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November 2017

Apocalypse Is Inevitable; So Let's Fuck the Ecology for Profit

Given the Trump/Pence Regime's Fanatical Commitment to Fulfilling Biblical Prophecies of Human Extinction, Its Genocidal Social Policies and All-Out War on the Environment Make Terrifyingly Perfect Sense

 

OUR LIVES ARE NOW DARKENED by what I believe to be the most ominous conjunction of events ever to threaten our species.

Forget the looming environmental apocalypse or the Trump/Pence Regime's maliciously genocidal destruction of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and any other such necessities for human survival in the Neoliberal slave-plantation of the United States; the terrifying truth is all humans whether at home or abroad may be too short-lived for any such policies to matter.

But that truth, horrible as it is, offers the only logical explanation of the regime's sneering brutality. Its perpetrators believe these are the End Times prophesied by the Bible, and that as their sadistic god's designated destroyers, they can savage us at will. What do humanitarianism or environmentalism or the popular will matter in a world they obviously intend to reduce to a bug planet?

Verily, it's as if the regime's secret slogan is “Loot and Rape and Kill Now Because Tomorrow We're All Dead.”

North Korea's launch of a missile that could target most of the USian imperial homeland including Washington D.C. and New York City interacts with the Trump/Pence Regime's nuke-the-world-to-bring-back-Jesus madness and escalates the probability of World War III to near 100-percent certainty. That's because – due to North Korea's geography –  (scroll down), Trump's threatened annihilation of the country by thermonuclear “fire and fury” would be as much an attack on China and Russia as on North Korea itself. See also “How the U.S. Bombed Russia in 1950.”

Meanwhile Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin's decision to put Russian industry on a wartime footing – a decision obscured, ironically enough, by the USian Thanksgiving holiday and further suppressed by USian Mainstream Media censorship – proves the Russian government is now convinced World War III is inevitable.

The Trump/Pence entourage, contrary to its seductive pre-election Big Lies, and as unequivocally proven by its unprecedented increase in the imperial war machine budget, has obviously believed in the inevitability of World War III – and its theological necessityfrom long before Trump's first day in office. Not that Trump/Pence enabler Hillary Clinton would have been any better, for Republicans and Democrats alike serve the One Percenters' apocalyptic agenda.  

Meanwhile the USian empire's domestic subjects – led by those who continue publicly pimping the Big Lie of “our democracy” – remain in clinical denial of the terminally theocratic Trump/Pence horror that threatens all humanity with extinction – a reality so terrifying, now even some of the Mainstream Media propaganda machine is beginning to edge toward acknowledging it.

 

New Study Puts Puerto Rican Death Toll at “Nearly 1,100,” 20 times higher  than the Trump/Pence Regime's bullshit figure of only 55 deaths.

 

Again the Not-So-Secret Fundamentalism of the Empire's Ruling Cabal shows its apocalyptic support for its Islamic counterpart.

 

Meanwhile the Imperial Politicians Demonstrate Their Biblical Commitment to rape, sexual harassment and misogyny in general by making rules that marginalize or silence their female victims.

 

*********

Predictably, the Regime Continues Its Subjugation of the USian Homeland, the better to fatten the imperial war machine for one last apocalyptic Big Bang. Analyses of the contents of the proposed budget include its genocidal impact on seniors and disabled people its equally genocidal attack on the African-American community;  its oh-so-sneaky approval of Christian theocracy; and a pair of usefully informative Marxist overviews of the proposals here and here. Also,  Common Dreams  has some valuable information on the budget and the closely related topic of taxation, but its 600-to-900-character URLs are (intentionally?) a prohibitive pain in the ass to convert to live-links.


The Fate of Baltimore's Sparrows Point, Once Home of the Nation's Largest Steel Mill, exemplifies the sort of sweatshop economy the Trump/Pence Regime will perpetuate  – that is, should our species somehow manage to survive the government's Biblical apocalypse-mongering. Meanwhile Amazon's so-called CamperForce exemplifies the wretched lot to which We the (Ever-More-Subjugated) People have already been reduced. See also how Amazon imposes de facto slave labor on England

 

Anti Trump/Pence Resistance Continues, Albeit to Little or No Avail because the regime has already made it clear it doesn't give a flying fuck about public opinion. See updates here, here, here, and here. But please ignore the obnoxiously positive tone by which some of these reports attempt to reassure us the hard work of revolution isn't necessary – in other words, that we should merely wait submissively for the apocalypse.

 

Censorship Updates: Suppression of Vital Information revealed at the University of Oklahoma  and glaringly apparent in the Mainstream Media propaganda machine's non-coverage of the net neutrality fight. Meanwhile a ruling that “threatens reporters’ ability to maintain the confidentiality of their sources and gather the news without being surveilled” is on (probably fruitless) appeal to the Gorsuch Court.

 

Hate Crime Updates: With Trump/Pence Encouragement of White Supremacy, Asian Americans are again a target. Also an analysis of what the regime's deliberately limited hate-crime statistics actually tell us.

 

Nurse Fired for Expressing Not-Uncommon Response to White Supremacy: “Every white woman raises a detriment to society when they raise a son...Someone with the HIGHEST propensity to be a terrorist, rapist, racist, and domestic violence all-star. Historically every son you had should be sacrificed to the wolves.” (Emphasis as in original.)

 

An Indicative History Lesson from World War II.

 

LB/29 November 2017 (with contributions from TigerLille).

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Capitalism Has Reduced Thanksgiving* to a Day of Self-Deceit

With a Sneeringly Genocidal Federal Budget Threatening All of Us,
W
e Should Be Rising Up in Fury, Not Bowing in Craven Submission

YES, BUDGETS ARE BORING, unless they contain – as the proposed 2018 federal budget surely does – death threats to entire groups of people. Even then they are a huge pain in the ass to properly cover because proper coverage requires hours (and often entire days) of wonkishly scrutinizing line-item minutiae.

Nevertheless, be not dismayed; I have chosen here the least-wonkish, most informatively readable reports on the proposed 2018 federal budget I could find. Why? Because for many of us, this budget will literally be a matter of life and death – more likely the latter.

Though it is absurd to imagine we can stop the intended killing by any means short of revolution, we may indeed reduce the death toll – perhaps even substantially – by vehement protest, which I most emphatically recommend. At the very least we will be forewarned of the budget's disastrous impact in time to construct whatever collective and individual preparations we might be able to organize to protect our communities, our families and ourselves.

In whatever form this budget is finally enacted, the Ayn Rand ethos of the Trump-Pence Regime guarantees it will be the most deliberately vicious budget of my lifetime – and possibly the most deliberately vicious budget in the entire post-slavery history of the United States. That's because the neoliberal malice of Congress long ago defined the federal budget as a weapon for inflicting slow-motion mass-murder on those of us condemned as “surplus population” – that is, those of us who are poor and/or old and/or disabled and/or chronically unemployed and therefore no longer exploitable for Capitalist profit.

Thus the budget proposal's weaponized finances remain the lead story on Dispatches, just as its related tax measures were in last week's curiously obstructed DfD anthology, “Tax Reform Is Capitalism's Newest Euphemism for Genocide,”  the posting of which was first delayed by the temporary emotional paralysis evoked by the death of a half-sibling and then kept off the Tacoma Communists Facebook page by a vexing technical glitch that may or may not be of hostile origin.

Since then, I've found a comprehensive analysis of Republican budget proposals that shows how the tax bills and all its other “deadly details” savage the entire Working Class with “what amounts to a one-two punch – huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, to be paid for by even deeper cuts to social programs.” This analysis appeared the day after the Trump/Pence Regime announced its intention of slashing Medicaid, Food Stamps and other social services to pay for hurricane relief, including in abandoned Puerto Rico, where the unofficial death toll already approaches 900.

There is also unequivocal proof of Neoliberalism's financial success. The USian poverty rate is again soaring, thrusting inequality  to what – though nobody else dares say it – may well be the greatest and most unbridgeable such chasm in our species' entire history.

 

***

 

THE VAST AND EVER-WIDENING distance between poverty and wealth defines both our own powerlessness and the omnipotence of our Capitalist overlords.

It is exemplified by a detailed report in The Guardian that reveals – perhaps more succinctly than anything I have yet read – the properly terrifying malevolence  of the monsters who now rule the United States.

In yet another of the monsters' “hurry-up-and-die message” to those of us who are poor and/or elderly and/or disabled, they have ended the subsidy that enabled lowest-income people to have telephone service.  Because loss of telephone service is loss of access to emergency services, the end of this funding will undoubtedly murder many of its victims, especially those who are elderly and/or medically disabled, which – let there be no doubt – is clearly the Trump/Pence intent.

Nor can the Democratic (sic):Party protest without laying bare its own elemental hypocrisy, for the Democrats did the same thing to Washington state's poor in 2015.

Such are the circumstances that inflict bottomless despair. And because such despair is the defining characteristic of our time, deaths by drug overdose – at least 65,000 and climbing daily – thus become part of the arithmetic of deadliness that measures the aforementioned distance, with each corpse, each insensate mass of dead and rotting flesh, each remnant of what was once a woman or a child or a man, each fatality “part and parcel of capitalism's war against life itself.” (If you go to no other URL in this edition of Dispatches, please go to this one: it is as fine and angry a prose poem of resistance as any I have read.)

 

***

 

THROUGHOUT THE YEARS of my boyhood and early manhood there was always rational hope the USian judiciary would intervene against the worst forms of Capitalism, ameliorating its malevolence with modern humanitarian* interpretations of USian law as in Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board of Education. But these hopes are now slain, probably forever and unquestionably for the foreseeable future, by the Trump/Pence Regime's intent to pack all federal judicial vacancies with JesuNazis and other sorts of fascists and white supremacists –  a packing facilitated by the unyielding refusal of the Republican Congress to allow Obama any lesser-evil judicial appointments. Hence the dearth of lesser-evil judges who might at least have been depended on to soften this regime's tyrannies.

All of which makes it anything but a non sequitur to insert at this point Paul Craig Roberts' denunciation of the United States as the ultimate Moron Nation. Roberts' text is viewable as a budgetary footnote, but it could serve equally well as a prelude to next six linked reports, all of which detail the Neoliberal war against education  that has already succeeded in reducing us to the most ignorant  pseudo-citizenry** in the industrial world.

Additional details on the avowedly anti-intellectual process of moronation and its consequences include a scathing report on how the Trump/Pence Regime's malice is specifically aimed at college students; a provocative new essay by Diane Ravitch;  disclosure that fully half the nation's college students are so poor they don't have enough to eat; and the infinitely dismal collegiate truth of 21st Century Capitalism: that in an economy defined by the neoliberal intent to forcibly reduce the population without resorting to the out-of-fashion and therefore embarrassing methodology of death camps, not even a doctorate is a guarantee of employment.

With this last condition I have some indicative personal experience. No, not as a doctorate; despite verbal skills that test in the uppermost tenth of the topmost one percent and a solid 3.5 collegiate grade-average, it took me an 18-year, six-school financial struggle merely to earn a BA degree (interdisciplinary studies; Fairhaven College: 1976). Thus the most important (i.e., most embittering) lesson taught me by academia was that graduate school was so far beyond my fiscal reach, it was masochistic to even fantasize about it. Moreover, from the perspective of prospective bosses, it turned out my BA itself was worthless. As an infuriatingly smug personnel specialist told me in 1982, the fact it took me so long to graduate was absolute proof I wasn't “serious about doing college-level work” – never mind I had already answered her “why 18 years” interrogation by explaining the vindictive miserliness of the Vietnam Era GI Bill and the openly contemptuous denial of familial aid that was my lot as my family's one and only Despised Child.

 

***

 

AT THIS POINT WE again encounter the extended relevance of Roberts' essay, now as an epitaph for what Capitalism has almost certainly turned into a death planet. Predictably following the war-starting protocols of the Third Reich,  it turns out the de facto Fourth Reich was planning false-flag attacks to start World War III at least as early as 1962.  At least a dozen such attacks most intended to start lesser wars or facilitate fascist coups – have been perpetrated or at least planned by the U.S., including the Gulf of Tonkin incident used to justify expanding its imperialistic presence in Vietnam into a full-scale war.

The British Ministry of Defense, which is just a tad more forthright than its USian Defense Department counterpart in terms of publicly acknowledging Capitalism's apocalyptic horrors, has meanwhile described “various doomsday scenarios,”  among them “the end of the world, or at least of humanity.”

Nor – despite public assurances to the contrary – can any one dissident general stop an USian president from launching thermonuclear Armageddon.  And that report, depressing as it is, omits in classic politically correct fashion any mention at all of the religious fanaticism that would make thermonuclear apocalypse a dead certainty once it were ordered. The terrifying truth is the highest levels of the imperial war machine's chain of command are ruled by JesuNazi fanatics who not only believe in Jesus as their “personal savior” but are push-the-button certain the apocalypse will bring about his return to Earth – their fanaticism ensuring that once the Deadly Decider decides for Death, the best our Mother Earth can expect is survival as a bug planet.

Then there's the less dramatic but potentially just as apocalyptic poisoning of the planet by Fukushima. “Is the decision to hold the Olympics in Japan in 2020 a foolish act of insanity and a crude attempt to help cover up the ravages of radiation?” As the report points out, this question must be asked because “Japan is a totalitarian corporate state where corporate interests are protected from liability by layers of subcontractors and by vested interests of powerful political bodies and extremely harsh state secrecy laws. As such, it is believed that nuclear safety and health issues, including deaths, are under-reported and likely not reported at all in most cases.”

And let us not forget the other manifestations of Capitalism's deadly hatred of the environment, the direct legacy of its Christian origin in the belief “environmental is of the Devil” and our sole soul purpose here is to earn our way to Heaven or doom ourselves to Hell if we fail. The resultant atrocities include the lead-poisoning plague that is now obviously nationwide.  ”Beyond the 71 water systems in Michigan that have recorded higher-than-Flint lead levels,” says the linked report, “a Reuters investigation found that children in nearly 4,000 communities across the United States have recorded lead levels more than twice those found in Flint at the height of the crisis.”

Tragically, the defeat of California in a water-rights fight shows the states – however well intentioned – are powerless to stop the Trump/Pence Regime's atrocities. 

Meanwhile the Keystone pipeline,  just as predicted,  is spilling thousands of barrels of oil via unreported and under-reported leaks.   



***

 

NEWS OF ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS – news that's always under-reported and sometimes totally suppressed – brings us full circle back to Roberts' Moron Nation essay, this time as the introduction to five reports on the unprecedented imposition of censorship by USian Mainstream Media in fulfillment of its late-Capitalist role as the for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

The chief executive of Google's parent company now brags of its close cooperation with the government to censor any Leftist criticism of the Empire, its Capitalist overlords and their financial fiefdoms. Chris Hedges' details another aspect of the censorship campaign,  while Black Agenda Report helps us brace ourselves for another succession of Trump/Pence atrocities with what amounts to an obituary for Net Neutrality and much else in the telephonic realm. An earlier Truthout story on the same subject is here.

An equally oppressive aspect of the new regime of USian censorship is disinformation, a primary example of which is the neo-McCarthy demonizing of minority activists as foreign agents. “Donna Brazile didn’t even try and run from the Democrat plantation, but she is being treated like a runaway slave for just having the temerity to question Massa Clinton.”

As Hedges says, “put the censorship campaigns together and the message is clear.” Left-wing critics, already under attack by the seemingly omnipotent forces of capitalist governance, will be silenced. And since the Trump-Pence Regime long ago made it obvious 'Net Neutrality is doomed no matter the overwhelming magnitude of its public support, there ends, probably forever, the usefulness of social media as a tool of resistance.

Unfortunately, because we have become so helplessly dependent on social media's implicitly despotic technology – despotic because it enables our overlords to censor us or switch us off literally any time they choose – there's not fuck-all we can do to fight back.

Such are the methods by which Moron Nation is perpetuated. With the death of the neutral Internet, the process of moronation becomes unstoppable. Moron Nation prevails. Thus in all probability our species dies, whether with an apocalyptic bang or a stupefied whimper it matters not; dead is dead.
_________________

* USian ”Thanksgiving” is a compound of Big Lies and lesser deceptions. Its true origin, now emphatically denied by USian Christianity, is the pagan harvest-feast that was typically celebrated as part of what we now call Hallowe'en. (Note how Canada – far less despotically Christian than the U.S. – has therefore preserved more of its original significance.)  Given the holiday's true history, it should be renamed “Genocide Day” and celebrated as a national day of shame and mourning.

**”Humanitarian” rather than “progressive” because the latter has been befogged to meaninglessness by at least two kinds of etymological abuse, specifically the mindless overuse encouraged by language fads and the premeditated theft of the term by the Democratic (sic) Party as part of the verbal deceptions by which it conceals its support for and collaboration with the more blatant fascism of the Republican Party.

***”Pseudo-citizen” because one is a citizen only if one is granted the rights of citizenship as spelled out in documents such as the U.S Constitution or the Four Freedoms and encouraged to behave accordingly. But these are the very rights and freedoms we here in the United (police) States are now methodically denied. Thus “citizen” in its present-day USian usage is part of the Big Lie of “our democracy.” Were we truth-speakers, we would describe ourselves not as “citizens” but as people conquered and subjugated by global Capitalism, i.e., “subjects.”



*********

 

And Yet There Remain a Few Glimmers of Hope...

 

Will Organized Labor Rise Again? It may already be happening. Millennials are discovering unionism is “the way we enforce democracy.”  Abusive charter-school bosses, low pay and wretched working conditions are sparking unionization campaigns in the very realm the Capitalists hoped would serve as a model for destroying unions. Similarly motivated efforts  are gaining headway in the Mainstream Media propaganda machine. And the Teamsters Union won a precedent-setting victory against the prescription drug lords at McKesson.

 

Tacoma Acknowledges It's Racist History. “In late September of (1885) all of the Chinese residents in Tacoma were told by city officials to leave town by Nov. 1 or 'face the consequences.' Many Chinese, fearful for their lives, left as quickly as they could, but slightly more than 200 remained in the city by the deadline date. On Nov. 3, a mob led by Tacoma’s mayor, the fire chief and other city leaders rounded up nearly all of the remaining Chinese residents and drove them out of town with only a few hours’ notice... The businesses and homes of the Chinese were ransacked and looted by the mob, and two days after the Chinese were expelled all of their homes were burnt to the ground.” Now, 132 years later, a collaboration between present-day Chinese-American residents and the Tacoma Art Museum addresses this dark period in the city's history in what is hoped will be a belated healing.

 

Redneck Revolt Expands Its Anti-Racist, Anti-Capitalist Organizing. Good news from folks the Republican and Democratic (sic) parties – and especially the Democrats' pseudo-Leftist sycophants – love to hate.

 

An Outspoken Feminist Seeks the Mexican Presidency, challenging the Hispanic cult of Macho. She is said to be the first such candidate in Mexico's history.


Censorship as Hilarious Hypocrisy: a British bakery is forced to apologize for portraying the Baby Jesus as a sausage pastry(Never mind the ritual cannibalism implicit in “this is my body; this is my blood.”)

Remembering an Important Writer Obscured by Patriarchal Prejudice: Louise Bryant's reporting on the Russian Revolution  is as relevant now as it was a century ago. Alas, like Gerda Taro's groundbreaking photographs of the Spanish Civil War, male supremacy had thrust it into the realm of the forgotten.

LB/16-24 November 2017 (with contributions from TigerLille and PF).

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Tax Reform Is Capitalism's Newest Euphemism for Genocide

HR-1 Blitzkrieg Confirms Magnitude of Neoliberal Murderousness.
But How Can We the People Fight Its Lightening-Fast Enactment?


FOR THE FIRST TIME in a journalism career that began in November 1956, I have no choice but to lead a story with “what the fuck?” – that ultimate admission of ignorance, taken-abackedness and shock-doctrine powerlessness such ignorance is maliciously induced to sustain.

Despite innumerable reassurances the House vote would be put off until next week, HR-1, the House effort at deliberately genocidal “tax reform” – that is, the elimination of myriad tax deductions We the (piss-drenched) People at the lower levels of Neoliberal trickle-down economics depend on to stay alive – was speed-passed earlier today (16 November 2017) and is now in the hands of the Senate.

There it will be combined with the as-yet unnamed, unnumbered senatorial effort to achieve the same goal, exterminating those of us deemed “surplus” and/or “disposable” by our economic overlords and killing us in ways guaranteed to obscenely increase their already pornographic wealth.

While the Senate measure will undoubtedly differ from the so-called “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” shat forth by the House, it will be every bit as intentionally murderous,  with the debate over reconciling the two versions' differences nothing more than (yet another) Big Lie to distract us from the fact both versions have the same deadly intent of eliminating as many of us as possible while extracting maximum Capitalist wealth from our victimization.

Such is genocide in an era in which death camps have become unfashionable even as their function remains critical to the success of Capitalist governance.

***

DESPITE THE OVERALL LACK of reliable details and analysis – reports from the usually reliable leftish web sites are heavy on rhetoric but light on facts – I can call upon my 61 years experience as a news reporter to state with absolute certainty that “tax reform” aka slow-motion genocide is being imposed on us with such death-blow swiftness precisely because its coup-de-grace speed and momentum eliminate almost entirely the possibility of mobilizing effective resistance.

Indeed, given this “tax reform” project's unprecedented savagery, I cannot but wonder if its perpetrators have somehow raised Vlad TepesElizabeth Bathory and the Marquis de Sade – and maybe Reinhard Heydrich  and Ted Bundy – from their graves to write the legislation. Given his connections to the Republican Party hierarchy, Bundy would be particularly appropriate as an adjunct to the GOPorkers' death-dealing “tax reform” effort.

Bottom line, this so-called “tax reform” campaign is undoubtedly the most brazenly vicious legislative effort ever considered by the federal government in my lifetime – and maybe in all U.S. history.

Half its horror is its deceptiveness. While at the moment it is Republican Party viciousness that assaults us, that fact is too often used by the Mainstream Media propaganda machine to distract us from the underlying fact the same morally imbecilic savagery – the defining characteristic of Neoliberal economics – is enthusiastically shared by the Democratic (sic) Party.

Doubt me? Note for example Obamacare's intentionally murderous method for cutting Medicare costs by limiting the number of times a heart patient can be hospitalized – an ongoing effort the success of which is measured by its five percent increase in cardiac deaths.

Still think the Democrats are the good guys? Then consider Obama's death-dealing, Big-Lie-enhanced assault on the food-stamp program  (see also here) and the Clintons' deadly destruction of the welfare system,  rationalized in part by Hillary's blatantly racist Big Lie welfare dependency was breeding generations of “super predators.” 

Such is the always oppressive, too often deadly reality of “our democracy.”

 

***

 

BELOW, WITH MY APOLOGY for how long it has taken me to rewrite this post to accommodate the surprise passage of HR-1 and dig up the additional resources, are the best links I could find on HR-1 itself; on its Senate sequel (that is, on the probable content of the final legislation Trump will ram down our throats); and what – if anything – we might be able to do to ameliorate our victimization:

On HR-1: Regardless of its fate in the Senate, its contents are relevant because they reveal the genocidal malice of the One Percent.

Analyses of how it would radically expand the ranks of homeless people by ending the construction of affordable housing – particularly the sort of tax-subsidized senior housing in which I am living out my final years – are here and here, with a much more detailed analysis here.

HR-1's intentionally deadly impact on our access to healthcare is described here.

Meanwhile CounterPunch's analysis is here, a disappointing work that reflects the bourgeois bias of its author Jack Rasmus by including only a “short list” of the devastation that would be inflicted on us, the 99 Percent – a few paragraphs obviously added as a concession to the publisher's need to appear “progressive.” Mostly Rasmus merely rants on ad nauseam about what we real leftists already know too well: how Congress intends to (again) reward the One Percenters and their wholly owned Ruling Class executives and professionals who – like latter-day Adolf Eichmanns – obediently (and ever more lucratively) whore for the plutocrats whose unspeakable wealth makes them the real rulers of the world.

Also note the Republican summary of HR-1, which gloatingly states most of its axe-blow eliminations of deductions would begin on 1 January 2018.

On “tax reform” in the Senate: the most relevant analysis I could find, not surprisingly from the World Socialist Web Site, is here. It required I wait until 2:12 a.m. today (17 November) to include it in this report, but the delay was entirely worth while. Here is a paragraph that shows why:

The bill is a measure by and for the oligarchy that controls both major parties and rules the country, in alliance with the military and the intelligence agencies. This reality was reflected in the response on Wall Street. All three major stock indexes soared, with the Dow Jones Industrial Index closing up by 187 points. The markets recorded their biggest one-day gains since September.”

And another, with the beginning sentence of a third graf:

“Ryan failed to explain why he and his fellow Republican leaders were rushing such a transformative measure through Congress without so much as a public hearing in either the House or Senate, and utilizing expedited procedures to circumvent a Democratic filibuster in the Senate so as to allow the Senate bill to be passed by a simple majority.”

“The Democrats, for their part, are carrying out their typical half-hearted and two-faced opposition. They themselves are calling for a massive cut in corporate taxes...” 

The rest of the what-happens-in-the-Senate material is again too heavy on rhetoric and way too light on data. The best of it is here, the link rendered uncertain by the new Common Dreams practice of obstructing the sharing of its reports by hiding them behind impossibly long URLs, for example the 786 characters of “speed-passed earlier today” (way above) or the 802 characters of “best report.” This necessitates converting these impossibly fragile links to tiny URLs, a process that because of the unprecedented length of the links is often time-consuming and at best vexing. (My thanks to the TinyURL website for its free and invaluable service.)

Other relevant reports are here  and here.

How then are we to fight back? Like the military version of Shock and Awe – the USian equivalent of the German Nazi Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg –  the One Percent's intent is to inflict maxim damage before we can muster an adequate defense. Given the speed and depth of the assault, this is a battle we will almost certainly lose, but we dare not surrender lest the enemy discredit us as hopelessly weak – another of the assault's obvious purposes.

In other words, these are truly desperate times. My suggestion is therefore that we employ not only the routine tactics of contacting even the anti-tax-cut senators by letter or telephone and demonstrating or picketing in appropriate locales, but that we offer maximum cooperation with any and all organizations that are attempting to resist the “tax reform” onslaught – whether or not they publicly admit its undeniably genocidal purpose. While we should recognize the obvious pitfalls that lurk in any such united-front effort – co-optation and infiltration are of course the worst hazards – we should also understand that such a circumstance offers us a unique opportunity for anti-capitalist consciousness raising.

Indeed, that's why I included the above reminder that it's not just the Republicans we have to fight – that both parties (which are in ugly truth mere factions of a single Capitalist party) – are, like their Nazi and fascist antecedents, the sworn enemies of any genuine people's democracy.

 

*********

 

BEFORE THE HOUSE passed HR-1, I had accumulated 68 news items from which to choose the stories I would feature in this week's Dispatches. This is the normal amount of reading and research for each week's edition, but I was sidetracked first by the emotional trauma of a family tragedy and then by the shock of HR-1's passage. (Yes, I had foolishly believed the sources, public and private, who were certain there would be no action on the measure until next week.) Hence I am choosing only the most relevant of these 68 items, stories that cannot wait until next week, in all only four news reports, plus two petitions I heartily recommend you sign:

 

Another Killer Cop Gets Another Predictable Acquittal. Officer charged in Freddie Gray case will remain on the job. 

 

GOPorkers Put Ronnie's Top Union-Buster in Command at NLRB: how Trump fulfills his promises to USian workers. 

 

Another White Cop, Another Dead Person of Color: the authoritiesclaim the victim called the police on himself and  suggest it was suicide.

 

DC Cops Busted Journalist to Seize His Film for use as evidence in ongoing felony trials of innocent victims of Inauguration Day mass arrest. 



Color of Change Petition: Justice for Meek Mill. “Have you heard about the judge who sent Meek Mill to prison? She's notorious for cruel and harsh sentences against Black people in Philadelphia. And she's shown extreme personal bias in Meek Mill's case. She needs to recuse herself from the case. That's why I signed this petition to demand she be removed from the case. Will you sign it too?”



UltraViolet Petition: Protect Mila Kunis, who who is under attack by Mike Pence supporters for her public support of Planned Parenthood.

 

LB/17 November 2017 (with contributions from TigerLille and PF).

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Another Week's Bold Battles against Minions of Malevolence

Misogyny Exemplifies the Patriarchal Putrescence at Capitalism's Core

HARVEY WEINSTEIN, WITH the help of key Democratic (sic) Party associates, employed ex-Israeli spooks and other private-investigators – psychological goon squads protected by judicial sleight-of-hand – in a failed effort to threaten his accusers into submissive silence. The unfolding story is especially relevant for the revealing glimpse it gives us of the depth of anti-woman hatefulness at the core of patriarchy and its favorite son Capitalism. The New Yorker's investigative report  reveals the details of Weinstein's breathtakingly vast effort to assail his accusers' credibility, while The Daily Caller exposes the connections of Weinstein and his allies to the demonstrably hypocritical  Clinton machine and the Democratic (sic) Party apparatus in general.

(Note: The Daily Caller is an openly fascist publication, revealed as such by the fact the pro-JesuNazi demagogue Ann Coulter  [see also here ] is its lead opinion columnist. While my citation of TDC material exemplifies the usefulness of the fascist and/or JesuNazi Mainstream Media in exposing ugly truths routinely suppressed by the Mainstream Media faction that serves the Democratic [sic] Party, it also provides an opportunity to show how the alleged rivalry between these media factions helps maintain the illusion of USian “freedom of the press” – a key deception in preserving the far more malignant Big Lie of “our democracy.” My advice? Read these sources mindful of their primary functions in maintaining the aforementioned Big Lie, but never forget they are useful sources of information about the nature and methodology of Capitalist governance as it inevitably metamorphoses into JesuNazi tyranny in the U.S. and other forms of fascism elsewhere.)

 

The Late American Indian Movement (AIM) Activist Dennis Banks served as a grunt in Vietnam, where he witnessed the USian Empire employing the same sort of terrorism it had used against his ancestors. After he returned home and encountered more of the same, he realized the irrefutable truth of the USian brand of Nazism in action: whatever the white supremacists were eager to do to people in other countries they were equally eager to do “to continue the genocide against the indigenous community.”

 

How Congressional Surrender Made the President the New Führer. That's my description, far more accurate than the euphemistic (and therefore implicitly submissive) language used in this report.  Yes, the Tom Dispatch writer follows the deliberately deceptive liberal practice of trying to seem radical while avoiding any call to revolution, but his text is nevertheless worth reading for its accurate summation of imperial history.

 

The Ongoing Persecution of Anti-Trump/Pence Demonstrators: felony trials in these Washington D.C. cases begin this month, with upwards of 200 people – many of them non-demonstrators caught up in the Nazi-style sweep – facing decades in the slave-pens of the USian prison system as retaliation for the illegal acts of a few anarchists.  See also an earlier but more detailed report on the D.C. mass arrests here, Meanwhile, this report on prosecutorial sleight-of-hand  provides a microcosm of the tactics that will undoubtedly be used to maximize convictions. 

 

Piss Off der Führ...ah, er, the President, Become Unemployable Forever. All this woman did was express her disapproval  by giving the finger to one of the president's invasive convoys, but she was fired in retaliation for that single act of defiance. As to her future, note what Colin Kaepernick's permanent unemployability proves about the fate of those who dare defy the Trump/Pence Regime. (With apologies for the “our democracy” Big Lie peddled by columnist Leonard Pitts.)

 

Los Angeles Mass Arrests Were Intended to Suppress Dissent. The headline tells the story, with more details here.

 

T/P Regime Finally Ends Persecution of Woman Who Dared Laugh at Sessions. Again the head tells the story, with details in the linked report. 

 

JesuNazis Sneak Fetal Personhood into Republican Tax Plan  in yet another theocratic effort to make all abortions illegal. See also here.

 

Capitalist Parties Dissolve into Factional Fights. The soap opera continues, but the details are both informative and entertaining. Go here and here.

 

In a Microcosm of These Fights, Senator's Assailant May Face Years in Prison. Local authorities are contemplating felony charges and Trump/Pence Regime authorities are looking to file federal charges against retired anesthesiologist Rene Boucher, who is accused of assaulting Sen. Rand Paul. The two are next-door neighbors in a gated community exclusively for millionaires and above, which means their antagonism epitomizes the warfare within the Imperial One Percent and its cadre of professional and executive harlots. Paul is a fanatical social Darwinist more details hereand Boucher is a Democrat, but both are members of the cadre of Ruling Class professionals who shamelessly whore for Capitalism.

 

Citing Capitalist Savagery, Majority of Younger USians Prefer Communism or Socialism. Alas, the vital question – are they willing to join and sustain the necessary revolution – remains unanswered by this anti-Communist poll. From the report: “The data on attitudes toward socialism, which confirms other surveys with similar findings, is all the more extraordinary given that opposition to capitalism is excluded from the mass media.”

 

The End, Forever, of USian Due Process? How Special Counsel Muller has nullified attorney-client privilege is a warning to us all.

 

Why the Future is Either Chinese or Nonexistent. Unless the USian Empire acts upon its JesuNazi ethos of Better Dead than Red and so destroys the world, “there is no reason to doubt that China will surpass the U.S. as the planet’s most important economic center long before 2049...The Chinese build African ports and railroads, while the U.S. builds drone bases.” Many more details here.

 

How JesuNazi Oppression Warps Our Sexuality. The “most serious determinant of the sexual well-being of our youth” are the negative attitudes with which we approach it.

 

Hashtag #MeToo Teaches Us Speaking Out Is a Genuinely Revolutionary Act, a blow against the compulsory silence that is the patriarchy's most potent weapon – a lesson as relevant in all other forms of economic and political rebellion as it is in the liberation struggles of women and minorities.

 

Another Police-State Perversion of the USian Mainstream Media Adds Twitter to the private, for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. (That's Goebbels in the accompanying photo.)

 

Sergeant La David Johnson a Victim of the Poverty Draft. “Any discussion about Sergeant Johnson ought to point out that he was a victim of the poverty draft. Before enlisting he worked at Walmart, a sure path to continued poverty or to the dubious odds offered by the army.”

 

Rebels Are Not Always Working-Class Heroes: two critical assessments of the Catalan independence movement, here and here.

 

A Washington State First Nation Exemplifies New Eco-Leadership, using its totem-pole exhibit to defy Capitalism by raising environmental consciousness.

 

In Compellingly Poetic Prose, Christy Rodgers pens a poignant prophecy relevant to that environmental consciousness and thus too important to ignore.  

 

Homeless People in Seattle Demand Recognition as Fully Human,  with my apology for the misleading Popular Resistance headline: the protesters did not “take over” city hall; they were invited there as showpieces by the politicians.

 

The Capitalist Present May Be the Most Stressful Time in Human History: “fifty-nine percent said they can't remember a worse time in the nation's history...Women who took the survey reported higher levels of stress than men, and black and Latino males had a higher average stress level than their white counterparts. Black respondents also expressed far less optimism  about the path the country is on than white respondents; 72 percent disagreed that the country could have a strong future, while only 55 percent of whites disagreed with the sentiment.” Me, I fear even the Black respondents are way too optimistic.

 

Perhaps as an Ultimate Yardstick of Our Despair, an USian woman bedded down with a predatory python, unaware the seven-foot snuggly snake was actually measuring her to determine if she could be swallowed as its next meal.

 

The Analysis of Speeches, Debates, and Various Documents demonstrates that Trump stands out from other politicians as being very low in analytic thinking. However, he represents the next step in a trend wherein most Presidents and presidential candidates have been becoming less analytic. Trump may be an anomaly, but he is also a part of a long-developing presidential pattern.” So says a psychological study, the full text of which is censored by an $11.95 pay wall.

 

Yet Another Killer Cop (Predictably) Acquitted. A jury acquitted Wayne Isaacs, an officer with the New York City Police Department (NYPD), of murder and manslaughter after he gunned down unarmed Delrawn Small in Brooklyn on July 4, 2016. Since both killer and victim are African-American, the atrocity exemplifies the judicial immunity that maximizes police violence.

 

Protecting Capitalist Savagery, Congress Bolsters the USian Police State. “The aim of this campaign is to claim that social conflict within the United States arises not from the scale of social inequality (which is) greater than in any other country in the developed world, but rather from the actions of 'outside agitators' working for the Kremlin.”

 

Two Black Agenda Reports on Democratic (sic) Treachery show us the Hillary Regime's euphemistic fascism would have been scarcely more than a dishonest version of the Trump/Pence Regime's JesuNazism. Go here and here.

 

But Are Deceptive Demos a Bit Better Than Openly Despotic Fascists? As predicted, a big majority of New Yorkers say yes, electing Mayor Bill de Blasio to a second term despite his many broken promises. (Another example of how our revolutionary impulses are relentlessly suffocated by declining expectations.)

 

Giroux Documents What We as 99 Percenters Already Know: that the atrocities in the Middle East, in Puerto Rico and Las Vegas are products of the same mindset. “ At the beginning of the 21st century, we have seen the emergence of a new kind of politics of death, the effects of which extend from the racist response to Hurricane Katrina to the lead poisoning of thousands of children in Flint, Michigan, and dozens of other cities...People who are Black, Brown, poor, disabled or otherwise marginalized are now excluded from the rights and guarantees accorded to fully fledged citizens of the republic...their efforts to mobilize...met with murderous police crackdowns and deportations...With the election of Trump, the politics of disposability and the war against democracy have taken on a much harder and crueler edge...a snapshot of how war culture and violence merge.”  (Well worth reading.)

 

Working Class Peoples as (Yet Another) Endangered Species: As demonstrated by the aftermaths of hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Irma and Maria, plus the wildfires that ravaged the western US, the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals refuse to acknowledge the causes or the consequences of the increasingly devastating effects of climate change. And – due entirely to neoliberal malevolence – we Working Class folk are invariably the people who are most ruinously afflicted.  Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, teachers are arrested for protesting the neoliberal closure of the public schools.

 

Most of Us Know the Demos Swept the Off-Year Elections, but journalistic principles nevertheless require linking to a comprehensive national report. That said, nothing will change save radical escalation of anti-socialist identity politics, especially efforts to forcibly disarm the 99 Percentparticularly in Washington state,  where the Democratic (sic) Party will now use its recapture of the state Senate to try to fulfill its long-term goal of outlawing and confiscating all semi-automatic firearms and radically expanding the class of firearms-ownership prohibitions to include all opponents of Capitalism.

 

Germany, Feeling Abandoned and Perhaps Even Threatened by the Trump/Pence Regime, contemplates rearming for offensive warfare.  (Can you say “blitzkrieg”?)

 

Korean Crisis Update: Trump uses South Korean parliament as “the stage for a display of choreographed war propaganda.”  Meanwhile a related story is seemingly ignored by Mainstream Media. Go here for current details and background on the empire's potebtially apocalyptic warmongering against Korea and also against  Iran.

 

Self-Education: an Informative Short Course on Middle Eastern History, with emphasis on the imperialistic ploys that led to the present-day Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, is available here.

 

In the USian Homeland, Even the Telebots Are Racists: a New York City school system robo-call repeatedly mistakes the N-word as an African-American student's first name.

 

Dialectic Materialism Is Our First Accurate Description of What Is and how things actually are. A most relevant essay by Susan Babbit. “Cubans discovered, or rediscovered, the ancient truth that human beings know the world dialectically. We know, not just intellectually, but by feeling the effects of the world, bodily.”

 

An Anthology on the 100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution, without which we socialists would have no rational hopefulness at all. Inspiring reading here, here, here and here, with the Better-a-Dead-Planet-Than-a-Red-Planet retaliatory Capitalist loathing of the 99 Percent evidenced here.


LB/1-8 November 2017 (with contributions from from TigerLille and PF).

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Congress Joins U.S. War on First Amendment Freedoms

Sen. Grassley Blames Russians for Agitating Black Rebelliousness

IMG_1942 - Copy Anti-abortion fanatic shrieks biblical invective at a Planned Parenthood patient in Tacoma.
(Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2017)

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(Note: the following story has undoubtedly received some [probably misleading] coverage by the Mainstream Media propaganda apparatus, but the linked reports below, mostly from World Socialist Web Site, cleave through the disinformation to give us a much more complete picture of what actually obtains as the Empire mentally goose-steps ever more rapidly toward unabashed JesuNazism. Also: as of today I am again changing Dispatches' publication schedule, this necessitated by changes in the schedules of some of my other obligations. Henceforth new material will be posted every Wednesday evening or very early Thursday morning. My apology for any inconvenience so imposed./LB)

 

CLAIMING “CIVIL WAR,” the capitalist owners of the imperial USian government and their political puppets in Congress have launched a bipartisan assault on our few remaining First Amendment freedoms.

An earlier WSWS story, relevant for its slightly different focus, is here.

Significantly, this sudden, dramatic escalation of efforts at censorship and suppression of anti-Capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-theocratic activism is jointly led by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic (sic) Sen. Diane Feinstein.

The Trump/Pence Regime itself has already unleashed its Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) secret police against African-American activists and has long encouraged supporters to attack its opponents in a variety of other ways. Combined with the decision by pro-regime social-media and Internet monopolists to suppress allegedly subversive websites and journalists,  these developments lend credibility both to fears the regime intends to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law to facilitate mass arrests and/or that it is preparing to start World War III.

These fears are intensified by the fact the regime's newest tyrannies were actually begun in 2016 by Democrats who were then the regime's (alleged) opponents but are now its obvious allies.

Remember it was Democratic (sic) Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton who advocated thermonuclear war against Russia and China, while Republican Donald Trump promised he would seek world peace while launching what amounts to a latter-day pogrom against minorities and immigrants, thereby confining the empire's savagery to the homeland.

The de facto pogrom began as soon as the regime took office, with skyrocketing immigration arrests and presidential encouragement of police brutality.

Now the collaboration of the two parties on domestic-oppression measures suggests the proverbial fix – in this instance some sort of secret, tyranny-enhancing agreement between the two Capitalist parties – was probably in place long before the Trump/Pence inauguration last January. Proof we are all, as never before (unless we were combat-zone soldiers), in dire and potentially deadly jeopardy. (See also “God's Own Death Squad,” below.)

 

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Trump/Pence Warmongers Ban South Korean Peace Activists, canceling their visas as the Empire's massive military build-up continues. Look at a map of the region to see how its geography mandates that a thermonuclear attack on North Korea will, because of radiation and fallout, unavoidably be an attack on Russia and China as well. Hence World War III. Hence the apocalypse we all dread and the JesuNazis all welcome. Hence the reduction of our beloved Earth to a bug planet. Hence kiss your ass good-bye. Hence The End. (Because of the personalities involved, this confrontation is infinitely more terrifying than the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which I was 22 years old, married to my first wife and just back from nearly two years Regular Army service in Korea. In fact our troop transport, the USNS Sultan, was shadowed by a Soviet sub from the time we left Pearl Harbor until we entered San Francisco Bay maybe five days later. It was September and the missile crisis was still secret; when the sub surfaced 600 yards or so off our port side to charge her batteries, which she did two or three times, the Soviet sailors always waved at us and we U.S. soldiers always waved back, though in retrospect I have no doubt the sub's orders were to sink us  – nearly 4,000 soldiers – the instant war began.) (These personal details are based entirely on memory as all my journals from that era – all my Korea photographs too – were destroyed in the 1983 fire.)

 

Nurses' Union Denounces Trump/Pence Abandonment of Puerto Rico, says the regime is knowingly leaving hurricane victims to die. A related story is here.

 

JesuNazi Death Threats Bar Congresswoman from Congress. Never in my 77-plus years have I heard of anything like this happening in the USian Homeland. In banana republics, yes of course, but never here in the United States. More proof the brazen, regime-encouraged malevolence of our enemies is truly beyond description. (Again see “God's Own Death Squad,” below.)

 

Contrasting Police Responses as Drivers Use Motor Vehicles as Anti-Personnel Weapons: Muslim man in Manhattan legitimately arrested as terrorist, white man in California coddled by cops. For more on the California incident, go here.

 

Conflict in Catalonia: two situation reports from Spain, here and here.

 

Genocide in Burma: the killing of Rohingya people continues despite the Empire's pro forma (i.e., meaningless) protests.

 

Trump Posed to Appoint Four Theocracy-Minded Judges who will undoubtedly do everything in their (considerable) power to advance the JesuNazi agenda. Another warning as to how truly awful our circumstances are. (See also “God's Own Death Squad,” below.)

 

If Money Co-Opts, Does Big Money Co-Opt Completely? See here and here. I thought long and hard before I posted these two stories because of their potential divisiveness. Finally I concluded the fact they each publicly raise the all-important co-optation issue gives them must-post newsworthiness. Such is the sometimes-troubling duty of an editor. Nevertheless I apologize to anyone who is offended by my decision. 

 

On Mothering a Black Son in a Realm Where Blacks Are Targets. A testament of a Black woman's maternal courage, its prose written with such compellingly poetic skill it made me cry. May we all have such loving mothers, as I most certainly did not. (Yes, some of my tears were undoubtedly tears of envy.)

 

The Struggle in the South: a situation report from Middle Tennessee. 

 

Imprisoned Immigrant Teen Finally Wins Her Abortion. This story did get a little Mainstream Media coverage, but Dispatches has followed it closely, so I'm posting it here in case you didn't see or hear the outcome.

 

Viciously Deceptive “Clinic” Lures Unwary Abortion-Seekers to Relentless Abuse: the magnitude of the JesuNazis' newest lies equals the magnitude of their misogynistic hatred. (See photo above.)

 

Hurricane Recovery by LGBTQ People in the JesuNazi Theocracy of Texas: how art and solidarity heals, a useful lesson for every one of us regardless of how we define ourselves.

 

A Realistic Retrospective on the 2016 Election: The advent of the Trump/Pence Regime has most likely sealed our doom – my opinion, not the linked author's – but as he says, had Hillary been elected we'd probably already be nothing more than radioactive dust, so at least we're getting more time in which to taste the exquisiteness of life. (Yeah, even for me, an arthritic cripple for whom pain has become as much a part of consciousness as breathing.)

 

Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan, Now Studying Lenin, damns the Democrats' blame-Russia warmongering, notes how the party has become a Capitalist tool for betrayal of the 99 Percent.

 

Soviet Sub Captain Honored for Defying Launch Order, thereby averting World War III. Would an USian officer dare do likewise? I think not. Nor would the Empire's soldiers dare disobey an order to massacre unarmed USian civilians. All available evidence indicates that we USians – contrary to the Russian revolutionaries of 1917 (who shot their officers rather than fire on unarmed demonstrators) – live in a realm peopled mostly by obedient Adolf Eichmanns.

 

Two Interesting Reports on the Kennedy Assassination Papers, here and here, the latter revealing undeniable but long-suppressed proof the president was targeted by at least two shooters.

 

On the Relevance of the Soviet Revolution: “Taking state power is a serious enterprise: it requires a workers’ army to defend the country from national and international capitalists.”

 

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Knowing Our Enemy: More on the USian Empire as God's Own Death Squad

WHY DOES MAINSTREAM MEDIA refuse to acknowledge the Trump/Pence Regime's wildly accelerating conversion of the white-supremacist U.S. empire into a militantly doomsday-minded thermonuclear Christian theocracy?

Why do we the people continue to deny that our imperial overlords truly believe their sadistic god commands them to conquer the entire planet  and subjugate its peoples at least as violently as their forebears massacred the First Nations of North America and vaporized the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The answers to both these questions become obvious once the questions themselves are viewed in their proper sociopolitical and historical contexts.

Jeff Sharlet exposed the theocratic agenda of the U.S. Ruling Class nearly a decade ago in The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). As many Dispatches readers already know, it is a properly frightening revelation of how a generously-financed Christian conspiracy that began in the 1934 is succeeding – not just with the Republican Party's enthusiastic sponsorship but with the clandestine assistance of the Democratic (sic) Party as well – in imposing Christian theocracy on the United States.

(We should ask: is it coincidence this corporate-funded ChristoFascist effort began in 1934, the same year the Bankers' Plot failed  to make the U.S. a partner in what was to become the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis?) (See also here.)

Though Sharlet's pivotal work on the Empire's theocratic core was published nearly a decade ago, subsequent events have since elevated it and two earlier but closely related works to the stature of superbly well-reasoned prophetic analysis. One is Chris Hedges' American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press: 2006). The other – the best of the three for historical documentation – is Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Viking: 2006). 

The Christian fanaticism Sharlet, Hedges and Phillips decry – which began its boiled-frog climb to technologically enabled Trump/Pence omnipotence long before the politicians of both Capitalist parties formalized the thrust toward theocracy by adding the phrase “under God to the Pledge of Allegiance – has triumphed not only by obliterating the few remnants of USian liberty but by threatening human survival in a manner unprecedented in our species' 300,000-year history.

What makes the threat so deadly dangerous is the thoroughly documented JesuNazi belief, as expressed by George the Second  and later by a Trumpist pastor, that self-inflicted apocalypse – whether by thermonuclear warfare, Capitalist ecocide or both – is the essential precursor to Jesus's return to Earth.

And the danger is far more immediate than many of us dare admit. It is intensified to near infinity by our Mainstream Media's concealment of just how unspeakably jeopardized life itself has become under Capitalism's (always biblical) agenda and how the Trump/Pence Regime has escalated this jeopardy to almost certain fulfillment by declaring its genocidal, ecocidal, ultimately apocalyptic agenda to now be the summum bonum of the Empire's foreign  and domestic policy, which our theocratic overlords and their JesuNazi followers believe is divinely ordained.  

Nor is there any rational hope the Democratic (sic) Party might birth any significant rethinking of these policies. As Sharlet points out in The Family, “The difference between the two parties, economically, theologically, is one of degrees, not principles.” (p. 384-385)

Hedges, as if he were anticipating Sharlet's work, had already noted the mindset that would propel the Trump/Pence Regime into terminally apocalyptic power: “And the congregation gathering today in this church waits for the final welcome relief of the purgative of violence, the vast cleansing that will lift them into the heavens, and leave the world they despise, the one they ruined or that was ruined for them, to be racked by plagues and flood and fire until it, and all those they blame for the debacle of their lives, are consumed and destroyed by God.” (American Fascists, p. 183).

While the people Hedges describes in this passage are mostly members of the Working Class, the same intensity of hatefulness, albeit without the goading of financial desperation, defines the white-supremacist executives and professionals who were by far the largest faction of Trump/Pence voters.

Phillips adds a bit of the historical perspective that makes his work especially valuable: “The essential political preconditions (for theocracy) fell into place in the late 1980s and 1990s with the emergence of the Republican party as a powerful vehicle for religiosity and church influence, while state Republican parties, most conspicuously in the South and Southwest...set out in varying degrees the radical political theology of the Christian Reconstruction movement, the tenets of which range from using the Bible as a basis for domestic law to emphasizing religious schools and women's subordination to men.” (American Theocracy, pgs. 232-233)

“The Christian Reconstructionist movement...proclaims ambitions that range from replacing public schools with religious education to imposing biblical law and limiting the franchise to male Christians...Most Americans, having never heard of Christian Reconstructionism, likely assume it has only fringe status. The groups that monitor such activists – Theocracy Watch...the First Amendment Foundation...Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and others – take the movement more seriously...” (ibid., p. 243)

Meanwhile a Center for Inquiry report notes the federal government loses “over $71 billion per year” in religious tax exemptions, much of which underwrites pro-theocracy proselytizing. Susan Jacoby, one of the many sources cited by the report, puts it thusly: the question is why “church authorities adhering to a deeply conservative brand of Christianity . . . get to use taxpayer money to further their parochial agenda.”

The answer to Jacoby's question is also the answer to the question that opened our know-the-enemy discussion. The government that grants the tax exemptions to finance the theocratic onslaught and the Mainstream Media that refuses to report the magnitude of the theocratic threat (or even acknowledge its existence) are owned by the same cabal of One Percenters.

Which further confirms the formerly unthinkable truth collectively revealed by Phillips, Hedges and Sharlet – that the USian Empire was clandestinely a sword-of-the-Lord theocracy when Trump and Pence took control. Their job, no doubt scripted years ago by the sons and grandsons of the original Bankers' Plot conspirators, is to do exactly what they have been doing since Inauguration Day: that is, releasing the theocracy from its proverbial closet and ascertaining we the people of the 99 Percent are either its captives or its corpses.

In other words, whether as individuals or a species we are well and truly FUBAR. As to why so many of us remain in such self-destructively stubborn denial of that fact, I suspect it is mostly a manifestation of the classically USian imbecility of hope – the same self-protective “ideological bubble”  of all-will-be-well fantasy that fostered the extended refusal to recognize Obama the Orator was in fact Barack the Betrayer.

Plus if we accept the unmitigated horror of our circumstances – that we are already targets in a holy war – we will each have to modify our thinking accordingly, never again forgetting we are opposed not only by the theocratic state but by the lynch-mob fanaticism of its civilian and paramilitary allies.

Thus like Red Army soldiers in the earliest months of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, our circumstances are bound to radically worsen before there is even the smallest chance of compelling their improvement.

 

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If You're in or Near London, There's an Amedeo Modigliani Retrospective – dates to be announced – planned by the Tate Modern, which is essentially the British equivalent of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Meanwhile thanks to an organization called Artsy, the mission of which is to make the viewing of great art readily available to all the peoples of the world, here's a collection of Modigliani's work.  Here too, from the visual treat cupboard of Artsy's online magazine, is an interesting study of how and why women and men differ in their approaches to shooting selfiesIndulge. Enjoy. Relish. As the LGBTQ community of Houston discovered (see “Hurricane Recovery,” above), art is healing even when one is menaced by the jackboots of the JesuNazis, as indeed – given the Empire's ever-more-apocalyptic global reach – all genuine humans now are.

LB, with contributions from TigerLille/ 24 October-1 November 2017.

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