Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

(Smoke from Embers in the Burn-Barrel of My Late Career)

A WORDS-AND-PICTURES JOURNALIST since 1956 -- variously a stringer; newspaper staff-member; city editor; news editor; picture editor; editor-in-chief; freelancer; unpaid volunteer editor-in-chief; blogger; etc. -- I have witnessed the initial success and the eventual  failure of every humanitarian movement that has arisen in this nation since the New Deal began our tragically short-lived socioeconomic restoration eight years before I was born.

And having seen what I have seen, I cannot but acknowledge what to many is an unpalatable -- literally unspeakable -- truth: that the USian Left is -- sadly -- at least as prone to vindictive, malicious, ultimately self-destructive censorship as is the USian Right.

It's an old and troublesome story.

The U.S. Right, especially its now-dominant Christian faction,  has always demanded censorship: note how the teaching of evolution remains under attack even today, with the advent of Trump/Pence theocracy further encouraging those who would ban it as heretical.  No surprise here, not now nor any other time.   

But my first encounter with censorship by the Left was indeed surprising. It was quite nastily imposed by two (white/bourgeois) representatives of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)  in the aftermath of the 1963 civil-rights atrocity and international incident described here.

A sheriff's deputy had attacked and arrested a Latin American diplomat, a person (theoretically) protected by diplomatic immunity -- the racist language accompanying his victimization therefore a vital illustration of the hatefulness that underlay the entire episode. But the deputy's self-damning words -- a snarl my mind's ear still hears plainly -- were suppressed by the two CORE activists.

Just after the massed raiding party of city police and sheriff's deputies burst without warrant or justification into a quiet gathering at a family residence (see story linked above),   the diplomat -- one of many invited guests -- attempted to intervene. He approached an older deputy who seemed to have a bit more authority than his fellow officers.

I witnessed the entire encounter. It was clear the diplomat's intent was to use his immunity as a platform from which to help protect us from false arrest.  But as a person of color in the United States of America on 2 June 1963,  he was granted neither the recognition to which he was entitled as a diplomat nor any other sort of authority. In fact he had no rights at all. 

And because we were a racially mixed group, neither did we.

"I am Milton Vargas," the diplomat said, withdrawing a black leather folder containing his credentials from the left-hand inside pocket of his dark pinstripe suit. "I am Panamanian Viceconsul. I am..."

The deputy's response was to smash Vargas with his truncheon. The impact -- which hurled the diplomat's credentials to the floor -- was so loud I initially feared the man's right arm had been broken. (It was not, though it was indeed severely bruised.)  

And it was the deputy's sneering command -- "shut your mouth, you goddamn Mexican nigger" -- that told us exactly why our mixed-race gathering was being raided and why we would all soon be in jail.    

These and several other telling details, including a paragraph describing how the raiders awoke and terrorized the host-couple's three-year-old daughter were -- at the CORE representatives' relentless insistence -- excised from my original 1963 story. 

Since then -- because like most of us I have learned that allegedly "supportive" censorship that suppresses vital details ostensibly in the name of "credibility" is often an identifying characteristic of secret-police infiltration operations --  I have occasionally wondered for whom the two CORE men might  actually have been working.

Given the white Christian violence that (again) characterizes the United States, given too how the elitist bigotry  of many bourgeois whites  often excluded sympathetic lower-income whites from the Civil Rights Movement, the censorship by CORE had at least two obvious origins: fear and class hatred.

The two white CORE members claimed they feared the suppressed details,  had they been published, would have somehow damaged the Civil Rights Movement's credibility, a claim that under scrutiny proves no less bogus than R. Milhous Nixon's "I am not a crook." 

Ask yourself:  did the uber-sensational disclosure of the Mai Lai massacre in any way damage Anti-Vietnam-War Movement's credibility?    

However the two men seemed mostly frightened by the possibility my more everyday-vernacular newsroom English might even temporarily surpass the stilted, emotionless, ultimately off-putting language of academia that was the only medium they regarded as  "safe" for movement communications: language deliberately kept abstruse to powerfully discourage proletarian readership.    

More to the point, each of these men -- both possessed of the smug self-righteousness that identifies the financially comfortable Caucasian elite -- also made it painfully clear they regarded me, at the time a 23-year-old military veteran with no degree, as naught but white trash, to be tolerated only because my journalistic skills were momentarily useful and then -- never mind we were all presumably on the same side -- to be cast off and abandoned as soon as possible.  

The irony of censorship is that its tyrannical imposition at any point on the political spectrum,  Left, Center or Right, invariably contributes to the downfall of the censor, whether it be another in-our-faces Hitler or a deliberately camouflaged Neoliberal cabal -- a history-proven fact that should always be paramount in the minds of those of us attempting to build the global eco-socialism essential to preserve us from extinction. 

Why? Because history assures us that in the quest for freedom there is no ideological weapon more powerful than truth.       

But in today's United States, it's become axiomatic the federal government exists only to protect the financial aristocracy;  thus it routinely lies, betrays and murders to maintain its power.  That's why this government -- and those who are part of it -- are now among the empire's most despised and distrusted individuals and institutions.

Cemented in place by 53 years of "bipartisan" betrayal,  fostered also by the savage anti-intellectualism and equally savage self-centeredness imposed by decades of Ayn Rand moral imbecility and the ultimate travesty of education-for-ignorance,  the result seems profoundly self-defeating -- until we realize it is clearly intended, with diabolical perceptiveness, to forever suppress the trust-in-ourselves and trust-in-governance essential to the advent of socialism.

Moreover it demonstrates both the dire efficiency and terminal consequences of the Empire's unprecedented mastery of the Nazi/Neoliberal skill at psychological warfare.   

Thus USian domestic policy is of a kind with its imperial foreign policy: in either instance it's the deliberate metastasis of maximum distrust as the source of the permanent chaos essential for governance by division and subjugation -- for what better enables despotism than  divisiveness so enduring it thrusts solidarity forever beyond reach?   

Below then are three more exceptionally damning examples of this self-destructive trend that -- as our species continues its fragmentation into two mutually hateful subspecies¹ and a paralyzing miasma of irremediably antagonistic factions  -- is but another proof we are already perilously deep into the apocalypse.  

*****

THE FIRST OF these examples is by far the most maliciously self-serving and publicly injurious episode of  Leftist-imposed censorship I have yet encountered, which is why it heads this list of road-apples despite the fact it is from the 1970s.

It is also one of those now-it-can-be-told stories. That's because at the time my (decidedly non-Leftist) editors would not allow me to expose either the censorship nor its (admitted) motive; the bosses feared libel suits -- never mind the facts revealed below were substantiated in grisly detail by victim reports and even (with profound reluctance) admitted by one of the self-appointed censors. 

What brought this particular incident to vivid memory -- I had not given it more than an increasingly occasional, ever-more-soft-focused thought for at least three decades -- was a Reader Supported News essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar entitled "Who Decides Who's Allowed to Say the N-Word?"

From Mr. Abdul-Jabbar's text:

Walter Mosley’s recent New York Times article, “Why I Quit the Writer’s Room,” detailing his contentious interaction with the HR department of a major entertainment studio that led to his quitting should be required reading for every American because it addresses what constitutes free speech in the workplace, in schools and in the arts. To summarize, Mosley was telling a personal anecdote in the writers room of CBS’ Star Trek: Discovery: “I just told a story about a cop who explained to me, on the streets of Los Angeles, that he stopped all n---ers in paddy neighborhoods and all paddies in n--er neighborhoods, because they were usually up to no good.” An unidentified writer in the room complained to human resources about his use of the n-word and HR admonished Mosley not to say the word again. He could write it in a script, they explained, but not say it aloud. Mosley’s response was to quit the show. 
.....

HR’s response is predictable because their language policy, like so many other rules in the workplace and schools, is based on the one-size-fits-all condom of policies: zero tolerance. “Zero tolerance” sounds like a strict ethical stance, but in reality it’s a lazy position created so institutions can appear culturally sensitive while really just trying to legally cover their asses. However, zero tolerance in anything related to free speech is antithetical to democracy...

Unfortunately the (entirely reasonable) 1500-character limitation on RSN comment-thread posts did not allow me the space to point out that Mr. Abdul-Jabbar's otherwise-flawless account of this dismal-but-typical incident overlooked the obvious, obviously Leftist, obviously "more-politically-correct-than-thou" bias of the cravenly anonymous snitch who sicced the HR brain police on Mr. Mosley -- a writer with whom I was not familiar but whom I now salute for his notably rare courageousness.

Such courage was also a number of times mine -- yet I shall go to my grave lamenting the many more occasions it should have been but was not. 

As I wrote in response to Mr. Abdul-Jabbar's report:

In (most distasteful) truth, during the staff-member-and-stringer portion of my journalism career (1956-1959 and 1962-1986), I encountered as much maliciously injurious censorship from the Left as from the Right.

The worst example of all, especially in terms of collective harm, was a radical feminist rape-relief official who for at least five years suppressed the story of a Christian hospital that refused to treat rape victims and routinely ousted them – often still bruised and bleeding – from its emergency rooms.

Why did she suppress the story?

For the decidedly Ayn-Randish reason she and her colleagues would get sole credit -- and a substantial boost in contributions -- for using their "womanpower" to force the hospital to change its bigoted wounding of victims.

The result of the women's stance -- go it alone/don't let any man even get close to the story -- was five years of failure, while (of course) the hospital continued victimizing rape victims.

(Disclosure: the hospital was finally compelled to change its policy, but the necessary force was a tip from a notably reliable police source and my own investigative reporting. The story was further weaponized by top-of-Page-One placement. In those days -- long before the Trump/Pence Regime would complete the Nazification of the nation -- the hospital had no choice but to publicly abandon its misogynistic Christian hatefulness.)

I will reveal neither the locale wherein this incident occurred nor any other identifying details lest sleeping grief be re-awakened; many of its victims yet remain among the living.  I will however add five details the aforementioned space limitation forced me to omit:

One, that the Christian hospital's godly rationale for its abusive treatment of rape victims was biblical, a disclosure  necessarily followed by my apology that at this distance I can no longer remember the quote or even from which testament -- Old or New -- it might have been taken. 

Two, that while my initial (regional) police source was a man, the (regional) unit commander whose revelations of substantial additional data solidified, expanded and completed my story was a woman.

Third, that because of my story the director of the anti-rape organization's program came within one board-member-vote of being fired. 

Fourth, that it was the director's inability to suppress my story -- NOT her organization's half-decade of purposefully self-serving evasions and deceptions -- which provoked the ire of her board members.    

And fifth, that immediately after I confronted the hospital officials at the beginning of my investigation's final phase, the local police (not the regional cops who tipped me to the story), suddenly began following me every time I visited or even drove through the town the hospital claimed to serve -- which to me suggests an early form of the same terrifying link between the white Christian religious authorities and ChristoNazi government officials that today has become one of the more glaring proofs of our ongoing reduction to theocratic dictatorship.  

Meanwhile the Christian malevolence so revealed earns new, double, one-nation-under-Trump relevance in the regime's legalization and encouragement of just such bible-based savagery.   

*****

THE SECOND EXAMPLE of malicious censorship by Leftists  -- an episode in which the human damage  cannot be assessed -- was in response to a freelance magazine-length investigative piece I completed in January 1995.

Its intent² was to counter or at least ameliorate the runaway, proto-genocidal demonization of welfare recipients that began in 1994 when the Clintons and all the other Ayn-Rand fascists at the core of the Democratic (sic) Party joined hands with the closet Nazis of the Republican Party.

Entitled "The Most Outrageous Welfare Fraud of All," the report and its extensive bibliography -- a copy of which I have preserved -- ran to 52 double-spaced typewritten pages.

Here are its opening paragraphs:

U.S. Commerce Department data reveals that welfare bureaucrats hog every penny of the past two decade's $131 billion social-service cost-increase -- even as they miser out an ever-shrinking pittance to the nation's poor.

By any reasonable standard of judgement, the U.S. welfare system is a scandalous failure -- a sullenly unresponsive, byzantine monstrosity of widespread ineptitude and colossal waste.  But U.S. Department of Commerce documents reveal that the resultant public outrage, though wholly justified, has been tragically misdirected. The real "welfare queens" -- those who use welfare to defraud taxpayers -- occupy welfare-bureacy executive suits rather than the roachy tenements or ratty hovels typical of the long-term poor. 

Consider the following: From 1970 through 1990 inclusive, welfare administrative costs increased by a staggering 5,390 percent -- that's five thousand, three hundred and ninety, not a typographical error. Based on the federal poverty level, inflation during this period amounted to 208 percent. Yet during this same period, stipends and services provided to welfare recipients increased only 149 percent.

Taken together, these figures show that all of the real-dollar increase in U.S. welfare expenditures during the past two decades has gone into the pockets of the welfare bureaucracy.

As I knew from my brief tenure in 1971 as the press officer for a statewide war-on-poverty program, the chief engineers of this combination of welfare fraud and slow-motion genocide were a coterie of  vindictively aristocratic white radical feminists -- many of them Ivy Leaguers -- whose hate-all-males "consciousness-raising" efforts had been adamantly, loudly (and occasionally violently) rejected by the women of the defiantly biracial National Welfare Rights Organization.

In retaliation, these feminists  had publicly denounced all adult female welfare recipients as "hopelessly reactionary," had simultaneously branded all adult male welfare recipients as "parasites," and had demanded the immediate cessation of all stipends and services to all males beyond the age of 18, disabled veterans included. 

At the time these demands were made public -- c. 1970-1972 -- they were of course (seemingly) rejected, often vehemently  -- though now in Trumpworld they arise to relevance again as another eerie example of the unintentional prophecies of moral imbecility to be found in events that occurred even during the earliest most clandestine years of Neoliberal conquest. 

After their denunciation of welfare recipients and lower-income people in general,  these financially pampered vectors of an often exclusively white-bourgeois movement  proclaimed their intent to "infiltrate the welfare bureaucracy" and "feminize welfare from within."

And in those seemingly halcyon days, with the "love-and-peace" ethos of the 1960s  very much alive, only a handful of Marxists and libertarians dared criticize  the hateful contempt with which white bourgeois feminists  view us, the Working Class, especially its impoverished people -- most particularly those of  color.

Though now I understand why the bipartisan advent of Neoliberalism and its associated identity politics compelled the Democratic (sic) Party to secretly unite with the Republicans despite the apparent conflict between the latter's blatant misogyny and racism versus the former's alleged principles -- those same principles all since revealed (especially during Barack the Betrayer's two terms) as 21st Century variants on Josef Goebbels' original Big Lies. 

Nevertheless it was more than anything else the common socioeconomic identity shared by those who censored my 1960s civil rights story and those whose malicious censorship was (insufficiently)  exposed by my hospital story a decade later that brought to mind the steadfast rejection-slipped refusal by Leftist editors in 1995 to even consider publishing what a decade earlier probably would have been aired by any of the better news outlets as a world-class exposé.

Which in turn -- after I read a present-day Crosscut report entitled "For Some Disabled Seattleites, Federal Assistance Means a Return to Homelessness" -- prompted me to post the following rejoinder in a brief dialogue with a reader who has obviously never been a victim of the  career-mandated, smile-faced Ayn Rand viciousness that characterizes the welfare bureaucracy's present-day gatekeepers: 

Quoth the hostile reader: Pretty sure social workers are not in it for the money.

Said I in response: Right. That's why, between 1970 and 1990, the welfare bureaucrats nationwide raised administrative costs by 5,390 percent (including by radical multiplication of jobs and salaries) even as they slashed stipends and services to the poor by at least 60 percent.

And that 5,390 percent -- say again, five three niner zero -- is not a typo.

("Nationwide" = federal government and all state bureaucracies combined.)

Today the welfare establishment -- reduced to little more than a jobs-program for bureaucrats -- helps few of us escape poverty and in fact, by its malicious cutbacks and exclusions, deliberately thrusts most of us far deeper into mind-bending, death-dealing wretchedness.

Such are the shrunken social services that define the United States following its predator-sneaky transition to Neoliberal (i.e., ChristoNazi) dictatorship that began with the assassins' coup of 22 November 1963 and reached the onset of fruition in the Trump/Pence Regime's Electoral College coup on 8 November 2016.  

*****

MY THIRD AND  and last example of censorship on the Left -- though in this instance not entirely by the Left -- is a perplexing three-pronged episode of textual death and resurrection imposed by Discus censors attempting to eliminate my most important comment-thread posts on the website Popular Resistance earlier this month, last weekend and this week.

Hence in fairness to PR and its founding stalwarts Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers -- each long-time activists for whom I have substantial respect -- I'll open this section not with examples of my censored comments but with Mr. Zeese's  disclaimer about what Discus was doing:  

My heartfelt thanks to  Mr. Zeese. With his response thus duly reported, I must nevertheless point out that hiring Discus to manage Popular Resistance comment threads is itself an act of censorship -- particularly now that the government is flaunting its secret-police alliances with all the Internet's masters.

Also I must note here that despite Mr. Zeese's claim the censored comments are "very few," my own experience with Discus censorship is quite different:  any time I directly challenge one of the monstrous Big Lies included in USia's so-called "everyday wisdom," my post is more likely to be disappeared than not.

Note too how other Leftist websites -- among them Truthout, Truthdig and Common Dreams -- repeatedly drop me from their e-mail rosters, an intermittent embargo that began in early 2016, when I denounced Hillary as a fanatical but carefully closeted Goldwater Girl  and warned she would destroy us all with her H-bomb-reinforced belief she could be the first-ever conqueror of Russia.³

Then for a while the subscriber-deletion brand of censorship seemed to have been abandoned, at least as it had been employed against me.  But it resumed again this year after I began writing that our overlords' ongoing refusal to act against climate change proves beyond argument they are weaponizing it to impose their definitively Nazified New World Order.

They make no secret of the fact they want our global population shrunken by 90 or 95 percent.

This means ourselves, we the people,  reduced to naught but slavery or serfdom. It also means our masters eternally enthroned as obscenely omnipotent Caligulas, their sadistic Ayn Rand moral imbecility forever enabled by the same impossible-to-defeat technology of surveillance and predatory profit  that has already damned most of us to inescapable wretchedness.

As I have said repeatedly, to view  our only possible future as 99 Percenters -- unless by some miracle we manage to rescue ourselves by revolution -- we need merely visit the nearest encampment of homeless people. 

Hence my effort -- suppressed by Discus, restored by Mr. Zeese -- to resolve a genteel disagreement over the meaning of "despair," an incident on the comment thread of ‘The Moron Fascists’: ICE Fails To Properly Redact Document Proposing ‘Hyper-Realistic’ Urban Warfare Training Facility:  

I suspect ours is but a semantic quibble, Jon; despair is not a synonym for surrender.

Among the more telling examples of despair leading to decisive action is the Red Army's defense of Fortress Brest in 1941. Every fighter -- woman, man, child -- knew they were doomed. Yet they fought to the death; their bravery first bewildered and ultimately terrified the Germans. That same despair-become-determination enabled the Red Army to defeat what was then the mightiest offensive war machine on the planet.

What happened amidst the Greasy Grass on 25-26 June 1876 under the leadership of Tȟašúŋke Witkó is another such example.

Quoth Webster: "hopelessness; a hopeless state; a lack of hope or expectation." (Note that nothing here says such a state is permanent. Note also this from dictionary.com: "Despair suggests total loss of hope, which may be passive or may drive one to furious efforts, even if at random: in the depths of despair; courage born of despair.")

Yes, I believe our species' war for survival is lost. I believe it was lost when a plague of talking snakes, fiery wheels, loquacious burning bushes and other such UFO-like phenomena terrified our forebears into imposing patriarchy -- the smallpox-infested blankets of our own self-destruction.

All that has happened in the approximately six millennia since then is the new Ruling Class, like the Fifth Column of some interstellar invasion, has perfected its technologies of both genocide and ecocide -- the former to exterminate our species, the latter to transform our Mother Earth back into a bug planet.

Whomever our masters are -- wherever they might be from, whatever their true clandestine purpose -- their moral imbecility marks them as no longer human, just as their technological and psychological omnipotence tells us that only a genuine miracle will enable us to defeat them.

But, as at Fortress Brest, that does NOT grant us leave to surrender.

Not ever.

The next such episode -- my post deleted seconds after it appeared, restored a couple of days later, then deleted again when I attempted to insert a missing apostrophe⁴  -- was on the thread of a genuine scoop-the-world Popular Resistance report entitled This Is Not The Sixth Extinction. It’s The First Extermination Event. Here's the complete text, exactly as posted, censored, restored, finally permanently suppressed by Discus but defiantly resurrected from my personal files:

Thank you, Ms. Flowers and Mr. Zeese, for publishing this essay. It is the best (i.e., most thought-provokingly true) such work I have seen anywhere.

Nevertheless I must quibble with one of Mr. McBrien's points. He wrote:

"Perhaps the fires will consume the last vestiges of the fantasy of an ossified international liberal order capable of stopping this planetary crisis."

Thus Mr. McBrien repeats the most common "progressive" error of under-estimating the absolute Evil that defines our (all-powerful) overlords.

In bitter truth, no power that has thermonuclear weaponry capable of destroying all planetary life can properly be defined as "ossified."

Thus too our masters' feigned powerlessness is yet another of the Big Lies by which we are now tyrannized.

What is actually happening -- and it is obvious to anyone who knows enough about history and the overwhelming human penchant for reducing all politics to despotism -- is our masters are merely applying their Shock Doctrine to the (additional) weaponization of what Mr. McBrien so correctly labels "the First Extermination Event."

Its purpose is of course reduction of the human population by at least 90 percent, and the reduction of society to but two classes, masters and slaves -- i.e., them and us.

(See also Chris Hedges' razor-edged essay at https://popularresistance.org/our-invisible-government/ )

Again it seems any mention of Shock Doctrine weaponization as the reason behind the One Percent's refusal to act against what should be forthrightly labeled "terminal climate change" violates an increasingly obvious Internet taboo. 

Lastly there is the matter of my comment on  Nonviolence Denial Is As Dangerous As Climate Denial, the essay itself published by PR on 5 September: 

This too was suppressed by Discus when I attempted to correct a typing error and later -- again my thanks -- restored by Mr. Zeese. 

*****

SOMETHING TO PONDER: You're on a picket line, whether against our relentlessly shitty working conditions or against the ChristoNazis who attack women entering any medical facility that provides abortions. Which of these -- this or this -- would you rather have as psychological reinforcement when our enemies attack?

*****  

STUFF I THOUGHT relevant but couldn't fit anywhere else, so I disguised it as footnotes:

¹I can no longer doubt our species has been cleft in eternally hateful twain: our own subspecies,  we the people, today's üntermenschen,  all of us 99 Percenters versus the predators of the One Percent, the übermenschen, our present-day masters. Nor can I doubt the absolute Evil of boundlessly predatory moral imbecility that increasingly defines these tyrants, their henchmen and their consorts is also what defines them as a new, entirely nonhuman subspecies that somehow devolved from human origins. Quite literally the fact they have chosen an inhuman path proves they have become other-than-human.  

²Six months before quitting smoking in what would be my final (and finally successful) attempt to wean myself from the deadly dependency of nicotine addiction, I also knew this piece would be my last-ever effort at real investigative reporting. As most readers know, the fact my verbal skills test in the topmost one-tenth of our nation's uppermost one percent is almost completely nullified by the fact I am severely dyslexic. Hence I had long been aware that without the temporary amelioration provided by nicotine, I would lose forever my (formerly) characteristic speed and skill at journalistic writing. Indeed I had to teach myself again what  I had first taught myself at ages 14 to 16. Nor was it easy:  the re-learning process took me somewhat more than five years, from 23 September 1995 until sometime in 2000 or 2001. Now after 24 years  as a non-smoker it still takes me at least three hours to write what as a smoker took me less than a third of that time. Thus it remains obvious I will never again even remotely approach the multi-faceted alacrity that was mine  as an investigative reporter at the height of my daily newspaper career in 1970. When I wasn't out chasing a story, I sometimes filled in as an editor on the telegraph desk,  but my non-investigative favorite was working rewrite, completing stories from reporters in the field, at which I soon proved myself to be the best high-speed, last-minute, breaking-news-guy in The Jersey Journal's nine-edition-per-day newsroom.  

³I voted for Jill Stein, the only choice possible were I to avoid the Republican karma of domestic holocaust or the Democratic (sic) karma of World War III.

⁴Apropos my (way too many) typing errors, not only am I dyslexic; I also have difficulty writing on a computer because after cataract surgery I have no close-up vision save through prescription bifocals or +3 power reading glasses. But what I need to clearly view both keyboard and monitor are tri-focals, which of course Medicare denies us all, deeming such accessories as a luxury to which only the aristocrats are entitled, thus complying with the ever-more-reinforced USian policy of healthcare as a privilege  of wealth. Or perhaps we should say "healthcare as wealthcare."

*****

THIS MONTH'S RECOMMENDED READING: here are links to nine not-necessarily easy pieces, with my hope you'll pay them more than passing attention:   

Exposing Wage Theft Without Fear Is Possible And Necessary: For more than five weeks now, coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky have been camped out on railroad tracks, blocking a train loaded with coal, to demand that their bankrupt employer pay them their owed wages. Their story highlights the rampant nature of wage theft and the need to address it, along with retaliation, or the fear of retaliation, that keep millions of other workers silent.

Air Pollution Reaches the Placenta During Pregnancy, New Study Finds: Air pollution particles that a pregnant woman inhales have the potential to travel through the lungs and breach the fetal side of the placenta, indicating that unborn babies are exposed to black carbon from motor vehicles and fuel burning, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications.  

Opioid Crackdown Forces Pain Patients to Taper Off Drugs They Say They Need: Chronic pain patients form a vast constituency in America, and millions of them take opioids for relief. Changes in medical guidance covering opioids have left many of them frustrated, confused and sometimes howling mad. They feel demonized and yanked around. Dystopic Observation (DO): such suffering is but another manifestation of the sadism implicit in Christian medicine.

Fascism, White Nationalism, The Nazis And America :  I was born in 1942 but I remember the war. It made a deep impression on me. When I was two years old, I shocked my mother by being so disturbed at the radio news I was hearing about the Nazis that I stormed into their bedroom and announced angrily that if anyone tried to destroy my world, I will destroy them. My Jewish mother was terrified. This was her son?

FOCUS | Edward Snowden: 'If I Happen to Fall out of a Window, You Can Be Sure I Was Pushed': The most unflattering thing is to realize just how naïve and credulous I was and how that could make me into a tool of systems that would use my skills for an act of global harm. The class of which I am a part of, the global technological community, was for the longest time apolitical. We have this history of thinking: "We're going to make the world better."  DO: this is an especially vivid example of a deceptive head. What it should say is "Snowden Explains Himself: New Disclosures on the Stunning Magnitude of Total Surveillance." 

Unipolar Governance of the Multipolar World: The emergence in recent years of the economic and military powers in countries like China, Russia and India has given rise to theories and hopes of a multipolar world that could temper the heavy-handed unilateral/unipolar policies of the United States on a global level. Such hopes are further buoyed by the fact that these rising poles of economic development have instituted a number of regional international organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the China-sponsored Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and the Eurasian Economic Union that incorporates Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia...however...

Student Loan Crisis Helped Army Leaders Exceed Recruiting Goals This Year: “One of the national crises right now is student loans, so $31,000 is [about] the average,” Muth said. “You can get out [of the Army] after four years, 100 percent paid for state college anywhere in the United States." DO: yup, folks, that's precisely what we have, brought to us by Democrats and Republicans in tandem: the Neoliberal version of the military draft, exemption from which is by wealth alone.

Drop The Term “Austerity” – It’s The Race To The Bottom: Let’s get straight to the point. The striking General Motors workers are locked in an epochal struggle against the global corporate drive to reduce the entirety of the world’s working class to a state of abject desperation, leaving the great mass of people -- from Detroit to Bangladesh -- with no options but to accept whatever wages and conditions of labor the bosses offer. This is the essential, global imperative of today’s late stage capitalism, and the tie that binds the money-men that control both U.S. governing parties, their counterparts in Europe, and billionaires the world over. 

Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites: Friday’s climate strike by students across the globe will have no more impact than the mass mobilizations by women following the election of Donald Trump or the hundreds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the Iraq War. This does not mean these protests should not have taken place. They should have. But such demonstrations need to be grounded in the bitter reality that in the corridors of power we do not count. If we lived in a democracy, which we do not, our aspirations, rights and demands, especially the demand that we confront the climate emergency, would have an impact. We would be able to vote representatives into power in government to carry out change. We would be able to demand environmental justice from the courts. We would be able to divert resources to the elimination of carbon emissions.

*****

Despite that which encroaches, may we all find respite in the mindfulness of autumn.

LB/20-28 September 2019

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