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February 2018

14-21 February 2018: Darkness of Dystopia, Flares of Defiance

'Hate Speech' Posters Spearhead JesuNazi Offensive in Tacoma Area

Nazi Poster Tacoma 18 Feb 18 - Copy
One of the JesuNazi posters pasted on walls and utility poles in Tacoma. (Photograph by KD
© 2018.)

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By Ryley Knowles
THE WHITE NATIONALIST GROUP Patriot Front has slapped up recruiting posters at seven locations in Tacoma, Washington. Photographs of the posters -- see example above -- were published on 18 February in Washington Front, Patriot Front’s Twitter for their Washington-state activities.

Patriot Front is a white supremacist group that, according to its website and manifesto, believes  America belongs exclusively to its white European settlers. The group is based in Texas and led by 19-year-old Thomas Ryan Rousseau.

Spawned by the neo-Nazi organization Vanguard America, Patriot Front was formed in the wake of the ‘Unite The Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on 11 and 12 August 2017.

James Fields Jr, who is accused of driving his car into a group of anti-fascist protesters at the rally and murdering Heather Heyer,  was photographed marching only a few feet  from Thomas Ryan Rousseau earlier that day. Rousseau claims Fields was not a Patriot Front member and had merely asked to march with them.

Patriot Front has plastered its propaganda in Washington state three times this year. The first two incidents were in Gig Harbor, a coastal town about one mile from Tacoma. Each poster asks, “Will your speech be hate speech?” -- with the phrase ‘hate speech’ partially erased. One was pasted on a utility shed near the Tacoma Dome. The others are on utility poles in or around the downtown Tacoma area.

The posters feature Patriot Front’s iconography, a stylized fasces similar to that used by Italian fascists under Mussolini. It is surrounded by thirteen stars and promotes their website, bloodandsoil.com. “Blood and soil” is a German Nazi slogan, popularized by Adolph Hitler,  that sums up the goals of a white ethnostate: an aggressively militarized nation with a racially exclusive  population.

(Dispatches welcomes Ryley Knowles, a freelance journalist who lives in the Pacific Northwest, to our expanding roster of contributors.)

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(Editor's Note: when italicized and enclosed by quotation marks, the following texts are indicative passages taken directly from their hyperlinked URLs. Each passage is limited to less than 200 words in compliance with present U.S. copyright law.)

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More on the JesuNazi Onslaught in the Pacific Northwest and Elsewhere

"...the Atomwaffen Division, a tiny paramilitary neo-Nazi group that has been linked to the suspects in at least five killings in the United States. It is among the most violent groups on the far-right...Researchers believe that some cells are based in Texas and Florida, (with)...others in Washington, near the Seattle area, and Richmond, Va. But details about the group are difficult to confirm." Comment: the unfettered existence of armed and openly murderous groups such as Atomwaffen -- too often protected by the U.S. authorities at all levels -- is precisely why all genuine Leftists should regard any weakening of the Second Amendment as a matter of life and death and therefore oppose "gun control" as a euphemism for forcible disarmament of the proletariat. Regardless of our particular ideologies -- Marxist, democratic socialist, anarchist, even reformist -- we are all equally in jeopardy of the JesuNazis adding our names to their kill lists. In which context note the lessons taught us by the Deacons for Defense.     

*****     

"Federal prosecutors and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in Washington, DC, colluded with far-right groups in cases against anti-Trump protesters, a recently filed lawsuit alleges. Filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) last week, the lawsuit against DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and Karl Racine in the US Attorney's office seeks information about the relationship between the prosecutors and police and right-wing political groups.'The police here are really serving the political goals of these far-right organisations,' Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director and constitutional rights lawyer at PCJF, told Al Jazeera. 'We are seeing a pattern of this taking place around the country,' she said. 'While there have always been members of police departments who have acted out in abusive and racist behaviour against the civilian population, we're now seeing it at an institutional level.'"

*****

"(To build a) philosophical fascist system that was more appealing to Baby Boomers raised on New Left and post-colonial rhetoric...far-right philosophers...decided to reframe fascist values and ideas in the language of popular national liberation struggles...Organizations like Identity Evropa have already been doing this for almost two years,  focusing primarily on college-age men...Operation Homeland will expand that pool, becoming another organization that will work as an independent organization and movement." Comment: the USian culture of "manufactured illiteracy" and violent anti-intellectuality has already guaranteed the fascists' success. The question now is how to resist a toxic infestation that's spreading like deadly nightshade in an abandoned garden.    

*****            

"While men debated in legislative chambers and listened to challenges on the bench, women headed to school cafeterias, playgrounds and PTA meetings, doing the bulk of the behind-the-scenes work of supporting the politics of segregation. White women organized precinct gatherings to pressure their politicians to uphold Jim Crow laws. They transformed their homes into centers of bureaucratic efficiency — copying fliers, assigning neighborhoods for petition drives and scheduling protest shifts at elementary schools and bus garages. It was also women who shaped the way segregation, white supremacy and ideas about racial identity were knitted into the fabric of their communities." Comment: White women are nearly as hatefully racist as white males. For example, note that 53 percent of white women -- including 45 percent of white women with college degrees -- voted the JesuNazi Trump/Pence Regime into the White House.

*****       

"Trump is worse than almost anyone imagined, and while his critics across the ideological spectrum have begun to go after him, they rarely focus on how dangerous he is, hesitant to argue that he is not only the enemy of democracy, but symptomatic of the powerful political, economic and cultural forces shaping the new US fascism."

*****

On the Absolute Necessity of Revolutionary Leadership by Oppressed Minorities

"...the Combahee River Collective Statement...made a case for understanding how racism, sexism, class oppression, and homophobia are all connected:...'If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression'...when it comes to electoral politics, even 'progressive' leaders too often leave out those whose lives fall at the intersections of discrimination, such as poor black women or undocumented LGBTQ youth. Under the Trump administration, these groups are meanwhile overtly targeted...White-dominated, ostensibly “progressive” feminism...continues to miss the mark on respecting and centering those women who arguably have the most to lose, such as women of color, transgender women and trans women of color in particular...We can see this disregard...in their voting patterns today, from the 57% of white women who voted for Trump...to the 63% of white women in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election who voted for Roy Moore...” Comment: how many times must it be said we cannot make a successful revolution unless we follow the leadership of those who are the most oppressed and therefore have the most to gain by throwing off the shackles of patriarchy, racism and sexism implicit in Capitalism?

*****

"Amid the #MeToo movement across the country, the formation of the Silence Breakers, first reported by Crosscut, and their public appearances this week have brought home the reckoning with how women are treated inside the City of Seattle. But the group’s discussions have also gone beyond sexual harassment, folding in concerns about intimidation, toxicity and racial discrimination in the workplace." Comment: once again the Big Lie of "progressive Seattle" is laid bare by its victims of class warfare, misogyny and racism.

*****                      

"I’m too weary from watching well-meaning souls on TV who talk earnestly about gun control without admitting what we all know in some dank corner of our souls: the prime source of mass murder in this world, whether it’s in the tree-lined small towns of America or the hamlets of Viet Nam or the drone-blasted deserts of Yemen, is racism. Racism armed with napalm, racism kitted out with bump-stocks and huge magazines, racism poisoning the waters of Flint—the pathogens float easily around the country and the globe, like windblown dandelion puffs. It’s the only disease that is terminal for other people, not one’s-self."

*****

...we live in a racist country that hasn’t figured it out yet. And it’s always important to bring attention to it, even if it angers some people." Comment: hear, hear!

*****              

Trump/Pence Genocide Scheme Now Criminalizes Humanitarianism

"Based on data, No More Deaths reports that water jugs were destroyed more than twice a week on average. In other words, border patrol are condemning people to death and punishing those who stand in the way of this homicide...Also in the file of punished good deeds: feeding the homeless. This too has been an ongoing attempt at government sanctioned slow homicide. Between 2013 and 2015 alone, 26 cities passed food-sharing bans..." Comment: The USian Empire's methodology of post-deathcamp genocide goes far beyond deliberately murderous cuts in socioeconomic stipends and services and includes making humanitarianism itself a crime, especially when the humanitarianism's intended beneficiaries are targeted minorities.

*****

"The (Trump/Pence Regime's) changes at the Department of Health and Human Services represent 'rapid destruction of so much of the progress on LGBT health,' said Kellan Baker, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who worked with HHS on LGBT issues for nearly a decade. It’s only a matter of time before all the gains made under the Obama administration are reversed...Christian conservatives are noticing, and specifically praising, the reversals..." Comment: JesuNazi theocracy marches on.

*****

"Lambda Legal filed a federal lawsuit against Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The suit was filed on behalf of a same-sex couple who says they were denied the opportunity to serve as foster parents for refugee youth because, according to the lawsuit, they don't 'mirror the Holy Family'...Lambda's lawsuit claims that HHS—a federal agency currently run by Republican donor and pharmaceutical exec Alex Azar—is violating the Constitution by allowing USCCB to impose a religious test on applicants."

*****

"Bad Bureaucracies Are Fraying the Social Safety Net." The headline tells the story. Comment: the author carefully omits any acknowledgement of the bad bureaucrats who deliberately design the bad bureaucracies to function as weapons of oppression. These include the real "Welfare Queens" -- the regally powerful, mostly white female welfare executives whose primary function is to justify -- often by the dictates of white bourgeois feminism -- the imposition of elaborate schemes for denial of stipends and services. Equally culpable are the legions of caseworkers who for various ideological reasons, typically religious fanaticism and/or reactionary politics, consider themselves gatekeepers rather than aid-facilitators.  

*****

"...20 percent of US children live in families with incomes below 50 percent of the national median income. In the Nordic countries, the same number is 3.6 percent to 6.7 percent depending on the country...But that’s not the only peculiar thing about America’s income distribution for children...While the Nordic distribution looks like a bell curve with the overwhelming majority of kids clustered near the middle, the American distribution is a pyramid." Comment: The pyramid in question, with our overlords and their Ruling Class executives, professionals, bureaucrats, generals and politicians at the top and everyone else beneath their boot-heels at the bottom, is the classic portrait of Capitalist tyranny. It is also a classic portrait of "trickle-down" economics, with the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals congratulating themselves and smirking with malicious glee as they piss on all the rest of us and wantonly befoul our Motherland the Earth.

*****          

"'Shame': 12 Democrats Join With House GOP to Attack Americans With Disabilities Act." The headline tells the story. Comment: none of the 12 were from Washington state.

*****        

"A concrete analysis of the explosive contradictions of contemporary capitalist globalization demonstrates that...the paternalistic 'pro-immigrant' discourse of corporate liberals and the multicultural elite (does not challenge) the structures allowing for the exploitation and oppression of immigrants and migrant workers."

*****                             

"Interviews with scores of state officials, legal-services advocates and labor specialists indicate that the failure to enforce minimum wages touches every corner of the country, but is especially acute in the six states that have no investigators probing wage violations at all."

*****         

"The Washington Post has long had a hostile attitude toward unions, which it expresses in both its opinion and news sections."

*****                      

"Instead of urgent relief and uplift, most people in Obama's America were confronted with stagnating or worsening conditions at work, growing debts and a rising cost of living, alongside ongoing injustices such as police brutality and mass deportations. The groundswell of hope and optimism gave way to painful disillusionment and demoralization, which paved the way for the Trump disaster. But the road to Trump was long and winding, extending back over the reigns of two Bushes, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter--through a 40-year ruling class offensive to constrict the conditions of working class existence, which came to be known by the name of 'neoliberalism.'" Comment: a broader perspective on how and why the Trump/Pence Regime is fulfilling the inevitable transformation of U.S. Capitalism into JesuNazism, a metamorphosis that began with the Bankers' Plot of 1933-34.  

*****     

"...on Thursday, the (Federal Communications Commission) will finally publish its rule to revoke network neutrality protections...the repeal will be published on the Federal Register, the official ledger of federal agency rules. It will become the rule of the land 60 days after publication, upon which time internet service providers will be able to block or throttle access to websites or charge websites a fee to reach users at faster speeds." Comment: the result will be economic and technological censorship that is intentionally devastating to minorities. Precisely as demonstrated by the fact polls show 83 percent public support for net neutrality -- this in contrast to the failed and therefore demonstrably delusional efforts to reverse this particularly odious manifestation of the Trump/Pence Regime's malevolently JesuNazi tyranny -- the notion the U.S. is governed by "democratic process" is thus proven to be one of the most devastating Big Lies in Capitalism's arsenal of weaponized deceptions.  

*****       

Will the Capitalists Victimize Us with Another (Profit-Taking) Recession?    

"Trump’s multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for business, investors and the wealthiest 1 percent, plus his annual trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, plus his phony real estate industry handouts that parade as infrastructure spending together will lead the U.S. economy into recession, most likely in early 2019. Here’s the scenario:"

*****        

'''Many analysts pointed to a seemingly unusual cause for the (stock market) turbulence: rising wages'...No, it’s not an 'unusual' cause at all. When we start doing better—when wages start going up–Wall Streeters shit themselves. This is the norm. They only celebrate when we’re fucked, when workers don’t have the ability to demand better wages, better treatment, health care, coffee breaks and less handsy bosses. Stock markets around the world panic when the workers are strong."

*****                

"The events of the past two weeks, with the largest fall in markets since the crisis of 2008, raising the spectre of an even bigger disaster than that of a decade ago, have provided a damning exposure of (Capitalism's) entire ideological framework...The lie, which forms the basis of all bourgeois economics, that somehow the growth of capitalist economy can, at least in the long run, provide the road to advancement for the mass of humanity, the working class, the producers of all wealth, has been exposed. It has been laid bare by the fact that signs of economic growth and a growing movement of workers against the decline in living standards have raised the prospect of a new financial disaster, even more serious than that of a decade ago."

*****

The Empire Revises Its Big Lies of War Mongering to Target Russia

"The indictments (of 13 Russian nationals) are primarily aimed at providing The New York Times, Washington Post, and major broadcast media outlets with fodder for their claim of massive Russian involvement in US politics...The campaign has been used to justify a regime of Internet censorship and condition the population for war against Russia...The American population does not need Vladimir Putin to undermine 'public confidence in democracy.' After all, as Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights said after a visit to the United States last year, 'There is no other developed country where so many voters are disenfranchised … and where ordinary voters ultimately have so little impact on political outcomes.'" Update: more details of the fraud, including how it duplicates the Big Lie that justified the neo-colonial conquest of Iraq, are here.   

*****                         

Relevant Miscellany: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly and Sometimes the Inspiring

"Anti-choice protest tactics are on trial in New York amid a marked uptick in violence against abortion providers and clinics."

*****       

"Oxfam, a confederation of charitable organizations focused on alleviating global poverty, is reeling under reports that staff members in several parts of the world engaged in sexual misconduct, including using underage prostitutes. Allegations of a cover-up (have) worsened the situation." Comment: patriarchy in action, whether Abrahamic or otherwise, in which context remember that the artificial hierarchy imposed by male supremacy is the ideological grandfather of Capitalism. 

*****                      

"Khudoberdi Nurmatov, a journalist and LGBT activist who was detained by Russian authorities last year for violating migration laws, was granted (Russian) court permission to go to Germany after he faced deportation back to his native Uzbekistan...He originally migrated to Russia in order to escape imprisonment and persecution." Comment: Whether in the name of Uzbeki Islam or Russian Orthodoxy, Nurmatov is a victim of Abrahamic religion and its defining hatreds of women, LGBTQ people and non-believers. Kudos to modern-day Germany for giving him sanctuary.

*****

"Thomas, as a crucial vote on the Supreme Court, holds incredible power over women’s rights, workplace, reproductive, and otherwise. His worldview, with its consistent objectification of women, is the one that’s shaping the contours of what’s possible for women in America today, more than that of just about any man alive, save for his fellow justices. And given the evidence that’s come out in the years since, it’s also time to raise the possibility of impeachment...because of the lies he told, repeatedly and under oath, saying he had never talked to Hill about porn or to other women who worked with him about risqué subject matter." Comment: the impeachment of Justice Thomas could help save us from JesuNazism, especially in a post-Trump/Pence environment.   

*****            

History Lesson: Colonial Massachusetts Was Ruled by a Christian Taliban

"There were many subgroups that certainly didn’t enjoy life in early Colonial Massachusetts: religious dissidents, agnostics, free thinkers and, well, assertive women. We’ve all heard of the infamous Salem Witch Trials, but nearly four decades earlier the widow Ann Hibbins* was executed, hung for witchcraft, after having the audacity to complain that hired carpenters had overcharged her for a remodeling job on her house...All told, 344 citizens were accused of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts...Here there was a direct connection between the Puritan religion and the cruelty seen in the Pequot War and King Philip’s War. In the Pequot War, Massachusetts militiamen attacked a native fort at Mystic, Connecticut, and through fire and fury burned alive 400 to 700 Indians, mostly women and children. The survivors were sold as slaves...From the 'City on a Hill' it is but a short journey to Manifest Destiny and the conquest of a continent..." Comment: and it's an equally short journey from the white supremacist rationale for continental conquest to the "master race" concept of "American Exceptionalism" that fuels the Empire's apocalyptic schemes of JesuNazi world conquest today. Once again, welcome to the Fourth Reich.  
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*The text erroneously misspells the victim's name as "Higgins," obviously -- given the proximity of 'b' and 'g' on the standard keyboard,  a typographical error. Hence my correction.

*****                

More History, This Time as Archaeology

"Archeological finds show that Slavs have been living in Crimea for five millennia."

*****

A Challenge, Especially for Believers in the Big Lie of "Democratic Process"

Which of these two movements will achieve approved of its demands, and which will fail abysmally? The renewed push for so-called "gun control" (actually the newest manifestation of the fearful, 20th Century effort by the Capitalist Ruling Class to impose forcible civilian disarmament on a proletariat increasingly inclined toward socialist revolution)? Or the growing demand for "Improved Medicare for All" (actually the newest manifestation of a 70-year, life-and-death struggle between those of us who favor healthcare as a human right versus the deliberately genocidal Ruling Class policy of retaining healthcare as a privilege of wealth)? While present-day support for each movement is difficult to track -- polls show variations in wording of the relevant questions produce different, sometimes widely varying results -- available results (see here and here) suggest each movement is favored by approximately 60 percent of the electorate. But which -- if either -- movement will win?  My guess is the advocates of forcible disarmament will win at least moderate victories, especially in the imposition of regulations that will further restrict firearms ownership amongst the regime's targeted minorities, while the advocates of healthcare as a human right will suffer yet another total defeat. Such is U.S. Capitalism as it metamorphoses into JesuNazism. 

LB/21 February 2018

-30-       

 


Dystopia Dominates, but There's Some Good News Too

Imperial Warmongering Continues; Cubans Thrive as Puerto Ricans Suffer     

"The Trump administration’s new National Defense Strategy is being touted as a sea change in U.S. foreign policy, a shift from the 'war on terrorism' to 'great power competition,' a line that would not be out of place in the years leading up to World War I...The problem with designating 'great powers' as your adversaries is that they might just take your word for it and respond accordingly."  

*****

"How absurd — remove an elected president with a military coup to restore democracy? Does that pass the straight face test? This refrain of Rubio and Tillerson seems to be the nonsensical public position of US policy. The US has been seeking regime change in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998. Trump joined Presidents Obama and Bush before him in continuing efforts to change the government and put in place a US-friendly oligarch government."

      *****     

"The arrival of 415 members of the U.S. Air Force in Panama has been described by social organizations and media outlets as a 'silent invasion'...a strategic move to carry out military action in Venezuela."

                      *****                    

"...the Bush administration went to war with Afghanistan on October 7, 2001...Lacking a stated reason to be in Afghanistan, the US stayed. And the US is still there. And the US is complicit in the deaths of a million or more Afghans, and complicit in the forced exodus of more than five million Afghans, and complicit in the devastation of Afghanistan culturally, politically, militarily, and economically. Only US delusions survive more or less intact."

            *****         

"Ignoring Calls for Peace Effort, Pence Refused to Engage With North Koreans at Olympic Games": the headline tells the whole story as USian warmongering continues. Why? Because war is  the Empire's most dependably profitable export.

   *****

"Cuba was hit by Hurricane Irma, a category 5 hurricane, on September 8, 2017. Two weeks weeks later, on September 20th, Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, a category 4 hurricane.  In Cuba, the electricity was restored to the entire island within a few weeks.  In Puerto Rico, over four months after Maria nearly 40 percent of the island is still without power. The scandal-plagued response to the hurricane on the part of the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments exposes the operation of disaster capitalism at its worst."

     *****

               

More Genocide and Oppression; Workers Unionize; Antifa Mobilizes

"The White House...calls for $1.7 trillion in cuts to crucial safety net programs over the next decade -- including $237 billion in cuts to Medicare alone." Comment: cuts of this magnitude -- also a $300+ billion cut to Medicaid; a $213 billion cut to food stamps; a $21 billion cut to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF); and a $72 billion cut to disability programs -- are intended to facilitate mass murder without the controversy associated with death camps, which have become unfashionable. Yet few dare call it genocide

         ***** 

"Life expectancy in the US has fallen for the second year in a row...educational performance weakened, social divides (including income inequality) widened, middle class incomes stagnated, and poverty rates exceeded those of most rich countries..." Comment: again, few dare say it, but the declining life expectancy is obviously post-deathcamp genocide in action.

           *****   

"If the Democrats were alarmed by Trump’s obscene tax cuts, they and all their 2018 congressional candidates would be campaigning on a (sincere) promise to repeal them, not just a few parts of them. (They’re longtime champions of corporate tax cuts, so they won’t want to disturb them much if at all.) They would also be promising to repeal the obscene Bush tax cuts that Barack Obama and his Democratic congressional majority extended in 2010."

                   *****          

"Trump is only a symptom of the economic, political and ideological rot at the heart of casino capitalism, with its growing authoritarianism and social and political injustices that have been festering in the United States with great intensity since the late 1970s. It was at that point in US history when both political parties decided that matters of community, the public good, the general welfare and democracy itself were a threat to the fundamental beliefs of the financial elite and the institutions driving casino capitalism...(and thereby imposed) a climate of terror and repression that is the essence of fascism."

                  *****         

"The system would remain in place even if the Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as if foreshadowed in the timidity of the current Democratic proposals for reform."

                             *****                    

Hilton Stamford workers defeated the company's vicious anti-union campaign by voting 110 to 5 for the union. "Beyond the life-changing victory for the workers and their families, the Stamford hotel workers used an organizing formula different from anything most unions use today, ferociously overcoming the challenges most unions face." Comment: Bypassing union bureaucracies and returning to the worker-to-worker organizing model of the 1930s, the Hilton Stamford workers achieved the allegedly impossible -- thereby providing a vital lesson for the entire 99 Percent.

              *****     

"The centrality of self-defense can never be forgotten when we discuss 'aggressive' responses to fascism. Fascism is inherently aggression, inherently violence, inherently death."

                      *****            

"The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called 'alt-right'...the movement as it’s known today can largely be traced back to 2012 and 2013 when two major events occurred: the killing of the black teenager Trayvon Martin and the so-called Gamergate controversy where female game developers and journalists were systematically threatened with rape and death."

                 *****      

"Staffers at Seattle's most prominent National Public Radio affiliate are getting a union. In a card check this week, KUOW reporters, producers, and other staffers overwhelmingly elected to join SAG-AFTRA, a union representing radio and TV journalists across the country...At the heart of their fight: making sure KUOW staff can afford to live in the increasingly expensive city they cover."

                        *****             

"Washington, DC, police and federal prosecutors have been collaborating with notorious right-wing groups known for fascist statements and using doctored videos to ambush their targets in an attempt to convict and jail protesters from President Trump's inauguration...There is a long history of police working with right-wing groups to subvert the organizing and speech rights of social justice groups.

                       *****            

"A statewide meeting of the American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV) and the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) in Flatwoods on Sunday announced that county-by-county balloting showed overwhelming support throughout the state for a teachers’ strike...West Virginia teachers, (are) now paid 48th lowest out of 50 states in the United States..."

                        *****             

Burlington, Vermont community members mustered with one day's notice on February 10 to break up a hatefest by the white supremacist group known as Patriot Front.

                         *****             

"A new anti-fascist website tracks the location and activities of people affiliated with Daily Stormer, one of the largest neo-Nazi websites in the United States. Launched on January 28, FashMaps is an activist-run initiative that seeks to inform local communities about the presence and gatherings of neo-Nazis in their area."

                  *****    

"When West Virginia House of Delegates candidate Lissa Lucas decided to take a stand against Big Oil's pernicious political influence last week by rattling off the names of state lawmakers receiving massive campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, she was swiftly and forcefully silenced...forcibly removed from the hearing by security."                    

                  *****    

"Five people were arrested at a College Republicans rally on the University of Washington campus Saturday that attracted a large crowd of protesters..The UW student Republicans invited conservative group Patriot Prayer to speak at their 'Freedom Rally' in Red Square...They were joined by several members of the Proud Boys, a group that has been referred to as alt-right, as well as Patriot Prayer supporters and conservative students. Some of those attending the rally wore red caps with President Donald Trump’s slogan 'Make America Great Again' on them." Comment: bad reporting -- or more likely censorship -- mostly concealed the political affiliations of those who were arrested. But perusal of a half-dozen news reports indicated the only people taken into custody were anti-fascists. Which is precisely what one would anticipate, given the clandestine cop-JesuNazi alliance).

                      *****        

"The White House...released a disappointing package of...transportation budget cuts, including once again advancing plans to gut Amtrak’s long-distance services by cutting $757 million from the annual Amtrak grant."

                           *****            

The headline tells the story: "Theater Died So Athletics Could Live at Washington State University." Comment: another example of how Capitalist academia collaborates in the making of Moron Nation.

                            *****             

"In 35 states, it’s legal for cops to detain and have sex with someone in their custody. Is your state one of them?" (See map: Washington state is not.)

                *****

Why Jackson, Mississippi May Not Be as Progressive as Claimed 

Alternet tells us "Cooperation Jackson is one of the most important stories for those of us struggling for social justice, for human emancipation and self-determination, and for a solidarity economics as a base for working class political struggle and the fight against the systematic economic strangulation."  But Black Agenda Report reveals that Jackson's mostly Black police force is nearly as murderous as its white racist forerunners: "In the last few months Jackson's supposedly radical mayor has lifted residency requirements for city police officers, and remained silent on a wave of officer involved shootings." Comment: while the Alternet piece is typical of what one might expect from a white/reformist website, the BAR essay includes a thought-provoking and therefore vital analysis of the causes of crime and the relation of USian cops to the imperial homeland's many oppressed peoples.     

                              *****            

Acts of Love: from a Mother, for Creatures of Our Motherland the Earth

"Romy McCloskey's late mother said butterflies were a sign she would always be with her. Decades later, those words inspired McCloskey to perform a remarkable act": successfully repairing the broken wing of a Monarch butterfly. Note: perhaps eerily, some Celtic myth regards butterflies as the souls of the dead.

                        *****      

Telling Our Stories: Some Notes on Effective AgitProp Techniques

THE WEBSITE POPULAR RESISTANCE, one of our better sources of real news (and therefore relentlessly censored by the Google Gestapo), ran a piece on 12 February entitled “Understanding How Media Protects the Status Quo.” It cited several examples of deliberately distorted reporting, particularly in picture captions, but failed to focus as closely as it might have on a few simple but demonstrably effective tactics to prevent or at least minimize such distortions. Hence I posted the following response, here slightly edited and somewhat enlarged for clarity:  

(Note: readers will need to open the link to the original article, as my remarks refer to photographs therein.)  

Speaking as an elderly media professional (55-plus years behind typewriter, keyboard and camera, a dozen significant editorial awards and commendations, picture credits including Paris Match and Newsweek) -- the points about clear messaging on protest banners and picket signs cannot be stressed too emphatically, particularly in a realm wherein the anti-intellectual, anti-historical, anti-political agenda of Capitalism and corporate-run schools has made near-illiteracy a tragic proletarian norm.  

Every protest group should therefore include an editorial collective. Its primary purpose would be to make sure the protest's message is expressed with maxim impact -- without any misspelled or misused words -- and when necessary to provide individuals to serve as press contacts, thereby avoiding inflammatory remarks by agent provocateurs and misrepresentation by dunderheads. The collective would also document the demonstration itself, preferably with both video and still photography, thereby providing a record of events that could prove decisive in combating hostile propaganda.


Rule of thumb, banners and picket signs should be so succinct that when they are photographed, no explanatory caption is needed. In this context, note the second picture from the top in the “Status Quo” article: the “No 2 SROS” picket signs are utterly incomprehensible to anyone not intimately familiar with the protest, and perfectly exemplify the sorts of slogans that should be avoided at all costs.

This of course also requires photographers who can recognize and capture telling images, a task at which the photographers of the first three images in this report not only failed, but failed abysmally. Had those images been brought to me when I was a city editor and/or a news and picture editor, I'd have dropped them in the garbage and rebuked their makers for wasting my time and their film.
 

Turning again to the second (“No 2 SROS”) photo, the photographer's ultimate error was failing to focus on the large yellow banner in the picture's lower left corner, the message on which, “Get Cops Out Of Schools,” could have told the whole story in one memorable image. 

Rule of thumb, photographers should always strive to include the reportorial five Ws -- who, what, when, where, why (and sometimes how) -- in their images. I know this is not always possible, but I also know embracing it as a conscious purpose always leads to better pictures.  

By contrast, the bottom two pictures in this report are at least adequate. The next to the last picture is actually quite good, though better framing would have made it more immediately obvious the protest was aimed at the bank. The last image is excellent protest portraiture but needs an explanatory caption to put it in context. Again, more thoughtful framing might have helped.

That said, the overall quality of USian photojournalism today is disgraceful. This is no doubt in large measure because corporate-censored academia, aware that real photojournalism is always at least implicitly anti-Capitalist, is suppressing the work of our greatest photojournalists -- e.g., Gene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Jacob Riis, et al. But if you're not exposed to the masters and their masterworks -- and I who taught photography in two colleges am astounded by the number of younger photographers who tell me they have been denied such access -- you'll never be able to achieve the requisite mastery yourself. And that inability -- not the photographer's fault but the result of an especially insidious form of censorship -- is precisely what serves our JesuNazi overlords.

The other factor in the present-day dearth of USian photo quality is the extent to which dependence on technology has replaced visual mindfulness. Just as fully automatic firearms discourage careful aiming, so do fully automatic cameras discourage mindful image selection and careful composition.

Lastly, as a veteran of the alternative press of the late 1960s and early-to-middle 1970s, I cannot but bristle at the name "Unicorn Riot." It is the most damning example of self-discrediting I have yet encountered. It says -- indeed it shrieks -- "don't take us seriously." But given the organization's overt connections to the anarchist movement (which serves the Ruling Class both as the Empire's most effective agent provocateurs and by reinforcing Capitalism's vicious anti-intellectualism), given too the organization's less obvious connections to the Democratic (sic) Party and its pseudo-Left mechanism of reinforcing Capitalism by co-optation and betrayal, perhaps the self-discrediting function of its name is part of Unicorn Riot's mission.  

LB (with contributions from TigerLille1)/15 February 2018  

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Dispatches Lives! Here by Permission Is the Full Text of Black Agenda Report's Thought Provoking Essay on Intersectionality

FIRST, MY DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO the tech support women at Typepad, my blog server, for showing me how to bypass my dead word processing system and assemble, edit and write Dispatches directly on my website at dispatchesfromdystopia.net.  Without such expert help -- especially that most recently provided by Anna D. -- I would remain but a lost child in the alien, glitch-haunted forests of Pancomputerdemonium. (The Nurdly consensus is I was not hacked; instead, attempting to run Open Office 4.1.1 in Windows 10, I was yet another of the innumerable victims in Microfuck's ongoing war against open-source software.) Hence this special, catch-up edition of Dispatches, including much of what was to have been 8 February's post but was lost in the WP demise. 

 

***

NOW LET'S GET TO WORK.  As friends, Communist Labor Party comrades and even some kinfolk will attest, I have argued for many years we USian whites will never overthrow Capitalism until we not only join in heartfelt solidarity with our minority sisters and brothers but fully accept minority leadership and thereby take to heart the pivotal lessons, strategic and tactical, these seasoned veterans of extended class-struggle are uniquely qualified to teach us all. 

Nor is my stance unique. In the personal sense it was shaped by my late father -- ironically a skilled  teacher despite the psychological brutality and sadism that made him an abysmally unfit parent -- who fervently believed the 20th Century Civil Rights Movement would, in his words,  "force the United States to at long last live up to its democratic potential." (A few years later, I would for a time hold the same view of the Women's Liberation Movement, believing its original Marxism could save us from Capitalism's march toward fascism.) But my pivotal moment in this thinking was shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Canadian media laid bare a purported Committee for State Security (KGB) estimate of U.S. revolutionary potential in the late 1960s. It concluded that amongst most USian whites, the vast majority of whom were from comfortable bourgeois or petite bourgeois backgrounds, revolution was no more than a passing fad, while within the viciously oppressed African-American, Hispanic and First Nations communities, as well as within a tiny segment of the white Working Class, revolution was correctly viewed as a matter of survival. Hence while the KGB analysts evaluated the revolutionary potential of the Caucasian community as near absolute zero, it rated the revolutionary potential of the minority communities as quite high, though it simultaneously concluded these communities were of themselves too small to qualify for clandestine Soviet assistance.

(Note I write of this KGB analysis from memory; the reportage in question, which appeared in print c. 1992-1993, as I recall in Maclean's Magazine, has either never been referenced on the Internet or has been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole, though I suspect it could yet be confirmed by any researcher who had access to a major Canadian library.)

In any case, the implicit conclusion is obvious: either we whites learn to listen to our Black, Hispanic and First Nations sisters and brothers, or we remain slaves forever.  After all, is not listening the first step toward building solidarity? Thus the following, the best (i.e., most thought-provoking) essay on intersectionality I have yet read, reprinted in full with permission from its author, Black Agenda Report Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon, to whom my most sincere thanks.                           

 

Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism, Part 2

By Bruce A. Dixon

WHEN I TOOK A swipe at intersectionality last week, declaring that it was a hole, that afro-pessimism was a shovel and it was high time to stop digging, some friends and comrades were displeased. As far as they were concerned, questioning intersectionality amounted to a frontal attack on the place of women in the struggle against capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire, utterly inconsistent with my own politics and that of Black Agenda Report. I also threw some rocks at afro-pessimism, which I labeled the nappy headed step child of intersectionality, to the disappointment of its defenders, some of them friends and comrades too. Additionally neither group admits to understanding why I lumped them together, so I’m taking this opportunity to clarify both critiques and what joins them.

"The second intersectionality according to Smith, is rooted in post-structuralism which categorically rejects socialism and class analysis..."

Intersectionality is a termed coined by California law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 in her attempt to convince her fellow officers of the court to refine anti-discrimination law by incorporating the recognition of multiple overlapping oppressions into anti-discrimination law. While the term hasn’t made much headway the last three decades in the arguments of lawyers or the decisions of judges, it’s become a pervasive buzzword with multiple meanings in the realms of politics and the nonprofit industrial complex.

Nowadays, and perhaps from the start, as Sharon Smith explains in an indispensable August 2017 Socialist Worker article titled “A Marxist Case for Intersectionality ,” there are two separate, distinct and mutually incompatible intersectionalities. The first, she says is firmly in the camp of the real left, those who oppose and aim to overthrow capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire – not two or three out of four but all four. This tradition, which puts intersectionality in the context of class analysis and class struggle goes back at least to Claudia Jones in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and the Cohambee River Collective in the 1970s, although neither of these ever heard or uttered the word “intersectional.” The second intersectionality according to Smith, is rooted in post-structuralism which categorically rejects socialism and class analysis, and downgrades the importance of class struggle at most to something coequal in importance with ageism, ableism and speciesism. With no anchor in class struggle, and emphasizing the oppressed experience of individuals and non-class groups this kind of intersectionalism acts to perpetuate the division of the US left and wannabe left into squabbling constituency groups vying for attention, funding and acknowledgement of whose cause is the most righteous. With neither the means nor the inclination to contend for power, this intersectionalist emphasis on individual experience and deeds has given rise to atrocities like callout culture .

Unfortunately this second version of intersectionality is nearly hegemonic among self defined radicals and even liberals in the academy. Since it’s vigorously promoted by sectors of corporate media and the funders of the nonprofit industrial complex , it’s likely to remain so for the forseeable future. Worse still, since class conscious and class oriented formations neither dominate or even figure prominently in the US left, the class struggle intersectionalists are seriously handicapped at playing the game they say they want to play. Add to this the fact that some left feminists doggedly insist on using the same name for themselves as the anti-socialist, anti-class struggle intersectionalists who have a far broader reach and bigger microphones, and we have what can only be described as a hot mess.

"...the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric to deceive the unwary..."

Zoologists identify about a hundred species of birds they call brood parasites . A brood parasite lays its egg in the nest of a host species, and it counts on fooling the host mom into hatching, feeding and raising the hostile alien offspring. Evolution has engineered the parasite chick to out-eat, out-compete or simply butcher its nest mates. The parasite chicks often grow bigger than both parents put together while still being fed in the nest. In the context of the real left, the community of those aiming to overthrow capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire – not two or three out of four but all four, the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric and branding to deceive the unwary and ensnare many bright, serious and sincere leftists into defending and promoting its fundamentally hostile project.

Melissa Harris-Perry was lauded as a leading intersectionlist at the same time she aggressively defended the government’s right to intercept and record every email, text message, phone call and electronic brain fart on the planet and store them for future inspection. DemocracyNow, which has given more air time to intersectionality than perhaps anybody, refused to cover the lynching and ethnic cleansing of black Libyans during Obama’s 2012 war on that unhappy country even though they had a correspondent on the ground. To this day DemocracyNow dependably spouts US propaganda justifying Obama’s and Trump’s war on Syria. Angela Davis gets credit for being a leading proponent of intersectionality too, even though like hordes of other intersectionalists, she lost her mind over Barack Obama. All these people are examples of intersectionalists, with bigger audiences and far more visibility than left feminists are likely to achieve any time soon. When bona fide left feminists defend the word intersectionality and call themselves intersectional they confuse the lazy, the naive or unwary, they surrender their own credibility to the anti-socialist intersectionalists, and they provide protective cover to the eggs of these brood parasites. It doesn’t have to work that way.

In the natural world brood parasites have been around for millions of years, long enough for hosts to evolve defenses against them. Birds defensively mark their eggs and their chicks to distinguish them from hostile parasites. Sometimes they stand watch to sound the alarm at the presence of intruders and strange eggs, and more. These are lessons left feminists might do well to emulate. You defeat a brood parasite not by adopting its name, but by making it easier, not harder to distinguish the parasite from the real thing. Real left feminists will never get as many professorships, grants, media outlets and TED Talks as the anti-socialist intersectionalists. They invented the term anyway, for their own reasons not yours. Get over it. The real left can't get intersectionality back and there was never a time when they had exclusive possession of it anyhow. Claudia Jones and the Cohambee comrades made themselves perfectly well understood without it.

There’s no shortage of sharp, erudite left feminists who can if they want, come up with some new terminology that will allow ordinary people to distinguish between the anti-socialist intersectionalist project and authentic left feminism without a six paragraph discourse on postmoderism and post-structuralism. We cannot wait on natural selection to take care of this for us. At the risk of being that cis het guy who offers unsolicited advice to woman comrades, I respectfully suggest this is something that needs to happen real soon.

"Like the dominant version of intersectionality afro-pessimism is pretty explicitly anti-socialist and anti-class struggle..."

I said last week that afro pessimism was a stepchild of intersectionality. Like the dominant version of intersectionality, afro-pessimism is pretty explicitly anti-socialist and anti-class struggle. It’s about centering (the woke intersectional word for putting something first and last and ignoring all else) the totality of anti-blackness, the permanent war against black bodies, black aspirations, black lives, black livelihoods and black dreams. Sounds a lot like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Like intersectionality, afro-pessimism is not a theory. Like intersectionality, it only describes and does not explain. Like the prevailing flavor of intersectionality, it enjoys considerable support in the academy and mimics enough “woke” rhetoric to deceive the unwary into imagining afro-pessimism is some new kind of emancipatory project, that it prescribes or informs solutions and strategies to tackle real world stuff, even though its foremost proponent Frank Wilderson says it does not.

The only instance where afro pessimism seems to have anything prescriptive to say about how struggle ought to be conducted in the real world is afro-pessisms’s consistent disparagement of the possibility of achieving anything in coalition with anybody who ain’t black. It’s never worked before, the afro-pessimists say, trotting out a long historical list of times and places white “allies” turned tail and defected from the cause of their black compatriots. But since in just about every instance neither the fickle white allies nor the black formations in question were class-based, class oriented or led by the working class it’s hard to see how things could have turned out differently. It’s a problem the Green Party, which I’m part of, has to this day. If the state, the media and the so-called economy are contraptions a particular class uses to rule the rest of us, how do you contend for power when you don’t have a class analysis, or even recognize the importance of class? Nobody can be a dependable ally, a steady rock on either side of an alliance contending for power without a class analysis and an understanding of how power is exercised.

Clearly, the afro-pessimist injunction against working with non-blacks is a prescription for impotence. People of African descent are 13% of the US population. Slavery didn’t end until the political moment when a plurality of white people sided with blacks to end it. Reconstruction folded only when that plurality was shrunken, disarmed and shattered. Jim Crow also ended at the political moment that a plurality of whites took the same side as blacks to kill it. But afro-pessimists, even the ones who talk about reparations, rule coalitions off the table period exclamation point. How they plan to achieve that without cultivating and working with non-black political partners is anybody’s guess. But I misspoke-- Afro-pessimists do not plan. They engage, they propose, they put on a show making the point that nobody is or ever was as oppressed as they are, all in the same self-involved spirit of post structuralist intersectionality. Their shtick isn’t even unique; there’s a queer pessimist discourse that sounds a lot like Frank Wilderson or Ta-Nehisi Coates on whatever drug is the opposite of speed.

Tellingly there was no queer pessimism in the early 1980s, when gay men (and even greater numbers of straight black women) were dying like flies from then untreatable HIV-AIDS. People were too busy fighting for their lives then, just as our own ancestors in the 1950s, the 40s, and prior decades had no time for anything like afro-pessimism when Africans in America could be lynched with impunity and Jim Crow was an everyday reality. Queer pessimism only emerged after drug therapies enabled people to live decades with HIV-AIDS. Similarly afro-pessimism only surfaced after enough black faces got comfy spots in the academy.

A few years ago a young comrade in school somewhere told me his professor was insisting that Europeans colonized Africa and maybe the Americas too not because they wanted land, slaves, gold and empire, but because they feared and/or envied the sexual potency of all those outa control black bodies. After I stopped laughing, I assured my young friend this was errant nonsense and I didn’t think about it any more. Now I know this is part of a concept Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson and other afro-pessimist academics call, presumably with straight faces, “libidinal economy .”

Ta Nehisi Coates has fashioned a lucrative and prestigious career out of that stuff, although I doubt he would call himself an afro-pessimist. Nice work if you can get it. I really believe the afro-pessimist shtick is about one-upping Coates. It’s working well for him, maybe it will work for them too.

(Bruce A. Dixon  can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)georgiagreenparty.org., also via Twitter @brucedixon.)  

 

*****

"(An) intra-Korean deal could open a new path to negotiations between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs and a final settlement of the Korean War—if Donald Trump is willing to take such an off-ramp from the crisis. But it’s not just Kim Jong Un who has taken the diplomatic initiative to open such a path out of the crisis. Moon Jae-in has been working to advance such a compromise since he was inaugurated as South Korean president last May." (Significantly, any reportage on the Moon proposal...has thus far been suppressed by the war-mongering U.S. mainstream media propaganda apparatus.)

*****

Another example of U.S. law enforcement helping JesuNazis and other white supremacist groups  target anti-fascist activists and anti-Trump/Pence Regime protesters.

*****

Seventy-three Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 36 Democratic Senators joined with Republicans...to pass a two-year spending bill that does nothing to protect immigrant communities and throws undocumented 'Dreamers' under the bus." NOTE: Amongst these Democrats, who by their votes have abandoned all pretense of being anything other than fascists,  white-supremacist imperialists (and therefore JesuNazi sympathizers), are Washington state's Senator Patty Murry and Rep. Denny Heck.

  *****   

"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a notice outlining extraordinary plans by the social media company to monitor all the postings and messages of its users, censor independent journalism, and use artificial intelligence (AI) to report users to the police and intelligence agencies."

*****

"From its earliest establishment in America, capitalism has been guilty of enriching its private fortunes out of the most savage robbery of the Negro people and the most ruthless exploitation of the labor power of Negro working people, both during the era of chattel slavery, and throughout the span of the century since emancipation."

*****

"The most cynically brilliant outcome of the ‘blame Russia’ campaign has been to neuter left activism by focusing the attack on Donald Trump rather than the interests he represents. As evidence, the proportion of Goldman Sachs alumni in Mr. Trump’s administration approximates that in Mr. Obama’s and what was expected for Mrs. Clinton’s. If the problem is Donald Trump, then the solution is ‘not Trump.’ However, if the problem is that the rich substantially control American political outcomes, how would electing ‘not Trump’ bring about resolution?"

                 *****                

"What were more than 7,000 'doughboys' (U.S. soldiers) doing in Siberia at the end of the First World War?"

          *****         

"The political crisis in South Africa derives from the failure of Zuma and the leadership of the ANC to actually oust white monopoly capital from the commanding heights of the economy, after nearly a quarter century in nominal power. Instead, they have fatted a new class of Black bourgeoisie, most of them ANC-connected, as junior partners with the white monopolists through the government’s Black Economic Empowerment policies." 

 *****

"Elizabeth’s New Life Center is part of 'a collaborative effort within the state of Ohio to provide abstinence education to students through in-school programming,' according to the organization’s website. It is the regional coordinator for the 'Ohio Adolescent Health Centers' collaborative program and had received four years of funding from the Ohio Department of Health in 2011. A Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion case study on the collaborative notes that it uses 'sexual risk avoidance strategies' and is paid for 'with federal funding provided through the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant (aka Title V).' Comment: JesuNazi theocracy marches on.

*****

Recovered from the hitherto-lost text of 8 February 2018:

“These days, Trump mocks Schumer as "Cryin' Chuck" on Twitter and Schumer paints Trump as an unreasonable negotiator who "won't take yes for an answer." But the two have had a close working relationship over years that belies whatever harsh words they exchange today. One example: Schumer has received more donations from Trump across his career than any other sitting member of Congress.” 

***** 

“A quiet coup d’état has taken place in Connecticut. The legislature has effectively turned over control of the state to Wall Street.”

***** 

“...white people who are more prejudiced toward black people are also significantly more opposed to welfare.” 

*****

“In the U.S. the absolute majority of the working masses, deprived of elementary rights to survival, are hovering in the abyss of nightmare.” 

***** 

Which is more frightening? The destruction of the environment and the climate that sustain human civilization as we have known it? Or the collapse of democracy and the rise of endless war and fascism?” 

***** 

“(The Trump/Pence Regime) has announced that as of January 31 it will stop distributing food and water to residents of Puerto Rico...Politically, the short shrift Trump has given Puerto Rico in the face of the ruinous intensity of Hurricane Maria only adds to the evidence of his bigotry. This will... help him with the white nationalists he has clasped close to his chest.” 

*****

 “When Puerto Rico’s governor Ricardo Rosselló announced last week his plan to privatize the nation’s largest electric utility, he justified the move as a remedy to the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe being inflicted upon the population... (the utility) was deliberately run into the ground, starved of resources, and allowed to mire in corruption. Meanwhile American capital, abstaining from investment in the productive forces of Puerto Rico, instead offered indebtedness, fully conscious that this would lead toward default and set the stage for the looting of public property.”

***** 

“Consumed with a Coke versus Pepsi ideological battle, framed within an uncontested arena of historicized nationalism, most Americans, and the political parties to which they owe allegiance, are magnificently unprepared to grapple with their nation’s irrelevance in defending them from the unfolding realities of our geo-historical moment; even less, to comprehend the apparent acts of war being waged by non-human forces – forces with which we must now find an accommodation.”

***** 

“What Trump and his GOP backers want is ethnic cleansing.”

***** 

“This new narrative of FBI integrity and neutrality is predicated on the assumption that most of the public has forgotten or is unaware of the notorious history of the FBI and its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was a racist anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer. He shared his obsessive anti-communism and anti-Semitism with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Gestapo chief, who Hoover corresponded with personally and kept on the FBI’s mailing list right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.” 

***** 

“Tobacco changed the entire dynamic of colonization and control in North America. Finally, there was money to be made. The Englishmen shipped the newest vice eastward and pulled a handsome profit in return. Our beloved forefathers were early drug dealers...soon 'blackness' became inseparably associated with slavery and the lowest of social classes.”

***** 

“It’s unclear exactly how many kids in the U.S. are malnourished, but there’s some disturbing evidence: A quarter of toddlers don’t receive enough iron, 1 in 5 children are obese, 1 in 6 households with children are food-insecure, and over half of infants participate in the federal Women, Infants, and Children program for supplemental nutrition.”

*****

“An outspoken neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier is set to become the Republican nominee for an Illinois congressional seat.” 

***** 

“Nearly one in three disabled undergraduate women experiences sexual violence.” 

***** 

“The Trump administration approved Indiana’s request requiring some Medicaid recipients to work to get benefits on Friday, meaning thousands of people in the state could soon be without health insurance...Indiana is the second state whose Medicaid changes have been approved, following Kentucky in January. A handful of other states have also sought federal permission to amend their Medicaid programs, from adding work rules to mandating drug tests.” Comment: Obviously, an example of the Capitalist/JesuNazi post-deathcamp methodology of genocide.  

***** 

“Republican Congressman Invited a Holocaust Denier to Be His Guest at the State of the Union Address.” Comment: the headline tells the whole story: like the proverbial birds of a feather, Nazis flock together.  

 

*****

 “In 2016, 45 million people did not fill their prescriptions because of cost, half of them are becoming even sicker because they do not have access to medication. Please sign this petition in support of common sense policies to lower drug prices in America and expand access to lower cost medication from pharmacies in other countries.” NOTE: I am not so foolish as to believe the Capitalists and their JesuNazi puppets can be swayed by petition, but I nevertheless post this item because the prohibitive cost of prescription drugs is another perfect example of the post-deathcamp methods of genocide employed our overlords.

***** 

IN MEMORIAM: a statue of Hungarian-born U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, was unveiled Thursday in Budapest as those attending praised the man known for his advocacy of democracy and human rights around the world.

LB (with help from TigerLille1)/ 8-10 February 2018.

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Word Processing System Failure Shuts Down Dispatches

IMG_0376 - Copy
Regardless of the fate of Dispatches,  we must fight on until Capitalism is no more and we the united people of the Working Class are everywhere in this world triumphant.  (Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2016.)

***

TWO NIGHTS AGO the Open Office 4.1.1 word processing system on my Windows 10 computer went stone dead. I cannot write any new documents, cannot open any existing text documents, cannot even download material from flash drives. I don't know if I have been hacked or if something else has happened -- though given a new agreement with another genuinely revolution-minded Leftist domestic source, the timing is surely suspicious. Moreover I am too abysmally ignorant of computers to troubleshoot a failure of this magnitude. (In truth I despise computers -- the only inanimate objects that have ever roused me to genuine hatred -- because I recognize what they are: genocidal weapons modified by our Capitalist overlords to function as the ultimate scabs, exemplified by the fact that in my lifetime field of print journalism, computers destroyed about five of every seven jobs and enabled our masters to force the rest of us to labor about three times harder at less than half the pay.) In any case, Dispatches is down, and I have no idea for how long. (Yes, a nurdly comrade is coming to attempt rescue, but probably not until Sunday at the earliest.) Best-case scenario is I will be back online next week; worst case scenario is this computer is dead. Given that I lack the financial means to replace it, this would mean Dispatches too is dead. Goddess grant the problem is repairable, though in either case, sighs of relief or lamentations, I'll post the appropriate notice. Hence my apologies.

Meanwhile let us never forget Earth is our True Motherland, and that as we free ourselves of the genocidal shackles of Capitalism, we free our Mother from the apocalyptic bondage of patriarchy. Hence an audiovisual meditation I recommend for us all, especially when the encroaching darkness threatens to weaken our determination.

LB/8 February 2018

-30-

 


USian Empire's Capitalist Healthcare Horror Turns Personal

AS REGULAR READERS KNOW, I was badly injured in a household accident on 7 January 2018. Since then, the effort to get adequate care for the injuries inflicted by that accident has thrust me into an eye-opening struggle with Kaiser-Permanente, which took over Washington state's Group Health Cooperative last year.

This fight is significant to Dispatches because it exemplifies the deadly obstacles that confront us all in a realm wherein healthcare is permanently defined as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.

Significantly, though I joined GHC as a voting member nearly 45 years ago, I never once found it necessary to challenge its policies or personnel to obtain needed care. Indeed – in perfect health at the time I joined – my membership was more than anything a political statement, endorsement of the co-op as the closest approximation to socialized medicine USian Capitalism will ever allow. For that reason – never mind the pathetic self-deception that proclaims healthcare-as-a-human-right to be achievable without full-fledged revolution –  I voted against the KP takeover and will lament the death of GHC and its former, implicitly socialist idealism for as long as I remain alive.

Though KP is allegedly a non-profit organization, its unwritten but nevertheless obvious policy – that health care is indeed a privilege of wealth rather than a human right – is no different from the policy of the Empire itself and the policies of the Empire's more brazenly murderous for-profit medical monopolies.

Indeed KP has often been accused of concealing for-profit operations behind a non-profit disguise. Quoth Wikipedia:

“Kaiser has had disputes with its employees' unions, repeatedly faced civil and criminal charges for falsification of records and patient dumping, faced action by regulators over the quality of care it provided, especially to patients with mental health issues, and has faced criticism from activists and action from regulators over the size of its cash reserves.”

See also herehere, here, here, here and here.

KP's 2013 executive salary schedule – with then Chairman George C Halvorson paid $10.2 million per year and his five immediate underlings garnering an additional $13.6 million annually – is here.

The 2013 data is the most recent I could find. But it nevertheless exemplifies the class warfare that defines what passes for “healthcare” – whether for-profit or (allegedly) non-profit – here in the Imperial Homeland. Thus a few millionaire Capitalist elitists dictate the fates of millions of 99 Percenters – nearly half of us now reduced to permanent official poverty as USian Capitalism inevitably metamorphoses into JesuNazism. Thus too millionaire executives profit obscenely from genocidal denial of care to the needy (see again the above links).

Such are the policies expressed by the email a KP medical assistant (MA) sent me on the morning of 31 January 2018:

The reason you can't refill mupirocin is because your insurance want (sic) pay for a refill until 2/28/2018. Are you use (sic) the medication as directed three times daily?

Mupirocin is a powerful antibiotic ointment vital to the treatment of the chronic leg ulcers inflicted by congestive heart failure. Prior to the accident, my own ulcers were nearly healed, but those on my left leg were ripped open by the associated fall. The result is a complex of weeping, bleeding, extremely painful, wretchedly slow-healing wounds in an area about five inches long by about three inches wide halfway between my left ankle and my left knee.

Nor is my confidence in KP care-quality enhanced by the MA's glaring illiteracy.

 

***

 

OBVIOUSLY BY HER QUESTION the MA was attempting to lay the foundation for a hostile claim I am misusing the prescription, but the fact of the matter is I was unavoidably under-using it, not just because of KP's unconscionable delays in fulfilling its promises of providing adequate home health care, but – in recognition of KP's medication-rationing protocols – to extend the prescription as long as possible.

Rather than thrice daily, I use the Mupirocin only once per day because it is only once per day someone – more often a volunteer Communist Labor Party comrade than a KP nurse – is available to change the dressings on my leg ulcers. (The lingering results of the hip, thigh, buttocks, upper leg and aggravated back injuries of 7 January 2018 make it impossible for me to bend over enough to change these dressings myself.)

Of course I had mentioned these circumstances to several KP registered nurses and to at least one KP urgent care MD, all of whom recognized it as the best that can be done under the circumstances. Each of these individuals indicated their approval of my efforts and cautioned me to watch for signs of infection.

Proof of their recognition should therefore be available in the medical records (i.e., “charts”) another KP employee assures me are kept in such meticulous detail, they prove my allegedly “always adversarial” attitudes toward health care personnel even during the approximately 45 adversary-free years I was a Group Health voting member.

Not only does this particular assistant lie on behalf her superiors; she also therefore implicitly threatens me with knowingly false revisions of my medical records to support these lies.

More importantly however – and my doctor surely knows this as well as the moral imbeciles who dictate KP operational policy – this denial of antibiotics is tantamount to a death sentence. By his own implicit assertions, the fact I am denied Mupirocin refills until 28 February means infection of my ulcerated leg(s) becomes unavoidable, which in turn means the possibility of of death by sepsis soars into the realm of extreme probability.

Not that I am surprised. Such denial of care and treatment is the favored means of genocide under the New American Holocaust by which Capitalism is ridding itself of its “surplus” population: those of us deemed, whether because of disability, chronic poverty, old age, racial or sexual minority status or some combination of all these factors to be no longer sufficiently exploitable for profit and therefore no longer worthy of life.

There is also the fact that – just as I feared (and despite KP's many now-obviously false reassurances to the contrary) – the supplemental pain medications I was prescribed to help me cope with the off-the-scale pain of the 7 January injuries have in fact been added to my strictly rationed monthly anti-pain prescription, the mildest of the opiates. As a consequence I am denied access to any effective pain medication for the next two months. Never mind that monthly prescription originated from the diagnosis provided by the MD attending my spinal MRI at St. Joseph Hospital five years ago, who described my spinal arthritis as the worst such case she had ever seen, with every vertebrae arthritically inflamed.

Though the worst of the constant pain inflicted by the 7 January injuries is now seemingly behind me, the aggravated back problems, the bruises on my left buttocks and upper leg and the ulcers on my lower leg remain disabling. The ulcers also inflict, typically at four or five minute intervals, a moment of shooting or throbbing pain that spikes to a seven or eight and occasionally even to an abscessed-tooth nine on the one-to-10 medical pain scale.

Even without the accident, the back pain will be there as always, sometimes minor, sometimes debilitating, a few days each month so severe as to leave me bedridden – which means until KP finally renews my anti-pain prescription, I have no choice but to cling to my few remaining tablets for only the most dire emergencies.

This also means that to minimize discomfort, I have no choice but to spend as much time as possible in bed. My physical therapist will undoubtedly object to my choice of a bed-ridden state, but the pain-pill prohibition leaves me no other alternative.

 

***

 

WHAT IS TOO OFTEN OVERLOOKED in the debate over USian healthcare is that here in the One Nation Under God, insurers and government bureaucrats alike enforce not only Capitalism's deliberately murderous policy of healthcare as a privilege of wealth, but also the savagely punitive dogma of Christianity and its sadistic deity that suffering should never truly be alleviated because it is a cosmic declaration its victim is the Christian god's enemy and is therefore being punished accordingly.

Thus the brazen act of perversion unique to Capitalist medicine: turning the Hippocratic Oath into an oath of bottomless hypocrisy.

Want an alternative? Imagine a healthcare system owned and managed not by Capitalist millionaires – socioeconomic predators whose wealth proclaims their moral imbecility – but by fellow 99 Percenters in accordance with the Marxist principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

Meanwhile the JesuNazi realities of the Fourth Reich make it obvious We the People will never achieve healthcare as a human right unless we make it ours by revolution – yet another proof our very survival demands we rise up and overthrow our Capitalist overlords.

 

***

 

HEALTHCARE  UPDATE: No doubt in response to my disclosure I had engaged a lawyer to escalate my struggle against KP, I was granted the Mupirocin refill late on 31 January. As my lawyer says, “in an adversarial situation” – which USian healthcare invariably is – “one always has to be one's own advocate.”

 

*****

 

BECAUSE OF THE HOURS and energy consumed by my fight with KP, I am abbreviating the preparation of this week's Dispatches by application of a new format. Rather than the conventional headlines and text, I'm providing what in journalism used to be called “bang quotes” or “money quotes” – one or two sentences that exemplify or paraphrase the content of a story and include a link to its full text. Quotation marks around these sentences indicate they are taken directly from their respective texts; lack of quotation marks indicates my own paraphrasing. Ergo:

...the current president is turning demands from anti-immigrant hate groups, groups that have ties to the eugenics movement and openly advocated for heavily restricting immigration levels in order to maintain a white majority, into U.S. immigration policy.”

 

*****

"...largely ignored by the mass media, the reign of terror by police officers continues to rage across the United States. The entire state apparatus, from local cops to immigration agents, has been unleashed by the Trump administration to beat, maim and kill with impunity.”

 

*****

The grotesque visage of Trump is the true face of politicians such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.”

 

*****

In our 'booming' economy most American workers nearing retirement age have little or no savings, and Social Security pays an average of only $14,000 per year, which is less than the poverty threshold for an adult with one child. Many 75-year-olds consider themselves lucky to have jobs at Walmart.”

 

*****

 

If you want to see real fascism in action, look at what these people have been up to. Somebody leaves water in the desert for undocumented immigrants, and the Border Patrol pours it all out and then arrests the guy.”

*****

 

Chuck Smith, CEO of Equality Texas, told Rewire that the United States is experiencing an 'epidemic of violence' targeting LGBTQ people.”

 

*****

A quiet coup d’état has taken place in Connecticut. The legislature has effectively turned over control of the state to Wall Street.”  Note: what the ruling class can do to Connecticut, it obviously can do to any other state as well – a rather badly written report that therefore bears reading.)

 

*****

...billionaire casino mogul, Trump ally, and Republican National Committee (RNC) finance chairman Steve Wynn, has been sexually abusing his employees for over a decade.”


*****

The Capitalists – always theologizing from their Better Dead than Red fanaticism – are now literally gambling with our entire species.

 

*****

Profits made from slavery were higher than those of all other industries, banks, railroads, combined”.


*****

On January 16, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen told the Senate Judiciary Committee that, at her department's request, federal prosecutors are 'reviewing what avenues might be available' to arrest and prosecute mayors of sanctuary cities for harboring unauthorized immigrants.” Question: Is this a tactical prelude to the mass arrests and concentration-camp confinement by which the regime intends to persecute legal marijuana users?

*****

Perpetuating the Big Lie: how the Democratic (sic) Party intends to ensure JesuNazi victory in this fall's elections.

*****

“The coming weeks will show whether the U.S. intelligence establishment (the FBI/CIA/NSA, AKA the Deep State) will be able to prevent its leaders from being held to account.”

 

*****

As long as we remain in denial about how unspeakably bad things are, our circumstances will only get worse.

*****

"Bernie knows that in the days when America was not only the greatest military power, but also the greatest economic power, we actually took care of many of our white people. How else could an Empire run?”

*****


In remembrance of the Bear River Massacre, Jan. 29, 1863. “All of the social ills of struggling tribal communities today are connected by a common thread, and we must remember and understand why: Indigenous peoples have suffered brutality and compound traumas at the hands of settler colonialists and the United States government, with little to no time or space to heal, no acknowledgment or compassion from the masses, no admission of the crimes which began in 1492...we must never forget. The road to Auschwitz was paved with indigenous blood.”

*****

Book review: Hari’s Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions (Bloomsbury) zeroes in the social change that is needed to restore better relationships on the job, in families, and in the neighborhoods we call home. The book is part memoir, part investigative report and part expose of the ways consumers have been hoodwinked into relying on medication to relieve emotional distress.”

 

*****

Incomprehensible essay of the week. Note: A working intellectual all my adult life, I nevertheless cannot even begin to understand Rob Urie's impenetrable boast of esoteric (and therefore probably meaningless) knowledge. But I have posted a link to it anyway, just in case someone might find it at least minimally relevant.

*****

Worth watching: World Socialist Web Site Chairperson David North interviewed by Chris Hedges.

LB/ 1 February 2018

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