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INTRODUCTION

  • HOW DO I CHOOSE STORIES
    for inclusion in the "Coronavirus Update"? Essentially -- and in keeping with today's (unequivocally apocalyptic) context -- it is a matter of relevance plus probability of censorship.  I ask myself three  questions: firstly, is a given story useful – a term in this context I use as synonymous with relevant. If the answer is yes, I than ask, secondly, how likely is it to be suppressed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine. And here my rule is one of inverse returns: the less likely I think I am to see the story disseminated via the MMPM, the more likely I am to include it in these daily anthologies. Reports that pass the first two tests are each then subjected to the third and final test: do they include indications from which we might evolve estimates of our situations accurate enough to facilitate effective response? If the answer here is also affirmative, the report in question will always be included in the daily update. Meanwhile the first two criteria generate a lengthy list of possibles I winnow down to probables and thence to musts, a process that takes approximately seven or eight hours each day. (¶)-Beyond that, it's on the basis of my news judgment as it evolved during my 64 years as a writer, photographer and editor, three decades of which were in the working press. (Despite an on-and-off involvement with the alternative press that began in 1963, all but about three of those first 30 earning-years were primarily in the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, at least half in jobs where much of my responsibility was deciding what stories we would publish and on what pages they would appear. My job titles ranged from sports editor and associate editor to city editor, news-and-picture editor and editor-in-chief. (¶)-For most of those years, it seemed a promising career. But as my colleagues moved stealthily Rightward, so did I move ever-more-openly Leftward, until eventually I was Left...outside.) (¶)-Meanwhile "Dispatches from Dystopia," dispatchesfromdystopia.net, which evolved from the less sharply focused "Outside Agitator's Notebook," has under the deadly pressure of the coronavirus pandemic become precisely what its title and domain name describes. It is an ongoing anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-Capitalist testimony from the Dystopia that Neoliberal (neo-fascist) Capitalism has made of our world. It's epicenter is the post-humanitarian United States of America: our species' self-inflicted Moron Nation and its empire of global-conquest malevolence, the de facto Fourth Reich, the true birthdate of which will eventually be recognized – if indeed our species somehow miraculously survives the present era – as 22 November 1963. (¶)-Dispatches thus chronicles our relentless subjugation by Capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery and – just as Capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism – as it now matures into a Nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the details of what is occurring, DfD shows how ours is a Dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's Zieg-Heil-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the genocidal, ultimately ecocidal atrocities the Capitalist Ruling Class perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “Exceptionalism.” (¶)-Why “USian” rather than American? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or Nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist USiaNazi enslavement. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which Capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, too each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – Nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn. (¶)-But what then is Capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics alone, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, its only possible offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), Capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation, filth, deadly danger of untreated disease and constant fear of enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care. (¶)-Ultimately Capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male One Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of Capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under Capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of Nazi governance. Not that We the (formerly exempt) People should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the Capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all the Capitalist victim realms abroad. (¶)-Moreover much of our plight is of our own making. We the People long ago surrendered to our Capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the Capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp. (¶)-Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by Capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide.   (¶)-Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly Nazi puppet government. And now, in the person of Donald Trump and his appointees, the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, the people who by their prideful ignorance and hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world. (¶)-But in these times our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the Capitalist “education” system; by Capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the physical and psychic terrorism of Capitalism's manufactured crises. (¶)-Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. And as it says in a breathtakingly apt, wrenchingly poignant anthem grown increasingly popular far beyond its video-game origin, “shadows fall and hope is gone; steel your heart; the dawn will come.”

For More Information...

Links relevant to Introduction

Fire Survivors

  • After the Demonstration Failed
    These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including three books in progress and all the associated research. Some of these photos shown here escaped the flames because they were with me in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the One Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost and what might have been. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

  • Goddess emergent (1), 1968 (blue variant c. 2009)
    In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfilment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

Graffiti: a Sampler

  • Gun Graffiti
    When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the mammalian practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Faces of the Fight

  • Health Care For All!
    Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of health care reform's opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally set for Lakewood City Hall, the event was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

RELEVANT WEBSITES

  • Americans United for Separation of Church and State
    A vital website that is often our only source of accurate information about the terrifying effort to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States.
  • Best Site for Suppressed Assassination Facts
    The late Mae Brussell was our most relentless researcher into the murder of President John Kennedy and many other such outrages. Her legacy is a damning list of the USian Empire's darkest secrets.
  • Best, Most Thorough Documentation on the CIA's Destruction of the 1960s Counterculture
    Ms. Brussel outdid herself in her nobody-dares-publish-it investigative report exposing how the CIA's Operation Chaos destroyed the 1960s Counterculture. (My assumption is the Agency, with its Ivy-League analysts and their knowledge of pagan mythology, recognized the Counterculture's anti-patriarchal, resurrection-of-the-Goddess direction, understood it as a far greater threat to Capitalism than Marxism and responded with the murderous efficiency inherited from Gestapo predecessors.)
  • Communist Labor Party
    Communism as it is evolving in the United States after the murder of the American Dream and the slaying of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.
  • Communist Labor Party's Harry Bridges Club (Facebook)
    Communism as it is evolving in Tacoma, Washington.
  • Consortium News
    Superb reporting and analysis. Founder/Editor Robert Parry exposed Reagan's Iran-Contra scheming and has been persecuted by the capitalists ever since.
  • der Spiegel
    Mainstream German newspaper that is often a valuable source of news about Western European politics.
  • Global Research
    A genuinely independent news site -- neither definitively Left nor Right -- that often covers stories suppressed by U.S. Mainstream Media, which (let us never forget), is owned by the same One Percenters who own the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties and thereby control all U.S. governance at every level.
  • Gun Owners of America
    Fanatically hard-Right (and often ChristoFascist as well), it is nevertheless the best source for information about the One Percent's efforts to forcibly disarm the U.S. 99 Percent.
  • International Marxist Archive
    All of Marxism's defining texts defiantly uploaded to the Internet by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as its final contribution to humanity's eternal struggle for economic democracy -- without which there is no democracy at all.
  • Popular Resistance
    A daily newsletter featuring essential tactical and strategic analysis plus vitally informative reports of news suppressed by the "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Rewire
    Probably the most in-depth coverage of women's issues, LGBTQ issues and general human rights issues available on the U.S. Internet today, bolstered by decidedly professional reportage and editing.
  • RT
    Formerly "Russia Today," it accurately covers U.S. news the "mainstream media" propaganda machine routinely suppresses. Its notable work includes the nation's best coverage of the Occupy Movement (2011-2012), and the ongoing struggles of Black Lives Matter, Water Protectors and other such groups against the Empire's now-openly-fascist policies of homeland governance.
  • Second Amendment Foundation
    Unmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.
  • Socialist Worker
    An informative Marxist website in the United States, with news reporting and analysis that is usually far superior to anything fed us by capitalism's "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Southern Poverty Law Center
    Best source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, ChristoFascist and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.
  • TASS, the Russian Wire Service
    Vital reading, especially now that the USian Empire's plans for global conquest have rekindled the so-called Cold War.
  • Theocracy Watch
    Cornell University's in-depth source on the escalating campaign to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the USian Homeland. It is flawed only by its refusal to recognize the Democratic (sic) Party's mostly clandestine collaboration with the openly theocratic Republicans -- a collaboration revealed in frightening detail by Jeff Sharlet's "The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" (Harper: 2008).
  • TruthOut
    Generally reliable crowd-funded news site sometimes featuring cogent sociological analysis by Henry Giroux. Discussion thread's potential limited by Discus, which discourages posting of comments written off-site.
  • Ultra Violet
    Perhaps the most powerful racially integrated gender-equality organization in the United States.
  • World Socialist Web Site
    The day's news, typically with the most in-depth Marxist analysis available on the U.S. Internet -- this despite constant interference by the Empire's privatized, for-profit censorship apparatus.
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September 2017

26 September 2017

Slow-Motion Genocide: Trumpcare, Betrayal of Puerto Rico Are Schemes to Exterminate Minorities and Surplus Workers

Black Athletes' Revolt Could Change USian Revolutionary Dynamics 


APART FROM THE ONGOING rebellion of African-American athletes, the influence of which is already spreading beyond the realm of sports,  probably the most important story in the USian Homeland right now is the One Percent's escalation of its efforts to radically reduce Working Class and non-white populations, whether by abandoning Puerto Rico  to the most immediately deadly aspects of terminal climate change or by making healthcare so expensive  only the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals can afford it.

Both tactics, denial of post-disaster aid and denial of healthcare, are obvious expressions of Capitalism's strategy of exterminating unwanted or surplus populations by boiled-frog methods of slow-motion genocide.

Meanwhile the athletes' rebellion offers the hitherto-unexplored potential of expanding revolutionary leadership to include a group of people who are not only profoundly respected for their physical prowess but are literally adored by a segment of the USian population that spans every race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and caste.

Whether and to what extent that potential might explode into actuality depends on how brutally the authorities suppress the athletes. The team owners' verbal alliance with the dissidents is obviously an attempt at nonviolent suppression, specifically by co-optation, but in such a white supremacist JesuNazi police state as the U.S.has become, literally anything is now possible.

That's why, though the Mainstream Media pundits assure us the athletes' protests are succeeding, also that there will be aid for Puerto Rico and that the latest Trumpcare terror will never become law, we dare not forget these pundits are the same Josef Goebbels types who assured us Trump/Pence JesuNazism would never be headquartered in the White House – the name of which has now been fully restored to its grotesque antebellum appropriateness.

We are thus ruled by an ideological combination of JesuNazi white supremacy and Ayn Rand moral imbecility in which anyone who is neither wealthy nor a Christian Identity fanatic is damned as the same sort of üntermenschen the Trump/Pence Regime's German Nazi predecessors gleefully consigned to the concentration camps. If We the (Real) People are to have the slightest hope of survival, we must therefore do the difficult work of cleaving through a seemingly impenetrable cloak of disinformation and deception to examine the regime's every gesture and initiative in terms of its real-world impact on ourselves, the global 99 Percent.

Not only does retaining health as a privilege of wealth  guarantee the premature death of any of us deemed no longer exploitable for profit (whether because we're rebellious, old, disabled, chronically unemployed or all of the foregoing), it's also a helluva lot cheaper than manufacturing Zyklon B and building the facilities essential for its use. Besides which, death camps have fallen out of fashion since the Red Army liberated Berlin.

Moreover – given how our overlords get off on massaging each other with money – premiums from the plutocrats and from the professionals and executives who whore for them will obviously be sufficient to keep the insurance barons and prescription drug lords in business after We the (Surplus) People are all We the (Genocidally) Murdered Corpses, thereby guaranteeing the lords and barons their continued membership in Capitalism's global fraternity of sadists, mass murderers and eco-slayers.

In this dystopian context the most relevant report available is my own analysis, for which scroll down to “Single Payer Situation Report.”

But it is confirmed in far greater detail by a CounterPunch report published on 21 September: “Most of those Democrats have signed on because they felt politically forced to, because they knew they could not face their constituents if they didn’t. But many of them do not support single-payer... and will, in fact, do their best to undermine and prevent it.”

This was of course precipitated by Trumpcare's most brazenly murderous iteration yet.

While I trust most USian readers already know the horrifying details of the latest Ruling Class effort to make “healthcare” the newest euphemism for genocide, I'm nevertheless linking additional aspect-focused reports here,  here, here and here. These URLs make the record complete and serve readers outside the imperial homeland who many not understand the infinite viciousness hidden beneath the Big Lie of “our democracy.”

As to what will obtain – whether genocidal Trumpcare will become law, whether the genocidal abandonment of Puerto Rico will continue and what will become of the athletes' rebellion – the best I can say is we won't know until it happens. But only a fool would be optimistic.

 

***

 

The Rest of the Week in Review: Obladi, Oblada, Death Goes On

The Broader Significance of the Athletes' Rebellion is what it reveals about life in the USian Homeland as it truly is for those of us who refuse to give the stars-and-stripes banner of white patriarchal Capitalism-under-god the Zieg Heil its politicians demand.

Racist malevolence has become so extreme even cultural heroes – and major-league USian athletes are certainly that – are routinely attacked by the police. Thus it is increasingly undeniable the police have been federalized and militarized specifically to sustain Capitalism and expand white supremacy.

Most of us know this story already. Many of us have experienced it firsthand. But its ultimate significance lies in the fact the transformation of the local police into the equivalent of armored infantry – and thus into a functional counterpart of the German Nazi SS – began long before the advent of the Trump/Pence Regime.

This tells us our overlords knew at least two decades ago,  and probably as early as the Nixon years, that the uniquely USian hybrid of Capitalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia and Christian Identity bigotry would eventually become so vicious its defense would require Gestapo-type brutality. 

 

The Central Intelligence Agency's Strategic and Tactical Debt to Nazi Germany – so obvious in its activities both at home and abroad (though not specifically mentioned in the linked text) – should thus surprise no one, particularly those of us who recognize the father-son relationship of Capitalism and Nazism.

Predictably, the CIA under Trump/Pence management is becoming yet another instrument of JesuNazi fulfillment: “more white, more male, more Jesus.”

 

Just as Trump/Pence Normalizes Violent Racism, So Does It Enable Militant Misogyny, a disheartening conclusion strongly suggested by an alarming escalation in assaults on family planning facilities. Obvious question: are representatives of the regime secretly meeting with JesuNazi zealots and giving them permission to maximize their anti-abortion aggressiveness?

 

Apropos Mysogyny, Note Nikon's Exclusion of Women from Its Newest Camera Ads. Thirty-two photographers, no women. Nikon claims it's an accident  but those of us with a more rationally skeptical turn of mind wonder if the company is cozying up to the Trump/Pence New Order.

 

St. Louis Police Brutality Is an Old Story, but Truthful Coverage of It Is Brand New: a detailed report by People's World provides us the perspective Mainstream Media deliberately suppressed. 

 

Harvard Comes Out of the Closet, Defiantly Aligns Itself with JesuNazi Agenda by honoring Betsy DeVos and endorsing her campaign to destroy what remains of USian public education. Since Harvard is the leading USian Ruling Class university – first amongst the academies of privilege where those who transform Capitalism into JesuNazism are educated in the methodology of Machiavellian malevolence – its fondness for the Trump/Pence Regime should surprise no one, especially after the university's behavior toward Chelsea Manning.

 

But Apparently Not Every Department Got the Memo. The Harvard business school just released a report condemning what too many of us still think of as “our democracy” as a primary enemy of the people.

 

JesuNazis and Other Fascists Now Openly Recruiting College Students, another manifestation of the same Trump/Pence dynamic that's targeting minorities and women. Thus fascist Ohio seeks to abolish on-campus dissent.

 

More on How the Democratic (sic) Party Continues to Fuck Itself – and Us. Yes it's an old story, but in such desperate, any-port-in-the-storm times as these, we (myself included) often need to be reminded the Democrats are merely the more deceptive half of the One Fascist Party of Two Names that tyrannizes us all on behalf the One Percent.

 

New Vietnam War Documentary Refurbishes Old Vietnam War Lies. not surprising since it's broadcast on PBS – the now hopelessly co-opted Plutocratic Broadcasting System. A properly negative critique, here,  with my comment-thread recollections of the class warfare that so often divided veterans and non-veterans and foretold how the latter would purge the Working Class from the Democratic (sic) Party. Plus an antidote to the documentary's lies, here.  Relevant to these texts is a soldier's essay on why there is no longer an effective veterans' anti-war movement, its conclusions supplemented by my comment-thread review of the real reason the government ended the military draft: that mandatory military service was training the revolution.

 

***

 

Life and Death Under Capitalism Closer to Home

Washingtion State Has the Nation's Most Regressive Tax Structure, nor will its smirking Bill Gates aristocracy ever allow even the slightest easing of the deliberately impoverishing burden its taxes inflict on lower-income people. Between-the-lines message: apart from the state's deceptively progressive identity politics, it is as socioeconomically viciously as any unapologetic plutocracy in the deep South, the greedy malice of its Ruling Class proven by its perennial war on public education and infrastructure.

A Washington State Lawsuit Could Clarify a Key Issue of States Rights. Attorney General Bob Ferguson's suing GEO Group Inc.,  the operator of the for-profit gulag in which immigrants are held for deportation. His state Superior Court suit accuses GEO of wage theft and enslavement of prisoners. GEO claims its violations of Washington state labor law are legal under federal law because its prison is a federal facility.

But What Might Ferguson Do If Trump/Pence AG Sessons Invades the State with deputized federal troops  (note particularly the fourth paragraph) and/or DeVos Family mercenaries for mass arrests of marijuana users? It is now almost certain Sessons is planning such an action –  no doubt intending to confine the thousands of prisoners in concentration camps on federal military bases.

Though There's Also Some Solidly Good News from Washington State. Trump/Pence misogyny has sparked a surprising surge of female activism in a nominally conservative rural county.  And a precedent-setting show of female photographers is generating big attendance and rave reviews on an island near Seattle.

 

***

 

The News from Abroad Is a Mixture of Intriguing and Disheartening

How BRICS Is Emerging as the Main Threat to USian Imperial Hegemony: an anthology of informative, thought-provoking reports assembled by Global Research  that explain why the imperial plutocracy, in sheer terror of losing its global dominance, is trying to start World War III.

 

Fascist Resurgence Restructures German Politics. First a report from Der Speigel, then a commentary from Common Dreams,  and somewhere deep in the CD comment thread, the restoration of my commenting privileges and my gratitude obliquely expressed by what might accidentally be a poem:

HARK!
Do I hear the sound of snare drums?
Of hobnailed jackboots trodding cadence on the cobblestones?
Is it of Horst Wessel the marching multitude now sings?
Be afraid.
Be very very very afraid.
For this time there is no Red Army to save us
from ourselves.

 

***

 

Stuff to Contemplate

It Ain't Utopia, but There's a Helluva Lot Less Anxiety Under (Real) Socialism: a brief anthology of interviews with residents of the former German Democratic Republic.

 

Existential Crisis: Do I Punch That Nazi or Just Walk Away? From the text: “...in order for the left to present itself as a true alternative that is supportive of everyday citizens’ struggles and opposed to the continued oppression of the state and its right-wing metastases, it must embrace people’s rights for justice, equality, defense and dignity by any means necessary.”

 

We Should Continue Reading Chris Hedges Despite His Despicable Slander of anarchists, socialists and Marxists by portraying us as no better than Nazis. Why? Because he is brutally forthright in warning us of what is to come:  “This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do—govern through wholesale surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed censorship and, eventually, violence.”

Anti-Fascist Heroines Past and Present. A Common Dreams essay honors three women, Sophie Scholl, Anne Frank and Heather Heyer. It concludes with “Let all their stories inspire a new wave of bold resistance.” Let us therefor in the name of “bold resistance” also remember heroines such as Lyudmilla Pavlechenko, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Zinaida Portnova and all the other Soviet women who battled the fascists, personifying female courage for all time and humanity.

 

Clicktivism Occasionally Works. But don't for a minute imagine it takes the place of the revolutionary activism that is our only true antidote to Capitalist tyranny. Nevertheless sometimes it's better than nothing. Hence this.

LB/26 September 2017

-30-

 

Posted at 05:45 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Current Affairs, Disabled People , Film, History, Minorities, Misogyny, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Television, Weblogs | | Comments (0)

Tags: anti-fascist heroines, Betsy DeVos, black athletes' rebellion, boiled frog, BRICS, Capitalism, Chelsea Manning, Chris Hedges, clicktivism, coping with fascism, Democratic (sic) Party, fascists recruiting on campus, female activism, freedom from anxiety, German Democratic Republic, German elections, German fascism rises again, government as enemy of the people, Harvard, Harvard Business School, healthcare, Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Maria, JesuNazism, little anxiety in GDR, Mainstream Media, marijuana, militant misogyny, militarization of police, military draft, most regressive state taxes, Puerto Rico, slow-motion genocide, socialism, St. Louis police brutality, surplus populations, Trump/Pence Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessons, Trump/Pence Regime, Trumpcare, veterans, Vietnam War, Washington state, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Washington state versus feds, Washington state versus GEO Group Inc., White House, World War III, Zyklon B

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25 September 2017

Trumper-Tantrums Foul USian Professional Athletes; Amateurs Join Pros to Penalize Trump-Pence Bigotry

MOST OF YOU are probably familiar with at least some elements of the following story. But as a [long-ago] sportswriter and sports editor who is also a near-lifelong Marxist, I believe I approach it from a unique perspective.

What began as a sports controversy over anti-racist protests by Colin Kaepernick has evolved into a nationwide rebellion against white supremacy.  And its ranks are already being reinforced by high school athletes.

Hence I now view this long-overdue uprising as a uniquely revealing stand against the socioeconomic fragmentation and genocidal terror inflicted on minorities and minority-supporting Caucasians by the white racist hatefulness personified by the Trump-Pence Regime and the white majority that voted it into office.

That's why I suspect the conflict's final resolution will be unerringly prophetic, telling us in no uncertain terms whether these whites will follow the Trump/Pence Regime's malignantly racist leadership into a JesuNazi replica of Hitler's Germany.  

***

UNTIL NOW, COMPETITIVE SPORTS in the USian Homeland, whether amateur or professional, were mostly apolitical, especially from the perspective of the fans.

Apart from yea-team partisanship, you left your politics behind whenever you joined the solidarity of stalwarts gathered to witness a sporting event, whether in the stadium or the arena or at the swimming pool or on the racetrack or the golf course or the rifle range or wherever else it might be taking place.

Were there gradients of true – that is, were it possible to somehow intensify a truth to greater truthiness – the truth of athletics as an apex of apolitical accomplishment was never more actualizing than in the alleged minds of those of us who, as sportswriters*, were assigned to cover the action.

But now Trump the Tyrannical Tweeter has triggered massive protests by tainting professional sports with the same racist malevolence  that prompted the Nazi-minded white majority to vote him into office.

As a result, it's legitimate to ask two questions based on concerns that in the USian Homeland were previously unimaginable:

Will the obscenely rich owners of professional sports teams who joined other Capitalists to celebrate the electoral triumph of JesuNazism by donating millions to the Trump/Pence inaugural now do as the German Nazis did  in obedience to Hitler and enforce Trump's demand to purge USian sports of allegedly unpatriotic minorities?  (A later story about Trump's call for a German-Nazi-type purging of sports, its disclosures weakened by typical Mainstream Media euphemisms, is linked because it  reports the spread of anti-racist protests into professional baseball.) 

And who will the USian white majority support – the rightfully rebellious athletes or the Tweeting Tyrant?

(I am aware some pro-Trump team owners are now repudiating Trump's remarks. But I am also aware Hitler and his cronies allowed some Jews to participate in the 1936 Olympics to contradict reports of Germany's increasingly murderous antisemitism. Now as then, the assurance of Ruling Class spokespersons is most often meaningless.)

__________________

*I know the often adamantly apolitical mindset of sportswriters from long experience. I began my journalism career as a 16-year-old sports stringer and copyboy at The Grand Rapids Herald, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in late November 1956, where I got a press card and an American Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO union card on the same day. Though I no longer remember the exact date – that was lost when the 1983 fire destroyed most of my journals – it was at the time the best day of my life, yes even better than the night I lost my virginity in the chilly East Tennessee darkness of a one-car garage three weeks before my 15th birthday.

Subtracting the three active-duty years of my six-year Regular Army enlistment, I was a sports stringer, then a staff sportswriter and finally a sports editor until 1965, when I exited sports via crime and political reporting and entered what I considered “real journalism” – that is, journalism with the potential for revolutionary agitation that had prompted my teenage choice of careers. Though I had always regarded sports as irrelevant entertainment, I knew from the beginning that without a college degree – which due to familial abusiveness would remain beyond my reach until enactment of the Johnson Regime's Vietnam Era G.I. Bill – sports writing was my only path to journalistic success.

I must have pretty good at it too. It gave me the strength to survive the emotional devastation inflicted by the parental hatefulness that ousted me from Michigan and returned me to Tennessee, it got me similar albeit woefully underpaid stringer-work on local newspapers in and around Knoxville, and when I came back from mandatory military service to civilian life, it got me a staff sportswriter's job on one daily and the sports editor's job on another and won me a few awards and commendations including a second place from the Tennessee Press Association in 1963 and a lifetime membership in the Knoxville Track Club for my then-revolutionary focus on individual personalities rather than scores in the coverage of track and field events – the latter an honor I understand was withdrawn after my commitment to the Civil Rights Movement became public knowledge.

 

*****

 

YES, THIS IS a terribly belated update of Dispatches, with another much longer and still-more belated update to follow in perhaps 18 hours.

I have yet to completely recover from the disruptions imposed by the intrusion of a surprise state inspection atop production of the monthly newsletter I edit for my fellow residents in the 90-unit senior housing complex where I dwell.

Because of these disruptions, which also afflicted some of the newsletter's contributors, I was unable to finish this month's edition until September 22, fully six days past its normal deadline.

That's why – though until now I have tried faithfully to produce Dispatches twice per week – I am cutting this blog back to once-per-week updates, with publication very early on Tuesdays.

The new update schedule is also in response to readers who have told me I sometimes include so much linked material, they lack sufficient time to read it all.

Content, of a quantity akin to that of a weekly news magazine, will of course retain the same focus, with emphasis on presumably relevant material I suspect has been downplayed or suppressed by the Mainstream Media propaganda apparatus. And, as before, I will post extras when breaking stories so demand.

My apologies to anyone who is inconvenienced or disappointed by this change.

LB/24 September 2017

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Posted at 03:53 AM in Current Affairs, History, Memoirs, Minorities, Web/Tech, Weblogs | | Comments (0)

Tags: 1936 Olympics, Adolf Hitler, anti-racism protests, antisemitism, Colin Kaepernick, Donald Trump, German Nazis, high school athletes join protests, high school sports, JesuNazism, Loren Bliss , professional sports, racism, Trump-Pence Regime, white supremacy

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18 September 2017

Pterodactyls of Climate Change Coming Home to Roost; JesuNazism, White Supremacy and War-Mongering Prevail; Subversive Thoughts and Books; How Not to Break Your Dick

 

THE MOUNTING HORRORS of terminal climate change foster the sort of news reports I deliberately exclude from Dispatches, a practice that today I am momentarily abandoning.

As a prelude though let me explain the three reasons that prompt such exclusions:

Firstly, disasters are invariably headlined by Mainstream Media, which means all of us are constantly deluged with all such news. In contrast, the purpose of Dispatches is ferreting out relevant information to which we might not otherwise have immediate access.

Secondly, Mainstream Media typically eliminates any mechanism of empathy beyond the solicitation of contributions to Capitalism-sustaining “charities.” It thus reduces disasters to pornographic spectacles of death and destruction. Nor is this accidental. It occurs because far too many USians – especially the JesuNazis and their ilk – find it obscenely titillating to witness the suffering of others, particularly when those others have darker skins: precisely why the professional descendants of Josef Goebbels reap such grotesquely huge profits by exploiting mass tragedy.

Thirdly, the pornification of disaster exemplifies perfectly the misdirection by which Capitalism offers us the televised equivalent of lynchings or mass executions to distract us from its culpability in the tragedies and atrocities themselves.“If it bleeds, it leads” is therefore far more than editorial policy. It is also disclosure both of the sadistic nature of Capitalism and the fact that by offering vicarious fulfillment of sadism – re-creation of the opiate provided by the Roman Colosseum – the Capitalists cunningly numb rebellious impulse and thus perpetuate their omnipotence.

Nevertheless amidst the resultant effluent of disaster porn there occasionally appears, like some rare jewel borne into our field of vision on a torrent of turds, a report about climate-change that genuinely expands our knowledge of what it means, who is to blame and what – if indeed anything at all – might yet be done to prevent our extinction.

But disaster of such inconceivable magnitude also demands a telling metaphor, even if the metaphor itself is based on popular misconception, as is surely the case when I describe the horrors of climate change as “pterodactyls coming home to roost,” which honors the murdered Malcolm X (“chickens coming home to roost”)  even as it adapts his apt description of the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the inconceivably greater murder of our species and our planet by Capitalist greed rationalized by the patriarchal contempt and hatred for all that is female, most especially our Mother Earth.

Popular imagination envisions the pterodactyl as a winged Tyrannosaurus Rex, perpetually thirsty for blood and insatiably hungry for living flesh, the most nightmarish creature ever to hunt our planetary skies. It thus gives us an appropriate symbol for the relentless airborne deadliness of terminal climate change. It also gives animated form to our belief the petroleum with which we have fatally poisoned ourselves and our environment is the liquefied putrescence of dinosaurs. And the last syllable of the name of one of pterodactyl's  cousins, pteranodon, could be taken as a reference to theocracy-enabler Donald Trump, the USian emperor whose JesuNazi-mandated surrender to the apocalypse has in all probability damned our species' to extinction and guaranteed the reduction of our beloved Earth to the ultimate bug planet.

Meanwhile there is no denying climate change has escalated from scary threat to deadly omnipresent horror  (see also my contribution to the linked report's comment thread).

As explained by Paul Fleckenstein in a recent address to a local chapter of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), only Marxism can save us from extinction. Cuba's great success in coping with hurricanes –  particularly in contrast to deadly U.S. failures – underscores the functionality of the Marxist humanitarianism Capitalism forever seeks to exterminate. (The foregoing URL also accesses a vital but probably useless petition to free Ana Belén Montes, which I nevertheless signed as an act of fuck-the-Empire defiance and hope you will sign likewise.) And as much as I distrust Amy Goodman and her Democracy Now – were it truly revolutionary, it would have been suppressed long ago – her broadcast on “why Cubans are 15 times less likely to die from hurricanes” provides further documentation of how Marxism saves lives and might thereby save our species.

Then there is Elizabeth West's poignant essay,  which tells us by implication why – if indeed we are to have any chance at all of saving ourselves – all Marxists must become Mother Earth's pagans and all Mother Earth's pagans must become Marxists, and why we cannot effectively begin our work to preserve our species and our planet until we rid ourselves of the shackles imposed by Abrahamic religion and its direct descendants Capitalism and fascism.

There is also this, which given its Mainstream Media origin you may have already seen or heard, but it is included here as, to date, the most complete BDA (bomb-damage-assessment-type) accounting of the physical destruction inflicted by Hurricane Irma.

For the record and in conclusion, here too are the scientific truths about pterodactyl, pteranodon and petroleum, a paleontological potpourri supplemented by an essay on the role of the bug planet in sustaining a “happily fascist world.”

 

***

 

Now for the Rest of the Accumulated News Since 11 September:

Lest We Forget All Fascists Are Murderers and Should Be Treated Accordingly, 15 September marked the 54th anniversary of the Birmingham Church Bombing, in which the Ku Klux Klan murdered four young black girls and wounded 19 others. Two other blacks were also slain by bigots in Birmingham, Alabama that day, as if in white supremacist celebration of the original atrocity.

 

White New Hampshire Teens Try to Lynch Biracial Child, White Cops (Predictably) Do Nothing until the boy's outraged mother posts a photo of her son's rope-torn neck on Facebook, the post goes viral and the resultant outcry embarrasses the authorities into reluctant action. (The foregoing link is to most complete of several alternative-media reports.) As usual, the Trump/Pence Regime responds with the silence of approval.

 

Yet Another White Cop Beats a Murder Charge for Gunning Down Another Unarmed Black: the archetypal USian story repeated ad nauseam.  

 

White Supremacists Use Captive Courts to Further Their Suppression of Black Voters, the nasty tactic evident in the relentless persecution of a Georgia city official.

 

A Legislator Vows to Run Over Protesters, Thereby Applauding the Murder of Heather Heyer: the headline tells the whole story, yet another example of the JesuNazi predilection for violence against which we should all be prepared.

 

Sante Fe Cops Prove It's Not Just Blacks in White Supremacist Gunsights. Still another report on white USian police brutality, this time targeting First Nations people.

 

Harvard Endorses War Crimes by Embracing War Criminals, Rejecting Chelsea Manning. Of all the reports on this disheartening but predictable revelation of Harvard's replacement of educational open-mindedness with closed-minded fascist malevolence, Robert Parry's is the most complete.

 

How the Empire Is Ginning Up World War III: Now that the Capitalists have raped our Mother Earth to ruin, they must find someone to blame for the apocalypse – and what better way than provoking war with Russia?  Note too Vladimir Putin's determined efforts for peace,  all of which are, of course, suppressed or distorted by Mainstream Media in its Josef Goebbels function as the world's first for-profit Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, owned by the same One Percenters who own and control USian government at every level.

 

The Empire Fucks Itself – Again – This Time by Alienating South Korea: the breathtaking karmic irony of the Maker of Banana Republics reducing itself to the biggest banana republic yet. From the text: “Russia’s evolving political entente with both South Korea and Japan is providing support for...(reshaping)... regional populations for a generation to come: revival of plans to build a $50 billion rail-auto bridge linking Hokkaido with the Russian island of Sakhalin, thus uniting Japan with the continent and facilitating freight shipments across Russia to Europe.”

 

Does the United States Have Any Future beyond Bedlam and Apocalypse? Gilbert Doctorow gets right to the point.

 

On the “Specific Horrors to Being an American When You Become Aware of the Truth”: an especially compelling essay by Missy Comley Beattie titled, with maximum intentional sarcasm, “Why I Wish Hillary Clinton Had Won.”

 

 

***

 

Neoliberalism Is Everywhere the Same, But the Resistance to It Is Stronger Outside USia. French President Emmanuel Macron reveals himself as another Barack Obama and the French Working Class responds accordingly  rather than cower in submission as the USian Working Class so often does. Seems the French Ruling Class ran an overt fascist to elect a closet fascist. Was this the ploy that backfired in the U.S.? Or was the Trump/Pence victory the One Percent's clandestine intent? No matter; either way our overlords win. Either way Capitalism continues its metamorphosis into fascism.

 

***

 

Single-Payer Situation Report

As We All Know, There Is No “Care” in USian Healthcare – Nor Will There Ever Be. Even so, the newest campaign for socialized medicine (which I fervently support, and have fervently supported for as long as I can remember), is interesting from at least three perspectives.

One is the issue itself: will we remain fatally imprisoned in the death house of health “care” as a privilege of wealth, or will we somehow muster the courage necessary to liberate ourselves from Capitalism and finally achieve healthcare as a human right?

Two is the present campaign's deliberately deceptive optimism, so reminiscent of the optimism generated by the Democratic (sic) Party's all-time Big Lie of “change we can believe in.” Let us resolve to never, ever, be again so utterly duped by the Capitalists and their Ruling Class vassals.

Three is the campaign's psychological warfare function as the precursor to another epidemic of politically-induced alienation – the self-disenfranchisement that so effectively serves the One Percent. I would not at all be surprised if the (inescapable) failure of this newest single-payer campaign triggers another abandonment of the ballot-box at least as widespread as was provoked by the unprecedentedly malicious deception that preceded Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer.

Indeed I have no doubt intensification of the doomed campaign's vast potential for inflicting by its failure a new plague of weaponized alienation is the sole reason it is garnering support from the Democrats or any other members of the Ruling Class. Let us never forget all of its supportive politicians are mere puppets of the One Percent. They would not be allowed to hold office were it otherwise.

Think, people. To imagine our Capitalist overlords will ever give up their murderous profiteering and allow such humanitarian legislation to be enacted is to again fall prey to the Big Lie of “our democracy” and thus to invite post-defeat collapse into (often genuinely clinical) depression. Understand the Evil that confronts us, the magnitude and cunning of the Capitalists as they metamorphose into JesuNazis. If we are to achieve healthcare as a human right, we must first win the socialist revolution the vast USian majority is too cravenly subjugated to even contemplate.

(An earlier story that foretells the doom of single-payer, albeit in far less financial detail than the Common Dreams investigative report linked above, is here,  linked only to share my contributions to its comment thread.)

 

***

 

Dangerously Subversive Reading and Discussion

In Eloquent Rebuttal to Neoliberal Propagandist Ta-Nahesi Coates and his latest defense of Capitalism-bolstering identity politics, Paul Street characterizes  “The First White President” as “more brilliant bourgeois bullshit” and exposes how Coates, like Obama, tries to hide his fascism behind his dark skin.

 

Book Excerpt from Michel Chossudovsky's always-relevant America's “War on Terrorism”: Can you say “Reichstag Fire”?

 

Jeffrey St. Clair Leverages a Review of Hillary's Newest Tome into a Devastating Exposure of the Real Hillary. A delicious sample of his text: “This egotistical gibberish comes from the woman who seemed eager to bring the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust over Syria and Ukraine...What Happened is a sordid book, petulant and spiteful. It made me feel queasy and dirty while reading it, like the whole 25-year-long experience of Clintonism itself. By the end, I got the sense that its sleazy torrent of invective and blame-mongering was more an attempt to console the frail psyche of the author rather than to repair her shattered image to any readership the book might find. In the years to come, What Happened will prove much more valuable as documentary evidence for psycho-historians than political scientists.”

 

Note Too How Amazon, Its Tongue Ever Reliably Rimming Our Rulers' Rectums, is suppressing the negative reviews with which innumerable everyday readers are rebuking Hillary's book.

 

Bruce Levine's Review of Jonathan Smucker's Retrospective on Occupy, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals (AK Press: 2017). From the book's text:  “One byproduct of focusing too much on group identity is being dismissive of potential allies because they were not radical enough...We often seemed more preoccupied with the purity of our political expression than with how to move from Point A to Point B. It felt as if having the right line about everything was more important than making measurable progress on anything” (emphasis as in the review).

As an early and long-term veteran of Occupy Tacoma, I can attest to the accuracy of Smucker's reported observations, but I wonder if he dares address the vicious anti-intellectualism that was as effective a destroyer of the movement in Tacoma as the tear gas and truncheons of the federally militarized local police were elsewhere.

Apropos which, anyone who wonders why the federal government is turning local police into armored infantry – equipping them with the combined-operations (aerial-and-waterborne assault) capabilities that enabled all the German victories in the early years of World War II – need first recognize it proves the One Percenters and their vassals believe their own intensifying fascist viciousness will eventually provoke rebellion even from the thoroughly cowed and cowardly USian 99 Percent. Obviously – and here is the sole purpose behind the federalization and militarization – our overlords are preparing to suppress us with the same murderousness the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS employed against the Poles, Czechs and Russians.

 

In Another Relevant Book Review, Richard Moser of CounterPunch takes us inside Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times, an invaluable history of 1960s and early 1970s activism. By Amy Sonnie and James Tracy (Melleville House: 2011), the book is said to have many lessons to teach us today. (I've no idea why it is being re-reviewed now save that its relevance is probably ever more obvious due to the resurrection of Marxism and recognition of the truth of its insistence we cannot find our way to revolution without knowing our past.)

 

Discussion: “The Disagreement with Black Bloc Tactics Articulated in Previous Socialist Worker articles is a disagreement over the best means of fighting the fascists, not a preference for pacifism versus violence.“

 

“It Is Commendable and Necessary to Go Blow-for-Blow in the Streets against Predatory Racist Gangs,” asserts Glen Ford in Black Agenda Report. “It is also clear that Donald Trump is giving political aid and comfort to today’s sons and daughters of the old Confederacy who, although not yet able to mass in large numbers, could do so in the future. But that threat pales in comparison to the three-quarters of a million sworn police officers that strut the streets of America, killing Black and brown people with impunity and dragging hundreds of thousands into the gulag every year. According to Police magazine , 84 percent of cops supported Donald Trump for president. The statistic is no surprise, but points up the real threat to Black lives and the rule of law: the state, itself.”

 

With Huge Thanks to People's World for Its Link to David Harvey's Wonderfully Informative, Easily Readable Teachings on Das Kapital, here, which all of us should bookmark for quick reference and continued study.

 

***

 

And Now at Last Some Uplifting News and Penis-Protective Sex Education

“Happiest Place” Workers Manifestly Unhappy with Substandard Wages. Forty thousand Disneyland dissidents rise up via Unite Here to fight for $15.71 per hour.

 

Instructions on How Not to Fracture a Phallus, Whether Yours or Your Lover's. See “This Week in Sex” https://rewire.news/article/2017/09/15/week-sex-semen-can-carry-dozens-viruses/ (zip down).

LB/13-17 September 2017

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Posted at 07:54 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Poor People, Religion, Science, Weblogs | | Comments (0)

Tags: " Hillary Clinton, " predatory street gangs, " "Hillbilly Nationalists, " Black Bloc, " bug planet, " Amazon censorship, " Birmingham (Alabama) church bombing; Ku Klux Klan, " David Harvey, " disagreement over tactics, " Disneyland dissidents, " Hillary the Warmonger, " how not to break a dick, " John F. Kennedy, " Malcolm X, " Paul Street, "America's 'War on Terror', "Black Agenda Report, "brilliant bourgeois bullshit, "chickens coming home to roost, "Das Kapital, "happily fascist world, "Hegemony How-To: a Roadmap for Radicals, "if it bleeds it leads, "People's World, "sleazy torrent of invective, "Socialist Worker, "Starship Troopers, "This Week in Sex, "What Happened, $15.71 per hour, 000 workers, 40, 84% cops support Trump, all fascists are murderers, another cop beats another murder charge, apocalypse, Capitalism, climate change, Clintonism, disaster porn, Donald Trump, Emanuel Marcon, France, healthcare, Heather Heyer, horrors of being American, identity politics, Japan, JesuNazism, Josef Goebbels, killings by cop, Korea, legislator vows to run down protesters, Mainstream Media, Marxists, Michael Chossudovsky, misogyny, Mother Earth, neoliberalism, neoliberalism, neoliberalism everywhere the same, New Hampshire attempted lynching, not pacifism, Occupy, pagans, patriarchy, peackeeper Putin, petroleum, pterodactyls, pterodons, Russia, Sante Fe cops target First Nations people, Sante Fe cops target Native Americans, self defense, single payer, socialism, Ta-Nahesi Coates, theocracy, Trump-Pence Regime, U.S. fascism, U.S. future, U.S. warmongering, Unite Here (union), Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times, Vladimir Putin, voter suppression, World War III

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13 September 2017

Poverty Forces Me to Dwell in Subsidized Housing. This Means I Am Caged in Abject Powerlessness, Which Is Why...

there will be no Dispatches today, nor any until Sunday 17 September 2017 at the earliest.

Normally I manage to update Dispatches even during the always hellish week I also edit and produce the monthly newsletter that serves the federally subsidized, privately owned senior housing complex in which I am now imprisoned for the remainder of my life by steadily worsening poverty.

Yes it is extremely difficult to simultaneously fulfill both sets of obligations, but until now I have succeeded. It requires an utterly exhausting work-week of at least 80 hours, physically and mentally draining when one is young, deadly dangerous when one is old, but frankly I don't give a fuck because I am close enough to the grave I no longer care how I get there as long as it is not too painful.

In addition to reading and evaluating approximately 100 news items as I do for every Dispatches update, the monthly newsletter demands not only that I function as an editor but also as a writer and photographer and atop all that endure the mind-numbing clerical drudgery of typing manuscripts written by people who are even more impoverished than I and therefore will not ever be able to afford computers. Next I design the issue and assemble its texts and illustrations into a presumably attractive whole and send it off to be printed and hope – because the people who do the printing don't care whether or when the newsletter gets to its 90 readers – it is completed within two or three weeks.

All this (unpaid) anxiety and frustration kills seven days each month, but my neighbors say it serves them well, so I endure its discomforts because I am delighted to still be of some use to other humans.

Dispatches, also unpaid, is born of the same motive. It is always a joy to produce, even during newsletter week, because it not only encourages my journalistic iconoclasm but due to the requisite research also rewards my lifelong addiction to the sensuality of learning and thinking. Had I acquired enough wealth or been a child of caring parents, my lust for knowledge would surely have propelled me into academia rather than journalism, where such pleasures were far more rare but where entirely on my own I found a useful home despite the abandonment and betrayal that defined my childhood.

But this month the discomforts of newsletter week became unendurable. On Monday 11 September we the inmates of Geezer Hall were informed the state of Washington will on Thursday 14 September conduct a surprise inspection of our premises – this in addition to the quarterly premises inspections by which all our noses are rubbed in the turds of irrefutable truth that under the jackboots of Capitalism, we who are segregated from the rest of society as “the poor” and “the elderly” and “the disabled” are de facto subhuman and therefore must be regularly inspected to insure we are not somehow befouling the overpriced apartments in which we fritter away the final years of our allegedly worthless lives while we wait for the last bus on the route called Death.

The quarterly inspections are inflicted on a regular schedule, which means we typically have at least three weeks to prepare, and though the process is always miserable, I always manage to pass. But the grotesque realities of worsening physical disability also mean the chill of inspectophobia routinely invades my consciousness. To fail is to risk eviction. And to prepare for this surprise inspection we are allowed only the minimal 48 hours notice mandated by state law. As a result – afflicted as I am by midlife back and knee injuries that were always troublesome but with old age have deteriorated into painfully crippling disability made far worse (and sometimes excruciating) by osteoarthritis – I am condemned to three days torture by the agonies of the bending and stooping and twisting and turning required to ensure I pass this inspection too.

And of course this comes at a time when – due to the rebellion of domestic neglect into which I gleefully escape whenever I am contentedly occupied by meaningful and therefore fulfilling endeavors (as I usually am on behalf Dispatches) – conditions inside my apartment have deteriorated to maximum disorder: dirty clothes scattered everywhere, the sink stacked with rancidly moldering dishes, the kitchen stove spattered with food, the linoleum begrimed with who knows what, the bathroom sorely in need of a bath, and over everything a coating of pale gray ash deposited by the air-poisoning superfires of terminal climate change that rage throughout the drought-stricken Pacific Northwest.

By putting in 12 pain-wracked hours per day on Monday and Tuesday I have completed the clean-up save for the kitchen and the floors. Vacuuming and mopping the floors would take an able person an hour at most. They take me at least four utterly wretched hours including rest-breaks necessitated by pain. The kitchen – washing the dishes and cleaning the stove and cabinetry and counter-tops and scrubbing the stove-spatter off the refrigerator – will take another only slightly less painful four hours.

Yes of course I have prescription pain medication, but thanks to the federal decrees implicit in biblical medicine – treatment predicated on the Christian doctrine that suffering pleasures the Divine Sadist and is therefore redemptive – the quantity is minimal and strictly rationed.

Tonight I will go to bed hurting. I will toss and turn in doomed efforts to minimize my discomfort. I will consider myself goddamn lucky if I get even three hours of genuine sleep. Then tomorrow morning my alarm clock will roust me out at 7 a.m. I will make my bed, the requisite bending and stooping and twisting and turning inflicting at least 45 minutes of the nearly unbearable agony I routinely avoid as long as possible. That's why, any more, the only times I ever actually make my bed are on pre-inspection mornings. As a result I normally sleep in a hopeless tangle of sheet and blankets, but it is far preferable to the suffering imposed by making the bed.

After that I will doze uncomfortably in my desk chair as I await the inspectors – who may or may not number my dwelling amongst the 10 apartments they will scrutinize in each of two buildings.

Such is the crushing price of tenancy in government-subsidized housing – the inescapable and infinitely demoralizing inspection-taught lesson such tenancy means not only absolute powerlessness but the total and permanent loss of even the most minimal control over the conditions of one's life – precisely the reality I try desperately to forget because there is not one motherfucking thing I can do to change it but which, thanks to this surprise inspection, now kicks me in the balls and spits in my face and reminds me once again that in the eyes of our Capitalist masters I am at least as low and loathsome as the filth I must later today scrub off the kitchen and bathroom linoleum.

Finally, on Friday 15 September – assuming I am physically able to get out of bed and sit at my desk and run this computer – I will start the newsletter work I should have begun last Monday. If possible I'll also update Dispatches. But don't hold your breath. It may be Wednesday the 20th before my life is back to normal, and even that estimate might be overly optimistic. Hence my apologies.

LB/13 September 2017

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Posted at 06:21 PM in Current Affairs, Disabled People , History, Memoirs, Poor People, Religion, Seniors | | Comments (0)

Tags: apartment inspections as reminders of powerlessness, biblical medicine, Capitalism, god as the divine sadist, subsidized housing, the pains of disability and old age

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11 September 2017

Clinging to the White Bourgeois Delusion of 'Our Democracy' Reduces Optimism to Counter-Revolutionary Complacency

Our capitalist overlords have already robbed us of our (alleged) liberty. Now we must purge ourselves of any delusion they might restrain the lethal malevolence they have unleashed.


READING AND ANALYZING the news as it comes to me by email, snail mail and telephone, I scan probably 100 reports per day, and from this tsunami of texts and messages choose perhaps a dozen of the most relevant* items to forward in these twice-weekly Dispatches.

It is a process comfortingly akin to how, for nearly 56 years, I earned my living as a reporter, photographer, editor, creative director, copywriter or freelancer for at least 43 media outlets (including staff jobs on 18 daily or weekly newspapers and trade journals and 15  years as a stringer for United Press International back when it was a real wire service).  And last April when Dispatches acquired its present form – this thanks to encouragement from my comrades in the Tacoma chapter of the Communist Labor Party – I was initially overjoyed to be, at age 77, once more energized by culturally useful work.

But within weeks I was disheartened by the relentlessly negative content of the news flow. It was far more depressing than anything I had yet encountered, even as an investigative reporter or on big-city police and crime beats.

Each day brings  an ever more repugnant litany of atrocities. These include an update on the record number of killings  committed by the ever more militarized police; the efforts to impose death-dealing terms of imprisonment for acts that were formerly protected by our now-forever-nullified constitution; the plans for maliciously genocidal cuts in the already lethally shrunken or misogynistically redirected funding of our never-more-than-miserly grants of life-sustaining stipends and services; the racist war against immigrant children ironically begun by our first African-American president; the incidents of deliberate ecocide; the escalations in the relentless thrust toward thermonuclear Armageddon by our Biblical Capitalist overlords; the fanaticism of Christians whose sadistic god demands the apocalyptic fealty of murderous hatred for our Mother Earth, for all the human females of which she is the archetype and ultimately for all her species including our own.

The accumulating hurtfulness of such daily encounters with our necrotic national nastiness far exceeded the burden of any other series of theoretically impersonal events I had covered. It was worse – more soddenly painful – than anything I might have imagined or anything I have yet encountered in even the most horrifically dystopian fiction.

But finally, bolstered by the discipline of Marxian ideology, I was restored – first to anger and then to purposeful activism. I recognized how today's endless litany of atrocities serves our Capitalist masters as a weapon of adverse conditioning. I saw how it brutalizes us until we succumb to despair and flee to whatever soothingly self-centered apolitical obliviousness we might somehow manage to find. And I then came to understand our only defense is to accept its function as a weapon and follow Sun Tzu's advice to turn our oppressors' strength into a weakness.

After all, serving the people (hopefully helping make our lives a bit less difficult while also nurturing the revolution), is precisely the reason I chose 63 years ago to devote my own life to journalism.

As always with such consciousness-raising, this most recent renewal process included a number of epiphanies. I was surprised to discover that age – and undoubtedly the enhanced realization of human sisterhood and brotherhood that is one of Marxism's most compelling gifts – had opened me to new intensities of empathy. I understood as never before the impulse to pull the proverbial blankets over one's head and and hide. I sensed too how tempting it might be to ignore the screams of someone being raped to death in a nearby alley when we all now know with absolutely proven dead-body certainty that calling the police for help can get us killed by some trigger-happy cop instead.

Most of all I was renewed in my determination to describe such events in their proper historical and socioeconomic contexts as manifestations of Capitalist savagery and its theoretically limitless intensification as it morphs into fascism. (Think of Auschwitz as a beginning of Capitalism's metamorphosis and a million Hiroshimas and Nagasakis as the end result of its maturation into fascism.)

Meanwhile let us never forget the deluge of deliberately depressing data is not the only form of information the Capitalists weaponize for psychological warfare. There is conventional censorship, always a factor in USian Mainstream Media, but which today is more commonplace than ever. There are the sorts of purposeful Big Lies pioneered by Josef Goebbels, an USian example of which was Iraq's alleged possession  of “weapons of mass destruction,” the falsehood that cloaked the start of the Empire's effort at unabashedly Nazi-style military conquest of the Middle East.

Which brings us at last to the primary topic of today's Dispatches – the far more insidious weaponization of information in which its operatives use optimism not to inspire and encourage rebellion but to reassure us we can relax – that the hard and often dangerous revolution is not necessary after all.

Long aware of the uniquely counter-revolutionary dangers of deliberately deceptive optimism and falsely fostered hope, I have been tracking the phenomenon via the Internet for some time, at least since the Democratic (sic) Party weaponized both optimism and hope with what was since proven to be the most brazenly deliberate Big Lie in USian political history: Obama's 2008 slogan, “change we can believe in.” Since then, amongst the two dozen mostly leftist and pseudo-leftist websites upon which I now regularly rely for reports relevant to Dispatches' readership, the worst offenders – perhaps not surprisingly – are those that revealed hitherto-closeted neoliberal (i.e., fascist) sympathies by the aggressive, often censorious despotism of their 2012 support for Obama and their 2016 support for Hillary Clinton.

One such website is Common Dreams, which banished me from its roster of authorized comment-thread contributors several months ago, apparently in retaliation for my repeated assertions the so-called “Russiagate” scandal – apart from being moronically “gated” by Mainstream Media's breathtaking hostility to original thinking – is probably nothing more than a red herring to distract us from Hillary's culpability in the victory of JesuNazism.

Another is Reader Supported News, wherein a regular contributor is Robert Reich, a former neoliberal who repudiated that particular brand of fascism during the mid-1990s but still clings to the Big Lie the core murderousness of Capitalism can somehow be ameliorated, as if by plunking Froggy the Gremlin's Magic Twanger.

Via RSN, Reich serves up a new example of counter-revolutionary optimism nearly every week. One of his more outrageous essays, dated 21 August 2017, was deceptively headlined “The End Is in Sight. Trump's Power Is Ebbing Away Fast.”

Rebecca Solnit, a notably talented essayist whose prose is often exquisitely poetic, is another repeat offender. Like Reich, she clings to the ultimately suicidal belief Capitalism can be purged of its defining evils merely by electing Hillary Clinton. Hence on 19 June 2017, originally in The Guardian, the Solnit soliloquy absurdly entitled “Victories Against Trump Are Mounting. Here's How We Deal the Final Blow.”

Perhaps the most potentially deadly example of counter-revolutionary optimism in this sampling is “The Nashville Statement Is the Religious Right's Death Rattle,”  by Sarah Jones of The New Republic on 5 September 2017. Jones assures us the JesuNazis who achieved political omnipotence by the Trump/Pence victory and have since been ramrodding the entire nation toward vehemently misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic theocracy, are really a dying cult and are therefore nothing about which to worry. Were we to heed Jones' advice, a great many of us – especially those of us who live in rural USia – would take the potentially fatal step of locking away firearms kept loaded and ready for defense against the terribly real threat of JesuNazi violence, especially against women and sexual minorities. 

Then there's Jill Abramson, another of The Guardian's writers, who tells us, “Trump Is a Coward. At Least It Limits the Damage He Does,” this on 4 August 2017 – just four days before Trump brought the world to the brink of nuclear war by threatening North Korea with obliteration by “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Last but by no means least is the constant, bottomlessly deceptive and therefore increasingly obnoxious optimism in support of universal single-payer health care. In one of many examples by several writers for several websites, Scott Galindez, another Hillaryite neoliberal who is stabled at RSN, promised us on 26 August 2017 that “Single Payer Healthcare is Achievable.” His deftly composed text would probably convince anyone foolish enough to still believe the Big Lie of “our democracy” that single-payer is just around the calendric corner. Such disinformation is an edged weapon that cuts in two directions. Not only does it reassure us revolution is unnecessary; it elevates false hope to maximum heights, thereby establishing the conditions for a terminal plunge into the depths of hopelessness that serves the Ruling Class by driving people out of politics and into the despair of permanent self-disenfranchisement. Thus did millions abandon the vote after the magnitude of Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer because painfully obvious. Presumably those of us who understand the zero-tolerance tyranny of late-Capitalism won't be conned because we recognize revolution is the only way we will ever compel the Empire to recognize healthcare as a human right rather than a privilege of wealth.  

For those who need a post-Galindez refresher on the malevolent omnipotence of USian Capitalism, here is a piece by Henry Giroux that prophecies the Trump/Pence triumph, not by name but as the emergence of an overtly fascist regime which in all probability will retain its power forever – that is, until the Empire self-destructs in thermonuclear war or until it has crumbled, as Rome did, into perpetually quarreling regional nations.

__________________
*I have three primary criteria for determining the relevance of information to Dispatches readers. (1)-Does the report advance or reinforce our recognition of Capitalist malevolence and its inevitable intensification as Capitalism is drawn by the momentum of its own moral imbecility into fascism or Nazism. (2)-Is it likely to be suppressed or radically downplayed by Mainstream Media (which, conversely, is why Dispatches often seems to ignore major news events such as hurricanes and eclipses I know will receive widespread coverage). (3)-Is it strategically or tactically exemplary, i.e. can it serve as a lesson in successful or unsuccessful activism, as a suggestion for local projects or to warn us of the inconceivably Machiavellian cunning the Capitalists conceal behind their facade of ignorance, stupidity and arrogant incompetence. To paraphrase Sun Tzu: underestimation of the enemy is warfare's deadliest sin.

 

***

 

Hedges Trashed Antifa as Psychological Nazis. Now Two Anti-Fascist Women Trash Him. First, in keeping with the episode's chronology, here is the Chris Hedges opus in which he casts away his decades-long pretense of being a socialist and sides openly with those Capitalists who in their clandestine transition to fascism would assert there is no difference between Communists and fascists and thereby blind us to what they are doing to us. Next come the rebuttals, thought-provoking work by Ramona E. Durán via CounterPunch, the other by CounterPunch's Stephanie Basile, a notably informative review of Mark Bray's Antifa: the Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House: 2017).



Korean War Incidents Show the Apocalyptic Dangers of Warfare Near North Korea's Border with Russia and teach us a hitherto-classified lesson  about how the U.S. Air Force repeatedly bombed the Soviet Union but President Harry Truman and Russian Premier Josef Stalin collaborated to preserve world peace.



El Salvador's Murderous Misogyny Is What Trump/Pence JesuNazis Would Impose Here: an unusually truthful New York Times report shows us the kind of violent oppression by which the JesuNazis intend to re-enslave women. 

 

Why Female Equality Is Vital If We Are to Survive Climate Change: a provocative essay by H. Patricia Hynes: “there is abundant evidence that women care more about the environment than men and handle risk—economic, environmental and personal—more wisely than men.”


JesuNazi Gestapo Wannabes Are Organizing Themselves into a Real Gestapo, compiling secret-police-type dossiers  on Antifa activists. Undoubtedly these Nazis – following in the jackbooted footsteps of their German Nazi predecessors – are also assembling dossiers on all the rest of us who are part of the real left – and maybe even on the pseudo-leftists who front for the Democratic (sic) Party.


Anti-JesuNazi Coalition Wins Bitter Fight to Keep LGBTQ Book in Chicago Library: a significant victory against the Illinois Family Institute  and its fanatical effort to impose theocratic censorship.

 

Rail Passengers Scored a Major Congressional Victory when a bipartisan group of House members defeated the Trump/Pence Regime's effort to end all USian long-distance rail passenger service.

LB/10 September 2017

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Posted at 04:44 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Poor People, Religion, Science, Web/Tech, Weblogs | | Comments (0)

Tags: aerial battles, African-Americans, air-ground attacks, Alex Wubbels, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), anarchists, anti-capitalist, Barack Obama, Barack the Betrayer, Bethlehem, Chris Hedges, Clarence Kemp, communists, corporate crime, culture wars, Democratic (sic) Party, deportation of children, Evangelicals, Henry Giroux, immigration, impeachment, JesuNazis, local police, Michigan City (Indiana), militarization of police, neoliberalism, nullification of the Fourth Amendment, optimism as counter-revolutionary weapon, PA, Patrick Toomey, plight of deportees, Rebecca Solnit, Republican Party, Republican Party, Robert Reich, Roe v. Wade, Sarah Jones, Scott Galindez, Simon Radecki, socialists, Soviet Air Force, Trump, Trump-Pence Regime, United States Air Force, University of Utah Hospital, US police state, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, “our democracy”, “the Nashville Statement, “we only kill black people, “you can’t really be an anti-fascist without being an anti-capitalist, ” healthcare, ” Detective Jeff Payne, ” Korean War, ” Mark Bray

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06 September 2017

I Cough; Therefore I Am (Yet Alive) in Burning-Planet Smoke

 

MAN-MADE CLIMATE-CHANGE RADICALLY INTENSIFIES FOREST FIRES. The vultures of environmental apocalypse come home to roost in the ironically named Evergreen State, where the USian version of bourgeois environmentalism – an atrocity-fostering ideology the murderous reality of which seems 100-percent paywall-censored save for exceptions granted to its advocates – has long fulfilled its goal of protecting the Capitalists and their continuing the rape of the environment. Now the ashes of our burning planet are falling like toxic snow on Tacoma and the Puget Sound region in general. The concentration of smoke that at 19:30 PDT on 6 September 2017 officially ranges from “unhealthy” to “very unhealthy” thus threatens Tacoma with what could be the worst air-pollution disaster in its “Tacoma Aroma” history. It is already hospitalizing some of my neighbors in the senior housing complex where I live. Yesterday the smoke reduced the sun to an ominous red ball. Today it obscured the sun completely. And – of course – both the Trump/Pence Environmental Protection Agency and Mainstream Media, in accordance with their anything-to-protect-Capitalism policies, are minimizing the danger.

 

EVEN WORSE THAN WE THINK: A FORMER OPTIMIST confirms the ultimate pessimism I expressed in “Death Squad Nation: How Trump/Pence Militarization of Cops Ends Forever Any Real Hope of “Liberty and Justice For All.”

 

TRUMP 'JUSTICE': FEDERAL COURT OKS BANNING BLACK, HISPANIC VOTERS: a notably white supremacist law, originally nullified because of its undeniably racist intent, is reinstated by two infamously fascist* judges. By eliminating African-American and Hispanic Democrats from the Texas voter rolls, the law – which may change the outcome of the 2018 election – exemplifies the sort of judicial malevolence we can expect from the Trump/Pence Regime as it eliminates the last remnants of USian democratic processes.
________________

*From now on and whenever appropriate, Dispatches will refute the deception intended by the euphemism “conservative” and comparable terms (“moderate,” “libertarian,” “neo-liberal” etc.). I'll call a fascist a fascist and a Nazi a Nazi – the Nazis distinguished by their avowed bigotry. It is the least I can do to foster acknowledgment of the extent to which “our democracy” is a Big Lie and the U.S. is already a JesuNazi dictatorship.

 

HOW CAPITALIST ECO-HATRED WORSENS THE APOCALYPSE: an analysis of Hurricane Harvey that defies the Big Lies, disinformation and censorship by the Trump/Pence Regime and Mainstream Media and unsparingly discloses human cause and environmental effect.

 

JESUNAZIS MUSTER FOR ANOTHER ASSULT ON OREGON, but this time the Real Left is (maybe) not wearing blinders.

 

SUSPICIONS CONFIRMED: HOW GESTAPO-MINDED FEDS LEVERAGE U.S. MEDIA: a series of damning documents, appropriately dated 1984, tells us how much the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) despises the First Amendment. 

 

BEWARE HOW HATE-SPEECH LAWS ARE USED TO SILENCE THE LEFT, a problem already evident in European policies, including prohibitions against denouncing Capitalists as the vicious exploiters they are.

 

IT'S THE SELF-INFLICTED STUPIDITY, STUPID: Putin notes how USian ignorance and anti-intellectualism gravely jeopardize human survival.

 

HOW WHITE USIA'S 'TIE-CLAD' JESUNAZISM EMPOWERS TRUMP/PENCE TYRANNY: Matt Taibbi reminds us anti-immigrant hatefulness is the defining truth of present-day USian politics, a terrible truth many of us would like to forget. But some immigrants and their advocates bravely fight back despite the near certainty they'll lose.

 

TRUMP/PENCE TYRANNIES PRELUDE ZERO-TOLERANCE JESUNAZISM: detailed docomentation of what should be obvious.

 

PLASTIC POLITICS PHYSICALLY PLASTICISIZE PLANETARY PEOPLES: an environmental report that exposes the near-universal magnitude of our drinking water's toxicity.

 

HENCE 2 PETITIONS TO DE-TOXIFY WASHINGTON STATE'S DRINKING WATER. They would minimize carcinogenic poisoning inflicted on us by Capitalist (military and industrial) use of PFAS chemicals.

 

WEAPONIZED RIDICULE: a study for the Imperial War Machine urges ridicule to reinforce fascism, but that sword can cut two ways.  (With thanks to Brian Weaver for spotting the story.)

 

STUDY CONFIRMS HALF OF USIAN JOBS ARE BRAIN-NUMBING DRUDGERY: yet another of today's confirmations of Capitalism's toxic truths.

 

YEARNING FOR BIBLICAL APOCALYPSE, THE JESUNAZIS SEEK NUCLEAR WAR: the deliberately downplayed story of how in Korea the Trump/Pence Regime tries to fulfill Christianity's suicidal End Times fantasies  and thereby reduce “Satan's earth” to a bug planet.

 

USIA'S UKRAINIAN NAZI PUPPETS FLUSH HISTORY DOWN THE ORWELL HOLE, replacing fact with a Big Lie narrative the magnitude of which may exceed even the deceptions imposed by Nazi Germany.

 

IN TRUTH, WOMEN RAN THE ORIGINAL BLACK PANTHER PARTY: a teleSUR report tears off the deceptive cloak of patriarchal censorship.

 

BEHIND IDENTITY- POLITICS SCAMS, CORPORATE NURDMASTERS ARE AS FASCIST as their Capitalist colleagues everywhere else. A subtly deceptive, you-gotta-read-it-carefully report by CommonDreams, which never forget was fanatically pro-Hillary – that is, pro-Hillaryite-fascism – during the last USian presidental campaign.

 

FEMALE CAPITALISTS FORCED TO BIRTH AN ADULT MAN TO BATTLE SEXISM. More proof for anyone who doubts the infinite – and infinitely vicious – sexism that rules the high tech industry.

 

A FACEBOOK PAGE THAT REFUTES MISOGYNIST LIES, an enlightening resource for which we should all thank TigerLille, a longtime reader.

 

MY APOLOGY FOR A MISSED COMMEMORATIVE: THE LIBERATION OF PARIS, officially 26 August 1944, here celebrated with the anthem of the (real) Resistance.

LB/6 September 2017

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Posted at 11:59 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, Disabled People , History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Weblogs | | Comments (0)

Tags: " Ukraine, "Satan's Earth, "watered-down, anti-immigrant hatred, biblical apocalypse, Black Panther women, capitalism intensifies apocalypse, carcinogenic drinking water, censorship, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), civil war, drudgery dominates U.S. workplace, eco-hatred, Facebook, fascist judges, FB page refutes misogynist lies, First Amendment, Gestapo-minded feds, Heinrich Himmler, high-tech fascism, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, identity politics, immigration, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, JesuNazis, Korea, last remnants od democratic process, Liberation of Paris, North Korean missile tests, Orwell hole, Patriot Prayer, PFAS chemicals, plastic pollutes tap water, Portland (Oregon), Texas, tie-clad" Nazism, Trump/Pence dictatorship, Trump/Pence Regime, Trump/Pence war on immigrants, U.S. ignorance, Ukrainian Nazis, Vladimir Putin, voter disenfranchisement, Washington state, weaponized ridicule

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04 September 2017

Death Squad Nation: How Trump/Pence Militarization of Cops Ends Forever Any Real Hope of “Liberty and Justice For All”

 

(The research for the following investigative report required seven consecutive workdays, each day of at least 14 hours duration, instead of the three or four 10-hour workdays I originally estimated. The text is 1,013 words longer than the 2,500 words I initially envisioned. My apology for the resultant delay, unavoidable in the quest for accuracy and thoroughness. Normal Dispatches will resume Wednesday 13 September 2017.)

 

I.

MANY OF YOU will refuse to believe what I am about to reveal – that the Trump-Pence Regime's decree resuming the federal government's total militarization of local police departments marks the end – forever – of the United States as any sort of “sweet land of liberty” we might foolishly have hoped or imagined it would eventually become.

But that is why I have linked three additional reports on the executive order's magnitude and consequences. Their varied perspectives – here, here and here – provide details I think are vital if we are to begin building an accurate understanding of what the Trump-Pence Regime has done to us and our nation.

Few doubt the decree itself is ominous. But the context provided by its history proves it to be far worse that it seems. So viewed, it is the final culmination of a remarkably cunning stealth-campaign of deliberate subjugation – slow as the proverbial boiling of a frog yet relentless as any lynching.

As we shall see, the make-USia*-fascist campaign, of which the Trump/Pence Regime is the climax, began during the 1930s – its roots in Rome, Berlin and most of all Wall Street. But it did not acquire its irresistible terminal momentum until the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963.

Nevertheless what follows is not, I assure you, more conspiranoid whodunit dreck. The identity of individual perpetrators – or more aptly “perpetraitors” – has become irrelevant with the passage of time. My focus is instead on reassessment of events in light of their outcomes – in other words, the search for patterns of cause-and-effect that informs all legitimate historical analysis.

Indeed it is this same approach that makes JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (James W. Douglass; Orbis Books: 2008), the best, most informative, most thought-provoking work on the assassination yet published.

Hence please try, if only for a few moments, to transcend the Pavlovian conditioning that paralyzes so many of us in reflexive denial whenever the Big Lie of “our democracy” is challenged by some incontrovertibly wrenching truth. For it is just such a truth that now confronts us – the implicitly genocidal truth of a malevolently Capitalist empire that (in a manner frighteningly reminiscent of its German Nazi predecessor) – has chosen as its official, publicly expressed policy to encourage and enable the brutal, ever-more-deadly  subjugation of dissidents and minorities.
__________________

*I coined the term “USian” and its variant “USia” probably five years ago. My hope is they will provide us with geographically and politically accurate alternatives to the arrogantly deceptive, brazenly imperialistic use of “American” and “America” as synonyms for the United States. Given its now undeniable embrace of white-supremacist fascism, to call the United States “America” and to identify its ideology and people as “American” is to perpetuate the Big Lie all the peoples of the entire American continent, north and south, are USian subjects. In turn, this deception perpetuates the even-more-preposterous Big Lie all these racially and ethnically diverse people are either fascists or at the very least submissive supporters of USian fascism's innumerable white-supremacist tyrannies.

 

***

 

II.

THE WHERE AND WHEN of the first proto-fascist pivot-point in U.S. history is endlessly debatable. Some historians cite the so-called “American Revolution” itself, begun – as a handful of courageous researchers are at last willing to reveal – not from any colonial quest for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (the original Big Lie upon which all subsequent USian Big Lies are founded), but rather in malicious reaction to greed-inflamed fear the British Empire would soon outlaw the slavery that obscenely enriched southern plantation-owners and their northern financiers. Other historians focus on the white-supremacist backlash  that sought to neutralize the abolition of slavery resulting from the Civil War of 1861-1865. Still more point to the Palmer Raids, the proto-fascist apex of the relentless purge of Communists, socialists and intellectuals that followed the First World War.

While each of these events are unquestionably historical preludes to the emergence of Trump/Pence JesuNazism, I believe the decisive moment – the instant in which the United States pivoted irrevocably toward fascism and its eventual hybridization into JesuNazism – is the unknown (and possibly secret) date in 1934 when never-identified federal authorities ruled against prosecuting the Bankers' Plot conspirators  for high treason.

Quoth William Dodd, (scroll down), U.S. ambassador to Germany in 1936:

“A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. ... A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions” (emphasis added).

These industrialists had schemed with Hitler and Mussolini to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, abolish his New Deal, impose fascism on the United States and unite its natural resources, industrial capabilities and financial power with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Falangist Spain in a campaign of global conquest by the forces of Capitalism. But every one of the conspirators – among them Prescott Bush – were effectively granted immunity for their crimes. Another Capitalist who openly collaborated with the Nazis, though never named as a Bankers' Plot conspirator, was International Business Machines (IBM) President Thomas J. Watson, who also escaped prosecution despite his obvious guilt as an enabler of the Holocaust.  As would be said of these Nazi-minded plutocrats' familial and occupational descendants eight decades later, they were “too big to jail.”

Already immunized to prosecution for their treason, many of the Bankers' Plotters – the fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today's One Percent – soon began scheming how to seduce the U.S. population into a uniquely “American” fascism disguised as Christian theocracy. Thus was “one nation under god” and its definitively fascist ideology of “Biblical Capitalism”  born of the One Percenters' quest for absolute power.

The labels “JesuNazi”  and “ChristoFascist” are the products of my own efforts to economically express Biblical Capitalism's seemingly endless list of miscellaneous horrors.

In 1971 the secular aspects of the JesuNazis' agenda were spelled out in (originally secret) detail by the Powell Memo.

By the year 2000, though the Democratic (sic) Party clung to the Big Lie of its “progressive” disguise, it had become indistinguishable from the Republican Party  save in economically irrelevant matters of identity politics.  In a nation wherein the dwindling white majority rages with racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Christian fanaticism and malice toward elderly and disabled people, the Trump-Pence victory had become inevitable.

 

***

 

III.

THREE FACTS – HITHERTO IGNORED or overlooked even by the most thorough researchers – link the assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy,  Fred Hampton and Mark Clark:

Firstly, each of these murders – regardless of its unique circumstances – expresses the same fascist hostility to democratic process, civil liberties and socialist humanitarianism expressed by the Bankers' Plot and all the One Percent's subsequent efforts to impose implicitly fascist Capitalist despotism.

Secondly, as already noted, the present-day One Percent includes the familial, ideological and corporate descendants of the plotters. Therefore – particularly given the damning evidence of the Powell memo – to believe Capitalism has somehow been cleansed of its malevolence is to believe Ted Bundy will rise from the dead a saint.

Thirdly and far more conclusively, the cumulative impact of these murders was to rob the nation of all its effective leftist, left-leaning or even Keynesian national leadership. By the end of 1969, all such nationally influential leaders had been murdered or (as in the case of Edward Kennedy), otherwise neutralized. Since then, no one has dared arise to replace them. And now, after the passage of fully half a century, it is obvious no one ever will.

Moreover, when we look at what has happened in the United States since the 1960s, the socioeconomic consequences of the murders become undeniable. Together they cleared the way for neoliberalism – a deceptively genteel euphemism for the socioeconomic sadism that became the ideological camouflage of Capitalism's historically inevitable metamorphoses into fascism.

Was this in fact the murderers' clandestine purpose? We don't know. But we can state with absolute certainty the combined evidence – the Bankers' Plot, the Wall-Street-financed emergence of Biblical Capitalism, the Powell Memo and how the murders themselves radically accelerated the nation's historical thrust toward fascism – most assuredly does not refute such a probability.

With King and the Kennedys in their graves, there was no one with sufficient national stature or eloquence to expose neoliberalism as the implicitly genocidal doctrine it is. Nor was there, in the absence of King and the Kennedys, any remaining leader around whom an anti-neoliberal movement might have coalesced. And the fatal warning implicit in their murders – that anyone else who sought to provide such leadership would invariably be slain – ensured no one would ever again dare pick up such scepters of influence.

It is equally obvious the murder of King ended forever any potential the real USian left – what little remains of it – might again be allowed to achieve any comparable degree of national leadership. No doubt someone will cite the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign  in an attempt to refute this assertion. But the hard truth  is Sanders was not, is not now and never will be a real leftist.

Indeed the manner in which the Democratic (sic) Party handed the election to the Trump/Pence JesuNazis rather than allow the nation even a baby-step back from fascism also proves the corollary to this third and concluding point: that after the political murders of the 1960s, the most any genuine leftists can ever again expect to achieve in the United States is local empowerment  of the kind that is evolving in Seattle and elsewhere on the West Coast.

Atop that, we should never forget this woefully minimal political tokenism is tolerated only because it serves the all-important One Percent purpose of substantiating the Big Lie of “American democracy.” How? By fueling rightist rejoinders: “if it ain't a democracy, how come Seattle has a woman socialist on its city council?”

No doubt as soon as Trump, Pence or some subsequent despot decides this particular Big Lie is no longer necessary, all such proofs of “democracy” will be disappeared – quickly and with maximum brutality.

(Let us hope at least some of the targeted peoples will escape across the increasingly prohibitive imperial borders into more tolerant lands.)

 

***

 

IV.

MEANWHILE THE EVIDENCE reaches beyond the graves of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Francis Kennedy, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

Viewed from our cause-and-effect perspective, the government-perpetrated murders at Kent State University and Jackson State College –  likewise the unsolved murder of Karen Silkwood (in which the federal authorities repeatedly obstructed the investigation) – come into focus as extensions of the same One Percent strategy and tactics.

Not coincidentally, these are precisely the methods employed by conquerors against post-conquest resistance: murder its leaders, make horrific examples of its most committed activists, invert the evidence or otherwise tamper with it to ensure the victims are blamed for their own deaths.

Though such glaring patterns would be rightfully alarming to any trained intelligence analyst – “once is coincidence, twice is suspicious, three times is enemy action” – their historical significance has nevertheless gone unrecognized by most U.S. journalists and historians. Obviously this is due more to censorship – or fear of governmental retaliation – than it is to ignorance or obliviousness. Again the Big Lie of “our democracy” serves as the garrote by which the USian Ruling Class strangles protest and resistance.

The same oppressive silence hides the significance of the murder-pattern's expansion into racially selective killings by federally militarized local police, a reign of terror encouraged by the implicitly white-supremacist cop-as-warrior mindset that is the psychological and ideological component of militarization.

Again it's the extended pattern – data ignored and/or suppressed by official or quasi-official USian journalists and historians – that defines what obtains.

As already noted, the first wave of murders – 1963-1969 – eliminated all the Left's national leadership, revolutionaries and reformers alike. The second wave of killings – Kent State University, Jackson State College, Silkwood – made fatal examples of dissidents.

Now it seems the government has broadened its targeting to murder randomly chosen victims – children and women included – whose significance is defined solely by the fact they are members of historically rebellious communities. It is therefore corpse-making to exemplify the fate of any African-American, Hispanic or First Nations person who dares resist the Capitalist authorities. Which, again, duplicates  terrorism in keeping with the methods of political suppression  perfected by the German Nazis and subsequently applied by the United States in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Eastern Europe and now here in the USian Homeland – especially in African-American, First Nations and Hispanic communities.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

 

 

***

 

V.

NOR IS SERIAL MURDER the only conclusive evidence. Additional indications are provided by the definitively white supremacist, often openly JesuNazi fanaticism of federal, state and local cops revealed by their overwhelming support for the Trump/Pence candidacy and their equally emphatic support for the Trump/Pence Regime's malevolently JesuNazi Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.

Not surprisingly, the white cops' embrace of Trump/Pence racism is driving a permanent wedge of suspicion and hostility between themselves and their African-American colleagues, who make up about 12 percent of the nation's state and local police personnel. Similar antagonisms now set white cops against fellow officers of other minorities  too.

The Newsweek data – despite the cloying, sugar-coated optimism with which it is presented – shows that in 2015, 73 percent of all the nation's cops were white. Based on the pro-Trump majorities cited in the preceding paragraph and elsewhere in this report, it is thus apparent nearly every Caucasian cop in the United States is either a JesuNazi of one sort or another or at the very least a JesuNazi sympathizer.

This properly frightening conclusion is confirmed by innumerable incidents in which local police have openly supported fascists and fascism.  Its fearfulness is intensified by the fact USian cops – exactly like U.S. soldiers in combat zones – are increasingly hateful and contemptuous toward the entire citizenry. This means every one of us – literally anyone not obviously a cop –  is equally at risk of maliciously false arrest and even in fatal jeopardy  from the officers who are allegedly our protectors.

These days, our “protection” here in the homeland is ever more often the same murderous brutality the imperial war machine provides the conquered peoples of the empire's innumerable colonies. And that's obviously how the One Percenters want it. Their neo-liberal economics have reduced us to the modern equivalents of serfdom and slavery. Now the cops are becoming the Ruling Class storm troopers who guarantee our subjugation. The message is undeniable: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

 

***

 

VI.

WE THE PEOPLE, at long last awakening to the magnitude of our betrayal and victimization by Capitalist governance, are increasingly rebellious, and the Ruling Class is increasingly retaliatory.

That's undoubtedly one reason the Trump/Pence Regime now intends to train and equip all the police as armored infantry. It's also why the federal government is providing the cops tanks, helicopters, airplanes and gunboats that can strafe or bombard mass demonstrations and terrorize protesters into breaking ranks and fleeing for their lives.

Remember the rocket artillery deployed at Standing Rock?  Those Avenger rocket launchers are described as a “ground-to-air” missile systems. But what militarily innocent civilians don't know is that anti-aircraft weapons, including the Stinger missiles with which the Avenger system is armed, can also function as conventional artillery.  And this unprecedented arming and equipping of the police for combined (land/sea/air) operations is in perfect compliance with the Wehrmacht/Waffen SS doctrine that was long ago translated into the imperial war machine's “shock and awe” capability.

Indisputably, the One Percent's purpose is – and has been since the federalization/militarization program begun by Republican President Ronald Reagan was radically upgraded by Democratic (sic) President William J. Clinton – to transform the police into a quasi-military force.

With the rifles, bayonets, grenades and artillery of armored infantry plus the combined operations capability provided by aircraft and watercraft, the Empire's militarized police can thus employ against those of us who live in the USian Homeland the same murderous effectiveness that characterizes the imperial war machine's oppression of peoples elsewhere on the planet.

But there's more happening here than the Trump/Pence Regime's preparation and encouragement of the police to “terminate with extreme prejudice” anyone who dares resist Capitalism's metamorphosis into various forms of fascism.

That's why it's important to understand the Trump/Pence agenda is no less tyrannically malevolent than a Clinton regime would have been.  Each represents, albeit in slightly different ways, the fanaticism that defines Capitalism's inevitable transition to the unabashed barbarism essential to perpetuate its profits and maintain the obscene wealth and god-like omnipotence the Capitalists claim are theirs by divine right.  These murderous reflexes, already aggravated to genocidal intensity by the realities of terminal Capitalism,  are goaded to unprecedented frenzy by the looming environmental apocalypse. In other words, whether imposed by Trump or Clinton, whether by Democrats or Republicans, the One Percenters will remain enthroned as our species' most murderous serial killers – just as We the People are their intended victims.

Hence the predecessors of the Trump/Pence Regime long ago fortified themselves and their One Percent overlords with a dependably lockstep, sometimes openly fascist military. And JesuNazism is increasingly the dominant USian military ideology.

Even so, the approximately 58 percent of military offucers and enlisted personnel who rushed to embrace Trump is notably smaller than the percentage of Trump supporters – as high as 90 percent – amongst the nation's police. Which is obviously the other reason – and in all probability the main reason – the Trump/Pence Regime has restored total militarization of the cops.

Yes, Caucasian dominance of the nation's people-killer forces is nearly identical in the military and the police, 74.6 percent in the former, 74 percent in the latter (for which see the Newsweek report on police demographics linked in Section V above). Yes, the Trump/Pence vote – 58 percent of the white electorate  – proves all these voters guilty of supporting violent white supremacy; the evidence is as irrefutable damning as membership in the Ku Klux Klan or one of the burgeoning JesuNazi Sturmabteilungs.

But from the Trump/Pence perspective, the police – who at the very minimum are 84 percent pro-Trump/Pence  are thus at least 26 percent more reliably JesuNazi than the 58 percent JesuNazi military.

Obviously that's why the Trump/Pence Regime is arming, equipping and training the cops as their personal Gestapo and Waffen SS.  Police departments so armed, equipped trained and inflamed to maximum white-supremacist hatefulness would provide a vital, instantly available ready reserve to decisively reinforce the already overwhelming superiority –  numerical, tactical and strategic – of the imperial war machine's Trump/Pence faction. Remember how the SS reinforced the Wehrmacht. Were the second U.S. civil war to break out as increasingly threatened, that's how the JesuNazis will win.

Unlikely? Guess again. Hitler parlayed USian financial support (see again Section II) into a fully Nazified Germany with only 43 percent of the vote. Not only is the Trump/Pence faction 15 percentage points larger and therefore a true majority. It is billions of dollars richer. And its racial, socioeconomic, political, religious and terrorist-minded solidarity  already rules the USian Imperial Homeland.

That's why the Trump/Pence militarize-the-cops decree marks the end, forever, of any rational hope the USian shibboleth of “liberty and justice for all” might have evolved from a viciously seductive Big Lie into compelling humanitarian truth. The neo-Confederates –  that is, the JesuNazis – have won their 84-year war against constitutional governance. The USian reincarnation of Germany's Death Squad Nation has triumphed. The United States as we knew or imagined it is dead.

And this time We the People have no one but ourselves to rescue us from genocidal racist hatefulness, no one but ourselves to save our world from Capitalism's morally imbecilic race to self-destruction.

We are truly alone. Our efforts to combat our oppressors are hopelessly fragmented by the organizational rivalry that was encouraged by the far-less-arduous circumstances ot our recent history. Our disunity is exacerbated the deliberate betrayals dealt us by the Democratic (sic) Party in obedience to its Capitalist masters and their graspingly bourgeois sycophants. And unlike the anti-Nazi partisans of World War II, we have no allies abroad.

Perhaps – though only if we intensify the solidarity, skill and ferocity of our resistance – we can yet build the true revolution that has become our species' only escape from extinction. Perhaps then by some miracle our Mother Earth will intervene on our behalf. Perhaps the raison de vivre that defines us as human will somehow yet prevail.

LB/4 September 2017

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