Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

SOMETIMES SEVERAL TOPICS mesh into a single essay, a process to which I alluded, though only en passant, as I was writing and assembling last week's OAN. But that meshing was slap-in-the-face obvious this week, as Internet reporting on governmentally sanctioned persecution by Christian theocrats at the U.S. Air Force Academy shared indicative synchronicity with five other topics. These were the release of some new data on the forcible impoverishment of the 99 Percent; the smashing of a unionization campaign in the de facto Christian theocracy of the South; the methodical falsification of U.S. history (specifically about the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon's treason and President Johnson's humanitarianism); the judicial approval of religious profiling by the ever-more-ubiquitous secret police, and a provocative review of poetry as a medium for speaking truth to power, which Reader Supported News thoughtfully picked up from The New Yorker.

What ties all these pieces together is the fact they are each – even the poetry review – about class struggle. Though we USians are conditioned to reject class struggle – even to deny its existence – its reality becomes obvious whenever you focus on the increasingly unapologetic, might-makes-right savagery of capitalism. That's because what is called capitalism is at its Ayn Rand core nothing more complex than infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever established. Its individual, clinical state is called moral imbecility or sociopathy. When it's metastasized from economic theory into a defining national philosophy, as it has in the United States, what you get is capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – another name for which is fascism.

The class-struggle common denominator of these stories is provided by new economic-inequality data,  for which a tip of the green visor to an extremely useful email newsletter, PopularResistance.Org Daily Digest. The data, assembled by the Economic Policy Institute, show a key aspect of how we in the 99 Percent are methodically impoverished: “Between 1979 and 2007...the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 18.9 percent. Simultaneously, the average income of the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much—by 200.5 percent.”

EPI then addresses the discrepancy state-by-state. The worst states – the realms of capitalism so malevolent the One Percenters allowed us no increase in average incomes – are Nevada, Wyoming, Michigan and Alaska. The 15 next worst, where the One Percenters made off with from half to 84 percent of all income growth between 1979 and 2007, are Arizona (where the richest of the rich grabbed 84.2 percent of all income growth); Oregon (81.8 percent); New Mexico (72.6 percent); Hawaii (70.9 percent); Florida (68.9 percent); New York (67.6 percent); Illinois (64.9 percent); Connecticut (63.9 percent); California (62.4 percent); Washington (59.1 percent); Texas (55.3 percent); Montana (55.2 percent); Utah (54.1 percent); South Carolina (54.0 percent); and West Virginia (53.3 percent).

Another Popular Resistance dispatch – a photo essay on the homeless camps  that have become a signature presence in the USian woodlands – exemplifies the real-world consequences of the EPI data. (The suppression of these communities, which earlier generations knew as Hoovervilles, is amongst the primary reasons for the endemic closures of formerly public lands throughout the United States.) Ben Marcin's pictures of individual dwellings at these sites are well-composed, so much so they vividly portray the eerie, almost tangible sense of tragedy and banishment that haunts all such locales. Though that is part of the story's strength, I must nevertheless as a photographer and former photo editor fault the work for its failure to include the people who built and inhabited these wretched domiciles. But its publication in the same edition of PRODD as the EPI report is laudable – another wake-up call demanding we recognize the forbidden truth of class-struggle.

Likewise the conclusion of the EPI report: “Policy choices and cultural forces have combined to put downward pressure on the wages and incomes of most Americans even as their productivity has risen...In the next decade, something must give. Either America must accept that the American Dream of widespread economic mobility is dead, or new policies must emerge that will begin to restore broadly shared prosperity.”

Meanwhile the One Percenters' choice of alternatives – zero-tolerance fascism – is already obvious in the politicians' embrace of “austerity” at every level of USian governance, federal, state and local. Hence the class-struggle relevance that binds the following texts and comment-thread responses into a single OAN entry.

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“How the Union Was Defeated at Volkswagen”  Kevin Drawbaugh and Nick Carey of Reuters byline an obviously-censored report that nevertheless manages to suggest the behind-the-scenes, beyond-the-workplace coordination that defeated the United Automobile Workers effort to unionize a Volkswagen plant in East Tennessee. The defeat is all the more revealing because VW's (German) management, which believes workers do have rights, welcomed the union's presence. But the wire-service dispatch, though detailed, says nothing about the anti-union fanaticism of the local white churches, to which I can attest because I lived in Tennessee for a miserable 13 years. Such theocratic malevolence is often enforced by the Ku Klux Klan – colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Hence my contribution to the comment thread: We on the Left need to “recognize the role Christianity plays -- Godzilla huge and King Kong strong -- in keeping the South anti-union. The so-called 'Prosperity Gospel,' which originated in the fundamentalist South but is now the doctrinal mainstay of Christianity throughout the USian homeland, holds that wealth and power are meted out by the Christians' god to reward godly men. An extension of the same doctrine decrees the manager is god's anointed representative in the workplace. Managerial right is thus divine right – the same entitlement formerly accorded kings. Thus too any disobedience is deadly sin -- and from this perspective, there is no greater sin than unionism. (Moreover) this is all part of 'a cultural/ideological war that extends far beyond the workplace.' It reaches into the bedroom via bans on abortion and birth control; into the schools via bans on teaching scientific truth; and into the military via the forcible Christianization imposed on the officer corps. It is nothing less than an organized campaign to replace the constitution with Biblical Law, the Christian equivalent of Sharia, and it has already conquered the federal government, for which see The Family: the Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power: (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008)”

Ralph Nader's later, much more revealing report on how East Tennessee and Ayn Rand ideology defeated the UAW is here. But even Nader, a skilled and insightful researcher, missed the Caucasian pulpit-pounding that, sure as sunrise, hammered home the Christian  god's commandment “to put them uppety workers back in thar rightful place.”

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“Judge Tosses Muslim Spying Suit Against NYPD, Blames Reporters”  Dan Froomkin of First Look reports in detail on a ruling by the U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., that voids the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom, blames the press for the associated controversy and grants USian secret police the right to monitor religious practices. Remembering how Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic judiciary cleared the way for Hitler, I supportively answer another poster on the story's comment thread by saying, “what is being done to us is infinitely worse than 'blow(s)' to our civil liberties. To understand the magnitude and objective of the One Percent's assault on the rule of law, and why the Democrats are as instrumental as the Republicans in subverting the Constitution, the best source is probably The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (William L. Shirer; Simon & Shuster: 1959). Apropos the total corruption of the U.S. judiciary, the parallels described in the section entitled 'Justice in the Third Reich,' pgs. 268-274 (1981 edition), are especially damning. 'The law was what (the Leader) said it was...with the power to do to death whomever he pleased.' Sound familiar? Welcome to the Fourth Reich.”

I regret I did not comment on why the court decision is so personally disturbing: because I remember how the authorities in East Tennessee – including officials at the University of Tennessee – persecuted Unitarians during the 1950s, and how the First Amendment was ultimately our only defense.

Now in the looming Christian theocracy of the USian Empire, I can easily envision the secret police whether local, state or federal again assigned to monitor the political conformity and even doctrinal orthodoxy not just of Muslims (as in the Newark case), but of all people – especially those in sects officially viewed as “suspicious,” as Unitarians were during the era of the postwar purges, as all non-Christians, agnostics, atheists and even non-fundamentalist Christians are today.

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“Lying to Survive at the Air Force Academy: An Open Letter to Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson”  Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation shares a letter he received that bitterly protests the Christian theocracy imposed upon the U.S. officer corps. I point out that “In the de facto Fourth Reich of today's USian Empire, the Christian church in its more savagely fundamentalist cults is becoming the equivalent of the Nazi Party in the Third Reich of Hitler's Germany...In which context recall the inscription around the swastikas on German military uniform belts: Gott Mit Uns -- 'god with us,' thereby granting Christian sanction even to the Holocaust.”

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“Does Nixon's 'Treason' Boost LBJ's Legacy” Robert Parry of Consortium News reports on the oft-ignored fact President Nixon's treason prolonged the Vietnam War, adding at least 20,000 U.S. military people and perhaps a million Vietnamese men, women and children to the death toll. As a result, President Johnson's domestic humanitarianism is “overshadowed” to the point it is nearly forgotten. My answer notes what should be obvious: “Methodical censorship of historical facts that rehabilitate President Johnson's image is understandable when viewed from the perspective of class struggle. The benefits of LBJ's generosity toward the 99 Percent were very real. These included giant strides toward redefining USian health care and adequate transport as civil rights rather than privileges of wealth; equally significant steps toward ameliorating the socioeconomic disadvantages that keep lower-income peoples imprisoned in poverty; and, as a result, strong reinforcement of the New Deal/anti-Ayn-Rand notion of the United States as a genuine land of opportunity. Were LBJ to be historically rehabilitated, these aspects of his policies -- humanitarianism that is truly revolutionary in the context of the Ayn Rand fascism that rules the USian Empire today -- would be brought to the forefront.”

(Which is not, say again NOT, to  suggest LBJ's conspiratorial role in turning a little war into a big war -- and thereby handing his One Percent masters untold profits -- should ever be forgiven.) 

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“Misremembering America's Wars, 2003-2053” Nick Turse of TomDispatch describes an ultra-high-tech 2053 in which government propaganda is the only so-called truth. He then uses this improbable fiction to legitimately criticize the Big Lie “history” of the USian Empire's wars now being disseminated by the military. While I applaud his critique, I am so vexed by its underlying PollyAnna notion of progress, I focus mostly on that: “Mr. Turse's high-tech 2053 will exist, if at all, only in the privileged quarters of the One Percent and its factotums, the politicians and bureaucrats whose job is to perpetuate capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total wretchedness for all the rest of us. The One Percenters and their enablers will live in guarded and gated compounds. As for us, think not of Star Trek but of Les Miserables; picture not houses and apartments but the sordidness and stench of slave pens and homeless camps...That will be the real 2053.” Another poster rejects the likelihood of slave pens; I say “slave pens -- specifically for-profit prisons -- are already a key part of the USian Empire's Ayn Rand economy.”

(And this was before I had seen Marcin's photographs of homeless camps – which are so vivid you can almost smell them, exactly as I have smelled them in parts of the Cascade Mountains back country before it was closed to public access.)

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“Can Atrocity Be the Subject Matter of Poetry?” Robyn Creswell in The New Yorker reviews Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu, editors; W.W. Norton: 2014).

Creswell gets the title wrong but raises compelling questions about the relationship between politics and art. As a socialist, I of course believe the two are inseparable, that what Robert Graves describes as “one story and one story only” cannot be told without reference to the elements of class-struggle that are evident even in our most ancient myths. But Creswell – a man of obvious Ruling Class privilege no doubt schooled in the capitalist dogmas that dismiss class struggle as delusion and proclaim art and politics to be like Kipling's East and West, “never the twain shall meet” – damns the anthology for its very democracy: “(t)he editors’ decision to include the voices of heroic liberalism...means there is too much verse that is, by all conventional criteria – vividness of language, ability to surprise, techniques of rhyme and rhythm – very bad.” His review -- despite its begrudging nod to editor Wu and many other critics of the socioeconomically exclusive, academically cloistered narcissism so much USian poetry has become since the 1960s -- is perhaps then an exposition of the selfsame exclusiveness. But that insight comes to me only now, after a much more careful reading. My original comment was written in delight at finding a poetry review – any poetry review – on RSN. My intent was mostly to thank RSN Founder/Editor Marc Ash for running it and to express my hope it represents another expansion of the site's already eclectically gratifying content. I also applauded a fellow comment-thread poster “for reminding us of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and 'Babiyy Yar,' which was later set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his wrenchingly powerful 13th Symphony, subtitled with same name in a slightly different spelling, Babi Yar.”

I cannot listen to Babi Yar without getting tears in my eyes, and I doubt anyone who is fully human can. It achieved enormous popularity in the allegedly brainwashed Soviet Union, but here in the allegedly free world of USian homeland, Babi Yar died in the oblivion of public indifference – one of the many reasons the Soviet citizenry often jeered us as nyekulturniy. Other great works, including virtually all of the formerly recognized occidental classics, have similarly perished. That's because the One Percent uses censorship as a weapon of class struggle. And censorship thus employed takes many forms. There is censorship by denunciation, as in Craswell's review. There is censorship by obscurity, imposed by the fact so many USians never lose the intellectual gag reflex with which our public schools condition us to reject art and literature, thus to ensure we carefully avoid the near occasion of enchantment by aesthetic agitators. There is censorship by price, as the anthology in question lists at $29.95, more than most of us in the 99 Percent can afford for anything beyond the necessities of our household budgets: food, clothing, transport, doctors, medicine, shelter. And now there's censorship by suppression (as against Edward Snowden or as implicitly demanded by the Federal District Court in Newark), plus of course censorship by the Big Lie, as in the falsified histories of the empire's wars. But let us not despair: our understanding of class struggle – in this instance the One Percent's escalating efforts to ensure we proletarians and peasants remain forever impoverished, powerless and ignorant –  now melds a plague of seemingly unrelated oppressions into a single, potentially revolutionary summation of grievances.

LB/23 February 2014

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(Edited 18/2/2014 to clean up the debris of writing in haste to avoid the pangs of painful memories.)

I APOLOGIZE FOR the tardiness of this post. The activities of “retirement” that included two days of volunteer editorial work plus responding to a wealth of relevant material on other websites seemed to have left me no time for the weekly contemplation, research and writing that usually keynotes this space. Instead I planned to note in passing how my compulsion to outside agitate on other sites had generated a total of eight posts in four days, which is probably a personal record for Internet contributions. I would then write a few sentences on the common concerns – deliberate disinformation, co-optation and political betrayal (mostly the latter) – that bind these eight posts into a topical anthology and headline it accordingly.

But – such is the undeniable (white, gray and sometimes black) magick of writing – what I intended wasn't at all what happened.

After I boasted of my eight-post output, I sat smiling at the fact I was fairly sure it's a high-water mark I haven't approached since the good old days when I was often summoned to stand in as a rewrite-man on The Jersey Journal (1969-1970), where I was a reportorial top gun, a presumably up-and-coming young journalist who was not only appreciated and respected by my employers but also well-liked by most of my colleagues.

Now I fondly remembered the uniquely welcoming smell of paper, machine-oil, tobacco-smoke and ink that characterized all big-city newsrooms of that era. I remembered the staccato of typewriters and the faster more assertive riffs of wire-service teletypes punctuated in random counterpoint by bulletin bells and ringing telephones and the suck-bang of the pneumatic tubes that carried skillfully edited copy to the composing room where with equal skill it was set in type cast from molten lead. I remembered too the self-assured expression of my own editorial talents that always seemed bolstered by this atonal but profoundly energizing symphony as it rose to its crescendo at our main deadline, straight-up noon for the big makeover we called the North Lift. And now as I contemplated these memories, I realized they had been rendered poignant by the sepia-toning that characterizes history and the quietude imposed by distance – that they were shaping themselves into a spontaneous eulogy to a breed of journalist and a rewarding intensity of life and work and commitment that is no more, and I began to write how good I felt about having been part of all that.

Next much to my surprise it came to me I had set my all-time story-production record not during good times at The JJ, but during the bad old days I was a reporter and sometimes photographer for The Federal Way News, from the fall of 1976 through the first half of 1981.

Such is the blessing – and the curse – of writing. To write is to remember, and sometimes, even amidst pleasant memories, it is to suddenly and unexpectedly recall painful, hitherto-suppressed details: in this case all the reasons why I have no fond memories of the The Federal Way News, none whatsoever. It was there I was paid the lowest wages of my career and evaluated not for the quality of my work but for whether I met a weekly word-quota and whether my personality meshed with the personalities of the other (disgruntled) occupants of the editorial hive, which mostly it didn't, not the least because I cannot respect people who flee from their own intellectual potential or cringe in terror and/or rat you out to management if you so much as whisper the word “union.” At first – remembering all this wretchedness here and now 33 years after the fact – I was merely taken aback. But then the rest of the details rose to haunt me like vengeful ghosts, and I was overwhelmed by hurt and anger.

Unlike The JJ, where we were proud of what we did and for whom we did it and proud too we were represented by the Hudson County Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO, The FWN was a journalistic sweatshop and was infamous as such throughout Washington state and maybe the entire Pacific Northwest. You never knew whether you were meeting the word-quota because it was deliberately kept secret – a sadistic albeit diabolically effective means of ensuring the subjugation of the staff. But that wasn't its only deficiency. As I was warned over drinks one night by a friendly editor at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, FWN had such a bad reputation for suppressing stories to placate advertisers, even if you won a Pulitzer there, you probably wouldn't get any credit for it because of where you'd been working. “You wanna get back in the game,” he said, “you gotta get out of Federal Way and onto a real newspaper first.”

I wrote some significant and award-winning stories at FWN – exposés that changed local policies, won me a place on Gov. Dixy Lee Ray's enemies list and in one instance beat a sneaky Christian effort to close gay and singles bars – but all that really mattered to the bosses was whether the text was long enough to fill spaces between the advertisements. Not only did my writing suffer a ruinous lack of discipline resulting from FWN's operational shibboleth of longer is (always) better; my mental health was wounded too. Vicious, relentless bullying by the psychological thug who was FWN's glaringly talentless editor for most of my five years there was the most painfully wrenching workplace experience of my entire life.

Though I would not let myself admit it until now, his constant derision and belittlement had weakened me to the point I was unable to muster the emotional strength necessary to find a better job, much less return to the East Coast where I belonged. His undeserved but relentless antagonism was also, because of my own history, an especially wounding form of betrayal. Bullied and abused as a child, I had turned to journalism as a sanctuary, a realm wherein I could be myself and  demonstrate my true strengths without fear of ridicule or assault, and so it had been on every publication for which I had worked in New York City, New Jersey, Michigan and even during most of the years I worked in the South. But my experience at FWN soon became a nightmare, and a source of nightmares, and so it remained until the editor was fired.

Eventually, maybe a year later at the beginning of the downsizing that preceded the paper's bankruptcy, I got the boot too. At least I was laid off rather than fired, which meant I could collect unemployment compensation.

As for my alleged colleagues, they were obviously glad to see me leave. None attended my going-away party, a small gathering hosted by a few non-newspaper people, mostly cops who had come to know me as the one local reporter they could trust to get the facts right and never burn a clandestine source. Despite the nagging uncertainties of joblessness amidst the recession Reagan and his cronies imposed to begin the reduction of everybody's wages, I cashed my last FWN paycheck with feelings of joy I imagine are akin to those of a man newly freed from a hard-time prison. But by then it was too late for any rapid recovery; so damaged was I, it took a season as engineer/deckhand on the Caroline, a 96-foot salmon-seiner out of Bellingham's Squalicum Harbor, to even begin to rebuild my self-confidence, for which my eternal gratitude to Skipper Andy Zanchi.

Indeed this is the first time I have been able to write of my circumstances at The Federal Way News. In fact it is the first time I have even spoken of these circumstances save in denials voiced to my long-ago lover who (though she was two decades my junior), was nevertheless perceptive enough to recognize in me the symptoms of a victimization I could not bear to admit to myself. Perhaps my inability to confront the associated issues was one of the underlying reasons we broke apart. In any case she was a notably kind young woman who unintentionally took my heart with her when she left. But perhaps some good came out of those dismal FWN years too; perhaps that's why I'm yet so sensitive to the betrayals now routinely inflicted on us by politicians, bureaucrats and alleged advocates.

*

(Note: The Federal Way News for which I worked from 1976 through 1981 no longer exists. Originally a weekly shopper, its management had intended to make it a daily newspaper – the promise that [foolishly] diverted me from a ticket-in-my-pocket return to New York City. Though the paper subsequently achieved thrice-weekly publication and at one point seemed sure to go daily – the pie-in-the-sky by which I rationalized enduring the editor's psychological brutality – FWN nevertheless went bankrupt during the 1980s. It was then bought by The Seattle Times and shut down. The present Federal Way News, a weekly, has no organizational connection to the former publication by the same name.)

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“Our Movement Must Desegregate, or We'll Lose”  Carl Gibson of Reader Supported News fumbles for euphemisms to enable his otherwise accurate reporting of how Ayn-Rand-minded Emily's List “feminists” betrayed Rush-Limbaugh-target Sandra Fluke and how her betrayal is a teachable moment. I sharply criticize the opacity of Gibson's language: his chosen words “are clearly intended to avoid the implicitly Marxist terms 'ideological solidarity' and 'ideological discipline' – both of which are necessities the USian Left self-destructively rejects.”  Then I commend his insight – and refute a comment-poster's absurd claim the Democratic Party might foster such solidarity and discipline. “The Democrats,” I explain, “who maliciously conceal their fascist zealotry beneath progressive slogans – are the primary deceiver in USian politics. By contrast, the Republicans have been a vessel of USian fascism since the 1920s and, now as then, make no secret of it. Thus the de facto one-party rule that defines USian governance...(Thus too) Emily's List's endorsement of 'fiscal conservatism' – another euphemism for economic savagery – is typical of the Ayn Rand feminism spawned by capitalist co-optation of the USian feminist movement. As the loss of jobs and income that subjugates the USian 99 Percent, women are denied reproductive freedom by the loss of health insurance, a fact deliberately ignored by Emily's List and the Democrats in general. “Nor – despite Big Lies to the contrary – does Obamacare provide a satisfactory alternative. Meanwhile, Rand herself has become an USian feminist heroine, which explains not just the Emily's List stance, but bourgeois white USian feminism's tacit approval of capitalist malevolence.”

***

“The Empowerment Elite Claims Feminism” Jessica Valenti, the founder of the compellingly radical website Feministing, exposes a new effort to neutralize feminism. I reply that TEDWomen, the target of Valenti's reporting,  is undoubtedly (yet another) effort by the One Percent – the diabolical cunning of which we underestimate at our own peril – to co-opt the one radical movement that, despite all the odds against it, has nevertheless forced (some) amelioration on the ever-more-openly savage Ayn Rand capitalism that governs the United States. In this context, the lily-white, bourgeois nature of TED and TEDWomen should surprise no one: it is merely a reflection of the ethnicity of the USian Ruling Class and the bigotry therein...“As to TED's taboo on discussing reproductive freedom, this is a strong indication the organization is a clandestine collaborator with the forces of Christian theocracy -- the most obscenely well-funded, relentlessly fanatical subversives in USian history. (Apropos which, note the secret collaboration between Hillary Clinton and Sam Brownback, exposed by Jeff Sharlet in The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, [Harper: 2008], pgs. 272-277.)”

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“Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-Lite?” Robert Parry of Consortium News lays bear some ugly truths that suggest the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is no more a “change we can believe in” than President Obama was. I point out she's “infinitely worse than 'neocon-light' or even neocon-heavy,” again citing Sharlet's report she's a clandestine theocrat, secretly collaborating with Brownback and others of his ilk to impose biblical law on the United States. Her specialty, says Sharlet, is deceptive legislation “dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunnelling beneath it.” The same strategy of stealthy oppression is enabling the Roman Catholic Church to ban birth control, abortion and end-of-life choices by buying up U.S. health care facilities,  already a crisis in Washington state.

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“Quit Talking About Equal Pay and Do Something”  Elizabeth Schulte of Socialist Worker explores how President Obama talks progressive change but then does nothing to make it happen and often actually sabotages the effort. She speculates the same presidential tactic will betray the struggle to close the wage gap that allows women only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. In the associated comment thread I note this sort of treachery is in fact the president's defining characteristic. Forever Janus-faced, he presents himself as Obama the Orator, pledging “change we can believe in.” But then he invariably shifts to Barack the Betrayer – “his true imperial self” – and he allows no changes save those that define, advance and perpetuate capitalist governance. A subsequent comment by another poster prompts me to list seven ways Obama has done more harm than any other president in my lifetime, which began in 1940.

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“Reagan's 'Liberal' Son Takes on Ted Cruz” Elias Isquith of Salon discuses another debate over Republican obstructionism. I say the purpose of all such debates is to normalize austerity – “a genteel euphemism for genocidal cutbacks by which the One Percent intend to kill off all of us they consider 'surplus workers' – that is, any of us (elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed) who are no longer exploitable for profit...The Republicans, I add, “are capitalism's trail-breakers, as in their proposed $40 billion cut in food stamps. The Democrats are capitalism's facilitators, as in the 'compromise' food-stamp cutback of $8.7 billion. It's rule by One Party of Two Names – the Capitalist Party – and we the people are the victims.

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“House Democrats Call for Discharge Petitions!” Thom Hartmann reports the House Democrats are planning a new ploy to move legislation obstructed by the Republicans. I respond: “What is obvious here --what makes me grin with glee -- is how mere mention of 'revolutionary socialism' (as by Councilwoman Kshama Sawant in Seattle) has terrified the Democratic Party into a  pretense of returning to New Deal values. That – and the fact it proves beyond argument socialism is anything but 'dead' or 'irrelevant' – is the real story behind these discharge petitions, though you'll never read it in so-called 'mainstream' (i.e., Ruling Class) media.”

“Distorting Russia: How the American media misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine”   Stephen F. Cohen reports via The Nation on the disinformation and outright lies USian “mainstream” (Ruling Class) media is disseminating about Russia. I suggest the real reason U.S. media is spewing anti-Russian propaganda is the fact the second largest political organization in today's Russia is the Communist Party. My comment then triggers a long series of exchanges on the comment thread, for which it's necessary to scroll way, way down.

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“Will US Civil Liberties Survive the Occupy Trial?”  Chase Madar of the Guardian questions whether the USian homeland's ever-more-restricted freedom to peaceably assemble will survive the trial of an Occupy activist who was savaged by New York City cops. The resultant comment thread is taken over and hogged by a Christian apologist for fascism, but I try to bring it back to one of Madar's most vital points: that the USian incarceration rate now exceeds even those of the former Soviet Union and East Germany. I point out the only valid incarceration-rate comparison is between the Third Reich of Nazi Germany and the de facto Fourth Reich of the United States – and even then, including the Nazi concentration camps – Internet data suggests the USian rate is worse. Though my let's-get-back-on-topic post wins ten reader thumbs-up, my effort is to no avail: the Christian continues to demonstrate Christian love by shouting down everyone else.

LB/16 February 2014

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Obama Lies, Claiming Cuts Will 'Make Sure America's Children Don't Go Hungry'

THE FINAL VOTE against food-stamp recipients was a revealing 68-32, with only nine Senate Democrats opposing the cuts; that plus the president's enthusiastic approval of a decade of downsizing the government now admits will total at least $8.7 billion is tantamount to official notice from the Democratic Party it too wants the nation's poor people dead – that the only difference between the Democrats and Republicans is over the forcefulness with which this genocide is to be accomplished. The Republicans wanted to slash the program by $40 billion,  which would have begun killing off lower-income people almost immediately. But the Democrats apparently feared the GOP's proposal would be too obviously murderous – almost as embarrassing as public endorsement of death camps – which is no doubt why the One Party of Two Names finally opted for the less dramatic, easier-to-obfuscate reduction that will short 850,000 food-stamp-dependent households a starvation-inflicting average of $90 per month.  

Meanwhile, with the Democrats ever more worried by the growing popularity of revolutionary socialism, they've intensified their efforts to hide their Ayn Rand malevolence behind classic, Josef Goebbels-type Big Lies, most recently President Obama's astonishing claim the food-stamp cutbacks will “make sure America's children don't go hungry.”  Though the “public integrity” Barack the Betrayer promised us in 2008 was long ago recognized as no less a deception than “change we can believe in,” portrayal of the deliberate imposition of hunger as a humanitarian act is a new low, a falsehood in comparison to which most of the president's other lies dwindle to insignificance. It is also in the mind-wrenching mode of “freedom is slavery,” a proclamation that characterized the (formerly) fictional tyranny described in George Orwell's prophetic 1984. Now we are implicitly shown its entirely non-fictional equivalent: “hunger is nourishment.”

And for the 47.2 million USians who now depend on food stamps  to keep themselves and their children fed, the associated pangs will only intensify: as a prescient headline writer at Seattle's excellent on-line daily Crosscut has already implied, this is undoubtedly the beginning of the end  of the entire food stamp program, the formal name of which is S.N.A.P., the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Perhaps now the acronym will become a sardonic joke: Starvation Neutralizing America's Poor, as in “with a SNAP of its fingers, the Ruling Class has fucked us again.”

Hunger as nourishment? Verily, such is the quintessence of absolute evil.

*****

Outside Agitation on the Comment Threads of Other Relevant Reports

“50 Reasons We Should Fear the Worst From Fukushima” Harvey Wasserman of EcoWatch exposes the apocalyptic reality of the Fukushima debacle. I quote a Cheyenne Ghost-Dance chant: “The white man's god/ has forsaken him/ Let us go and/ look for our Mother...” Then I add a nightmare notion that should especially bug the UFOs-have-landed folks: what if “the alleged 'divine revelations' that spawned patriarchy – Moses' Burning Bush, Ezekiel's fiery wheel, etc. ad nauseam -- were intergalactic equivalents of the smallpox-infested blankets by which Europeans exterminated First Nations peoples. Thus the ultimate purpose of patriarchy and its maturation over the centuries into capitalism and now finally into ecocidal fascism is to make Earth too toxic for life as we know it – precisely as is happening. Our final, dying clue as to who the Global Ruling Class serves by its relentless moral imbecility (and who – or rather what – will inherit the planet as a result), is found in the fact that of all earthly species, only the cockroach is totally immune to radiation and can within a single generation evolve immunity to any other toxin.”

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“The New Snowden Revelation Is Dangerous for Anonymous - And for All of Us” Gabriella Coleman of Wired reports on the government's zero-tolerance, maximum-sentence prosecution of on-line civil disobedience, but then inexplicably claims such draconian measures are applied only to cyber-activists – that “physical tactics such as trespass or vandalism of property rarely result in serious criminal consequences for participants and tend to be minor civil infractions instead of federal crimes.” I imply she's either ignorant or in denial: obviously, “the new USian Empire norm – note the felonies for which the Oak Ridge 3 were convicted – is going to be maximum charges and maximum sentences in retaliation for ANY act of civil disobedience.”

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“Helping homeless students stay in school”  Joseph Sutton-Holcomb describes the valiant efforts of the specialists employed by local school districts to ensure the Seattle area's many homeless students are able to remain in school. A major challenge, he writes, is arranging the students' transportation to and from classes. I use the story as a teachable moment to point out the only way to end homelessness is to end capitalism.

Only now – too late for the comment thread – did I focus on the fact Sutton-Holcomb failed to report the specialists' tasks are made profoundly more difficult by the region's notorious hostility to mass transit,  with a growing number of local voters rejecting buses, trolleys and even commuter rail service as welfare that encourages laziness by pampering minorities and lower-income people in general. (Note: my OAN piece on the anti-transit-user hatefulness that defines Washington state politics was written nearly four years ago, but the bigotry it describes intensifies each time there is a transit vote,  as in Tacoma during the 2012 general election. Though the local transit authority was not forced to shut down, all that saved it was a small, unanticipated, post-2012 increase in sales tax revenues. Its service remains minimal, the nation's worst amongst comparable cities, with its 37 bus routes so radically downsized, their operations end as early as 5:20 p.m. daily. Meanwhile its minimized schedules inflict extreme hardship on anyone who does not have an automobile, while the refusal of even self-proclaimed “progressive” politicians to take ameliorative action again demonstrates the malice toward lower-income people that increasingly characterizes USian governance at every level.)

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“What does Al Jazeera America see in the Northwest?” Olivia Weitz reports on Al Jazeera's new Pacific Northwest bureau but notes that despite the news agency's reputation for accurate reporting, its U.S. viewership remains tiny. I point out it's no doubt “the (very rational) fear of being placed on one or more secret-police watch lists that keeps the Al Jazeera America audience so small. Thus the USian Empire's total surveillance regime fulfills another of its definitive purposes: ensuring that we the people remain imprisoned in ignorance.”

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“Whose Radical Jesus? The Story of a Literary Success” Truthout's Paul Buhle reviews Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House: 2013).  I point out that regardless of the truth or falsehood of Aslan's hypothesis, its ultimate function is to serve the Ruling Class by re-legitimizing the murderous and ecocidal religion of a god that failed. A far more genuinely revolutionary interpretation of the Jesus story, I add, “was written nearly 70 years ago by Robert Graves in King Jesus, which argues that while Jesus was indeed a rebel zealot, his primary purpose was to extinguish the last lingering remnants of the old goddess-centered religions. The 'money quote' -- morbid pun intended -- in Graves' telling of the story sums up the entire history of patriarchy, from its origins in Moses' burning bush and Ezekiel's fiery wheel to its final manifestations today as capitalism fulfills itself by morphing into terminal fascism. 'I am released from the jurisdiction of the Female,' says Jesus, 'I have come to destroy Her works' (King Jesus; Minerva Press, London: 1946, p. 256). The 'Female' of whom Jesus spoke was the goddess who is the variously titled Mother of All Being, Gaea, the Mother Nature whose act of creation was to give birth to the entire cosmos. Especially if we consider the Gaia Hypothesis -- that Earth (and perhaps by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating -- what Jesus said two thousand years ago is precisely what the capitalists are saying today: that they are released from Nature's jurisdiction; that they have come to destroy all her works.”

LB/9 February 2014

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14 in Progressive Caucus, 15 in Black Caucus Help Impose $8.5 Billion Cut

JUST AS “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,”  neither will the murderous impact of the Democratic vote to slash food stamps by $8.5 billion ever be acknowledged by mainstream media. MSNBC, The New York Times and their local equivalents will never tell us what it means that 89 of the 200 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have publicly joined the Republican campaign to savage the nation's poor. That's because “mainstream media” is a clever, falsely comforting, deliberately misleading label for what should properly be known as “Ruling Class media” – the propaganda apparatus that serves (only) the One Percent by ensuring the rest of us remain intellectually imprisoned in a panem et circenses miasma of distraction, falsehood and disinformation.

Food stamps, as the Food Research and Action Center  explains, are essential to the survival of 47 million Americans each month. The $8.5 billion the Democrats are helping hack from the program – even with the cuts spread over ten years as they are – will make it ever more difficult for impoverished USians to avoid starvation. Some 850,000 households will now be devastated by food stamp reductions averaging $90 per household per month. (For the record, the proper name of the food-stamp program is Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the acronym for which is “SNAP.” The damning vote against its recipients was 251 to 166, Roll Call Nr. 31, by which the House of Representatives approved HR 2642, the “Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013.”) It was the second such blow to recipients, who already suffered a significant downsizing in benefits last November.

But Ruling Class media will never communicate – save in the most hackneyed, stereotypical and carefully pre-approved narratives – the hunger pains and emotional anguish these malicious cutbacks inflict on the children, women and men so victimized.

While the self-censoring protocols of Ruling Class media are many and complex (as I can personally attest from my own decades in its employ), one particular taboo is especially relevant to the food- stamp coverage – or rather the abysmal lack thereof. The taboo in question, an unwritten but inviolable rule during my decades behind a Ruling Class typewriter, governs the use of the term “genocide,” carefully limiting it to actions by declared or undeclared enemies of the USian Empire, as in “Nazi genocide,” “Communist genocide” or “terrorist genocide.” Never under any circumstances is the term “U.S. genocide” allowed, even to describe the (undeniably genocidal) wars of extermination waged by the empire and its European antecedents against First Nations peoples. That is why Ruling Class media will never report the fact its capitalist masters have contrived a seemingly flawless apparatus for exterminating huge masses of people without the embarrassing stench of death camps. It's called “austerity” – a Big Lie that is perhaps the most diabolically cunning euphemism for genocide in our species' history.

But is austerity really genocide? Isn't calling it “genocide” a bit over the top, as even some of my closest friends maintain? Decide for yourself: the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language defines genocide as “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.”  Merriam-Webster defines it similarly: “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group.”  Now consider how the One Percenters and their representatives are forever denouncing “the culture of poverty”  and its politics of dependency.  In either case, these blame-the-victim diatribes – even those that make no direct reference to racist or socioeconomic stereotypes – clearly identify the USian imperial homeland's poor as “a political or cultural group.” Then note austerity's (deliberately) death-dealing results.  Finally consider the arguments postulated in “Why the One Percent Wants Seniors and Older Workers Dead.” Not only is “genocide” the appropriate noun; it is the only truthful description of the USian war against the poor that began during the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter, radically escalated under Republican Ronald Reagan and has been continued relentlessly by every USian regime, Democrat or Republican, ever since.

(It is an aside, old news to long-time OAN readers but relevant information for newcomers, that in the vicious uniformity of economic policies imposed by Democrats and Republicans alike – Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama – is irrefutable proof the United States is ruled by One Party of Two Names. Behind its deceptive labels and rhetoric, this One Party is exclusively a Ruling Class party. Its sole purpose is to further empower the One Percent. Its long-term goal, already dangerously close to fulfillment, is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. And what is capitalism? Ayn Rand's books – the USian Empire global-economy equivalent of Hitler's Mein Kampf – define it as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue: the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated. It is an operational definition with which the notably prescient Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would surely agree.)

Meanwhile the Ruling Class media's repeated use of the relatively innocuous “austerity” and its even more deceptively euphemistic forerunner “reform” as code-words for “genocide” has proven remarkably effective. It has not only stifled dissent but shifted (additional) blame onto the ever-increasing multitude of capitalism's victims. Indeed, Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels would applaud its success as yet another real-world confirmation of his principles for mass manipulation.  (Note how concentration of USian mass media into a half-dozen rigidly self-disciplined monopolies allows imposition of the Nazi führerprinzip – “Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority'' – without any obvious government intrusion. Such is another example of the evil genius of capitalist governance.)

As a result, only genocide's immediate victims dare label it the atrocity it is.  And they – or more precisely we – are steadfastly ignored unless we somehow manage to mount massive protests, in which case we are then brutally silenced, just as the Occupy Movement was silenced, by police truncheons and barrages of pepper gas and slander.

The disturbing fact 89 Democrats knowingly voted for what was merely a less murderous version  of reductions in the food stamp program – the still more disgusting fact Washington state's Democratic Senator Patty Murray has publicly admitted she too will vote against food-stamp recipients – are yet additional proofs (if any are needed) today's USian Homeland is governed by One Party of Two Names. That this is the first time Democrats have ever publicly acknowledge their hostility to food-stamp recipients  merely underscores the intensifying oppressiveness of the One Party's rule.

While the names of the 89 Democrats have already been publicized  by both Ruling Class and alternative media, their (allegedly) progressive affiliations have received far less notice. As reported via the preceding link, three of these class-traitors are Democratic Party stalwarts: Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Fourteen members of the Democrats' House Progressive Caucus voted for it: Suzanne Bonamici (Ore.), Corinne Brown (Fla), Andre Carson (Ind.), Emanuel Cleaver (Mo.), Sam Farr (Calif.), Lois Frankel (Fla.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio), Steven Horsford (Nevada), Jared Huffman (Calif.), Dave Loebsack (Iowa), Ben Lujan (N.M.), Rick  Nolan (Minn.), Bennie Thompson (Miss), and Peter Welch (Vt.).

What has received far less publicity – seemingly none at all in Ruling Class media – is 15 more of these men and women who voted against food stamp recipients are members of the House Black Caucus: Sanford D. Bishop Jr. (Ga.), Corrine Brown (Fla.), G. K. Butterfield (N.C.), Emanuel Cleaver II (Mo.), James E. Clyburn (S.C.), Marcia L. Fudge (Ohio), Alcee L. Hastings (Fla.), Steven Horsford (Nev.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX), Hank Johnson (GA), Cedric Richmond (LA), David Scott (GA), Robert C. Scott (Va.), Terri Sewell (Ala,) and Bennie Thompson (Miss.). That all but two of these representatives are from states of the old Confederacy probably explains their votes as attempts to preserve their election-year attractiveness to the region's malevolently reactionary whites, who whether rich or poor decry food stamps as pandering to allegedly “lazy” minorities. Such paradoxically self-destructive hatefulness by impoverished whites perpetuates the Ku Klux Klan-type Sturmabteilungs that ensure the local white aristocracy's unbreakable hold on the levers of power. A similar, racially motivated dynamic fuels the reactionary malice of lower-income whites in the USian Homeland's interior and thus fosters the nation's ever-more-definitive socioeconomic viciousness, the vote against food stamps included.

One (deliciously ironic) result is that Wal-Mart, a lavish financier of the reactionary politics that spawned the cuts, is now complaining of reduced grocery profits. In a far more bitter irony reported by the Food Research and Action group, the bill passed the House “almost exactly a year after an expert Institute of Medicine committee found that SNAP benefits are already inadequate for most families to purchase an adequate, healthy diet; and it comes in the same month that researchers issued a new study showing that low-income people have increased hypoglycemia-related hospital admissions late in the month because they run out of food.  The SNAP cuts will be a blow to health and nutrition, and to the government’s long-term fiscal well-being as well.” Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact the Democrats who voted for the cuts, which are now authoritatively estimated at fully $8.7 billion, are inflicting them on their own constituents,  an ultimate “fuck you” from the Ruling Class to the rest of us. (The changing numbers as to the cutback's magnitude reflect how congressional sources themselves now often obstruct the flow of accurate information – another tactic by which the One Percent works to maintain our ignorance of current events.)

In fairness, I should note a long-time Democratic Party activist who is one of my more reliable local (Washington state) sources emphatically states the Democrats who voted for the bill did so because they believed it was the only way to block enactment of the far more deadly Republican proposals. But that glib rationale does not excuse the Democrats' 38-year history of ever-more-feeble representation of the nation's lower income peoples. We the victims – children, women and men (many of the adults elderly and/or disabled) – believe the Democrats should have opposed the bill as a matter of principle. That is, assuming the Democrats still recognize any principles other Ayn Rand's coda of infinite greed as maximum virtue.

LB/2 February 2014

(With special thanks to Pat Fletcher for significant research and reportorial assistance)

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