

No wonder then the transit authority's Proposition 1 was killed by a 55-45 majority.

And the slaying of Proposition One, which will slash Pierce Transit's service by a devastating 35 percent, is clearly part of the carefully orchestrated Democrat/Republican war against lower-income people and unions everywhere in the United States.

Not only is this war a calculated effort to shift the blame for economic collapse from its Wall Street perpetrators to its Main Street victims. Its infinitely darker purposes are the elimination of people who are no longer exploitable for capitalist profit – all of us who are elderly, disabled or permanently unemployed – and the disempowerment of anyone who dares resist what former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls “supercapitalism.”

With all due respect to Mr. Reich, the capitalism of which he speaks should more accurately be labeled “tyrannocapitalism”: lizard-brained plutocrats proclaiming their greed and selfishness the height of virtue as they run amok robbing the defenseless.

And since the ideology of Moron Nation and its creeds of theocratic Christianity all define poverty as entirely the fault of the impoverished, there's no effective outcry at the mounting death toll. These days – more often than not – there's actually applause, whether from the politicians or an electorate cunningly agitated ever closer to lynch-mob fury.

American democracy, once rightfully a global beacon of hope but now forever reduced to a Big Lie, is thus revealed as manipulative tyranny imposed by a monolithic, increasingly merciless oligarchy intent on seizing all the nation's wealth.

Until recently the oligarchs hid their unity of purpose behind the deceptive facades of two seemingly rival political parties. But now we see mounting evidence they – especially the politicians of the parties whose names I spell “DemocRat” and “GOPorker” – have been secret collaborators for at least the past 37 years.

Yes, the requirements of public image still grant us some protection: for example U.S. politicians don't (yet) dare re-establish the sorts of death camps that characterized Nazi Germany. But that's only because the same genocidal result – albeit more slowly (though with the added bonus of avoiding the public embarrassment of barbed wire or the irritating stench of crematoria) – is easily achieved by abandonment and neglect.

Hence the obvious motive behind the not-so-subtle re-branding of health care, transit and even public education as “welfare”; also the reason for capitalism's sharply escalated war on unions. Whenever a governmental function is portrayed as a subsidy for the undeserving, it is all the more easily ended forever – the result ever more workers hurled into inescapable poverty, ever more lower income people savaged by denial of stipends and services.

Such is the increasingly undeniable agenda behind the harsh new social-Darwinist paradigm of governance in the United States: absolute power and unlimited wealth for the oligarchs, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

LB/10 February 2011

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In Tompkins Square Park, Manhattan, fall 1966 or spring 1967. I don't remember whether this was a random street photograph or if I shot it for Beth Israel Hospital as part of my portrayal of the peoples and neighborhoods served by its free clinics. Minimal tech data: most likely a 50mm lens on either a Canon VT or a Pentax H1A; the film Tri-X, probably (based on the grain) developed in Microdol at 400 ASA. This jpeg is made from a scanned print that survived the fire because it was part of the working portfolio I took back to NYC in 1983. Alas the negative was stolen by a public relations freelancer in Bellingham c. 1986; if I ever see this picture or any part of it used without my permission, I will file suit immediately. Click on image to view it full frame. Photo by Loren Bliss copyrights 1967, 2011.

*

YES I KNOW I promised to try to avoid the near occasion of sin that is the pointlessness of political journalism in a despotic realm of failed constitutional democracy; that I pledged also to amend my life through the practice of self-redemption by art.

But today when I ordered an amlodipine refill – one of seven prescription medications that now sustain my life – I discovered Medicare Part D had jacked up the drug's price 152 percent.

And yes, there's no doubt CMS – the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (and thus ultimately Barack the Betrayer himself) – is the perpetrator of this outrage.

Amlodipine, used to treat high blood pressure, is a generic drug the co-payment for which under the Medicare Part D Extra Help program is (theoretically) fixed at $2.50

Inquiring as to how and why the co-pay suddenly soared to $6.30, I was told an official directive from Medicare redefined a number of Extra Help generics as brand-name drugs. Amlodipine, which has been a generic since 2007, is one of the drugs so reclassified.

Thus, by imposing the resultant $3.80 price hike, the government has arbitrarily gouged out for itself an additional $3.80 payback on every such Extra Help prescription.

The obvious result is a deficit-reduction tactic that not only frees up more money for the Wall Street banksters and the Big Business tycoons, but also protects their wholly owned subsidiaries in governance – and does so by the stealthiest and most calculatedly vicious means possibly.

Calculatedly vicious?

Verily. Wantonly inflicted on the most vulnerable and most powerless people in the United States, this price increase is deadly.

Only the poorest of the poor – the most despised minority in the nation, the demographic of despair into which I was permanently exiled by the economic collapse of 2008 – qualify for Medicare Part D Extra Help.

Most Extra Help recipients are elderly women whose invaluable contributions of motherhood earned them not a penny in Social Security pensions.

Why not?

Because the ever-miserly capitalists who own the politicians deem motherhood a form of slave labor for which no payment is necessary.

Regardless of gender, a great many of us on Extra Help live frighteningly close to the edge of ruin – so close the addition of $3.80 to a co-pay can price that prescription forever out of reach.

The alternatives are often impossible: eat less on what is already a malnutrition diet; turn down the heat in an already frigid dwelling; find less expensive housing; or (of course) just give up and die outright – our deaths a Final Fulfillment of tyrannocapitalism and its New Paradigm: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else.

Thus am I forced back to active duty in the field I foolishly believed I had finally, after 55 years, managed to leave behind. Once again it seems journalism is – at least in this one aspect – identical to espionage and its cousin organized crime: an occupation from which retirement is impossible.

*****

Because this is a breaking story, there are many questions to be answered. But all my former sources have either vanished into post-career oblivion or – like the now-forbidden social-contract they defended – are no longer amongst the living. Hence I'll probably have no additional information until Monday at the soonest.

In the meantime here are some of the more obvious questions:

(1)-As I understand U.S. patent law, once a pharmaceutical baron's patent expires, his brand name drug becomes a generic drug – no exceptions allowed. Is my understanding wrong? Or was the law changed by some sneaky Obama-orchestrated DemocRat/GOPorker sleight-of-hand? Was this part of that back-door Chicago-type sitdown between Barack the Betrayer and the prescription drug lords? What happened?

(2)-The people with whom I spoke Saturday all said that while their knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry was limited to their immediate work assignments, none had ever heard of a long-time generic being reclassified as a brand-name drug. Neither had I. Again, is our collective understanding wrong? What is the record on this matter? More to the point, how was the change imposed?

(3)-Medicare propaganda disseminated by CMS (Medicare & You 2011, page 88), states that “Drug costs in 2011 for most people who qualify will be no more than $2.50 for each generic and $6.30 for each brand-name drug.” This raises yet another series of questions: does the reclassification of generics to brand-name drugs apply to all Medicare programs? Or is it yet another tactic in the ObamacRat war against Medicare Advantage programs – the public/private partnership favored by so many lower-income people as the only way around regular Medicare's murderously prohibitive co-pays. (Note that money taken from Medicare Advantage providers – whether genuinely care-giving nonprofit organizations like Group Health or the for-profit death-panel insurance scams – is money returned to the government, first to reduce the deficit, eventually to provide more bonuses to the banksters and tycoons: once again, tyrannocapitalism in action.)

(4)-How many generics have been reclassified as brand-name drugs? How many people are present-day recipients of Medicare Part D Extra Help? How many are afflicted by these arbitrary reclassifications?

(5)-As far as I know there are only three ways such a reclassification could have been authorized. These are: (A)-by a change in drug-patent law, the change either carefully hidden in the ObamacRats' alleged health care “reform” or quietly wormed onto some unrelated legislation since then; (B)-by arbitrary CMS edict and the law be damned (a practice that here in the toxic darkness beneath the ObamaBush is already routinely employed to nullify the Constitution); (C)-by executive order, again the law be damned.

(6)-Who are the beneficiaries of the tax increase implicit in this co-pay outrage? The government alone? Or are the prescription drug lords getting a share of the takeback too? How much does the government seize by this viciousness?

(7)- Are these co-pay increases an especially Machiavellian trial balloon? Could they be an experiment to see how many people protest and whether our protest can be censored to ineffectiveness? (Note that most protests from here below the salt are already ignored by Ruling Class Media and hence disdained by the politicians.)

These are some of the questions to which I hope to find answers. (Yes, I'd much rather be working on my memoirs, but this new drug ripoff is damn well the more important story.)

Meanwhile we live in hard and treacherous times -- by far the hardest and most relentlessly savage of my nearly 71 years -- and the term "progressive" is increasingly meaningless. Likewise the terms "friend" and "foe." As my late father learned during the struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, so have I learned in the present era: trust (save amongst those who have known each another for decades) is a luxury we cannot afford. 

Indeed it seems again as a certain Lev Bronstein observed in 1905: labels mean nothing, and every gathering of three apparently like-minded activists includes at least one rat. 

But this Medicare moment is also uniquely teachable, an episode in which perhaps we can all finally see one of the more hideous truths of liberty lost: that under the New Paradigm by which capitalism has forever vanquished the social contract – its replacement the emergent new ethos of limitless selfishness that has overturned the Golden Rule and thrown down the Beatitudes – our survival truly is a revolutionary act.

Under this New Paradigm of the United States reduced to capitalism's United Estates, those of us who are impoverished or elderly or disabled or some combination of the three have not only become the nation's most despised minorities; as were the Jews in Nazi Germany, we are now increasingly damned as the cause of all the nation's troubles.

In this context our defiant refusals to surrender to murder by abandonment and neglect is open resistance to the thug-minded greedmongering capitalist pigs who have herded us onto the economic equivalent of the slave-pen railroad platform and are now trying to further divide us into the barely living and the soon-to-be dead.

__________________

DISCLOSURES:

Because we live under ever-more-unyielding patriarchy (and increasingly under its worst most viciously theocratic forms), psycholinguistic accuracy demands I refer to the prescription drug lords with exclusively male-gendered pronouns; denounce me as a hopeless romantic if you will, but I believe the female gender is sufficiently superior to the male that no self-respecting Woman could ever participate in such malevolence. As evidence I submit the Minoan matriarchy: no slums or mansions, an apparently proto-communist economy and an administrative organization so skilled it evacuated Callisté – an island of at least 25,000 people and possibly as many as 250,000 with their pets, livestock and moveable goods – all transported to safety in a fleet of ships propelled by wind and oars (the original and sadly misnamed Noah's Arc?) well in advance of what now seems likely to have been the most destructive volcanic explosion in human experience. Secretly or at least privately, a growing number of archaeologists now believe the Minoan civilization was the never-again-to-be equaled apex of human endeavor.

Because I discovered the drug-reclassification story on a Saturday, I was unable to reach the best-informed sources at Group Health Cooperative, the superb Puget-Sound-area organization of which even in dire and inescapable pauperage I remain a voting member. Nevertheless the Group Health people with whom I spoke were as helpful as they could possibly be: their characteristic responsiveness another of the many reasons I regard my enrollment, which dates from 1973, as one of the best most clearly Muse-blest decisions I ever made. Any errors in this initial report are not Group Health's; they are mine and mine alone.

LB/5-6 February 2011

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