Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

For Once I Was Wrong; Even So, Why Are We Not Rising Up in Anger?

Contemplating his fate: U.S. seniors, disabled people and minorities crippled by economic discrimination, workers flung into permanent poverty by Big Business downsizing – we are all now falsely blamed for the nation's economic crisis, a deliberately malicious Big Lie with potentially murderous consequences. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 2011 and 1971; original image: Nikon F, Tri-X at 800 (no other tech data); digital sepia tone and posterization c. 2011.  

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THANKS TO A humanitarian coalition here in Washington state, there's a new and infuriating disclosure that could bolster our too-often-hopeless fight to throw off the chains of plutocratic despotism, but first here's a long-promised update on a related national story – in this instance with a hearty self-serving of crow.

On 6 February in "EXTRA: Has Obama Thrown the Medicare Poor Under the Deficit Bus," I speculated Medicare's seemingly unprecedented reclassification of a life-sustaining generic prescription drug back to brand-name status was – via the resultant 152 percent price increase – evidence of (another) sneaky ploy by Barack the Betrayer and his administration  to (further) shift the cost of capitalist greed onto those of us who are elderly, disabled or otherwise no longer exploitable for workplace profit. 

Given the administration's ever-more-obvious intent to collaborate with the Republicans, the Wall Street banksters and the capitalists in general to loot Social Security and abolish Medicare, this seemed a perfectly logical suspicion: arbitrarily reclassify a long list of drugs, charge Medicare recipients 152 percent more for every drug so reclassified, then apply the difference to reducing the deficit. Such sleight-of-hand dishonesty would surely be in keeping with the now-undeniable Big Lie of "change we can believe in." 

But as it turned out, I was flat wrong about the cause of the price hike.

After diligent research by Group Health Cooperative communications people (to whom many thanks),  I'm now reliably informed the price increase was limited to a single drug: amlodipine. Its cause was said to be a programming error by the for-profit subcontractor who manages all Group Health's prescription drug coverage. Our inquiry reportedly corrected the error and is generating refunds to everyone who was overcharged. 

I will not apologize for the grave and now-reflexive distrust that prompted my mistake – the DemocRats' epic and ongoing betrayal of lower income people is perhaps the greatest atrocity-by-deception in U.S. political history, and it is precisely in this context I concluded the price-hike was probably yet another expression of the party's post-2008 treachery – but I will certainly take all due (dis)credit for my mistaken judgment.

And I am of course gratified by the fact old-time journalistic persistence has once again fulfilled its always-radical function of making our lives just a bit better, if even in a very small way.  

Meanwhile the glaring extent of Washington state's obscene favoritism of the Ruling Class rich at the expense of all the rest of us – especially those of us whose income forever damns us to live below the salt – is provocatively exposed in a document I received this morning from the Washington Area Association of Agencies on Aging: “W4A” as it's known here in the state that's Evergreen with untaxed profit and governmental giveaways to the aristocracy of greed.

Listing seven financial disasters the DemocRat (i.e., closet GOPorker) governor and her DemocRat-dominated legislature could (but probably won't) avert, the report forwarded by W4A reveals vividly what is at stake here in Washington state and thus exemplifies the dimensions of struggle in the 49 other states and at the federal level too.

Prepared by Our Economic Future, a statewide coalition of genuinely courageous humanitarians, the study dares show the stark reality that faces us now that the two major political parties represent only the one Ruling Class:

Either we the people mobilize enough anger to force the rich to pay for the privilege of exploiting our labor and looting our savings and pensions and medical insurance...

Or we allow our infinitely treacherous politicians to continue condemning us to death in capitalism's secret silent holocaust of abandonment and neglect.

As indeed the politicians seemingly plan to do – since by all reports Gov. Christine Gregoire and her DemocRat/GOPig legislators have no intention of repealing any of their pornographic kickbacks to the financiers of the state's political parties.

Of the seven tax-break outrages cited by OEF, by far the most Antoinette-grotesque is the apparent intent of the 'Rats and 'Pigs to starve lower-income school children by preserving the sales-tax exemption on the membership fees the aristocrats pay to their country clubs and private golf courses.

The exemption, says the OEF analysis, costs the state $2.4 million; to preserve it, Christine the Cruel and her legislature would slash $3 million off the school meals program.

Other probable tax decisions – numbered for subsequent reference – are equally enraging, particularly when we consider how they are likely to be financed at our expense:

(1)-Cowtow to the agrobusiness tycoons by preserving their $80 million sales tax exemption for the environmentally destructive use of non-organic fertilizer. How? Slash home care for seniors and persons with disabilities by $76.2 million.

(2)-Whore for the Wall Street banksters by preserving their $76 million business-and-occupation tax exemption on first mortgage income, and pander to the rich in general by continuing their $171 million sales tax exemption for personal and entertainment services. How? Savage 69,000 lower-income working adults by hacking $246.2 million from the Basic Health Plan.

(3)-Pamper the wealthy by retaining the $12.4 million sales tax exemption on the nose-job/face-lift luxury of elective, non-medically necessary cosmetic surgery. How? Cut Medicare Part D prescription drug assistance to lower-income seniors and disabled people by $16.4 million.

(4)-Continue the $58 million sales-tax exemption on security and janitorial services – a huge bonus to Big Business. How? Kill the $48 million state Food Assistance Program.

(5)-Retain the $71 million sales-tax exemption for out-of-state shoppers – another coddling of the aristocracy by the ever-servile 'Rats and 'Pigs. How? Slice $59 million from the children's health program.

(6)-Maintain the $339 million sales tax exemption on financial services, insurance and real estate fees and commissions – again overwhelmingly the transactions of the wealthy. How? Destroy the $216 million fund to reduce class sizes in grades K through 4.

The OEF findings are here: http://www.oureconomicfuture.org/

Note my reporting of these choices is somewhat more provocative than OEF's – this is after all the unabashedly socialist Outside Agitator's Notebook – and note too I have listed the exemptions and their staggering costs in a slightly different order than OEF presented them.

But most of all note how retention of the tax breaks listed in items (1) through (5) is tantamount to premeditated murder: if the exemptions are continued – that is, if the rich remain exempt from paying – the resultant program reductions and eliminations will literally kill us.

Once more we learn the bitter truth of capitalism – infinite greed as ultimate virtue.

Once again we see the oppressive reality of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class; total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else.

Once again we witness capitalism's secret, silent holocaust: for those of us the capitalists deem surplus population – those of us who are elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed – it's the U.S. version of the Final Solution.

Why are we not rising up in anger?

LB/28 March 2011

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'What If You Knew Her and Found Her Dead on the Ground'

Because capitalism is infinite greed defined as ultimate virtue – because maximum profit for the capitalists always means minimum pay for workers – the Ruling Class has always preferred to exploit those of us who are most powerless and therefore most easily bullied: women, minorities, especially immigrants. As in the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, so it is today: capitalism is capitalism, its malevolence unchanged. But sometimes even the most oppressed workers rise up angry, as an entire nation of workers did after Triangle Shirtwaist, as also in this small local protest against sweatshop conditions in Manhattan's Chinatown during the 1980s. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1984. M Leicas/Tri-X; no other tech data. (One of several related images shot on assignment for and published by the socialist newspaper National Guardian.)

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AS A NEW YORKER – even a New Yorker now in permanent Pacific Northwest exile – I seldom forget I am blessed to have spent my earliest most formative years and a substantial portion of my adulthood in a place that for all its life-celebrating assertiveness is nevertheless also a true city of the dead: a realm where 397 years of ghosts often seem eager to arise and assist the Muse with her chores of inspiration.

So it was this morning, 2,853 road miles from the City, when the curiously jarring slam of something dropped in an upstairs apartment brought me awake remembering a eulogy I once heard broadcast for the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Though the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was a hundred years ago today, 25 March 1911, exactly five days short of the day I was born in Brooklyn 29 years later, its horror has always seemed curiously personal, as if women I knew – or perhaps a lover – were amongst its dead.

I had been thinking about that dreadful fire off and on for most of last night, reflecting on the damning contrast between its profound significance to generations of socialists and labor activists and its utter meaninglessness to everybody else, and I was thinking perhaps I would write yet another denunciation of Moron Nation for its morally imbecilic betrayal of not just the Triangle Shirtwaist victims but of literally everyone in the last maybe 200 years who gave up their lives in the struggle for justice and economic democracy – the very principles last November's election proves beyond any possible argument the Moronic Majority has now rejected forever.

But the sudden noise from above my bed not only woke my everyday intellect but – like the Zen slap that fosters satori – opened my subconscious as well, and for just an instant I was again hearing that long-ago lamentation for the Triangle Shirtwaist dead: a poem of rage and sadness in which the word “thud” served as punctuation and paragraph breaks, its dreadful onomatopoeia echoing the unspeakable sound a young woman's body makes when it smashes against Manhattan pavement from 10 stories up.

Probably – almost certainly – the poem was broadcast on WBAI, the nation's first alternative radio station and the stone favorite of Lower East Side bohemia, the milieu with which I was intimately involved in the real-time 1960s (if indeed “real-time '60s” is not an oxymoron), and in any case the ethos with which I have remained associated by fond recollection ever since. It would have been very much like WBAI to have accorded the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire its own solemn day of remembrance – something the always at-least-incipiently fascist United States would never do – and my memory of the poem, linked in recollection with the amber light of a darkroom and the pungent scent of photo chemicals, has a decidedly 1967 feel, the year of my emergence as a publicly declared photographer: as if I heard the broadcast on the portable radio that sat on the shelf above my developing trays.

My intention last night was to write of Triangle Shirtwaist as an apt metaphor for what the capitalist Ruling Class is again doing to us today – for what, in fact, capitalism has always done to us – but lying abed in this morning's post-thud consciousness and somehow seeing in the apparently unrelated martyrdom of Allison Krause a grisly prophecy of more Triangle Shirtwaist types of atrocities to come it seemed not only futile to indulge myself in yet another for-the-choir diatribe but much more honest to simply quote a line from Neil Young's “Four Dead in Ohio,” the song he wrote for performance by Crosby Stills Nash and Young in the wake of the Kent State Massacre of 1970: “what if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?”

Because so many were found dead on the ground beneath the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, a surprising number of New Yorkers are convinced the site of the fire, the former Asch Building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, is haunted. And in light of this morning's moment of realization I can no longer deny my own belief, admittedly contradictory for a self-proclaimed materialist, that it is not just haunted but probably the most haunted locale in all Manhattan, indeed in all the Five Boroughs, perhaps in all the United States, unquestionably the most haunted place I have ever encountered.

An accomplished colleague, in the City for a conference with her publisher, rented a bicycle to tour Manhattan on a bright summer Sunday, pedaled into the intersection unaware of what had obtained there and was stunned – almost paralyzed she said – by its overwhelming pall of tragedy, a reaction that left her questioning her mental and physical health until someone informed her of the relevant history.

Once again the strange resonance of Neil Young's lyric.

No doubt in an attempt to hide the Triangle Shirtwaist legacy – which after all is a microcosm of the legacy of capitalism – the structure that housed the factory has been renamed. It is now the Brown Building. But some stains do not yield to propaganda: you cannot exorcise the ghosts of Auschwitz by renaming it Disneyland. Which is why I wonder if the building's present occupant – a New York University science department – was chosen precisely because its personnel would never dare speak of psychic encounters however undeniable: a scientist who claims to have seen a ghost is an instant pariah.

But the janitors and cleaning crews are under no such restraint – and I would love to ask them what eeriness they might have witnessed, especially while working on the upper floors.

I suspect their answers would at least parallel my own experiences – and I was never more than a passer-by.

When I lived on East 5th Street I always walked home from Googie's or the Ninth Circle and diverse other Village saloons or much later from the Lion's Head, and my route was always along Washington Place past Greene Street and what used to be the Asch Building and its factory of death, and even before I knew on what blood-sanctified ground I trod I nevertheless sensed in the eerily silent long-after-midnight solitude the disquieting murmurs of female anguish forever etched on its walls and splattered on the pavement and lingering even now as a strong component of the surrounding air.

Perhaps this is why its wounded spirits always seem to seek me out no matter where I go and – even more so now that I am presumptively age-distanced from fantasy and strong emotion – always bring tears to my eyes: tears of rage and grief and most of all the overwhelming sense of loss and futility that now oppresses so many of us, especially those of us in our waning years.

LB/25 March 2011

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32 Senate DemocRats Join GOPig Death Panel to Target Seniors, Disabled

An octogenarian enjoys a contemplative moment with his dog. Our right to such a secure retirement, formerly unquestioned even in the notoriously social-Darwinist United States, is now gravely threatened by the collaboration of DemocRats with Republicans and their Wall Street masters in an escalating campaign to privatize Social Security and abolish Medicare. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2011; Leica M4, 35mm f/1.7 Voigtlander Ultron at f/2.8 on Kodak Professional BW400CN.     

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EXACTLY AS I WAS shocked to intellectual paralysis by the devastation seismic force and nuclear folly inflicted on the Japanese – what could I have possibly written that would not have been rendered meaningless by such horror? – so am I now face-slapped back to mental activism by Friday's report that 32 DemocRat senators have openly joined the Wall Street/GOPorker effort to loot Social Security and destroy Medicare.

The result is a 64-member senatorial death panel – 32 'Rats, 32 'Pigs – that by further shrinking already-frozen Social Security stipends and notoriously miserly Medicare allowances will impose on those of us no longer exploitable for capitalist profit a particularly cunning U.S. variant of the Final Solution: not extermination camps per se – that would be entirely too embarrassing – but poverty, abandonment and neglect clearly intended to have the same deadly impact on lower-income seniors and disabled people.

I say “will impose” rather than “would impose” because the death panel's bi-partisan majority makes it obvious the political situation – at least for those of us who are elderly or disabled – is already hopeless: that just as quake and tsunami and meltdown are savaging Japan, so will the capitalist Ruling Class savage Social Security and Medicare – never mind Sen. Harry Reid's obviously impotent, perhaps deliberately misleading assertions to the contrary.

Yet with the notable exception of The Hill, the right-leaning on-line journal that broke the story Friday morning, not a single Ruling Class Media outlet – not even MSNBC – has reported the hideous truth: that the 64-senator supermajority combines with the Big Business/Teabagger House to ensure there is no longer any doubt we will soon be ravaged by the very cutbacks we so desperately fear.

Indeed it is my own prediction those of us already on Social Security will be hurt at least as badly as future retirees and disabled people. Given the genocidal hostility toward lower-income people obvious in President Barack the Betrayer's handpicked anti-Social Security, anti-Medicare Fiscal Commission and in both houses of Congress, I strongly suspect we have seen our last-ever cost-of-living increase – no matter the death-dealing runaway inflation in food, fuel and medical prices.

The murderous intent of the politicians and their masters is obvious despite the “we may not agree” weasel-wording of the death panel's letter to Obama:

“As you know, a bipartisan group of Senators has been working to craft a comprehensive deficit reduction package based upon the recommendations of the Fiscal Commission.  While we may not agree with every aspect of the Commission’s recommendations, we believe that its work represents an important foundation to achieve meaningful progress on our debt.  The Commission’s work also underscored the scope and breadth of our nation’s long-term fiscal challenges.” 

“Beyond FY2011 funding decisions, we urge you to engage in a broader discussion about a comprehensive deficit reduction package.  Specifically, we hope that the discussion will include discretionary spending cuts, entitlement changes and tax reform.”

And who are these DemocRats who by their endorsement of “entitlement changes” now openly reveal themselves to be closet Republicans? Some of the names might surprise you:

John Kerry (Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Joseph Lieberman (Conn.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Thomas Carper (Del.), Mark Udall (Colo.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Dianne Feinstein (Caif.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Christopher Coons (Del.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Ben Cardin (Md.), Al Franken (Minn.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Mark Warner (Va.), Dick Durbin (Ill.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Patty Murray (Wash.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Tom Udall (N.M.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio).

One name on this rat list that does not surprise me at all is Washington's Sen. Patty Murray: as two-faced as Janus, her voting record (which includes lockstep support for NAFTA and other job-stealing, anti-labor “free trade” measures) proves her “progressive” rhetoric is as much a Big Lie as the Betrayer's “change we can believe in.”

The full text of The Hill's report is here, though (free) registration may be required to access it:

http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/150671-sixty-senators-call-on-obama-to-broaden-budget-talks

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I'm sad to say my predictions of Obamanoid/DemocRat treachery are now 100 percent accurate.

Remember how many times I said the President would fling us a few strategically timed culture-war concessions that, though economically meaningless, would appeal to the Left Bourgeoisie – the Democratic majority of arrogant academics and professionals and technicians and bureaucrats who (because they are still financially comfortable), moronically reject all notions of class struggle and therefore remain willing slaves of capitalism?

Remember when I wrote that even as I welcomed Obama's sudden about-face endorsement of gay rights, I believed it nothing more than an insidiously clever pre-2012 fence-mending ploy – and the harbinger of many more such devious stratagems to come?

Remember when I predicted Barack the Betrayer would eventually use gun control – more accurately forcible disarmament and compulsory victimhood – to win back the mandatory-pacifism fanatics and anti-self-defense zealots dominant amongst the bourgeois voters alienated by his serial betrayals?

Remember how many of you disagreed?

Well folks it's happening, an obviously pre-scripted anti-gunowner campaign that's already re-igniting the old Vietnam Era antagonisms just as the Ruling Class intends. On one side there's the formerly draft-exempt, now again hysterically anti-gun elite. On the other side are the mostly blue-collar folk who in years past often had no choice but to serve in the military and now own firearms, not just because it's a constitutional right but for practical purposes of subsistence and self-defense.

These men and women recognize the necessity of such measures because they have long been the nation's primary victims of crime – whether random murder, rape, robbery and mayhem or methodical capitalist exploitation, downsizing, outsourcing and union-busting.

Obviously – given these are the very workers who would be most likely to provide an expanded Wisconsin Rebellion the righteously angry nonviolent muscle it needs to be self-sustaining – their renewed alienation by resurrection of the DemocRat war against legal civilian firearms ownership (and therefore against the right to self-defense) is no coincidence.

It's no surprise I'm already hearing again what I heard so often in the Clinton years: “fuck it; might as well vote Republican: bad as they are, at least they'll let us keep our guns.”

Once again solidarity is flushed down the proverbial commode.

Thus the DemocRats deliberately work against themselves, antagonizing the very workers who might have truly revitalized the Democratic Party a la Wisconsin.

Thus too these same Obamanoid betrayers collaborate in thrusting Moron Nation ever closer to the permanent Republican majority the Ruling Class demands – the last step before the United States becomes the United Estates, the de facto Fourth Reich, the ultimate Big Business despotism.

LB/21 March 2011

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Reflections on International Women's Day and the Music of Resistance

The Russian Revolution started on  International Women's Day, 8 March 1917 (22 February on the old Tsarist calendar), with a massive demonstration in Petrograd.  (Photo credit: Wiki Commons)

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THIS PIECE BEGAN as a thank you note to Barbara Mor and Franetta McMillan for their supportive comments on my previous post, 'Far & Away the Road Goes Winding; Look & See How Merrily the Road Goes,' the title a passage so long it required single quotes and ampersands to fit the allotted headline space.

As I have said before, I regard responses from writers and artists of the caliber of Ms. Mor and Ms. McMillan as infinitely better than Sigma Delta Chi awards and I always genuflect accordingly.

But my effort to express my gratitude was blocked by TypePad, this blog's server, according to its tech support people because I was “keeping a page...open for too long without saving changes.”

As I said in rebuttal, “I have been in 'edit' mode occasionally for as long as six or seven hours...and in any case I have NEVER been blocked by TypePad as I was early this morning.”

Though TypePad's generally excellent and superbly responsive tech people say they are “working on resolving the underlying issue causing this error,” I cannot but wonder if TypePad's new owner, the advertising monopoly Video Egg (for which Google), is intent on ideologically purging TypePad of capitalism's opponents.

Could this hitherto unknown “error” therefore be part of a preliminary wave of technological discouragement?

Obviously we shall see.

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The quotation that titled my previous post – especially relevant today, 8 March, International Women's Day – is as I previously explained a line from Paul Robeson's translation of “Song of the Plains,” Polyushko Polyē in Russian, a favorite of the Red Cavalry during the Russian Civil War and World War II.

Robeson's variant, an anthem of the powerful U.S. Communist Party during the same approximate years, is linked in the previous post and again here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5PBrFXNQQA&feature=related

The Russian version, sung by the Red Army Chorus, is also re-linked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdHyz0G7qcw&feature=related

The relevance of this song to International Women's Day is that it was on the morning of this day 94 years ago the women of the Lesnoy Textile Works struck to protest the firing of their (mostly Bolshevik) sister organizers and boiled into the streets of war-starved Petrograd chanting “Klyēb! Myr!” (“Bread! Peace!”).

Soon these women were joined by the men of the nearby Putilov Machine Works, and perhaps an hour later – when the soldiers and Cossacks refused the Tsar's orders to fire on the marchers – the Russian Revolution had begun.

The above photograph, from Wiki Commons, gives us a sense of what that day was like: note the smiles, especially on the women's faces; Wiki translates the banners – typically blood red with yellow letters – as (from back to front) "feed the children of the defenders of the motherland" and "increase payments to the soldiers' families – defenders of freedom and world peace."

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Explanatory note: We are often confused by the fact that in Russia this event is called the “February Revolution.” This is because under the Tsar and the Russian Orthodox theocracy, an older form of the calendar was in use. International Women's Day – founded 100 years ago in 1911, was therefore 22 February on the Russian calendar despite the fact the same day was 8 March on calendars everywhere else. Though the theocratic calendar was eventually replaced by the revolution (the modern calendar is now used in Russia too), the original names of the revolutions themselves – February for the overthrow of the Tsar, October for the Bolshevik victory – have endured.

*****

As a matter of semiotic interest, here is the song Polyushko Polyē as used by present-day Russian youth in a curious and visually interesting metaphor that connects Russian athletes of today with the Red Cavalry of the revolution and the subsequent civil war:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvlTN4hONkw&feature=related

The peaked hats worn by the Red Cavalry were a deliberate effort to link their struggle to that of the Scythian horse-archers who routed the Persians from the steppes in 512 BCE; the Scythian warriors wore identically-shaped headgear.

Though I know nothing of this video's history, I cannot but wonder if it was among other things a Trotsky-sarcastic response to President Bill Clinton's “let-them-eat-cake” suggestion midnight basketball would somehow fill the empty bellies and the cored-out minds of all the children imprisoned in the U.S. ghettos.

*****

I deserve no special credit for the discovery of the music to which I have linked. With the obvious exception of the jock version of Polyushko Polyē, it was in fact the music of my childhood, the legacy of my late father's aesthetics and heartfelt political convictions.

The earliest records I remember – 78 rpm played on a then state-of-the-art mahogany-cased Victrola through the speakers of a walnut-cased RCA three-band radio – included the first album that was truly mine, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 1939 performance of Sergei Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf."

This was a cherished gift, probably given me on my third birthday and most likely by my father, which would explain why my mother destroyed it in one of the rages preliminary to her foiled attempt at post-partum abortion on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945 – another story for another time.

Returning to the infinitely more comfortable topic of familial music, I remember we also had Antonin Dvorak's "New World Symphony" (the album with the totem poles on the cover).

But the most lasting impressions came from Robeson's "Songs of Free Men" (with its cover illustration of a dagger piercing the Nazi serpent) and most of all from the Red Army Chorus, the latter an album imported from the Soviet Union by New York City's Stinson Trading Company.

For me as a child the music of the Red Army was eerily hypnotic. There was not a single word of English anywhere in it – neither in the lyrics nor on the album cover and record labels – but the images the music evoked seemed as vivid as real life. Though I would realize this only after I reached my late 30s and found translations of many of the songs, these mental images were also astonishingly accurate – as if I had been born understanding Russian. I was not translating it as we do a second language; I was knowing it as pictures and sensations, precisely as we comprehend our own native vocabularies – an inexplicable ability I lost long before puberty and which remains deeply perplexing to this day, not the least because some would argue this phenomenon proof positive of reincarnation.

Here is more of the Red Army Chorus, a Civil War song called Partizanska that again became popular during the Great Patriotic War Against Fascism:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBbZA0ZQF6I&feature=related

(Note from the accompanying photographs the numbers of women amongst the partisans, especially in Russia: not surprising given that women sparked the actual Russian Revolution.)

And here is another song about partisans, a moving ballad of the French Resistance sung by Leonard Cohen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG4ndbhOkpI&feature=related

One of the verses of "Partizanska" translates approximately as follows:

Banner-bearers were riding past us
Their flags red as the blood of the dead and wounded
The squadrons were advancing at a gallop

To which the closing words sung by Cohen seem a perfect conclusion, especially on this of all days:

Ah the winds the winds are blowing
Through the graves the winds are blowing
Freedom soon will come...

LB/8 March 2011

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'Far & away the road goes winding: look & see how merrily the road goes'

THE REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL of the Labor Uprising that started in Wisconsin and is spreading across the nation is already terrifying the Ruling Class.

Definitive proof of the extent to which the capitalist aristocracy is genuinely frightened comes from two seemingly unrelated developments.

One of these is the government's decision to charge Private First Class Bradley Manning with a death-penalty crime – the intent obviously to make him an example a la Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

The other development is Time magazine's publication of an anti-Marxist warning that eerily recalls the Rosenberg era.

Wikileaks suspect Manning is facing 22 additional charges that include the capital offense of aid to the enemy. Because the new accusations have received almost no coverage in Ruling Class Media apart from MSNBC, they are detailed here:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/03/02-7

I am hardly surprised by the newest action against PFC Manning. The unusual (and perhaps unprecedented) long-term confinement of an Army soldier in the maximum-savagery environment of a Marine Corps brig is a telling index to the magnitude of both the Ruling Class alarm and the resultant government vindictiveness.

But the appearance of the Time opinion piece is genuinely surprising. For nearly as long as I've been alive, the Ruling Class has conditioned us to believe Marxism is thoroughly discredited by its own failures – that its exposure of the historical truth of class struggle is therefore irrelevant if not delusional.

The Time article discards both these plutocrat-protecting falsehoods. Indeed it is the first printed evidence of specifically anti-Marxist panic – whether civilian or military – I've seen since the 1950s.

It is entitled “Your Incredible Shrinking Paycheck.” Written by Rana Foroohar and published via the Internet on 28 February, it presumably also appears in a print edition of the same approximate date. In any case it's core argument is that capitalism should beware a new Marxist revolution.

To stave off such an event, says Foroohar, the capitalists should evolve a new humanitarian facade – an updated version of the New Deal – behind which to hide capitalism's tyrannosauric malevolence. Such camouflage, the essay concludes, is “a lot better than the Marxist alternative.”

Never mind that – exactly as Gov. Scott Walker is proving in Wisconsin – today's capitalists are far too maliciously greedy to allow even the most minimal concessions.

Though no Time staffer would ever be permitted to describe capitalism as forthrightly as I just did – Foroohar describes the facade urged on the capitalists as “social mobility” rather than a Big Lie – “Paycheck” nevertheless makes the astonishing admission that public interest in Marxism is growing fast:

“Before I started writing this column on why paychecks are likely to keep shrinking even if unemployment starts to inch down,” Foroohar tells us, “I consulted Google to see if the term Marxism was trending upward. It was and has been ever since the end of December, the conclusion of a year in which workers' share of the U.S. economic pie shrank to the smallest piece ever: 54.4% of GDP, down from about 60% in the 1970s.”

“No wonder Marx is back in fashion. It's been more than 100 years since the German philosopher predicted that capitalism's voraciousness would be its undoing — as bosses invest more in new technologies to make things more cheaply and efficiently and less in workers themselves, who, deprived of fair wages, would eventually rise up and revolt...”

“Yet even if unemployment starts to ease, it's unclear whether labor's portion of the pie will stop shrinking. The global headwinds may be too strong. Just as Marx predicted, technology-driven productivity is increasing not just in manufacturing but also in services...

“The other megatrend of our age, the rise of emerging markets, will also continue to put pressure on U.S. wages...

“A recent study by Capital Economics found that from 2002 to 2008, employment abroad by U.S. multinationals (grew by) 22.6%, while employment at home increased by a mere 4.9%. What's good for U.S. companies and what's good for U.S. labor and wages are no longer always the same thing. The discrepancy may become an increasingly contentious political issue.”

The full text of “Paycheck” is here.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2050019,00.html

Prompted by Foroohar's curious omission of the Google statistics so cited, I did some checking on my own and learned that Google searches targeting Marxism have gone up by 420 percent since 2007, from approximately 18,000 to 94,000 in 2010. Hits on Marxist topics have increased by nearly 300 percent during the same period, from 637,000 to 2,380,000.

Meanwhile to older members of the Ruling Class, the renewal of their Marxophobia must seem like the worst possible case of deja vu, harkening back to the 1930s, when Communists boasted what still today was the best organized political party in U.S. history – also the third largest.

In those halcyon years of national resistance to capitalism, the cringing fat cats encountered fearsomeness everywhere, even in music: U.S. Communists and their socialist allies had adopted “Song of the Plains,” a breathtakingly powerful ballad favored by Russia's Red Cavalry, as their own anthem of solidarity.

Its a good bet most of the participants in the new uprising have never heard it. Due to the purges that began the moment World War II ended, “Song of the Plains” quickly became the most forbidden song in the United States, and so it remained until probably a decade ago. But now it's on the Internet. Here it is as sung by the incomparable Paul Robeson on his 1941 album Songs of Free Men:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5PBrFXNQQA&feature=related

The melody is probably as old as Russia herself, possibly even as old as the magnificent Scythian horse-archers who routed Darius and his Persians in 512 BCE.

But the words Robeson translates so movingly came out of the Russian Civil War and its epic cavalry marches from one battle to the next – ride two hours, dismount and walk one hour to rest the horses; ride two hours, walk one hour; on and on across the endless steppe beneath its eternal skies, the leather sling of your Vintovka Mosina wearing blisters and then calluses on your shoulders as your soul aches with yearning for the wife or lover you have not seen in months – and nothing to abbreviate the numbing miles of grassland sameness but singing.

In Russian “Song of the Plains” is called Polyushko Polyē, and it again became a favorite of the Red Army – especially the horse cavalry – in the fight against the Nazi invaders. Here it is as performed and recorded by the Red Army Chorus sometime after World War II:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdHyz0G7qcw&feature=related

The great fear of the capitalists in the 1930s and 1940s and even in the 1950s was that they like the Tsarist aristocrats before them would awaken in their mansions to discover their mercenary guards gone and the gates open and the wind bearing the song of approaching revolutionaries:

O maidens fair raise your eyes
Gaze upon the road we follow
Far and away the road goes winding
Look and see how merrily the road goes...

LB/3 March 2011

(-30-)