Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Reinforced by Catholic Teens, ChristoNazis Turn Ecumenical

No Matter Who Rules -- Democratic (sic) Party or Republican Party --
Deadly White Supremacy Is U.S. Imperial Policy at Home and Abroad

ANOTHER EXTENDED WEEK of breaking news and time-consuming personal obligations again delays my work-in-progress on (the few) anti-Nazi Christians and once more makes for a somewhat abbreviated anthology of Dispatches:

Viral footage of (white) teenagers mobbing a Native American man and his companions at Friday's Indigenous Peoples March is sparking outrage. In the video, the man—identified by Indian Country Today as Omaha elder Nathan Phillips—is seen singing and drumming with fellow marchers while encircled by chanting teens, many of whom are wearing President Trump's Make America Great Again apparel. One youth pointedly stands directly in front of Phillips, smirking.

The teens are thought to be students of Kentucky's Covington Catholic High School, which dispatched students to Washington D.C. for the anti-abortion March for Life, which was also held Friday.

See also: ...It’s the kid’s face. The face of self-satisfaction and certitude, of edginess expressed as cruelty.

***

U.S. ChristoNazism Encouraging Ever-More-Violent White Racism

Due to its unusual growth spurt, this (bigotry) is now openly assailing  people of color,  physically and emotionally...

This unfounded hatred was once done secretly, now it is out in the open. The national government has become an obvious nesting site for this violent bigotry. Also, it is obvious to see that it has infiltrated all levels of local government, including courts, police, jail, and social services. These bigots are of European Caucasoid origin, educated, illiterate, elderly, young, rich and poor...

***

The Psychological Underbelly of the ChristoNazi Malignancy

Everyday we look at unfolding news and events through the lens of politics. Suppose we tried to understand it all instead through the lens of psychology? Suppose we got beyond the zero-sum political construct, and into how we have been and are still being manipulated.

What if we realized that President Donald Trump is just a symptom of the deeper crumbling psychological infrastructure of our country? One that makes us so vulnerable to divisive political tactics?  

Our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast is psychologist and attorney Dr. Bryant Welch. In his book State of Confusion, he argues that these are questions not of politics, but about the health of the American mind.

Welch talks to Jeff Schechtman about the long-term impact of today’s sophisticated forms of political manipulation, all of which undercut our ability to seriously deal with modern problems. In an era of change and the onslaught of technology, Welch explains how we are particularly susceptible to paranoia, sexual perplexity, and envy — and how they can easily be used to undermine our ability to function rationally.

In Welch’s theories, we can see the root cause of the power of religious groups...

***

White Racist Malevolence at Border Revealed as Policy Not Accident

Following reports on Thursday that federal officials forcibly separated thousands more migrant children from their families than previously reported, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D.-Ore.) released a document to NBC News revealing the Trump administration intended to “traumatize children and intentionally create a humanitarian crisis at the border.”

***

Anti-Child, Anti-Woman Racists Run Amok as Haiti Is Recolonized

Children in Haiti are viewed as exploitable—be it by the NGOs or the U.N., which are ready to use their faces as invitations for donors to send money. Many male NGO workers have been found to have exploited women sexually in return for food and shelter, a fact made public in 2018 with the Oxfam scandal. What is less well-known is that there are men who specifically enter the field of humanitarian aid in order to gain easy access to children...Female children are most at risk in Haiti, and the presence of NGOs has not made them any safer. If anything, it has exacerbated the situation...

In the cases of many international adoptions, the paperwork has served as a cover for trafficking. Many (Haitian) children were not placed in families but were trafficked and made to work on Dominican sugarcane plantations, and many female children were prostituted to tourists all over the country. There are even cases of these children’s bodies used for organ harvesting.

***

No Surprise: White Supremacy Remains Dominant in Mainstream Media Machine

The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) has joined the NAACP in criticizing CBS News’ initial, 12-person lineup of digital journalists assigned to cover the 2020 elections, which includes five women, three Asian Americans, at least one Hispanic, but no Blacks...

Black employment in newsrooms is a civil rights issue, like employment issues anywhere, but it has been a very long time since the presence of Black and brown reporters of any gender has made any detectable difference in the politically monochromatic corporate world view transmitted by the so-called “mainstream” electronic and print press in the United States. Since its formation in the mid-Seventies, the National Association of Black Journalists has been concerned almost solely with counting Black faces in newsroom chairs, rather than the issues of power and politics that shape the actual journalistic content churned out daily by the “news” industry....The NABJ asks only that Blacks be represented on corporate payrolls, mastheads and credits. For the NABJ, “diversity” has no political content beyond numerical representation in the workplace.

***

“Kamala Harris Is No Friend of Black People”

California Senator Kamala Harris shows all the signs of announcing her candidacy for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. She is giving speeches in the right states, interviewing with the right talking heads, and recently published the obligatory memoir. She has been on the Democratic funder’s casting couch for nearly two years. Only the official announcement is missing.

But Harris is highly problematic for black voters, perhaps more so than any other candidate. She served as the district attorney of San Francisco and later as attorney general of California. In both roles she did everything in her power to support the mass incarceration system and all of its foundations. That is what prosecutors do after all, but most of them don’t try to run for president and ask for black people’s votes...

***

Obviously, the Shutdown Is as Maliciously Racist as the Border Closure

The ongoing, historically unprecedented shutdown of the federal government has exposed...the Republican Party’s bottomless disdain for marginalized people through its craven refusal to contain the man who has unleashed all this misery.

***

And as For That (Entirely Bogus) State of Emergency...

While there is little question that Trump has the legal authority to declare a state of emergency, it remains to be seen whether...Trump’s appetite for even more outrageous initiatives will expand exponentially until he destroys our democracy piece by piece, one phony national emergency at a time.

Comment: The charade of U.S. democracy died on 22 November 1963; since then, its mudflow of associated Big Lies -- “liberty,” “justice for all ,” etc. ad nauseam -- have merely gotten more obvious. But I linked to the story despite the text's reflexive salute to falsehood because its content provides further proof of what I have been hypothesizing all along -- that this shutdown/lockout is Grover Norquist's long-intended, meticulously planned drowing of humanitarian government, complete with the murder by genocidal deprivation of as many as possible of those of us dependent on Social Security, Medicare and various government social-service subsidies.

It is also ever more obviously a strategic turning-point in imperial governance, clearly intended by our Neoliberal masters -- whether Democratic (sic) or Republican -- as a devastating, potentially blow to us, We the (real) People of the 99 Percent.

The only question now – since it is clear no resolution is forthcoming – is how the shutdown/lockout will conclude: with a general uprising of the Working Class (which will give the regime its long-sought excuse to openly tyrannize us as brutally as any other Nazi-conquered people); or merely with the submissive whimpering of an additionally wounded but already thoroughly subjugated proletariat.

*****

Ruling Class Insider Admits U.S. Is Imposing Nazi-Style Total Censorship

Soon after the social media “purge” of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider — Jamie Fly — was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was “just the beginning” of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond.

*****

Another (Pointless) Demand for New Probes of Kennedy, King Murders

A group consisting of relatives of the Kennedy and King families, as well as their confidantes and other prominent voices, is calling for a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to get to the bottom of these tragic murders.

Over the decades, those in power, whether in government, media, or academia, have contended that all of these murders were simply the result of lone-wolf actors: There was “no collusion,” and please don’t mention that other “C” word — conspiracy.

But parallel to these affirmations, an ever-growing group of dissenters has pointed out the inconsistencies in the official narratives. They have demonstrated that those events could not have unfolded the way we’ve been taught on TV and in standard textbooks. Indeed, the evidence of a deeper and darker story is so compelling that one must begin to ask why those in power are not investigating further?

Comment: Never happen. Why? Because a real investigation would reveal to the world what most of us already know in our hearts even if we cannot bear to admit it consciously -- that the United  States has been on a deliberate, malicious, boiled-frog path to ChristoNazism ever since the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 proclaimed the death of the USian republic and initiated the political cleansing of the USian Empire's ever-more-tyrannized homeland. 

***** 

Barr Claims He Won't Persecute People in Legalized-Marijuana States

The Trump administration’s nominee for US Attorney General, William Barr, during Senate testimony on Tuesday  affirmed that he would not use the power of the Justice Department to target marijuana-related activity in jurisdictions where the plant is legally regulated.

Comment: How reassuringly progressive of this newest Trump/Pence Regime nominee. But never forget that all USian Capitalist-party political appointees routinely lie under oath.

***

Democratic Treachery: Two More Examples of “Change We Can Believe In”

It’s a brand new year and Democrats running the House of Representatives under Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn and Steny Hoyer need to rebrand themselves in preparation for the 2020 elections. So Team Pelosi has rolled out what they and their far flung chorus of corporate media hacks from MSNBC to so-called “woke” social media are calling their flagship bill for the 116th Congress. To hear them tell it, it’s all about ending corruption in Congress and the White House, about taking the Big Money out of politics, and most of all, it’s about protecting voting rights.

It’s HR 1, a 571 page monstrosity, actually a sleazy ghetto ice cream truckload of empty promises Democrats wouldn’t keep even if they had the power, and which they refused to put forward when they DID have the power. In typical Democrat fashion HR 1 also contains a couple of serious threats against American left dissenters in general and the Green Party in particular...

See also: The Democratic Party is a political trap designed to capture the most progressive constituency in the United States: Black America...

History has shown that the Black left has always been in the most favorable position for bringing this (racist) reality to light. After all, Black workers struggled to throw off the yoke of slavery only to find themselves mired in the murderous jaws of Jim Crow and mass Black incarceration...

A splintered and weakened Black left and left-wing political movement in general in the United States has taught us invaluable lessons about the Democratic Party and the two-party duopoly more broadly. The so-called “Blue Wave” of the mid-term elections of 2018 has been more of a low tide that has continued to drown Black America and poor people generally...

*****

U.S. Elders Embracing Marijuana for Anesthesia and Contemplation

As attitudes towards cannabis shift, the fastest-growing group of users is over 50 – and marijuana’s popularity among seniors is beginning to change the American experience of old age.

Comment: Interesting reading despite its undertone of Marijuana Madness propaganda, precisely as mandated by Abrahamic religion and the One Percenters' slavery-by-imprisonment malevolence toward anyone who is not part of the Ruling Class.

*****

Three Relevant Perspectives on the Los Angeles Teachers' Strike

(T)he L.A. teachers’ fight is symbolic of a bigger struggle to maintain and expand quality public education for all Americans and to secure the rights that the critical stakeholders—teachers, students, parents—have within that system.

See also: Depending on one’s capacity for optimism, 2018 either foretold the rebirth of labor militancy in the United States or, conversely, suggested the last gasp of a movement that has been in near-terminal decline since the 1970s. Two key events took place last year, which, per one’s analysis, have led to opposing predictions for workers in the US.

Plus this: The walkout by more than 33,000 teachers, which began on January 14, has pit educators in the nation’s second largest school district against the entire Democratic Party establishment, which has overseen decades of defunding of public education and expansion of charter schools and other privatization schemes.

Comment: A union member and near-lifelong Marxian, I recognize organized labor -- especially Black and Hispanic organized labor -- as the most potentially revolutionary force in the USian Empire, though only if we workers finally recognize raising the Red Banner is truly our only defense against extinction.

LB/20 January 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-

An Introductory Anthropology of Apocalyptic Imperialism

DUE TO THE TIME and energy consumed by end-of-year, New-Year and first-of-month chores, this week's Dispatches will be short and to the point. Hence these five examples of human behavior as the United States and its Empire continue to disintegrate:

Regime's Lockout/Enslavement/Shutdown Scheme Targets Entire 99 Percent

The partial shutdown of the federal government is a major attack on the working class by the Trump administration. More than 400,000 federal workers are effectively locked out, furloughed without pay. Another 400,000 are engaged in compulsory labor without pay,

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

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.

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

in violation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude.

The shutdown exposes the fraud of Trump’s supposed sympathy for the plight of American workers. It affects increasingly broad layers of the working class and lower-middle class, with the biggest impact on the poorest sections of the population: millions of food stamp recipients, some two million Native Americans, whose tribal services are largely financed through the Department of the Interior, and millions more dependent on other forms of government support for their subsistence.

The population as a whole will be affected by delays in income tax refunds and other federal stipends, by the disruption of air travel as payless paydays drive air traffic controllers and security screeners from their jobs, and by the loss of many other services and facilities.

Even more ominous is the threat to democracy posed by Trump’s declaration that, as president, he has the power to declare a national emergency...

Comment: I fear the Trump/Pence Regime intends to use the growing rebelliousness evoked by the lockout/shutdown as an excuse to end all remaining pretense of "American Democracy" and unleash the empire's kill-hardened military machine on anyone who dares protest.  Thus the border-wall fight may be no more than a classic distraction -- that plus a fake "border emergency" as an excuse to muster the regime's national death squads (cops, military, ChristoNazi goon squads) before unleashing them on everyone who has ever dared oppose him. At the very least, I see no visible end to this shutdown, for in its potential permanence is the ultimate fulfillment of the U.S. Ruling Class goal as articulated by Grover Norquist, to "drag (the federal government) into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." 

*****                              

The Ruling Class Again Weaponizes Identity Politics for Maximum Divisiveness

CNN’s Anderson Cooper and The New York Times' Sydney Ember and Katie Benner are on the case of gender-based dysfunction within the 2016 Sanders campaign. Apparently they have discovered that progressive women take gender issues seriously. Who knew?

The NYT report references Anderson Cooper’s segment on the issue, but struggles to establish inappropriate conduct on Sanders’s part, although Ember and Benner seem to want pretty badly to get there. In totality, it’s remarkably thin in terms of documentation for a feature piece about a leading presidential contender.

It appears that Sanders and other 2016 campaign officials including Jeff Weaver did respond and seemed to acknowledge the need for greater attention to the matter. Ember and Benner nonetheless found it necessary to define many Sanders supporters as “Bernie Bros,” a politically based smear label intended to polarize, which draws attention to the ad hominem and away from the very important issues on which Sanders’s movement is focused. For some reason, the piece did not quote any of the high-ranking women officials in the Sanders organization...(it) makes a cursory case that some women in the campaign felt salaries were skewed but does little to establish a pattern factually..

Comment: Fake news no doubt suggested by Nancy Pelosi...or maybe even by Hillary herself. 

*****                            

Yale Psych Prof Says Trump Is More Dangerous Than Ever

Yale Psychiatry Professor Bandy X. Lee has long argued that Trump’s behavior is pathological—and that the more that he feels his power threatened, the more likely he is to lash out in ways harmful to himself, the country and the world... (With thanks to TigerLille1 for spotting the story and sending me the link.)

*****  

As Seattle Locks Out Everybody but the Super Rich, Other Cities Fear Its Fate

“Seattle-ization” is a thing now, at least according to a New York Times article published last week. It’s described as “a particularly dire diagnosis,” and characterized by high housing costs and tech wealth, a combination that’s thoroughly transformed the city in an alarmingly short span of time.

Even in New York City, apparently, some folks are terrified that the planned Amazon campus there could turn the place into "Seattle on steroids"...other cities' worst-case scenario.

Comment: Seattle -- with its ever-less-euphemistic effort to become the nation's first city to transform itself into an exclusively priced club for the One Percenters and their most honored vassals -- is a classic study in the maliciousness of late-stage Capitalism. 

*****                 

Like Street Thugs, U.S. Politicians Hurl Threats and Pejoratives at One Another

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is publicly supporting her fellow new Democratic lawmaker Rashida Tlaib, calling b.s. on all the supposed outrage that her call to “impeach the motherfucker” raised in reference to President Donald Trump. The New York lawmaker who has been grabbing lots of headlines lately called all the supposed outrage, “Republican hypocrisy at its finest.”

The freshman Democrat pointed out on Twitter that Republicans somehow think that Trump “admitting to sexual assault on tape is just ‘locker room talk’,” whereas they choose to scandalize “themselves into faux-outrage when my sis says a curse word in a bar.” Ocasio-Cortez was clearly referring to the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump said that being a celebrity allowed him to “do anything” to women, including “grab ‘em by the pussy.”

Comment: It's always entertaining when the Ruling Class politicians start trying to out-toilet-mouth one another.

LB/6 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.

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

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 20^th 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.

*****

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...

*****

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).

*****

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

-30-

 

Yes, Virginia, the Government Is Committing Humpty-Dumpty

So Is Our Species. And Neither Santa Nor Jesus Nor All the Wise Men
Can Glue Humpty's Fragments Together Again

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA Propaganda Machine dares not acknowledge the symptomatic meaning of the ongoing series of governmental shutdowns that began during the Clinton/Gingrich feud.

To do otherwise -- to acknowledge the federal government is now turned off and on and off again with exactly the same fuck-you moral imbecility its Capitalist owners demonstrate in wage cuts and factory closures -- the Josef-Goebbels wanna-bees who disseminate our daily doses of disinformation would have to at least hint that such events are symptomatic not of minor "adjustments"  (as alleged by the Banksters), but rather of the crumbling foundation that precedes total structural failure.  

In Marxian retrospect, the Clinton/Gingrich shutdown was an early disclosure of the bitter fight within the ruling cabal -- actually the One Capitalist Party of Two Names (OCPOTN) -- over how rapidly and forcefully the United States Working Class was to be reduced to ChristoNazi theocracy and the modern equivalents of serfdom and slavery, the current euphemism for which is of course Neoliberalism.

A far better term would be "Neroloberalism," an economic system in which the slavemasters fiddle and fondle and set the forests alight and we the people die accordingly. 

Here too -- if I may be forgiven the McLuhanism that became a prime cliche of the 1960s -- "the medium is the message." The "medium" is the shut-down itself; the "message" is the

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

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.

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

aforementioned fuck-you,  not just to the 800,000 federal employees who won't get their holiday paychecks, but to each and every one of us who have ever been dependent on a paycheck to survive.

In other words, what our overlords are saying is "now that we are the sole (and soul) owners of the government,  we can treat it like any other Capitalist venture...and you workers can't do a damn thing."

Or won't, since in a realm in which the Working Class had even an ounce of courage, such a shut-down -- actually a lock-out (with most of the workers viewed as slaves and thus required to work without pay) -- would trigger a general strike.

But not in the good old United States of America, where far too many of us workers merely bow our heads and submit to whatever outrages and atrocities our sadistic bosses choose to inflict upon us in imitation of their sadistic Prosperity Gospel god.  

Yes it is true some of us  are rediscovering militance. But until We the People of the entire 99 percent learn to transcend our differences and close ranks in solidarity, our Capitalist overlords will continue fucking us however and whenever and to whatever extent they please.  

***

CONFESSION: I contemplated writing "Trumpty-Dumpty" or maybe "Humpty Trumpty," but concluded that would unfairly affix the blame for our ChristoNazification on the present occupant of the White House, when in fact the blame links politicians and plutocrats and extends back in time at least to the 1930s and ultimately to the Empire's beginnings as a slave-owner protection-gang that soon learned to camouflage itself in revolutionary rhetoric. Thus I concluded the image of Uncle Sam as Humpty irreparably shattered at the foot of his great wall was sufficiently metaphoric to serve as a "Bah, Humbug" to misplaced holiday exceptionalism or any other expressions of Manifest Destiny (i.e., like the German Nazis' lebensraum, a god-given license for genocide). 

***

That said, let us assess some of the more damning evidence of Humpty's irremediable fragmentation:   

"Dumb Ways to Die: Welcome to Our Mass Suicide"

So…here we are, only a year away from 2020 and contemplating another year in the struggle for survival. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we’ve got about 12 years to turn this climate change thing around and that’s just to avoid catastrophe, never mind guaranteeing a healthy planet in the future. Such a catastrophe could well involve the extinction of human beings, which would reveal just how dumb we are. Is there anything more stupid that the most intelligently-evolved species on the planet could do than commit mass suicide?

*****        

Late Capitalism: One Foot in the Grave, the Other on the ChristoNazi Oilslick

The Dow lost 1655 points for the week, a decline of 6.8 percent, its worst percentage drop since the onset of the financial crisis a decade ago, the NASDAQ lost 8.3 percent for the week and is now 22 percent below its high last August and the S&P fell by 7 percent and is now down 17.8 percent from its high.

Both the S&P and the Dow are on track for their worst December performance since December 1931, amid the Great Depression.

*****

White Ruling Class Chants "Diversity" as It Methodically Intensifies Racism

Like fashion house Prada’s recent so-called apologyfor selling racist trinkets, universities and other institutions often only pay lip service to the intent of dismantling harmful structures and tropes that feed racial inequality while their actions reveal their true priorities.

Take Northwestern University, where astute students writing for the student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, revealed  Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, is working and thriving on Northwestern’s campus as a visiting researcher in the psychology department. He is widely known as the author of the 2011 Psychology Today piece  (now removed and replaced with an editor’s apology), “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?” — an article that has since been roundly rejected by both the scientific and broader educational communities.

The piece was crafted on poor methodology, and one must also wonder what scientific ideal was being pursued that would justify what amounts to well-worn racist beliefs that linger on without context?

Comment: lest we forget, racism (and identity politics in general) is the primary Ruling Class weapon against Working Class solidarity. (Yes, I also posted this report on the Tacoma Communist Labor Party Facebook page.)

*****    

And the Public Schools Are Being (Methodically) Re-Segregated Too

When it was reported that Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) attended and sent her daughter to segregated schools,  an issue was back in the news that many Americans believe had been addressed in the civil rights era.  

But Hyde-Smith’s experience is far from uncommon. Nearly 65 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, schools across the US are quietly being resegregated — and many were never fully desegregated to start with.

According to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), much higher percentages of students of color attend high-poverty schools compared to white students — and experts agree that it is only getting worse.

***** 

Hence, Predictably,  Most U.S. Public Schools Also Teach Sexism and Homophobia

According to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, the country is presently a patchwork, with only the District of Columbia and four states — California, Colorado, Iowa and Washington — mandating that sex ed be LGBTQI-inclusive and affirming of different sexual orientations and gender identities.

Thirty-one states continue to stress abstinence before (hetero) marriage and seven — Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas — ban the teaching of anything that might be construed as queer acceptance or inclusivity.

In Alabama, for instance, teachers are mandated to be overt in their condemnation, telling students that “homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public.” They are also required to inform their classes that “homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.”

These homophobic provisions, called “No Promo Homo laws” by opponents, have for nearly 40 years been pushed by a coalition of right-wing evangelical groups...

(This report too I posted previously on the Tacoma CLP Facebook page.)

*****                 

Meanwhile, Anticipation of a New Holocaust Looms Amidst the Fragments

The touchy-feely phrase “What you believe becomes your reality” is making the rounds of pop psychology. People who claim uncommon wisdom promote this insight as the road to everything — from financial well-being to a fulfilling and pleasurable sex life.

Here’s an ominous thought: What if you believe, as many folks now do, that with anti-Semitism on the rise, something akin to the Holocaust could happen in the United States?

Simply reading the newspaper can compel us to think the unthinkable. A recent survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany showed that 58 percent of Americans believe the Holocaust could happen again. The recent massacre of 11 Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh is the worst anti-Semitic attack in American history. Play that back: the worst anti-Semitic attack in American history.

In 2018, the Anti-Defamation League reports the increase in anti-Semitic incidents from 2016 to 2017 was the largest in a single year since the ADL began tracking in 1979.

*****   

Trump-Mattis Breakup Exemplifies How the Government Is Falling Apart

Thursday’s resignation of US Defense Secretary James Mattis has provoked... panic and near hysteria from leading members of both major political parties...

Trump had campaigned in 2016...for an end to the protracted US wars...This rhetoric played a substantial role in (defeating)...Democrat Hillary Clinton, the favored candidate of Wall Street and the CIA, (who favored) past US wars and... escalation of the Syria intervention as well as a direct confrontation with Russia.

Trump’s decision to act on these campaign pledges now are bound up with the deepening crisis of his presidency, which is besieged by multiple scandals and investigations that are themselves driven by the bitter conflicts within the American ruling class, particularly over foreign policy...
(H)e knows that bringing troops home from the Middle East and Central Asia will enjoy broad support, well beyond (his) far-right base...

Within the US working population there is deep hostility to the never-ending wars waged by US imperialism... wars (that) have killed well over one million people, demolished entire societies and cost trillions of dollars...

Democratic Party leaders virtually wept over Mattis’ resignation and voiced virulent opposition to any end to the US wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.

See also: "Send the Mad Dog to the Corporate Kennel."

Comment: again and as always, the "bitter conflicts" can be summed up in a single question: how overtly Nazi is the de facto Fourth Reich to be?  The recent news does not inspire optimism.

*****      

Clash of Populisms Mirrors Our Species' Ultimate, Probably Terminal Division 

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)...

Then there’s the reactionary anti-cosmopolitan nationalist “populism” of the right. This unattractive and backwards-looking populism shares some of left populism’s disdain for giant globalist corporations and financial institutions.  Still, its ire is aimed primarily at immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities and their perceived liberal and multi-cultural champions in the globalist “elite.”  This white-nationalist “populism” (some would say faux-populism) carries no small whiff of fascism...

So which of these two populisms – the progressive populism of the left and the reactionary “populism” of the right – does the corporate and financial ruling class prefer? The right-wing one, of course.

Supposition: the fight-to-the-death triggered by the paralytic fragmentation of our species into two eternally incompatible subspecies -- eco-humanitarians and moral imbeciles -- is merely the macrocosm of the process that is destroying the United States, where the moral imbeciles now control governance at every level. 

*****

Merry Christmas from the Ruling Class: More Cuts to Food Stamps 

The Trump Administration announced Thursday that it will impose tougher work requirements on adults seeking food assistance. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) unveiled the proposed rule, which will strip food stamp benefits from hundreds of thousands of poor workers...

Nutrition advocacy groups say work requirements increase food insecurity. They argue that food, health insurance and housing are all keys to helping people get a job and stay employed. One Ohio survey found that many SNAP recipients have unidentified injuries, such as chronic pain, that prevent them from working. Factors such as language barriers, education and lack of transportation also prevent people from working.

Furthermore, a significant proportion of available jobs are volatile part-time minimum-wage jobs. Approximately 95 percent of jobs created since the 2008 financial crisis fall into this category. The notion that the 3.7 unemployment rate is indicative of a recovery for working people is false. But this idea is being used to strip workers of necessary assistance.

***** 

Lastly, Here Are Some Midwinter Meditations

Let us never forget -- and when the time comes,  let us instruct our children accordingly -- that Santa is but the nursery-rhyme version of the sadistic, zero-tolerance patriarchal god:

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake...

And whether labeled Santa or god, that which is invoked by most of the white Christian U.S. population is the quintessence both of Capitalism and subjugation.

In which context too many children still awaken on Christmas morning to the heartbreak horror of stockings filled with coal (a symbol of burning in hell), or fresh-cut switches with which they know they'll soon be beaten. 

There is also -- for those whose seasonal slogan truly is "Bah, Humbug" -- my late father's anti-Capitalist revision of a traditional Christmas carol:

Deck his balls with poison ivy,
Fa la la la la-ah hah hah hah...

But let us also take heart in the fact that according to lore far older than Santa or god or even patriarchy itself, the Full Moon atop the Winter Solstice "bodes well for embracing change and letting go of the past."

Hence may we all have the finest midwinter holidays our circumstances allow.

LB/23 December 2018

-30-

 

 

 

 

 

U.S. Journalists Begin to Rediscover Their Moral Imperative

But Can They Overthrow the Monopolistic Tyranny and Post-Watergate Gentrification That Reduced Our Calling to Stenography?

JUST AS I PREDICTED -- often in the face of (entirely rational) skepticism -- a few present-day members of the working press, broadcasters included, are beginning to rediscover the moral imperative of our calling, which in my day defined not only the best reporters and editors but the best newspapers and magazines and broadcast journalism.

It is however to our greatest national and professional shame this renaissance and resurrection did not obtain until it was goaded into being by the ChristoNazi conquest of the entire federal

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

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.

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

apparatus -- especially how the conquerors gloatingly perpetrate the deaths inflicted by the regime's overtly white-supremacist-Christian (and thereby covertly genocidal) immigration policy.

But the Trump/Pence border gestapo's murder-by-neglect of little Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin may have finally re-oiled and freed-up a few mainstream journalists' long-rusted moral hinges.

Two years ago the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, the world's first privately owned, for-profit Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, would not have dared touch this story; the half-dozen plutocrats who own 90-something percent of the U.S. news media would have suppressed it in service to their advertisers -- the same moral imbeciles who own the federal government and express their terminal misogyny by waging apocalyptic war on our Mother Earth. In those days you'd have to have read the alternative press to learn about an atrocity of this sort -- if indeed its (overwhelmingly white) editors had even deemed it worthy of mention.

And now before we continue, let us pause for a moment and try to imagine how many such atrocities were never reported at all.

 

***

 

A DECLASSÉ KID schooled in Marxism by a father who was a superb teacher but otherwise a terrible parent, I knew by the time I was 14 that investigative journalism was the only possible way a proletarian might positively influence U.S. domestic policy, and it was then, the fall of 1954, I decided to become a newspaper reporter.

My decision, first declared in Miss Freeman's spring-semester-1956 sophomore English class at Knox County Central High School, was admittedly shaped by my admiration of Donald Read Bliss Jr., an older half-brother I had met only two years earlier; Donald, a 12-year Regular Army soldier, master sergeant and Korean War combat vet, took up reporting via Pacific Stars and Stripes. After he left the service he went on to become a three-times Pulitzer nominee at Barry Bingham's superb Louisville, Kentucky newspapers, The Louisville Times and The Courier-Journal, the near-legendary editorial quality of which would die quickly after Bingham died and his papers were acquired by the advertiser-ruled, anything-for-profit Gannett monopoly.  

My own awards never went beyond state-level or regional honors and were thus radically diminished in comparison to those gleaned by my half-brother, who was far more adept than I at euphemizing -- and later suppressing -- his discomforts with Capitalism. Thus he and I were eventually alienated by my own steadily worsening socioeconomic circumstances, an alienation I fear remained unhealed when he died late last year. He was a bit more than a decade older than I, born in late 1929, 88 years to my (born-in-early 1940) 77.

Even so I am certain he shared, at least for a time, my conviction journalism is not just a job but a calling, not just an occupation but a 24/7 way of life, with an innate summons to anti-Capitalist activism whenever possible. Certainly it was a conviction shared by many, perhaps most of my own generational peers -- for remember in the era of which I am speaking, journalism (especially newspaper journalism), was a blue-collar job that attracted the same sort of idealists who might otherwise have become humanitarian cops or liberation-theology priests or  radical nuns.

Not that my colleagues and I were all closet socialists; the majority leaned Left more out of instinct than doctrinal conviction. But we all profoundly distrusted government at every level, for we knew firsthand the vindictive arrogance of government bureaucrats and sinecured politicians. And while many of my newsroom colleagues would probably have found a genuinely socialist U.S. difficult to imagine and a Marxist U.S. to be utterly repugnant, they were nevertheless moved to incipiently revolutionary agitation by the scoop-the-world/make-life-better morality that inspired us all.

Indeed journalism was so blue-collar a calling that in late November 1956, when The Grand Rapids Herald hired me as a copy boy and Sports Editor Bob Host hired me as a stringer to cover high-school sports, I was as proud of my Newspaper Guild union card as I was of my sports-department press card.

Alas – ironically enough – and possibly not accidentally (given what we are now learning about the Hitlerian depth and magnitude of Capitalist scheming) – U.S. journalism's halcyon era died with the post-Watergate film All the President's Men, which suddenly made the former blue-collar realm of newspaper journalism attractive to the petite bourgeoisie and therefore subject to all their socioeconomic dementia, identity-politics vindictiveness and zero-tolerance closed-mindedness in general.

The resultant rightward shift in newsroom sociology facilitated the breaking of the American Newspaper Guild. The death of the union guaranteed the craven editorial submissiveness that enabled the triumph of the aforenamed half-dozen monopolies and their taboo against anything even remotely resembling the sort of investigative reporting characterized by The Washington Post's Page-One exposure of Nixon's criminality or Jack Anderson's Page One exposure of the Mein Kampf intent lurking within the Powell Memo or my late half-brother's Page One exposure of the Ku Klux Klan's infiltration of the Louisville Police Department or my own Page One exposure of an Auburn, Washington hospital whose proto-ChristoNazi owners forbade the treatment of rape victims in its emergency rooms lest any association with sexuality besmirch its Prosperity Gospel holiness.

Predictably, the fad-driven petite bourgeois youth – prompted by All the President's Men to infiltrate newspapers via journalism schools that were originally intended only to train public relations mouthpieces in the manipulation of real journalists – were not only blind to Capitalism's atrocities; the comfortably white-supremacist Ayn Rand moral imbecility they shared with their Capitalist masters left them pathologically indifferent to any grievances save their own.

So it remained until the ChristoNazis came boiling out of their white supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, theocratic and “Environmental-Is-of-the-Devil” closets to elect the Trump/Pence Regime and thereby both Nazify and theocratize the entire federal government.

Now, in belated reaction, we get reportage of the vastly superior yesteryear-caliber done by NBC News as linked above or the please-read column written by Charles Pierce of the upper yupscale Esquire magazine and entitled “We Are Governed by Monsters Now” (never mind we USians have nearly always been so tyrannized):

 

(A)s soon as this child was taken into the custody of the United States Border Patrol, she became its responsibility and nobody else's. At that point, it doesn't matter if she had walked here from Guatemala, or Guam, or Jupiter. Once she was in custody, the child's health and well-being became the responsibility of the United States government. It became the responsibility of the United States government to monitor her for any sign of exposure.

(Although it's very hard reading this story not to remember this video of Border Patrol officers pouring out water left in the desert for migrants by church groups.)

 

That approaches the sort of advocacy journalism sometimes achieved – when our editors and their publishers would allow it – by the more determined reporters of my generation. We sought to follow and duplicate or perhaps even improve upon the precedents set by the several generations of notably courageous journalists who preceded us; think Peter Zenger and how that tradition extended through reporters such as Lincoln Steffens and Jacob Riis and Ernest Hemingway and Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill and Marc Crawford (my boss at TransMundo) and photographers such as Matthew Brady and Timothy. O'Sullivan and (multi-talented) Riis and Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange and Gene Smith and Susan Meiselas and Jill Freedman. But any compulsion to produce work of that caliber died with the post-Watergate gentrification of print media and was entombed – seemingly forever – by the Neoliberal conversion of mass media onto the world's first for-profit Ministry of Truth.

But now our unmistakable conquest by the ChristoNazis and their imposition of Prosperity Gospel theocracy has seemingly terrified a few of today's scribes enough to prompt rebellion against their long-suppressed moral obligation to report the steadily worsening wretchedness of the present-day USian human condition as it truly is.

I must confess I find the irony delicious: the regime that is more outspoken in its hatred of the First Amendment than any other regime in the nation's history has by its very hostility rolled the metaphorical boulder away from the proverbial tomb-entrance and so resurrected mass media as a secular messiah --  which if it lives up to its obligations will by its reporting surely help light the torch of rebellion.  

And the reportage that reveals the government's murder-by-neglect of a seven-year-old girl is by no means the only example of the journalistic awakening that now seems underway here in the one nation that now truly is under (the jackboots of) the ChristoNazis' sadistic god, precisely as celebrated by the 1954 conversion of the Pledge of Allegiance to an unabashed assertion of theocratic intent.

Now though -- however belatedly -- to counteract the metastasis of theocracy  we have the unprecedented shibboleth-smashing of “The Boy Scouts are rebranding. But they're still excluding a big group,” also from WaPo:

 

But before we raise three hearty cheers for the BSA’s inclusive turn, it is important to note that one sizable group of young people are still excluded from membership and leadership — nonbelievers. Even as the number of nonbelievers grows steadily in the United States, the Boy Scouts still require a religious oath.

Since 1911, every new member has had to promise, “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country.” The bylaws of the BSA have a “Declaration of Religious Principles,” to which all boy scouts and scout leaders are required to subscribe: “Recognition of God as the ruling and leading power in the universe . . . [is] necessary to the best type of citizenship.”

 

Or “The boy on the bridge/ A 12-year-old tried to kill himself, police say. Instead he killed someone else,” again WaPo:

 

The SUV was like a convertible. Glass from the windshield was everywhere. The roof was partially collapsed in. The top half of the steering wheel had snapped off.

Behind it, where Marisa should have been, was a boy, covered in blood, with a bone sticking out where it shouldn’t have been. Police would later conclude that he had been trying to kill himself. Now he was staring at Perry, terrified.

Marisa, Perry suddenly realized, was beneath the boy. Her seat had been knocked flat back. Her eyes were closed. Perry shook her, trying to wake her. Nothing.

The car, which had been going 55 miles per hour, was still hurtling down I-66.

Or “Mother of teenager killed in hate crime more than a decade ago in Harbor Gateway has written a book about her daughter's death” in The Los Angeles Times:

 

Though it was largely ignored by the media, Lovett’s Harbor Gateway neighborhood had been a source of Latino-on-black violence for years leading up to Green’s killing.

Unchecked urban development combined with enduring poverty and a lack of city services fueled tensions between newer and more established community members. A Latino gang looked to establish itself while a black gang nearby did the same. Neighborhoods soon became gang territories, and crossing the boundaries could have lethal consequences, even for the uninitiated.

 

After newsroom gentrification and before the ChristoNazi coup, none of these reports, especially the last with its backhanded confession of journalistic racism and malfeasance, would ever have been allowed into print by Mainstream Media's vindictively Capitalist masters.

But now we are indeed seeing a resurrection of what I think of as “real journalism.” And while much of it -- perhaps even all of it -- is prompted by the huge schism that is sundering the USian One Percent (the boiled-frog ChristoNazism of Hillary Clinton et al versus the instant ChristoNazism of Donald Trump et al), it nevertheless is to be applauded as the sort of reportage that helps foment revolution.

*****

The remainder of this week's exemplary Dispatches are from the alternative press:

“Vladimir Putin Outmaneuvers the U.S. Yet Again”

The victory took place Nov. 25 in the Kerch Strait, the narrow strip of water separating the disputed Crimean Peninsula from the Russian mainland to the east. It occurred when the Russian coast guard fired on and seized three Ukrainian naval vessels. As always, the details are in dispute, with the Ukrainians claiming that their boats informed the Russians about their plans to navigate the strait but received no reply and Russia saying the opposite.

But there’s no doubt as to the result. By briefly closing the strait, Russia has demonstrated that it can restrict access at will to roughly half the Ukrainian coastline that lies within the Sea of Azov, including the economically vital ports of Mariupol and Berdyansk.  Although Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko immediately called for Western intervention, it also demonstrated that there is little NATO can do in response.

*****

Four Texas Abortion Cases That Could Kill Roe v. Wade

Texas Republicans pass increasingly extreme anti-abortion laws, judges block them and then both sides fight it out, often all the way to SCOTUS. Many of these laws are still winding their way through the court system now, even as state lawmakers file their next round of anti-abortion bills ahead of the 2019 session. Those that pass will likely prompt more lawsuits next year.

But if any of the pending cases do reach the high court in the coming years, they’ll face a very different panel than when the cases were filed. Abortion rights advocates felt optimistic after their major win in 2016, when SCOTUS struck down much of House Bill 2 — a sweeping 2013 law that shuttered more than half the abortion clinics in the state. Now, President Donald Trump’s appointment of conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch throws the future of Roe v. Wade into question. Here are four reproductive justice-related challenges in Texas that could end up at SCOTUS soon.

 

*****

“Butina Broken by Torture, 'Admits' Guilt on Absurd Charges”

Maria Butina’s only crime is that she is Russian, legal analysts told RT, attacking the US justice system for keeping her in solitary confinement until she admitted guilt to at least one of the many charges brought against her.

“This is an utter and total miscarriage of justice,” retired CIA agent and whistleblower John Kiriakou told RT after Butina pleaded guilty to the charge of failing to register with the Justice Department as an agent of the Russian government. “You can see clearly, this is not about justice, this is not about criminal activity. This is about making a political point. This is about identifying Russia and Russians as the enemy of the United States, and punishing them.”

*****

A Cushy New Job Rewards Official Charged in Flint Water Deaths

A Michigan public health official currently facing charges of involuntary manslaughter stemming from her role in an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease during the Flint water crisis has managed to secure a cushy new job with the state, according to several reports.

As Ron Fonger of MLive/The Flint Journal reported on Tuesday, Dr. Eden Wells, who is currently serving as Michigan’s chief medical executive, was recently hired by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services as an “advisory physician.” As such, Fonger reports, Wells will be entitled to “an annual salary of $179,672,” as well as “job protections she doesn’t currently have as chief medical executive.”

Wells was hired to fill this newly created position on December 2. In a statement, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health and Human Services averred that the agency “determined there was a need for an advisory physician to the Population Health Administration,” and that the position would specifically advise on “public health issues such as HIV, Hepatitis C, environmental health and more.”

“MDHHS posted the position, and Dr. Wells was chosen for the role,” it continued.

The timing of the appointment is curious in itself, as it came five days before Wells was ordered to “stand trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter, obstruction of justice and lying to a peace officer.”

Comment: No doubt Trump has already promised her a full pardon if she is convicted.

*****

The Resurrection of the Contras and the Pro-Contra Pseudo Left

Just as a refresher, the Contras (short for “counterrevolutionaries”) were made up largely of the National Guardsmen of the US-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza.  After the successful 1979 revolution against Somoza – a revolution led by Ortega and the FSLN (or, Sandinistas) — the CIA organized the Guardsmen into the Contras and trained, armed and directed them for the purpose of undermining the fledgling Sandinista government.  The Contras, with the direct encouragement of the CIA, carried out various terrorist acts which included the torture, rape and murder of civilians and the destruction of key civilian infrastructure.  All told, around 30,000 Nicaraguans died in the 1980’s as a result of the US-backed Contra War.

The Contras, after effectively exhausting the Nicaraguan people and extorting them into voting Ortega out of office in 1990, largely disarmed.  However...

*****

“Is California About to Execute an Innocent Man?”

Three hours and 42 minutes. That’s how close Kevin Cooper came in 2004 to being murdered by the state, strapped down to a gurney and poisoned via lethal injection. He had been placed in what he calls a “death chamber waiting room” and stripped of all his clothes before he was granted a stay of execution. Five years later, in an unprecedented dissent, five federal judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion that began: “The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man.”

*****

French Yellow Vest Movement Acquiring Real Revolutionary Flavor

French citizens have revolted for the fourth week in a row calling for changes in governmental and corporate design. Even though UN Military and thousands of French police have been deployed in response, the police have actually been filmed removing their helmets in solidarity with the French people...

Yet, there isn’t a coherent agreement among the people. Sure, huge proportions of the population reject the way things work in different ways, but the problems and therefore solutions are different according to each person you talk with.

We CAN capture the general vibe though; populist dissent is against the political and corporate elite. (Emphasis as in original.)

*****

A First Nations Astronomical Clock Older Than Stonehenge

The ancient medicine wheel...was constructed over the span of a few thousand years. Incredibly, its first stones were placed approximately 5,000 years ago. So...the wheel is 1,000 years older than Stonehenge, 3,500 years older than the Mayan Pyramid of Chichen Itza, 500 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Now, perhaps, you have a clearer picture of what we’re dealing with here. In Alberta. Just a couple of hours from Calgary.

In his book, Canada’s Stonehenge, author and professor emeritus at the University of Alberta Gordon R. Freeman describes the Majorville Medicine Wheel as “the most intricate stone ring that remains on the North American Plains.”...

Although the Majorville Medicine Wheel...is not as visually impressive as monuments such as Stonehenge, the significance of the site is just as profound. Interestingly, Freeman, who camped at this site for weeks on end in the ’80s and ’90s, discovered remarkable similarities to Stonehenge and other ancient sun temples. The alignment of rocks, surrounding stone markers, and spokes (although barely recognizable, there are 28 spokes, or “rays,” that fan out from the centre cairn) all point to a solar calendar that would most likely have been used for ceremonial purposes. (With thanks to TigerLille1 for spotting this story and forwarding its URL to me.)

Comment: In my own long-ago work documenting some of the ancient, astronomically oriented but archaeologically tabooed sites in Washington state -- more of the years of rock-the-boat research and investigation obliterated by the life-destroying arson fire of 1983 -- I raised some eyebrows by speculating the sites were “either evidence of an ancient Afro-European presence in North America or of an indigenous culture of hitherto unsuspected astronomical sophistication.” It is now obvious the latter explanation is at least as plausible as the former. 

LB/16 December 2018

-30-

Just More Atrocities by Our Ever-More-Openly Nazi Overlords

With One Possibly Inspiring Environmental Report at the Very End

HAMSTRUNG BY CONVERGENCE of geriatric disability and the increasingly severe punishments the Neoliberal (NeoNazi) United States inflicts on those of us it wants to exterminate -- i.e., people of color, old folks like myself, LGBTQ people, allegedly "uppity" women, disabled people however young or elderly, non-Aryan whites, impoverished people (again like myself), anyone else deemed either undesirable or insufficiently profitable or both -- this week's Dispatches will be hastily assembled but cynically outspoken as always.

Yes I am sick yet again -- this time it's cellulitis, a chronic infection in both lower legs that is one of the more debilitating consequences of congestive heart failure. Meanwhile my schedule is controlled by my permanently car-less dependence on volunteers for first-of-month chore-transport, a condition due not only to poverty but to the fact Pacific Northwest "transit-is-welfare" white racism  dooms Tacoma to forever-shitty mass transport. Plus now I'm coping 

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

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.

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

with the annual interrogation the Washington State Department of  Social and Health Services inflicts on recipients of its ever-shrinking stipends and services. Filling out the paperwork,  assembling the required documentation and annotating it by mechanical typewriter -- the only way my arthritic hands can do it legibly -- steals at least seven workdays from my life every year. And of course every year DSHS and its Neoliberal masters vindictively add new requirements to the already difficult (and bottomlessly nerve-wracking) process.  

Today's DSHS, of course, is nothing more than a meticulously malicious zero-tolerance gatekeeper, focused not on helping impoverished people but rather on finding ever-more-euphemistically creative ways to deny us help and thereby fund the untold, ever-increasing  billions in big-business tax breaks -- by far the greatest such giveways in the U.S. -- by which the Democratic (sic) Party state government rewards the party's Capitalist owners and bribemasters...

Even as Washington state's lower-income population, which now tops 50 percent -- suffers under the nation's most deliberately, vindictively, viciously regressive state tax structure.

Such are the rules of existence -- and death -- under the Democratic (sic) Party's allegedly "progressive" (sic) governance.

Which, in embittering truth  -- except of course for the Democrats' loudly proclaimed and moronically applauded agenda of suicidally aiding the ChristoNazi Sturmabteilung by imposing mandatory pacifism and therefore compulsory victimhood via near-total forcible civilian disarmament -- is yet another Big Lie, part of the Democrats' perpetual, ChristoNazi-enabling repetition of "change we can believe in": the most devastating, tyranny-facilitating electoral deception in USian history.

That said -- preachment ended -- let us continue with some of the week's most allegedly "subversive" reports of allegedly "fake" news:  

Here's  (Minimal) Exposure of Tyrannies Inflicted by School, Welfare Bureaucrats 

Fed up with what they see as obstinate parents who don’t agree to special education services for their child, or disruptive kids who make learning difficult, schools...use the threat of a child-protection investigation to strong-arm parents into complying with the school’s wishes or transferring their children to a new school. That approach is not only improper, but it can be devastating for families, even if the allegations are ultimately determined to be unfounded...In interviews, more than a dozen lawyers said these investigations disproportionately affect low-income families of color, who tend to live in neighborhoods and attend schools that have bigger police and social services presences and whose children are more likely to show markings of poverty that can be confused with neglect.   

Comment: Such typically malicious abuse -- most of it impossible to appeal without the vast wealth required for hard-fought lawsuits -- is infinitely more commonplace than reported. (Note for example the DSHS practice, rampant during the 1980s and early 1990s,  of vindictively changing the diagnoses of Vietnam-era military veterans from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to various disorders that make you permanently unemployable and thereby utterly destroy your life. Why? To deny the male victims any/all vocational rehabilitation services and reserve all the associated jobs exclusively for women.) Of course; such is white Neoliberal (Capitalist/ChristoNazi) identity-politics feminism in action.  

Note too how Truthout, all-too often a parargon of pseudo-Left reportage, carefully downplays the magnitude of the atrocities. (Wouldn't want to offend those honky feminists, much less the Democratic (sic) Party.)

*****

Teaching White Supremacy to Proletarians as Prelude to Total ChristoNazification

(T)he White House has become a brazen think tank for the promotion of white supremacy in the US and abroad. We must also contend with the fact that the nation’s leading newspaper, The New York Times, is now lending its editorial page to the promotion of white supremacy in the gauzy guise of yet another George H.W. Bush hagiography.

*****

Nazified US Policy Has Killed 20 to 30 Million People Since WWII

Now it is George Herbert Walker Bush’s turn to be canonized for bringing “'a ‘thousand points of light’ illuminating the greatness, hope, and opportunity of America to the world," in the words of the current CEO of Empire, Donald Trump. Former White House denizens Obama, Clinton and Carter also lauded the life and works of their accomplice in global predation, as did the son-of-a-Bush, George W., the under-achiever who wound up out-doing his daddy in mass murder...

Most Americans...know the U.S. leaves dead bodies in its wake all around the planet -- Americans are not clueless, and that which they don’t know is due as much to deliberate, determined ignorance as it is to the failings of the news media. A nation born in genocide and slavery does not change its nature without undergoing a revolution, and the United States has not experienced such a transformation. At least half the population sees the death of millions of non-whites as “collateral damage” from America’s civilizing mission in the world: it’s “worth it.”

          *****    

How the U.S. Nukes Its Foes Yet Avoids Those Embarrassing Mushroom Clouds

At the close of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was denounced as a ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti oil fields, clotting the air with poisonous clouds of black smoke and saturating the ground with swamps of crude. It was justly called an environmental war crime.

But months of bombing of Iraq by US and British planes and cruise missiles has left behind an even more deadly and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb fragments laced with depleted uranium. In all, the US hit Iraqi targets with more than 970 radioactive bombs and missiles.

It took less than a decade for the health consequences from this radioactive bombing campaign to begin to coming into focus. And they are dire, indeed. Iraqi physicians call it “the white death”-leukemia. Since 1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent.

         *****          

Why USian Universal Healthcare Is Pie-in-the-Sky without Real Revolution

(I)ncoming Ways and Means Committee chair Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.)...has denounced Medicare for All as "not realistic" and will soon be in a position to tank healthcare plans that are unacceptable to his insurance industry donors.

*****

And Why Even the Most Minimal Reforms Are Likewise Doomed

Will the powerful and huge protests that erupted against Trump in January 2017 and ’18 rise again to confront the Clintons? If history is any guide, it is doubtful, given the absence of Democratic-liberal outrage at Bill Clinton’s Iraqi sanctions; Hillary Clinton’s support for the Honduran military coup of 2009 against President Manuel Zelaya that has led to the murder of thousands of indigenous and union activists, journalists, and human rights advocates; and her backing of the Saudi war on Yemen, the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world. The coup and Saudi attack began on Obama’s watch, a fact dropped down Orwell’s memory hole and erased from history.

*****

For the Real Reason Washington Voters Nixed I-1631, Read My Comment

Record amounts of money were spent trying to derail the efforts of activists and labor unions fighting to save the environment. One such instance was over Initiative 1631 in Washington State where the oil industry spent more than $30 million trying to sabotage the struggle for a better world. In this exclusive Truthout interview, Jeff Johnson — who led the fight for the passing of Initiative 1631 — reflects on the lessons activists nationwide can draw for the future from the climate change struggle in Washington State.

Comment: as we Washingtonians know from long and exceedingly embittering experience, whether the legislative halls and the governor's palace are controlled by the Republican Party or its Democratic (sic) enablers, the permanently plutocrat-protecting politicians will always find ways to exempt the rich from any such costs and will instead vindictively inflict every penny of those costs on us, the 99 Percent, were we to dare vote any such measure into law. That's why such no such environment-saving proposal will ever pass here without the vital prelude of genuine, plutocrat-impeaching, proletariat-empowering revolution: we the people can't afford the deadly cost-of-survival increases that such measures inevitably inflict. Hence -- and most of us know it -- without revolution, we proletarians are fucked no matter what we do.

*****   

Capitalist Politicians Using Tax Cuts to Kill Few Remaining Social Services

Even as the federal government executes major cutbacks, it’s giving huge subsidies in the form of tax breaks to industry, a fact legislators rarely acknowledge. The Boston Globe recently published a thorough and eye-popping report detailing the nature and extent of these breaks.

Comment: despite methodical newsroom purges, a few carefully closeted Commies (as I was during my working-press decades) and equally closeted socialists in general have managed to conceal their personal politics well enough to remain employed by U.S. Mainstream Media, the world's first privately owned, exclusively for-profit Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Occasionally these courageous journalists get to break pivotal stories (again as I did whenever possible). Hence read this report quickly before it vanishes down the Orwell Hole, and the reporter and editors who dared put together it are fired for heresy and flung into permanent joblessness. 

***** 

How Democratic (sic) Treachery Slays Our Last Faint Hope for Net Neutrality 

The vast majority of Americans support net neutrality, but a handful of Dems are holding out support. Why? They’ve all taken tens of thousands of dollars in “campaign donations” from telecoms like Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T...

Comment: this is a call for action, which I post with full awareness Net Neutrality is dead forever even if every USian voter responded as requested. The end of Net Neutrality allows every ISP to impose unlimited censorship -- yet another atrocity that  will never be undone without genuine revolution.

*****

How Our Overlords' Respond to Tiny Expansions of Revolutionary Consciousness

Prefatory Comment: Despite the wildly escalating threat of murderous attacks on Leftists by ChristoNazis and other such fascist scum, the nation's white Ruling Class is busily ensuring we dissidents are denied any legal means of self-defense. Hence -- not the least to counter the minuscule number of Communist Labor Party comrades who are so self-deluded yet cling to the belief it can't happen here -- another of my periodic summaries of  skyrocketing efforts to repeal or nullify literally all our Second Amendment rights. Again with my apology for the fact the ONLY reliable sources of such information are the fascists themselves:

On December 5^th, the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a group backed by out-of-state elites, announced it will pursue its most extreme anti-gun legislative agenda to date during the upcoming 2019 Washington (state) Legislative Session.

Comment: the privately stated intent of the Democratic (sic) Party is -- and has been since the late 1970s -- to make Washington the first state in the U.S. wherein firearms ownership is effectively outlawed for every civilian save those who are obscenely rich. This forcible disarmament and its accompanying mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood is to be accomplished not by open releal of constitutional amendments, but rather by imposition of prohibitive fees and taxation. And with Democratic (sic) control of the entire state government, there is no force on earth capable of effectively resisting this year's flood of the hate-all-gunowner fanatics.

***

Which Makes This Horror Story from New Jersey Especially Relevant

Two thugs chased a 19-year-old woman across the street, into a store, and then executed her by shooting her 20 times. She died on a weekday afternoon in broad daylight. She was killed in front of witnesses in Trenton, the state capital of New Jersey. The murder was caught on security cameras. Jersey politicians and the news media told us time and again that this could never happen. We were supposed to be safe since the rigorous gun-control laws in New Jersey have disarmed the criminals. That obviously isn’t true and Jersey politicians and the news media lied to us. In fact, honest law abiding people were disarmed while the criminals still have guns. Gun control failed again and today, honest people pay with their lives. Have we had enough?

Comment: Lest we (conveniently) forget, the ChristoNazis and other  Sturmabteilung types  are themselves avowedly violent criminals who will never be disarmed by the looming tsunami of forcible-disarment/mandatory-pacifism/compulsory-victimhood laws by which the Capitalists and their wholly owned politicians are  reducing the rest of us to flee-or-be-murdered defenselessness.

See also here, here , here and especially here.  Plus this, which I post with a warning that despite its incipiently violent anti-immigrant white supremacy, it is the only report I could find that ACCURATELY describes the new forcible disarmament, prelude-to-confiscation law that now threatens every firearms owner in Bolder, Colorado.

Yes I also posted it -- with a similar prefatory heads-up -- on the Tacoma CLP Facebook page. Hence yet another apology for these fascist URLs,  necessitated by the frightening fact that (with the very notable exception of Dispatches), every Leftist and allegedly Leftist website in the United States is now so thoroughly censored by anti-gunowner fanatics, there are no other sources from which to learn of the deadly reality of the headlong Ruling Class rush to forcible civilian disarmament.

*****

Had to Search Damn Diligently, but Here's an Inspirational Concluding Report

This week, with the market saturated and prices depressed, Alberta’s premier announced that her government would temporarily curtail the province’s oil production, chiefly from the tar sands, because there isn’t enough pipeline capacity to ship the crude to market.

It was a startling announcement from a government whose prevailing energy policy has been to promote more production of its bitumen—known as tar sands or oil sands—which ranks among the most carbon-polluting sources of oil.

Comment: Sometimes protests do hold our enemies at bay, though far too often -- note the fate of the Civil Rights, Feminist and Environmentalist movements -- the armistice is painfully temporary.

LB/9 December 2018

-30-

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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.

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

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 departments – never 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

-30-

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 

-30-

 

Without a Revolutionary Agenda, Hope Is Only Another Opiate

Five New Examples Prove the Futility of Efforts to Reform Capitalism;
Before We Go There, Let Us First Embrace the Legacy of Alex Hyland 

    Alex Hyland, as talented a teacher as ever lived, demonstrates the heartfelt patience that should inspire us all. 
(Photo by Loren Bliss © 2017)

*****

THE DEATH OF Alex Hyland, the most instinctively skillful teacher I have ever met, leaves a painful gap in the lives of all of us who knew him. 

It also leaves a gaping tear in the fabric of life itself.

I don't recall exactly when I was introduced to Alex save that it was during an episode of shared political activism. It may have been at the same time I met his older brother Max, at the beginning of the ill-fated hurly burly of Occupy Tacoma (2011-2012). It may have been later, in the midst of the Communist-Labor-Party-led struggle to raise Tacoma's minimum wage -- an effort that was partially successful despite its (entirely predictable) betrayal by a bipartisan cabal of Neoliberal politicians led by then-mayor Marilyn Strickland, who was rewarded for her anti-proletarian treachery by a jackpot job as president and chief executive officer of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

But I remember vividly the first time I witnessed Alex in action as a teacher at Tacoma's Community Montessori School. I'm guessing it was late in the winter of 2014-2015, though I may be off by a year. In any case I watched him calm and reassure a disruptively troubled child, then seemingly without so much as a pause to bolster his soft-voiced equilibrium, move on to an adjacent table and patiently instruct four rambunctious youngsters in the most effective use of their crayons.

And Alex did this without the usual repetition of commands disguised as instructions that reinforce the implicit hierarchy of pedagogic relationships as defined by Capitalism. Instead he engaged the children in a respectful dialogue that was almost classically Aristotelian. What did they hope to accomplish? What had they already learned that might facilitate their quests? Thus he encouraged them to call upon their own knowledge and intuition of how to use color in expressing the form and content of their own ideas.

Thus too he taught his students to explore their own personhoods and -- ultimately -- to think for themselves.

But I am hardly the proper person to eulogize Alex's tragically foreshortened life. I did not know him nearly as well as many of my younger Tacoma Communist Labor Party comrades knew him. Moreover my continuing struggle with flu-turned-pneumonia kept me from attending his memorial service earlier today at the Swiss, the Tacoma bar and restaurant that holds a weekly trivia contest in which I am told Alex was a regular and oft-victorious participant.

Alex himself, however, was anything but trivial.

When I made the above photograph of him late last year at Tacoma Planned Parenthood, it was during a confrontation with some of those fanatically misogynistic Christians who so despise female sexuality they intend to ban not only abortion but all forms of contraception save abstinence.

Most of us that unseasonably warm November afternoon there on Martin Luther King Jr. Way countered the Christians' noxious hellfire-and-damnation haranguing of Planned Parenthood's patients with our own volleys of protective shouts and sloganeering. 

But Alex -- just as I had seen him do at Community Montessori -- transcended whatever anger or dismay he might have felt at our species' stubborn and often vehemently aggressive stupidity. Instead of bristling as we did with our own prickly retorts, he spoke to our presumptive enemy as calmly and gently as he might have spoken to a bewildered child in one of his classrooms.

And Alex not only silenced her hateful harangues; he did so with such soft-spoken certitude the Christian woman's awe and astonishment was unmistakable. Hence my index finger on my Canon T5's  shutter release --14 frames worth.     

Though I never had an opportunity to discuss it with him -- most of our chats were friendly but typically brief en passant exchanges of the absurd puns in which each of us delighted -- after what I witnessed in my viewfinder, I could not doubt that amongst Alex's core-most values was the impassioned conviction even the most bigoted humans may eventually be persuadable by reason.

One day, he seemed to believe, we would therefore achieve the global reign of equality, justice and peace that sometimes even now amidst this mid-apocalyptic darkness seems in brighter moments to be our species' destiny and destination.

Such was a conversation -- perhaps a respectfully friendly debate -- to which I as an aging and far less optimistic Marxian surely looked forward. But that desirable dialogue will never obtain; Alex, less than two months into his 26th year, was slain on 3 November by a frighteningly aggressive form of cancer.

Which is no doubt why it was Alex of whom I was thinking when I wrote in my journal last Friday that "the saddest, most tragic thing about life is that it tempts us to believe it is forever," an insight that soon evolved into the lead paragraph of last week's Dispatches.

But perhaps the very best tribute one might give Alex and what he meant to us and why his absence is a great yawning chasm is actually a tribute that is among the best of the tributes with which any one human might honor another human.

It was what Brie Sweaney said to me when we spoke by telephone during the memorial. She was at the Swiss; I was at home wishing I were healthy enough to be there too.

Brie said every time she and Alex spoke at any length, “he renewed my faith in humanity.”

Would we all can all follow Alex Hyland's example and do likewise for one another in the forthcoming years, even as we forever miss his reassuring presence.

*****

THIS WEEK I chose only five reports – the first a composite dispatch of my own making -- to illustrate our circumstances and perhaps suggest a pathway to our survival:

Racism Run Amok: U.S. Has First World's Worst Transit, Deadliest Healthcare

Why do We the People of the United States of America suffer the developed world's most murderously exclusive healthcare and its indisputably worst mass transit?

A plethora of reports answers these often-asked questions by documenting the ugly fact the nation's ever-more-brazenly brandished white supremacist Christian hatred is so intense, it

 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.

 

 

routinely imposes transit and healthcare policies the sole purpose of which are to maximize the suffering of racial, ethnic and nonconformist minorities.

Here are quotes from two reports on the world-class wretchedness of U.S. mass transit:

By the 1960s, “white flight” was in full swing, spurred by the pull of suburban housing as well as the push of racial integration in urban neighborhoods. The populations of many cities plummeted. Detroit's dropped from 1.85 million people in 1950 to 1.2 million by 1980, while the suburbs grew rapidly. Since most transit systems had never seriously expanded beyond the urban cores, this increasingly meant that most of the metropolitan population was not meaningfully served by transit. Poor communities of color that could not afford to drive were particularly badly affected.

***

Although history and geography are partly to blame, there's a deeper reason why American public transportation is so terrible. European, Asian, and Canadian cities treat it as a vital public utility. Most American policymakers — and voters — see transit as a social welfare program.

Studies of the industrial world's most deliberately genocidal "healthcare" system invariably reach the same conclusion: that U.S. healthcare will remain a murderously exclusive privilege of wealth until the nation's white Christian bigotry is overthrown and eliminated:

If America were an all-white country, we would have had universal health care decades ago. Even though cancer, heart disease, and diabetes are color-blind, conservative whites have consistently opposed expanded health care access because many whites would rather be sick than share a waiting room with African Americans. It’s as true now...as it was under Harry Truman.

In 1947, intrigued by the national health care systems of World War II allies Britain, France, and Canada, Truman proposed a national health care system for the United States, to be administered by federally funded hospitals. But conservative Dixiecrats from the Old Confederacy killed the plan because it would have meant, under federal anti-discrimination guidelines, that black and white patients would have been treated side-by-side.

***

A 2012 study found that about two-thirds of primary care doctors harbor biases toward their African-American patients, leading those doctors to spend less time with their black patients and involve them less in medical decisions. Although doctors typically aren’t aware that they’re treating African-American patients any differently, this ultimately creates an environment in which black people often don’t feel welcome in the medical system — and may start avoiding it. On top of that, black Americans are more likely to lack access to health insurance and less likely to have a regular doctor. This creates a situation in which African-Americans are dying from diseases at higher rates than other racial groups because they don’t get treatment in time.

In other words, the white Christian USian majority is so hatefully bigoted, it would rather suffocate in its own festering dung-heaps than cooperate with minorities to build a better world for us all. 

Which, in hideous truth, tells us all we need to know about our most likely future: not only in terms of malicious denial of mass transit and murderous rejection of healfhcare as a human right, but in terms of why our "one nation under (the white Christian) god" is rushing toward the apex of apocalypse. As some crew of space-alien archaeologists might conclude a few millennia from now: "the whites had to destroy their planet to save it from all those people of color and non-Aryan ethnicity and heretical nonconformity they so despised."

***** 

Mainstream Media Mostly Silent as Typhoon Wrecks U.S. Colony of Guam  

After the typhoon, some media critics called out the industry’s failure to adequately cover Yutu, while acknowledging that it happened the same week that a shooter killed 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue and pipe bombs were sent to high-profile Democratic figures. The HuffPost reporter Chris D’Angelo noted that the silence about Yutu echoes the meager coverage another U.S. territory, Puerto Rico, initially received when Hurricane Maria struck last year, killing nearly 3,000 people. D’Angelo pointed out that President Donald Trump, despite having tweeted about other natural disasters in the U.S., posted nothing about Yutu. Though Trump signed emergency and disaster declarations freeing up federal aid for the region, CNMI residents we spoke with remarked on his silence about the typhoon. 

Comment: I cannot but wonder if the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine's relative silence about these storms is part of a deliberate, One-Percent-commanded effort to downplay the fact we are already well into Capitalism's self-inflicted environmental apocalypse.

*****

Cops Kill Elderly Man to Enforce Forcible Disarmament Decree

When accusations trump the nation’s Bill of Rights, people die. No better example exists than the Nov. 5 shooting death by police of an elderly Maryland man in his own home. Early that Monday morning, one of two Anne Arundel County Police officers slaughtered 61-year-old Gary Willis inside his home while attempting to serve a protective order to remove firearms from his home under Maryland’s “red flag” law. Maryland’s red flag law enables an anonymous source to accuse people of potentially being a danger to themselves or others, and the state will remove any firearms from the home.

Comment: the same sort of law, forcible disarmament inflicted by anonymous complaint against which there is no allowable pre-confiscation defense,  was imposed on Washington state in 2016 by Initiative 1491. 

*****

U.S. Funded Ukranian Nazis Now Training U.S. ChristoNazi Sturmabteilung 

Last month, an unsealed FBI Indictment of four American white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) declared that the defendants had trained with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia officially incorporated into the country’s national guard. The training took place after the white supremacist gang participated in violent riots in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, California and Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017...After a wave of racist violence across America that culminated in the massacre of twelve Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the revelation that violent white supremacists have been traveling abroad for training and ideological indoctrination with a well-armed neo-Nazi militia should cause extreme alarm.

Comment: no surprise here; birds of a feather etc. ad nauseam. The only question is when -- if ever-- the Mainstream Media Propaganda Apparatus will at long last acknowledge our nation is drowning in the foul effluent of paralytic racism.

*****

Soviet Scientists Were First to Identify Apocalyptic Climate Change

It is worth noting that the Anthropocene concept originated in the early USSR. It first appeared in the English language in the translation of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia in the 1970s. This arose out of discussions of anthropogenic change and the biosphere pioneered in Soviet science, pointing to today’s Earth System perspective and to our current, more developed notion of the Anthropocene...Today’s planetary ecological crisis is due first and foremost to the increasing scale of the capitalist world economy. The greater the scale of the economy the more it rivals the fundamental biogeochemical cycles of the planet. All of this is connected to the nature and logic of capitalism, understood as a system directed at the accumulation of capital. Capitalism is a grow-or-die system. If accumulation declines, the result is economic crisis. The answer of the system is to boost accumulation. This, however, intensifies global environmental crises as the already visible impact of the economy on the Earth System increases.

Comment: here we have another lesson in the innate superiority of science freed from religious restraints and Capitalist restrictions. But how many more times must it be affirmed we either overthrow Capitalism or become extinct?

*****

ONCE AGAIN IN proletarian vexation I am compelled to acknowledge the tragically pivotal wisdom expressed by "Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse," the oft-suppressed essay by Chris Hedges that outrages so many self-proclaimed "progressives" even as it inspires genuine revolutionaries to unflinchingly acknowledge the apocalyptic monstrousness of Capitalism. 

Quoth Hedges:

The naive belief that history is linear, that moral progress accompanies technical progress, is a form of collective self-delusion. It cripples our capacity for radical action and lulls us into a false sense of security. Those who cling to the myth of human progress, who believe that the world inevitably moves toward a higher material and moral state, are held captive by power. Only those who accept the very real possibility of dystopia, of the rise of a ruthless corporate totalitarianism, buttressed by the most terrifying security and surveillance apparatus in human history, are likely to carry out the self-sacrifice necessary for revolt.

The yearning for positivism that pervades our corporate culture ignores human nature and human history. But to challenge it, to state the obvious fact that things are getting worse, and may soon get much worse, is to be tossed out of the circle of magical thinking that defines American and much of Western culture. The left is as infected with this mania for hope as the right. It is a mania that obscures reality even as global capitalism disintegrates and the ecosystem unravels, potentially dooming us all.

Sophia Burns' essay “Strategize, Don't Moralize” -- coincidentally also a bit of reflection on the sort of wisdom that characterized Alex Hyland's thinking -- tacitly builds on Hedges' arguments by documenting one of the consequences of cultoid hope-ism: the anti-intellectual aversion to strategic and tactical thinking that hamstrings nearly all the (real) U.S. Left.

US leftists tend to think in moralistic, rather than strategic, terms. To be clear, “moralistic” doesn’t mean wanting to be ethical. Rather, it’s the impulse to reduce every political question to an abstract, absolute, and non-contextual value judgment...But when you isolate a tactic from its strategic context, it loses its meaning. No tactic is good or bad in itself. What counts is its ability to accomplish a particular goal in a particular situation.

Thus -- or so one might (hopefully) imagine -- we are inspired to think carefully about how we might redouble our efforts to save our species from extinction and protect our Mother Earth from reduction to a bug planet.

LB/18-19 November 2018

-30-