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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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« Slow-Motion Genocide: Trumpcare, Betrayal of Puerto Rico Are Schemes to Exterminate Minorities and Surplus Workers | Main | Trump/Pence Tyranny Reduces Us All to Conquered People »

04 October 2017

ChristoCapitalism's Dysfunction Dives Deeper into Deadliness

IMG_1479 - Copy

A Tacoma Clinic Defense volunteer, left, confronts a JesuNazi who was harassing a Planned Parenthood patient. The JesuNazis shriek biblical invective at any woman entering the clinic, whether for an abortion or any other gynocologoical care.  (Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2017)

*****

Is Celebrity-Backed Rebellion of Athletic Heroes a Glimmer of Revolutionary Light?

BEYOND THE DISTRACTION of the Las Vegas massacre,  the four major stories in the USian Homeland this week are apocalyptic climate change, murderously inadequate healthcare, killer cops and expanding protests against the rising tide of death, brutality and oppression that now afflicts us much as it afflicts the population in any other colony or Third World nation.

The Las Vegas atrocity most assuredly diverts our attention from the more gradual but far more deadly atrocities perpetrated by the Trump/Pence Regime and the Capitalists in general. Hence it should be viewed with extreme suspicion. But – horrific as it is – it does not change the fact the “four major stories” I cited above are each separate aspects of one much larger story – the genocidal malevolence spawned by Capitalism's inevitable metamorphosis into fascism. Whether Las Vegas is a fifth aspect remains to be seen.

In any case, “genocide” is not a term to be taken lightly. Merriam-Webster defines it as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.” What it means in real life are corpses piled in mounds so grotesque  we can scarcely visualize them, much less imagine the smell of the decaying flesh or the incessant buzzing of carrion-hungry flies. And thanks to Capitalism our present-day circumstances have worsened to the extent we must now add two more categories to genocide's list of victims, so its definition reads “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, sexual, socioeconomic, political or cultural group.”

 

***

 

San Juan Mayor Says Trump's Abandonment of Puerto Rico Is “Close to a Genocide”

ADD CARMEN YULÍN CRUZ to the list of courageous women thrust by circumstances toward revolutionary awakening. She is – at least thus far – the only public figure in the entire USian Empire courageous enough to dare use “genocide” to describe what the Trump/Pence Regime is doing to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands and to all other populations everywhere on our beleaguered planet.

What Cruz said was Trump's abandonment of Puerto Rico threatens so much death it might become “close to a genocide.”

Truthful as her assessment is – bravely truthful in fact – Donald Trump is nothing more than Capitalism's latest and most blatant malefactor. Plus there's the high probability The Donald is merely the twittering finger of a regime the commanding brains of which are in the relentlessly theocratic, demonically Machiavellian skull of Vice President Mike Pence, much as the real power in the regime of George Bush the Second was almost certainly Vice President Richard Cheney.

What we should be asking ourselves is not what the Tyrant of Tweet is doing, but what the Mike the Misogynist is doing behind the tweet screen. 

Nevertheless – regardless of whose thumb is on the kill switch (and were I a gambler I'd damn sure wager it is Pence's) – the genocidal intent in US governance became undeniable with the Clinton Regime's unabashedly murderous “welfare reform,”  and I have been calling it that in print since Dispatches was born as Outside Agitator's Notebook in 2009. A couple of characteristic examples are here – yeah, I used to be a helluva lot more (stupidly) hopeful than I am now – and here. But my readership, albeit global, remains quite small, never more than a thousand persons at most, which means my commentaries have approximately the same impact as the proverbial fart in a windstorm.

By contrast, Carmen Yulin Cruz, the embattled mayor of San Juan – the capitol city of the mixed-race island the Trump/Pence Regime has abandoned to die in the aftermath of two climate-change-intensified hurricanes – has an audience limited only by the censorship imposed on behalf the Empire and its Capitalist overlords by Google and Mainstream Media. But thanks to social media, she may well have the eyes and the ears of the entire world anyway. So perhaps the Capitalism-is-genocide meme will at last begin to acquire the requisite momentum.

At the very least, abandonment of Puerto Rico Cruz so vehemently protested has already become an international outrage, widely recognized as a racist atrocity. Were there any doubts about its identity, they were banished by Trump's belittling of all Puerto Ricans with the dog-whistle slander of laziness, claiming “they want everything done for them” – the same malicious accusation by which white supremacists routinely defame African Americans, Hispanics and First Nations people, the traditional USian targets of genocide.

The Trump/Pence Regime therefore seems to be targeting not only the 24.2 percent of the Puerto Rican population that is of African, First Nations or racially mixed descent. It is also apparently aiming at nearly all the 75.8 percent of the island's population that, though officially “white,” is nevertheless of Hispanic descent and therefore does not meet the white supremacist standard for“whiteness.” (The latter link is to a notorious fascist website, for which I apologize. But Mainstream Media – no doubt in obedience to orders from its Capitalist owners – has done such a thorough job of concealing the JesuNazi threat, there was no other source by which to vividly demonstrate how white supremacists typically dismiss Hispanics as “mongrels.”) In fact, only .009 percent of the Puerto Rican population, a mere 2,490 women, children and men, seem to fulfill the white-supremacist definition of “white” – a group so small the maliciously white-supremacist Trump/Pence Regime is evidently willing to write it off as collateral damage.

Even without the demographic evidence, genocide remains the obvious intent – indeed the only plausible intent – motivating the regime's abandonment of hurricane victims in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.  (Note the linked report, from The New York Times, describes the hurricane damage but deftly avoids describing how the islands were already drained of their economic lifeblood by Capitalist vampires. Again my apology. Because The NYT's fawning service to the Capitalists has made this formerly [usually] reliable journal an upscale equivalent of Volkischer Beobachter, I link to it only when I can find no other source.)

Meanwhile at least one Ruling Class politician has publicly noted the telling contrast  between the Trump/Pence Regime's murderously miserly response to the people of the Empire's Caribbean colonies and the regime's largess toward the mostly white hurricane victims in Florida and Texas: “New York Congressmember Nydia Velázquez, who was born in Puerto Rico, said the White House showed far more urgency responding to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which devastated parts of Texas and Florida – two states that voted for Trump.”

The regime's genocidal purpose is further underscored by its refusal to allow Puerrto Ricans to accept aid from other nations: “Cuba has offered help in the form of doctors and a brigade of electrical workers to help shore up and rebuild the island’s ravaged infrastructure...Yet cruelly, but predictably, the American government denied them entry on political grounds...Puerto Rico is dying, yes. It is a victim of the stupidity of its political class and the racist vindictiveness of its colonial masters.”

“Racist vindictiveness” indeed: note how the Trump/Pence henchmen obediently parrot the Tyrannical Tweeter's truculence in slandering Cruz. (Picture a flock of white parrots perched on a magnolia branch, each bird wearing a Koo Klucks Klamor cape and shrieking calumny in perfectly synchronized cadence.)  But note too how many USian celebrities were hastening to her defense. Perhaps at long last the times truly are a-changin.  

Puerto Rico is also an object lesson in Capitalist savagery, all the more so since Trump himself fucked Puerto Rican taxpayers out of $32.7 million. Now the vulture-Capitalists are circling the Puerto Rican ruins. That Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens “is not a privilege, but the branding of a slave.”

 

***

 

JesuNazis Say Natural Disasters Prove God Hates Orgasmic Women, LGBTQ Folks

HALF OF ALL USIANS – including the anti-sexuality fanatics I've confronted while helping Tacoma Clinic Defense protect Planned Parenthood (see above photo) – believe the disasters inflicted by terminal climate change are the beginning of the Biblical Apocalypse: that is, the Divine Sadist's extermination  of all of us “who don't love Jesus.” In other words, biblical genocide as at Sodom and Gomorrah.

Never mind Pew Research data identifies Puerto Rico is “overwhelmingly Christian,” 56 percent Catholic and 33 percent Protestant. Never mind half these Protestants declaring themselves born-agains or evangelicals. No matter. From the prudishly prurient perspective of the Bible-brandishing bigots, hurricanes are punishment for anyone who dares relish anti-biblical sex, LGBTQ or otherwise.

 

***

 

Denial of Healthcare Is Least Controversial Way to Exterminate Surplus Workers

GENOCIDAL INTENT IS ALSO overwhelmingly apparent in the Trump/Pence Regime's ongoing effort to make healthcare ever-more-unaffordable and therefore ever-more-definitively a privilege of wealth. Our lack of healthcare is transformed into a killing machine. It exterminates any of us who are chronically impoverished, thereby proven unexploitable for profit and thus deemed unfit to remain alive. Money becomes the only recognized permit to live – the permit without which we'll be murdered by neglect.

That is clearly the rationale behind the various iterations of the so-called Trumpcare program. Thus Graham-Cassidy would have slain at least 41,600 people per year. Though Trumpcare once more appears to be dead, it will no doubt be reanimated again – and again and again – until by some combination of stealth, misdirection and legislative sleight-of-hand it is imposed with all its deliberately fatal results.

(In a related atrocity, Republicans and Democrats joined hands in sentencing 9 million children to death by terminating the Children's Health Insurance Program [CHIP]  on 29 September. Will CHIP eventually be restored, perhaps after a secretly agreed-upon number of [mostly minority] children are slain by untreated conditions? Your guess is as good as mine.)

Because we are entering an era in which the malicious denial of healthcare is once again openly unsheathed as a weapon of genocide, it's worth reflecting on the fact such medical manipulation has always been “the American Way,” especially notable for its inspiration to Adolf Hitler.

And don't for a minute imagine the Graham-Cassidy measure died because of public opposition. As we should all know by now, we the people are of no significance whatsoever in imperial decision-making. “Our democracy” is truly the biggest of Big Lies. What killed Graham-Cassidy was the adamant opposition of the insurance barons, who feared it might clear the way for some states to develop their own single-payer programs.

 

***

 

Killer Cops Refurbish European Imperialism's Oldest Terror Tactic

THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER of non-white humans is probably the Empire's oldest defining characteristic. In fact it was USia's hitherto-unequaled efficiency at genocidal extermination of First Nations peoples that provided Hitler the prototype for the Holocaust. This particular expression of USian white supremacy got its biggest modern boost  from Bill Clinton's welfare “reform” and Hillary Clinton's denunciation of African-American youth as “super-predators.”

But that does not minimize the present regime's culpability for encouraging its escalation, with predictable results.

 

***


Sports Stars Spite Sports Tsars; Scribes Salivate; Censorship Shrouds Citizen Struggle

YES I AM PAYING most unusual attention to the athletes' rebellion. Given the extent to which USia is a nation of oft-frenzied sports fans, I believe the rebellion's revolutionary potential is far greater than many of us imagine. Admittedly this is no more than a hunch, but it is fostered by logic based primarily on Mainstream Media's lavish, celebrity-driven coverage of the entire affair. Its lavishness becomes obvious when it is compared to MM's near-total suppression of reportage about the ongoing protests in St. Louis, for which see the next paragraph.

(If my hunch is wrong, I will apologize for the wasted space, take the 15-yard penalty and punt.)

That said, let us never forget it is the definitively USian modality of methodical murder of minority persons by federally militarized police that is provoking both the athletes' rebellion and the St. Louis demonstrations. As Black Agenda's Margaret Kimberley says of Colin Kaepernick, he “made police brutality his target. No one should claim to join with him unless they are completely onboard with that sentiment. Stand or kneel with Kaepernick against the police state or don’t bother at all.”

In other words, beware not only Kaepernick's overt opponents, but also those who would co-opt or undermine his protest by pretending to join it.

Kimberley thus urges us to always remember what Kaepernick said: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

To which a (white) member of the Evangelicals for Trump Facebook Page replied with characteristic JesuNazi hatefulness:  “Go back where you came from. You are ungrateful demanding and intimidating. And America doesn't need or want your type of control. Why did you leave your native land in the first place?”

Kaepernick, of course, is a native-born U.S. citizen.

But that means nothing to the JesuNazis. Their white-supremacist core dogmas – brutally exemplified by the Facebook poster – include the Ku Klux Koncept that even the most distant African ancestry forever excludes one from the ranks of “True Americans.”

*

As support for the rebellion Kaepernick sparked spreads throughout the sports world, so do its enemies multiply and wax fruitfully putrescent.

National Association for Stock Car Racing  (NASCAR) owners, all whites and most from the old Confederacy, say they'll fire any driver who joins the protest. Given the organization's deep-South roots and Klannish history,  the owners' declarations are hardly surprising. NASCAR is also the defendant in at least two racism lawsuits, one for $500 million,  the other for $200 million.

Probably the most devastating blow to the rebellion thus far was dealt by the National Basketball Association (NBA), which has forbidden its players to participate.  “The NBA has a rule that players, coaches and trainers stand respectfully for the anthem. The league office will determine how to deal with any possible instance in which a player, coach or trainer does not stand for the anthem. (Teams do not have the discretion to waive this rule).”

Parkway High School, in Bossier, Louisiana, has issued a similar edict: students who refuse to “stand in a respectful manner” during the national anthem will be punished.

Predictably, most of the opposition festers amongst the Trump/Pence Regime's JesuNazi supporters. Robert Jeffress, who is one of the regime's most biblical dogmatists, says Kaepernick and his supporters are lucky “they're not shot in the head.”

And two students at the Victory and Praise Christian Academy in San Antonio, Texas, were permanently ousted from its football team after they joined the protest.

But some students, like the cheerleaders at who knelt during the national anthem at a football game in Houston, Texas, remain defiant.  The game was between McCallum and Lyndon B. Johnson high schools, but inept reporting by The Houston Chronicle failed to state which school the protesters were from or whether they were from both.

*

Among the more articulate defenders of the athletes' rebellion were San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Gen. Michael Hayden.

Popovich said Trump's normalization of white-supremacist hatefulness  has reduced the United States to “an embarrassment,” adding that white racism is “the elephant in the room” of our national politics.

Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, denounced Trump for fostering divisiveness “by wrapping humself in the national banner,” adding were he forced to choose sides, “put me down with Kaepernick.”

Because these two men are members of the Ruling Class, their statements immediately bring to mind Margaret Kimberley's warning, above.

Popovich though was probably speaking from the heart. His remarks declare him an opponent of the NBA's newly issued protest ban, which could prove extremely troublesome if the rebellion continues. Also, he and his wife Erin each have long histories of supporting causes the Trump/Pence faction condemns as “un-American.”

Hayden on the other hand was most likely trying to do nothing more than wipe some of the racist feces off the nation's dung-bespattered face.

But now even the stereotype of the red-necked race-car driver is breaking down. On Monday 2 October, NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt Jr. defied his colleagues by Tweeting his support for nonviolent protest.  At the same time he Tweeted a memorably relevant quote from the murdered President John Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible...make violent revolution inevitable.”

Nevertheless the USian public remains starkly divided in its response to the protests – and perhaps a bit confused – as shown by poll results here  and here.

As I wrote last week, “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.”

Since then, Ron Jacobs of CounterPunch and Kareem Abdul Jabbar have each spelled out a remarkably similar analysis of the rebellion's revolutionary potential.

“The good news,” says Jacobs, “is that the protest is spreading. Part of this is due to Donald Trump's racist attacks on the players involved in the protest, but it is also related to the growing awareness Trump is using the racist attitudes of many U.S. residents to maintain his hold on power...Furthermore, the protests have sharpened the contradiction between the nation our children are told we are and the nation that we truly are.  It is up to us to carry this struggle to its fruition.”

And as Jabbar says,  “We can’t hide from these harsh realities by escaping in talk show antics or the diversion of sports when – to their credit – athletes and entertainers are reminding us of the seriousness of our national crisis.”

 

***

 

Dystopian Miscellany

Trump/Pence Regime Seeks to Criminalize Its Opponents

In an unprecedented action that is being ignored (if not deliberately covered up) by the Mainstream Media propaganda machine, the Trump/Pence Justice (sic) Department is seeking the names of its online opponents. The implication, unthinkable until now, is the regime is scheming a Pinochet-type coup in which all of us will be arrested. (Yes, we must indeed begin thinking as if we were the subjects of a conquered nation.)

 

Reagan Treasury Official Says the Entire 99 Percent Is Being Enslaved

Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the treasury under Ronnie the Repugnant, was a traditional (Eisenhower-type) conservative who sounds more like a socialist every day, no doubt why his latest essay is published by CounterPunch. “Without jobs, dependent on their masters for trickle-down benefits that are always subject to being cut, and without voice or representation, Americans, except for the One Percent, are becoming the most enslaved people in history.”

 

Chinese Report Notes USian Economic Deterioration, Human Rights Hypocracy

The People's Republic of China prepares an annual report on socioeconomic and political conditions in the USian Homeland. This year's edition is particularly damning. “Wielding 'the baton of human rights,' (the U.S.) pointed fingers and cast blame on the human rights situation in many countries while paying no attention to its own terrible human rights problems...In 2016, the U.S. social polarization became more serious, with the proportion of adults who had full-time jobs hitting a new low since 1983, income gaps continuing to widen, the size of middle class reaching a turning point and beginning to shrink, and living conditions of the lower class deteriorating.” Though most of us already know this by embittering first-hand experience, it's always good when a government with the stature of the People's Republic confirms it. (Perhaps, in time, we can once again proclaim triumphantly “The East Is Red.”)

 

Is a New Civil War Looming in Spain?

Mass protests engulfed Catalonia as its population attempted to vote despite a brutal crackdown by Spanish national police dispatched to block the Catalan referendum on secession from Spain. Lest we forget, there is this, with its lyrics translated in the comment thread here, and then of course this, this, this and this. The last, as relevant today as it was in 1936,  is translated here.


Fascist Media Executive Promises Concentration Camps, Hitler's Face on Money

Claiming connections to Trump, AltRight.com honcho promises all Europe will be under the jackboots of a new reich by 2050.

 

Community Solidarity, Government Atrocities Follow Mexican Quakes

Linked is the most comprehensive, non-sensationalized (i.e., non-pornofied) report I could find on the aftermath of the Mexican disasters.  “The difference in behavior between Mexico's classes has been very noticeable after the disaster. Unlike workers who rushed to rescue others in their community, politicians and entrepreneurs have been looking to take advantage of the situation for their own gain.”

(With special thanks to TigerLille for spotting the Concentration Camps/Hitler-on-the-Money story and contributing several URLs to the Puerto Rico and athletes' rebellion stories.)

LB/25 September-3 October 2017

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Posted at 03:51 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Current Affairs, Disabled People , History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Music, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Visual art, Weblogs |

Tags: " Peoples Republic of China, "most enslaved people in history, anti-sex, apocalypse, apocalyptic climate change, athletes' rebellion, brutality, Carmen Yulin Cruz, Catalonia (Spain), Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), death, end times, expanding protests, fascist media, genocide, Graham-Cassidy, imperialist tactics, insurance barons, JesuNazis, killer cops, Las Vegas massacre, LGBTQ, Mexican earthquakes , Mexico, murderously inadequate healthcare, Nazi Europe by 2050, oppression, orgasmic women, Paul Craig Roberts, Planned Parenthood, PRC report on U.S., Puerto Rico, Reagan, San Juan, San Juan mayor, St. Louis (Missouri), St. Louis police brutality, St. Louis protests, surplus workers, Trumpcare, Virgin Islands

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