Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Admitting How Fiercely We Hate Our Oppressors Is Neither Ideology nor Ideological Discipline, but It Is the First Step toward Liberation

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA MACHINE, owned as it is by the same moral imbeciles who own the USian Empire's economic and political systems and all their global subsidiaries, long ago became the for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

Exemplifying how Capitalism's momentum invariably thrusts it toward fascism, Mainstream Media was headed in that direction even under the independent ownership that characterized most USian newspapers and broadcast outlets during the years of my later teens and earlier manhood, 1956 through about 1980 or thereabouts.

While the only meaningful difference between local Capitalists and their global counterparts has never been more than the geographical limits of their greed, the socioeconomic interactions characteristic of local ownership exercised enough moral restraint on publishers that in most instances, mass media did not metastasize into its present-day malignancy until the news monopolies took over.

Microcosms of empires and imperial tyranny, the monopolies quickly ended any pretense of accountability to local audiences or even to local elites. Soon afterward the monopolists' suppressed or co-opted the various unions and other organizations that had previously guaranteed print, radio and television journalists a modicum of editorial independence.

During the same period, the monopolies' overwhelming financial power leveraged the collegiate journalism schools to impose the gate-guard functions that guarantee the press corps remains forever purged of any trace of revolutionary or even reformist consciousness.

Hence by 1983, when the destruction by probable arson of a 24-year book project and all the rest of my life's work flung me into the post-traumatic clinical depression that ended my career as a Mainstream Media staff member (though I would continue as a freelancer for many more years), my staff-job employability was already doomed by the spread of the ideologically lockstep journalism mandated by the monopolies wherever they bought out formerly independent publications and broadcasters.

While newspaper journalism was originally a haven for bright and articulate but un-colleged people of blue-collar or lower-income backgrounds and often therefore subtly reflected our Left-populist, pro-union, even socialist bias, the monopolists were determined to purge or suppress all such viewpoints and replace them with bourgeois conformity.

Thus from the monopolists' perspective, by the mid-1970s there were already three strikes against me: firstly, I had entered journalism at age 16 via the formerly traditional Working Class route of a job as a copyboy; secondly, as if to underscore my Working Class status, chronic poverty had denied me a bachelor's degree until my 36th year (by which time I had already held a half-dozen editorships, two of them significantly award-winning); and thirdly – whether as editor, reporter or photographer – my battles against my employers' protocols of internal censorship had earned me the reputation of a troublemaker and chronic dissident. In short our corporate uberführers regarded me as not just a member of the Working Class decidedly unwelcome in the relentlessly bourgeois exclusivity of the monopoly newsroom, but – because of my commitment to unions and other such expressions of proletarian humanitarianism – a subversive as well, probably (tsk, tsk) even a clandestine Communist.

The rationalizations by which I tried to accommodate the monopolists' implicitly fascist regimes and the comparable efforts I witnessed amongst my colleagues were – as I recognize now (though only in several decades' retrospect) – early and therefore indicative (if not actually prophetic) variants on the “lesser of two Evils” meme that has defined the politics of the Imperial Homeland since its pretense of democratic process was murdered in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Because most of us had mortgages and car-loan debts and families to support, we either surrendered or – if we were very lucky (that is, wealthy enough to afford such detours) – we pursued alternative careers.

As did I, thanks to the Vietnam Era GI Bill and the fact my second (and avowedly final) attempt at matrimony had ended without financial obligation. What I sought was a new career as a geologist, a choice encouraged by enthusiastic support from my professors and bolstered by a dean's-list grade-point-average.  But then the Nixon Regime's malicious curtailment of the GI Bill's educational stipends ended my academic aspirations just as it did so many others, and I re-discovered an ugly truth I had first learned as a teenager: that here in the United States, professorial endorsement is meaningless in the quest for scholarship money unless you also have the endorsements of business executives and churchmen – which for me (as for nearly all other offspring of severely dysfunctional families), are no more accessible than the bridal suite of Buckingham Palace. Hence, albeit with radically diminished expectations, I returned to journalism.

In other words, I am intimately familiar with the history of USian Mainstream Media from the 1950s through the present.

All of which is prefatory to the fact that since the advent of the Trump/Pence Regime and its implicit declaration of the USian Empire as the Fourth Reich, I have observed a heartening effort on the part of a few of our journalists to slyly resurrect the pre-monopoly practice of occasionally speaking truth to power. The truth-speakers – actually more whisperers than talkers-aloud – are mostly in what is commonly regarded as elitist or alternative media, the PseudoLeftist mechanism by which our overlords maintain the Big Lie of “our democracy.” The laudably subversive elements in this sort of journalism, initially almost imperceptibly subtle, have slowly intensified until now, as in the following examples, they have become unmistakable in their fosterage of the hatred that will perhaps at long last induce an otherwise cravenly submissive population to rise up against its oppressors. Here are three laudable examples, complete with passages that exemplify their rebelliousness:

“The Language of a Dictatorship,” by Masha Gessen, of The New Yorker. Reporting on the adulation heaped on Trump by his coterie of sycophants, she notes such speeches “are usually given (only) in dictatorships...This is what we observed in Washington on Wednesday, and it’s the scariest part of Trump’s big tax triumph.”

“They Cheered When This Tax Bill Passed: Always Remember That,” by Truthout's William Rivers Pitt, who advises us to prepare ourselves...”in whatever way best suits. The thing that is about to happen...will be beyond your worst expectations.”

“Will the Resistance Win in 2018?” This, the best and most telling example saved for last, is by Amanda Marcotte of Salon: “Maybe we win. Maybe we don't. Most likely we get some victories but lose much that we hold dear...much of the damage done – to our economy, our democracy, our planet, our collective mental health – will be permanent. So we have to learn to love the fight itself, not because we are winning, but because we are fighting...Let's resolve to help the people who need help, instead of trying to save people who don't want to be saved. That clarity of mind and purpose will serve us well in the dark days ahead, which won't end anytime soon.”

Yes, of course I understand these sorts of journalistic deviations are allowed only because of strategic battles within the Capitalist Ruling Class and the monolithic tyranny it hides behind the charade of two names, the brazen JesuNazis of the Republican Party versus the euphemism-cloaked fascists of the Democratic (sic) Party. But this is nevertheless the first time probably since World War II I have seen even a tiny segment of USian mass media devote energy and space to teaching us to hate our enemy with even more intensity than the enemy hates us – and though that is neither ideology nor ideological discipline, it nevertheless bodes well for the cause of revolution. Especially if the JesuNazis use their now proven omnipotence to silence their Ruling Class foes – as they surely will (for this is precisely what the original Nazis did in Germany even before they begin silencing everyone else).

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Moral Imbecilic Congressional Plutocrats Expedite Deaths of USian Children. From the report: “Alabama parents whose children depend upon AllKids – the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)  – received devastating notices. The program would stop enrolling children as of January 1... furthermore, the entire program will be terminated on February 1 should Congress fail to earmark funding for CHIP. Alabama was the first state to announce enrollment freezes and possible closure, but a total of 9 million children are threatened nationwide by the failure of Congress to provide new funding for the program for the fiscal year that began October 1.”

Oklahoma Predictably Chooses Genocide as its Expression of Christian Love: The JesuNazi-governed state is attempting to terminate the in-home care that sustains the lives of 20,000 disabled and elderly people.

More Such Christian Love Expressed by Catholic-Owned Seattle Hospital in its discrimination against a transsexual man.  As I noted on the report's comment thread: “Make no mistake, the burgeoning expansion of hospitals owned by the Catholic Church (and by other fanatical Christian organizations) is itself part of the longstanding effort – now radically intensified by encouragement, funding and assistance from the Trump/Pence Regime and its rubber-stamp Congress – to reduce the United States to zero-tolerance Christian theocracy. This includes the total disempowerment of women by criminalization not only of abortion but all other forms of birth control and recriminalization not only of LGBTQ sexuality but any and all sexual activity outside of marriage.” As to Seattle's alleged tolerance, see the anti-LGBTQ hatefulness expressed elsewhere on the same comment thread.

JesuNazi-Owned KOMO Suppresses Murder Suspect's Nazi Connections. From the report: “The Washington Post reported...the same story the same day as KOMO. But (WaPo's) headline provided an important piece (of) information: “A teen is charged with killing his girlfriend’s parents. They had worried he was a neo-Nazi...the parents of the suspect's girlfriend...pushed for the two to break up their relationship. On Thursday, December 21, the mother texted a friend that the 'outspoken Neo Nazi' was out of their lives. The next day, she was dead. And her husband was also dead. And the suspect was almost dead – he shot himself and is now in critical condition. But if he survives, he will be charged with the murder of two white Americans The New York Times identified as anti-fascists.”

Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford Predicts the One Percent's Downfall. From the text: “The orgy of class thievery just completed on Capitol Hill has alarmed and outraged three-quarters of the public...and the full import of the crime has not yet set in. The oligarchs have no shame, and revel in the ease with which the system allows them to plunder. The ghouls of Wall Street believe they are basking in the glow of the ultimate 'creative destruction' – the elimination of all constraints on capital – and that they are invincible. Donald Trump tweets that this is so from his hegemonic toilet seat. The rich cannot help but push the rest of our noses in the dirt, and that – plus the inherent contradictions of capitalism in fatal decline – will be their undoing.” Wishful thinking, because history proves such an overthrow requires the four prerequisites of revolution (see below), all of which We the People tragically lack – but changes at home and abroad may well provide them, though the process could take decades, which means our liberation is ultimately dependent on whether the apocalypse-minded JesuNazis nuke the world into a bug planet before we can achieve liberation.

On Learning from 1917 How to Agitate a New Revolution: Advice well worth reading given us by Socialist Worker, much of its text focused on Vladimir Lenin's paraphrasing of Rosa Luxemburg: “The truth that reforms are possible only as a by-product of a movement that is completely free of all the narrowness of reformism has been confirmed a hundred times in world history.”

The Ku Klux Kunning of Trumpian Truculence. Like the flamboyant flasher who brandishes his dick and thumps it on the lecturn to highlight his sermons to congregations of fellow exhibitionists, Trump the Tyrant ensures the ongoing loyalty of his JesuNazi followers by uttering blatantly white-supremacist comments whenever the opportunity arises. Thus his denunciations of Haitians and Nigerians.

My Comment-Thread Remarks on Other Websites. One of the great pleasures I have regained as a result of the death of the senior-housing-facility newsletter I founded five years ago – a monthly publication I faithfully served as editor, writer, photographer, designer, typesetter and general flunky – is that now since the newsletter has been killed by lack of money for printing, I again have time to post well-reasoned responses to material on other websites. Below are links to four such dialogues, complete with indicative titles and excerpts:

On Fomenting Revolution Even Without Its Four Prerequisites: First we must abandon the spurious notions of “reform” and “resistance” and replace them with the realization that our only alternative is revolution – that either we rise up, overthrow Capitalism and replace it with socialism or we die, whether as individuals or a species. Secondly we need to recognize that history proves all successful revolutions have four prerequisites. These are (1)-unifying ideology and supportive ideological discipline; (2)-organization and leadership able to elude nullification by the surveillance and death-squad apparatuses of the Capitalist state; (3)-access to and ability to employ the latest technologies, especially including those of the military; and (4)-the assistance, both clandestine and overt, of a major foreign power. Thirdly we must recognize that none of these prerequisites exist in today's USian Empire, which at least since 1945 has been deliberately (and successfully) structured to exclude them. Indeed it was their absence – particularly the absence of items (1) and (2) – that nullified the Occupy Movement's revolutionary potential. It was a nullification all the more tragic because Occupy fervently acknowledged our desperate need for revolution – that revolution is in fact the only way we will ever save ourselves from Capitalism's inevitable and nearly complete metamorphosis into fascism and its inevitably apocalyptic consequences – but without the ideology and guidance that might have been provided by the Soviet Union, Occupy had absolutely no idea how to go about making revolution happen. Which brings us back to the question first asked by V. I. Lenin amidst the Tsarist Russian tyranny of 1902, Что делать? – Shto dyehlat, “what is to be done?”

On the Environmental Mandate: Revolution as Our Sole (and Soul) Survival: Excellent wake-up call from (John Bellamy) Foster, but nevertheless missing one vital point: that without the resurrection of the Soviet Union in eco-Marxist form (or the emergence of some comparable, equally powerful Marxist nation with a new Red Army and the capability of decisive global subversion), there is absolutely no chance humanity will overthrow Capitalism...The “exterminism” Mr. Foster cites, undefined in the (comment thread's parent text), is the Capitalist plan to reduce the human population by Neoliberal genocide until the entire planet duplicates the antebellum South: a global network of corporate plantations ruled by the zero-tolerance savagery of a tiny white male aristocracy with just enough of the rest of us bred and worked to death as slaves to keep the Market functioning – the ultimate fulfillment of the murderous moral imbecility advocated by Ayn Rand in her fictionalizations of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

On the Fate of a Species That Seemingly Cannot Learn from Itself: At the very best we are doomed to environmental apocalypse as long as there is such a thing as Capitalism...Far more likely is our extinction by thermonuclear apocalypse, which we would be facing no matter who won the presidency, Hillary, who in defiance of history intended to be the first ever conqueror of Russia and China, or Trump, who has already launched a domestic Holocaust and – in service to his fanatical JesuNazi masters – intends to being about the end of the world by nuking North Korea.

On the New Evidence Linking the CIA to the Murder of President Kennedy: You described the Central Intelligence Agency as “one of the dirtiest Black operatives on the planet,” which is ok, but the truth is it is the dirtiest, not the least because of its employment of Nazi war criminals who facilitated the continuation of the bottomless horrors imposed on humanity by the Third Reich, especially the Abwehr and the Gestapo – always with the applause and assistance of the fathers and grandfathers of the same U.S. Capitalists who have since turned this nation into the de facto Fourth Reich.

And a New Year's Gift to Make the Russophobes Reconsider Their Warmongering even as it makes the rest of us smile (and perhaps even gasp with awe).

LB/27 December 2017.

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Engineered by Trump/Pelosi Collaboration, the Deliberately Under-Reported Decision Kills Any Hope of Judicial or Legislative Relief from Capitalism's Murderous Greed and JesuNazism's Genocidal Malice

EVEN ALTERNATIVE MEDIA seems loathe to admit the pivotal significance of the Democratic (sic) Party's deliberately under-reported unconditional surrender to the Trump/Pence Regime at the start of the weekend on Friday 15 December.

The brazen bipartisanship of the Democrats' no-impeachment-ever pact with the Republicans was certainly the most glaringly indicative, breathtakingly abject Congressional surrender in all the nearly 78 years of my lifetime. It was probably the most cravenly submissive act since Congress concluded in 1934 the Bankers' Plot conspirators were too rich to jail and thereby enabled the One Percent's subsequent and now utterly victorious 83-year campaign to convert the United States into the de facto Fourth Reich.

In any case there is no question the Democrats' no-impeachment-because-Trump-is-our-man-too vote – and that is precisely its message – was maliciously scheduled to take maximum advantage of the fact at this time of year (and especially on Fridays), most USians are distracted from politics, whether by the anticipated lusts of weekend frolic, the sublimated lusts of holiday shopping or – most likely – by the wrenching realization this will this be their bleakest midwinter holiday season thus far, with the tombstone above the corpse of their personal American Dreams reminding each of them that every subsequent holiday will be progressively more wretched until they themselves are buried in the same graveyard as their aspirations.

So now it's “Happy Holidays 2017” as we anticipate being murdered by genocidal tax “reform.” Soon it will be “Happy New Year 2018,” when we will begin dying from the saber-cuts and axe-blows to the stipends and services that hitherto kept us alive.

While such seasonal preoccupations are surely one reason to blame for why so many USians were oblivious to the vote itself, the more telling reason is that outside Washington D.C., the Mainstream Media propaganda machine mostly ignored or downplayed the story. The alternative press in the person of Reader Supported News tried to compensate for the news dim-out by running the story on Monday 18 December, but its failure to comprehend the vote's pivotal significance has no explanation beyond alternative media's decidedly counter-revolutionary penchant for reflexively peddling false hope as the dopiate of the USian masses.

Apparently not even RSN's formidable William Boardman (for whose work see my first paragraph's first link) was allowed to acknowledge the Democratic (sic) Party has now – with a very real fuck-you contemptuousness on a par with Marie Antoinette's probably apocryphal “let them eat cake” – effectively admitted its members are part of the morally imbecilic, relentlessly malignant and therefore infinitely Evil imperial plutocracy that now seeks to rule the world by economic conquest, by cultural if not physical genocide and above all else by thermonuclear terror. That's what really happened last Friday: 128 Democrats stopped denying the fact their primary domestic and foreign policy goals are identical to those of the Republicans, never mind the GOPorkers were their alleged adversaries in the cruel charade of “our democracy.” But now with our subjugation nearly complete, that charade is no longer necessary, and in the ever-escalating brutality of late Capitalism's inevitable metamorphosis into fascism, the Democrats seem quite content to publicly embrace their erstwhile alleged enemies, thereby declaring themselves open for the business of bribery and opening their bank accounts (especially the secret ones offshore or in Switzerland) to the tsunami of blood-money with which the Capitalists reward political, professional and executive co-conspirators.

Quoth Boardman in the piece linked above: “A majority of Democrats...have now gone on record in opposition even to debating Trump’s behavior on its merits. Those Democrats, 128 of them, mostly white-privileged, have voted in tacit support of the racism, bigotry, and prejudice streaming from the Trump administration. Led by Nancy Pelosi, these 128 Democrats (including all the party leadership except James Clyburn) have taken a public pass on discussing real issues of conscience with national importance. Only 58 Democrats voted with conscience...”

In other words – the words not even Boardman dared utter – the no-impeachment vote is the declaration by our Capitalist overlords and their vassals of perpetual plutocratic unity in the One Percenters' wholly owned One Party of Two Names. Its underlying message is we are so thoroughly conquered and subjugated, our masters no longer feel any need to disguise the Neoliberal bipartisan solidarity that's behind their manipulative malice. Never mind they already made their contempt for us glaringly obvious in “change we can believe in,” the most deceptive Big Lie in USian presidential history, and equally evident in Obama the Orator's shape-shift to Barack the Betrayer.

Just as there was no revolutionary great awakening sparked by Obama's deceptions, neither will there be any such reaction to Friday's vote. As infuriating as all these outrages may seem to those of us who are aware of the class war – i.e., the war we have most assuredly lost – the fact remains Moron Nation is already so benightedly submissive, not even a brass-knuckled Ruling-Class fist shattering the teeth in its Working-Class mouth will awaken it to its victimhood. That's at least partly due to the blindness sustained by paralytically optimistic works of counter-revolutionary propagandists such as Rebecca Solnit, who strings together a meaningless and/or judicially tenuous litany of victories that allegedly prove we are winning but in fact demonstrate the magnitude of our powerlessness, or Rebecca Gordon, who has obviously forgotten how the German Nazis permanently disproved “the moral power of international law”  and how their USian Empire descendants have since one-upped them by forever disproving the baby-blanket notion “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” As 525 years of genocide perpetrated by European imperialism, Capitalism and particularly the USian Empire itself demonstrate far more conclusively than any other body of evidence, “the arc of the moral universe” – if indeed there is such a thing – bends not toward justice, but toward maximum tyranny and zero-tolerance subjugation.

In this context the submissiveness of the Moronic Majority is especially vexing to me because priority one amongst the looming atrocities mandated by the Trump/Pence Regime's newly imposed tax law is the genocidal extermination of all of us the One Percenters and their political, professional and managerial whores condemn as “surplus” workers – that is, those of us, self included, who are considered throw-away people, cast off because we are damned as too elderly, too disabled and/or too chronically impoverished to be exploitable for profit. But since death camps are no longer in fashion, We the People are to be thinned like any other herd of working animals, exterminated by the slower though every bit as deadly methodology of genocide by abandonment, i.e., the termination of the life-sustaining stipends and services provided by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and a variety of other programs including the already slain Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

That the silent submissive paralysis of the earmarked victims is like that of the Auschwitz inmates who without resistance let themselves be rounded up and gassed is merely more terrible proof of how successful our overlords have been at turning our entire nation into a total surveillance concentration camp and indoctrinating all of us with the concentration-camp mentality. The Democrats' no-impeachment vote is, like the Congressional tax measure itself, additional proof of the nearly complete reduction of USia to a concentration-camp nation – yet another unmistakable declaration the One Party's owners will no longer abide any major deviations from the JesuNazis' biblically ordained agenda of murder and deprivation. Hence I am now convinced – just as our masters seem to be – the Moronic Majority whether Hillaryite or Trumpanoid is so thoroughly subjugated, even the public re-establishment of death camps would not prompt it to rise up angry in effective rebellion.

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ONLY ONE DEMOCRAT from Washington state dared vote against the Democratic (sic) Party's declaration of solidarity with the Republican Party. This is 7th District (Seattle and vicinity) Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who indicatively says nothing whatsoever  on her website about the vote. Her five colleagues, Derek Kilmer, Suzan DelBene, Rick Larsen, Adam Smith and Denny Heck, all voted with the no-impeachment-ever Democratic (sic) majority to endorse the fanatically Christian white supremacist, misogynist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant hatefulness that fulfills the darkest intentions of the Bankers' Plot conspirators and forever defines the Republicans as the JesuNazi descendants of Germany's original Nazis. Thus the Third Reich is reanimated here in the USian homeland by an undeclared but terrifyingly real Fourth Reich whose moral imbecility jeopardizes our species' survival and threatens to reduce Earth to a bug planet. But – to reiterate – no matter how many goddamned times this must be said, it seems only a tiny few will ever acknowledge what these motherfuckers are doing to us, much less respond accordingly.

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Woman with Stage 4 Cancer Ousted by Senator after she dared ask him why he supports legislation that will kill her by denying her care. Yet another eye-opening example of the “let them eat cake” viciousness of the nation's elected officials, in this instance U.S. Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada.

Is “Me Too” a Revolution or an Unrecognized Ritual of Christian Repentance? Such a question would probably never have occurred to me had I not sequentially read “The Great American Sex Panic of 2017” followed immediately by “'End Times' prophets beg Trump to give Americans one last chance to repent.”  But the genuinely terrifying Trump/Pence Regime's threat to nuke the world did indeed precede the sex scandal by several months, which makes me wonder if the confession-like denunciations of the rapists and molesters were somehow triggered by our looming (and now probably unavoidable) extinction by thermonuclear apocalypse. A Marxist analysis of the scandal's dynamics and apparent purpose is here, with a provocative retort by the actress Minnie Driver here, Meanwhile the JesuNazi Roy Moore continues demonstrating an apparent belief he will somehow be raptured into the Senate, while Erica Smiley analyzes the socioeconomic sources of the Christian fanaticism that put the Trump/Pence Regime into office and threatens us all with zero-tolerance theocracy.

How Identity Politics Protects Neoliberals from Legitimate Criticism: Examples of how Democratic (sic) identity politics “continue to be used as a weapon to derail progressives whose record of commitment to racial justice, gender equality, and LGBT issues has historically eclipsed that of the Democratic Party itself.”

JesuNazi Sessions Resurrects Discredited Anti-Planned-Parenthood Video as he weighs federal criminal investigation into fetal tissue charges already proven bogus.

Black Democrats as Neoliberal Imperialist Enablers. “There is no stopping the rot in the Democratic Party. When the elected representatives of Black America, historically the most pro-peace and social justice-oriented constituency in the country, enlist en mass in the War Party, it is obvious that they are (thrust there by) outside forces.”

Seattle Weaponizes Bike Racks to Oust Houseless Folks. Again the allegedly “progressive” Emerald City demonstrates the malicious cunning of its bourgeois hypocrisy.

Washington State Democrats Will Target Gun Owners. With the legislature and the governor's mansion now under Democratic (sic) Party control, an anti-Trump vendetta against firearms owners looms large.  But what the vindictively anti-gunowner Democratic (sic) leadership refuses to recognize is how many of the state's Democratic (sic) voters own firearms, especially in rural areas. (Note: the two forcible disarmament measures cited in the foregoing report, which is dated January 2017, have already been resurrected for the 2018 session, but anti-gunowner fanatics also intend to repeal the state's pro-Second-Amendment preemption law,  which would mean the end of statewide concealed pistol licenses.

Cornel West Implies Ta Nehisi Coats Is Neoliberal Race Traitor. Normally I am reluctant to take sides in ideological struggles within the Black community, but Neoliberalism aka Ayn Rand economics is the morally imbecilic foundation of the new fascism,  which – given how Coats' is ascending to national leadership – makes West's damning comments especially relevant.

Sessions Continues to Plot Anti-Marijuana Blitzkrieg. The JesuNazis are terrified by how marijuana nullifies fanatical Christian brainwashing. Hence the Trump/Pence Regime's JesuNazi attorney general yearns to attack legal-pot states – probably by using federal troops for mass arrests – but thus far Congress is still keeping this Trump/Pence attack dog on a short leash.

Apocalyptic Abandonment of Puerto Rico Continues: Thanks to the Trump/Pence Regime's combination of Neoliberal malice and white-supremacist hatefulness,  at least one million Puerto Ricans are surviving without modern necessities of sewer, water, electricity and schools.

USian Houselessness* Soars as Capitalist Savagery Intensifies. Three reports, here, here and here, on the plight of class-war victims reduced to de facto refugees in their own homeland. (*With thanks to  Kate Corvan for this more accurate term to describe the women, children and men dispossessed by Capitalist aggression.)

JesuNazi Point Man Scott Walker to Weaponize Food Stamps. Like all fascists, the Wisconsin governor believes food-stamp recipients are lazy drug addicts and should be punished accordingly.

Alien Probe or Wandering Space Junk? Scientific American reports on an intergalactic anomaly  as feds admit too many fighter pilots have encountered so many UFOs,  the Air Force now regards such craft as “Advanced Aerospace Threats.” 

Another Example of the Imbecility of Hope. I take to a comment thread to criticize the pathetically foolhardy belief the net neutrality fight can still be won, prompting an interesting discussion with other posters.

Trump's Would-Be Gestapo Guy Versus Congress. This story is undoubtedly well known by now, but Charles Pierce's sarcastic reporting is nevertheless worth reading.

In Retrospect: Musical Discovery Soothes Sadness, a Dispatches from 2011, written shortly after the apparent loss of my three main film cameras, a pair of M2 Leicas and one M4 Leica, all of which I had shipped to a service facility for long-overdue maintenance. This vital equipment was eventually recovered, serviced and returned. Three months later, the advent of Occupy Tacoma summoned me back to photojournalism. In 2014 I would finally switch to digital photography. Contemplative prose, with most of the URLs – traditional (and traditionally Pagan) folk songs every one – still active and well worth visiting.

LB/20 December 2017 (with contributions from from TigerLille and Kate Corvan.)

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The Sneeringly Genocidal Trump/Pence Agenda Celebrates the Final Victory of the One Percenters' 84-Year Effort to Perpetuate Capitalism by Imposing JesuNazism on a Politically Defenseless Moron Nation

MASTURBATED TO MINDLESSNESS by the maliciously deceptive Mainstream Media propaganda machine after being moronated to submissiveness in public schools deliberately rendered dysfunctional by the JesuNazis in service to their Capitalist oberführers, the vast majority of USians – intellectually paralyzed by the suppression of critical thinking skills  and induced ignorance – have repeatedly failed to recognize the ugly reality of our boiled-frog reduction to serfdom and slavery.

They foolishly try to convince themselves all is well. They cling to the Big Lie of “our democracy” and the even Bigger Lie the Trump/Pence Regime's apocalypse-mongering is nothing more than rhetoric, and by some trick of self-deception, when they go to bed at night they do not fall asleep wondering if they will never again awake – if before morning they will be reduced to naught but heart-wrenching shadows  or radioactive ash on an unspeakably poisoned wind. They cling pathetically to their own optimism, refusing to recognize their submissiveness as an ultimate and potentially suicidal form of folly.

Obviously, whether from ignorance or delusion or the momentary psychosis of denial, they reject the serial significance of what will someday – if our species somehow survives – be recognized as the five most pivotal events in the USian Empire's sordid political history. These are the Bankers' Plot (1933-1934); the post-plot merger of Capitalism and fanatical Christianity (1934-present*); the long decade of political murders  (1963 to 1974); the Reichstag Fire rerun of 9/11 (as I have been calling it at least since 2013);  and now finally the fulfillment of the Bankers' Plot goal of a permanently fascist United States  achieved for the One Percent by the 2016 election.

The sequence of historical events cited above proves the advent of the Trump/Pence Regime is the climax of a subversive process that unites at least three generations of Capitalism's most morally imbecilic plutocrats. These events are the exclamation points – the beware signs – in an infinitely damning progression that details the nation's passage from the New Deal's illusion of representative democracy to the JesuNazi truth of the Trump/Pence victory. But the Moronic Majority overlooks – or more likely is too cowardly to acknowledge – the climactic nature of the 2016 presidential election and how it ended forever any rational notion of the U.S. as a “sweet land of liberty.”

I can (sort of) understand how some ignoramus might ignore our Capitalist overlords' love affair with white-supremacist fascism despite the fact it has been evident since the 1930s. Though the stealth fascism of the pre-Bush-II past always victimized USian minorities, the white majority remained mostly immune to its brutality and was therefore mostly ignorant of its atrocities. Such trends and their associated atrocities are carefully excluded from the so-called “American narrative.” But the more overt fascism that characterized the Bush II and Obama presidencies and finally exploded into the stark, ever-intensifying JesuNazi horrors perpetrated by the Trump/Pence Regime now assaults the entire Working Class regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. Yet the Moronic Majority still refuses to acknowledge  what has been done to us, much less react appropriately to the regime's ever-intensifying malevolence.

As Henry Giroux reports, the Trump/Pence victory “has accelerated a culture of cruelty, a machinery of terminal exclusion and social abandonment that wages a war on undocumented immigrants, poor minorities of color and young people.” In other words – words even the notably courageous and outspoken Giroux dare not say – we are now as conquered and subjugated as the people of France were beneath the jackboots of the German Nazis. This is not hyperbole; apart from the persecution of the Jews, the of the German occupation of France took at least two years to achieve its final zero-tolerance brutality.  The magnitude of the atrocities by which we are brutalized will likewise intensify ad infinitum just as they did in France – until the stench of putrescence becomes the sole/soul definition of our existence.

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*For extensive documentation of this deliberately obscured chapter of USian history, go here.

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The Remainder of This Issue Measures Our Descent into Despotism:

Tax Policy Remains the Most Terriftying Proof of Genocidal Intent. “The Democrats are not seeking to rally popular opposition to a brazen tax giveaway to the super-rich. Rather, they are appealing to the Republicans to let them participate in the grubby legislative horse-trading.”  Because there are a number of relevant Marxist and/or Left-leaning analyses of the tax measure that's emerging from the Trump/Pence Congress, each analysis with varied focus, I have provided links to most of them, for which see here,  here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Probably the few people of color who helped vote the Trump/Pence Regime into power did so because Wikileaks' disclosure of (more) Clinton treachery rendered them vulnerable to seduction by Trump's oft-repeated pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – like Obama's “change we can believe in,” another of Capitalism's obviously premeditated Big Lies. Most if not all of these minority Trumpster-dunces, now facing calculatedly genocidal cuts in the programs that keep them alive, will say “fuck the elections they're meaningless” and never vote again.

In this context let us always remember one of the many functions of the broken Trump/Pence promises – like their precursor in Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer – is to discredit the entire electoral process and demoralize the electorate so thoroughly, fewer and fewer people bother to vote, a tactic the success of which is proven by declining voter turnout throughout the nation.  That's another of the ways Capitalism conditions us to react with the same submissiveness that defines serfs, slaves and conquered peoples – the only thing you know for sure is your life is going to get worse.

New Tax Plan Fulfills Intent of 1933 Bankers Plot. During the holiday news lull, the better mass media catches its breath by reporting on the back story of how the fascists and their JesuNazi stormtroopers conquered and subjugated the United States, which given the conquest's apocalyptic implications is the most important back story in human history. “The new U.S. tax plan is a scam—a corporate coup—that benefits a few rich and powerful Americans who make the most and want to pay the least. They are the owners of our country, the plutocrats and oligarchs that run this nation and tell politicians what to do.” Hence the renewed significance of a Bankers' Plot book by Sally Denton, The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right (Bloomsbury Press: 2012)

Why Capitalism Means Homelessness for Millions. The Capitalists regard homelessness as a weapon. They brandish it to warn us we must submit to their brutality or be flung into homelessness ourselves. See also: a photographer, himself homeless, documents its grim realities.

Skyrocketing Rents Prompt Demonstrators to Disrupt Landlord Convention and enables a Democratic (sic) legislator to grandstand as a supporter of rent control when in fact there is absolutely no chance such legislation will ever be enacted. That's because the Washington State Democratic (sic) Party and its Republican counterpart are each wholly owned subsidiaries of the rip-off real estate industry. Once again we see the Democrats at work on the project assigned them by our Capitalist overlords, bolstering false hope to strangle the evolution of revolutionary consciousness.

Congressman Sics Cops on Complaining Constituents in an atrocity that tells us all we need to know about the relationship between people and politicians that now defines the ever-more-subjugated USian Homeland. 

Anti-Abortion Thugs Scare Off Half a Clinic's Patients. Thousands of JesuNazis swarm North Carolina reproductive care facility.  See also: “Willfully Protecting the Monsters”; plus an interesting conjecture on the probable illegality of Pence's publicly-stated policy of “never dine alone with a woman”; a report that makes me wonder whether the refusal of newsroom bosses to answer questions about anti-sexual-harassment policies reflects tacit approval of harassment; and a wishful-thinking analysis that suggests the women's outcry could be (though I gravely doubt it) the beginning of something larger.

Hatred of Mother Nature as the Ultimate Misogyny: The link between Capitalism's rape of the environment and violations of women's rights is increasingly undeniable. “The 2016 murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres – who was leading the struggle of her indigenous community to oppose the construction of a dam on their sacred river in Honduras – showed how deadly the risks can be.” 

Beware Trump's Volunteer Gestapo. U.S. prosecutors are using video shot secretly by the fascist media group Project Veritas as evidence in the felony trials of people mass-arrested during Inauguration Day protests.

House Bill Would Effectively Outlaw Sanctuary States and Municipalities. “The Stopping Lawless Actions of Politicians (SLAP) Act of 2017 would penalize state or local officials who 'knowingly ignore a request from the Federal Government' to turn over suspected undocumented immigrants through fines up to $1 million and five years in federal prison.”

Censorship Intensifies as Google Hires 10,000 Workers to Purge You Tube. Another example of how yesteryear's creeping fascism has become today's JesuNazism.

Media Ratings Battle Is Another Form of Censorship that serves the One Percent by imposing Twitterized sensationalism of trivial news and suppression of vital reports on Trump/Pence atrocities.

Censorship of RT and Sputnik Escalates USian Moronation. “The fact is the political establishment is scared to death that more and more people are abandoning their corporate media, and does not want you hearing outside perspectives.” 

Significantly, One of the Suppressed Stories is the  Volgograd State Medical University's clinical trials of a non-addictive drug claimed to out-perform morphine as a pain-killer. Obviously the USan prescription drug lords, who are as morally imbecilic as their street-corner counterparts, have no incentive for such research because it would eliminate the obscene profits they reap from opiate addiction. See also “The Russia-gate hysteria has spread beyond simply a strategy for neutralizing Donald Trump or even removing him from office into an excuse for stifling U.S. dissent that challenges the New Cold War” just as 9/11 rationalizes the total-surveillance state that goes far beyond fulfillment of Hitler's most tyrannical dreams.

Class Warfare Heats Up as Bourgeois Bicyclists Battle Industrial Workers: a microcosm of environmental conflict divides a Seattle neighborhood. (Aside: I have witnessed this struggle firsthand. The obnoxiously arrogant bikesters, smug with their Ayn Rand sense of entitlement, make no secret of the hatred and contempt they feel for the hard-working truck drivers with whom they so often clash. Clearly the bikesters are oblivious – or more likely indifferent – to the fact Capitalist privilege is the antithesis of environmental consciousness. Which by some weird twist of free association brings to mind the plague of similarly bourgeois tree-spikers, self-proclaimed “environmental activists”  whose slogan is “kill a logger, save a tree.” [For those unfamiliar with logging, most of the work today is done with gasoline-powered chainsaws. These saws are named after their blades, which look like bicycle chains with steel teeth attached. When a chainsaw blade hits a spike, the chain often breaks. Then it warbles through the air fast as a bullet, decapitating or maiming anyone it hits.] Such is class consciousness in the JesuNazi era.)

Greedy Restaurateurs Have Developed Software to cheat states out of sales taxes and no doubt fuck their employees out of tips and wages too. 

Puerto Rican Situation Report: the regime's genocidal abandonment and shock-doctrine exploitation of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands continues unabated. See also: hurricane reduces more than half the Puerto Rican population  to the government's outrageously inadequate statistical definition of poverty.

USia as the Empire of the Big Deception: “Having established global hegemony, the US treats every deal as an Indian treaty — to be binding only for the other side.”

USian Biblical Malevolence Invalidates Comparisons to Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War. Not mentioned in this disturbing analysis of deteriorating U.S.-Russian relations, JesuNazism's Biblical malevolence is nevertheless the primary enabler in Trump/Pence Regime's wishful apocalypse-mongering.

Planning for the “Obliteration” of North Korea: In what amounts to the convening of a war council, the Canadian government will host a US-led international meeting on North Korea early next year. See also here, here and here.

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NOTE: There will be no Dispatches next week [10-16 December 2017]. Not only is this the week I edit and produce the monthly newsletter for the senior housing complex in which I dwell; it is also the week of my annual, always-adversarial audit by the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, the bureaucratic purpose of which is to enforce neoliberal austerity – aka genocide – by reducing or eliminating the stipends and services that keep me alive. The spreadsheet-completion, form-filling and other paperwork preparations for this invariably unpleasant encounter with Capitalist governance typically take three whole days, with a fourth day consumed by the actual DSHS interrogation. Publication of Dispatches is planned resume the week beginning December 17. My apology to readers for any inconvenience.

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Meanwhile Here are Three Petitions I Urge You to Sign:

– By UltraViolet, demanding MGM release footage that reportedly reveals the depth of Trump's racism shows him far exceeding his “grab-em-by-the-pussy misogyny.”

– By Unite Here Local 8 demanding protection of hotel domestic workers against sexual predators;

– By UltraViolet demanding continuation of the free birth control provided by Obamacare.

Unite Here's fight inspired me, a still-active National Writer's Union member, to reinforce my signature with a comment:

“The hotel bosses' retaliatory defense of the men who sexually harass and assault hotel housekeepers makes these maliciously male-supremacist executives co-perpetrators. Hence they should be prosecuted and convicted accordingly, thus forever identified as the sex-crime accomplices they truly are.”

And I was similarly inspired to respond to an UltraViolet tweet:

“Patriarchy = moral imbecility = Capitalism = Nazism, and now with the US become a thermonuclear JesuNazi empire, patriarchy is almost certainly our species' extinction. Thus the righteous anger of woman is literally humanity's last defense against the looming apocalypse.”

LB/30 November-7 December 2017 (with contributions from PF and TigerLille).

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