Humanitarianism

Five Links That Explain Why We Are All Doomed to Extinction

(Sorry; with Permanently ChristoNazified SCOTUS Defiantly Resurrecting the Racism and Misogyny of the Confederacy and the German Third Reich, Moron Nation's Skyrocketing Horrors Force My Reversion to Political Reporting.)

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FEEL AGAIN THEIR NOW-TRIUMPHANT HATE -- Thanks to the "Democratic" (sic) Party's post-22-November-1963 function as the permanently Christo-Nazified Republican Party's treasonous Fifth Column,  we'll be subjugated by the GOP's lifetime Supreme Court appointments until we the people of the 99 Percent are either dead or eternally enslaved and the remnants of our nation either completes our Masters' ever-more-obviously intended destruction of the world or by some miracle is added to the mass grave of failed states and collapsed empires before its ecogenocidal agenda is complete. Meanwhile these two were among the now-victorious fanatics who in 2017 picketed Tacoma Planned Parenthood to demand the sexual re-enslavement of women. (Photo by Loren Bliss ©2022)

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HERE ARE THE five links of dreadfulness, their concluding item added -- as if in terminal finality --  by the death-sentence the ChristoNazi SCOTUS imposed on our species and our Mother Earth, thereby fulfilling the ecogenocidal mandate at the core of all Abrahamic theology:

As Trump looks on, Illinois Republican hails overturn of Roe as “victory for white life” 
(Brace yourself for an ever-expanding universe of racist horrors.)    

Indictments in Flint Water Crisis Are Invalid, Michigan Supreme Court Finds
(Thus Flint's Masters are granted the same permanent immunity that protected the original Bankers' Plot conspirators -- those who sought to make the United States a  Nazi German protectorate -- freeing each cabal of perpe-traitors  to propagate  their male-white-supremacist malignancies to whatever venomous extent they choose.) 

Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants fuel yet another global COVID-19 surge
(Obviously, not even another umpteen-million deaths will sate our Masters' ecogenocidal cravings.)

With the end of Roe, the US edges ever closer to civil war 
(To survive the inevitable NeoConfederate onslaught -- neutron bombs, tactical nukes and burgeoning slave plantations included --  the nine so-called "bluest" states, those that seem most committed to the doomed struggle to preserve a few remnants of  New-Deal social democracy, will either have to unite with Canada to gain the protection of the militarily potent remnants of the  British Empire, or -- more likely -- submit to unconditional-surrender annexation by whatever few allegedly anti-nazi world powers might remain.)  

US Supreme Court Drops Carbon Bomb on the Planet
(Relentlessly pursuing the agenda they claim is commanded by the ecogenocidal sadist they've  anointed as their "one true god,"  our Masters have thus condemned us all -- the human 99 Percent and most other forms of earthly life -- to death by deliberately inflicted extinction, simultaneously reversing evolution by guaranteeing the reduction of our Mother Earth back to the bug planet she was some 480 million years ago.) 

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THE ECOGENOCIDE EXEMPLIFIED by the  above is no longer "plausibly deniable"; in fact it has become so plausibly undeniable, so overwhelmingly obvious, we are at last awakening to the self-evident truth our Masters1 -- whomever (or whatever) they might be -- have commanded their theological, cultural and political puppets to maximize all barriers to human survival.

Why? Because our Masters are convinced -- most likely by the results of illegal psychological experiments on prisoners --  that confinement in an environment of predatory deadliness is a sure way  to eliminate capitalism's  greatest enemy: our species' capacity for humanitarian empathy.

We’ve also begun to suspect that’s probably why our Masters’ propagandists o-so-cleverly camouflaged their overlords' ecogenocidal intent with the deceptively gentle-sounding euphemism “neoliberalism” -- the ideology that redefines run-amok selfishness as the fuel of  human  progress, thus elevating greed to godliness and imperial conquest to godhood itself.

But -- as we of the 99 Percent can most bitterly attest -- "neoliberalism" turns out to be a nastily deceptive, mostly slow-motion effort to disguise capitalism's inevitable deterioration into  localized forms of nazism.

Nevertheless, a combination of factors -- the U.S. policies of deliberate de-education, conditioned prideful ignorance and ever-intensifying censorship paramount among them -- ensure most of "neoliberalism's" innumerable victims remain unaware the elimination of human empathy and its replacement by self-obsessed morally imbecilic greed are foremost among the ideology’s implicitly defined purposes. Thus, exactly as scripted by our Masters psychological warfare experts,  the blame for its destructiveness  is convincingly shifted onto its victims, which makes "neoliberalism" almost impossible to resist.

But now conditions of everyday life for the 99 Percent have deteriorated to the point not even the most distracting "conspiracy theory" controversies can   obscure the sustained, therefore ever-more-undeniable truth  the sole function of "neoliberalism"   is our Masters’ endless enrichment of themselves   and their favored vassals by the slow-motion robbery and extermination of "surplus workers" (i.e., all the rest of us), followed by permanent enslavement of the non-aristocratic survivors and eventual reduction of the global human population to some 500,000,000 persons. As Jungian psychology implies, an ideology’s true intent is evidenced by its ratio of rescue to ruin; already we have four decades' irrefutable proof the ruin inflicted by "neoliberal" socioeconomic down-pressing far exceeds its rescue potential: in deadly truth it is creating a social-Darwinist world already so harsh its emergent horrors were until quite recently genuinely unimaginable beyond the realms of  fiction.

Back in the ‘60s, somebody coined the slogan “eat the rich,” and in those halcyon days, everybody I knew -- self included -- took it as nothing more than  sarcastic hyperbole, a dramatic exclamation  that underscored the already-evident world hunger crisis, which would make its awareness-goading potential approximately the same  as that of the popular World War II song, “Love Is Gonna Be Rationed.” Neither was ever intended to be taken literally. But now, as if in the gullible bigotry of terrified vengeance, it seems our Masters intend to reduce the entire 99 Percent to such a desperately predatory struggle for individual survival, it would even legitimize  subsistence cannibalism. Such is the quintessence of “neoliberalism” -- the mass-market label of the serial-killer ethos that forever defines the entire global Ruling Class.

Why suppress empathy? Because without empathy there cannot be solidarity. Without solidarity, there cannot be effective resistance to our Masters' tyrannies. And without the capability of such resistance, humanity is doomed.

Having weaponized their unprecedented wealth into the real-world counterpart of the let's-nuke-Sodom-and-Gomorrah omnipotence hitherto attributed  to their ecogenocidal deity, our Masters and their vassals now seem intent on completing the anti-humanitarian apocalypse initiated by their 19th and 20th Century ancestors. The result  is  a multi-generational USian horror story -- one so relentlessly censored, its details are mostly known only by the more courageously research-minded historians, sociologists and investigative journalists.

But most of this lot has no intention of publicizing their damning knowledge.

That's no doubt because they've learned the same bitter lesson I was taught by the arsonist(s) who burned my "Dancer" just as it seemed on the brink of mainstream publication-- that if our Masters are in any way threatened by our work, they will always find some way to destroy it, or at the very least to make certain it is never published, which in all probability means there will never be any truthful recounting of the staircase-logical sequence of carefully choreographed atrocities by white-male-supremacist Christian fanatics that shaped USia2  into the world epicenter of ChristoNazism and the de facto successor to the Third Reich.  

Though at age 82 I have no intention of undertaking such an expose', I nevertheless retain the professional instincts that were mine as a journalist and part-time college instructor, and I’ve vivid memories of the pivotal incidents involved in the destruction of what I, like so many,  used to ignorantly think of as "my country." Professional obligation required I follow all such events closely, a number of  which I also covered firsthand. Thus I could hardly stop myself from contemplating how one might present the fiercely tabooed story of the destruction of what we used to foolishly imagine was "our" nation, documenting it  in a manner both unflinchingly accurate and compelling enough to break through the self-censorship inflicted by USia's deliberately conditioned aversion to the study of history.

Initially I merely sought to confirm my recollections of the relevant atrocities, but as I  substantiated  my memories,  I  soon discovered the accumulation of evidence to be so eerily self-organizing I  began setting it down as a chapter outline -- a rare and welcome occurrence for any writer simply because it is always easier to write a story so dynamically true its emergence on paper seems powered by a relentless logic that confirms its accuracy even as it fuels its   momentum;  also -- perhaps because for me journalism was always a way of life rather than  merely a job -- I find it much easier to report truth than to fabricate disinformation.

Here then is the initial product of my impulsive contemplation: a chapter outline of how I might tell the story, whether as lessons or essays -- an Occam's-Razor-tested contribution I trust could prove at least minimally useful to anyone who dares imagine our Masters might allow them to  report what is actually being done to us:  

Chapter/Lesson One: reiterates how the racism of the Southron slavemasters and their New England financiers begot the so-called American Revolution and now ironically begets the destruction of the nation so founded. 

Chapter/Lesson Two: tracks the emergence of white supremacy as  formalized ideology in both the Ku Klux response to the defeat of the Confederate rebellion and the again-burgeoning popularity of Hitler's core belief, detailed in Mein Kampf  and further envenomed by USian identity politics,  that race war -- not class war -- is the ultimate human struggle.   

Chapter/Lesson Three:  exposes the mental goosestepping of the pro-Hitler/pro-Mussolini aristocrats who perpetrated the 1933-34 Bankers’ Plot against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal social democracy; includes commentary on our subsequent mass seduction by the illusion of humanitarian strength and progress in how the One Percent’s intended nazification of the United States was thwarted by courageous exposure -- never mind the plotters were then granted immunity from prosecution.

Chapter/Lesson Four: documents how the  plutocratic plotters’ undiminished tyrannical intent is again affirmed by their pre-war weaponization of Christian fanaticism and reaffirmed by post-war developments including the purge of anyone branded "prematurely anti-fascist," my late father among them, and the  imposition of the viciously anti-union Taft-Hartley Act. That said, no atrocity reveals our Masters' long-range intent more glaringly than the pornographic eagerness by which government and big business granted legions of Nazi war criminals powerfully influential sanctuary in the United States.

Chapter/Lesson Five: explores several credible hypotheses about the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy,  22 November 1963, which I have long regarded as our nation's date of death3, not the least because the murder of the president  was the first slaying in an 11-year, 13-victim homicide spree that in retrospect was unmistakably intended to clear the way for the final nazification of the nation. (In addition to our dead president, the martyrs in question  – say their names – are  Malcolm X;  Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy; Fred Hampton and Mark Clark; Allison Beth Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder; Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green; and finally Karen Silkwood on 13 November 1974.)

Chapter/Lesson Six: discusses three logical, evidence-supported hypotheses about the murder of our president. Sources include Michele Metta’s book, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation on the Trail of the Assassins of JFK, which suggests the Nazi Otto Skorzeny may have been the so-called Umbrella Man that day in Dallas; the revelations in the late Mae Brussell’s vital documentation of "The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination"; and Abel Cohen’s excellent overview, “Killing Kennedys: Secret Team,” which defines the assassination as (another) expression of the USian Ruling Class’s fanatical yearning for absolute power -- precisely what motivated the Bankers’ Plot.

Chapter/Lesson Seven: evaluates Brussell's relentlessly censored  "Operation Chaos: the CIA’s War Against the Sixties Counter-Culture" and explores the probability our Masters  secretly exterminated dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of additional presumed subversives including several cultural figures, among them the Taliesin-caliber pagan rock-poet Tim Buckley and the singer Janis Joplin

Chapter/Lesson Eight: summarizes the six decades of ever-more-conclusive evidence the “Democratic” (sic) Party’s collaboration in the assassination of the president and the 11-year murder-spree reduced it to its present-day role as nothing more than the Republican Party’s Fifth Column. The primary topic is contextual: the ever-expanding evidence terminal climate change is deliberately sustained ecogenocide; subtopics necessarily  include white male supremacy, imperialism, "welfare reform," the "neoliberal" necessity of eternal war, the 2000 presidential election, 9/11, the Patriot Act, Trump and ChristoNazism.

Chapter/Lesson Nine: describes how now, nearly a half-century after their 11 years of murder, our Masters have grown so bold they make no secret of their transformation of the United States into the de facto successor of the Third Reich -- its final form a global slave plantation rendered inescapable by technology -- never mind their triumph is already destroying the habitable world. 

That's why – if we are to have even a snowball-in-hell’s chance of survival – we must somehow find the courage to acknowledge what our Masters are doing to us. They are deliberately maximizing terminal climate change; they have already completed their pre-planned conversion of social media into a total lifetime surveillance system against which there is no possible defense, thereby making even minimal resistance impossible for as long as electronic technology prevails; and now they are guaranteeing themselves and their descendants permanent retention of power by their near-infinite wealth and its self-perpetuating monopoly of all weaponize-able technologies. Thus even were the necessarily global scale of successful organizing still technologically possible, our Masters' unbreakable monopoly on the methodology of terrorism would guarantee our defeat.

It is one of the greater ironies of history a freedom-loving people are enslaved by the very technology they embraced in the name of liberation. Again in retrospect, I can no longer doubt computers, cell phones and their social-media offspring were all  designed to be our species' first-ever set of willfully self-imposed shackles, even as these total-surveillance devices were pimped as instruments of ultimate self-empowerment. As to what sort of dystopia must necessarily follow betrayal of such terminal magnitude, we need only look to SCOTUS and the  smirking, viciously envious re-imposition of mandatory chastity implicit in its  ChristoNazi re-enslavement of women.  

Here we also witness the terrible fragility of genuinely progressive change: a single hydrogen  bomb dropped on Petrograd in 1917 would have  exterminated the entire Russian revolution; given the counter-revolutionary invasions of Russia c. 1918-1925, there's no doubt had thermonuclear weaponry then existed, our Masters would have at very the least employed their Neutron Bomb to incinerate all the rebels but preserve Petrograd's factories for profiteering and save its aristocratic architecture to sustain despotic gratification.4  More likely -- given the violently fanatical Hitlerite magnitude of rejection, fear, hatred and oppression any suggested sharing of material wealth invariably provokes from the entire global Ruling Class -- had our Masters the limitless power they possess today, they'd have vaporized Petrograd and everyone in it with a single final-solution H-bomb. Which tragically is no exaggeration; these days our Masters have the capability to track us all from birth, to detain those of us they suspect might prove troublesome, to confine us all on some island known to be doomed by rising seas and execute us all with a single nuke, secure in the certainty terminal climate change will quickly obliterate any evidence of the atrocity.  

No matter; with modern civilization's extinction now guaranteed by our Masters’ wanton squandering of our Mother Earth’s resources, any hope for change beyond the ever-worsening circumstances of the present is delusional. And given how we are now under surveillance as inescapable as that of any rat maze, activism is defeated -- note the fate of Occupy -- long before it grows enough strength to become effective. Thus, ever more often, activism's only result is the intensification of our Masters' savagery.

A cowardly statement? In some circumstances, unquestionably; but we are neither the already legendary defenders of the Soviet motherland or equally legendary French resistance fighters, which is merely to say the vast majority of us are not combat-secure in the terrible certainty dying to preserve humanitarianism is never a  squandering of our lives. Neither are we suicide bombers or kamikaze pilots; that's why, like Sun Tzu,  we regard backing away  from obviously hopeless circumstances as wisdom rather than cowardice: specifically  the wisdom to recognize the necessity of strategic withdrawal and so differentiate it from retreat or surrender. Our Masters' methodical destruction of Occupy -- confined  by their nazified authority, trashed relentlessly by their mass media and  sundered from within by their deliberately induced "neoliberal" culture of fanatically greedy self-obsession -- proves effective resistance is not just futile but impossible. In this context, the best we can do is note the antidote to inevitable defeat implicit in the ursine example of winter hibernation; we too must hibernate,  re-emerging only if and when times and circumstance prove advantageous. So, it seems, does life itself behave. Though we must also recognize our Masters have already been so ecogenocidally deadly in their misogynistic rape of our Mother Earth, she will never again be able to support any sort of technologically  advanced civilization.

And our Masters now repeatedly prove their infinite cunning, ironically by the same hypocritical deceptiveness  their wholly owned Abrahamic religions denounce as "diabolical"; they divide us by brandishing ideological conflicts to camouflage their behavioral unity -- the undeniable fact that, capitalist or socialist, they are all earth-destroyers; that's why, in what we  should take as an ultimate example of our Masters' limitless malevolence, the dynamics of the global (i.e., imperial) economy are deliberately structured to allow no alternatives. Whether as the ChristoNazis whose lifetime SCOTUS appointments are now transforming the (former) United States into the Third Reich’s ecogenocidal successor, or as the state capitalists who claim "socialism" justifies their own brands of ecogenocidal tyranny, their ever-expanding technological superiority has made them all effectively divine -- and therefore infinitely evil. So they intend to remain forever -- that is, until the society founded and sustained by their purposely oppressive technologies is no more, the collapse of which will like as not also bring about the final "better-dead-than-humanitarian" extermination of our entire species.

Lastly let us all note how our Masters' re-emphasis on thermonuclear terror  tells us they believe they've now bunkered themselves to guaranteed invincibility no matter what horrors they inflict on the rest of us.

Thus freed of all restraint, our Masters have become as sadistic as their Abrahamic god, which under patriarchy5 is ever-more-obviously the not-so-secret behavioral model of every aristocrat and Ruling-Class vassal on this doomed planet.
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1"Masters" is the only honest term for the all-powerful tyrants whose seemingly infinite wealth provides the lavish, post-Citizens-United bribery by which they have seized absolute control of all elected politicians and therefore of all USian politics, federal, state and local. Their ongoing refusal to allow their political puppets to enact effective measures against terminal climate change,  the Covid pandemic and runaway inflation proves they are deliberately financing  ecogenocide -- that is, the simultaneous destruction of the environment to make it unsuitable for human life combined with radical reduction of the 99 Percent and permanent enslavement of the survivors. (Twelve years after the fact, Keith Olbermann's analysis of the dire consequences of the Citizens United decision -- included in the above link -- is  proven by subsequent events to be 100 percent pure prophecy.)      

2USia” and “USian” because I refuse to participate in our Masters' theft of an entire double-continent's name to title their Empire; the present-day United States occupies less than a quarter of the Americas, only 9,629,091 square kilometers of the continent's 42,320,985-square-kilometer landmass,  which strongly suggests the naming is (secretly?) a statement of intended conquest.   

3If enough of us survive our Masters’ ecogenocide to sustain the study of history, the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 will undoubtedly be regarded as the date of the USian Empire’s death, much as the ouster of Romulus Augustus on 4 September 476 is regarded as the death-date for the Western Roman Empire.

4I linked to a "survivalist" website for the Neutron Bomb discussion because it was the only source I could find that exemplifies both the relevant science and the terror it inflicts.

5Ultimately, everything that oppresses us – Abrahamic religion, imperialism, feudalism, capitalism, nazism, plutocracy, ecogenocide – is fathered by patriarchy, the compulsory advent of which ended the cooperative ethos that governed our species until about six thousand years ago.

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(Next: how our Masters' Big Lies of "progress" and an historical "arc...toward justice" seduced us into ecogenocidal ruin.)
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LB/29 June-14 July 2022

--30--


SitRep #5: Life and Death Under Neo-Confederate Barbarism

(Note: The socioeconomic and environmental Apocalypse is undeniably upon us. But the lies, deceptions and betrayals promulgated by the One Percenters and their minions no longer hide how -- in accordance with their shock-doctrine -- they are using the Apocalypse to impose the ultimate regime-change: the reordering of human society into Neoliberal utopia: Ayn Rand opulence for our masters, serfdom and slavery for the few selectively bred 99 Percenters they allow to survive. The following merely adds to the preponderance of  evidence.)

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Please Read These Next 3 Reports (Even If You Read Nothing Else Herein)
My recommendations as the past week's most vital reports, chosen for how the events and trends define our overlords' intentions and therefore shape our world, the U.S. Empire and the probable doom both of our species and our planet.   

America the Barbaric
The gleeful USian embrace of barbarism is no accident. It is instead an unprecedented national orgy of prideful self-fulfillment, its present horrors mind-boggling, its potential horrors far in excess of those inflicted on our species  by Germany c. 1933-1945.     

How the South Won the Civil War
To understand this is to understand how and why the U.S. Empire is not just "America the Barbaric" but also the de facto Fourth Reich.

The Death Penalty is Getting Crueler
See also: Supreme Court's Death Penalty Ruling Leaves Legal Experts Aghast plus earlier stories, US Supreme Court ruling guts ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” and Supreme Court Delays Buddhist’s Execution, but Not Muslim’s, Over Faith Adviser   As the ChristoNazi ideology of the Robbers' Court becomes ever-more obvious, so does its ever-more-slippery slope toward theocratic fulfillment of the Bible's innumerable examples of religiously motivated rape and divinely mandated genocide and mass murder including that children be stoned to death for disobeying their parents.

 

Ecocide: the Relentless ChristoNazi/Capitalist Assault on Our Environment
Obviously our Capitalist overlords know Mother Nature always bats last. Just as obviously,  that's why they're obstructing any effective action against Climate Change. They're depending instead on their wealth and mastery of technology to enable them to establish their Neoliberal (Neo-Confederate) dream-world even as the deteriorating environment kills off as many as  7.2 billion women, children and men -- 95 percent of the 99 Percent

CO2 Levels Are Now at a 3 Million-Year High

The Privatization of Wildlife: How Ted Turner Scored Yellowstone Bison

Paradise Lost: Reflections on the Camp Fire

Logging Is the Leading Driver of Carbon Emissions From US Forests

Free Market Solutions to Climate Change Aren't 'Realistic'

The Madness Driving Climate Catastrophe

Chernobyl's Disastrous Cover-Up Is a Warning for the Next Nuclear Age

Critics of the Green New Deal Are in the Pocket of Big Oil

Why Recycling Is a ‘Pseudo-Solution’ to Reducing Plastic Waste

RSN: Three Mile Island's Murderous Legacy Still Threatens Us All

Mozambique Floods Cover More Ground Than NYC, Chicago, D.C. & Boston

In Middle East and North Africa, Environmentalism Is Espionage

 

Imperial Warmongering for God, Profit and Sadistic Pleasure

In Vietnam, the Empire's methodology of global conquest was aptly summarized by the infantry officer who tried to mansplain the necessity of destroying  Bên Tre to save it for Capitalism and Christianity. Now -- having extermimnated whole nations to grant them such salvation -- the Empire is destroying the entire planet to save it for Jesus and his Wall Street puppetmasters.

The Pentagon Wins Again

UNICEF: A Child Dies Violently in Honduras Every Day

The CIA: Surprise, Kill, Vanish

Trump Administration Revokes ICC Prosecutor's Visa Over War Crimes Probe'

Venezuela Won't Become 2nd Syria': Lavrov Sure S. America Won't Back Military Invasion v. Maduro

To Ramp Up Fear Of Russia In Africa, NYT Downplays Massive US Military Presence On Continent

Why There'll Be No US-Russia Reset Post-Mueller

 

Miscellaneous Atrocities and Outrages
Random examples of the sneering sadism, brazen moral imbecility and police-state omnipotence by which our overlords amass unfathomably pornographic profits as they  methodically reduce us to corporate serfdom and penal slavery.

Why aren’t Boeing executives being prosecuted for the 737 Max 8 crashes?

Boeing CEO praised “streamlined” oversight of 737 plane that crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia 

The bizarre story of the L.A. dad who exposed the college admissions scandal

ICE Arrests More Than 280 in Texas in Largest Workplace Raid in a Decade

Chicago Suburban Cops Call for Kim Foxx's Resignation Over Jussie Smollett Case

Identity Rules: A Report from Reddening Chicago

WikiLeaks warns that Julian Assange faces imminent eviction from Ecuador’s London embassy

The Border Patrol's Reckless Use of High Speed Chases Has Killed and Injured Hundreds Since 2015

US Senate fails to restore sweeping cuts to food assistance for Puerto Rico

New U.S. attorney on safe injection sites in Seattle: 'Don't go there'
Bad head: what the story says is the feds -- determined to exterminate junkies by any means other than overt (and therefore unfashionable) death-camp facilities -- will not allow safe, medically monitored self-injection sites in Seattle or anywhere else.

The South Dakota Legislature Has Invented A New Legal Term To Target Pipeline Protesters

GM Squeezed $118 Million From Its Workers, Then Shut Their Factory 

Centrist Dems Are Trying to Block a Universal $15 Minimum Wage
The Democratic (sic) Party demonstrates its faithfulness to its Republican overlords.

Wendy’s Owner Gives Big to Trump While Refusing Farmworkers’ Demands

Kids in Cages: Donald Trump's Brilliant Re-Election Strategy. Will It Work?
Ever more unabashedly ChristoNazi, the Trump-Pence Regime has already assured its re-election merely by institutionalizing the bottomless hatred and bigotry that has always poisoned the hearts of the USian white-supremacist majority. 

DOJ Report Finds Widespread Rape, Murder, and Torture in Alabama Prisons

University of Arizona Students to Face Criminal Charges for Protesting Campus CBP Event

Democrats Promised to Go After Trump's Taxes. Why Are They Dragging Their Feet?
Another definitive betrayal by
the Democratic (sic) Party. 

Collusion in Plain Sight
Uninformative  head from Counterpunch; the report exposes how Mueller and the Democratic (sic) Party
methodically ignore the evidence of Trump's brazenly ongoing collusion with ChristoNazis, also with corporate criminals, banksters, mobsters. 

A Neoliberal “Wall of Values”
Another uncommunicative head from Counterpunch. The nonsensically titled report reveals the strategy and tactics by which the Neoliberals are demonizing -- and thereby neutralizing -- the Left whether pseudo or real.

How Trump appointees helped the makers of BOB jogging strollers fight off a safety recall
Occasionally even the Josef-Goebbels-wannabees of the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine report unpleasant truths.What better way to boost their credibility? But never forget the propagandist's trick of sandwiching  lies amidst undeniable truths.

Nancy Pelosi Believes in Nothing
As of 2015 -- the last year for which Open Secrets has made the data available -- Pelosi is the sixth wealthiest member of the House and the seventh wealthiest member of Congress.  Thus like any other Capitalist,  she will do whatever she deems necessary to preserve and enhance her own $101 million  net worth.

Arizona Students' Free Speech Rights Challenged in Border Agent Visit Protest

Intelligence Report Appeared to Endorse View Leftwing Protesters Were 'Terrorists'

Sitting Pretty on a Sinking Ship: Neoliberal Feminism
How feminism is co-opted -- perverted, actually -- to serve our Capitalist masters.

That Kiss, and Other Daily Indignities

Why Don't Schools Teach Children Morality and Empathy?

 

Sometimes the Racist Malice Is Too Obvious to Hide
Whether in a nation founded to preserve slavery or a technology invented to facilitate maximum surveillance and genocide, the  evil intent of its founders prevails until the nation and its technology are no more.

Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy

Former Louisiana Officer Wayne Welsh, Who Shared Racist Facebook Meme, is Now the Chief of Police

Report: IRS More Likely to Audit Those Living in Poor, Mostly Black Counties

NAACP Shows How Fossil Fuel Industry Manipulates Communities of Color

'Reasserting White Power': Behind the Psychosis That Gave Rise to Blackface

 

Media and Censorship
The growing realm of state secrets and the shrinking realm of what our masters allow us to know measures our descent from a charade of democratic process to the enthusiastic embrace of tyranny.  

Weaponized Social Media Is Driving the Explosion of Fascism

YouTube has done too little, too late to fight misinformation

Media Blackout As Israel's Largest Banks Pay Over $1 Billion In Fines For US Tax Evasion Schemes

NewsGuild-CWA journalists ask tough questions on Equal Pay Day

Irritating Facts About Korea that Many in the West Would Rather Not Know

Economic Inequality Could Spell the End of American Democracy
A telling example of how allegedly "alternative" media -- in this instance Truthdig -- soft-pedals the present crisis, steadfastly denying the fact the pretense of U.S. "democracy" ended on 22 November 1963. Thus by pretending (the charade of) democracy continues, they avoid confronting the necessity of revolution -- that for us, we the people of the 99 Percent, it's either socialism or extinction.

An unprecedented leak from Saudi Arabia exposes torture of dissidents

Chicago Elects First Black Lesbian Mayor—But Not All Progressives See It As a Victory
The malevolent purposes of disinformation and co-optation -- the strategy and tactics at which the Democratic (sic) Party is the all-time master -- is always creation of the confusion and delusion that facilitates tyranny.  

 

Healthcare
This is one of two lost causes the ultimate combined  result of which will be nothing beyond another explosive increase in the fuck-it-why-bother-to-vote faction of the increasingly alienated citizenry. (The other lost cause is the quest for the restoration of net neutrality.) They are lost causes because neither universal healthcare nor net neutrality can ever be achieved in the United States by anything less than (hopefully nonviolent) revolution. Meanwhile...

Pelosi Accused of Deploying 'Most Dishonest Argument' Against Medicare for All

Behind Bars, Co-Pays Are a Barrier to Basic Health Care

 

Sparks of Anger, Murmurs of Rebellion
But absolutely nothing to indicate the emergence of effectively organized and disciplined resistance. 

Union Locals Build Support for the Green New Deal’s “Just Transition”

Rep. Jared Huffman is (Officially) the Only Openly “Humanist” Member of Congress

Boeing’s Homicides Will Give Way to Safety Reforms if Flyers Organize

Flood of Comments Shows Public 'Utterly Repulsed' By Trump Plan to Take Food Stamps From 750,000 People

(Standing Up) For Venezuela
Genuinely sophomoronic head rewritten to summarize the report's encouraging disclosures. But the question remains: will the U.S. succeed in its scheme to use Venezuela to provoke World War III? 

Out Of Patience: NYC Nurses Take On Hospitals For Better Staffing

Haiti At The Crossroads
Another bad head. What the story says is Haitians are approaching revolution -- but no one can be sure what kind. 

Wolf pack living west of Cascade Mountains for first time in decades

All Of This, We Have To Defend
Again another  uncommunicative  headline. What the story is about is how Mexicans are resisting Capitalism's misogynistic hatred of our Mother Earth and our natural environment.

Seattle's queer community finds refuge in nature

Tulsi Gabbard Is A Sheepdog, Greens Howie Hawkins Is 2020's Only Real Peace Candidate

Ms. Cortez Goes to Washington

Florida Sex Workers Demand Decriminalization After Massive Raids

Commonwealth v. Mohamed
An amazing story that, though true, could mislead us into thinking more than a tiny few USian ChristoNazis might be won over by reason.

75% of Scotland's Electricity Now Green; and All Cars Electric by 2032
It is with no small amount of ethnic pride I note the metaphorical chasm-spanning bridge suggested by two facts: firstly,   how my Scots ancestors were amongst the last peoples in Europe to surrender their minds to the enemies of the Great Goddess; secondly, that it is the Scots who are amongst the first to begin officially re-embracing her environmental dictates.  

Federal Judge Strikes Down Girls-Only School Dress Code as Unconstitutional

Belt and Road Initiative in Full Swing in Europe
Alas, making the U.S. Empire economically irrelevant --  precisely what China, Russia and the European Union are attempting in their own defense -- will neither save our environment nor protect us from a Capitalist cabal that lives and dies by the ChristoNazi slogan "Better Dead Than Red," the One Percenters' unequivocal pledge they will destroy the planet rather than surrender their unprecedented dominance. 

 

Stuff to Think About
Essays I respectfully suggest you read and contemplate.

Gender, Class and Capitalism

Freedom Rider: Remembering April 4th

American Exceptionalism is at the root of the Fake News Epidemic Attempting to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

If Only He Knew: First, Assume Women Aren’t People

Surveillance Capitalism Is Destroying Our Freedom and Our Intimacy

Socialist Principles Have Always Been Part of Black American Tradition

LB/7 April 2019

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Ecocidal Genocide and Enslavement of All Surviving Workers: That's the Shock-Doctrine "Final Solution" Ever More Evident in the Neoliberals' Stubborn Refusal to Fight Climate Change

Imagine a Concentration-Camp Planet Ruled by a Hillary or a Trump. Unthinkable, Yes?  But What Other Future Could They Be Planning?  

WHEN WE ANALYZE the indications  as investigative reporters and intelligence analysts are taught to do, there is only one possible  explanation for the denial, dithering and maliciously scripted paralysis by which our overlords sabotage every effort to counter the already-apocalyptic and soon-to-be-terminal climate crisis.1

No matter how I evaluate the evidence, I find it impossible to escape the conclusion our Capitalist masters long ago decided their "Final Solution" to all the world's problems is to allow the looming disasters to exterminate as many of us as possible. And then impose a zero-tolerance global tyranny more savage than anything our species has ever known, condemning the few Working Class survivors and their descendants to inescapable slavery. 

Thanks to Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Metropolitan Books: 2007), the Neoliberal methodology is obvious. Thanks to Chris Hedges (American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America; Free Press: 2006); to Kevin Phillips (American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century; Viking: 2006); and most of all to Jeff Sharlet (The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power; Harper: 2008); we already know our oppressors' capabilities and intentions.

We therefore also know our masters are methodically weaponizing the murderously self-righteous patriarchal misogyny, the hateful Christian white-supremacy and the sadistic theocratic malevolence of their increasingly fanatical supporters into a new, terrifyingly global Sturmabteilung to serve as  guards,  torturers and executioners.         

A few of us even recognize the Shock-Doctrine dynamics evident in the epidemic of mass murder2 that fuels the now-probably unstoppable Forcible Civilian Disarmament Movement, which is manipulating our fear, horror and ignorance into the frightened helplessness of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood. 

Given how the ChristoNazis and their fascist collaborators are already embraced as allies by the cops and by the imperial war machine,  it is obvious these new Storm Troopers will remain armed -- legally or otherwise -- even after the last firearm has been confiscated from the last non-fascist U.S. household.

Meanwhile the entire murder-minded rabble is officially encouraged to  prey upon us at will.  

But -- until now -- only one other journalist, the admirably courageous Sarah Kendzior, has dared publicly suggest the Occam's-Razor-obvious answer of why our rulers are behaving as they do. Clearly they intend to profit both from the apocalyptic disasters and from the Shock-Doctrine opportunities for genocidal reconstruction of human society -- think  Puerto Rico and New Orleans -- such  events provide.  

Our masters have been quietly smuggling their traveling holocaust of horrors home, one private jetload at a time, since 22 November 1963. But now the triumph of the genuinely Nazified Donald Trump and his burn-all-witches running-mate Michael Pence has blown the One Percenters' cover and revealed -- over an entirely bogus storm of objections --  the hideous truth of what actually obtains in this "one nation under (their  sadistic) God."     

We can (and typically do) spare ourselves the guilt and horror evoked by these near-daily atrocities if we reduce them to the emotionless abstractions of statistics -- for example the approximately 45,000 USian children, women and men the Neoliberals exterminate each year by deliberate denial of medical care.  Such sanitized information does absolutely nothing to alleviate our overwhelming sense of powerlessness or goad us to action.  But its near-universal availability most assuredly helps maintain the Exceptionally Big Lie of U.S. press freedom.

Of course if we are mindful enough to see without flinching -- and far too few of us are --  we can look directly at the hopelessly distraught faces of the growing legions of homeless children and adults and acknowledge that what is already sculpted by wretchedness on their faces is also an accurate vision of our own more-than-probable future.  Housed or not, we struggle to survive even as we are criminalized for the poverty inflicted on us by our masters. So impoverished, we are  endlessly tormented -- indeed not infrequently slain -- whether by the edicts of their insurance executives and welfare bureaucrats  or the hollow-point antipersonnel rounds fired by their  uniquely murderous federally militarized local police.  Survival itself thus becomes a (potentially fatal) assertion of revolutionary defiance. 

It is therefore utterly delusional to suppose the Apocalypse -- here deliberately capitalized as a proper noun -- is not already well underway. Never mind the environmental projections; to see the future intended for all of us in  the  99 Percent, just visit the nearest homeless encampment.   Meanwhile the One Percenters and their trusted henchmen -- the lawyers, politicians and executives who transmogrify their masters' moral imbecility into real-world atrocities -- are fully cognizant of our intensifying anger. That's why they are building strongholds and raising private armies to defend them.

Welcome to the new post-imperial Dark Age, complete with moated castles. 

Knowing history as I do -- including military history and the history of weapons -- I have a reasonably accurate notion of what is taking shape. Forget nations and governments; it will instead be a world of corporate manorialism enforced by the de facto tribalism of ultra-high-tech feudalism. Its population will be forever divided into two classes: the all-powerful and the abjectly powerless -- that is, the masters and the slaves.

Also knowing anthropology and mythology and life on rural agricultural communes, I can  accurately imagine the post-apocalyptic socialist alternative: a contentious but nevertheless fully functional amalgum of family and community that despite its emotional dysfunction is bound by a diligent solidarity evident in  proven skill, whether at subsistance  agriculture or self-defense.   

Obviously I would choose the latter were I able. 

My own sense of what our  probable future might look like -- mental imagery  based on scholarship and personal experience including not only the tragedies and disasters I covered as a journalist but also the postwar horrors I witnessed in South Korea c. 1961-1962 -- is something I intend to write about in considerable detail during the weeks ahead. 

For now though suffice it to say life in a postapocalyptic world -- that is, assuming there is any human survival at all -- would be nothing like most of us seem to imagine. The eventual collapse of the electrical grid would eliminate nearly all post-19th Century technology including the associated industrial capabilities essential to its restoration. Meanwhile the post-Roman history of Britain vividly demonstrates civilization's fragility. Save for its stone-and-concrete structures -- chiefly aqueducts, roads, bridges and buildings -- it was gone in less than a century. By the time these  structures began crumbling, there was no one left alive who was knowledgeable or skilled enough to repair them.    

What follows then is list of 115 present-day headlines arbitrarily divided into eight categories of evidence. Each head is hyperlinked to its text. I lifted 96 of these from the approximately 760 news stories and analytical commentaries I received in my electronic in-box between 25 February 2019 and 15 March 2019 inclusive. The remaining 19 -- 13 slightly older analytical and historical essays listed under "However Banal, Evil May Also Prove Bottomless" as background reading and six reassuring entries under the concluding section, "Unrecognized Resistance to Extinction"  -- are from the bookmarks of my electronic library. 

Were we to envision a genuinely accurate metaphor for our circumstances and begin to focus on these 115  examples as accurate microcosms of our real circumstances, we might soon realize it is rather as if we of the 99 Percent are  passengers aboard a ship at sea. But the officers -- the One Percenters and their lawyers, politicians and executives -- have knowingly overbooked it to maximize their profit and have thus overloaded it nearly to the point of sinking. As we sail toward heavy weather the officers have realized the danger they are in and have begun to lighten the load by flinging groups of us overboard in circumstances designed to rebrand murders as unavoidable tragedy -- exactly as is done, for example,  to hide the murders of the approximately 45,000 of us who are slain every year by deliberate denial of health care.

(I am compelled to ask: when someone is killed by deliberate perpetuation of a policy known to be deadly, how can it not be murder? Note in this context the deliberate embrace of genocide inherent in the U.S. One Percenters' knowingly deadly edicts to perpetuate healthcare as a privilege of wealth rather than the universal human right it is considered by every other government  in the developed world.)   

The officers who command our metaphorical ship meanwhile tells us they are doing everything they can to save our lives. They continue repeating this lie even after we discover they  are actually opening the scuttlecocks; the truth is we passengers are all doomed. By sinking us the officers not only silence our complaints and pocket our fares but also collect on the insurance, profiting obscenely.

Now -- as passengers who have not yet been flung overboard -- let us look both at the unprecedented real-world malevolence  of our overlords, at the growing rebelliousness it is evoking and also at a few of  the many oft-unrecognized assertions of our own boundless determination to survive. It's that very combination -- the serial-killer moral imbecility of our rulers versus our own humanitarian mindfulness -- that make this hypothesis so obviously true once we have brought the evidence into sharp focus.

Having contemplated our circumstances for nearly a decade  -- see for example "Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke To Hated Public Services?" (my post of 27 April 2010, for which I was immediately and permanently ousted from Facebook) --   I can no longer doubt  the rulers of the world have no intention whatsoever of ameliorating climate change; that instead they are deliberately using the apocalypse -- and quite possibly engineering it --  the ever-more-obvious goal of which is to reorganize all human society into the hierarchical structure of the slave plantation or the concentration-camp.4

Thus the following, a portrait of the deepening gloom in which we dwell, the hues of its darkness softened -- because I'm sure you are as tired as I of reading atrocity reports  -- into lists of hyperlinked heads and titles from which you may choose at will. You'll see more of these easy-choice lists as I continue to re-format Dispatches after Facebook terminated my access to the Tacoma Communists page, where until last January links to my work were routinely posted.    

*****          

(I). Our Mother Earth as an Abused Woman

The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy

In the Deepest Ocean Trenches, Animals Eat Plastic

Iconic Forests Reaching Climate Tipping Points in American West

Nothing resolved as Flint water crisis nears fifth anniversary

Insecticide Linked to Increased Breast Cancer Risk -- 40 Years After Exposure

Moment of Reckoning: US Cities Burn Recyclables After China Bans Imports

A World Without Clouds. Think About That a Minute: New Study Details Possibility of Devastating Climate Feedback Loop

Like a nightmare’: Amtrak train, trapped by snow for 36 hours, arrives back in Seattle

Flint water crisis claims its youngest Legionnaires’ victim to date

Measles outbreak in Ukraine claims eight lives

Popular Brands Of Beer And Wine Found To Contain Glyphosate Weedkiller

RSN: How Fukushima Nukes Kill Our Climate, Our Planet, Ourselves

Game Over? Report Card on Our Planet’s Environment

 

(II). Dithering as Denial

The Environmental Implications Of A Trump Presidency

Dianne Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal

Legislature, Inslee struggle to fix roads that block salmon, help starve orcas

Top Democrats Are Enabling Climate Catastrophe

The 2020 Democrats of the "Anti-Green New Deal Coalition"

Democrats Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns

 

(III). The Apocalypse Is Already Upon Us 

Survival of the Richest, All Are Equal, Except Those Who Aren't

American Exceptionalism: The Naked Truth

The New York Times Won't Stop Pushing Crank Economics

Amazon federal taxes: how the company’s corporate tax bill was $0

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes

Dakota Access Pipeline Company Is Abusing The Judicial System To Silence Dissent

Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All

Trump's 2020 Budget Proposes $1 Trillion Cut to Medicare, Medicaid

FOCUS: Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump by Destroying Each Other?

Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the US, ADL Finds

Pack City Hall to Stop Mayor Durkan’s attacks on Homeless Services

The Most Harrowing Revelation of the Cohen Hearing

Corporate and “Progressive” Democrats Threaten Medicare Itself

Trump Reportedly Wants to Steal From the Troops to Pay for His Wall

Joe Biden Has a History of Racist Comments

Pharma & Insurance Gave $43M To 130 House Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All

Immigrants endure inhuman conditions at ICE prison in New Jersey

Poverty in the UK: 100 “baby banks” spring up to assist parents with basic supplies 

Torture Fans and War Criminals Determine US Foreign Policy

Pelosi dismisses efforts to impeach President Trump

Free dental clinic draws hundreds in Nashville, Tennessee

Closure of Brazil Ford plant to destroy up to 27,000 jobs

The Trump presidency: From the Manhattan underworld to the White House

Latest collision on Long Island Rail Road shows fatal consequences of system-wide neglect

Nearly 200 Immigrants in Texas Detention Facilities Have Mumps

Trump May Want to Be President Forever. Take the Threat Seriously.

Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America

No charges for Sacramento police officers who murdered Stephon Clark

Fascism by Another Name

The Global Assault on Indigenous Peoples

Mitch Nuclear Option McConnell Poised to Turn Steady Stream of Trump's Right-Wing Judges Into a Flood

Cuts to hours for Whole Foods workers exposes fraud of Amazon pay increase

Big Capital, the Working Class, and US Imperialism: a Brief Look at Recent History

Nearly 1.4 Million Puerto Ricans Facing Dangerous Food Stamp Cuts as Trump and Congress Fail to Act

Trump to Divert Up to $385 Million From Crucial Health Programs To Pay for Government-Sanctioned Child Abuse

Big Pharma, Insurers and Hospitals Team Up to Kill Medicare for All

Trump's Legacy: Conservative Judges Who Will Interpret US Law for Decades

Chelsea Manning Defies Secret Grand Jury, Julian Assange Scoops Michael Cohen

Stephon Clark Killed Twice by U.S. imperialism

President’s Budget Targets Key Health Care Programs

The VA Is Privatizing Veterans Health Care While Launching A Campaign To Deny It

Union Busting on Campus: Jackson Lewis and Higher Education Anti-Unionism

College admissions scandal: what it reveals about wealth in America - Vox

NY School Holds Mock Slave Auction Selling Black Students to White Kids

FOCUS: Colony of Hell: 911 Calls From Inside Amazon Warehouses

Joint US-South Korean war games amid rising tensions with North Korea

Federal Aviation Administration accused of colluding with Boeing in wake of 737 crashes

Of Course College Admissions Rigged for the Rich. The Whole Economic System Is

Report Card Shows Majority of Senate Democrats Aiding Trump's Right-Wing Court Takeover

Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job

The criminalization of environmental protest in Trump’s America

 

(IV). Their God Demands They Rape Our Mother5

The Supreme Court Is Quietly Changing the Status of Religion in American Life

Giving The Bomb To Saudi Arabia's Dr. Strangelove

What You Need to Know About Trump’s Latest Attack on Reproductive Health

United Methodist Church votes to maintain its opposition to same-sex marriage, gay clergy

Southern Baptist Convention Grapples With Sexual Abuse Report

Cuba's Evangelical Alliance Leads Crusade Against Gay Marriage

With Trump, White Protestantism Hits Rock Bottom

United Methodists Fracture: LGBT Plan Rejected - The Atlantic

The Cult of the Good Christian Woman

Anti-Vaxx Mobs: Doctors Face Harassment Campaigns on Facebook

Revealed: AmazonSmile Helps Fund Anti-Vaccine Groups

Abortion Restrictions Sweep Through GOP-Held Legislatures

Saudi Women Activists Stand Trial in Criminal Court

Trump Administration Rolls Out Implementation Plan for Transgender Military Ban

The Kansas Bomb Plot: What Has the Media Missed?

New Zealand mosque shooting: what we know so far about the mass shooting in Christchurch

Trump's Pick of Wealthy Climate Denier for UN Ambassador Decried as Slap in the Face to Planet and Humanity

New Zealand mosque shooting: the shooter’s manifesto shows how white nationalist rhetoric spreads

The shadowy network shaping Trump’s anti-immigration policies

The EPA and Evangelical (Anti)Environmentalism

Trump: The most anti-science president ever?

 

(V). A Few Vernal Sprouts of Wishful Thinking

Climate Change Could End Washington’s Global Dominion

FOCUS: A Future Without Fossil Fuels?

How long can we keep dodging nuclear war? 

The climate crisis and the insidious idea that things must get worse before they get better

 

(VI). The Earth Mother's Spring Sunshine Grows Flowers of Defiance  

The Keys To The Sunrise Movement's Momentum? A Bold Idea, A Visionary Narrative, And Organising Best Practices

The Black Stake in the Green New Deal | Black Agenda Report

Female Leaders Warn Against Global Rise of Autocratic Strongmen and Attack on Womens Rights

Youth Climate Activists Arrested for Sit-In at Mitch McConnell's Office

Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse

Researchers: Violence, War And Climate Change Are Linked

Vandana Shiva: We Must Fight Back Against the 1 Percent to Stop the Sixth Mass Extinction

It’s the Green New Deal or Else

Extinction Rebellion: “Green” capitalism versus world socialism

The Youth Climate Strike and the fight against global warming

Global Climate Strike in Pictures: Millions of Students Walk Out to Demand Planetary Transformation

A Tribal Camp in South Texas Is Vowing to Resist Trump’s Wall

 

(VII). However Banal, Evil May Also Prove Bottomless

Donald Trump Is Anti-Environment, But So Was Barack Obama

How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism

Joining the dots: women, environmentalism and neoliberalism

What is Neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility

A shock to the ecosystem: Neoliberalism and the environment | well sharp

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action

The Secret Threat That Makes Corporations More Powerful Than Countries

Average U.S. Citizens Have “Little Or No” Influence On Government Policy

Our Mania For Hope Is A Curse

In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve

 

(VIII.) Unrecognized Resistance to Extinction
A much-expanded version6 of the Jung/McLuhan hypothesis all art includes elements of prophecy.

How to Spin Wool (with Pictures)

Enjoying Horseback Archery Adventures of the Year 2017

Ricky Roberts Ferguson Rifle Timed Fire at King's Mountain National Military Park

Finding Freedom in a Frontier Life 

Making a Blacksmith Shop with No Power Tools

Western Science Is Finally Catching Up To Traditional Knowledge

 

===========================

1Key passage of the cited essay: "climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term." How near? About a decade.

2The U.S. epidemic of mass murder is the byproduct of a culture that decrees humans worthless save as consumers, declares greed the only human motivator and honors hatefulness as the apex of emotion. Thus -- without any need for possibly embarrassing conspiracies -- do our rulers guarantee themselves a constant flow of tragedies by which to rationalize their imposition of Shock-Doctrine tyranny. See for example "School Shootings and Drone Wars: America's Invisible Ways of Violence,"   

3As I suspect all truthful historians will do if our species escapes extinction, I take the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy as the death-date of the United States as a pretend-democracy. See James W. Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books: 2008), pgs. 375-376. See also: After Kennedy's assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson immediately reversed his predecessor's order to withdraw 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1963.

4I built a half-dozen population projections based on the assumption some humans will survive, my reasoning elaborated in Footnote 6, below.  One projections was based on reduction of the human population by 95 percent -- approximately the percentage of earthly species taken by the Permian-Triassic Extinction 250 million years ago. Significantly, using the One Percent/99 Percent model, a 95 percent human extinction rate would would result in the same ratio of masters to slaves, 8.75 million to 350 million or 1:40, that is  typical of today's U.S. chain gangs. By comparison, the ratio of Nazis to victims in the German concentration  camps was 1:18, for which see Bucheim, Broszat, Jacobsen and Krausnick, Anatomy of the SS State (English translation William Collins Sons: 1968); pg. 504. Given the One Percenters' now obvious adoration of Nazi Germany and the white-supremacist South, these are almost certainly the population parameters they are employing as they try to leverage the Apocalypse into their New World Order.

5Patriarchy and its Abrahamic religious offspring, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are the ideological vectors of the misogynistic war on the environment.  As defined by Thomas Sancton and cited by Naomi Klein in "Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action," The ultimate source of Neoliberalism (and Capitalism itself) is ...the misuse of the Judeo-Christian concept of "dominion" over nature and the fact that it supplanted the pre-Christian idea that "the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature -- the soil, forest, sea -- was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it."

6Carl Jung (All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness) and Marshall McLuhan (Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it)  each defined art as prophecy. A paramount example is the series of paintings entitled The Scream, each of which clearly anticipate the apocalyptic horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries. But the definitions of art employed by Jung and McLuhan are elitist, which caused them to exclude entirely the  vast body of evidence that is to be found outside of museums, galleries and theaters. Hence this section's focus on recovery of primitive skills such as fire-making, blacksmithing, spinning and weaving or the use of antique tools and weapons. All such activities -- and there are a great many more than are sampled here -- preserve the means to survive the death of the technologies  upon which we are now dependent.  Popular music likewise: in "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" -- the photographically illustrated manuscript that was destroyed, probably by government arsonists,  just as it was on the brink of major publication -- I presented an enormity of evidence the folk-music renaissance of the 1950s provided the aesthetic momentum of the 1960s Counterculture, especially the revolution against patriarchy implicit in the earliest aspects of Second-Wave Feminism, Environmentalism and the Back-to-the-Land Movement. Indeed the poet/musician Lisa Thiel has since composed what could be construed as an entire post-apocalyptic liturgy in celebration of the resurrected Goddess. Nor do I think it mere coincidence Robert Graves wrote the first draft of his revolutionary recovery of our species' long suppressed  pre-patriarchal mythology, The White Goddess, in 1944 -- literally just as the Atomic Age was dawning.  The survival instinct apparent in  such examples -- as if (often without conscious intent) we are already preparing for a world without today's technology -- convinces me some humans will survive, no matter what madness our masters inflict on Nature and ourselves.  

(With thanks to Tigerlille1 for some of the above links.)

LB/25 February-15 March 2019

-30-


The New Year Births a Hefty Anthology of Provocative Reports

I DO NOT RECALL any week in recent years with as many vital news reports and analytical essays as have appeared in our national media – Mainstream as well as Alternative – since 6 January 2019.

Hence I will (again) set aside the story upon which I have been working – assembling documentation that a very few notably courageous Christians and Christian organizations are most assuredly not Nazis.

Nor are they members of the vast legions of (mostly white Protestant) believers who support

====================================================

Important note: news reports formerly published weekly in Dispatches are now published daily on the Facebook page of the Tacoma (Harry Bridges) Chapter of the Communist Labor Party. Most are stories suppressed or downplayed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM), the world's first private, for-profit version of Nazi Germany's Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Therefore please check this page at least once per day for vital information. Thank you.

====================================================

the Nazi coup by remaining silent (and thereby functioning as silent partners) in the face of the Nazis' ever-more-brazen tyrannies and ever-more-ruinous atrocities.

Instead the heroic Christians about whom I am writing generally regard their Jesus as a humanitarian revolutionary. Hence they are -- albeit in their own ways -- as much a part of the anti-Capitalist, anti-ChristoNazi resistance as any socialist, Marxian or otherwise.

Because the core contents of this repeatedly delayed salute to Christian dissenters were assembled with major assistance from from a uniquely knowledgeable longtime Christian friend without whose informed guidance I could not have pursued the story, my obligation to complete it as soon as possible is as much personal as it is professional.

But now the press of real-time events (once more) demands I focus instead on some of the many developments that suggest the U.S. 99 Percent may at last be on the brink of evolving a genuinely revolutionary consciousness even as the last lingering pretenses of USian civil liberties are terminated forever.

At this point in our discussion it is therefore time we familiarize ourselves with Theodore Parker's oft-misquoted speculation that shrank into a shibboleth claiming “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Our brief but revealing focus on Parker is essential if we are to recognize how his speculative error of historical interpretation has been manipulated into what may well be our species' most ultimately apocalyptic Big Lie.

For the bitterly defining historical truth of H. sapiens sapiens is the diametrical opposite of what Parker imagined: “the arc of the moral universe” – if indeed there is any such thing – bends not toward “justice” but toward Manifest Evil.

Especially since the talking-snake/fiery-wheel/burning-bush advent of patriarchy approximately 6,000 years ago, any alleged “moral arc” has bent overwhelmingly toward the ecocidal (and therefore genocidal) moral imbecility that fosters and defines the inescapably apocalyptic miasma in which we are all being suffocated today.

Our species' exceedingly rare attempts to change its apocalyptic destiny – a long litany of revolutions most of which have been methodically disappeared down the Orwell Hole and its precursors or at the very least ideologically neutralized – have all either been crushed, have failed of their own internal contradictions or are threatened by hegemonic forces of such omnipotence their defeat appears certain.

If any of our former pretenses of “democracy” are ever to be resurrected as genuine civil liberties, the physics of history suggest it can only happen as a result of socialist revolution, most likely in some post-apocalyptic cultural reordering of the Imperial Homeland into as many as 13 separate nations. (For additional details go here, here, here and here; also google, without quotation marks, “cultural regions of the United States” and “Raymond Gastil cultural regions of the United States.”)

Meanwhile, the most obvious of the aforementioned Nazi atrocities is the Trump/Pence Regime's ongoing (and uniquely malicious) government shutdown/lockout, which I have believed from the beginning is intended not to force construction of a border-wall but instead to legitimize the “national emergency” essential to suppressing the last remnants of the Empire's epic 244-year Big Lie of “American Democracy." (See also here and here.)

To present this collection of informative material in the most concise and quickly accessible form, I am (to the extent space allows) relying on original headlines rather than my own paraphrasing to bolster my routine selections of definitive text. These original headlines are set off by quotation marks; those without quotation marks are my own revised titles, in every instances abbreviated to fit Dispatches' style of limiting the heads on individual reports to a single line of boldface type.

I am also – again in the interest of brevity – eliminating all but the most essential comments.

*****

Please-Read Background Material Essential for Perspective

The Roots of Fascism and the Seeds for Its Defeat”

With the rise of the right internationally, there has never been a more pressing need for clarity about the roots of fascism, its history, and why and how it can be defeated.

Among the clearest thinkers on this subject is German socialist Clara Zetkin, whose writing on the topic has been republished thanks to the work of Mike Taber, John Riddell and Haymarket Books.

(snip)

Zetkin is well-known...for her Marxist analysis of women’s oppression and helping to found International Women’s Day in 1910.

(snip)

Alongside (Rosa) Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Zetkin was part of many of the key debates within the SPD, including those with another leading member, Eduard Bernstein, which pitted the socialist vision of a revolutionary transformation of society against Bernstein’s idea that socialism could be achieved by a series of reforms.

Zetkin’s struggle against reformism within her party continued in the lead-up to the First World War, as she argued along with a revolutionary minority for the SPD to take a strong anti-imperialist position, including opposition to colonialism and the arms race, and a call for mass action to block the coming war...

***

Two Populisms, Not One”

Two very different “populisms"... have arisen in response to neoliberal capitalism in the West.

A left-leaning social-democratic “progressive populism” targets the Capitalist concentration of wealth and power and the unbridled pursuit of private profit as enemies of the people and the common good.  This populism is egalitarian and radically democratic.  It tends towards socialism.  Its attractive policy agenda, supported by working-class majorities, includes the downward distribution of wealth, the expansion of the social safety net, university quality health care, increased minimum wages and union power, public jobs programs, and the protection of livable ecology (a Green New Deal).

(snip)

Then there’s the reactionary anti-cosmopolitan nationalist “populism” of the right...

***

“The Working Class and the Environmental Crisis”

Perhaps the stupidest slander among the many hurled at the Yellow Vest movement in France by the corporate media is the claim that the workers involved in militant protests over social inequality, poverty and low-wage jobs are opposed to environmental concerns because they balked at the gas tax imposed by President Emmanuel Macron.

The New York Times, which has regularly circulated such smears, carried an op-ed column...under the headline, “Is Environmentalism Just for Rich People?” Written by Dr. Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College in Maine, the column claims that the Yellow Vest protests “are making environmentalists nervous”...

(snip)

Gross directly compares the Yellow Vests to workers in the United States: “As with working class support for the faltering coal industry in the United States, the question arises: Is environmentalism a boutique issue, a cause only the well-off can afford to worry about?” He cites a supposedly “landmark” 1995 sociological study showing that support for environmentalism is strongest in the higher income brackets, because “citizens were apt to prioritize environmental concerns only if they were rich enough not to have to fret about more basic things like food and shelter.”

***

"The Political Economy of Fascism”

For all of the millions of words written about the fascist danger posed by Donald Trump, there are very few devoted to an actual analysis of fascist economics both as ideology and state policy. Instead there is a fixation on marchers in Charlottesville chanting “blood and soil” or other Nazi era memes. Before considering whether people like Donald Trump or Steve Mnuchin seek to impose a fascist dictatorship on the USA, it might be useful to take a look at some of the demands found in the Manifesto of the Fascist party founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919 that was co-written by labor syndicalist Alceste De Ambris and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto that had a powerful impact on Russian art in the 1920s.

***

“Undemocratic by Design”

Despite his reputation as a scourge of religion and a herald of its death under capitalism, Marx saw traces of its cunning persistence in the secular dynamics of the market. Religion, he declared in the Communist Manifesto, would succumb to the pecuniary logic indispensable to the success of capitalist enterprise. The rage to accumulate ensured that all “heavenly ecstasies” would be “drowned in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.” Yet Marx marveled elsewhere at the “divine power of money”—its power to perform (and induce us to accept) the most perverse acts of moral and metaphysical sorcery. In our business civilization, money not only mediated access to life’s necessities but also determined the parameters of reality itself. From the mercenary standpoint of the market, “if I have the vocation for study, but no money for it, I have no vocation. Thus money, Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, “is the god among commodities.” Divinity had not expired, but relocated. Capitalism promoted what the theologian William Cavanaugh might call a “migration of the holy.”

***

“The Networks Blew the Call on Trump's Planned Speech”

There would have been crystal-clear precedent for their turning him down: In 2014, when Barack Obama gave a speech on his immigration-policy plans, neither CBS nor NBC nor ABC aired it live, on the argument that circumstances made the message “too political.” A closer parallel would be hard to find.

There was also a clearly unprecedented reason not to carry the speech: namely, that nearly everything Trump says on this topic is intentionally inflammatory and either carelessly or deliberately untrue. Politics always involves spin and selective emphasis, but the networks would know for sure ahead of time that they were using their resources to advance untruths.

But the networks said yes, they’ll presumably air the speech, and the question now is what else they can do to cope with the reality of an office holder who doesn’t care that he lies.

Comment: The significance of this report – and the reason it is included not only in Dispatches but here in this vital-background section – is that the One Percenters own all the networks. Which makes their morally imbecilic pandering to Trump's demagoguery incontrovertible proof he is our Capitalist overlords' hired gun – the socioeconomic hit man chosen to drown all the federal government's humanitarian functions in Grover Norquist's proverbial bathtub.

*****

And Now On to the Week's More Indicative News Reports

The Election Circus Begins”

It is January 2019. This signals the start of the 2020 election circus. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the first big-name Democrat on stage. But we will soon be deluged with candidates, bizarre antics and endless commentary by fatuous TV and radio pundits. The hyperventilating, the constant polling, the updates on who has the largest campaign war chest, the hypothetical matches between this hopeful and that hopeful, the mocking tweets by Donald Trump, will, as we saw in the 2016 election campaign, have as much relevance to our lives and political future as the speculation on cable sports channels about next year’s football season. This farce takes the place of genuine political life.

It costs a lot of money to mount this spectacle. Our corporate masters, like the oligarchic rulers of ancient Rome who poured money into the arena as they stripped the empire and its citizens of their assets, are happy to oblige. The campaign sustains the fiction of a democracy and gives legitimacy to the corporate state...

*****

“Don’t Speak, Memory: Resistance Apes Trump in Weaponizing Amnesia”

...Trump (Tweeted) the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in order to fight Islamic terrorism. But (Rachel) Maddow assures us, in great detail, that no one, anywhere...has ever advanced the notion that the Soviet incursion had anything to do with terrorism. In fact, (she claims) the only place in the history of the world in which this notion has ever been bruited is — of course — Putin’s Kremlin, which is planning an official “reassessment” of the Afghan invasion. (Which, rest assured, is not all like the “reassessment” being done by our stalwart Resisters today of the murderously criminal regime of George W. Bush.)

(snip)

Yet if I may paraphrase the great Ronald Reagan — whom that fightin’ progressive Nancy Pelosi favourably cited in her first speech as Speaker this week — facts are stubborn things...

When the Soviets went in, their claim that the US was backing Islamic terrorists was widely dismissed as empty propaganda. But it was later confirmed, cheerfully, by the very architect of that policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who told Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998 that he persuaded Jimmy Carter to secretly arm and support the jihadis precisely in hopes of provoking a Soviet incursion.

*****

Trump Can Relate … and So Can MSNBC’s Stephanie Rhule”

It’s always interesting when members of the ruling-class reveal their cluelessness about the lives of ordinary working people. Sometimes it can cost them dearly in the political realm.

*****

Court Uses Law's Absurdity to Allow Unfit Kavanaugh to Remain...”

It took the eight judges of the Tenth Circuit Judicial Council just over two months to decide to do nothing about any of the 83 misconduct complaints against Judge Kavanaugh. Worse, the court’s order asserted in a strained legal argument that there was nothing that could be done legally about the 83 misconduct complaints against Judge Kavanaugh for one reason, and one reason only – because he had become Justice Kavanaugh. That’s the whole argument: that Kavanaugh gets to escape judicial accountability, and his getaway car is his seat on the Supreme Court...

*****

“Trump Considers Stealing Money From PR Disaster Relief to Fund Wall”

As the shutdown drags on, President Trump’s ideas about how to secure funding for his absurd border wall are becoming more and more villainous. His newest strategy? Using $13.9 billion in Army Corps to build a segment of the wall, according to NBC. That money would otherwise go to fund projects in Puerto Rico and other disaster areas.

*****

Banksters Get Shutdown Relief after Appeal to Trump Regime Officials”

After an intense lobbying campaign by the mortgage industry, the Treasury Department this week restarted a program that had been sidelined by the partial government shutdown, allowing hundreds of Internal Revenue Service clerks to collect paychecks as they process forms vital to the lending industry.

Comments: (1)-No quotation marks on this head because I had to rewrite it to fit the Dispatches format. (2)-From The Washington Post, a major player in the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, linked here only because Amazonfǖhrer Jeff Bezos and his wholly owned reportorial steno-bots momentarily switched off their Josef Goebbels news values and scooped the world on this story.

*****

Four Vital Essays from Black Agenda Report

(To which I link so often because it is among the very few truly Leftist websites here in the United States. Hence – unlike Reader Supported News – it is methodically targeted by the forces of oppression.)

Raising the Bar on a Green New Deal

Our place as Greens, as leftists generally...is not to whine about how the Democrats stole our Green New Deal slogan and slapped it onto their half-assed efforts to appear responsive to the looming crises around us. What we did is we managed to raise the bar.

***

Ocasio-Cortez, Socialism, War and Austerity”

It’s good that there are now plenty of young people that like the idea of socialism. But if they don’t really know what socialism is, they also don’t know what capitalists will do to resist it...(they) have no idea what kind of capitalist enemy they are up against, but if they keep pricking it, they will soon find out. The Lords of Capital are in their end-game. The next moves are for keeps.

***

Freedom Rider: Phony Resistance Can’t Beat Trump”

The Democrats are making news after being sworn into the 116thCongress as the majority party in the House of Representatives. The media give great attention to the increase in the numbers of women, Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and Muslim members, and of course Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The first ever Palestinian-American member made news by calling president Trump a “mother fucker.” But as a character on an old television commercial asked, “Where’s the beef?”

***

The Diversity Hustle”

Identity politics is nothing but a diversity hustle. For the record, it’s not only Democrats who use this scam to get elected, Republicans deploy the same game of grievance and feigned concern to wield power and dupe their constituents. After all, Trump got elected President by treading on the hopes and frustrations of his supporters the same way that Barack Obama hoodwinked his believers...

Comment: Though I am not African-American, Black Agenda Report nevertheless articulates my own viewpoint more often and more bluntly than any other publication I have yet encountered, whether in print or on the Internet. The four BAR essays linked above are therefore as exemplary personally as they are professionally. Thank you, BAR, for being; more to the point, thank you for being whom and what you are.

*****

Plus Even More Relevant News and Analysis

“Marching Towards a Fighting Women’s Movement”

From the beginning, the Trump administration has waged a ruthless assault on women — from our right to workplaces free of sexual harassment to the ability to make our own decisions about reproductive rights.

It was hardly a surprise that, once in office, the candidate who was exposed on tape bragging about sexual assault would also be the president who denied the claims of survivors and nominated Brett Kavanaugh, an opponent of abortion also accused of sexual violence, for the Supreme Court.

Since the 2016 election, Trump and the conservatives who emboldened by him have acted like they have a mandate, running roughshod over abortion rights...

(snip)

But at the same time, Trump and the right wing that loves him haven’t gone unopposed.

*****

“The Limits of Social Democracy Will Test the US Left”

There is an inherent paradox in social democracy: It exposes social programs to the power of private capital, even as it tries to protect them from it.

*****

“Five Forces Driving the Rise of Fascism in 2019”

We start out 2019 with neo-fascists and assorted other “populists” and ethnonationalists holding office in 11 European nations and scoring recent double-digit vote tallies in Finland, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands. Marine Le Pen’s French ethnonationalist National Front garnered one-third of that country’s 2017 vote for president. Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s governing PiS Party, described migrants arriving in Europe as being physically different than Poles, with an ability to carry “various parasites and protozoa, which don’t affect their organisms, but which could be dangerous here.” Duterte celebrated New Year’s Eve boasting of his childhood molestation of his family’s maid. Bolsonaro praised genocide against Native Americans and, on his first day in office, issued an executive order putting agribusiness interests in charge of Indigenous reserves. He also told a fellow member of Brazil’s congress, on the floor of that house, that she wasn’t good enough for him to rape and promised to jail his opposition. 2019 is promising to be ugly.

*****

“The Age of Technology Requires Us All to Re-Imagine Politics”

In this interview, (Jamie) Susskind discusses some of the factors contributing to the exponential integration of tech in our daily lives and how we can take control away from market-driven tech firms by achieving a greater understanding of the technology that surrounds us.

Comment: Bad head! What it actually says is the age of technology – that is, the fact human technology is at least 200,000 years old – “requires us all to re-imagine politics.” Indeed it does, though that is most assuredly another discussion for another time. What the head-writer should have written was “Today's Technology Requires Us All to Re-Imagine Politics.”

*****

“The Real Story Behind the L.A. Teachers Strike”

If Los Angeles teachers walk off the job January 14, as widely expected, it will be a meta-strike with extremely high stakes not only for teachers, students and parents in L.A., but for public education across the U.S. The stalemated negotiations over wages, class size, staffing and other issues matter – but they are proxies for an epic fight that has been playing out in American school districts for more than a decade.

On one side of this divide are those who believe that public education as an institution should be preserved more or less in its current form, with a greater infusion of money to address chronic underfunding and understaffing. On the other side is an array of forces that want to radically restructure public schools, and who have made it clear they do not believe that the L.A. Unified School District in its current incarnation is worth investing in – or even preserving.

*****

“In The Eye of the Beholder: USA History of Imprisoning Women Politicals”

The United States has imprisoned women dissidents from the beginning, even as a colony. The intolerance of dissent, of questioning the established order, began then and it has continued.

*****

“Bordering on Fascism: Scholars Reflect on Dangerous Times”

One of the president’s nicknames ought to be Orange Truth-Crush (OTC). Trump has been lying...on a scale that is simply off the historical charts from the beginning of his presidency and before. That’s because he is at heart a totalitarian. And totalitarians don’t just lie about a one or a few things on occasion. They lie about almost everything they can pretty much all the time. They do this to advance their own political agenda and – most dangerously of all – to undermine and exhaust the public’s ability to separate fact from fiction and truth from deception.

Think Big Brother in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: he informs the masses over and over that 2+2=5, that Love is Hate, and the War is Peace. Because he says so.

*****

“Who or What Brought Down Dag Hammarskjöld?”

Hammarskjöld believed that the Congo ought to remain one country, and toward that end he was flying to Ndola (just over the border of Northern Rhodesia from Katanga) to have ceasefire talks with Tshombe, in the hope of mediating a settlement to the conflict. Instead, his plane crashed in the darkness, killing fifteen of the sixteen passengers and crew aboard the DC-6. One security officer for Hammarskjöld survived for about eight days.

*****

“News Outlets Reveal Their Utter Contempt for the Incarcerated”

News outlets including NBC News, The Washington Post and USA Today drew criticism for stories that echoed frustrated workers and shamed the incarcerated for being served holiday meals. The articles quoted prison guards who were “bitter” that, as the government shutdown left them working without pay, incarcerated people were allowed to eat a decent meal or celebrate a holiday.

*****

“The Shutdown Is a Middle Finger to Our Civil Servants and National Parks”

This week, as the government’s partial shutdown drags toward what will soon be the longest in history, we’ve started hearing harrowing stories about those who are suffering because of President Donald Trump’s decision to close the government over funding of a new border wall. Federal workers cannot afford to pay their rent, food will go uninspected, battered women may not be able to access services, and everyone faces long lines at airports as federal workers call in sick or quit rather than work without pay. With a stormy weekend ahead, it’s clear that the real victims of the protracted shutdown are largely innocent people just trying to go about their daily lives in a country that once provided certain services in the name of democracy.

*****

And Now We Close With Maybe the Biggest Story Ever

“Repeated Radio Signals Coming from Galaxy 1.5 Billion Light Years Away”

The breakthrough is only the second time scientists have seen such a repeating radio burst. It both deepens the mystery and offers a potential opportunity to finally understand what might be throwing out the burst from a galaxy billions of light years away.

Fast radio bursts have been speculated to be the result of everything from exploding stars to transmissions from aliens. But they have remained entirely mysterious, with little evidence at all of where they might be coming from.

LB/13 January 2019

-30-


Government Lockout: Neoliberal Moral Imbecility Wins Again

Putin Regime Reanimates Tsarist Russia's Theocratic Hatred of Jews;
Anti-Semitic Film
Trotsky Encourages New Pogroms Much as T/P
Regime Encourages New Plague of Racist, Sexist Violence
(See Below)

TO UNDERSTAND WHY the Neoliberals are murdering us and raping our Mother Earth to death -- and why the present government shut-down could become their deadliest short-term victory yet -- it is necessary to first acknowledge just how bottomlessly evil Neoliberalism truly is.

And to do that it is necessary to actually read a few treatises on Capitalist economics.

However I must confess this is a chore which for me is most often tantamount to suffocating myself in a bottomless miasma of boredom. Economics in the United States -- and probably

====================================================

Important note: news reports formerly published weekly in Dispatches are now published daily on the Facebook page of the Tacoma (Harry Bridges) Chapter of the Communist Labor Party. Most are stories suppressed or downplayed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM), the world's first private, for-profit version of Nazi Germany's Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Therefore please check this page at least once per day for vital information. Thank you.

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everywhere else in the Capitalist domain -- is taught like old-time parochial school catechism, a no-discussion/no-questions/rote-recitation-of-greed-worshiping-shibboleths. And it was that way decades  before the triumph of Neoliberalism.

But because journalistic intuition recognizes the present, seemingly irreversible government shutdown as the newest and potentially most vicious fulfillment of the Neoliberals' determination to “shrink (government) down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub” -- I spent all of Saturday struggling through the numbing turgidity of economic papers until at last I found five essays on Neoliberalism sufficiently definitive to help us understand just how ruinously our overlords are fucking us and how they intend to profit by our suffering.

The first essay, of British origin, defines Neoliberalism by its consequences:

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions, that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counter-productive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve...

In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

The second essay rather thought-provokingly  tells us what Neoliberalism is not:

What we are confronted by now is not the threat of fascism but the long march of neoliberalism that began in the 1970s with the overthrow of Salvador Allende. Chile became a testing ground for the economic ideas of Milton Friedman, which soon became enshrined in both the USA under Reagan and Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher. After them, they continued to be carried aloft by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The goal of neoliberal economics is to extirpate all of the gains made in the 20th century under social democratic or liberal governments such as social security or unemployment insurance...It has nothing to do with fascism and until we get that figured out, we will be next to useless careening from one antifa adventure to another.

The third defines Neoliberalism by its ever-more-murderous moral imbecility:

Neoliberalism is a vicious but cunning form of capitalism. And like all varieties of capitalism, it rests on a foundation of white supremacy. Neoliberalism’s goals are not merely privatization and the decimation of unions and the social safety net. It also seeks to manage the social order and ensure the continued political dominance of the ruling class by absorbing social threats. Sisters and brothers, your opposition to racist state terror is a major threat to the normal functioning (and thus the hegemony) of the neoliberal regime. To neutralize this threat and destabilize the most rebellious segments of the population, the corporate power structure aggressively propagates certain false assumptions among the public.

The fourth defines Neoliberalism by its methodical destruction of U.S. public education:

(N)eoliberalism... (replaces) the state with the market as a way to coordinate the economy...human relationships are forced to conform to an ideal of economic competition. The individual is transformed from a citizen into an independent economic actor... (by) massive tax cuts for the rich, the destruction of trade unions, a growing inequality of wealth, deregulation, privatization, unemployment and the decline of public services — with the exception of prisons and the military-industrial complex.

One aspect of...neoliberalism was to reshape the population’s understanding of the purpose of public institutions, such as schools and universities, to fit the corporate model...

The Powell memo’s plan was to: a) defund public higher education; b) then “save” the universities with ideologically focused corporate funding friendly to “free enterprise;” c) turn universities into corporations; and d) turn the students into consumers who became educated labor products. See also the update here.

The fifth and last essay tells us why the Neoliberals moved so swiftly to destroy Occupy:

Beneath the officially stated reasons for the often vicious and over-the-top, military-style municipal assaults on and break ups of Occupy’s camps lay a cold reality: city officials and police are beholden to overlapping metropolitan financial, corporate, and real estate elites, that is, to members, allies, and servants of the upper 1 percent that Occupy has with no small reason identified as the primary threat to public health, safety and democracy in the U.S. and the world. The masters and their metropolitan servants do not like...high profile symbols of how much their system has failed the American people (modern day “Obamavilles” that hark back to the ignominious “Hoovervilles” of the early Great Depression) or vibrant gatherings of energized people who seem to threaten to develop a life and culture beyond the wage- and salary- (and debt- and time-) slavery that is expected of the populace under the rule of capital...and...the longstanding corporate neoliberal agenda that serves and protects “the One Percent” -- the top hundredth of disproportionately Caucasian corporate and financial masters who own more than a third of the nation’s wealth and a larger share of its elected officials...

Note particularly the second of the above-linked essays. Please study it carefully and thoughtfully. Neoliberalism is not the same as fascism or Nazism; let us not be so blinded by fascist and Nazi atrocities to overlook the fact each dramatically improved their national infrastructures and by so doing provided millions of jobs to formerly unemployed workers.

In stark contrast, Neoliberalism does just the opposite. It unabashedly robs us and otherwise exploits us for no purpose beyond the fulfillment of our masters' unprecedentedly obscene and most likely terminal greed.

Neoliberalism, therefore, is best understood as a universal, government-enforced ethos of moral imbecility: Ayn Rand economics imposed on us with Ted Bundy savagery, obviously with the intent of reducing us all, via the Stockholm Syndrome, to the same serial-killer, snake-eat-crocodile sociopathy that defines our overlords.

(Yes, I am well aware the vast majority of my Marxian comrades regard the atrocities of Neoliberalism as “structural” and thus rebuke me for focusing on moral imbecility as Neoliberalism's ultimate origin. But in this instance I am compelled to reject their assertions as yet another variant of the always absurd chicken-or-egg argument. The fact remains -- proven beyond debate by the apocalyptic state of our world -- that just as one cannot become a Jeffrey Dahmer without first embracing moral imbecility, neither can one become a Neoliberal without first possessing the same anti-humanitarian mindset that defines serial killers.)

For two more recently exposed examples of Neoliberalism's atrocities -- these reported by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine in its sudden effort to regain a bit of its whored-away credibility and perhaps thereby reinforce the dwindling delusion of “American democracy” -- go here and here.

***

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING THE government shutdown is actually two Neoliberal coups simultaneously.

It is a lockout -- which is what happens when the boss shuts us out and denies us our paychecks in the hope the resultant devastation will make us more submissive to ever-intensifying tyrannies.

But for those of us who are required to work without pay lest we be punished for withholding our labor, it is unapologetic enslavement.

And our masters' defiantly bipartisan refusal to end the shutdown or even ameliorate its steadily worsening consequences proves they applaud the psychological havoc they are already inflicting. No doubt they believe it will “put us in our places” and shrink our growing rebelliousness into yet another episode of craven submission.

***

OBVIOUSLY THERE ARE at least three reasons reason the Neoliberals want to drown government in a bathtub.

One is that our overlords recognize the U.S. government -- for all its innumerable failings and deliberately genocidal atrocities -- has sometimes in the past, as in the Supreme Court's decisions on Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade,  managed to be the court of last resort for us, We the People, members of the Empire's ever-more-savagely oppressed 99 Percent.

And that protective function -- defending any of us against Capitalist atrocities -- could not be allowed in a genuinely Neoliberal nation. Hence the present-day Robber Court, which will never again allow the Constitution to obstruct white supremacy or misogyny or unlimited profiteering. Hence too the ongoing, eventually total destruction of the remnants of the socioeconomic safety net -- a long-range project given a huge boost by the lockout and its attendant subjugation and enslavement.

The second reason is that the government's function as the empire's primary denier of necessities for survival engenders precisely the heartfelt intensity of hatred, contempt and distrust of government and its bureaucrats that forever kills any widespread possibility of socialist revolution. Socialism is government -- and Neoliberalism's eternal uglification of government ensures its popular repugnance.

Reason three is the seldom-publicly expressed but nevertheless obvious Capitalist belief that corporate cabals are far more efficient than governments at reducing targeted populations to the modern forms of serfdom and slavery and -- when we are declared surplus -- to exterminating us without the embarrassment of death camps.

The consensus in every Capitalist boardroom on this planet is that government's only “legitimate” function is that of a goon squad, violently crushing resistance whenever it threatens to boil over into outright rebellion.

Let us therefore hope -- and if we are so inclined, fervently pray -- that the fully privatized, corporate-owned, for-profit Neoliberal future foreseen by so many of today's science fiction writers is a product of their loyalty to their corporate benefactors rather than of the prophetic function of art.

***

I THOUGHT THIS piece was finished until journalistic intuition again reared its oft-oracular head  and asked if the known victims of our 11 years of political murder -- President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Robert Francis Kennedy, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, James Earl Green and Karen Silkwood -- were each slain to ensure Neoliberalism never again has any effective opposition.

Following this hunch with a 12-hour exploration of the Internet -- thank you, Muse -- I found many hints others were reaching similar conclusions. Here is but one example:

(N)eoliberalism helped foreign bodies gain access to these resources and sell them abroad without reinvesting in the country where they were extracted. Understanding this chain of events that started with the JFK assassination helps us answer an important question about today’s world order.

But no one dared say it so bluntly as I say it now: that in the imperial homeland, as later in U.S. Puppet Pinochet's Chile, murder was the primary tool used to to clear the way for the imposition of Neoliberal tyranny.

Actually -- something I know both as a historian and as a former U.S. soldier -- such atrocities are nothing more than standard post-conquest military tactics: kill any potential leaders of resistance who cannot be co-opted or bought off and publicly gun down at least some of their followers to underscore the message that resistance is not only futile but suicidal.

To paraphrase Malcolm X, thus the predators of Operation Paperclip and the Gehlen Organization come home from Lidice to roost -- and feed.

Which at least circumstantially links all these seemingly unconnected deaths -- the victims ranging from a president who was presumably the most powerful and therefore well-protected man in the world to a high-school student slain on his way home from a part-time job or a union member murdered in retaliation for her activism -- by at long last assembling them into a familiar pattern that now in retrospect seems both Occam's-Razor obvious and therefore undeniable.

Such is the utterly conscience-less Evil by which We the People are confronted.

*****

Meanwhile Post-Soviet Russia Re-Embraces Its Own Brand of Violent Bigotry

RUSSIAN TELEVISION MARKED the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution with the broadcast of an eight-part television serial titled Trotsky. Quoth its most harshy outspoken reviewers:

The series is an exhibition of the political, intellectual and cultural depravity of all those involved...No excuses can be made for anyone...who participated in this mixture of lies, pornography, anti-communism and blatant anti-Semitism.

(T)he Putin regime...openly promoted this film and welcomed its broadcast on Kanal Pervyi (the most prominent TV channel) as an official event...

Joshua Rubenstein, author of the 2011 biography Leon Trotsky, said...“I wonder what their intention is by putting an explicitly Jewish figure like Trotsky at the center of the story...If they’re saying that Trotsky was behind the execution of the Tsar [as the film suggests], that’s simply not true. Lenin and Sverdlov executed the Tsar… If they’re saying it was Trotsky, then I really question their motives because this is a very sensitive point. … Trotsky always wanted to bring the Tsar to trial and serve as a prosecutor...The Tsar is an honored figure by the Russian Orthodox Church—to say that a Jew was behind his execution is a very incendiary accusation.” (Emphasis added.)

Comment: A notable U.S. scientist for whom I did a bit of journalistic work during his final years -- he was a PhD biologist whose mother had escaped from Tsarist Russia in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905 -- told me she had repeatedly frightened him and his brother by describing in detail the pogroms she had witnessed.  

The word is Russian; it means "to wreak havoc."

But his mother's most horrifying disclosure, he said, was that the Cossacks' favorite method of killing Jewish infants and toddlers was to anally impale them on picket fences and then bet amongst themselves on how long the tiny victims might remain conscious in writhing, shrieking, convulsing agony.

Significantly, the woman's two sons were each born in the U.S. after she herself had become a naturalized citizen and married an also-naturalized immigrant from Switzerland.

But while the boys were preschoolers, she often dressed them as Cossacks -- I have seen the photographs -- presumably to acquaint them with their Russian heritage.

Astounding.

*****

How Democrats Intend to Suppress the Sanders Campaign

National polling shows that the U.S. public strongly favors bold policy proposals that Sanders has been championing for a long time. On issues ranging from climate change to Medicare for All to tuition-free public college to Wall Street power, the party’s base has been moving leftward, largely propelled by an upsurge of engagement from progressive young people. This momentum is a threat to the forces accustomed to dominating the Democratic Party. Additional reportage here.

Comment: I doubt the Democratic (sic) Party and its Neoliberal owners will ever let Sanders be anything more than yet another Barack the Betrayer (and probably never more than a political decoy). But such reports are nevertheless significant for what they tell us about the terminal oppressiveness of the United States and its masters.

*****

Vengeful Republicans Kill Minimum Wage Hikes, Voter-Rights Expansions

Lame duck sessions of Republican-controlled state legislatures in Michigan and Wisconsin have passed dozens of bills overturning voter decisions in the November 6 election. In both states, Republican state administrations were swept out of office—narrowly in Wisconsin, by a wide margin in Michigan—but the state legislatures remain under Republican control.

While the most publicized actions have been politically motivated slaps at incoming Democratic governors in the two states, the most substantive and reactionary actions have been to effectively reverse efforts to raise the minimum wage and expand voting rights in the two states.

*****

NYC Steam Plant Explosion Looks Like Imagined Onset of Alien Invasion

Though it immediately evoked images of "an alien invasion" or the eerie opening scene of a "monster movie," the explosion that briefly turned New York City's skyline bright blue late Thursday night was actually something rather more conventional, but still cause for serious alarm and action: an electrical blast at one of New York's dirtiest power plants. (With scary photograph of the startling light show).

*****

Texas Persecutes Teacher-of-the-Year for Lesbianism

A former Texas teacher of the year, who has been on paid administrative leave since September after parents complained she was pushing a “homosexual agenda,” is suing the school district for discrimination.

According to the federal lawsuit, Stacy Bailey believes the Mansfield Independent School District put her on paid administrative leave, then offered to transfer her to a secondary school, because she is gay.

*****

Was Friday's South Sound 911 Outage Part of Much Larger Cyber Attack?

South Sound 911, the emergency service provider for Tacoma, was nonfunctional for a time Friday (28 December) as a result of circumstances that remain undisclosed.

Nevertheless, maximum kudos to the 911 operators, who notified by telephone the literally tens of thousands of us affected by the outage, provided us an alternative phone number to access emergency services and then, a few hours later, phoned us to announce the service was restored and asked us to please confirm receipt of the restoration message by pressing the number "1" on our telephonic keypads.

I can't imagine a larger city being so considerate of its population, so once again I am grateful for where I live and for the social services we Tacomans have thus far managed to save from Neoliberal theft and cancellation.

Other simultaneous computer failures -- including online access to the bank that holds my account -- leave me wondering if the South Sound 911 outage was yet another aspect of the much larger cyber-attack that shut down 11 major U.S. newspapers.

*****

Ralph Nader on Why We Desperately Need Canadian-Style Healthcare

Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare. No health insurance system is without problems but Canadian-style single-payer— full Medicare for all— is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal...

Below (in the linked report) please find 25 ways the Canadian health care system is better than the chaotic U.S. system.

Replace it with the much more efficient Medicare-for-all: everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear.

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Eight LGBTQ Struggles the Mainstream Media Refused to Cover

If anything, 2018 showed that LGBTQ liberation is a long, drawn-out process that’s going to take much more than policy change and a narrow focus on one particular identity. The many queer and trans people who organized around LGBTQ issues over the past year also worked to curb capitalism, end deportations and challenge police violence — issues that affect marginalized people everywhere. Here are (the) eight battles...

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How New Jersey's Bergen County Ends Chronic Homelessness

In order to receive emergency assistance an applicant must provide proof that no one in their family is declaring them a dependent on their tax forms. Many young homeless are homeless because they are estranged from their families and not on speaking  terms. Applicants for emergency housing assistance must also prove that they are not eligible for unemployment benefits. If you are, and even if those benefits don’t amount to enough to pay rent and live on, you are nevertheless turned down for emergency assistance.

Social services personnel too often act as though their job is to find obstacles to providing housing rather than trying to make their services readily available...

If you are thinking that perhaps Bergan County can achieve this because of its small size, monotone demographics and remote location you could not be more wrong. Bergan County is located directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan, it is the most populous county in New Jersey (948,406); and its population is as diverse economically and racially as any similar American urban center...

Julia Orlando is willing and eager to assist others in ending homelessness in the communities where they live. She is available for consultations, conference calls and one-on-one meetings. Reach out to her at the Bergen County, Housing, Health and Human Services Center, 120 S. River Street, Hackensack, NJ 07601. 201-336-6476 (w).

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And in Closing, a Delightful Story about the Crickets Who Came for Christmas

Besides my wife, Briana, and I, our house is home to 5-year-old twins, a 1-year-old, three large cats, one beagle-basset mix and one lizard. There was only one place where I thought I could put the cricket box without it getting overturned or split open by a child or an animal: the bathroom adjacent to our kitchen. I put the crickets in the cabinet above the toilet and went back to work. For about 20 minutes, everything was quiet.

Just as I was about to file my story, I heard Briana, in the kitchen, utter the following words: “Where do these crickets keep coming from?

In the name of the Goddess and all benevolent gods whether real or symbolic, a better 2019 to everyone!

LB/30 December 2018

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How Ayn Rand Moral Imbecility Prohibits Socialist Revolution

THE MOST INSURMOUNTABLE challenge for those of us on the Real Left in the United States today is figuring out how to convince the profoundly brain-warped electorate to discard the false notion that all government is tyranny.

By endlessly repeating the Big Lie that government is the ultimate barrier to human progress, the Capitalists and their Madison Avenue vassals have perfected what is undoubtedly our species' most enduringly effective barrier against socialist revolution and even New-Dealish reform.

And until we the people are somehow miraculously purged of the now-reflexive majority belief in this relentlessly conditioned and ultimately paralyzing falsehood, both reform and revolution will remain – precisely as our Capitalist masters intend – forever impossible.

But with Neoliberalism exposing itself ever more frequently as Capitalism's newest and most maliciously deceptive euphemism for fascism (and for outright ChristoNazism in the United States), even avowed “democratic socialists” such as Chris Hedges are beginning to acknowledging the relevance of Marxism.

Hence the relevance of Hedges' essay entitled “Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism,” perhaps the most succinctly revealing English-language summation yet published describing

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Important note: news reports formerly published weekly in Dispatches are now published daily on the Facebook page of the Tacoma (Harry Bridges) Chapter of the Communist Labor Party. Most are stories suppressed or downplayed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM), the world's first private, for-profit version of Nazi Germany's Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Therefore please check this page at least once per day for vital information. Thank you.

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how the Republican Party's Christian white supremacy and the Democratic (sic) Party's post-JFK surrender to Wall Street led directly to the implicit fascism of the Prosperity Gospel, the de facto merging of the two major U.S. parties into the One Capitalist Party of Two Names (TOCPOTN) and TOCPOTN's methodical, boiled-frog conquest of the United States by ChristoNazi theocracy:

Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. It had as much validity as past ruling ideologies such as the divine right of kings and fascism’s belief in the Übermensch. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy... But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power...

Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman were groomed in places such as the University of Chicago and given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand..It was a con. But it worked...“The great thing about freedom of the market is it appears to be egalitarian, but there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals...What Marx showed brilliantly in volume one of ‘Capital’ is that freedom of the market produces greater and greater levels of social inequality.”

While Hedges' most recent essay is most assuredly not news to those of us who are Marxians or increasingly so inclined, it is nevertheless worth contemplating for its succinct and unsparingly accurate summation of post-JFK socioeconomic history.

It is also (more) unequivocal proof the United States is Moron Nation – Planet Earth's most savagely anti-intellectual (and therefore willingly deluded) personification of the apocalypse.

The Powell Memo is thus again revealed as the modern, vindictively euphemistic (i.e. criminally deceptive) variant of Hitler's Mein Kamp, with Ayn Rand's atrociously turgid prose as its fictional, popular-propaganda variant. Though Hedges' does not specifically reference the former, his inclusion of the memo's prime sponsors – the Business Roundtable, the national Chamber of Commerce and the Heritage Foundation – cites it implicitly.

And just as the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM) knowingly suppressed the Powell Memo story until Jack Anderson finally managed to expose it via his (limited circulation) investigative column in 1975, so did MMPM's hucksters, Josef Goebbels wannabes every one, peddle Rand's how-to-do-it books on Nazism and moral imbecility in general so effectively they are now required brain-warp reading in all U.S. high schools.

Next, Andrew Levine points out, in “Trumpland: Get Ready for the Storm Ahead,” how the Democratic (sic) Party is in (oft-suppressed) truth the prime facilitator of the maximum-savagery Reaganism that is the key socioeconomic element in the Trump/Pence Regime's ChristoNazi agenda:

(T)he actual governing is being done by miscreants who think, as the Gipper put it, that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”   They also think, as Reagan did, that the way to deal with government is to disable it by impoverishing it, to “starve the beast.”

Their miserliness has limits, however; it only applies to those parts of government that serve socially useful purposes...Abandoning all pretenses of fiscal conservatism, they think that the parts that keep the military-industrial complex in business or that keep all but the hyper-rich in line through the use or threat of force ought to get heaps of money thrown their way...Democrats were on board with that too. Thus every American president after Reagan followed his lead; they were all Reaganites under the skin.

Indeed, the most Reaganite president of all was Bill Clinton.  No one did more to implement “the Reagan agenda”; not either Bush and not Reagan himself. (Emphasis added.)

Obama rode the Reaganite wave too, making a mockery of what Sarah Palin aptly called “ that hopey changey thing.”

Then there's “How Capitalism Prevents Confronting the Climate Crisis,” the inept and grammatically jangling title of which exemplifies what happens when computer-sappy publishers inform their copy editors Apple and Microsoft have made editing skills obsolete, fire us all and opt to rely solely on reporters' spell-check software as our (no-wage) replacements.

(I myself am one of those eternally unemployed victims of computerization; with nearly two decades of newspaper and magazine copy desk experience, I would have headlined this story, “How Capitalism Makes Environmental Apocalypse Inevitable,” which summarizes its contents far more accurately than its author did.)

Nevertheless:

Utah Senator Mike Lee  said about our climate change crisis, “all the proposals I’ve seen so far that would address any of these issues would devastate the U.S. economy.” This is considered a reasonable explanation of maintaining the status quo. This is the insanity built into capitalism... The context for the question was the release on Friday of a  report  from the US government itself saying that, within a century, climate change could cost our country “hundreds of billions of dollars annually” and kill thousands of additional Americans per year. 

Mike Lee is a right wing ideologue. But on this issue, his position is the mainstream one. The entire world—led by the rich developed nations, the US in particular—is staring down a huge, slow-moving tidal wave called climate change. We know it is coming. We have been told repeatedly the devastation that it will cause. And yet world leaders collectively go about their business as usual, taking no action concomitant with the level of danger that we all know we are facing. On a very basic level, this is insane. If we were standing on the train track, and we knew the train was coming, and we did not rouse ourselves to step out of the way, we would be suicidal. We are doing exactly that on the issue of climate change. Are we suicidal? No. We are capitalists. And we are following the logic of capitalism straight to hell. (Emphasis added.)

(Yes I already posted this report on the Tacoma Communist Labor Party Facebook page, but I repost it here for those whom – in rational fear of the 17 U.S. secret police agencies – prefer to avoid such virtual destinations.)

As to how the MMPM is in fact the world's first, privately-owned, for-profit Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, its suppression of the George H. W. Bush/Central Intelligence Agency cover-up of a Pinochet death squad's invasion of Washington D.C. is typical:

In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.

The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was (sending its death squads to invade the United States)...

Thanks to the late and much lamented Robert Parry for this most properly damning eulogy to Bush I and his CIA (Original Nazi) legacy of providing aid and comfort to the metastasizing cancers of Nazi and fascist regimes everywhere on the planet.

(One hopes future historians – if indeed the Capitalists are by some genuine miracle prevented from killing us all – will truthfully describe the MMPM as the ultimate example of Neoliberal privatization.)

But MMPM, again mimicking its German Nazi forebear, is predictably going to ever-more-extreme lengths to suppress any criticism of the ever-more-ChristoNazified U.S. status quo:

For ten years, Jim Hightower’s weekly column – Little Puffs of Populism – has been distributed week in and week out by Creators’ Syndicate to newspapers around the country.

Not one problem.

Until this week’s column titled “Free The Free Press from Wall Street Plunderers.”

The big, hedge-fund owned newspaper chains that Hightower calls out in his column are big customers of theirs, and as such, they don’t want to risk offending them,” said Hightower assistant Melody Byrd.

Another of the innumerable examples of Nazification in action also bears contemplation:

General Motors announced that it is closing five plants in the US and Canada and wiping out the jobs of nearly 15,000 production and salaried workers in early 2019. The jobs massacre is the spearhead for a new restructuring of the global auto industry, threatening the jobs of millions around the world.

Ten years ago, the global financial crash was used by capitalist governments in the US and throughout the world to organize a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the super-rich. A key chapter in this ruling class offensive was the 2009 bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler. The restructuring was overseen by Obama’s Auto Task Force, a gang of Wall Street financiers who axed tens of thousands of jobs and gutted the income and workplace protection of autoworkers.

This was the signal for a similar campaign against the wages and benefits of the entire working class in the US and around the world. Last year, global wage growth fell to the lowest rate since 2008, far below the levels before the financial crash...

As does this example of tyranny, a properly horrifying report on how welfare departmentsnever mind they are mostly commanded and staffed by alleged liberals and progressives – are methodically criminalizing impoverished people who dare have children:

Three-quarters of substantiated child maltreatment cases are related to neglect, and the kind of neglect that triggers a CPS case is almost always the result of poverty. Although each state gets to set its own specific definitions for neglect, they typically center around deprivation of things like food, shelter, clothing, or medical treatment, which are problems almost totally exclusive to poor people.

And then there's this:

(B)elief in demonic possession is widespread in the United States today. Polls conducted in recent decades by Gallup and the data firm YouGov suggest that roughly half of Americans believe demonic possession is real. The percentage who believe in the devil is even higher, and in fact has been growing: Gallup polls show that the number rose from 55 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 2007.

While in past years I might have sarcastically dismissed these findings as additional evidence of Moron Nation's penchant for fantasizing explanations of Capitalism's apocalyptic reality, I now recognize them as entirely logical expression of how even the more benighted members of our species are awakening to the fact we are all being drowned in our overlords' carefully synthesized miasma of the same Absolute Evil that was invoked and made real by Hitler and all the other Original Nazis.

Plus this:

The incredibly destructive Woolsey Fire in southern California has burned nearly 100,000 acres in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, killed three people, destroyed more than 400 structures, and...may also have released large amounts of radiation and toxins into the air after burning through a former rocket engine testing site where a partial nuclear meltdown took place nearly six decades ago.

In obvious response to such suicidal folly, Mother Nature again demonstrates how she always bats last:

Just when you thought you'd armed yourself appropriately to catch spiders in your house, along comes one that can turn itself invisible.

As she does likewise here:

A dad-of-five has reportedly died as the result of a bite from a deadly redback spider.

And here:

Just when you thought the flesh-eating False Widow spider was as bad as it gets... along comes the terrifying Huntsman!

Given the apocalyptic outcome of patriarchal religion's multi-millennia misogynistic war against our planetary Motherland, who can doubt she has begun evolving genuinely deadly weapons for her own defense against human malfeasance.

But – take heart -- there is a bit of encouraging news too:

The fight for LGBTQ rights didn’t begin with sexuality. In his new book, Roderick A. Ferguson asserts that the singular focus on sexuality and marriage was the result of a depoliticized movement that only served to maintain a white, heteronormative and capitalist status quo. One-Dimensional Queer (Polity: 2018) demands that we reexamine the intersectional history of the LGBTQ movement, which was rooted in many other movements of the ’60s and ’70s, to find instruments of true radical change. The (linked) excerpt explores the beginnings of that depoliticization that occurred almost immediately after the Stonewall riots.

Disclosure: the night of the Stonewall Riot I was drinking at the nearby Lion's Head, which in funereal retrospect might be best remembered as an unofficial New York City press club. Thus I must bear witness to the fact the police raid that provoked the Stonewall-patrons' bold resistance would have been dismissed as just another of the New York City Police Department's innumerable LGBTQ-bashing atrocities had not a number of heterosexual members of the working press been caught up in the NYPD's mass arrest of everyone, journalists included, who was anywhere near the Stonewall on Christopher Street that night. The resultant (relatively uncensored) coverage is what actually birthed the Gay Liberation Movement.

Meanwhile the nation's most viciously persecuted non-racial minority is generating a notably evocative art of resistance:

The visions that trans people have dreamed of, created and nourished are either a current reality or one in the making.

Lastly, a report of “Temperate Words from the Hard Right”:

Ammon Bundy is part of the family of ranchers who occupied a National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, touching off a prolonged standoff, the death of a follower, and an unsuccessful federal prosecution (the jury found Not Guilty).  He has previously expressed views characteristic of the extreme right wing, such as extreme hostility to government, and a conviction that we are “a Christian nation.”

But lately he has been criticizing Trump’s rhetoric and policies regarding immigration, arguing that Christianity teaches us that we should welcome and support noncriminal immigrants, sheltering them, feeding them, helping them to get jobs.  He rejects Trump’s lumping of all the immigrants together as criminals, and criticizes the use of fear to mobilize opposition to the immigrants.

Might then the less-sadistic varieties of Christianity actually help facilitate our awakening to how Capitalism and the ultimate Evil of its mandatory moral imbecility is literally our species' doomday machine?

I'll explore this possibility in another essay, possibly next weekend – assuming my first-of-the-month chores allow me adequate time for research.

LB/2 December 2018

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Bitter Bites: Reports on Capitalism's Happy Holiday Horrors

New Research Proves Most U.S. Whites Are Already Incurably Nazified

SOME READERS SCOFF at my oft-repeated assertion the Pew Foundation's post-Katrina polling is definitive proof fully 77 percent of the white Christian U.S. electorate is at least tacitly racist.

But now my 77-percent estimate is confirmed by a new study that defines the U.S. as probably the most viciously racist nation since Nazi Germany.

Hence – because the white Christian hatred of Jews and people of color is the epicentral malevolence of Nazism – I believe it entirely accurate to refer to these homegrown (and

NEWS REPORTS formerly published weekly in Dispatches are now published daily in the Tacoma (Harry Bridges Chapter) Facebook page of the Communist Labor Party. Most of these reports were suppressed or significantly downplayed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM), the world's first privately owned, for-profit version of the Nazi German Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Please scroll down this (slow-loading) FB page at least once per day for vital new information. Thank you.

 

 

probably home-schooled) bigots as “incipiently Nazi” though the vast majority of them conceal their malignancy save at critical moments.

Here is an excerpt from the study:

Evil disguised as common sense is as American as Thanksgiving, and now we have research to back it up...(in) Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. (Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Míriam Juan-Torres, Tim Dixon et al; More in Common: 2018). They asked...why is America so polarized?... the Hidden Tribes study clearly shows that this country is profoundly right-wing and segregated. Millions of Americans disguise their enabling of corrupt policies and our slide toward being an authoritarian society run by the rich by claiming to be disgusted, befuddled, and turned off to politics. Silence is consent. And the study shows a majority of people in the United States are remaining silent about Trump’s white nationalist horror show.

And here are two excerpts from a review of a book that (perhaps unintentionally) supplements the Hidden Tribes findings by examining the Capitalist miasma of socioeconomic despair, toxic ignorance and morally imbecilic Ayn Rand anti-humanitarianism from which USian ChristoNazism has – like its German forefather and its Manifest Destiny grandfather – grown so rapaciously.

How Fascism Works: the Politics of Us and Them (Jason Stanley; Random House: 2018)...Fascism’s taproot, (Stanley) finds, is harsh socioeconomic disparity...Particularly perceptive is Stanley’s intimately related reflection on how the political culture of pseudo-democratic duplicity and disingenuousness that is generated by modern capitalist inequality and plutocracy creates space for fascistic politicians who...signal authenticity by standing for division and conflict without apology. Such candidates, Stanley writes...come off to many jaded voters as “a breath of fresh air in a political culture that seems dominated by real and imagined hypocrisy.” Fascist politicos’ “open rejection of democratic values” is “taken as political bravery, as a signal of authenticity.”  

Stanley is especially critical of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: 

(Obama's) progressive-sounding "hope” and “change” policy bailed out and protected the Wall Street financial institutions that collapsed the U.S. and global economy...offered no remotely comparable bailout for working people and the poor...passed health insurance reform that only the big insurance and drug companies could truly love...abandoned his promise to...relegalize union organizing (and)...offer(ed) bigger cuts to Social Security and Medicare than the right...had dared to demand... 

Then came the Hillary “Goldman Sachs” Clinton campaign...undermined further when she called Trump’s “heartland” “flyover country” supporters a “basket of deplorables” in a sneering comment (one that accurately reflected her aristocratic progressive-neoliberal worldview) to rich Manhattan campaign donors.  

Nevertheless – as the reviewer makes clear – Stanley ignores how the neoliberal Democratic (sic) Party has collaborated with the Republicans in the creation of a single Capitalist party disguised by two names and already notorious for its New Gilded Age of “spectacular” inequality.  

Based on this review, Stanley also seems to ignore the seething hatreds – of Nature, of femaleness, of people of color, of LGBTQ people, indeed of any sort of alleged nonconformity – that I regard as the first cause and ultimate vector of ChristoNazism's terrifying momentum.  

Yes, Capitalism's socioeconomic horrors are indisputably amongst the causes of the Christonazi conquest of the United States and the rise of Nazism and fascism elsewhere.  

But the X factor – the factor that determines whether one becomes a ChristoNazi (or any other form of fascist) – is a depth and magnitude of anti-humanitarian hatefulness so extreme it is utterly irremediable.  

Which I believe is the defining characteristic of a newly emergent human subspecies: call it Homo sapiens horribilis – literally “consciously horrible human.”  

Whether the first cause of Nazism and fascism is the U.S.-defining legacy of 526 years of murderous white supremacist hatefulness or the socioeconomic savagery that defines Capitalism, the growing roster of its victims is making its reality undeniable even here in the Disneyworld of Self-Delusion.  

Here is a prime example:  

I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …”

This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.

Poverty—both individual and social—is a policy, not an accident, and not some kind of natural law. These are deliberate choices about the allocation of resources. They are eminently undo-able by modest exercises of political power, although if the state- and city-level Democratic leaders of New York and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally left-wing party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social wealth to an extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women.

And another:  

What we know today is that America’s political and corporate elite would rather see humanity end within a century than disavow its imperialistic and self-aggrandizing ambitions. Their obsession is to rule to the bitter end, a bitter end hastened by their obsession to remain in control. America does not have a robust permanent national commitment to contain, ameliorate and possibly reverse climate change and ecological deterioration because that would necessarily require the overthrow of Imperial America’s capitalist elite and its classist and racist mentality.

And yet another:

With a black-ink pen, (Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions') initialed...a document formalizing the terms of what will be one of his abiding legacies: a Justice Department disengaged from its role in investigating and reforming police departments that repeatedly violate the civil rights of the people they’re sworn to protect...His memo places significant hurdles in the way of DOJ entering into consent decrees with state and city governments. It mandates closer control by the Justice Department’s most senior political appointees, requires sunset dates for consent decrees, and limits what the DOJ can require of state and city agencies...Current and former Justice Department officials note that the new policy also applies to other areas of the department’s work, such as efforts to curb pollution. They worry its effects will be most profound and far-reaching in those realms.

Meanwhile Hillary – no doubt in preparation for her next effort to capture the USian emperorship – now unleashes her inner Goldwater Girl and joins the ChristoNazis in blaming immigrants-of-color for all the world's apocalyptic ills:

In an interview with The Guardian, the 2016 presidential candidate...suggested Europe should end its attempts to resettle the world’s 25.4 million refugees whose home countries have become unlivable due to war, unrest, and poverty—frequently thanks to actions by the U.S. and its European allies...Clinton’s remarks echoed Trump’s frequent lies about the burden Central American immigrants have placed on the United States.  

Given the ever-more-evident Christo-Nazification of this “one nation under god,” I am hardly surprised Hillary the snickering sadist is again brandishing her moral twinhood with Ilsa Koch in an effort to convince the electorate she is as Trumpian as Trump himself.  

Nor am I surprised the white male Christian god's Prosperity Gospel government has abandoned Camp Fire California just as it abandoned the mostly-minority populations of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the entire Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil-spill disaster, and Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricane Maria. 

The Camp Fire, the deadliest in state history, took ruthless aim at older people. Paradise, the Northern California town erased by fire, was largely a retirement community, with a quarter of the population 65 and older. The fire’s death toll was 81 at last count, and nearly 1,000 people still unaccounted for — most of them seniors. The sheriff’s list of the missing includes many in their 70s and 80s. 

The response of government officials, Democrat and Republican, has been to downplay the extent of the disaster while seeking to deflect attention from those responsible. On Sunday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke absurdly declared that unnamed “environmental radicals” are to blame for preventing good forest management. This followed Trump’s tour of the state with Democratic Party officials, which was characterized by empty platitudes and mutual declarations of support.

But even when we add the equally unsurprising revelations that two of the United States' most relentlessly oppressive characteristics – the industrial world's most socioeconomically genocidal healthcare and the developed world's worst mass transport – are intentionally malicious expressions of racist hatefulness – I nevertheless found the following (which I did not know of until yesterday), to be painfully wrenching:  

I have long joked that “kill a tree for Christmas” or "kill a tree for Jesus" should be the midwinter slogans of the white male Christians, whose bottomless misogynistic vindictiveness is as much directed at Mother Earth as it is at femaleness in general. But I must confess its newest notional national variant, "torture a turkey for Thanksgiving,” shocked even my own jaded crime-reporter's sensibilities:

That is what the Yellville Turkey Trot festival is famous and infamous for, you see: living, breathing, squawking birds getting lobbed out of a low-flying aircraft.

Holidays and the rites and rituals by which they are celebrated are of course a primary element in how a people defines itself. 

As I said, H. sapiens horribilis.

LB/26 November 2018 

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