Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Thoughts on Ukraine, Gentrification, Our Struggle with Racism

NO ORIGINAL ESSAY specifically for OAN this week because I'm working on what I hope will be next week's lead story.

Meanwhile I'm still groping toward a satisfactory format for links to material on other websites. So here are my “in-case-you-missed-it” picks from last week's work by other journalists, with my own Outside Agitation on the comment threads as indicated.

First of course are dispatches about the ongoing USian attempts to inflame the Ukraine Crisis into World War III, again our lead story because the outcome of the crisis may determine whether we have any future at all.

“Clashes Spread Across Eastern Ukraine As Russia Begins Military Drills on Border” By William Booth and Michael Birnbaum of The Washington Post. This Ruling Class propagantorial piece provoked a discussion thread about why the USian Empire “always” supports Nazism. My contribution was a short summary of modern history:

When the U.S. One Percent welcomed all the Nazi war criminals after World War II, the Nazis made no secret of their intent – to use U.S. resources to spread Nazi ideology (hence "U.S. exceptionalism") and eventually to use U.S. wealth and military power to create a Fourth Reich.

That's what fostered Pinochet, what drove the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and what's fostering the Ukraine Crisis, where the neo-Nazi presence is NOT an accident. That's also why the Russians are so (rightfully) alarmed.

Most of all, it's why this crisis is far more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis...The One Percent clearly wants war...Furthermore, with the One Percenters believing they will be safe in their obscenely posh bunkers, they no doubt see war as the best way to suppress the rising anti-capitalist dissent and exterminate all us "takers" – We the People who are unemployed, elderly, disabled and/or members of ever-more-openly oppressed minorities.

***

“Beneath the Ukraine Crisis: Shale Gas” Nat Parry of Consortium News reveals how USian aggression is (again) motivated by the quest for fossil fuel.

Though I contributed a bit of Outside Agitation to the associated discussion thread, my remarks were more relevant to the thread than to the article itself, hence my decision not to repeat them here. That said, note the unusual spelling of Parry's family name; could Nat be kin to Robert Parry, also of Consortium News? The latter Parry's reporting on the Ukraine Crisis is without peer, but this piece too is filled with vital information.

******

In the fall of 1974 the jazz pianist and chanteuse Melinda Mohn told me of a dream that had deeply disturbed her. She had been hired to perform at a nightclub in Seattle, but first she had to obtain a “city pass” – an official document that instructed the armed guards to let her past the concertina wire and minefields and through the gates in the high stone medieval-fortress-like wall and finally into the city itself. Some sort of apocalypse had occurred, she said, and now in her dreamtime all cities were reserved for the Ruling Class of the neo-feudal realms that had replaced the United States. And Melinda, like any housemaid or nanny or secretary or janitor or scribe or teacher or other worker who served the aristocracy, now had to ensure her papers were in order before she was allowed into the main baronial compound of the Puget Sound region.

What made the dream a nightmare, she said, was its Catch-22 element: not only was she required to have a pass to enter the city so she could sing for the pay she needed to save herself from starvation; she also had to find some way to first enter the city without a pass in order to apply for the requisite pass, and she did not have enough money to bribe the guards...

I do not remember how the dream resolved itself; I remember only it had troubled Melinda to tears, and as I told her at the time, I strongly suspected it was prophetic. Now I know it was. “The Bleaching of San Francisco: Extreme Gentrification and Suburbanized Poverty in the Bay Area,” by Adam Hudson of Truthout, describes how the cities are becoming bastions of the One Percent and the Ruling Class in general:

“Taken together, what's going on in San Francisco is deeper than just a fight between well-to-do tech workers and longtime San Francisco residents. San Francisco is microcosm of what's going on in metropolitan areas around the world. From San Francisco to New York City to London, urban areas are being redesigned into playgrounds for the very rich. The poor, working and almost-nonexistent middle-class people who can't afford to live in these rich Elysiums are forced to live farther away, with few resources to support themselves. By pushing poor and working-class people to the suburbs, gentrification...reconfigures the geographic lines of racial and economic inequality, granting improvements to the lives of the moneyed classes, at the expense of the needs - and sometimes, even the survival - of everyone else.”

Myself a victim of gentrification – that's what forced me out of Manhattan – I too can attest to the miserable consequences of exile to wretched locales, likewise to the bumpkin viciousness one all too often encounters in such places.

One of the realms on my involuntary post-NYC itinerary was a rural area ruled by zero-tolerance Christian fanatics who believed my non-attendance at church, my organic gardening practices and my two very large black dogs identified me as a witch. These prosperity-gospel vigilantes harassed me mercilessly for nearly three years. They trampled my vegetables, flattened my tires, flung rocks onto my roof at midnight, wired newly-slain kittens to my car door and finally poisoned one of my dogs. After the dog recovered, I let it be known via the local grapevine I was not only armed, but a military veteran demonstrably skilled at marksmanship, after which the harassment stopped.

The last destination on my dismal itinerary of exile was the city of Tacoma, where it seems I will live out the remainder of my life. Like Seattle, Tacoma is a major seaport on Puget Sound, and according to the prevalent Big Lie, the regional mindset is “progressive” and “green.” But beneath that shallow facade is a bottomless miasma of reactionary hypocrisy. Though Tacoma and Seattle certainly contain pockets of genuinely enlightened voters – note the Seattle election of Kshama Sawant – the Puget Sound norm is increasingly set by suburbanites who are as maliciously xenophobic as any Ku Klux Southerner. The resultant trend toward ever-more-unabashed fascism has already paralyzed the state government, and the next election or two will no doubt put it solidly under Rightist control.

Meanwhile – the ultimate proof of the region's environmental hypocrisy – it has a 46-year record of nastily opposing mass transit, a scorecard of negativity that has no counterpart anywhere in the notoriously anti-transit United States.

Even in the region's cities, the voters cling to their automobiles with a stubborn vindictiveness that routinely spawns hate-campaigns against the growing numbers of us – all victims of capitalism – for whom mass transit is the only affordable mode of travel.

The local One Percenters want us gone. They say we lower their property values and stink up their neighborhoods. Their newest and most successful gentrification tactic is now to denounce publicly-subsidized transit as “welfare,” an angry buzzword that prompts the reliably racist, reliably Ayn-Rand-minded electorate to react accordingly: to demand the privatization of transit (thereby making it unaffordable to “undesirables”), and to vote at every opportunity to dismantle public transit systems throughout the region, exactly as occurred last week in and around Seattle.

(Despite my obviously strong feelings on this topic, I added no Outside Agitation to the associated thread because – having been outrageously censored under Truthout's anything-to-protect-Obama election-year policy – I no longer dare post there.)

******

At last the small but increasingly effective USian Real Left is beginning to recognize the harsh truth reportedly asserted in KGB analyses of the rebelliousness that characterized the U.S. in the 1960s: that while the nation's minorities possessed genuine revolutionary potential, the mostly white New Left was scarcely more than a fad.

According to Canadian press reports during the early 1990s – at least one of these appeared in MacLean's Magazine, but I can find no links to it today – KGB analysts concluded the New Left of the '60s was too anti-intellectual to accept the need for disciplined ideological study, too bourgeois comfortable and Ayn-Rand selfish to repudiate capitalism, and above all else, too racist to accept leadership from its only genuinely revolutionary sources, which were within the African-American, Hispanic, Asiatic and First Nations communities.

Moreover, the New Left's individual members were deemed too ageist to accept input from the remnants of the Traditional Left and too arrogantly self-obsessed to build any solidarity with others apart from their own socioeconomic kindred.

Thus the Soviet spooks predicted the New Left would eventually abandon or betray its minority comrades, stop its lip-service assertions of humanitarian values and become a New Right as soon as the military draft was ended – a prediction confirmed to the letter by the post-Vietnam emergence of the so-called “me generation,”  the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the outcomes of all elections thereafter.

But now the collapse of the U.S.S.R. has freed the capitalists to disclose their infinite greed and innate savagery without fear of revolutionary reprisal. They have  discarded their velvet gloves and donned their original jackboots. This has fostered the evolution – actually re-evolution – of a Real Left in the USian Homeland, which in turn has prompted renewed examination of USian racism, starting with acknowledgment we Caucasians are subtly but methodically inoculated from birth with racism's toxins, the ultimate barrier against 99 Percent solidarity.

Hence “The Unbearable Whiteness of the American Left,” a Nation essay by Gary Younge that was picked up by Reader Supported News and – like a pry-bar wielded in a long-abandoned house – brought the termites out in force.  Hence too my comment-thread response:

Mr. Younge is – if I may lapse into the parlance of my radical youth – right on. The problem is that we USian whites have been conditioned from birth to think of ourselves as the personification of “American exceptionalism” – that is, of the global master race.

Not only that; we've been conditioned so thoroughly and effectively, our USian-supremacist/white-supremacist (and therefore incipiently Nazi) attitudes have been planted so deeply in our subconscious minds, they are exceedingly difficult to uproot.

Such is the psychological reality of the Fourth Reich.

But the effort to transcend that conditioning – painful as it invariably is – must nevertheless be made. Otherwise, exactly as KGB studies reportedly said of U.S. revolutionary prospects during the 1960s, racism will always nullify our efforts toward solidarity.

***

It needs be said there are two pseudo-Lefts in the U.S., also a much smaller Real Left:

The fad pseudo-Left is dominantly white and idiotically useful; it helps maintain the Big Lie of USian democracy. Its chief characteristics are the rowdiness, conformity and anti-intellectuality one finds in fraternity and sorority houses. Its members are pampered college and university students enjoying the political variant of Spring Break self-indulgence. Its exemplar is Jerry Rubin, who climaxed his “radical” activism by a career as a millionaire stock broker.

The bourgeois pseudo-Left is mostly wealthy, dominantly white and also idiotically useful. Its defining traits are its indifference to 99 Percent concerns, its “progressive” anti-unionism and its opposition to socialism and Marxism. It endorses “New Capitalism” – capitalism with its evils camouflaged by human-potentialist rhetoric. Its members include New Agers, Ayn Rand feminists (consumeroid consumption as women's liberation), most USian environmentalists (“green capitalism”), etc. ad nauseam. Its exemplars include Gloria Steinem and the One Percenter Bill Gates.

The Real Left, small but growing, acknowledges the struggles for equality, economic democracy and environmental protection as part of the historical truth of class war. It recognizes the relevance of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. It strives toward maximum solidarity by embracing maximum diversity. Its exemplars include Kshama Sawant and Angela Davis.

******

My final recommendation for the week, “Racism and Criminalization in the Media,” is a scathing exposé of “the hiding-in-plain-sight but never-discussed racism that characterizes the United States and the ways US media subtly sustain that racism.” By Truthout's Bethania Palma Markus, it is surely the most enlightening such reportage I have yet encountered – and I with a journalism career spanning a bit more than half a century. Again I added nothing to the associated thread, but in this instance there was nothing I could say – save kudos to Maya Schenwar for having the courage to publish Markus' work.

LB/27 April 2014

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Kerry's Contradictions – Peace-Candidate v. Warhawk – Exemplify How the Two Parties Collaborate to Dupe Voters, Sustain Sham 'Democracy'

 

(This essay was originally published only on my secondary website  because TypePad was shut down for several days by a massive denial of service attack.) 

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(Updated 14:56 Monday 21 April with a new Robert Parry dispatch on the Ukrainian Crisis, for which see "Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Imperative," below.)

 *

MOST OF US have already noted the apparent paradox of how U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the former antiwar-activist and Democratic presidential (peace) candidate, has become a frighteningly aggressive, propaganda-spouting war-monger. 

But even the most Leftward-leaning of the big-time pundits has not dared point out the bitter lesson – another irrefutable proof USian “democracy” is a naught but a cunning charade – implicit in Kerry's (apparent) transformation.

Stupefied as we are by the so-called “mainstream media” and its dire fulfillment of Josef Goebbels' plan to create the most hypnotically effective propaganda machine in human history, the majority of us have not heard of Kerry's murderous record in Vietnam.  We do not know his riverine operations reveal a penchant for inflicting death on civilians that would have earned him a hearty, Zieg Heil welcome into the most kill-hardened units of the Schutzstaffel, the Nazis' dread SS. 

Jeffrey St. Clair, the author of the above-linked Counterpunch report, says the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. revealed that Kerry's murderousness created a great many problems for Vietnam commanders. Zumwalt, himself a warrior of international renown, is quoted in the 2013 exposé as saying, “we had virtually to straitjacket (Kerry) to keep him under control.”

Thus in the context provided by St. Clair's disclosures last year and Kerry's conduct today, the 2004 election becomes a perfect, textbook example of how the One Percent defrauds the USian public with the Big Lie of “free elections.” The Democrats ran “peace candidate” Kerry as the antithesis of “war-criminal” George Bush, but also emphasized Kerry's Vietnam combat record, thereby appealing to Democratic warhawks. The Republicans then reinforced Kerry's “peace candidate” image  by attacking him for his anti-Vietnam War activities, by questioning the validity of his medals – three Purple Hearts for wounds plus the Bronze Star and Silver Star for bravery under fire – finally labeling him “unfit for command” and implicitly suggesting he was a coward.

It's a classic example of how the two halves of the One Party of Two Names perfectly fulfill the functions assigned them by the One Percent.

The same pattern, obvious once we have learned to recognize it, is apparent in the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. In the former, the One Percent allowed the Democrats a victory to preserve the deception of a functional representative democracy. Obama raised the electorates' hopes by promising “change we can believe in,” and the Republicans ensured the outcome, first by selecting a terrifyingly ignorant candidate for vice president, then by rabidly denouncing the proposed “change” as “socialist” conspiracy, thereby convincing desperate voters Obama's promises were surely more than rhetoric. In 2012, after Obama the Orator was clearly revealed as Barack the Betrayer, the Republicans again served the Democrats with the “accidental” revelation of Romney's contempt for 47 percent of the U.S. population. 

Meanwhile Warmaster Kerry, whose belligerence on behalf the violently greedy One Percent may well trigger World War III, is merely fulfilling the role for which he, like Obama himself, was obviously trained and scripted long ago.

****** 

In Case You Missed It (and apropos the fulfillment of assigned roles), “The Plot to Overthrow FDR: How the New Deal Sent Conservatives Into a Rage,” implicitly defines the imposition of fascism on the United States  as a multi-generational project. But as I said on the comment thread, Moyers and Company narrator Joshua Holland tells the story wrong – or very differently from how I heard it as a child and a young man.

Firstly, the coup was known as "the Bankers' Plot," under which search-engine entry you will find the most complete information.

Secondly, it was organized by Hitler and Mussolini. Its goal was to make the American Legion an SS equivalent; the objective was to make the U.S. part of the Axis. (The U.S. One Percent was already the prime financier of world fascism; now the U.S. would also be the primary source of food, natural resources and materiel for global conquest.)

Thirdly, the plot was exposed by Soviet agents. Despite Gen. Butler's efforts, it first became public knowledge only via the Communist and Communist-influenced alternative press.

What indicates these assertions are probably true is how they solve at least three riddles of history. They explain why FDR trusted Stalin (his agents literally saved FDR's presidency and USian democracy too); why the postwar U.S. harbored Nazi war criminals (back-door fulfillment of the plotters' intent); and why the postwar U.S. so savagely purged Communists, socialists and intellectuals (fear these elements would obstruct further efforts to impose fascism).

Obviously the plotters and their descendants have won. The results – the death of the “American Dream,” the imposition of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us) – are obvious.

******

In Case You Missed It, Robert Parry of Consortium News is continuing to slay the Big Lies spewed by the USian propaganda machine and courageously filter out the truth about the Ukraine Crisis. I did not comment on “The Dangerous Neocon Role in Ukraine,” linked here. But I said a few words about its sequel, “Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Imperative,” where I pointed out U.S. aggression is forcing the Russians to see themselves as the modern-day equivalent of the Spartans at Thermopylae or their own grandfathers at Fortress Brest. I also had a bit to say about the media issues raised by “Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass,” in which Parry describes the current coverage of the crisis as “utterly Orwellian...including accusing others of 'propaganda' when their accounts – though surely not perfect – are much more honest and more accurate than what the U.S. press corps has been producing.”

Parry reiterates the warning that – had we USians not been numbed by lies and disinformation – should rightfully terrify us all: “There’s also the added risk that this latest failure by the U.S. press corps is occurring on the border of Russia, a nuclear-armed state that – along with the United States – could exterminate all life on the planet. The biased U.S. news coverage is now feeding into political demands to send U.S. military aid to Ukraine’s coup regime.”

As another poster on this thread said in very different words, our submissive response does indeed demonstrate the terrifying reality of Moron Nation – we the people imprisoned in ignorance by decades of deliberate moronation, so dumbed-down we like the most abjectly broken slaves instantly believe everything our masters tell us – even when it is filled with obvious contradictions.

But what to me as a long-ago-blacklisted professional journalist is far worse is the relentless, never-challenged deluge of false information that proves how the One Percent – by subsuming the nation's formerly independent media into a half-dozen monopolies – have created a one-voice propaganda machine far more formidable than the ground-breaking model for all such apparatuses Joseph Goebbels built for Nazi Germany.

As a result the USian Empire has the most hypnotically effective propaganda in our species' history. And because the machine that produces it is disguised as a civilian business rather than a government bureaucracy, its tyranny and the diabolical cleverness by which we are brainwashed into submission remains forever unrecognized.

Once again we see capitalist governance in action: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Thus does capitalism fulfill its moral imbecility: not just as fascism, but as fascism sustained by modern technology and therefore more inescapably evil than anything our species has ever before encountered.

******

In Case You Missed It, Thom Hartmann has decided “American Democracy No Longer Works,” in support of which he cites a newly released study  that shows We the People are We the Powerless when it comes to influencing public policy. (Unfortunately, Hartmann does not provide us a link to a more detailed summary of the study's findings, an omission I correct here.) 

Meanwhile the fact it took a formal academic project and its 20-year collection of data to prove what our ancestors recognized at least a century ago – that the United States is an oligarchy in which the rich are omnipotent and the rest of us are impotent – prompts me to lapse into parody on the Hartmann comment thread: 

Five axioms concerning capitalist governance:  

Definitions: The One Percent is the hereditary capitalist aristocracy that owns the nation's wealth. The Ruling Class consists of the politicians, bureaucrats, police commanders, military officers and business executives who serve the One Percent. The purpose of capitalist governance is absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else.

Hence:    

(1)-The non-responsiveness of the Ruling Class to the popular will is directly proportionate to the extent the Ruling Class is indebted to – and therefore effectively owned by – the One Percent.  

(2)-The probability of revolution is directly proportionate to the non-responsiveness of the Ruling Class.

(3)-The probability of successful revolution is based on the presence of four historically proven prerequisites. These are (A)-a unifying ideology; (B)-effective leadership and disciplined organization; (C)-mastery of extant technologies; (D)-support by one or more foreign powers.

(4)-The probability of violent revolution is directly proportionate to the Ruling Class capability of violently suppressing non-violent revolution.

(5)-The negative consequences of violent revolution – death, famine, disease, destruction – are directly proportionate to the refusal of the One Percent and its Ruling Class to yield to the popular will.

(In other words, no matter who wins, life in a post-revolutionary United States would be no more or less wretched than life in a land that combines the violent anarchy of Somalia, the toxicity of Fukushima and the poverty of post-earthquake Haiti. Which is why I am so very glad I'm old – so old I probably won't be alive when the revolution happens.)

***

My next entry on the thread, in response to another poster, dropped the academic affectations: 

The unified ideology described by axiom (3)-(A) is already taking shape amidst the grassroots. It is beyond the domain of the two Ruling Class parties (actually one Ruling Class party with two names), and even beyond the Tea Party and its various overtly fascist subsets, (i.e., the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the other such groups whose banners are part of the international fascist solidarity demonstrations now taking place in Kiev). It is also beyond the domain of any specific organization of the Left, which is why this new unified ideology has yet to acquire a name and formal structure.

Nevertheless it is a hybrid of democratic socialism (cooperative and/or public ownership of vital services and the means of production); Marxism (recognition of the historical truth of class struggle and the necessity of disciplined Working Class solidarity); traditional anarchism (healthy distrust of hierarchal organizations) and classical Jeffersonian populist democracy (one person/one vote, fostered by the Internet). 

It has already made itself apparent in innumerable small ways, particularly as the (failed) Occupy movement and its  more localized successes, including the relief efforts of Occupy Sandy in and around New York City, the rapidly growing popularity of the Socialist Alternative Party in Seattle and Minneapolis, and the brushfire-fast nationwide spread of SA's $15 Now! campaign to raise the minimum wage to livable-income levels. 

When and if this incipient movement coalesces and comes to power, it would be absolutely compatible with the U.S. Constitution and would in fact be its fulfillment. 

The vital questions are therefore how and when its self-recognition will progress to the point of formalization, and whether it will have the solidarity (strength) and courage to withstand the inconceivably violent reaction by which the One Percent and the Ruling Class will try to suppress it, the forces for which are already in place. 

Apropos a civil war, I too see that, but probably not as you do. Assuming a successful revolution – note again its four prerequisites – a situation would probably evolve similar to what obtained in the old Russian Empire after 1917, with the One Percent trying (with the support of various overseas allies) to regain power, and the revolutionaries equally determined to hang on to the "liberated" parts of the U.S. 

The One Percent, in keeping with the lavish funding it is pouring into establishment of theocratic governance, would no doubt declare its territories ruled by Biblical Law, thereby ensuring the fealty of the South and the Midwestern interior, but both coasts and no doubt Alaska too would side with the revolution. The nation as we know it would cease to exist (as it nearly has anyway), and the land would be sundered in such ways that, combined with terminal climate change, would probably take at least a thousand years for recovery. Hence my vision of "the violent anarchy of Somalia, the toxicity of Fukushima (as the One Percent would not hesitate to nuke rebellious cities), the poverty of post-earthquake Haiti." 

As a result, the global power center would of course shift far eastward: China unquestionably, Russia more than likely. As to what remained of the former United States, part of it would be absorbed by expansions of Mexico and Canada and probable Russian reclamation of its former Pacific Northwest possessions; the remainder would either be uninhabitable due to the lingering toxicity inflicted by CBR (chemical, biological, radiological) warfare or so impoverished by isolation its habitable lands would be realms of famine and disease. 

Were the One Percent to win – and I believe the odds are 50-50 – most if not all of the same conditions would apply save that the residents of lands under One Percent control would have it far worse: they would be de facto slaves...which is of course what the One Percent already intends for all of us in the Working Class anyway.

As I said, I'm damn glad I'm old.

***

Then when another poster seemed to romanticize revolution, I added this:

Make no mistake: there is nothing desirable about violent revolution – which would leave the lands wherein it is fought looking, at best, like Europe in 1945 and, at worst, like Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the Bomb. 

Yet given how quickly the One Percent now resorts to violence – note again the example of the brutal suppression of Occupy, also the Gestapo-like disregard of neighborhood civil rights that characterized the search for the Boston Marathon bomber –   I fear an eventual violent reaction by the citizenry is inevitable. 

(Indeed, provoking a rebellion may be the clandestine purpose behind such tactics – the creation of an incident that will give the Ruling Class an excuse for exterminating large segments of the U.S. population, the Final Solution to the problems of unemployment,  poverty and homelessness.) 

And the mercilessness of the Ruling Class response has already been made clear: it was demonstrated in Vietnam: “we had to destroy the village to save it.” 

Remember too that morally there is not one scintilla of difference between the USian policy of exterminating an entire village for harboring alleged "terrorists" and the Nazi German policy of imposing exactly the same reprisals for harboring partisans. That the USian (Fourth) Reich does the extermination from afar with drones, while the German (Third) Reich did it up-close-and-personal with machine guns, rifles, bayonets and pistols, does not alter the moral depravity or karmic malignancy of the event itself.  In fact it is at least arguable the drone-exterminations are more reprehensible merely by how they protect the drone operators from being splattered with blood and gore – and how that bloodlessness is then diabolically used to assure the drone operators they are without sin.  

As to your notion of a coordinated revolutionary effort by socialist countries – Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam etc. – that capability perished with the Soviet Union, and it is already clear the USian Empire will do anything it can to prevent its resurrection.  China, meanwhile, has been totally co-opted (and totally corrupted) by capitalism; the USian Empire has achieved with money precisely what its British Empire antecedent sought in the 19th Century to accomplish with opium. The one remaining wild-card is Russia, where the Communist Party remains the second largest (and by far the best organized) political party in the nation – so much so it is at least arguable it was only by Putin's New Deal-like repeal of the most viciously capitalist Ayn Rand “reforms” imposed under Yeltsin the country was steered away from another Communist revolution.

(This is no doubt one of the reasons why the USian Imperial One Percent – the oberfuehrers of fascism's Global New Order – are now trying to provoke a war with Russia: they are terrified by what might happen should that vast nation again go Communist.)

LB/20 April 2014

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Are Ruling-Class Feminists Out to Kill the 99%'s New Solidarity?

NORMALLY I AM uncomfortable writing about feminism because, being male, I can never have an insider's appreciation of its dynamics. Moreover I believe the blessing (or curse) of a womb – and with it the implicit responsibility for mothering (or not) – creates in every female a perspective we males might approach intellectually but cannot possibly comprehend emotionally. Hence my usual response to feminism is akin to the respectfully inquisitive silence with which a hopelessly left-brained student might approach a Zen master. I know I will never achieve enlightenment – at least not in this lifetime – though I am unquestionably willing to learn whatever wisdom the master deigns to impart.

But twice this year already, the lily-white exponents of a uniquely USian brand of feminism – the “material girl” ideology so antagonistically antithetical to feminism's socialist roots I am compelled to label it “Ayn Rand Feminism” – have sunk their incipiently fascist fangs into progressive people and causes, first by public repudiation of reproductive-rights heroine Sandra Fluke  in retaliation for her progressive economic views, now more recently by denouncing the hacker-collective Anonymous and the women's-equality collective UltraViolet as “white-knight vigilantes” for their courageous defense of rape victims. Thus the Ayn Rand feminists have begun to brandish their fealty to the Ruling Class much as the Teabag Party asserts its lockstep adoration of the One Percent, which means these particular feminists are now – like any other organ of capitalist governance – a legitimate target of socialist criticism regardless of the critic's gender.

What therefore follows is a much-enlarged version of a commentary I posted two weeks ago on Reader Supported News in response to a startling piece of gender-war invective entitled “Brad Pitt's New Movie on the Steubenville Rape Case Has the Wrong Protagonist,” the text cited in the second of the above links. By Tara Culp-Ressler, it offers an updated version of the old gender-warrior doctrine that no man should ever be allowed to help the women's movement lest his good deeds reinforce not only his (despicable) male ego but strengthen the shackles of patriarchy as well – and that any woman who disagrees is a hopeless reactionary, part of the problem rather than the solution.

I ran afoul of that uniquely white-bourgeois dogma nearly 40 years ago, when I was an investigative reporter, and its resurrection renews a sense of shame that prompts me to reveal now a fact I should have disclosed then. Here is the whole story:

An assertively Christian hospital that served a large and populous suburb of a major city refused to treat rape victims lest the association with sex and violence taint its godly image. Despite the fact an executive of the local rape-relief organization was my lover, I got the story not from her but because in those days I had the best cop sources in the area, probably in the entire state, and the cops complained to me about the hospital after one of their fellow officers ran afoul of its atrocious policy while seeking emergency-room care for an especially distraught rape victim. The cops, who in that era still believed their job was to protect and serve the citizenry rather than to serve the One Percent as its army of occupation, were genuinely furious. Several officers correctly likened the hospital's coldly enforced anti-rape-victim policy to psychologically re-assaulting the victim. After my usual telephone-and-shoe-leather effort unearthed an extended pattern of such abuses, I confronted the perpetrators and wrote my report, a blistering story that ran atop Page One.

But to my lingering shame, I omitted from follow-up stories how the local rape-relief group had known of the problem for years but had deliberately kept it secret – apparently for two reasons: they hoped to get sole credit for negotiating a solution, and they feared some (male) “do-gooders” might discover the problem, forcefully solve it (exactly as the cops and I did), and thereby – or so these gender-warriors reasoned – perpetuate male supremacy. In other words, the white, petit bourgeois feminists who ran the rape-relief organization believed it was better for rape victims to be denied proper care at their local Christian hospital (and thus be forced to travel as much as 50 crow-miles to a secular hospital), than for anyone other than the feminist movement – and better yet this specific rape-relief organization – to get credit for solving the problem.

Again to my shame, I half-assedly rationalized my act of self-censorship by telling myself my inside knowledge of the group's operations and policies was off-the-record information. Now nearly five decades after the fact and with the unforgiving, pre-graveyard clarity of old age, I confess my rationalization was total bullshit. The truth is I suppressed that vital detail merely to sustain my relationship with the rape-relief executive; I was living with her in her own house, and the alternative would have been instant homelessness. In any other circumstances, such a deliberate cover-up of atrocities would have either been in my lead or in my second and third grafs. Given a time machine to go back to the where and when, here is how I would write the story now:

Rape victims in Gastropoda County are thrice victimized – first by the rapist, then by Gastropoda Christian Hospital, finally by the very rape-relief organization that claims to be the victims' advocate and protector.

These circumstances came to light after police sources described the chilling ouster of a distraught rape victim from the GCH emergency room two weeks ago. Subsequent investigation brought to light at least a half dozen other such incidents.

Now GCH executives reluctantly admit it bars rape victims from its emergency room and has forcibly ejected the few who have managed to get past its gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, Gastropoda County Rape Relief officials just-as-reluctantly admitted they've known about the problem for years but have kept it secret. They claim the secrecy was essential to what they describe as an “ongoing” effort to negotiate with hospital management to change its anti-rape-victim policy.

But no such negotiations, spokespersons for both organizations concede, have ever taken place.

Moreover, the hospital's executive director insists he and his managerial colleagues were never asked to undertake such talks.

The hospital's longstanding opposition to treating rape victims – which inside sources say grows out of its owners' fear any association with sex and violence will besmirch the institution's image of “Christian godliness” – is confirmed by records in...

(The anonymity with which I am now cloaking this report is in response to three facts: [1]-my clips of the original story, and therefore my ability to confirm its published details, were destroyed by the same fire that in 1983 obliterated all my life's work, and I cannot replace the clips as the newspaper's morgue of bound copies did not survive corporate bankruptcy in the mid-1980s, nor – for reasons I am unable to determine (especially since it was the local paper of record) – were its editions ever microfilmed by the local library; [2]-the hospital long ago changed hands and is now under secular ownership; [3]-the sources and perpetrators are either retired, dead or otherwise unable to defend themselves.)

Significantly, my lover had made it clear she was uncomfortable with the story from the moment I told her what I was working on. But we never had time to discuss the details of her discomfort. Hence I did not foresee her anger, much less its intensity. When I with my bottle of celebratory wine arrived at our dwelling the night after the story broke, I expected a joyful and exuberant welcome – at the very least a thank-you embrace and a “well done” in recognition of the quality of the work. Instead I was greeted with an unprecedented outpouring of anger and contempt. My reporting, she said, had damn near gotten her fired; some of the members of her board of directors accused her of using her relationship with me to foster publication of the story, thereby perpetuating the sex-for-favors dynamic of patriarchy; others condemned her for allowing a male to “invade” a realm of advocacy they believed should be exclusively female – never mind at least 10 percent of all rape victims are male; still others insisted she should have clandestinely pressured my editor and even my publisher to reassign the story to a woman. When the board voted on her proposed firing, she said, the termination motion failed by only one vote.

To say I was shocked is an understatement, but mostly I was enraged by the indifference to victims that to me had suddenly emerged as the common stance of everyone but the cops and had therefore become the core issue of the entire story. Finally I responded accordingly: “You of all people know how good a reporter I am; you know I'd have found out about it even if you and I had never met – and what I should do now, what I fucking-A-tweet would do right this minute if our circumstances were different, is write a new story revealing everything you told me tonight.” What I did not say, not only because it was too painfully embarrassing for me to verbalize but because both of us clearly knew it already, is that she could goddamn well thank her lucky stars I was living in her house, which meant there was no way I could write the rest of the story without condemning myself to instant eviction. Needless to say, the confrontation killed the relationship, though the process of breaking up would consume another month or two. It also tossed a huge bucket of cold water on my journalistic pride.

Nevertheless the story made a helluva big wave – big enough the hospital's management was forced to reverse their anti-rape-victim policy literally hours after the paper hit the street. They were also forced to pay for their emergency-room personnel to get the medical and psychological training necessary to provide proper care for rape victims of both genders. As ashamed as I am of my act of self-censorship, I remain fiercely proud of what my story accomplished.

(I should note here that journalism of that era – at least as it used to be practiced on a good many local newspapers here in the pre-global-economy United States – was mostly a Working-Class calling. It drew from blue-collar families the same sorts of aggressively bright kids who might otherwise have gone into the cops or the priesthood or maybe the military. Sometimes it even enabled a declassé proletarian like myself to actually better people's lives, which to me was always its biggest attraction.)

Apropos the malice directed at males accused of poaching in political or conceptual territory certain feminists believe should be theirs alone, that hospital story was not my first encounter with it. A few years earlier, when I was an undergraduate, it hamstrung a major research project of mine, part of the work that would become the forever-lost book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which was destroyed with all its research notes and most of its photography in the 1983 fire. “Dancer,” an investigative reporter's 24-year probe of the origins and significance of the '60s Countercultural Rebellion, concluded the rebels were resurrecting a modern variant of the ancient matriarchal or at least pre-patriarchal consciousness. My findings were based on the Counterculture's music, poetry, journalism, ritual, social structures, economics and the expression of its values in environmentalism, feminism, the back-to-the-land movement and the neo-pagan renaissance. (It is an aside, but the Jungian Edward Whitmont reached a similar conclusion from very different data. But Whitmont's work, unlike my own, was carefully apolitical and therefore achieved significant publication, for which see The Return of the Goddess, Crossroad: 1982.)

While working on “Dancer,” I had foolishly imagined, exactly as I had while putting together the hospital story, that feminists would applaud my disclosures. After all, the pioneers in the “Dancer”-relevant fields of folklore and myth were themselves males. But by the early '70s, the gender-war feminists believed they had appropriated these realms as their own, and they defended their conquests with the passive-aggressive nastiness and backstabbing that characterizes academic ferocity whether male or female. Meanwhile the males associated with my project, an undergraduate thesis, seemed to regard me as a traitor to my gender. Hence though I got enough credit for the research and writing to win my bachelor's degree, my thesis itself was rejected.

And now, decades later, Culp-Ressler has resurrected the same hateful doctrine of gender-exclusivity not just to belittle Anonymous and its breathtakingly courageous defiance of draconian prison terms, but to denounce UltraViolet, which unlike its (white bourgeois) sister organizations defends oppressed women without (ironically) discriminating on the basis of caste, ethnicity or the presence of male allies.

In this same context, the Emily's List endorsement of “fiscal conservatism” – a euphemism for the genocidal savagery of Ayn Rand economics – is typical of the feminism spawned by capitalist co-optation and redirection of the USian second-wave feminist movement. (See again the first of the above links.) Because Second Wave Feminism was a daughter of the New Left of the 1960s, its dominant vision was overwhelmingly petit bourgeois and often fiercely anti-intellectual; therefore, despite its “women's liberation” label and its use of socialist rhetoric, it was frequently hostile not just to the historical truth of class struggle,  but to any analysis based on the revolutionary traditions of socialism and Marxism. Stripped of socialist armor, it was therefore easy prey for infiltrators and agents provocateur. That's why the USian feminism of the so-called “mainstream” remains indifferent to the outsourcing of jobs and downsizing of paychecks characteristic of the capitalist (Ayn Rand) moral imbecility that subjugates the USian 99 Percent. It does not acknowledge the fact that for a Working-Class woman, the loss of health insurance inflicted by global-economy outsourcing is often the total loss of reproductive freedom, an ugly reality carefully suppressed by Emily's List and the (Free Trade) Democrats in general. Nor – despite Big Lies to the contrary – is there any guarantee of rescue from the theocratic Christian effort to prohibit Obamacare from providing any 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 unabashed support of capitalism itself, particularly as exemplified by the all the women who define themselves as “anti-union progressives.”

Could it then be a coincidence such divisiveness reappears just as we in the USian Imperial Homeland seem to be making genuine progress toward proletarian solidarity? Surely not, as every available indication points to the Ruling Class mustering all its resources to suppress what it fears is looming revolution. This mustering includes not only the obvious efforts – for example the attempt by the Democratic Party to co-opt (and thereby betray) Socialist Alternative's demand for a $15-per-hour minimum wage – but the newly exposed program under which secret-police agents accompany the military into overseas combat (for which see “Outside Agitation Elsewhere” below). Obviously, such a program has only one objective: to ensure the agents are kill-hardened enough to reliably follow orders when they are commanded to exterminate suspected revolutionaries at home. In this oppressive context, I am not surprised by the anti-99 Percent treachery of the feminism discussed above. In truth it is an old story, so old we should expect nothing else from a movement that was in too-large measure co-opted by the One Percent  from about 1970 onward, with the result its exclusion of impoverished women and women of color has long been infamous.

******

Outside Agitation Elsewhere: The big news is the ongoing neo-Nazification of the United States, the result of capitalism maturing into fascism, thereby not only fulfilling the predictions of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin but validating Marxism itself. (Aside: what the founders of Marxism called “imperialism,” we today know as fascism or Nazism.) Here are two links, with brief expositions of outside agitation on each of the comment threads: “Now We Know What's Being Done in Our Name,” in which Esquire's Charles Pierce writes about the leaked torture-memo scandal,  and “FBI Agents Were Deployed in Hundreds of JSOC Raids Conducted in Iraq & Afghanistan,” which describes how the USian equivalent of the Okhrana (or maybe the Gestapo) is being trained to suppress  the inevitable uprising against capitalism that is bound to occur here in the post-American-Dream wastelands.

LB/13 April 2014

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Unabated Climate Change: the 1%'s Final Solution for the Rest of Us?

(Note: I've omitted the usual “Outside Agitation Elsewhere” feature because I think the following disclosures, which are even more damning than I anticipated, should be presented without distraction.)

*

IS CLIMATE CHANGE to be the One Percent's doomsday weapon – the Final Solution by which it hopes to exterminate most of the 99 Percent and thereby win, forever, the class-war that now rages with intensifying fury everywhere on this planet?

Consider the evidence. The global aristocracy's continuing refusal to ameliorate the apocalyptic impact of climate change – were that refusal a singular phenomenon – could be dismissed (as it often is) as nothing more than unfortunate coincidence. It could be, as so many people assume, an ultimate (and ultimately deadly) example of what happens when political ineptitude interacts with man-over-Nature arrogance and general human folly. But when you add the murderous consequences of deliberate policies and policy-decisions – austerity; the proliferation of genetically modified and therefore toxic foods; unprovoked wars of aggression as in Vietnam and the Middle East; the abandonment of disaster-stricken populations as in post-earthquake Haiti, post-tsunami Southeast Asia, post-Katrina New Orleans and post-Sandy New York City – what emerges is a far more ominous likelihood.

Is there, then, behind the locked oaken doors of some palatial Ruling Class mansion – or more likely intimately connected via an invisible network of indecipherable electronic signals – a secret cabal of global oligarchs who dictate such policies? Is it their homicidal purpose to methodically worsen the human condition until the entire global Working Class is starved, sickened, shot and otherwise terrorized to eternal submission? Is it their intent to emerge as all-powerful übermenschen from their climate-controlled, nuclear-bomb-proof bunkers, thence to reorder the world in accordance with the morally imbecilic principles set out by Ayn Rand in her fictional diatribes on the themes of Mein Kampf?

Evaluate the damning evidence for yourself:

Most of us recognize U.S. Ruling-Class academics Paul and Anne Ehrlich  as the popularizers of the present-day arguments for forcible population control. But too few of us recognize how closely some of the Ehrlichs' proposals duplicate the policies of Adolf Hitler and his colleagues.  Nor is it common knowledge Der Führer modeled his genocidal seizures of lebensraum  on the U.S. doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”  and its methodical extermination of First Nations peoples.  Most of us flinch at the admission such atrocities remain as “American” (that is, USian), as the proverbial apple pie. Yet the formerly top-secret U.S. “National Security Study Memorandum 200”  implicitly endorses population control by whatever means are necessary to ensure the prosperity of the USian imperial future:

“The U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries...Whether through government action, labor conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbance, the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized. Although population pressure is obviously not the only factor involved, these types of frustrations are much less likely under conditions of slow or zero population growth...In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.” (Emphasis added.)

Youth in particular are targeted by this 1974 document: “The young people, who are in much higher proportions in many LDCs (less developed countries), are likely to be more volatile, unstable, prone to extremes, alienation and violence than an older population. These young people can more readily be persuaded to attack the legal institutions of the government or real property of the 'establishment,' 'imperialists,' multinational corporations, or other-often foreign-influences blamed for their troubles...” (Emphasis added.)

Beneath all such theorizing are the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian doctrines that claim most of us in the 99 Percent are genetically programmed to mindlessly over-breed until we exceed our environment's capability to keep us fed. Barring the intervention of humanitarian aid – which Malthus and his present-day disciples vehemently oppose – we will then in our frenzies exterminate ourselves by self-inflicted famine, disease and violence.

Unfortunately, the only sustainable counter-arguments to Malthusianism are based on Marxism, which – given the realities of capitalist governance – means they are deliberately marginalized, often censored and generally unavailable to the global masses.

Though I was already aware of anti-Malthusian reasoning – chiefly that Malthusian doctrines are so mean-spirited in their support of the capitalist status quo, they ignore the ameliorative potentials of science, industry and mass movements – it took me several hours of research to ferret out sources appropriate for citation on OAN.

Early in the quest I found John Bellamy Foster's “Malthus' Essay on Population at Age 200: a Marxian View,” an informative, historically detailed and refreshingly thought-provoking study available here, albeit with a caution it is hardly material for quick-and-casual reading over lunch or coffee.

But eventually I discovered “The Population Issue: Marx vs. Malthus,” by Martha E. Gimenez, which is both brief and compellingly well-written. Its essence is a quietly dire warning:  “as long as population control remains the main or only concern of the various international and national organizations which in one way or another are trying to foster economic development in underdeveloped societies, their action will only consolidate the economic backwardness they are avowedly aiming to solve.”

But what if perpetuating that economic backwardness in the developing world – not to mention re-imposing it on the industrialized world via austerity – is precisely the Ruling Class intent?

What if the One Percent's long-range plan is to destroy all allegedly “surplus humans” – especially those of us who are elderly or disabled or chronically unemployed or otherwise unexploitable for maximum profit – in order to clear the way for imposition of a new, Ayn Rand World Order?

Far-fetched? Not at all; that is precisely what Rand advocates in Atlas Shrugged.

Nor it is coincidence the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian credo closely parallels the Ayn Rand dogma by which the global economy is ever-more-openly ruled. The latter – the assumption our species is divided into a few innovators whose lives should be preserved at all cost and legions of parasites who should be abandoned to die if not actively exterminated – is indeed the logical extension of the former. Hitler's concepts of übermenschen and lebensraum, derivatives of the Nazi concept of geopolitik, were merely German-nationalist variants  of the same basic ideology. Its modern-day version is the U.S. geopolitical policy of global domination, complete with all its genocidal consequences.

To quote an axiom that supposedly originated from the intense and thorough training given Soviet intelligence operatives but is probably as old as espionage itself, “once is accident, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” “Accident” might be the paralysis that blocks, now obviously forever, any ameliorative action on what should properly be labeled terminal climate change. “Coincidence” might be the climate-change failures combined with the abandonment of disaster-stricken populations. But when you factor in all the rest – austerity, the mass poisoning inflicted by genetically modified foods, the now-permanent regime of unprovoked wars – the conclusion of “Enemy Action” becomes ever-more undeniable.

As I have said so many times before, such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

LB/6 April 2014

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