Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Violence Flairs as Racists Secede into Ideological Confederacy

WILL CIVIL WAR II (OR THE SECOND USIAN REVOLUTION) BEGIN IN PORTLAND? With the local Republican Party chairman admitting he is organizing a de facto Schutzstaffel  for “protecting” racist rallies, it is entirely legitimate for Dispatches to verbalize the question no other USian journalist has dared ask in print. Ergo: is the skyrocketing incidence of attacks on minorities by USiaNazi terrorists another Fort Sumter  – the opening volleys of a conflict that will sunder the North American population as violently did the Revolution of 1776 and the Civil War of 1861-1865? (The Sumter analogy is indeed appropriate, for the advent of the Trump Regime is itself a symbolic act of secession, the founding of an already murderous racist confederacy that is ideological rather than geographic  and – far more irresistibly than the confederacy of 1861 – spans the entire USian homeland.) That said, I believe the answer to this formerly unthinkable question will be determined by the Trump Regime itself, and given  the outspoken anti-minority hatefulness  of Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, I am not optimistic about the likelihood of national peace. (Indeed it may be this looming prospect of civil war and/or revolution that underlies the Empire's increasingly provocative warmongering against Russia:  start a war, the conventional “wisdom” claims, and you unite the country – the very belief  that was Tsarist Russia's final undoing.)

PORTLAND'S LEFT ORGANIZES AS USIANAZI VIOLENCE FLARES NATIONWIDE. With Portland's UsiaNazis granted what amounts to a mobilization permit  by the Trump Regime, the hitherto less-than-unified local Left pledges defiance. Meanwhile a white racist murdered a young Native American  in Washington state; a session of the Texas legislature erupted into the equivalent of a barroom brawl after a Republican representative said he sicced federal secret police on demonstrators;  and in what is almost certainly another act of Rightist violence, a Kentucky daily newspaper office was vandalized by gunfire.

SIMILARLY ORGANIZED FASCIST VIOLENCE CONTINUES IN BERKELEY, not-so-gentle reminders of which are here  and here.

BUT WHEN WILL THE LEFT REJECT ITS SUICIDAL SELF-BETRAYAL of opposition to the Second Amendment – a classic example of how we have been manipulated by the Ruling Class into cutting our own throats – and instead follow the (oft-suppressed) example of the Deacons for Defense and Justice.  With the federal government – and therefore also the federalized local cops – now condemning Leftist activists as terrorists,  we are as likely to be denied police protection as were African-Americans and civil rights activists of all races in the Jim Crow South. The lesson taught us by the Deacons?  Take firearms safety classes, purchase weapons, obtain marksmanship and self-defense training and practice until you are proficient, not  – obviously – for purposes of political action, (for which we should always embrace non-violence), but to protect ourselves, our loved ones and our homes from the Rightist retaliation that too often follows public activism. To paraphrase a National Safety Council slogan from my youth, “the life you save from Rightist goons may be your own.” I need not add that had one or more of the Portland martyrs  been armed, the accused murderer might be in his grave rather than bellowing USiaNazi slogans in a courtroom much as he did at a rally a few days before the killings.  

REFRESHER: HOW THE EMPIRE SUPPRESSES THE KING ASSASSINATION TRUTH, a 17-year-old ConsortiumNews report that's again relevant  due to the murderous racism resurrected and mainstreamed by the Trump Regime.

KUDOS TO THE STAND FOR ITS DAILY SUMMARIES OF RELEVANT EVENTS. It's the Washington State Labor Council's on-line newspaper – which often includes a superb summary of the day's national news – and its URL is here.  Recommended links in the 30 May edition include a long-overdue analysis of the increasingly violent ideological schism in the USian Homeland (a deadly threat the Ruling Class is only now publicly acknowledging); an interesting piece that shows how the so-called “alternative press” has joined the camp of a rising Ruling Class politician who will surely be amongst those employed by the One Percent to co-opt and thereby thwart the opposition to Capitalism; a nauseating encounter with an archetypal Capitalist who denounces those of us seeking a living wage as “socialists and fascists”; and mainstream-media reports that bury their leads as deeply as possible, downplaying the fact that now after bribing the Washington state legislature into an $8.5 billion tax exemption, Boeing is laughing all the way to the bank with profits from the fuck-you termination of nearly 10,000 of the jobs it promised the tax-cut would save. To reiterate, The Stand provides the most relevant daily summary of USian mainstream media I have yet found, nor is it afraid to link to alternative media when the story is otherwise suppressed, as in the McDonald's report above.

ANOTHER LINK I RECOMMEND FOR PERMANENT ACCESS is the Black Agenda Report, here. It's an invaluable source of African-American perspectives routinely suppressed by mainstream media, and subscribing to its informative reports is clickably easy.

MEMORIAL DAY REBUTTAL TO DAN RATHER: If you read between the lines, Rather's Memorial Day effort to redefine our resistance to Trump as analogous to World War II is in realityjust another Ruling Class effort to co-opt our opposition to Capitalism into the Democratic (sic) Party, where it can then be neutralized by another of the Democrats' classic “change-we-can-believe-in” betrayals. Rather's appropriation of Memorial Day for his propaganda – which provoked some interesting feedback on its associated comment thread – prompts me to repost my own Memorial Day memorial, the 50-year anniversary of an atrocity  that is far more typical of USian reality than what is portrayed by Rather's subtly pro-Capitalist panegyric.

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QUANDARIES, REFLECTIONS AND A BRIEF RANT: By far my biggest difficulty in transforming Outside Agitator's Notebook into Dispatches from Dystopia is scheduling its frequency. With OAN I could post only when I was so moved, which was sometimes only once or twice a month. Now however, with its transformation to DfD, it has become virtually a full-time (albeit unpaid) job, often requiring mandatory (also unpaid) overtime, and I find myself lamenting the resultant near-total lack of personal, do-as-I-will/do-as-I-need time, which includes not only blessed intervals of silently contemplating the colors of the light (whether outdoors or through my north-looking windows), but even such essential tasks as cooking adequate meals, washing my dishes and shredding vast quantities of paper – anything on which my name, address or Medicare Advantage number appears – for recycling. It seems my best alternative is to reduce DfD's posts to twice per week, but I fear that would limit my ability to link to breaking stories, and I have not yet resolved the problem.  Obviously DfD is still a work in progress.

Apropos the promised rant, astute readers will note (and perhaps be enraged by) my second link to the history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, above, which is contained in the National Rifle Association's archive. I post this link without apology; once again, Rightist media and even mainstream media cannot always avoid acknowledging and reporting truth and are thus sometimes valuable sources of information, particularly now as the imperial homeland divides into irremediably hostile camps. Moreover, despite the NRA's gag-me-with-a-spoon association with Trumpism and the USian Right in general, it and its far-more-fanatically Rightist competitor Gun Owners of America remain our best sources of information on firearms, firearms safety and the pseudo-Left's ongoing efforts to disarm us and thereby reduce us all to mandatory defenselessness and compulsory victimhood. Since the NRA never demands disclosure of one's political allegiances as a precondition of membership, its rolls remain as open to the Left as to the Right – an opportunity that (particularly given the obviously unceasing escalation of USiaNazi violence) – prompts the suggestion we stifle our gag-reflexes and act upon the NRA's openness as soon as possible.

LB/30 May 2017

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Democratic (sic) Party Treachery Makes New Party Mandatory

FIRST THOUGH, ANOTHER (WELCOME?) FORMAT CHANGE: Just as newspapers typically confine (admitted) expression of their overlords' opinions to inside pages, so will I now similarly structure Dispatches. Ergo, save in exceptional circumstances, the news items will precede the rants. For explanatory details, see “MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS OWNED BY THE SAME ONE PERCENTERS," after the last of today's recommended reports and below the photograph.

NOW AS TO THE SEEMINGLY SUICIDAL DEMOCRATS: The Democratic (sic) Party's (mostly) unspoken response to our poverty and desperation – “fuck you/your lives don't matter anymore/hurry up and die” – is for many of us an everyday experience. We also know the Republicans are scarcely different, merely less dishonest about their malevolence.

That's why so many of us don't vote; we already recognize we're tyrannized by one Capitalist party that hides behind the Big Lie of two names. Such is life – and death – as Capitalism morphs into its uniquely USian form of Nazism. But if we are to organize ourselves into a new political party that truly represents the 99 Percent, or even into an effective anti-Capitalist resistance, it is essential we learn as much as we can about our enemies.

Hence the relevance of these two obituary-like analyses of Democratic (sic) tactics and strategy:

One, by Lance Selfa, includes the disclosure a recent Gallup Poll shows the Democrats “have actually lost popularity since January, with most of the erosion coming from base supporters souring on their party's performance.” Selfa thus rebuts the predictions of a Democratic (sic) landslide in 2018 and supports those of us who say unless the party moves far Leftward, it will lose again next year.

The other piece, by Matt Taibbi, does likewise by dissecting the Ruling Class arrogance that prompts the Democrats to disdain the huge electoral potential of citizens who recognize they are ignored by both parties and silently protest by not voting. In making his case, Taibbi cites the Democrats' newest defeat, failure to achieve a seemingly certain victory last week in Montana, more details of which are here. 

Alas, neither Selfa nor Taibbi dares suggest the obvious – that the Democrats are self-destructing not due to incompetence but because that is precisely what their Capitalist masters have ordered them to do: to become an obscenely well-paid fake opposition party to preserve the Big Lie of “American democracy” while simultaneously ensuring the ever-more-openly fascist Republicans always triumph.

ANOTHER REASON THE REPUBLICANS ARE HARD TO BEAT is their anything-goes support – complete with limitless funding – by the Capitalist One Percenters. In the absence of meaningful ideological alternatives, USian election victories are bought not earned. Thus it's no surprise the National Association of Manufacturers is already praising Trump as their savior.

SUSPECT NAMED IN NEWEST TRUMPISM-INSPIRED MURDERS. Not surprisingly in a nation that sends nonviolent drug-law violators to prison for life but minimizes the penalties against habitually violent thugs, the convicted felon accused of verbally attacking two Muslim women and stabbing to death two of the three men who came to the women's defense is an outspoken bigot with a rap sheet that includes minimal (plea-bargained) sentences for kidnapping and armed assault. Assuming he is again convicted and sent back to prison, it will be no real punishment as he will unquestionably be embraced and honored by the Nazi-minded gangs that rule the white prisoners.  Meanwhile whether the incident for which Jeremy Joseph Christian is being held without bail was a spontaneous eruption or a pre-planned start-of-Ramadan incident – perhaps undertaken by Rightists in the hope of provoking Islamist provocation – remains undetermined.

REPORT CONFIRMS 'TRICKLE-DOWN' PROGRESSIVISM SHAFTS WOMEN OF COLOR, BUT its authors – the Roosevelt Institute and the Ms. Foundation for Women – would rather retain the divisiveness of identity politics than acknowledge our real enemy is Capitalism. Obviously such acknowledgment would recognize women of color as among Capitalism's favorite victims and therefore among those of us best qualified by experience of class-struggle to lead us in Capitalism's overthrow. But because the authors' unspoken purpose is the preservation of Capitalism, they reject the revolutionary consciousness-raising and pan-racial solidarity implicit in socialism's we-are-all-in-this-together analysis. The report and the story about it exemplify how Capitalism's defenders use identity politics to mobilize its inherent racism and sexism in its own defense, meanwhile employing anti-racist, anti-sexist rhetoric to conceal their purpose.

TRUMP MEANS THEOCRACY: He and his handmaid Betsy DeVos continue to engineer the elimination of the sad remnants of USian public education. (Knowing from my years in Michigan the determined fanaticism of the Dutch Reformed Church – they are notably less publicly violent than the Ku Klux Kristians with whom I clashed in East Tennessee but are otherwise no less intense – I also know it would be a ruinous mistake to under-estimate DeVos' malignant potential.) Meanwhile advocates of the same JesuNazism – the uniquely USian hybrid of moral imbecility, prosperity-gospel Christianity, racism, misogyny, sado-militarism and Ayn Rand economics all fueled by deliberately induced Moron Nation ignorance – are already running amok in Texas.

BUT PENCE, A PRACTICED THEOCRAT, WOULD BE FAR WORSE THAN TRUMP, and may already be the malign force behind Trump's theocratic successes. Meanwhile there's no doubt Pence is spearheading the Trump Regime's unprecedented attack against organized labor, the effectiveness of which is intensified by the fact it remains largely unpublicized.

SOMEONE ELSE DEMONSTRABLY WORSE THAN TRUMP is his attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who is remaking the Justice Department into an agency for the propagation and perpetuation of racism, misogyny, homophobia, Christian theocracy and its attendant zero-tolerance opposition to abortion, birth control, non-marital sex, LGBTQ rights and legal marijuana. Like Pence, Sessions is operating beneath the devastatingly effective cover of non-coverage by mainstream media – proof positive his malevolent endeavors are endorsed (if not mandated) by the One Percenters who own all major USian news outlets and own or control all USian government.

DON'T LET TRUMP DRAMAS DISTRACT YOU FROM THE ANTI-MEDICAID WAR. You might have read this report elsewhere, but I'm reposting its link because its message cannot be over-emphasized.

HOW COME THE TERRORISTS ALWAYS AID THE COPS AND SPOOKS by leaving behind their identification papers? A very good question very pointedly asked by Global Research's formidable Michel Chossudovsky. As 'tis taught in the world's intelligence schools, “once is coincidence, twice is suspicious, three times is enemy action,” a bit of espion wisdom allegedly first expressed in the Soviet Union, which, confronted by Capitalism's relentless aggression, was compelled to elevate its tradecraft to levels of cunning unknown before the present era.

BRADLEY FOUNDATION FINANCES FASCISM WITH “WEAPONIZED PHILANTHROPY.” Apropos the relentless aggression of Capitalism, here by the Center for Media and Democracy is a detailed report  on the ultra-low-profile Bradley Foundation, which with ultra-high financial power is bankrolling fascism throughout the U.S. (Yeah I know CMD is archetypal “liberal media,” but it nevertheless occasionally reports truth, just as Rightist media sometimes does.)

FCC EMBRACES ANTI-NET-NEUTRALITY RANTS BY CORPORATE BOTS as genuine human testimony,  thereby bolstering the escalating effort to abolish what has been described as the Internet's equivalent of the First Amendment.

HOW MAINSTREAM MEDIA SUSTAINS AND EXPANDS MORON NATION: an anthology of five provocative essays for contemplative reading.

LEST WE FORGET: MEMORIAL DAY 2017 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of an atrocity committed by the New York City Police Department, precisely the sort of outrage that is again becoming commonplace under Trump.   

SUNDAY EVENING  ENTERTAINMENT that's equally good any other time as well: Rising Appalachia, a dynamic group of Southerners whose performance demonstrates the real meaning of diversity, with much more of their outstanding work – some of it at Standing Rock in defense of Water Protectors – also available on YouTube. (Two notes: Firstly, as I know from the Appalachian portion of my boyhood, the “lach” in “Appalachia” is properly pronounced like “latch,” the synonym for a lock. Think “Apple Latch Ya,” as in “these mountains grow apples so fucking delicious they'll latch ya there forever.” Secondly, my apologies if you-uns already know about Rising Appalachia; y'all should bear in mind I'm 77 years old.)

 

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Conceptual illustration, from the forever-lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” of the emergent Great Goddess. The image, made by sandwiching two negatives atop one another and printing them as one, survived the fire only because it was in the portfolio with which I returned to New York City in 1983. I colorized the photo in 2010, though I still cannot decide which I prefer, this or the original black-and-white version. © Loren Bliss 1969, 2010.

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MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS OWNED BY THE SAME ONE PERCENTERS who own and/or control USian governance at all levels. Mainstream media is therefore nothing more than a privatized, for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' infamous Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. To expect it to behave otherwise is no different from expecting Capitalism to magically transform itself into socialism. Hence my purpose here is and always has been to provide relevant (i.e., useful) information and analysis that helps us transcend the mainstream media's effort to sustain and expand Moron Nation by suppression or marginalization of information and/or publication of dezinformatsiya (дезинформация) and outright Big Lies.

Originally I envisioned this blog as nothing more than an expression of personal defiance that might someday, perhaps long after I was dead, grow (as much of George Orwell's work has grown), into an antidote for the venom spewed by the forked-tongued mind-serpent English-language mainstream media has become. (My own newspaper and magazine career started in 1956 at Michigan's Grand Rapids Herald and thus includes the final years of that long-gone era in which some of the USian press was relatively independent and we reporters and photographers were occasionally allowed to break stories that fostered genuine reforms.) Indeed that's why, in 1954 at age 14, I decided print journalism would be my lifelong occupation; I viewed it – and membership in the AFL/CIO Newspaper Guild – as the one opportunity for a proletarian kid to do cultural work that might actually make life under Capitalism a bit more bearable. When I got my first union card, at age 16, I was as fiercely proud of it as any high-school jock is proud of a varsity letter.

Of course by the time I began this blog, I knew better. At some newspapers, the notion of a free press was already an embittered jest,  and even the best publications enforced their own reportorial taboos and shibboleths. By 1967 I had only one foot in the mainstream media; the other was already firmly planted in the cleansing but often treacherous waters of the alternative press, though my final ouster from the former (c. 1986) was far less the product of choice than of the devastating clinical depression inflicted by the destruction of all my life's work in a 1983 house fire. The fire was undoubtedly arson, most likely by government agents ordered to prevent the seemingly assured publication of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” the book of photographs (as above) and thoroughly researched text that would have penetrated the hurly-burly of the 1960s Counterculture to its metaphysical core and thus correctly redefined it as the grass-roots resurrector of the ancient Great Goddess – the first wave of our species' spontaneous, rescue-ourselves-and-our-Mother-Earth revolution against patriarchy.

What is now named Dispatches from Dystopia was the final mechanism of my recovery from the once-seemingly endless ennui of the fire-inflicted depression. This blog itself began in 2009 through a TypePad charity called “the Journalist Bail-Out Program,” about which I was informed by my second wife and in which I was accepted with surprising enthusiasm. As I originally envisioned this work, it would be the naked-soul, unabashedly socialist reincarnation of the award-winning editorial column I wrote for a local newspaper during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I designed it accordingly, altering the newspaper-column, op-ed-section format only by addition of my own photography and the excellent on-line graphics and typography provided by TypePad. But since then this blog has gradually evolved toward becoming a kind of oppressed-peoples' newsletter, a forward-and-backward process that at long last made its great leap forward with the name change from Outside Agitator's Notebook last March – perhaps not coincidentally under Aries, the astrological sign in which I was born – and its subsequent expansion of content.

It was a reader's compliment (“I love your news briefs”) that brought about my most recent awakening – a slap-myself-on-the-forehead realization putting my rant ahead of the news reversed the order in which these Dispatches should be presented, hence from now on, save only in the most exceptional circumstances, it's news first, rants last (if at all). Thank you KD.

(POST-PUBLICATION AFTERTHOUGHT: Yes, the  above originally contained passages emphasized by bold-faced type. My intent was to break up the sea-of-type impression I feared might be given by the longer items. A few hours later I decided all the BF looked tacky and went back to Dispatches' normal typography. What do you think?) 

LB/28 May 2017

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In Ugly Truth, Trump's Brutality Is Characteristically USian; So Is the Democratic (sic) Party's Effort to Rescue Capitalism by Co-opting and Betraying the Anti-Trump Resistance

(NOTE: Because Dispatches from Dystopia is as much work of art as journalistic fulfillment of the core socialist ethos – “from each in accordance with ability/to each in accordance with need” – it is sometimes more subject to spontaneity, i.e., visitations by the Muse, than to schedules and deadlines. Thus it was this morning. I began the day's work with what I imagined would be no more than maybe 10 minutes of memory-confirming research on how the USian Homeland became the primary sanctuary for Nazi war criminals; I'd assumed I'd be posting the finished text by mid-afternoon. But one Internet topic led inexorably to another, and 12 hours later I had learned our species' obscene history of genocidal medical experiments began not in the German death camps but on USian slave plantations nearly a century earlier. No wonder our Capitalist overlords want to replace net neutrality with Nazi-style censorship.)

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INNUMERABLE PEOPLE CLAIM to be part of the anti-Trump “resistance,” and the number grows as Trump's Nazism becomes ever more undeniable. But how might we as revolutionary socialists distinguish between the reformers, who will inevitably betray us (precisely as history proves they have always done), and those who are at least potentially our comrades.?

An immediate answer to this question is provided by whether the individual in question has reasoned and/or been emotionally thrust beyond the slogan “no justice, no peace” to the invariably painful realization there can be neither justice nor peace – nor long-term human survival – without the total and permanent elimination of Capitalism.

The fact Capitalism cannot be reformed – and the corollary fact all reformers are ultimately betrayers – is proven unequivocally by the fate of the New Deal. The USian Working Class – the We-the-People 99 Percent – returned from World War II whole-heartedly believing we and our allies had at long last fulfilled the World War I goal of making the planet “safe for democracy” – that we had defended the four freedoms  abroad even as we had forced the New Deal on our Capitalist overlords at home to guarantee those freedoms for ourselves and our descendants. 

But the truth was of course far different. The 1934 Bankers' Plot (scroll down for my comments) had not only revealed Capitalism's close kinship with fascism; it had also confirmed the existence of an USian One Percent as a Ruling Class that was literally above the law.

Thus ensured of their immunity from prosecution and secure in their gated mansions, exclusive clubs and Wall Street offices, these Capitalists-turned-fascists  never abandoned their schemes for imposing fascism on the USian homeland and its ever-expanding empire. Washington D.C. was thus destined to become Welthauptstadt, the world capital  of Nazi conquest Hitler had envisioned making of Berlin. For now, with Nazi tyranny reincarnated on the Potomac, what had once been regarded as the capital of our species' democratic impulses had become the capital of the de facto Fourth Reich.

The keys to the USian Nazis' success – proof our most self-destructive error has been our repeated underestimation their predatory intellect – are threefold: their unprecedented skill at hiding their malignancy beneath cloaks of euphemisms and distractions; their abandonment of the coup as their mechanism for domestic conquest (even as they intensify their imposition of coups abroad); and their cunning adaptation of the diabolically subtle, multi-generational boiled-frog strategy  that has culminated in the Trump Regime.

By 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act had begun the relentless war against unions that 70 years later has reduced USian organized labor to political irrelevance. At the same time, as if to preview the coming economic oppression, some of the German Nazi engineers imported by Operation Paperclip were being hired as  scabs to replace unionized (and better paid) U.S.-born engineers (scroll down to “National Interest/Project 63”), thereby bolstering U.S. aviation-industry profits.

More details about Paperclip, including how its beneficiaries were guilty of horrors that prove beyond debate that Capitalism is manifest moral imbecility, are here,  here,  here and here. 

Defenders of capitalism will of course argue that the blame for the murderous practices that defined Hitler's Germany should be put on Nazism rather than Capitalism. But that's nonsense. Firstly, precisely as socialist analysis tells us,  fascism is the ultimate, fully metamorphosed form of capitalism. Secondly, genocide disguised as medical research and/or health care began not in Nazi Germany but in the avowedly Capitalist United States at least as early as the 1840s.

One of its later and most infamous examples, the premeditated clinical murder of rural African-Americans,  began in 1932 and continued until 1973. Indeed, at the 1946-1947 Nuremberg Medical Trials, the Nazi doctors cited the long USian history of such crimes against humanity as a primary argument in their own defense.

Significantly, no USian has ever been similarly prosecuted. A 1987 Supreme Court decision has underscored the perpetrators' ongoing immunity, and such experiments have continued at least through 2010. (For details, click the “as early as” link above, then scroll down to “Other Experiments” and “Legal, Academic and Professional Policy.”)

In other words, the uber-Capitalist USian Ruling Class consciously embraced the core socioeconomic principle of Nazism – that race, ethnicity, poverty, disability and sometimes gender are characteristics legitimately citable as proof a targeted human or group of humans is unworthy of life – at least a century before the Nazi Party was born. And when we include the extermination of First Nations peoples that began with European colonization of North America, the USian legacy of proto-Nazism dates back to the 1600s.

Thus it is logical – whether by historical momentum or karmic cause-and-effect – the USian Capitalist Empire would also be the first to develop and use thermonuclear weaponry.

But it's not just the Bomb that threatens to reduce Earth to a bug planet. The Bomb is merely Capitalism's most obviously deadly product. Even without the Bomb, Capitalism's environmental malignancy – note for example the Deepwater Horizon disaster – is definitively apocalyptic.

(We should never forget, though the details are beyond the scope of this post, the Capitalist disdain of the environment is the legacy of Capitalism's Christian origin and the expression of the misogynistic hatred of Nature and woman [as, respectively, the female macrocosm and microcosm] at the epicenter of Abrahamic doctrine, itself the most venomous distillate of patriarchy.)

All of which is prefatory to defining Capitalism – even without its inevitable metamorphosis into fascism and Nazism – as the most malevolently destructive force our species has yet unleashed in our approximately 200,000 years of existence.

Which in turn underscores once again the vital importance of recognizing and resisting the Democratic (sic) Party's relentless and increasingly deceptive efforts to co-opt the anti-Trump resistance and reduce it to nothing more than another vehicle for the preservation of Capitalist tyranny– much as Obama the Orator's transformation to Barack the Betrayer reduced the notion of “change we can believe in” to the most malicious Big Lie in USian political history.

Wanna know if somebody is a reformer or a revolutionary? Just ask them if they think Capitalism can be reformed.

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NAZI-STYLE BRUTALITY IS INCREASINGLY THE USIAN NORM. An African-American university student was stabbed to death – lynched actually – in Maryland. On the same day, a Mississippi legislator ranted on Facebook that anyone who advocates removal of Confederate monuments “should be lynched.” The racist fear-mongering implicit in both incidents is discussed in detail here. More on the slain student and his accused killer is here.  Meanwhile what should be termed “the David Clarke Horror” continues to inflict its own brand of legitimately intensifying paranoia as a West Virginia police officer is fired for not gunning down a suicidal mental patient and yet another journalist is roughed up  by Trump Regime goons. One more attack on a journalist, this time by a politician, happened yesterday.

INAUGURATION PROTESTORS STUNNED BY FELONY CHARGES. With the nation descending ever deeper into overt Nazism, mere participation in a demonstration can now condemn you to years in prison.  In other words, Trump has already nullified the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The question is whether those of us so victimized can raise the money for an adequate defense or will be compelled by poverty to submit to life-destroying convictions.

TRUMP TARGETS TRANSGENDER BLACKS IN HIV TREATMENT CUTS. It's a typical Trump twofer, genocidal racism and sexism in one bigoted budgetary blast.  Another group on Trump's slow-motion genocide list are those of us – myself included – for whom food stamps are a life-sustaining necessity. And though the mainstream media is already trying to reassure us the budget will never be approved – this obviously to cripple organization of resistance – remember that's precisely what our Josef Goebbels clones told us about Trumpcare, the DEATH Act, the genocidal purpose of which is Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare. 

STILL MORE DETAILS ON THE SETH RICH MURDER: Why have neither the Federal Bureau of Investigation nor the mainstream media probed the Seth Rich case? Why keep blaming Russia when a tsunami of new details alleges Richards had both motive and the opportunity? And why the mainstream-wide effort to discredit the reporting that has unearthed this new evidence. CounterPunch's Mike Whitney probes these questions  in “Seth Rich, Craig Murray And The Sinister Stewards Of The National Security State.”

SOME STATES BOOST PRISON POPULATIONS BY DENYING ADDICTION REHAB. The newest victims of this restoration of slavery are impoverished pregnant women, many of whom are – you guessed it – African-American.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE THREE-DAY AT&T STRIKE. An overly optimistic report on the impact of the walkout, linked here because it includes lots of detail the mainstream media's Josef Goebbels clones suppressed.

COMMON DREAMS BREAKS ITS CHAINS AND CRITICIZES THE DEMOCRATS, publishing a Diane Ravitch report  that points out how Democratic (sic) Party treachery – the same mercenary machinations that put Trump in the White House – gave public-school enemy Betsy DeVos control of the Department of Education.

ALWAYS PROVOCATIVE CHRIS HEDGES EQUATES USIAN AND ROMAN EMPIRES. Quoth he: “The deep state’s decision in ancient Rome – dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States of 2017 – to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire...Trump and our decaying empire have ominous historical precedents. If the deep state replaces Trump, whose ineptitude and imbecility are embarrassing to the empire, that action will not restore our democracy any more than replacing Commodus restored democracy in Rome. Our republic is dead...Our constitutional rights...exist only in name. The vast disconnect between the purported values of the state and reality renders political discourse absurd.” An accurate analogy indeed.  But when will Mr. Hedges explore the equally accurate analogy between the USian Empire today and the old Russian Empire in, say, maybe 1904.

ANOTHER RIGHTFULLY ANGRY OBITUARY FOR THE DEMOCRATIC (SIC) PARTY, this by one of Black Agenda's most perceptive writers, who reasons from the indisputably proven premise “the Democrats would rather lose” than actually adopt truly Leftist proposals or embrace real Leftist candidates. (Once again, my warning to beware the Democrats' efforts at co-optation, the motives for which Ms. Kimberley documents vividly.)

LB/23-25 May 2017

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Clarke Appointment May Truly Mark the End of the U.S.

YES I HAVE substantially revised this essay.  In retrospect, its original form (which began with a rant about how Microshaft had nullified all my blood pressure meds with the rage and frustration evoked by Windows 10 updates), was absurdly selfish in the context of the news of Trump's appointment of David Clarke to the Department of Homeland Security as what is essentially the reichsführer over all U.S. local police departments.

Indeed Clarke's appointment may literally mark the historical end of the U.S. as we have known it and signal the beginning of its (necessarily murderous) deconstruction into an openly proclaimed  JesuNazi empire as malevolently theocratic as Saudi Arabia or the so-called  Islamic State (ISL).

Think George Orwell's 1984 combined with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Clarke's new authority  empowers him to turn every local police department in the USian Homeland into a clone of the original Gestapo – a development that might also enable mobilization of  fanatically Trump-loving cops into a modern version of the Waffen SS, determined to violently block any effort at Trump's ouster.

Whether coincidentally or not, all USian local police departments have already been federalized, equipped, trained and thereby militarized into the equivalent of armored infantry units – precisely as if in preparation for such a coup. 

Which makes me wonder if – despite all the distractions and disinformation  – Trump is not himself another Deep State puppet.   

I predicted a couple of weeks ago Trump would name Clarke to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation,  but what obtains now is infinitely worse, especially since Clarke is a genuine JesuNazi, demonstrably determined to force prosperity-gospel fundamentalist Christian theocracy on the entire nation: a particular horror for women and LGBTQ people. 

Welcome to the new, Third World/Banana Republic United States, yet another indicative atrocity by which is reported here. 

*****

Seven More Relevant Dispatches
(News of interest to socialists and other like-minded activists.)

THE DEMOCRATIC (SIC) PARTY IS SCHEMING HOW TO (AGAIN) BETRAY WOMEN. Not only is Democratic (sic) National Committee Chairman Tom Perez meeting with anti-abortion fanatics in hope of recruiting these JesuNazis and ChristoFascists for his party, so has Senior Senator Joe Manchin begun maximize-misogyny meetings with the author of the most recent anti-Planned Parenthood smear campaign.  Thus in the Democrats' ever-more-obvious support for theocracy we see once again how we are tyrannized by one party of two names.

THE BIPARTISAN THRUST TO THEOCRACY ESPECIALLY ENDANGERS LGBTQ PEOPLE. Hence this analysis of how the Democrats routinely betray the LGBTQ community, its findings supplemented by a compellingly poignant first-person encounter with the federal government's escalating anti-LGBTQ maliciousness. (Let those of us who are not LGBTQ put ourselves in the place of those of us who are.)

“MAGIC LIBERALS” BARE THEIR FASCIST FANGS: In their defense of the FBI,  the Democrats and the other pseudo-Leftisis “are again lining up with the very most repressive and authoritarian elements in government and the deep state.”

WHY THE DEMOCRATS WON'T WIN BACK CONGRESS: A political analyst says the Democrats' brazen, spit-in-our-faces collaboration with the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals guarantees they'll lose the 2018 election, this despite a national poll showing 54 percent of the respondents are desperate for an alternative to the Republicans.

COULD HANFORD BECOME A MINI-FUKUSHIMA? CounterPunch Editor Joshua Frank says the facility “is ripe for a radioactive explosion.”

TIMELY BUT BELATED VIEWING: Remember 9 May was Victory Day, when the U.S.S.R. and now Russia and most of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany. Firstly, a brief bit of footage you might want to bookmark as a quick but effective anti-depressant.  Lastly a full-length, English-subtitled feature  entitled Panfilov's 28 Men, which gives us a glimpse of how and at what terrible cost the Red Army defeated the Nazis and thus saved the world from Hitler.

How many times must it be said: the only demonstrably effective antidote for Nazism and fascism in general is Marxism.

*****

TODAY'S CLOSING THOUGHTS: One of the characteristics of being a writer  –  though some comrades, friends and even a lover or two would probably consider it a curse  – is an often Muse-driven compulsion to play word games:     

Ergo, perhaps the best acronym yet for the Republican program of genocide by denial of healthcare: the DEATH Act, Denying Every American Tenable Healthcare.

The same moment of mindfulness gave birth to a suggested addition to our vocabulary: “Googledegook,” a revision of the term “gobbledygook” (quoth Merriam-Webster: “wordy and generally unintelligible jargon”), this to acknowledge the ever-expanding despotism of Google and the verbal and conceptual chaos that results.

(But as we vainly protest the impending end of net neutrality and anticipate the imposition of other yet-unannounced on-line tyrannies, let us never forget computers evolved from the machines IBM designed and built specifically to enable the German Nazis to exterminate Jews, Communists, socialists, homosexuals, Roma, handicapped people, others no longer exploitable for profit and anyone else Hitler's regime chose to murder.  As Marc Antony says in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them.”)

LB/19-22 May 2017

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Hope as the New Paralytic Dope-iate of the Masses

A COUNTERPUNCH WRITER named Gregory Barrett – someone whose work I had not hitherto read – thrice prodded my alleged mind to heightened wakefulness Wednesday morning. The first prod was his title: “Hope is Our Enemy: Fighting Boiling Frog Syndrome.” The second prod was his reference to East Tennessee street preachers, a sidewalk spectacle I had neither witnessed nor consciously thought about since my boyhood years in Knoxville, but nevertheless an image painfully relevant to our present circumstances. The final prod was his bold assertion “hope...makes things hopeless,” which for a vastly larger audience succinctly summarizes a point I have been making in this space for at least seven years.

My original argument, dating from 2010,  was essentially that We the People are being drowned in “the Politics of Hopelessness” even as our overlords are elevating hope to a synonym for patriotism and attempting to damn as traitors any of us savvy enough to reject their latest Orwellian language-warp.

Given the Democratic (sic) Party's ever-intensifying efforts to co-opt the Left-leaning reawakening provoked by Trump, whom Seattle Crosscut's frequent comment-contributor DBreneman aptly calls L'il Duce,  (for which scroll down), it is significant to note 2010's “politics of hopelessness” also gives us a slap-in-the-face reminder of the breathtaking Neoliberal treachery of U.S. Sen. Patty Murray:

“How is it that the DemocRats prove (once again) they're no different from the GOPorkers – this time by slashing $11.9 billion from the food stamp budget – and almost nobody knows about it?...here in Washington state the Ruling Class Media's refusal to report the story is even more predictable because it was Washington's own Sen. Patty Murray whose amendment was the slasher – this as she runs for re-election. Clever move on Murray's part. If somebody makes an issue of it, she can use it to out-Nazi her opponent Dino Rossi: 'Patty's even tougher on those damn food stamp bums than Dino is'... The Murray Amendment – Hatchetwoman Patty doing a legislative Lizzie Borden for Obama – is available via Thomas, the legislative search engine: enter HR 1586, scroll down Amendments to Item 98 (S Amdt.4575) then click on the link...Note too the Big Lie legislative legerdemain – equally typical of DemocRats and GOPorkers alike – by which this class-war atrocity is concealed in a measure entitled 'FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act.'”

“Meanwhile, though the DemocRats tell us the cuts won't go into effect until 2014, this is utter nonsense. Self-serving welfare bureaucrats always plan ahead – especially when they're scheming new ways to put the screws to their captive populations – and that means they will initiate the reductions as soon as possible...the boil-a-frog method applied to all of us now trapped forever in the prison of Jobless Recovery.”

By 2013 I had realized that to celebrate “hope” and elevate it to a virtue is tantamount to admitting one's powerlessness,  an understanding that evolved from “imbecility of hope,” the phrase by which, at least since 2009, I have parodied Barack the Betrayer's “audacity of hope,” the Mother(fucker)'s Little Helper by which he reinforced “change we can believe in,” the biggest Big Lie in USian political history:

“(U)ntil we understand just how hopeless (our) circumstances are, we will never evolve the means to transcend our hopelessness...”

And as I wrote earlier this year in response to the obnoxiously optimistic Crosscut article linked above:

“(T)he realities of imperial subjugation offer us not the 'audacity of hope' as described by Obama the Orator before he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer...but the utter imbecility of hope proven by how so many of us were deceived by the Big Lie of 'change we can believe in' and by how promptly the Occupy Movement was crushed thereafter. The same lesson – need I say again the imbecility of hope – is taught abroad by the imperial legions, much as it was taught to Queen Boudica's anti-imperial revolutionaries by the Roman massacre of 80,000 of their number in Britain c. 61 CE.”

“Hope” as it is being peddled to us is thus not only an Orwellian synonym for “patriotism”; it is perhaps an even more deceptive synonym for “trust” – the sort of desperate, moronically foolhardy trust one places in the con man who, having promised to triple our paycheck, has just pocketed our earnings and disappeared around the corner or down the alley.

With that weird synchronicity that has characterized reportage at least since Gutenberg stole the printing press from the Koreans nearly 700 years ago and sparked the Occidental evolution from oral bardship to printed broadsides, Wednesday's Internet spewed out a classic example of yet another “trust me” con for (you guessed it), change we'd best not believe in. Indeed it was if the Muse Herself were determined to demonstrate hope-iate's oppressive reality, here disguised as a triumphant announcement  from CommonDreams, one of the bourgeois pseudo-Leftist websites that was co-opted by the Hillaryites last year and will probably never again free itself from the ideological tentacles of the Democratic (sic) Party:

“The U.K. Labour Party's election manifesto...could serve as a template for the left-of-center political sphere worldwide, columnist Owen Jones wrote for the Guardian...'unveiled today – (it) is a moderate, commonsense set of antidotes to the big problems holding back one of the wealthiest countries on earth...an attempt to confront the crisis of identity and vision afflicting social democracy not just in Britain, but across the western world'...(it) includes pledges to raise taxes on the wealthy, nationalize public services, build affordable housing, invest in education, and, in what became a viral crowd favorite, install free WiFi on trains...” (emphasis added).

But this so-called “manifesto” – Uncle Karl would be rolling in his grave (as would Uncle Friedrich and Uncle Illyich) – says not one word about eradicating Capitalism, the terminal cancer by which the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals are murdering us and reducing our Earth to a bug planet merely so they can pamper themselves (and maybe their children) with the moral imbecility of hitherto-unimaginable luxury.

Another vexing example of such hope-iate is the astounding penchant of so-called “progressives,” obvious since the Trumping of James Coney, to leap to the defense of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, correctly denounced on Black Agenda Radio by Sara Flounders for routinely employing “absolute repression, subversion, assassination... everything that they can do destructive to the working class...” (This broadcast is worth hearing because Flounders also has vital information on the ongoing Korean crisis and the additional boiled-frog downsizing of USian jobs and salaries.)

Meanwhile, as Barrett so aptly put it, “It is your hope which makes things hopeless...Can we at least adopt as our totem some animal with a bit more perspicacity and nobility than that hapless amphibian?”

 

*****

 

More Relevant Dispatches
(Additional news of interest to socialists and other like-minded activists.)

WAS THE MURDER OF DNC FUNCTIONARY SETH RICH A REVENGE HIT? Counter Punch says Fox News, citing an anonymous federal source, names Rich as WikiLeaks' most likely source  of the DNC emails that reveal how the Hillaryites maliciously sabotaged the Sanders campaign. (Yeah, Fox is indisputably Rightist – perhaps an acronym for Fascism's Omnipresent Xenophobia? – but we should all recognize, just as Counter Punch does, that here in the Imperial Homeland, the Rightist factions of the mainstream media propaganda machine do indeed occasionally report the truth.)

“CYBERWAR CAN BE MORE DESTRUCTIVE THAN STANDING ARMIES”: Six reports on the improperly secured U.S. and British governments' malware that wreaked global chaos.

FASCISTS TARGET WASHINGTON STATE FOR (MORE) UNION-BUSTING: The Stand, the state (AFL/CIO) Labor Council's online daily, cites two reports that Washington is a top-priority target in a lavishly funded campaign to (further) dis-empower organized labor and abolish (remaining) workers' rights. (Once again I am reminded of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's testimony that we Washingtonians are amongst the favorite rats in the rat-lab experiments by which the Ruling Class perfects its methodologies of oppression.)

“TRUMP IS THE SYMPTOM, NOT THE DISEASE”: another of Chris Hedges' thought-provoking essays, vaguely  suggestive of the possibility the long-declared socialist may at last be accelerating toward realization the only antidote for fascism is Marxism. Quoth he: “Our failure to defend those who are demonized and persecuted leaves us all demonized and persecuted.”

YES, EVEN NOW I TOO SOMETIMES SUCCUMB TO HOPEFULNESS, hence my slightly radicalized form-letter contribution to the email campaign on behalf 21,000 AT&T workers:

As a consumer who cares about how companies treat the people who work for them, I as an AFL/CIO union member was outraged to learn AT&T refuses to negotiate a fair union contract with the women and men who earn you and your company billions of dollars.

For shame!

Hence I most emphatically demand you settle with the workers who make you and your fellow AT&T Wireless executives so obscenely wealthy. I also insist you stop sending call-center work overseas and outsourcing retail sales to low-wage third party dealers, undermining standards for all those who work for a living here and abroad.

(Disclosure: I remain an active, dues-paying member of the National Writers Union, an offspring of the United Automobile Workers [UAW]. You too can send a letter by clicking on the link.)

AND ABOUT THOSE EAST-TENNESSEE STREET PREACHERS: My father bought a business in Knoxville and he and my stepmother moved themselves, their children and I there in 1950, when the city still had its already legendary Market Square, an area of at least four entire blocks that included a 19th Century red brick market house, with adjacent parking that accommodated local truck farmers and was a superb place to buy fresh produce and even freshly slaughtered pork and beef.

It was also the regular haunt of the region's then-ubiquitous street preachers, one of whom often “spoke in tongues” and whom Cormac McCarthy accurately describes in his novel The Orchard Keeper as “screaming incoherently and brandishing a tattered Bible,” almost certainly the volunteer evangelist I too remember from my own visits to the market.

The market house is gone now, the square has since been gentrified into a mall, and the street preachers are of course forever banished. Though I cannot but wonder – with no small quotient of fear – if we socialists are to be disdained by the hope-iated Moron Nation masses much as Market Square's wild-haired, begrimed and sweaty orators were disdained by the determinedly bourgeois, ostentatiously churchy Knoxvillians of yesteryear.

Which is precisely why I am so adamant about our need to re-translate Marx, Engels and Lenin into the easy accessibility of 21st Century contemporary language, lest we too be accused of speaking in tongues.

LB/18 May 2017

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Beware Co-optation by Democratic (sic) Deceptiveness

(Readers please note the new Dispatches format.)

OUR MOST IMPORTANT but most likely overlooked reading last week is a vitally provocative analysis by Shamus Cooke that warns against the Democratic (sic) Party's already frighteningly successful campaign to co-opt the Leftward shift provoked by Trump's ever-more-unabashed Nazism.

Alas, Cooke's vital work was obscured both by “mainstream media” censorship and the ever-more-deliberately blinding fog of Trumpwar. The report's undeserved obscurity was further facilitated by a woefully non-descriptive title, “The Trump 'Resistance' Is Slipping Through Our Fingers.”

First published  by Counter Punch and thoughtfully reprinted by Popular Resistance, Cooke's opening paragraphs neatly summarize the grim reality that should top every USian socialist's list of reactionary tendencies to expose and resist:

“The anti-Trump movement...faces two grave dangers: allowing Democratic Party affiliated groups to co-lead the movement, who want only electoral change while continuing many of Trump’s pro-establishment policies...(and) demoralization due to lack of concrete victories...already beginning to suck energy from the movement at a time the far-right begins to grow legs. Our movement’s defeat will be the fascists growth spurt...The Democrats want us to think that just Trump is the problem, and therefore they are the solution. But many of Trump’s policies are extensions of Obama’s...whose policies allowed Wall Street to capture 99% of new wealth creation.”

If you read nothing else from last week, please read Cooke. (I'd also recommend Ajamu Baraka's “War, Militarism & No Mainstream Opposition: Different Administration Same Story,” a Popular Resistance original that, in essence, elaborates on Cooke's revelations.) Meanwhile, as Cooke concludes:

“The most revolutionary thing (you) can do is not punch a fascist but help mobilize the broader population into a political fight. Local coalitions should copy the Richmond (California) Progressive Alliance, which successfully fought for rent control and recently won two more seats in the city council while remaining politically independent. Similar 'Resistance' coalitions can be organized quickly by reaching out to labor and community groups, asking them to plan joint actions or mobilize collectively in support of common demands made against city or state government. Millions of people are looking for the hope that a strong political movement provides, but the window is shrinking.”

(A link to additional information on the Richmond Progressive Alliance is here;  its Facebook page is here.  Those of us intrigued by united-front and dual-power activism might also find equally useful material on the Tacoma Communists Facebook page. Tacoma CLP, of which I am a proud member, organized the city's expanding clinic-defense program [see photographs here and here ]. The Party also spearheaded Tacoma's semi-successful campaign for a $15 minimum wage;  since then we're feeding many of Tacoma's homeless people and have begun the process of organizing a Tacoma tenant's union.)

*****

TRUMP'S FIRING OF James Comey has triggered what may well be the most confusing and contradictory tsunami of speculative analyses in our nation's history.

According to “mainstream media” – which let us not forget is the One Percent's wholly owned propaganda machine, different from Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda only in that it is a privatized, for-profit cartel rather than a government agency (and is thus an ultimate example of Neoliberal Capitalist governance) – Trump axed the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to quash the tediously labeled “Russiagate” investigation. Such war-mongering efforts to bring on the Apocalypse by nuking Russia – and war-mongering is precisely what they are – are peddled here,  here  and here.

(At least these last three writers managed to avoid the wearisomely unoriginal “Russiagate” – never mind it may have been chosen to psycho-linguistically reinforce the deceptive purpose of casting Trump as another Nixon.)

Meanwhile the infinitely more reliable Robert Parry, who scooped the world on Iran-Contra (and has ever since been penalized by the USian Ruling Class for his journalistic integrity and diligence), reports what is more likely the real story:

“President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday reflected a growing concern inside the White House that the long-rumored scheme by 'deep state' operatives to overturn the results of the 2016 election may have been more than just rumors...I’m told that Clinton was seen as dangerously hawkish and Trump as dangerously unqualified, opinions privately shared by then-President Barack Obama...So, according to this account, plans were made last summer to damage both Clinton and Trump, with the hope of putting a more stable and less risky person in the Oval Office...When I first heard about this supposed cabal in the middle of last year, I dismissed it as something more fitting a Jason Bourne movie than the real world. But – to my amazement – the U.S. intelligence community then began intervening in the presidential campaign in unprecedented ways.”

Parry provides additional corroborative analysis here. The Global Research team enlarges on the deep-state-coup hypothesis with five reports here  and a supplemental report here. William Boardman, by far the most credible – that is, the most un-co-opted – of the Reader Supported News writers, details his cogent observations  in “Comey Sacked by People With Much to Gain by Firing Him.”

Lastly there is my own suspicion, which sidesteps the distractions and/or red herrings of the competing analyses:

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion Trump's ouster of Comey is simply yet another victory in the president's ongoing Nazification of USian Capitalist governance. Thus Trump positions himself to appoint in Comey's place a Heinrich Himmler clone who – assuming approval by the Republican majority in the Senate – would turn the FBI (which already functions as the primary USian secret police agency), into a genuine Gestapo. This of course would give the Christofascist GOPorkers the governmental corps of covert killers for which they've always yearned.

If this is indeed what is happening, one of the prime contenders for the job is no doubt Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who believes all outspokenly Leftist USians should be arrested as “enemy combatants” and imprisoned without trial “at Guantanamo.” Clarke, recall, was on Trump's short list for Homeland Security chief.  Should such an atrocity as Clarke's appointment (or anything like it) eventually obtain, remember you read it here first.

Nevertheless, all we know for sure is what I said at the beginning: that We the People are being deluged 24/7 with contradictory narratives – which at the very least should make us especially wary of what might be hiding in all that muddy water.

*****

More Relevant Dispatches
(Additional news of interest to socialists and other like-minded activists.)

VIOLENT DEATHS OF BLACK LIVES MATTER ACTIVISTS in Ferguson, Mo., suggest death squad activity, no surprise to those of us familiar with the Ku Klux mentality of USian bigots, and a perfect example of why the Real Left should be unyielding in its defense of the Second Amendment.

TRUMP PACKS “ELECTION INTEGRITY COMMISSION” WITH RACISTS, another infuriating example of his brazen Nazification of USian governance. (This report includes a petition to Congress you can sign if you believe it might help discourage the intended purge of voter registration rolls.)

PSEUDO-SAVIOR SANDERS BARES HIS RULING-CLASS FANGS, withdrawing his former support for single-payer health care. Such is the predictable treachery of any politician beholden to the Capitalists – more proof the only meaningful difference between the Democratic [sic] Party and its Republican counterpart is how the former hides its fascism behind a Big Lie smokescreen of faux-humanitarian rhetoric.

GENOCIDE BY TRUMPCARE THREATENS US ALL. It would go far beyond the Capitalists' usual roster of those of us marked for death  because we're no longer exploitable for profit and would kill untold numbers of children, women and men whose only “crime” is treatable illness. No doubt to replace workers slain by deliberate denial of medical services, enactment of this “health care reform” atrocity would also shut down Planned Parenthood, resulting in “thousands of unintended pregnancies.”

ACLU: IF YOU LOOK UNAMERICAN, STAY OUT OF TEXAS. No joke; the Alamo state has given its cops permission to bust anybody they think might be a foreigner.

WAR ON FIRST AMENDMENT CLAIMS ANOTHER VICTIM, a reporter named Dan Heyman who dared confront Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. Given the Trump Regime's successful persecution of the retired librarian who laughed aloud at the absurd claim Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is not a racist, these are obviously the opening volleys of an unprecedented war on the last remnants of our freedoms of expression.

HERE'S (MAYBE) A WAY TO PROTEST THE ABOLITION OF NET NEUTRALITY. Though I'm woefully ignorant of computer technology and always vexed by the snidely bourgeois elitist arrogance that so often characterizes the associated texts, these linked instructions sound useful enough to pass on, with my apologies if I'm mistaken.

LEST WE FORGET WHY RUSSIA SHOULD NEVER BE OUR ENEMY, here's a reminder that to invade the Motherland is to fight nearly every man, woman and child who lives therein. More to the point, remember how the veterans so honored proved to the world the one and only genuinely effective antidote to Fascism (that is, the mature form of Capitalism), is Marxian defiance.

DAMN WELL WORTH READING: HEDGES' REVIEW OF “I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO,” in which he lauds the late James Baldwin as a prophet equal to George Orwell, adding that “whiteness...is about using moral rhetoric to defend exploitation, racism, mass murder, reigns of terror and the crimes of empire.”

USEFUL HISTORY: RACISTS, THEOCRATS AND CULTURAL WARFARE: not a quick and easy read, but – despite the fact it mostly ignores the pivotal issue of class warfare – it's nevertheless a worthwhile reference on the post-World-War-II history of USian Fascism.

LB/15 May 2017

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'Health Care Reform': USia's Newest Euphemism for Genocide

(I again feel the need to apologize for the long delays between posts: I am still recovering from a nearly fatal illness, a process my physician tells me will probably take at least seven more weeks. Hence I have decided to try a new approach to filling this space, writing shorter, more specifically focused and therefore more frequent essays rather than allowing material to accumulate into long multi-topic texts as I have done in the past. While I can't promise I'll succeed – health crises and other unanticipated interruptions seem to be the bane of my old age – I'll damn sure do my best to better serve you, my faithfully patient readers, to whom my most emphatic thanks.)

*****

THE PATHETIC OPTIMISM of the Empire's self-proclaimed “progressives” – those corporate Neoliberals (aka “Democrats”) whose pretend obliviousness  to the tyranny of USian governance reduces their claims of humanitarian consciousness and democratic values to Big Lies – was never more obvious than in the prelude to the gleefully genocidal atrocity  approved last week by the Republican House of Representatives.

Up until the moment the so-called “American Health Care Act” passed by a 217-213 vote, We the People were repeatedly assured this euphemistically disguised program of mass murder by denial of health care would probably again be defeated  as it was in March.

Several of these deliberately deceptive paeans to USian “democracy” have since been disappeared from the ever-more-obviously censored Internet. But some remain, though I cannot but wonder for how long. For example, as of this writing (7 May), there is the Axios piece Mike Allen wrote on 3 May reporting that a veteran of the Obama White House told him Comedian Jimmy Kimmel's emotional denunciation of the measure “killed the Republicans' already shaky efforts” to destroy Obama's (admittedly problematical) health-care reform.

But instead – and just one day later – we were treated to the infuriating spectacle of the bill's supporters celebrating the potential deaths  of at least 24 million people, the would-be de facto executions cheered and applauded with the same pornographic glee evidenced by Hillary Clinton's celebration of the USian-facilitated execution by anal impalement of Libyan Dictator Gaddafi.  Such is the bipartisan moral imbecility of USian politicians in the age when We the People have been reduced to utter powerlessness.

Jonathan Alter was one of the very few journalists – myself among them – who saw beyond the pseudo-optimistic bullshit. Quoth Alter:

“The latest betting is that the new version of Trumpcare – which would, like the old bill, throw 24 million Americans off health insurance – will fall short...(But) I’m not so sure. The White House and GOP-controlled Congress desperately need a win to show the conservative base they can deliver. They also need the money saved from throwing millions off of coverage to help fund their tax cuts for the wealthy.”

Now the genocide-by-denial-of-medical-care program goes to the Senate, where – once again – we are reassured it won't pass, this by the same Neoliberal (i.e., Democrat) Senator Charles Schumer who had assured us the just-approved bill would never pass the House.

Because the GOPorkers – their comments eagerly reported by “progressive” media – are mouthing the same (deliberately?) deceptive predictions,  I cannot but wonder if what we are witnessing is an especially cunning Ruling Class disinformation campaign, intended both to minimize organized opposition to what should be called the HIAGANE Act (Health Insurance As Genocide Against Non-Exploitables, pronounced “High Agony”), and to weaken the urgency of the growing support  for Improved Medicare for All. (Tragically, such propagandistic manipulations as are emerging from both Ruling Class parties are as demonstrably effective here in Trump's Fourth Reich as they were in Hitler's Third Reich.)

But nearly all such reassurance deceptively omits two important facts. Firstly, the three Republican senators' opposition is based on their belief the house bill is not genocidal enough. Secondly, given the moral imbecility essential to participate in Capitalist governance, any USian politician can be blackmailed or bribed to support whatever position his One Percent masters demand. Note for example Howard Dean's health-care reversal,  stunning to those foolish enough to cling to some vestige of belief in USian “democracy,” but absolutely predictable amongst those of us who recognize we are ruled by politicians who are defined not by ideology but by the most viciously mercenary sorts of Ayn Rand heartlessness.

Hence my guess is Trumpcare – the real purpose of which is to exterminate the millions of us who are no longer exploitable for profit while simultaneously cutting taxes to make our already bloody-handed Capitalist overlords even more obscenely wealthy – will become law no matter how many of us protest.

That's the (painfully realistic) message  in a bit of dark comedic satire emailed me by my comrade K.D., to whom a clenched-fist salute of gratitude and a round of well-deserved applause. K.D.'s timely find is a short film, like the cartoons that prefaced the movies of my youth, and it perfectly describes the greedily murderous intent of the pending legislation and its corporate authors.

Such is life – and more explicitly death – beneath the tyranny of Capitalism as it unabashedly matures into what most of us are labeling fascism or Nazism but which, on second thought, is actually a 21st Century hybrid of Nazism and feudalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class; total subjugation and the bottomless poverty of eternal serfdom for all the rest of us. (The original forms of Nazism and fascism, let us not forget, remained popular for as long as they did precisely because they provided their supporters with jobs and other promised benefits, while today's Prosperity-Gospel-reinforced Ayn Rand Capitalism delivers us naught but deception and misery.)

Meanwhile, exactly as in the prelude to the election of Trump himself, “progressive” optimism expresses nothing more than the wishful thinking of those who are too ignorant, too cowardly or too bribed to acknowledge that the United States has become the global embodiment of an Evil so omnipotent it cannot be overthrown  save by one or another forms of apocalypse.

LB/7-8 May 2017

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