His Policies Express the Terminal Arrogance of Patriarchal Misogyny: That Our Planet Is Just Another Woman to Be Beaten into Submission
"...indications are that the more ardently Christian an American becomes, the less he or she cares about the environment...Then there is the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency is currently headed by an evangelical, the now-infamous Scott Pruitt...unscrupulous, hypocritical, and dishonest—a walking caricature of the Trump era...But outside of the mainstream media and the coastal cities, Pruitt has supporters who like him so much that they’re willing to ignore his petty scandals and Napoleon complex. They like him because he thinks like them: He puts people before the environment, just like God does” (emphasis as in original).
See also: "As of 2014, it's estimated that nearly half of Americans—49 percent—say natural disasters are a sign of "the end times," as described in the Bible. That's up from an estimated 44 percent in 2011."
And this: "Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) is an anticipatory religion; a sect almost wholly fixated on the expectations (and apprehension) of a single and supposedly inescapable future event: the apocalypse detailed in John’s Revelation where all but “saved” Christians (perhaps as few as 144,000) will be butchered by the Middle Eastern Christian god…. and it’s a bloodbath many Christian captains have been (and still are today) simply giddy about."
Plus this: "In June 2012, Beisner penned a letter to the EPA opposing the agency’s classification of carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant as well as opposing any limits on carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. He did so on behalf of the Cornwall Alliance, the evangelical anti-environmentalism network that Beisner founded in 2005 to promote a “biblical” view of the environment...More than 100 evangelical theologians, pastors, scientists and economists endorsed Beisner’s letter, which featured signatories such as talk-radio host Bryan Fischer, Southern Baptist ethicist Daniel Heimbach, Calvinist theologian Wayne Grudem, former presidential candidate Gary Bauer and Christian Reconstructionist writer Gary North.
Also this: "Pruitt's profound harm to Americans is more due to his policies than his personal errant behavior. Take for example two recent developments in his capitulation to the chemical industry"
This too: "Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday used a Bible verse to defend his department’s policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border from Mexico, suggesting that God supports the government in separating immigrant parents from their children...the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”
And lastly this: "The idea that racial or ethnic groups should be persecuted is popular in the Bible. God himself was keen on exterminating whole peoples, such as the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:3). Believing that they had replaced the Jews as God's chosen people, Christians deduced that they were free to persecute and extirpate non-Christian peoples, and even that they were under a moral obligation to do so."
Comment: more than any other of the Trump/Pence Regime's appointees save perhaps the vice-president himself, Pruitt wears that utterly contemptuous, bottomlessly sadistic, oh-how-fun-it-is-to-watch-a-woman-burn-to-death smirk that so often identifies the white male Christian fanatic. It is our species' most malevolent smile, a triumphant, unmistakably ominous leer that -- as I learned during my boyhood years in Southern Appalachia and now witness again as an elder in the Pacific Northwest -- reveals the torture-chamber venom of fanatical Christianity's serial-rapist malice even before its adherents begin spewing their genocidal gospels of zero-tolerance tyranny, infinite misogyny and inescapable apocalypse.
And now, finally, after a year and six months of watching the regime shove us ever more forcefully toward JesuNazi theocracy, Brian Palmer of Slate awakens to warn us of the neo-medieval mindset of those who serve our Capitalist overlords by tyrannizing us.
Perhaps this time we the people will ourselves finally begin to awaken to the horrors of the abyss into which we are being herded.
Exactly as Mr. Palmer concludes, Pruitt "isn't an anomaly. He's carrying forth a tradition" -- precisely as intended by those who rule in the name of "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power."
Immediately below then is a foreshortened version of the response I posted on the comment-thread of Mr. Palmer's report. Its relevance here is its recognition of Pruitt's war on the environment as one of many fronts in patriarchy's far greater war against all forms of unfettered femaleness; that war is part of the apocalyptic crusade demanded by the primary Abrahamic documents -- the Torah, the Bible and the Qur'an -- which regard femaleness as not only the antithesis of godliness, but its ultimate foe. Hence the mixed tone of my reply: simultaneously critical but supportive, with the hope the writer will pursue this topic further:
As Mr. Palmer observes, Pruitt is most assuredly "not an anomaly"; but he is infinitely more apocalyptic than Mr. Palmer realizes.
I first encountered views like Pruitt's on a church reader board in rural western Washington state c. 1970: one side of the readerboard said, "Organic Is Satanic"; the other side said, "Environmental Is Of The Devil."
But that ecocidal malevolence was surely nothing new. It had originated perhaps 6,000 years ago in the era of talking snakes, loquacious burning bushes, fiery wheels and obsessive wheel-watchers; the swirling spheres of heavenly fire hypnotized the wheel-watchers into imagining the snakes and burning bushes talked in tongues and commanded them on pain of eternal damnation to beat their grandmothers and mothers and sisters and wives and yes their Mother Earth into submission.
Such was the birth of patriarchy, the philosophical construct in which we've been suicidally imprisoned ever since, our species' first and only genuinely unnatural act.
Patriarchy's core principle is misogyny -- murderous hatred and sadistic contempt for all femaleness.
This was rank heresy to our ancient ancestors, whose chief deity was a woman. Indeed the best evidence suggests they recognized femaleness in all forms -- most especially that of our Mother Earth -- as the source of all life and being and therefore the ultimate manifestation of sacredness.
But patriarchy won because its adherents were the German Nazis of their time: they had better weapons; they also had the god-is-on-our-side moral imbecility to find joy in genocide. And from their victory came not only Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), but all its associated misogyny, "Environmental Is Of The Devil" included.
The two best sources on patriarchy's maliciously concealed history are Robert Graves and Barbara Mor. Mr. Graves' work, The White Goddess (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1948; 1966), focuses on the contents of ancient poetry and folklore to provide compelling glimpses of the consciousness that patriarchy seeks to exterminate forever. Ms. Mor's work, The Great Cosmic Mother (Harper-Collins: 1986), tells essentially the same story, albeit in a much more accessible manner.
My own contribution to this dialogue – 24 years of weekend and after-work research that culminated in a photographically illustrated book of approximately 150,000 words entitled “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” – was destroyed by fire at the same instant I was dinner-meeting with a longtime publishing-industry friend who believed it would be one of the pivotal books of the 20th Century and intended to mother it to mainstream publication.
Obviously the fire was timed to send me the message my research had plowed forbidden ground.
Arguing from evidence within the folk renaissance, its subsequent transitions of form and content and the cultural consciousness so revealed and nurtured, “Dancer” defined the Counterculture that evolved in the 1960s as the first wave of a global revolution against patriarchy.
Thus had it been published, it might have helped unite socialists and environmentalists and feminists and anti-war activists and back-to-the-landers in a solidarity of vision already expressed by the era's best music, literature and visual art -- a solidarity that transcended ideological differences and was all the more credible for its breathtakingly ancient origins.
Amidst the apparently unlimited modern promise of the mid-20th Century, the resurrection of such antique material points to a cultural anomaly that has yet to be explained; why at the dawn of such allegedly all-fulfilling modernity would we resurrect and reanimate our oldest cultural heritage?
Indeed the emergence of the macrocosm of the Counterculture from the microcosm of the folk renaissance acquires an almost-magical quality when we learn that many of the traditional songs so resurrected were but "ill-concealed" liturgical remnants of the presumably long-suppressed religion of the Earth -- ancient invocations of the Earth Mother.
Is it possible that in the 1950s and early 1960s these invocations -- no matter how fragmented or disguised -- somehow played upon our psyches so compellingly they yet again functioned as originally intended?
The epic research by Ms. Mor and Mr. Graves also show us Mr. Palmer's "line backward" goes not back 2,000 years but straight back maybe 4,000 more years to that first talking snake who sold our species on patriarchy -- the apocalyptic toxin that (just as I suspect was intended) -- may soon render us extinct and reduce our Mother Earth to a bug planet.
(Patriarchy as the theological equivalent of smallpox-infect ed blankets? That raises all sorts of interesting questions...)
*****
Will Trump/Pence Safety-Net Reorganization Hide Genocidal Cuts?
"A looming Trump administration proposal to move safety net programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, under the control of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has drawn concern from advocacy groups that say it’s intended to justify cuts to the safety net programs...the plan could include the consolidation of federal safety net programs and a name change for HHS to incorporate the term 'welfare.' It is expected to be released in a report by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) within the next couple of weeks."
Comment: by renaming HHS the "Department of Welfare" or something like that, the Trump/Pence Regime maliciously positions it to become a primary target of the homeland population's ultimately murderous Ayn Rand selfishness.
*****
Supreme Court Says It's Ok for Republicans to Purge Voter Rolls
"The Supreme Court on Monday upheld Ohio’s efforts to purge its voter rolls, a 5-4 ruling with broad implications for voting rights in multiple states ahead of the 2018 midterm elections..."
See also: "That process, says advocacy group Demos, knocked hundreds of thousands of infrequent voting Ohioans off the rolls in 2015 alone."
*****
Newest Supreme Court Ruling Would Let Uniformed Nazis Terrorize Voters
"The (Minnesota) law banning political apparel was struck down...Groups like MVA will be free to wear whatever they want to the polls, as long as it doesn’t refer to a specific candidate. At its root, this decision is yet another instance of Justice Roberts’ utter dismissal of the importance of voting."
Comment: while the report does not mention Nazis per se, its meaning is undeniable: voter-discouragement groups "will be free to wear whatever they want" at the polling places, just as the Klansters wore their sheets and pillowcases at the polls to intimidate Black voters in the post-Reconstruction South.
*****
More KuKluxKop-JesuNazi Collaboration in California
"The resulting criminal trial against five anti-fascist protesters – who are accused of assaulting Quillinan during a roughly 15-second altercation – is, according to activists, the latest example of US law enforcement aggressively targeting leftwing demonstrators and favoring members of the far-right after violent clashes. In another California case, police have worked directly with neo-Nazis to go after counter-protesters, including a black activist stabbed at a white supremacist rally."
*****
The Empire Tightens Its Death-Chamber Noose on Assange's Neck
"Under conditions of a growing international campaign to demand freedom for Julian Assange, Ecuador’s foreign minister has indicated moves are underway to force the WikiLeaks editor out of Ecuador’s London embassy, where he was granted political asylum six years ago..If Assange is pushed out of the embassy he could be immediately arrested by the British authorities and subjected to lengthy imprisonment, pending extradition to the US, where he could face the death penalty on espionage and conspiracy charges."
See also: "The 66-page complaint claims that Trump’s presidential campaign collaborated with Russian intelligence agents who stole information from DNC email servers in the summer of 2016 and arranged for WikiLeaks to publish the information in order to undermine Democrat Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and secure the election of a US president more amenable to the Kremlin."
Plus this: "It’s an outrage that the Democrats, who are probably looked at as being a leader in First Amendment defenses...are establishing possibly a precedent here that diminishes the First Amendment freedoms."
*****
Schoolcops as Teachers: Submit to Fascist Serfdom or Go to Prison, Be a Slave
"Police are more likely to target marginalized students for control and these students are more likely to attend schools with a significant police presence. Crucially, schools primarily made up of students of color are more likely to have police in them irrespective of whether their community is a high crime area. Law enforcement officers, with implicit racial and class biases in tow, bring their prejudices inside the school building...The socialization of danger fosters a sense of insecurity and hopelessness, a mood on which authoritarianism thrives."
*****
Alleged Compromise Bill Again Betrays Former DACA Protectees
"It’s misleading to even call the SAF Act an immigration bill. As a matter of rhetoric, it’s an anti-immigration piece of legislation. If a Democratic politician sponsored a bill to cut legal gun ownership by 40%, Republicans would rightly call it an anti-gun bill. The same rules ought to apply here...Congress hasn’t considered an immigration bill this bad since the 1920s, when it passed the Emergency Quota Act in 1921 and the National Origins Act in 1924. Those laws ended most immigration from Europe...Even if that sorry history doesn’t repeat itself, the SAF Act is still the worst immigration bill introduced in almost a century...It’s a strategy for deporting Dreamers over a longer period of time while cutting legal immigration in half, canceling the applications of those who have patiently waited for a green card, and wasting $124 billion.”
Comment: note the source of this analysis and the rare opportunity for cooperation between Left and Right implicit in this Cato Institute analysis of Congress's newest betrayal of the DACA people, who as tiny children were brought to the imperial homeland by their undocumented parents and now face the horrors of deportation in retaliation for the mere fact they are alive.
See also: "The administration does not have the facilities to keep up with its brutal rates of detention, and a report by McClatchy News this week revealed the administration plans to deal with the overflow by warehousing children in tent camps on military bases."
Plus this: "'Cages that looked a lot like dog kennels.' That was Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley’s description of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility he visited in McAllen, Texas, last week. (He was denied access to a separate facility in Brownsville, Texas, whose windows appeared to be blacked out.) Both buildings reportedly house migrant children who have been separated from their parents at the border."
And this: “Effectively, these kids are incarcerated,”
Comment: can you say "concentration camps?"
See this too: "What's going on at our southern border is outrageous. Christians everywhere should be up in arms."
Comment: "Christians" -- those who claim to be Christian in the humanitarian sense Willie Nelson means -- have for the most part been reduced by JesuNazism to an intimidated minority. See also , above.
*****
No More Political Asylum for Refugees Fleeing Domestic Violence, Gang Warfare
"Sessions’ decision undoes years of advancements in women’s rights...Laura S., an undocumented Mexican immigrant, was found incinerated inside her mother’s car barely a week after being deported, despite her protests that her ex...would kill her... She warned the Border Patrol agent escorting her across the bridge from Texas to Reynosa that her death would be on his conscious."
See also: "In just the latest addition to the Trump administration's...'cruel' policies aimed at closing off the nation to refugees and asylum-seekers, Attorney General Jeff Sessions released a new Justice Department guidance on Monday declaring that migrants will no longer automatically qualify for asylum if they present concerns of domestic abuse or gang violence."
*****
Regime Expands Its Anti-Immigrant War, Targets Naturalized Citizens
"L. Francis Cissna, the Director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), announced this week the creation of a new office that will be focused on identifying American citizens who “cheated” in their naturalization application. The ultimate goal of the office is to seek to remove the citizenship rights of such immigrants in civil court proceedings, while also prosecuting them on the charge of criminal fraud. Presented as a straightforward and innocuous initiative, the move marks yet another step in ongoing and relentless attack against immigrants, and more broadly on citizenship rights in the United States."
*****
As I Predicted, "Progressive" Seattle Tells Homeless People to Fuck Off and Die
"Less than a month after unanimously adopting a head tax to help combat the homeless crisis, the Seattle City Council voted to overturn the tax on big businesses, 7-2...Councilmember Kshama Sawant lashed out at her council colleagues and excoriated Amazon. 'Jeff Bezos is our enemy. We have to fight big business...The message we are sending is that all Amazon has to do is snap its fingers to get the highest political body in Seattle to cave.'"
Comment: the only Seattle politician I trust on this (or any other Working Class issue) is Kashama Sawant; precisely as she said after an earlier version of the council's fuck-off-and-die vote last November, “The real reason there is opposition to the HOMES tax...is corporate politics.” As a declared Socialist Alternative Party member, Sawant is a genuine Marxist, following Leon Trotsky's path of building the broadest possible left-of-center alliance on the assumption that it is the best possible way of reaching the largest number of potential recruits. Note too that all the politicians who killed the tax spewed a deluge of euphemisms and excuses to hide their bourgeois exasperation, hatred and contempt for Capitalism's most obvious victims.
Quoth Trotsky: "The policy of the united front has as its task to separate those who want to fight from those who do not; to push forward those who vacillate; finally to compromise the capitulationist leaders in the eyes of the workers in order to consolidate the fighting capacity of the latter."
In which context I repeat my own recent commentary on earlier reports indicating Capitalist threats of killing the tax via a ballot initiative and Seattle's underlying Ayn Rand selfishness were combining to make the city's betrayal of its homeless people inevitable:
Having had the profound misfortune to have resided in Seattle from 1972 through 1976, I know too well the malicious hypocrisy of the majority of its white residents.
Thanks to the courageousness of the late Walter Crowley, I also know of the breathtaking racism, bourgeois socioeconomic bigotry and anti-Jewish malice exposed by the still-officially-secret polling that explained the self-destructive defeat of the Forward Thrust subway proposal as precipitated not as much by the so-called Boeing Bust as by the white Seattleites' decision to listen to their Inner Fascists.
(Walter told me of the poll and its results during an otherwise-social late-1970s J&M Cafe conversation that for a moment became the deepest of what in journalism is known as "deep background" briefing. Thus I promised him I would never write about it as long as he was alive, but now that he is dead [and sorely missed], there is no remaining reason for me to keep silent about his disclosures.)
Hence given how the old, clandestine poll results inadvertently predict the new poll's results, I would judge Seattle's dramatic change of heart toward homeless people to be nothing more than a 21st Century version of the "we-don'-wanna-be-another-Jew-York/yeah-we're-closet-Nazis-deal-with-it/fuck-you" exclamation like the ones of 1968 and 1970, albeit without the never-more-than-whispered "Zieg Heil" asserted quite so loudly.
See also: "...when it comes to race, the Puget Sound region, considered the most liberal part of the state, is really no different than conservative Eastern Washington."
And this, from the ever-more-outspokenly fascistic Conservative blabbermouth John Carlson, who said, "Until laws against illegal camping, illegal RVs, being drunk or high in public, using sidewalks and other people’s property to defecate, littering, possessing stolen property, using drugs, trespassing, etc., are enforced, the problem will grow. How do we know? Because it’s been happening pretty much everywhere in this city, which explains the widespread anger...Thanks to the referendum organized against the head tax, a citywide coalition now exists to organize, fund and staff a reform slate of new candidates to challenge all seven of the incumbent council members running in next year’s election. As the head tax fight well illustrates, a showdown over the values that will guide this city is long overdue."
Exactly as derTrumpenführer intended...
*****
JesuNazi Jury Pool Forces Water Defenders into Plea Bargains
"Michael 'Little Feather' Giron, a member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, was sentenced to thirty-six months in federal prison this week. He is the first person to be sentenced to serious prison time for his role in the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline..many of the defendants facing charges in relation to the events at Standing Rock take plea deals because a trial will mean facing a hostile jury pool. A defense-commissioned study last year by the National Jury Project found the a whopping 77 percent of potential jurors in Morton County and 85 percent in Burleigh County had already decided that the Standing Rock defendants were guilty. A motion for a change a venue for the defendants was denied. You won’t see this story on the mainstream media."
*****
Cops Ignore Occupancy Permit, Evict Resurrection City II
"U.S. Park Police and Metropolitan Police Department officers forced a protest encampment at Dupont Circle to disband Monday evening. The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign set up the camp, which they called Resurrection City II, on Saturday to bring attention to worsening conditions experienced by poor people and the homeless. They had obtained a permit from the National Park Service to be in the park until Wednesday."
Comment: obviously, the Trump/Pence Regime will not tolerate peaceful humanitarian protests of any sort -- something we already knew, thank you, long before the Poor People's Campaign proved it again.
*****
Reflections on Two Contrasting Summit Meetings
"The outrage over Trump’s bad behavior was magnified when he opined that Russia should be invited back to the group to form the G8 once again. There were howls of protest and shrieks about the evil Russians and their influence on Trump but the consternation was all for naught...Vladimir Putin was on the other side of the world in Qingdao, China where the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was also meeting. While clueless Americans fumed and fussed about Putin, president Xi Jin Ping officially declared him a best friend, literally. He awarded Putin the first ever Friendship Medal and called him 'my best, most intimate friend.'"
*****
Anti-Imperial Implications of the Korean Negotiations
“If the leader of North Korea...is now just another negotiating partner, and U.S. troop withdrawal from the South is a principled goal, then...the rationale for U.S. troops and bases virtually everywhere in the world collapses -- as is well understood by U.S. imperial strategists, who are in deep distress...So are the Democrats. Since Trump won the GOP nomination, they have become overt partisans of the War Party. Pelosi and her House minions have long voted to fund Republican and Democratic wars, while pretending to be peaceniks. Trump’s capture of the GOP presidential nomination drew them out of the closet."
See also: "There should be no illusions about U.S. intentions. If U.S. policymakers were really concerned with putting a brake on the North Korean nuclear-weapons program, they...would have created the necessary security conditions to convince the North Koreans that a nuclear deterrence to the United States was unnecessary...Being able to point to North Korea as a threat to regional security has provided the justifications for U.S. power projection in the region and the ever-expanding U.S. military budget.With the growing power of China over the last few decades, the threat of North Korea allowed the United States to continue a physical presence right at the underbelly of China."
And this: "Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un concluded the day of talks by signing an agreement in which Kim promises to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons. Trump called the agreement 'very comprehensive' in a press conference following the signing ceremony, but the text of the document contains no mention of concrete steps the North Korean regime would take to fulfill that pledge."
Plus this: "There you have it. Trump just publicly admitted that he doesn’t expect this to work out. Then he admitted that once the deal’s failure is evident to everyone involved, he’ll just make up a reason for why it failed and blame somebody else." (With thanks to TigerLille1 for the link.)
*****
Irish Feminists Now Target "Woman-in-the-Home" Law
"Following their success with the abortion referendum, Irish feminists are preparing for their next fight against a clause in the constitution which states that a woman’s place is in the home...it states that Ireland 'recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The state shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.'
Comment: may the determination of Irish feminists help sustain the determination of U.S. feminists, who with the Trump/Pence Regime's control of the federal government and encouragement of police brutality are under attack as never before.
*****
Planned Parenthood Unionization Fight Reveals the Subtleties of Class Warfare
"A fight in Colorado over Planned Parenthood unionization has some wondering why the reproductive health-care champion would stand in the way."
*****
Petition: Against the Imprisonment of Children to Torment Immigrants
"Immigration agents are taking children as young as 12 months from their mothers. They are ambushing courthouses to abduct, then deport, immigrant women who are looking for protection from abusive spouses. They have effectively scared immigrant women all over the country from reporting rape and domestic violence to local police. And as of yesterday, courts are now under orders to deny asylum to women who survived and are fleeing domestic abuse and gang violence. This is a national crisis--and we need both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to act. There are many ways members of Congress can step in to stop these human rights abuses..."
*****
Last Words: from Our Suppressed Labor History, the Battle of Blair Mountain
"When West Virginia teachers organized their nine-day strike, one thing that many workers living in this 'right-to-work' state made clear was that their struggle was part of a long tradition...Teachers wore red bandannas, bringing with them a fight that went back to 1921 and the miners' struggle, called the Battle of Blair Mountain, one of largest and bloodiest labor battles in U.S. history. For five days in August 1921 in Logan County, thousands of mine workers fought a pitched battle with Logan County sheriff's deputies who were trying to block their march to organize the mines in the area. Private planes were used to drop bombs on the miners' forces, and state and federal troops were sent in to try to quash the rebellion."
LB/16 June 2018
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