Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

A People So Fanatically Self-Centered, Solidarity Is for Never

(Thus the Powell-Memo/Ayn-Rand Moral Imbecility That Perpetuates
'American Exceptionalism' Dooms Us All to Ecogenocidal Extinction)  

CRADLE-TO-GRAVE AYN RANDIFUCATION -- maliciously seductive conditioning in the principles of Mein Kampf¹ and the Powell Memo that make tyranny fun and profitable for the plutocrats and inescapably deadly for all the rest of us -- has become the sole determinant of the quality of life in today's United States. 

This remains the one pivotal  truth of our existence no matter how frantically we might try to ignore or deny the skyrocketing horrors of its obvious results, a frog-boiled compound of deliberately ruinous afflictions that make it excruciatingly obvious we are never again to be granted even the tiniest mercy of an antidote, much less an actual cure. 

These ultimately non-survivable assaults include:

• The death-blows -- whether physical or mental -- endlessly dealt us by the fascists, ChristoNazis, Original Nazis and all the other antihumans vengefully massing on the global Right:
• The socioeconomic fragmentation the equally ego-driven USian Left imposes on us with the innumerable fads of identity-politics and zero-tolerance "political correctness" it employs to blind us to the urgent reality of ecogenocidal class war;
• The me-first recidivism by which We the People of the 99 Percent are endlessly conditioned to perpetuate our own socioeconomic powerlessness;
• The murderous coup of 22 November 1963, to which -- with the terror and terrorism of at least a dozen more political murders -- our Overlords have since added the police-state guarantee of their own ever-more-obviously irreversible omnipotence;
• The nearly two million children, women and men our Masters slew in Southeast Asia to begin transforming the global-enslavement agenda of Neoliberalism into the ecogenocidal agenda of the terminally White Christian USian Empire;
• And -- last but by no means of lesser significance -- the apocalyptic revelation implicit in the defeat of the Soviet Union: specifically that there will never again be a people or nation on this planet allowed to develop the capability of overthrowing our conquerors by any means less  suicidal than thermonuclear war.

Thus we are infinitely more paralyzed by subjugation than our officially enslaved ancestors could have ever imagined -- so subjugated, in lethal fact, that even the most far-fetched possibility of liberation is now eternally beyond our reach -- "eternally" used here in the sense our species' self- destruction-by-patriarchy will be literally everlasting. 

This is because our Masters, employing their unprecedentedly diabolical cunningly, have gradually but methodically reconstructed human society to deliberately rob all the rest of us -- forever -- of any instincts, skills or possessions that might facilitate our escape from the invisible dungeons of this new mode of solitary self-confinement.

(Indeed I cannot doubt the glaringly anti-intuitive operations of our dominant electronic devices is intended to drill us in the abandonment of intuition -- a paramount step in our forcible reduction to the subhuman consciousness essential to our permanent enslavement that would be a picture-perfect example of the ever-expanding thoroughness of our Masters' malevolence.)     

Precisely as mapped out by the psychological warfare gurus whose weaponized market research makes Madison Avenue the one true ruler of the world, the grotesquely anti-social  self-centeredness within which we are all so relentlessly conditioned -- literally from our first breaths outside our mothers' wombs -- guarantees the vast majority of us will forever remain self-subjugated and therefore eternally imprisoned in our Masters' slave-pens. 

Meanwhile the very few of us who manage to escape -- an already minuscule number that further dwindles every year -- are ever-more-vehemently denounced as failures, often with a slanderous hatefulness of such foul intensity, the temptation to forsake our defining iconoclasms becomes irresistible, never mind the sometimes-fatal, always-devastating cost such abandonment imposes on our own mental and physical health.

Forgive the apparent digression -- as you'll see, it is actually not -- but here for clarity and context I must explain that in all my decades of paying close attention to such matters, I have met only two sorts of iconoclasts, something that until this writing I had never given much thought beyond idly wondering to what extent a psychologist or psychiatrist might recognize each of these sorts as separate personality types.  But along comes the Apocalypse, and here we are again discussing Relevant Things, so I need to preface what follows by explaining that the sole criterion by which I the (iconoclastic) journalist determine in what lot any given iconoclast might belong is that of apparent trustworthiness, which tonight I shall designate accordingly: NT = Not Trustworthy; PT = Potentially Trustworthy.

In the NT category of iconoclasts go all those I think of as "volunteer iconoclasts," persons moved to iconoclasm by specific grievances and vexations or sometimes even fads and therefore prone to abandon their iconoclasm as soon as they can rationalize so doing, hence, for example, the death of the Counterculture -- and the nearly identical physics of the Ayn-Randified anti-solidarity epidemic that slew Occupy five decades hence. In the PT category I include all of us whose us whose quest for salvation-by-iconoclasm is of the involuntary and therefore permanent sort born of trauma. And -- yes (I am working this out as I go) -- an NT could certainly become an PT; though I doubt a PT -- save by betrayal --  could ever become anything else.  

Which brings us back to the less-than-comfortable topic of our individual and collective vulnerability to the omnipresent pressure of temptation to abandon our iconoclasm,   a vulnerability to which I myself will most assuredly attest. Emotionally orphaned at age five (and quite properly ever afterward a skeptic who -- try as I might -- will never unlearn the lesson that "trust" is but an invitation to betrayal),  I nevertheless did my best to evolve a working balance between (real/spirit-healing) iconoclasm and the (apparent) conformity by which for many years I was able to keep my iconoclasm fed. 

But of course in the end our unforgiving Masters won -- as the proper study of history makes it obvious they always have and always will -- a lesson taught me in my elder years  by the ever-worsening poverty that makes me ever more dependent on (and always infinitely grateful for) the beneficence of friends and comrades. Without them I'd be dead -- precisely as are others I have known who grew old without friends or families or died young because their poverty denied them healthcare.  Such is Neoliberalism in action, lethal as serpent-venom to its innumerable victims, fatal even in the realms of imagination.     

Beyond that, note too how the Neoliberal Final Solution to the growing rage resulting from our Masters' destruction of the last vestiges of the mostly illusory "American Dream" is leveraging the economy so brutally, all humans -- that is, everybody but the plutocrats and those former humans who have embraced moral imbecility to serve the ecogenicidal plutocrats' agenda -- are hurled into inescapable poverty and abandoned to the struggles-to-the-death it so often necessitates.  Such is our fate: We the (Surplus) People of the (hmmm; what do we call it now?) used-to-be (but-never-really)  United States  of America.

Meanwhile, in methodical furtherance of our disempowerment -- one of the lessons our Masters' grandfathers learned in Tsarist Russia is what happens when workers are allowed guns --  local rulers in both  Seattle and Tacoma have pioneered an entirely constitutional means of prohibiting civilian firearms ownership and funding compulsory buybacks. Thus the Ruling Class terror of revolution is being expressed -- just as I had repeatedly warned it would be -- by a notably Orwellian campaign of imposing forcible disarmament, mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood on every civilian who is not officially certified as a ChristoNazi or other sort of fascist, whether by obscene wealth or sturmabteilung membership. Borrowing from the poll-tax era, out masters have imposed taxation intended to make gun ownership so prohibitively expensive it is transformed -- first in the Ruling Class rat-lab of Washington state,² ultimately throughout the entire imperial homeland --  into a rare privilege only the wealthiest, most fanatically reactionary aristocrats can afford.

Exactly as in the antebellum South.
___________________________

¹See particularly pages 100-104, Mein Kampf (the Ford Translation, Elite Minds Inc.:2009), for a summary of some of the Nazi attitudes later embraced by Ayn Rand. For EMI's other titles -- and evidence indicative of its overall political and socioeconomic bias -- go here and here.

²As testified by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman, the Seattle plutocrat who played a leading role in helping President Richard Milhous Nixon nullify the Constitution. See especially this Harper's piece exposing the misogyny, racism and generalized hatefulness that spawned the so-called "War on Drugs" as a notably bipartisan war against racial, biological and ideological minorities. Also I must apologize for the lack of a citation to Ehrlichman's testimony about our Masters' use of  Washington state as a favorite psychological-warfare laboratory to test and perfect their methodologies of oppression. Though the story was covered briefly but extensively by local media including The Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the time, my Ehrlichman file was destroyed on 1 September 1983 by the same arsonist(s) who destroyed all the rest of my life's significant work. With the death of The P-I as a newspaper combined with the deaths of any relevant alternative journals, there is no way (now that Ehrlichman's admission has again become relevant) I can recover any of these bibliographical references; I have squandered I-know-not-how-many hours of  Internet time in failed searches for a usable reference, and now four-and-one-half months short of my 80th birthday, I am too damn old (and therefore too poor and too crippled) for the many requisite journeys to and from the microfiche machines of several Seattle libraries. But if someone is inclined to help me with this search, please do.

 

*****

I HAD FOOLISHLY imagined the recent election might give me some small reason to applaud, as indeed it did in Seattle. But alas that fleeting moment of uniquely localized joy was quickly reduced to anger and vexation:  

Pierce County sends a message to Sound Transit with vote on the I-976 car-tab measure

Washington State Voters Reject Affirmative Action, Again

Kansas City votes to remove King's name from historic street

Tucson voters overwhelmingly reject sanctuary city measure

Las Vegas law makes sleeping on downtown streets illegal

(These are heads exactly as linked from the Internet, with up-style capitalization or down-style lack thereof as in the originals.)   

Once again I am reminded of what has been the ultimate truth of human life on this planet for the past approximately six thousand years -- that under patriarchy, any and all alleged inferiors are ultimately naught but prey. That includes our Mother Earth, all females, anyone or anything else our male-supremacist  (or male-supremacist-minded)  overlords choose to target for exploitation, enslavement or death.

Nevertheless I wonder if it is wrong to equate Nazis and Neoliberals. The big difference is even the Nazis sought better lives for those they considered their own Aryan kind, while Neoliberals seek better lives only for themselves and make no secret of the fact they intend to savage all rest of us to ensure their obscenely undeserved comforts: Nazism shrunken to its most black-holishly in-sucking microcosm, as it were.

But thanks to the obsession-with-self  now so thoroughly ingrained in so huge an USian majority by allegedly "educational" or "religious" celebration of Ayn Rand's predatory individuality, it has become the Empire's sole defining ethos. Thus have our Masters transmogrified every one of our potentially revolutionary solidarities -- those of class and race and gender -- into insurmountable barriers the prevailing cult of Identity-Politics selfishness guarantees cannot ever be toppled or even ameliorated.

*****

FIVE RELATIVELY RECENT news reports and features  the comment-threads of which contain responses I am especially proud to share:

Abortion After the Clinic

FOCUS: 'Not Our Mission': Private Fire Crews Protect the Insured, Not the Public

FOCUS: A Future Without Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is a Chilling Prospect

Did Kavanaugh's Replacement, Neomi Rao, Show the Supreme Court a Path to Justify Trump's Defiance of Congress?

While Supreme Court Waffles, Cities Stand Up for LGBT Workers’ Rights

My apologies if I've linked to any of these reports in other contexts. 

*****

I WONDER IF anyone with greater readership than I has noted the existential similarities between the Republican assault-by-invasion against the Democratic (sic) participants in a classified (and therefore closed) impeachment hearing and the Democratic (sic) slaveholder-family Southron congressman's attempt to beat Republican Sen. Charles Sumner to death with a wooden cudgel.

No, this did not happen last week in Trumpland; it was one of the incidents that presaged the Civil War.

(And yes there are ironies here aplenty,  chief among them the 180-degree, century-long turnabout by which the Republican Party eventually betrayed the very peoples of color whose vigor had energized its youth, even as the Democratic (sic) Party would betray them again as, three decades later, our implacably white-supremacist nation became ever-more-open about resurrecting its white supremacy to its good-ole-Ku-Klux-Klavern max.)

But let us not forget how the Republicans first employed their modern adaption of  this slave-masterly tactic to deny Albert Gore Jr. the presidency in 2000. Nor this, which begins with how a Republican candidate assaulted a mainstream journalist and (thereby?) won an election victory and in its turn brings us back to this and therefore to this, all of which together I submit as irrefutable proof the Republicans are not only methodically encouraging violence but deliberately getting more brazenly violent themselves.

Plus given the growing weight of evidence there is indeed (again) some super-secret organization behind the global fascist conspiracy, it must certainly be asked what clandestine operations might have been served by this most recent act of treasonous brutality.

*****

RALPH NADER HAS written a new essay entitled "The World Is Waiting for America to Rise Up"; like most of his work it is informative and compelling. When it was published last week (8 November 2019) by the website Truthdig, I read it carefully, then took some time to pen a thoughtfully critical comment-thread response -- only to see my work slain by censors literally seconds after I posted it.  Here -- with an ink-stained social finger uplifted in contemptuous salute to Truthdig's picayune proctors of punitive propriety -- is the text they hoped they had suppressed:

I know and often applaud Mr. Nader -- I was the first daily-newspaper reporter in the United States to take seriously the findings he would later reveal in Unsafe at Any Speed (and of course the story was killed by my editor, Richard Smyser, ironically then chairman of the Associated Press Managing Editors Freedom of Information Committee) -- so I post the following with a combination of respectfulness and regret:

In the inescapably abject and steadily worsening poverty of old age, I am closer in the everyday sense to this nation's now-genuinely wretched "grassroots" than I ever was before, even during the 30-plus award-winning years I served a dozen newspapers and magazines in staff positions ranging from reporter to editor-in-chief.

Hence from innumerable conversations with socioeconomic peers of all ages I know something the pollsters dare not ask and Mr. Nader most assuredly does not want to hear: that most USians regardless of age, ethnicity or gender ignore calls to action because we -- like so many Germans under Nazism -- have learned from bitter experience we are already a hopelessly conquered people.

Which is the only conclusion possible from the data Mr. Nader cites in the above essay -- data that is further confirmed by the painfully low voter turnouts that reveal the (correct) belief we-the-people have been reduced to such irremediable powerlessness, a growing majority now acknowledges our elections are naught but meaningless charades.

Precisely as proven by Barack the Betrayer, any vote for a self-proclaimed progressive is likely to be a vote that merely sets us up for yet more betrayal.

That's how I know homeless camps are, in mostly denied truth, the only accurate archetype of our future: we the people now eternally damned by our Neoliberal masters to serfdom, slavery and whatever other forms of torture, exploitation and victimization they impose -- invariably with their signature gloating sadism.

Yes there is a flurry of bright spots, such as Kshama Sawant's victory in Seattle, but any progressive victory can be (and will be) nullified by the ChristoNazi cabal that now and forever rules the Empire via the Robbers' Court.

Under those irremediable conditions, resistance truly is futile -- just as it has always been, and just as it is sure to remain as long as the Capitalists are allowed to retain their omnipotence.

Doubt this?

Look at how every progressive gain we-the-people forced on the United States (mostly via the labor movement) during the New Deal and again c. 1961-1968 has either been repealed or – like the right of women to control their own bodies – it is under such relentlessly well-funded ChristoNazi attack its repeal is inevitable.

Moreover we are increasingly schooled in the corollary fact resistance has again become deadly dangerous.

And it will soon -- as soon as the ChristoNazis complete their consolidation of power in the boiled-frog aftermath of the coup of 22 November 1963 -- be infinitely deadlier.

In fact (based on new technologies of oppression and Rightist promises to maximize their use), it will be far more deadly dangerous than it was in Germany under Hitler.

But above all else we know this time the Nazi onslaught is literally forever because there will never again be a people or nation allowed to develop, as the Soviet Union was able to do, a force capable of defeating it -- "forever" in this context defined as however many years remain until we have rendered our own species extinct and reduced our Mother Earth back to a bug planet.

All that said, the only lesson I can discern in the rapidity with which Truthdig killed this piece is that the terminal truths of our ecogenoicidal era are increasingly tabooed -- including by allegedly "progressive"  publishers. To learn about of my two most telling encounters with our "nonexistent" press censorship, go here.

*****

AN ECLECTIC ANTHOLOGY of suggested reading from websites Left, Right and center, the following reports and essays sample the circumstances of our lives and the condition of our planet as we squirm beneath the crushing weight of Neoliberalism. Most of these are current works -- that is, published since mid-October.  The one exception, "How Democrats Keep Guns in the Hands of the Rich" (and are working overtime to confiscate them from all the rest of us), is a 2017 Chicago Tribune report that despite its age remains relevant today, especially in light of what is being done to us here in Washington state. (Yes, you already may have read one or more of these stories,  but in case their headlines pique your interest, here they are, in no particular order):

Missouri officials tracked women’s menstrual periods in effort to shut down state’s last abortion provider

Senate Democrats Join GOP to Back 'Automatic Austerity' Bill That Would Gut Social Programs, Hamstring Bold Policies

Humanity Has Already Destroyed Half the Animal and Plant Life on Earth

Crow Nation Is a Place Where One Could Vanish - and Many Have

After This Fungus Turns Ants Into Zombies, Their Bodies Explode 

Colorado Student Suspended for Holding Gun in Picture on Social Media

Best Gun Friendly States for Firearm Owners (2019)

David Lynch's Chillingly Prescient Vision of Modern America

How Democrats keep guns in the hands of the rich

The Boeing crashes and the criminalization of American capitalism

What in the world is Adam Schiff thinking with his domestic terrorism bill?

A New Study Confirms (Again) That Race, Not Economics, Drove Former Democrats to Trump

Restaurant Owner Enslaved Intellectually Disabled Black Man

Class War Violence: Centralia 1919 - CounterPunch.org

For the Eleventh Straight Year, United States Votes “No” to UN Anti-Nazi Resolution

The U.S. Drops to 32nd in Global Ranking of Nations Promoting Freedom of Thought

Trump Reveals Plans for Nationwide Crackdown, More Militarized Police

Muddying The Waters On Firearms Research & Suicides

Why Aren't People in the US Rising Up Like Those Elsewhere in the World?

AP Photos: Hong Kong protesters resort to medieval weapons

The Associated Press photo essay immediately above -- which includes some excellent photographs made under difficult wartime conditions -- brings to mind unpublished fiction I wrote in the late 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s, including a short-story about modern-day revolutionaries who responded to confiscatory disarmament by equipping and organizing regiments of archers;  its plot came to me as I watched the NYPD tactical police massing like medieval infantry to clear Central Park's Sheep Meadow of the many-thousand participants in the 1967 Easter Be-In, a Countercultural event I had already covered for maybe nine hours as a freelancer -- never mind it was also my 27th birthday. But all my fictional manuscripts were destroyed by the arsonist(s) of 1 September 1983, the same person or persons who also incinerated, as I note in the sidebar, a 24-year investigative project that had seemed solidly destined for mainstream publication, two other non-fiction works-in-progress and thousands of thematically related photographs, a loss so devastating it insured -- as I am certain was intended -- that no matter how much longer I might live, I would never again dare seek significant outlets for my work. Hence I have no clue what Dispatches might yet become, though perhaps a beneficent Muse will reveal to me its proper direction.

LB/15 November 2019

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Ten Reports That Exemplify Our Intensifying Wretchedness

(Which I Re-Post Here in Hope They'll Help Shape Our Responses)

AGAIN, THOUGH I had not planned on writing anything  more in this space for probably another month, some breaking stories demand attention well beyond the aggrieved but fleeting glances by which we now routinely (and often suicidally) try to defend ourselves against the horrors they expound.

Why pay these disturbing reports additional heed? 

Because most come from the alternative press, which means they received little or no coverage in the so-called "mainstream press" owned and operated by our overlords, the privately-owned for-profit successor to Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda that now peddles the Big Lies, disinformation and maliciously manufactured confusion central to the USian Empire's Neoliberal agenda of suppression, conquest and enslavement.

And because the reports featured here are what they are,  there is always a chance -- never mind ours is the most rationally hopeless of all human epochs -- of someone finding ideas therein for activism that might ameliorate the horrors our masters are bringing down upon us all.  

Sea 'Boiling' With Methane Discovered in Siberia: 'No One Has Ever Recorded Anything Like This Before'
Researchers on an expedition to the East Siberian Sea said the "methane fountain" was unlike anything they had seen before, with concentrations of the gas in the region to be six to seven times higher than the global average.  Observation: This is the newest report on the bobsled-speed with which terminal climate change is intensifying. Meanwhile our Neoliberal overlords are obviously escalating their efforts to weaponize the Apocalypse and thereby exterminate 90 to 95 percent of the 99 Percent and permanently enslave the survivors.

This report, brought to us by Reader Supported News, also exemplifies the sorts of information we are routinely denied by the Imperial USian censorship and brain-warping apparatus, the most ruinously effective such program in all human experience -- which is precisely why we should be doing everything in our power to preserve RSN, the censorship-nullifying source of so many vital stories. PLEASE therefore contribute to help RSN continue providing the most relevant summary of vital news available on the English-language Internet.  

Sexually Transmitted Diseases Hit New Highs Again in US
More than 1.7 million cases of chlamydia  were reported last year. The infection rate rose 3% from 2017. It’s the most ever reported in a year...About 580,000 gonorrhea cases were reported. That’s the highest number since 1991. The rate rose 5%. Scientists worry antibiotic resistance may be a factor. And the syphilis rate rose 15%. About 35,000 cases of the most contagious forms of the disease were reported — also the most since 1991. Factual Observation: These disasters are entirely the fault of the Fundamentalist Christians and their diabolical, intentionally murderous campaign to abolish sex education as well as all public health and reproductive care. Indeed their Prosperity Gospel Jesus is fast becoming humanity's most deadly enemy.

White College Kids Burn Latina Author’s Book After She Discusses White Privilege
But while some students at the Statesboro, Ga., school expressed disgust and shame, others defended the actions. Note: Do not dismiss this atrocity as "just the South"; uncontested brain-warping by Neoliberalism has made such neo-Confederate bigotry the defining characteristic of nearly all the USian interior states (in addition, of course, to all the original state perpe-traitors of secession).

War on Plastic Waste Faces Setback as Cost of Recycled Material Soars
For years the cost of making plastic products from recycled flakes was cheaper than relying on virgin plastics made using fossil fuels, meaning the sustainable option was an economic option too. But...new plastic is becoming cheaper to make due to a flood of petrochemicals production from the US driven by the shale gas boom. Note how this deliberately ecocidal trend is imposed on the world by -- what else -- the USian Empire (which by any accurate accounting is by far the most deliberately ecogenocidal empire that ever murdered and enslaved our kinfolk and otherwise infested our probably doomed plane).   

Wildfires and Forced Blackouts Lead to Multiple Deaths in California
The past week of events in California underscores the complete bankruptcy of the entire capitalist system, which subordinates every aspect of life—including the most basic needs of the population such as electricity—to the profit interests of the financial aristocracy. With all control over this vital resource left in the hands of the executives of the utility monopolies, Californians are offered the miserable choice: burn to death in wildfires or die prematurely when forced blackouts power down your ventilator or cause you to get into a car crash from the lack of stoplights. In a scene reminiscent of the French aristocracy at Versailles on the eve of the Great French Revolution, on the day of the public announcement that the mass shutoffs would go forward, PG&E staged a party for their top clients at a Sonoma County winery. Observation: The California wildfire crisis is a bitingly accurate summation of our true circumstances under Capitalism -- doomed no matter what we do or don't do, and so damned for as long as we indulge ourselves by remaining subjugated beneath the iron heels of the Neoliberal/ChristoNazi jackboot.   

Just 100 Companies Will Sign Humanity’s Death Warrant
Basically, a tiny number of sociopaths make the decisions that are currently dooming us all, and as much as I’d like to tell you otherwise, those people don’t even notice if we all march outside in colorful hats...Point is, the only protests that create change are those that interrupt the flow of business, because these corporations will not give up easily. Too much profit rests in the balance for them to stop their prolonged execution of the human race. Observation: And yet there are still those ignorant multitudes so willfully deluded they cannot accept the ever-more-obvious truth the One Percenters are methodically weaponizing  terminal climate change to facilitate the imposition of the aristos' own ecogenocidal Neoliberal World Order -- the organizational model of which is the antebellum slave plantation expanded to worldwide magnitude.   

Trump Asserts Unchecked Presidential Powers
In the wake of the eight-page letter sent Tuesday evening by the White House to the House of Representatives declaring the Trump administration’s defiance of the impeachment inquiry, the president and his attorneys are elaborating a theory of unchecked executive authority, a presidential dictatorship in all but name.  Comment: But most USians will cravenly ignore this warning just as -- methodically stupefied cowards they are -- they have ignored an infinity of equally urgent warnings dating all the way back to 22 November 1963.

Trump’s Spiritual Adviser: ‘to Say No to Trump Would Be Saying No to God’
Pastor White (also) says she was ordered by God to serve President Trump. See also: Ralph Reed: Christians Have a “Moral Obligation” to Support Donald Trump in 2020  Relevance: Each of these reports exemplify the theocratic horrors our Neoliberal slavemasters are methodically imposing.

US Supreme Court Term Begins with New Threats to Democratic Rights
Last Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States began its 2019-2020 term. The court is slated to hear cases involving a number of democratic and civil rights issues, including the separation of church and state, the right to abortion, equal employment for homosexual and transgender persons, the rights of immigrants and those defending them from state repression, and the rights of criminal defendants. Comment: Thus the Robbers' Court begins its long-planned effort to murder the final remnants of USia's pseudo-democracy. The only remaining question is how long it will be before the Regime begins its Gestapo-type mass arrest and extermination of all us in the 99 Percent, we the people of color, we the people of anti-patriarchal sexuality and all the rest of us including the few Caucasians whose values are anywhere to the Left of the ChristoNazis' saint, martyr and hero Adolf Hitler. 

*****

But Don't Be Deluded by a Tiny Taste of Seemingly Uplifting Stories:

MORE SPECIFICALLY, please don't forget the fact there can be no victory -- not in this winner-take-all fight to save our Mother Earth and our species -- until those Capitalists and Abrahamic fanatics who are now obviously the sworn enemies of all known forms of Earthly life are permanently removed from power and stripped of all influence.  Nevertheless:

Native Protectors at Wash. State Capitol Square Off with Riot Police and Stay Put
Members of the group Protectors of the Salish Sea, founded and led by Paul Chiyokten Wagner of the Saanich Nation, have kept a 24-hour vigil on the steps of the capitol building since September 24. They say they’ll stay until Gov. Jay Inslee meets their four demands, which include issuing an executive order terminating all fossil fuel expansion projects in the state. Observation: After unsuccessfully presenting himself as the Democratic (sic) Party's "environmental" presidential candidate, Inslee shows his true Neoliberal malevolence.  

Sara Nelson Is the Face of America's Resurgent Labor Movement
“Almost a million workers are locked out or being forced to work without pay. Others are going to work when our workspace is increasingly unsafe,” Nelson said. “What is the Labor Movement waiting for?” Comment: Hear, hear!

Crimeans Tell The Real Story Of The 2014 Referendum And Their Lives Since
In the case of Crimea, joining Russia (or actually rejoining, as most I spoke to in Crimea phrased it) was something people overwhelmingly supported. In the case of the Donbass region, the turmoil of Ukraine’s Maidan coup in 2014 set things in motion for the people in the region to declare independence and form the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Description: A factual antidote to ChristoNazi, Nazi and fascist Big Lies.

California City Gave People $500 A Month, No Strings; Here’s What Happened
Since February, the city has given $500 a month, no strings attached, to 125 residents, all of whom live at or below the city’s median income level of about $46,000. It’s a form of universal basic income (UBI): the idea that people receive regular payments, which they are free to spend however they wish. Encouraging: hence please read in full.. 

*****

And Let Us Never Forget the (Swiftly Vanished) Truths of Our History:

HERE IS ANOTHER brief compendium of vital facts maliciously suppressed in the name of the Ayn Rand moral imbecility that is the heart of Neoliberalism and its relentless war against all things human:

“Intersectional Before It Was Cool”: The Women’s Movement Under State Socialism
The erasure of East European women’s activism—together with that of the activism of their socialist allies in the Global South—happened both because the East collapsed and because the West declared victory and could subsequently control and direct the historical narrative.

Repercussions of Child Kidnapping in Argentina’s Dirty War
“If you have doubts about your identity, contact Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.” So read billboards across today’s Argentina, where thousands of people were “disappeared” between 1976 and 1983 during the brutal military dictatorship’s Dirty War.

*****

AS I HAVE done every year since I became aware of changing seasons, I embrace the advent of cooler autumn weather -- of which (if indeed it presents the anticipated seasonal display of Mother Nature's painterly expertise at deciduous color), I will surely share a photographic glimpse or two via this website. 

Meanwhile may all of us stay as healthy as we are able. 

LB/16 October 2019

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Demand Progress: Another Example of Deliberate Deception

WHEN I FINALLY ABANDONED my effort to make Dispatches a weekly news site and decided instead to retain its title but post only when events and (dwindling) creative impulses so demanded, my notion was I'd normally write maybe one post per month -- unless of course some breaking story required the 21st Century online equivalent of an Extra.  

(Yes I am old enough to remember when newsboys -- and very occasionally newsgirls -- hawked papers on the street: "Extra, Extra, read all about it...")

(No, not "just like in the movies"; "exactly as in what used to be real life" instead.) 

But then the net neutrality story took a new and damnably revealing turn that underscores my most recent anti-censorship essay and again demonstrates how the Left destroys its own credibility not only with censorship per se but with malicious disinformation -- in other words by behaving exactly as the ChristoNazis, Original Nazis and fascists routinely behave -- and thereby, like our enemies, serving our Overlords by further spreading chaos and confusion amongst us all, we the people of the ever-more-savagely oppressed 99 Percent, we who are ever-more-undeniably the planet's [only] remaining human beings.

Quoth the website Demand Progress in a 1 October 2019 email (bf as in original): 

A federal court just threw out a key part of Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality—a game-changer in the fight for net neutrality...But while we didn't get the complete win we wanted, allowing states to enact their own strong net neutrality protections is a huge deal. And we can still win at the federal level by pressing the Senate and presidential candidates to act. 

This grotesquely misleading pitch for an "emergency donation" then jumps to somewhat-less-deceptive, light-faced huckstering inside:

A federal court has just thrown out part of Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality. This ruling also means the 2020 presidential candidates need to step up and pledge to restore net neutrality — and we’re working hard to push them to do so. But we can’t act without your help, and time is of the essence.

All of which illustrates the knife-edged relevance of Chris Hedges' 2015 essay, "Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse" -- an essay every (allegedly) Leftist U.S. website save the notably courageous Popular Resistance has long ago maliciously suppressed as contrary to the mandatory USian  cult of (tyranny-preserving) clinically delusional optimism: 

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...

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...

The 19th century theorist, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief, central to Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality...

"Its regressive march," (Blanqui asserted) "goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.”

And again it is the eloquently truthful Mr. Hedges who tells us why not only revolution but even the most minimal humanitarian reforms are impossible at present and will undoubtedly remain so for as long as the USian ethos of compulsory delusion paralyzes the Occidental mind, exactly as our diabolically Machiavellian masters intend: 

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.

Meanwhile Credo -- a self-proclaimed "progressive" marketeer that implicitly promotes the notion Capitalism is humanitarianism -- a vivid example indeed of what George Orwell aptly labeled "doublethink" --  has nevertheless (to its credit) reported the partial truth about net neutrality's extermination. 

Quoth Credo:

Yesterday, a federal appeals court affirmed that the Federal Communications Commission's murder of the internet was lawful.

But then of course the Credo text continued pimping the Democratic (sic) Party's hallucinatory agenda of Hope and Change-We-Can-Believe-In by absurdly claiming the same bipartisan cabal of perpe-traitors can somehow (as if by magic) be pressured to restore net neutrality on a national basis -- never mind the lifetime (hence effectively eternal)¹  ChristoNazi control of the Supreme Court forever nullifies all such efforts.        

Not surprisingly, the most factually complete report of this ongoing Neoliberal atrocity -- an atrocity that will undoubtedly be grown to national proportions by the Robbers' Court -- is by a harder-to-censor wire service, specifically the Associated Press, the text of which was also featured by TruthDig:

The Federal Communications Commission could dump rules that keep internet providers from favoring some services over others, but couldn’t bar states like California from enacting their own prohibitions, a federal court ruled.

While Tuesday’s ruling handed Trump-appointed regulators a partial victory, consumer advocates and other groups viewed the ruling as a victory for states and local governments seeking to put in their own net neutrality rules.

The FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules had barred internet providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from blocking, slowing down or charging internet companies to favor some sites or apps over others.

Once again the Norman Vincent Peale disciples  and all the other power-of-positive-thinking pimps are confronted with the ultimate truth their historically illiterate, clinically delusional belief "the arc of history bends toward justice" is one of the two the most monstrously crippling Big Lies ever imposed on human beings. 

The other Big Lie? The equally delusional, equally paralyzing belief in "eternal life" -- which commands its deliberately duped millions to submit to the Neoliberal horrors by which our masters are slowly exterminating us and to focus gaining on the nonexistent rewards of "heaven"  instead.

All that said, the many-times-cited reason I seldom bother to report anything about the net-neutrality squabble is my recognition of Neoliberal murderousness tells me any notion of its restoration is but pie-in-the-sky.

Why?

Because one of the primary objectives of the Neoliberal (NeoNazi) New World Order is the malicious denial -- ultimately the zero-tolerance denial -- of any  information that might be useful to us, we the people of the 99 Percent, lest we awaken to the fact "Neoliberal" is already secret synonym for "enslavement"
___________________________

¹The death of net neutrality is "effectively eternal" because whatever reality prevails at the moments of our deaths is literally "forever" in the sense that any change, tyrannizing or liberating,  that takes place after one's death -- the permanent eradication of one's consciousness -- can never be known by the dead.

*****

A Dozen Relevant Reports I Hope You Will Read and Contemplate

NORMALLY I WOULD have set these aside to be posted as recommended reading once each month. But the last week produced so many such stories, my collection-file was soon overflowing. Hence:  

Report Highlights Gender Inequality Worldwide
Women are often at a disadvantage compared to men. A study shows where in the world the situation is especially dramatic -- and which countries are the closest to reaching gender equality. Description: conceptually useful geographic details of the patriarchal/Abrahamic/Capitalist/Neoliberal/NeoNazi horrors with which we are already familiar.

Secret Israeli Nuclear Test Covered Up to Help Jimmy Carter’s Re-Election
Former President Jimmy Carter covered up a nuclear weapon test by Israel in 1979, declassified reports have suggested. His administration feared that making the discovery public would damage his bid for re-election. U.S. satellites picked up a “double flash” signal associated with a nuclear explosion in the South Indian Ocean in September 1979. This led to an emergency at the White House, according to Foreign Policy magazine which obtained the documents.

Washington's Coastal Tribes Are Working to Escape Rising Sea Levels
For the Native tribes that have historically lived along Washington’s Pacific coast, the threat of rising waters is real and imminent. As a result, many must grapple with the forced relocation of entire villages to higher ground before their homes are submerged. Dystopic Observation: But, as always -- this misleadingly optimistic report not withstanding -- our genocidal overlords continue doing everything in their white-supremacist power to condemn the tribes to extinction, whether by surging sea levels or myriad other mechanisms of slow-motion genocide. 

One Year after Khashoggi Murder, US CEOs Flock to Saudi Arabia
At least 40 US executives are preparing to attend the annual Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference, dubbed “Davos in the Desert,” at the end of this month. Many of them bailed out of last year’s event, held just weeks after Khashoggi’s killing, sending subordinates to represent them in order to avoid being seen as openly endorsing the murderous methods of the Saudi monarchy. Casting such qualms aside this year, senior executives from Wall Street’s top financial firms—Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and BlackRock—are all listed...

Boeing Engineer Filed Complaint Alleging Culture of Profit Over Safety
A senior Boeing engineer filed an internal ethics complaint this year following two fatal 737 Max crashes, claiming that the company rejected a safety system during the plane's development to cut costs though it could have reduced the risks, according to the New York Times. In the complaint, which Boeing has sent to the Justice Department, the engineer Curtis Ewbank alleged, "Boeing management was more concerned with cost and schedule than safety or quality," according to the newspaper, which has reviewed the complaint...Ewbank also called out Boeing's chief executive Dennis Muilenburg for publicly misrepresenting the safety of the plane, the newspaper reported. DO: Welcome to the deadly skies of Capitalism.

NATO Rejects Putin's Request to Ban Missile Deployments in Europe
At the end of this week NATO announced a bombshell that’s gone largely under-reported given the Ukraine transcript brouhaha and Democrats’ push for impeachment.

Bigots Welcome on America's Police Forces
In June, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of police officers across the country who were members of closed racist, Islamophobic, misogynistic or anti-government militia groups on Facebook. We sought reaction from more than 150 law enforcement departments about their officers’ involvement in these extremist groups. Yet only one department – the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which fired a detective for racist posts – has publicly taken any significant action.

Democrats Refuse to Include Gang Members in 'Red Flag' Laws
Democrats showed their lack of interest in gun control laws that address the real source of gun violence this week when they refused to include gang members in “Red Flag” laws. DO: Thus the Democratic (sic) Party's role as chief perpe-traitor of the Ruling Class effort to frog-boil all us Working Class folks to compulsory pacifism continues apace -- never mind the ChristoNazification of the federally militarized local police means the cops' storm-trooper allies will of course -- exactly as in Nazi Germany -- be allowed to keep their weapons and thereby given carte blanche to terrorize us at will. (This report is unapologetically linked from a Rightist website because all major U.S. Leftist sites forbid pro-Second-Amendment coverage.)   

US Census Report: Inequality Grew Rapidly in 2018 to Record Levels
Social inequality in the United States is rapidly reaching unprecedented levels, according to US Census data published Thursday. The past year saw a staggering transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 percent of the population to the top 10 and top 5 percent. This is the intended result of the bipartisan social counterrevolution intensified by Barack Obama and carried to a fever pitch by Donald Trump, who has slashed corporate taxes and regulations with no opposition from Democrats in Congress.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Blow Past Joe Biden in Fundraising Race
Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders greatly eclipsed former Vice President Joe Biden in fundraising over the past three months, placing progressive Democrats on strong footing in the crucial final stretch before primary voting begins. RELEVANCE: The significant part of this story is its comment thread, specifically -- again apropos our censorship topic -- the overwhelmingly negative reaction I got for pointing out that Sanders' heart attack makes him un-electable. 

The Corporate Democrats (and Alicia Garza) Spewing Get-Sanders Slanders
Once the Bernie Sanders threat has subsided, Elizabeth Warren will be required to further neuter herself to allay the fears of billionaire Democratic donors...The War of/on Terror and Russiagate – both involving mass psychological warfare operations to stamp out domestic resistance to the global U.S. imperial offensive – signaled that the Lords of Capital’s tolerance for dissent was approaching zero. The contradictions of late stage capitalism and the increasing precariousness of U.S. empire squeezed all vestiges of liberality out of the boardrooms, as was reflected in the content of their ever-consolidating media. DO: written before Sanders' heart attack, this essay approaches genuine prophecy.

Earth’s Magnetic Field Mysteriously Pushing North Pole to Siberia
Earth’s magnetic field, the basis for modern global navigation systems, is constantly in some state of flux. However, it now seems to be going haywire, pushing the North Pole closer to Siberia, and no one’s sure why. The field changes as the molten metals surrounding the earth’s solid iron core churn and flow, creating electric currents and a corresponding magnetic field. As a result, the magnetic poles tend to shift slightly as a matter of course...(but)...The north magnetic pole sped across the International Date Line last year at a rate of 55 km per year, more than three times as fast as it moved before the mid-1990s. Now located in the Eastern Hemisphere, it’s moving away from Canada and approaching Siberia. Important detail: This report includes the most spectacular photo of the Aurora Borealis I have ever seen.

*****

IF WE ARE ever to cope with what is being done to us, we need to first transcend decades of carefully induced clinical delusion and admit why the Neoliberal (NeoNazi) Ruling Class is  reducing  our  once  beautiful  and productive nation to naught but a continent-sized miasma of burnt forests, slums, homeless camps, concentration camps, prisons and ever-more-heavily guarded military cantonments. The reason we are being drowned in destitution is simple: the Capitalists' genocidal exploitation of people and ecocidal rape of Nature is far more profitable in colonial realms more easily terrorized to submission.  Thus our domestic overlords are turning back to their ancestral source of obscene wealth: we the people, whom our overlords are quickly reducing to slavery -- which they in their greedy sadistic malevolence hail as the ultimate form of profiteering.

LB/4 October 2019

-30-

Censorship by Leftists More Damaging Than That by Rightists?

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

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

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

It's an old and troublesome story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

From Mr. Abdul-Jabbar's text:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did she suppress the story?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

Here are its opening paragraphs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

Loren -- we do not censor you. Disqus, which we do not control, stops comments for review. Very few are stopped. They usually have a link to another source as sometimes those are advertisers or spammers trying to use comments to sell something.

This requires us to manually review the comment. The last week or so we have been focused on the People's Mobilizationation, a series of events in NYC and have not kept up with these flagged comments.

When I saw you writing that you were being censored I went and checked the Disqus file and approved eight or so comments that had been flagged.

In addition to spam and advertising we sometimes block racist or abusive comments.

I've always found your comments to be well thought out and interesting. I appreciate your writing. You have never been censored.

Thanks for your participation. I look forward to what you have to say. KZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a wonderfully thought-provoking essay -- but like so many other such essays, it is ultimately a suicidal act of denial, utterly ignoring two ultimate truths:

One denied truth is that of Harry Turtledove's prophetic short story, "The Last Article," in which the Original Nazis exterminated all non-violent resistance just as they exterminated all other forms of opposition. (Note too the real-world confirmation of this frightful truth in the fate of the White Rose Society, for which google.)

The second denied truth is the ultimate murderousness of the United States of today -- which with its Chemical, Biological and Radiological (CBR) arsenal, its total surveillance, its insurmountable censorship, its utterly Nazified soldiers and police; plus its legions of death squads domestic and foreign is infinitely more oppressive than the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis ever was.

This is not Third Reich 1.2 we battle; it is instead the de facto Fourth Reich, a meticulously constructed space-age horror so vast and omnipotent, not even a collaboration between Stephen King and George Orwell could cobble together an accurate description of its bottomless
Evil.

And, like the Nazis in "The Last Article," our Capitalist (i.e. Nazi) overlords have bred and conditioned themselves into moral imbecility so complete, they no longer have any conscience or any other of the positive traits that (hitherto) defined our species as “human.”

Which means they will murder anyone -- non-violent or otherwise --who threatens their Capitalist (i.e. Nazi) Empire whether at home or abroad.

In other words, any time resistance seems effective -- no matter whether it is nonviolent or otherwise -- it will be neutralized and its leaders quickly exterminated. imprisoned or reduced to socioeconomic despair and silence.

That is the lesson -- the ONLY lesson -- to be learned from the murders of President Kennedy; Malcolm X; Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; Sen. Robert Kennedy; Fred Hampton: Mark Clark: the Ohio National Guard's victims at Kent State University; the victims of the white racist Mississippi police at Jackson State College.

And let us not forget the murder of organized labor implicit in the slaying of Karen Silkwood.

While these are but a few of the names and atrocities on the USian Empire's endless litany of victims, their deaths vividly illustrate how our masters have already obliterated forever each and every one of our progressive gains.

What this should tell us -- but it does not (precisely because the U.S. has been brain-warped into suicidal anti-intellectualism and its attendant hopelessness and surrender) -- is that ALL of our present-day strategies and tactics are useless, rendered so by the diabolical combination of our masters' technology and their own Hitlerian fanaticism.

Therefore -- we were we truly serious about human survival -- what we would be doing is consciously attempting to evolve new strategies and tactics rather than urging adoption of tactics that have already failed.

Non-violent protest, for example, will never again achieve anything in the United States save giving the authorities an excuse for mass arrests and whatever other acts of oppression they intend.

But what of non-violence in some new and far more universal socialist context?

Is there potential there? I have no idea. But were there a real Left, someone would surely be exploring such questions.

If we are to reach this decisive point, we must first admit that socialism, feminism, environmentalism and in fact EVERY other progressive movement whether in the U.S. or elsewhere has been either destroyed or co-opted to paralytic uselessness.

Which vital admission is of course already prohibited by USia's ever-more-violent anti-intellectualism...

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

*****

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

*****  

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

LB/20-28 September 2019

30-

 

 

       

Ok, It's Time to Get Off My Pity-Full Ass and Get Back to Work

Meanwhile Let Us Admit Our Conditioned Hatred of Government Is an
Insurmountable Barrier to Saving Ourselves from Extinction

QUITE SIMPLY, NO people who have been taught by their extended individual and collective experience to regard government and bureaucracy and bureaucrats and politicians with near-universal hatred,  contempt and infinite (yet utterly rational)  distrust -- precisely as we the people have been taught by the bipartisan malevolence of of Neoliberalism -- can ever  achieve anything even remotely resembling the socialism essential to rescue our species from extinction and save our Mother Earth from reduction to a bug planet.

Why? Because in the minds of the vast moronic majority,  socialism has come to mean naught but "Big Government" -- which is precisely what we in the so-called "United States" are taught to fear and despise even more than the (already-well-underway) Final Extinction.

And given the anti-intellectual ignorance maliciously inflicted on us by all financially accessible schools (whether public or private) and sustained by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine  -- which perhaps we should call the MaiMePropMach (pronounced "Maim Me Prop Mash") -- there is absolutely no way this intentionally suicidal preconditioning can ever be overcome. Indeed our masters are already hurling us under the proverbial bus.

Yes, we must keep fighting. But we must evolve strategy and tactics based on recognition we are far more powerless than even the abandoned, heroic-but-doomed anti-Nazi defenders of Fortress Brest -- for the monstrous and unspeakably horrific truth is there is no political leader, organization,  nation or people left on this wounded and dying planet with sufficient power, influence and will to rescue us from Neoliberal Capitalism and its coterie of fascist fanatics.

Nor can we continue hiding beneath our deluded fantasy of someday magically receiving justice for the innumerable atrocities already inflicted on us by our morally imbecilic, sadistically gleeful overlords in what is already the most murderously unjust global tyranny in our species' entire approximately 250,000-year history. 

There is no true justice -- none whatsoever -- under Neoliberal Capitalism, nor will there ever be.  

*****

EMPHATICALLY RECOMMENDED READING: an emotionally downsized  form of the news reporting that characterized the old Dispatches (because even I who lived most of my adult life in intimate embrace with the day's news can no longer endure  being beaten over the head daily with the fact we're doomed); also, note all save one of these heads are self-explanatory; hence, with that exception, the lack of routine descriptive comment: 

“You Can’t Trust the Government”: Flint Residents Speak Out on Newark Water Crisis

 

A Bunch of CEOs Want to Fix Capitalism. You Can’t Fix Anything Built on Slavery.

 

Offering Choice But Delivering Tyranny: the Corporate Capture of Agriculture

 

The 1619 Project and the Far-Right Fear of History

 

The Pseudo Debate Over Jeffrey Epstein’s Suicide

 

The Racist Right Has Been Searching For Trump All Along

 

March for Our Lives Unveils Sweeping Gun Reform Agenda: 'The Time Is Now'

Badly misleading head should read, "March for Our Lives Demands Total Forcible Disarmament" -- for which see the original  MFOL document,  here.  See also my comment on the initial report's comment thread

 

*****

EARLIER RECOMMENDED READING: selections I tagged for a planned posting was delayed by my latest CHF-related illness, another bout with cellulitis, this time a severely infected foot. Nevertheless I feel these essays and reports remain relevant:   

In the Face of Climate Collapse, We Need the Wisdom of Elders
But instead all U.S. governments, local, state or federal, inflict the various forms of psychological warfare and slow-motion genocide by which our Capitalists masters suppress and eradicate our individual and collective memory. 

What Would Happen If All Ice On Earth Melted?
A presentation that despite its reluctance to blame patriarchal  humans for destroying  our Mother Earth is nevertheless an accurate briefing on the ultimate consequences of terminal climate change. 

The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future
How our Capitalist overlords attack from all directions, with their Republican vassals  openly joining hands with the Sturmabteilung, thereby encouraging the equally Capitalist Democratic [sic] Party's forcible disarmament fanatics to escalate their campaign to leave us defenseless against the burgeoning ChristoNazi militias.

Welcome to Ayn Rand's America  (How Rand, whose Fountainhead is a celebration of a murder's moral imbecility and whose Atlas Shrugged is essentially a hero-worshiping fictionalization of Mein Kampf, became the leading U.S. "philosopher." 

We Must End Neoliberalism, Or Neoliberalism Will End Us
By far the best (and most succinctly knife-edged) essay on the cancer of Neoliberalism I have yet encountered.

A Night at the Garden
A terrifying seven-minute glimpse of the United States' ChristoNazi future as foretold by the United States' Original Nazi past.

Fear vs. Fear
Chris Hedges' most recent, always eloquent reflections on the now-unavoidable doom -- ecocide and genocide combined -- the Capitalists are deliberately inflicting on our species, on human society and on our Mother Earth.

A Very Old Man for a Wolf
A compelling study of human interaction with those whom, in the absence of H. sapiens sapiens,  might well have become this planet's apex species.

*****

RELEVANT PERSONAL STUFF: obviously I am back online with a new computer, a blessed gift from my two all-time best friends. As to the future of Dispatches, what you see is what you'll get from now on: brief commentary with links to a few reports I regard as relevant beyond their immediate Doomsday messaging -- that is, informative or at least thought-provoking for the (very few) truly committed activists remaining here in the de facto Fourth Reich.    

Meanwhile I who sought to live my life as a journalist and consumed news items with the same enthusiasm I yet eat broiled Eastern Brook Trout or oven-roast Ruffed Grouse now find the news not just unbearably depressing but all too often terrifying in a doomsday sense I had formerly never imagined possible.

But it is what it is.

With the total and effectively eternal ChristoNazi control of the courts,  the regime's ongoing imposition of theocracy on the United States obviously cannot be stopped or even much delayed, and that of course means within a couple of centuries (or more likely far less) our species will be extinct, everything we managed to achieve will thereby be reduced to utter meaninglessness, and our Mother Earth will be reduced back to a bug planet.

We are doomed -- and anyone who believes otherwise is not only an idiot but a perpe-traitor of our destruction.

*****  

PERSONAL BAD NEWS update: Two weeks ago I was diagnosed as "pre-diabetic," which because of my socioeconomic status -- my inability to afford a food budget that (were I to eat only the required low-carbohydrate diet)  would quadruple my monthly food expense from approximately $150 to nearly $600 -- is literally a death sentence.

Such a food expenditure is an absolutely impossible sum even had I no other expenses save rent (just hiked $26 to $515 per month, the biggest one-time rent increase I have ever known, raising the cost of my sardine-can-small apartment to an severely injurious 39.9 percent of my income); atop that, there's my health insurance ($82 per month); prescription and over-the-counter drugs (at least $100 per month); internet and telephone (at least $65 per month).

But even without transport -- buses when I am ambulatory, what are said to be the nation's most expensive taxis when I am not -- those sums already  exceed my monthly income, forcing me to survive by (abusing) what little credit I have been able to retain.  

And let us not forget it was Barack the Betrayer's viciously dishonest food-stamp cuts that slashed my monthly stipend from $130 to the $15 the ChristoNazi Trump/Pence Regime will soon take away simply because our Capitalist masters regard me and everyone of my caste to be what the Original Nazis damned as "unworthy of life."

But what pisses me off the most is that I who assumed I would die a natural death by congestive heart failure am now -- by the genocidal malevolence of our Capitalist overlords -- sentenced to die by poverty-inflicted diabetes merely because I cannot afford the sorts of non-toxic foods that are (now) readily available to (only) the genuinely wealthy aristocrats. 

Ironically, I used to grow just such foods -- for 18 good years,  annual harvests sufficient to feed me delicious organic vegetables until the next summer's crops came in.

Now and for however long I remain alive, I am trapped in a city and stuck for the duration in federally subsidized geriatric housing. But of course I still garden -- with a hand-trowel on a plot 12 feet by 2 feet instead of with a tractor on two meadow-sized plots totaling 8800 square feet -- and in this year of climate change those two 12-foot rows yielded only eight pounds of green beans (this as compared with 15 pounds last year).

Thus -- since there is absolutely no way I will ever be able to afford the funds necessary to eat well enough to avoid the diabetes death sentence -- I am now as I approach age 80 reduced to nothing more than another of Capitalism's ever-expanding infinity of victims.

***** 

LASTLY, THREE MORE recommended stories:

My Childhood Rape and My Life That Might Have Been
Recovering victim's story exemplifies just how on-point Second Wave feminists were with their slogan "the Personal is Political." (See also my own comment-thread acknowledgment of how and why my birthparents emotionally abandoned me three months after my fifth birthday.)  

The Stunning Revival of America's 'Christian Left'
Long-overdue report on the emergent and growing (but undoubtedly too late) Christian opposition to ChristoNazism.

Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Them
More on the evolutionary hows and whys most of us so love our canine companions.

Until next time (probably next month)...

LB/21 August 2019

-30-

 

Bruce Dixon: a Relentless Warrior for Socioeconomic Justice

BRUCE DIXON, managing editor and co-founder of Black Agenda Report, the only Leftist publication on this planet I regularly applaud and salute in near-total agreement, was slain by cancer 28 June 2019 -- another devastating loss of the sort that (as always) makes me wonder at this disease's apparent penchant for targeting effectively radical activists throughout the United States. 

The italicized passages below are from Ann Garrison's eulogy for him in CounterPunch, an informative piece I urge you to read in full. Likewise the two selections from Black Agenda Report itself:  

(...)

A year ago, after the Left Forum, he wrote “What Would an Authentic 21st Century US Left Look Like?”

(...)

An authentic left, he concluded, must be independent of the Republican and Democratic Parties, independent of corporate and church philanthropy, unconditionally opposed to empire and white supremacy, and class conscious in its opposition to capitalism. He also wrote that it must give birth to a revolutionary working class party and create “economic and social organizations which prefigure the world we want to build.”

(...)

Every time he and fellow organizers made electoral advances, he said, the Democratic Party changed the rules to undermine them.

 

(...)

 

I once asked him whether the Greens might be better off putting their energy and resources into, for one, creating community gardens in major cities all over the country, and he responded that most of the community gardens he knew of had been shut down by those with wealth and power. There is indeed no sign left of Los Angeles’s famous South Central Farm, the largest urban farm and perhaps the greatest community organizing success in the US from 1994 till 2006, when it was bulldozed by a real estate developer.

 

(To read the remainder of Ms. Garrison's informative piece, go here. Please also read  "Bruce Dixon, in His Own Words," here, and "For Brother Bruce," here.) 

 

If what CounterPunch now acknowledges is the USian Empire's methodical, Final-Solution-type scheme of weaponized ecocide and genocidal tyranny -- the likelihood of which you read about first on Dispatches -- is ever replaced by genuine liberty, Bruce Dixon will most assuredly be recognized as one of the truly heroic figures in U.S. alternative journalism. 

 

Meanwhile, thanks entirely to the great generosity of friends and comrades, I am gradually getting back on-line, about which more later.

 

LB/5 July 2019

 

-30-

 

 

Shut Down by Total Computer Failure, Probably Permanently

My 25-Year Address Book, the Dispatches Mailing List Included,
Is Gone Forever. Government Malice? Undoubtedly. But Fuck the
One Percenters and Their Vassals, Fuck Their Blood-Drenched Flag
and Fuck the God of Genocide They Serve. I'll Be Back If I'm Able.

OBVIOUSLY THIS IS the climax of the attack that began last December with repetitive efforts to max out my credit cards by fraud (which destroyed forever -- literally, because I will not live another seven years -- the credit I had been meticulously rebuilding since my 2008-2009 loss of nearly 70 percent of my annual income).

As we all know, the only way to remedy such a problem is with lawyers and lawsuits, which of course since I am now reduced to inescapable peonage is forever beyond me.

Plus all my research  after June 2018 -- a full year's effort -- is also lost forever. This kills the novel -- in fact kills any possibility of a novel -- as there is no way, at age 79 and slowly dying of congestive heart failure, that I can ever reconstruct the lost research.

And without it -- because to make fiction work it requires every bit as much research as journalism -- there is no way I can write it. (Yes, this is the same thing that killed "Dancer," though what the arsonist[s] destroyed was 24 years of research, as well as my entire always-fragile sense of personal identity.)

But in bitter truth, disasters of this sort are in fact the sole defining quality of my life. In other words, I am undeniably accursed.

And you damn sure  can't call yourself a writer or photographer without text and pictures to back up the claim.

Despite nurdly reassurance the associated computer problems can be resolved, I have been mostly off-line for the past eight days -- had to go completely off-line to finish this month's senior-housing newsletter, which is printed and hand distributed rather than emailed.

Hence it is now obvious that whatever is wrong with this machine cannot be repaired.

While there is no way I will ever again be able to afford another computer, some people I know promise they will get me another. I am most grateful for their emotional support, but given the prohibitive sums involved, I am rationally skeptical. We shall see.

Those of you who would want to see Dispatches if I ever get reliably on line again, please email me accordingly. As I said, all your email addresses were eradicated by the computer failure, and I have no other way to get them back than by begging as I am doing now.

Meanwhile I thank you for your readership. I will leave you all with this, knowing it may in fact be my last-ever online political statement:

Wanna comprehend the ChristoNazi/Neoliberal reality of the Trump/Pence Regime? Wanna know why the Democratic (sic) Party will again in the 2020 elections function as the Republican Party's Fifth Column?

Dig it:

What Trump is actually doing is imposing -- with absolutely 100 percent success -- the Neoliberal Final Solution: he's destroying the remnants of civil government -- exactly as Neoliberalism demands -- to allow for the emergence of a planet ruled entirely by the corporations, their secret police and their military goon squads. In other words, he's our corporate masters' perfect puppet; behind the hurly-burly, he's giving them everything they ever wanted.

Welcome to the future: wherein the vast majority of human lives -- literally all human lives save those of the aristocrats -- will be too horrible to endure.

LB/19 June 2019

-30-

 

 

Why I'm Dropping Out (an Open Letter to the Few Who Care)

A TERRIFYING ASSAULT on my always-fragile finances by an ongoing plague of so-called "billing errors" combined with attempted thievery by alleged "fraudsters" tells me I am again a target of the extra-legal secret-police malevolence for which the United States is increasingly infamous.

My alleged sin? I suspect it is writing about what should be obvious:  that the only possible reason the One Percenters are not fighting climate change is they are weaponizing it as the plausibly deniable mechanism of their ultimate Final Solution: reshaping the remnants of human society into a global concentration camp with themselves as commandants, guards and executioners. 

Thus it would appear I am being told to shut the fuck up, lest everything on which I am dependent -- apartment,  telephone service, Internet connection, health insurance, food stamps, even my Social Security retirement pension --  be taken away from me without notice.

(Question: How do you fight a 76-percent overcharge accompanied by an immediate disconnect notice when [A], you've already paid your monthly bill; when [B] you're a 15-year customer who's never been late with a payment; and when [C], Century Link initially  claims to have no record of either the overcharge or the pending disconnection? Answer: You stay on the phone for nearly seven hours, shouting yourself hoarse and repeatedly threatening legal action until CL employees eventually dig deeply enough into their computers to find the "error" and correct it.)

How did the "error" happen? The employees insist there is no explanation.  

Such harassment is never "explainable"; that is often what identifies it as the product of malice rather than ineptitude. In any case the fact this  allegedly inexplicable Century Link "error" was immediately preceded by a  half-dozen bank-thwarted efforts at electronic "fraud" makes it obvious I am (again) under deliberate attack.

One or two such incidents might be coincidental, but eight -- the count so far (including a new, ongoing attack by Century Link similar to the first) -- is unquestionably enemy action, especially since I am meticulously protective of the relevant passwords and confirmation-of-identity information.

More to the point, the alleged "fraudsters" were able to access new, hitherto-unused replacement accounts, which means they had information only the credit-bureaus and the bankers -- or the secret police -- are able to obtain. And we already know each of the 17 U.S. secret police agencies are dominated top-to-bottom by the ChristoNazis and their fascist allies.

As in the Beatles' song, "I get by with a little help from my friends." But the friends and comrades whose caring and generosity sometimes sustain my survival have not the resources to save me from the death-sentence horrors that would result were my Social Security account to "inexplicably" vanish from the government's computers -- exactly as my Washington state unemployment compensation  account vanished in December 1982. 

This happened the height of the Reagan Recession -- here in Washington state a genuine depression with actual joblessness approaching 30 percent. The disaster inflicted by the surprise loss of my unemployment stipends thus reduced me to homelessness long before my repeated, increasingly forceful letters-of-appeal generated sufficient political pressure to compel notoriously recalcitrant bureaucrats to reconstruct and restore my disappeared  account. 

Significantly, inside sources I had developed during my years covering the legislature  (1977-1981), told me the clerk  who vindictively deleted my account was never punished. Supposedly she acted on her own initiative, in Nazi-minded revenge for my anti-Vietnam-War activities 11 years earlier. But the extent to which she was protected tells me she was obeying the orders of some higher authority or at the very least had been assured of such support.     

As would be the case again today were my Social Security pension to suddenly vanish, in December 1982 my lover, friends and acquaintances were all too impoverished to provide more than minimal help. The best these folks could do was offer occasional free meals and a few nights on a living-room couch or in a spare bed. My lover, herself a victim of Reagan-inflicted economic woes, ended our relationship by returning to California.      

By the time the state got around to paying my unemployment-insurance stipends,  the money was  nine months overdue. My increasingly desperate hunt for work and shelter had meanwhile forced me back to New York City, where my award-winning journalistic skills netted me immediate employment as a writer and  editor and brought me regular freelance work both as a creative director and a photographer. 

But I was compelled to leave behind in Washington state the photography and manuscripts that were already beginning to achieve recognition as my life's most important work. These filled a pair of four-drawer filing cabinets, their contents including a 150,000-word draft of "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer"  and the tens of thousands of photographs I had made since 1952, when my father honored my 12th birthday by giving me my first camera, a truly life-changing gift. Perhaps a thousand of these photos -- my intent was to edit them down to about 50 images -- provided  the visual backbone of "Dancer," which by then had generated 24 years of file-folders bulging with research notes, outlines, clippings and earlier drafts.  Also within the cabinets were notes, photos, maps and site drawings for a book on Washington state archaeological anomalies, and a comparable files for a third book about the people of the Pacific Northwest salmon fishery. 

Because there was no way I could fit even one of these cabinets into my 1976 Honda Civic for the 2,900-mile drive across the country to Manhattan, I stored both cabinets and all the work they contained with an especially dear friend and trusted colleague; I would send for them as soon as I had achieved permanent housing in the City. 

But my friend's house was destroyed by arson on  1 September 1983 -- a blaze ignited at the exact instant I began a meeting with the book editor who believed "Dancer" to be a  cultural turning-point and had therefore promised to mother it to mainstream publication. 

The timing -- literally to the minute -- makes it obvious the fire was no coincidence, that it was clearly an assault by the secret police or their Nazi allies.   

And my loss -- as I'm  certain was intended -- was ruinous. The destruction of my life's work was the destruction of my life. No matter how determinedly I tried, I was unable to recover either from the fire or from the preliminary blow dealt me by that vengeful clerk in the Bellingham office of the so-called (and laughably named) Washington Department of Employment Security.

I was never again able to afford a place of my own -- that is, an apartment or dwelling without room-mates -- until I returned to Washington state in October 1986. By the following year a stubborn bout of post-fire traumatic depression -- impossible to conceal from future employers after poverty forced me onto welfare and the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services vindictively shunted me onto Social Security Disability -- had ended forever my career as a newspaper and magazine staffer. And I would never again have a lover;  my poverty had become too hopeless to hide.   

What saved my life was my excellent physical health; I was in my 40s; my back and knee injuries had not been complicated by arthritis, and the onset of congestive heart failure was two decades in my future. I had  the stamina essential for survival when survival itself becomes -- as it has under Neoliberalism -- an act of revolutionary defiance.

Now, at age 79, severely crippled by arthritis and slowly dying of congestive heart failure, there is no possible way I could  successfully combat such a sudden loss of income. The magnitude of my poverty would again, exactly as it did in 1982-83,  prohibit amelioration by  friends or comrades. Again I would be homeless,  isolated, alone -- and this time soon dead. 

So endeth the lesson.  

***

BUT THIS THREAT of fatal retaliation  is only a small part of what pushed me over the proverbial edge into something that at first glance seems uncomfortably close to the scary intellectual death I fear actual retirement is bound to be.

Consider:

There is no question the One Percenters and their minions have achieved genuine omnipotence in their tyranny over this planet and its inhabitants. They do as they wish. Their technology has given them  abilities hitherto attributed to the gods alone -- including the power to heal the global wounds inflicted by our man-made socioeconomic and environmental emergencies.

Instead our overlords have allowed these crises to merge and expand into an approximation of the Apocalypse traditionally prophesied by the Abrahamic zealots.

Have no doubt; our masters could have ended austerity anytime they chose to do so.

They could also have begun amelioration of what should be called "terminal climate change" when  Soviet scientists -- freed of the anti-environmental fetters imposed by "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power" -- began in the 1950s to warn humanity of global warming and its consequences.

These warnings were of course rejected by the United States, the most earth-raping, atmosphere-poisoning, water-polluting empire ever. 

The misogynistic depth of anti-environmental sentiment in "Christian America" -- the magnitude of its metastasis confirmed when the patriarchy's  "one nation under God" gave the Trump/Pence Regime unfettered access to the doomsday button -- cannot be over-estimated. It is perhaps best exemplified by the startling  messages that began appearing on church reader-boards during the early 1970s. Examples include "Organic Is Satanic" and "Environmental Is Of The Devil."      

But since the death of the Soviet Union, no people on earth have demonstrated the leadership, organization and discipline necessary to slow the One Percenters' tyrannical momentum, much less to overthrow the ever-more-obvious One Percent agenda, a shock-doctrine of strategy and tactics cunningly camouflaged by political hurly-burly yet clearly based on the deliberate furtherance of ecocidal genocide and genocidal ecocide.   

That is why -- though in ever-deepening despair we press our masters ever more frantically to use their infinite power and wealth to at least reduce the death and destruction wrought by their weaponized Apocalypse -- they respond with naught but dithering, obstructionism, disinformation, outright lies and defiant intensification of all the trumped-up persecutions at the heart of their global assault on democratic process.  

Politics is never more than a euphemism for might-makes-right compulsion. But we the people are already so dis-empowered we cannot even compel our overlords to fling us lifejackets in an already raging sea of disaster.

At best our masters are sneeringly indifferent to our fate; at worst they want us dead. That's why our traditional democratic methods -- disclosure, dissent and non-violent demonstration -- no longer work. 

And so it shall remain so unless some miraculous cataclysm evens the odds by nullifying the unbeatable technologies of oppression that grant the One Percenters their ever-expanding omnipotence.  

Beyond that, we desperately need a new strategy and new tactics, all grounded on the elemental wisdom of Sun Tzu. 

Until such measures evolve -- and the unprecedented creative paralysis inflicted by our powerlessness evokes rational fear that might never happen --  why should I who have already suffered the total destruction of my life persist in wasting energy on a doomed struggle that is not only therefore pointless but which -- if I continue (and as  I have obviously now been warned) -- could result in my extra-legal (and therefore irreversible) condemnation to one of the most degrading fates imaginable.   

As the Ku Klux Klan learned 56 years ago, the prospect of sudden death does not scare me. That's why, to the sadly limited extent allowed by worsening physical disability, I will continue volunteering for picket lines and helping discourage the increasingly violent ChristoNazis who are waging war on women's health services.

But slowly starving to death huddled abandoned and alone beneath piss-reeking  blankets in some filthy urban doorway -- which is precisely what would happen to me were all my income to be disappeared as it was 36 years ago -- is more repugnant and frightening than I can describe.

*** 

SOME OF US -- especially those of us adept enough to transcend even the censorship imposed by price and paywall -- are discovering irrefutable evidence our overlords are indeed exploring how to manipulate the serial disasters inflicted by climate change and Neoliberal economics into plausibly deniable campaigns of ecocidal genocide.

In accordance with their shock-doctrine methodology, our masters are using the Apocalypse to impose the ultimate regime-change. They are reordering all human society into Neoliberal utopia: Ayn Rand opulence for our masters,  including those who would rule from far above us; serfdom and slavery for the few of us 99 Percenters they allow to survive their deliberate conversion of our planet into Deathcamp Earth.

The post-hurricane atrocities that now define both New Orleans and Puerto Rico are already recognizable as our  overlords' rat-lab experiments in proto-genocidal social-Darwinist engineering: that is, Nazism in action.

And at least some of the funding to weaponize global warming -- obviously our masters' response to the fact death camps remain unfashionable despite increasing efforts to the contrary -- is disguised as national-defense spending:    

Weaponizing the Climate: Geoengineering's Military Potential

Global Climate Engineering: Who Controls the Thermostat?
(Both these vital reports, in Wired, may be censored by paywalls.)

Thus the One Perenters hide their malignancy behind the charade of our long-dead "democracy" as they dither and delay and disseminate  all manner of deception in their malign intent to hasten and maximize our deaths. 

Meanwhile we the people -- we the "surplus workers," we the surplus people -- watch ourselves and our planet slain by merciless plutocrats we now realize are already deciding how many of us and our descendants are to be exterminated.

Death panels? How better to describe the for-profit health insurance monopolies that slay at least 44,000 U.S. residents each year by defining health care as a privilege of wealth, thereby denying  care to anyone too poor to pay the de facto tax on survival.  

And that 44,000 -- a figure ten years old -- has since under Trump/Pence austerity policies begun swelling to a sum censorship now guarantees will remain unknowable.

Genocide?  Name me one continent where mass murder not been melded into the everyday climate. 

Ecocide?

Bear witness:

The Race Towards Extinction: Climate Change Versus The 5G Microwave Technology Roll Out

The Blue Ocean Event and Collapsing Ecosystems

How Much Ice Has Greenland Lost to Climate Change?

'Exhausted' Polar Bear Found 700 Kilometers From Home in Russian Village

Air Pollution Is Killing More People Than Smoking - and Fossil Fuels Are Largely to Blame

UK life expectancy continues to fall

U.S. Life Expectancy Drops Amid 'Disturbing' Rise In Overdoses And Suicides

A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy

The World Is Burning and Those in Power Are Stoking the Flames

***

ESPECIALLY NOTE HOW -- instead of working to ameliorate the crisis -- the Empire's Neoliberal owners have reshaped the U.S.  into zero-tolerance ChristoNazi theocracy and are thrusting its puppet-states into ever-more-obvious fascism. 

Future historians -- if indeed there is to be a human future -- will tell us U.S. constitutional rights were rendered forever meaningless by the events of  22 November 1963. 

Peaceful protest and poverty or minority status,  already crimes in this conquered nation, are now being criminalized throughout the globe. 

First Julian Assange, Then Us

Chelsea Manning's Appeal Rejected By 4th Circuit Court Of Appeals

Smearing Assange: The US Government's Plan to Silence Its Critics and Criminalize Journalism

Thought Police: US, Israel Increasingly Banning & Deporting Ideological Enemies

More than 30K immigrants have been deported via Boeing Field
Again the Democrats prove themselves liars and reveal the Big Lie of "progressive" Washington state.

RSN: America's "Hole-in-the-Head" Nuke Suicide Pact Gets Court Approval

'We Are Treated Like Animals,' Say Amazon Flex Drivers

Dear Mister President: Your Abortion Spreadsheet Takes the Cake

Florida deputy’s assault on high school student caught on video

US Gulf Coast still devastated six months after Hurricane Michael

States Are Trying to Stop Cities From Raising Minimum Wage

Supreme Court Will Decide if It Is Legal to Fire Someone for Being LGBTQ

The FBI Appears to Be Engaged in a Modern-Day Version of COINTELPRO

Baltimore Police Tried to Kill Keith Davis Jr.; Prosecutors Have Been Trying to Convict Him of Murder Ever Since.

Arrests At London Climate-Change Protests Top 1,000 

***

NOR WILL THE rulers of Moron Nation ever again allow us sufficient education to recover from our deliberately dumbed-down denouement: 

An American Tragedy Is Unfolding in Our Classrooms

Officer Attack on Teen Reignites National Debate on Cops in Schools

Why Are There So Few Black Ph.D.s?

The Death of Education in America

The Price of Publishing Independent Thought

It is a bit of an aside, but if you have read the last of these linked reports, you surely understand the potentially terminal crisis facing Reader Supportive News,  which provides the most relevant English-language, daily summaries of news and commentary on the Internet.

Though all progressive-minded alternative media are under Neoliberal and/or ChristoNazi  attack, RSN is literally  struggling against journalistic extinction. Please -- if you can -- make a  contribution to help them survive.

Obviously our masters are inspired by the example of the Southron slave-owners we were fooled into believing our great-grandparents defeated in 1865. Our overlords are not only imprisoning us  They are also destroying public education to make certain a skyrocketing number of us can neither read or reason.

Their intention is to make us as illiterate -- and therefore as helplessly ignorant -- as antebellum slaves for whom ability to read or possession of a book was a capital crime typically punished by agonizing tortures including whipping, amputation and death from the resultant infections.   

And there is no question our masters are succeeding: note how, to bolster their charade of democracy, they maintain the Big Lie of a free press, all the while privately celebrating the damning fact we of the U.S. 99 Percent have already been brain-warped to such abject submissiveness, we cannot muster an effective response even to the looming threat of extinction.    

Yet methodical human disempowerment is hardly a new phenomenon. Its large-scale imposition began with the advent of patriarchy some 6,000 years ago. It skyrocketed to its present intensity after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476CE elevated the Christians into  all-powerful terrorists, setting the stage for the Capitalist tyranny that defines the  Neoliberal present and its probably inescapable future. 

Since then, every revolution by which we might have re-empowered ourselves has been crushed or co-opted.  That which began 6,000 years ago now continues forever; that's because patriarchy -- our species' sole unnatural act -- cannot be sustained except by force.

Which is precisely why our masters have always sought omnipotence and now kill to perpetuate its impregnability.  

All that remains is ever-intensifying  tyranny -- the absolute rule of unconquerable despots perpetuated by  eternally ineluctable technologies of mass surveillance that from conception were defined by same gleefully malevolent intent that defines weapons of mass destruction. 

Since then -- and this is but one of the many dark historical truths kept hidden by Capitalist censors -- our masters have also become unfathomably devious in how they disguise their always successful, hence ever-intensified efforts to maliciously reduce us to inescapable poverty and finally to subjugation in serfdom and slavery.

Today the banks are their overseers;  centuries from now it will be back to the mercilessly whip-wielding disciples of Simon Legree on struggling plantations from which neo-feudal barons rule the few remaining habitable regions of our devastated world as it dwindles to its final fate as a bug planet. 

*** 

ALREADY OUR SPECIES  has seemingly divided into two mutually hostile subspecies.

As a result -- as if in anticipation of one last apocalyptic battle --  a new clash is replacing class conflict.

It strongly suggests  H. sapiens sapiens has already split in twain, the ruling subspecies threatening  war-to-the-death between those of us who  retain, cherish and strive to expand our ability to empathize with life beyond ourselves.

Meanwhile our enemies are breeding themselves free of all moral or ethical restraint. Their offspring --  perchance to define fascism as morality for moral imbeciles -- embrace  the evils of tyranny as enthusiastically as they suck their mother's milk.     

I label these new subspecies in accordance with their documented behavior.

Our masters  are of the subspecies H. sapiens tyrannis -- the Neoliberal tyrants by whom we have been conquered and who now prey upon us without mercy. 

We ourselves, their victims,  are H. sapiens empathia, the 99 Percent, we the (dwindling) peoples who remain capable of humanitarian solidarity with our fellow humans and with life in general,  those of us our overlords are methodically reducing to chronic desperation, whether by imprisoning us in serfdom and slavery or by slowly exterminating us for replacement by robots.

The most definitive difference? H. sapiens tyrannis has forever lost the ability for humanitarian empathy. Its members are born sociopaths; it is their moral imbecility -- indistinguishable from that of a Ted Bundy or any other serial killer -- which gives them their grotesque, increasingly glaring aura of extraterrestrial conquerors or genetic mutants run amok.

It is psycholinguistically impossible for our masters to hear us. They speak only the death-camp language of Neoliberalism. They do not just ignore our cries for mercy; they are literally deaf to them,  unable to separate human voices from the other background noises of exploitation and profit.

That's why our charade of democracy is dead, never to be resurrected. We are ruled by creatures whose amorality has made them as relentlessly anti-humanitarian as the insectoid aliens of science fiction. In this way they are identical to their Nazi forebears, which means they can be removed from power only as the Original Nazis were overthrown in World War II.

But that can never happen. Our overlords' omnipotence -- the fact we the people are utterly defenseless against their surveillance technology,  their weaponry and their conspiratorial malevolence -- has made them the first tyrants in all human history who are truly immune to overthrow whether by overthrow or invasion.  They hold our entire planet hostage. They have more than enough thermonuclear bombs to nuke the world to cinders -- and there is no question they would do just that were they to feel genuinely threatened. 

In the White House as in der Füherbunker, it's gone from "better dead than Red" to "better extinct than defeated."

Anyone who believes otherwise is a fool, seduced by the imbecility of hope. 

Meanwhile H. sapiens empathia, ever more subjugated  despite innumerable alternative-media claims to the contrary, continues to prove our powerlessness truly has no bottom .

Some of us, some few H. sapiens empathia, will undoubtedly survive for a time amidst the torture-chamber horrors of our masters' slave pens and their plans for global gentrification.

But the pampered übermenschen misogyny and racism that sustains our overlords' murderous hatefulness long ago defined us as mere üntermenschen --  no more than bipedal beasts of burden whose right to life is measured exclusively by our individual profitability.

Our masters justify their atrocities by viewing us as a  separate (subhuman) species. Why then should we not regard them identically?

Of course I would like to believe they will eventually self-destruct in much the same way their German Nazi forebears did. 

But -- again because I know history -- I know better. Even given the Third Reich's unbelievably arrogant self-destructiveness,  it required the strength of the Red Army to prevent Hitler's Germany from becoming the absolute ruler of the Capitalist (i.e., already fascist) world.

And I know our masters will never again allow such proletarian strength to coalesce, much less to solidify. 

Nor -- as the events of the past half-century have proven beyond any possibility of dispute -- will the stubbornly closed-minded, breathtakingly suicidal political naivety of the USian Left ever allow it to acknowledge the magnitude of sociopathic Evil that fuels the capabilities and intentions of our oppressors. 

***

PROTECTED  AS THEY are by total surveillance -- with neutron bombs and a variety of other chemical, biological and radiological (CBR) weapons available to impose and augment their Final Solutions  -- it is obvious our overlords have already made themselves impregnable to any and all forms of revolutionary ferment including pacifism, the violent nullification of which foretold by Harry Turtledove has become a 21st Century commonplace. 

Were an entirely nonviolent revolution to somehow seize one of our masters' cities, I cannot doubt they would they would resort to neutron-bombing, thereby preserving most of the buildings and office equipment  -- the sacred "market value" that in their profit-besotted Neoliberal minds outranks all other values -- while simultaneously condemning all the rebels to unspeakably horrible deaths by radiation poisoning.

Indeed we should expect no better from a Nazi-worshipping global empire that claimed it had to destroy the Vietnamese city of Ben Tre  to save it from Communists and is since resurrecting concentration camps in the imperial homeland.   

That's why, at age 79, I am finally forced to admit I have been given sufficient perspective by a six-decade journalism career and a solid academic background in history and sociology to at last acknowledge what is undoubtedly our species most bitter, most embittering and most clandestine truth: that the so-called "moral arc of the universe" bends not toward justice, but toward an ultimate high-tech tyranny so unspeakably awful perhaps only an Edvard Munch could even approach portraying its horror.    

Let us therefore never forget how our present condition is the logical product of its ideological and financial foundations: 

"Dark Money" Funds Climate Change Denial Effort - Scientific American

Susan Collins Receives More Donations From Texas Fossil Fuel Industry Than From Maine Residents

Consensus Among GOP Candidates: Let The Planet Die

The return of the population bombers

Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability

How Thousands Of Nazis Were 'Rewarded' With Life In The U.S.
Most of these diabolically skilled war criminals and perpetrators of crimes against humanity worked with Teutonic diligence to help the equally criminal One Percenters meld the glaring fascism of United States history with  the incipient fascism of its Ayn Rand socioeconomic ethos and the reanimated fascism of its puppets throughout  the Capitalist world into a genuinely global Fourth Reich,  precisely as the final orders of their various Third Reich Führers had commanded.  

Which is precisely why I can no longer doubt our species and our planet are doomed -- that our masters will never allow us to evolve the socialist solidarity essential for our salvation, that now only the profoundly unlikely intervention of some genuine miracle can save us. 

Nevertheless -- as I trust I made clear in the penultimate paragraph of the second section -- this is not  a farewell letter.

It is instead the announcement of a refocusing of intellect, creativity and effort -- given my age, undoubtedly my last such transformation ever -- in the hope of finding some noun other than "failure" to define the life my politically innocent high-school peers honored 61 years ago with a comically ironic superlative: "boy most likely to succeed." 

Quoth the I Ching:

Thus the Superior Man at nightfall
Goes indoors for rest and recreation.

LB/28 April 2019

-30-

 

 

An Indefinite Pause for Contemplation and Reconsideration

I HAVE BEEN researching, writing and editing Dispatches from Dystopia and its predecessor Outside Agitator's Notebook since the first week in October 2009.

But the only lesson I am able to glean from that 108-month effort is,  "why bother?"

I had hoped my work would be -- as it sometimes was during the 30 years I worked as an award-winning member of the editorial staffs of various newspapers and magazines and as a longtime stringer for United Press International -- a progressive influence.

But I was  never able to come up with a format  fetching enough to empower either of this blog's incarnations.

Readership, which peaked at about 3,500 maybe five years ago, fell off to near zero after old age began  sidelining me with various geriatric illnesses, and it has never exceeded more than about 1,600 readers since then.  

Indeed the only discernible consequence of my work as a blogger is various forms of harassment, whether by government agents and/or their storm-trooper allies or merely by the inescapable wretchedness that has defined my life since its beginning, I will probably never know.

Nor does it really matter.

Hence, in this the fourth week after my 79th birthday, I am stopping -- I know not for how long.  I am retaining the Dispatches domain name and of course intend to continue writing, but I am not sure when this new work might start appearing nor even whether it will be journalism or fiction. 

Meanwhile I thank you all for your readership; I am truly sorry I have not been able to serve you and our socialist cause more effectively.

LB/23 April 2019

-30-

Censorship by Wealth and Stealth: How Our Capitalist Masters Murdered Press Freedom; Why They Persecute Julian Assange

Jailing of Journalist for Exposing Poisonous Depth of U.S. Corruption Forever Nullifies the Pivotal 1734 Peter Zenger Case, Again Revealing "American Democracy" as Our Species' Most Self-Destructive Big Lie 

THE PERSECUTION OF JULIAN ASSANGE reduces to used toilet paper the Peter Zenger verdict, the pivotal 1734 finding by a British colonial jury that truth is always the ultimate defense against prosecution for seditious libel.

And that's just one of the many ways Assange's arrest lays bare the Big Lie of  "American democracy."

It also adds yet another chapter of atrocities to four centuries of damning evidence that would have long ago reduced the U.S. pretense of "democracy" to a bitter joke in any polity even slightly less dishonest or hypocritical than than pridefully ignorant, habitually hateful Moron Nation. It demonstrates just how thoroughly the  First Amendment and indeed the entire Bill of Rights have been reduced to be nothing more than stage-props.

Ultimately what Assange's illegal arrest shows us is the extent to which the tyranny implicit in "American exceptionalism" -- an older more euphemistically disguised variant of the bigotry that launched German Nazism -- has again been elevated to the dominant doctrine of U.S. governance.

Given the reality of the Roberts Court -- which I dub "the Robber Court" because I cannot doubt its intent to rob us of the last few remnants of New Deal humanitarianism -- the Assange case is merely another tombstone in the graveyard of U.S. democratic process.

But -- as my Tory ancestors might have told themselves after they were raped and beaten and tarred-and-feathered and harried into exile -- one could hardly expect  better from a nation founded by Southron slave-owners and their New England bankers to protect slavery and  preserve the enormous profits generated by unpaid captive laborers.

"American democracy" is thus revealed -- at least to the remaining few of us not already brain-warped either to stupefied babbling or submissive silence -- as naught but the most flagrantly dishonest of white Christian Europe's serf-and-slave realms.

Nor are the horrors   implicit in this damning truth any way diminished by the fact the Imperial U.S. is ruled not by a single dictator, but by a mostly anonymous,  ever-more-omnipotent cabal of plutocrats -- the unapologetically evil upper echilon of the One Percent aristocracy. 

Thus with its malignancy disguised by intricately woven deceptions, the United States has become the most deadly  threat to survival in the history of Planet Earth.

***

HERE IS a brief review of Zenger's significance. The Printer's Trial: the Case of John Peter Zenger and the Fight for a Free Press (Gail Jarrow; Calkins Creek: 2006) tells us that after Zenger's acquittal on a charge of criminal libel,  "British governors were reluctant to charge American printers with seditious libel. They realized that colonial juries would likely refuse to convict anyone for publishing criticisms of royal officials. Because of this, the colonial press became more open and free. During the years leading up to the American Revolution, printers published attacks on British authority as well as calls for independence.”

Assange, of course, is denied any such opportunity for judicial relief. His will be a show trial performed by a kangaroo court. Given the (additional) Big Lie of "American justice," Assange's conviction -- and in all probability his death sentence (whether by lethal injection or by the slower more agonizing torture of solitary confinement) -- is already assured. Thus do U.S. puppet-states like the United Kingdom obey the dictates of their Wall Street overlords.

***

U.S. CENSORSHIP IS seemingly unofficial -- another example of the founders' long-range cunning in their efforts  to protect  plutocracy and slavery. Hence the First Amendment's prefatory stipulation "Congress shall make no law..."

But that prohibition does nothing to limit the power of publishers, editors, educators and religious authorities to suppress whatever information they choose -- including information that today might challenge the absolutism of the Neoliberal/ChristoNazi plutocracy and its ever-more-undeniable embrace of the antebellum slave plantation as its ultimate model for human society. Nor does it prevent their clandestine collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency or any other malign elements of the ruling Neoliberal plutocracy. 

What that tells us is our founders were so sure of themselves -- and so certain of the ideological faithfulness of their descendants -- they felt no need to impose the formal censorship characteristic of Europe.    

As a result, by deliberate design, U.S. censorship is far sneakier than any of its official counterparts elsewhere. 

And that sneakiness is why, as proven by the oppressive reality of Moron Nation --  the most pridefully ignorant, hateful, morally imbecilic population in the developed world -- U.S. censorship is demonstrably the most diabolically effective methodology of thought control ever devised. 

Note for example -- and I promise this is not a non sequitur -- how the coup-protecting  Warren Report was rammed down our collective throats: 

In October 1964 -- when the Associated Press first released its 366-page, one-volume summary of the  evidence presented to support the Big Lie President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered not by a seasoned death squad but by a deranged lone gunman -- the hardbound book was distributed free to members of the working press.

If memory serves,  the nation's AP-member papers  gave away innumerable copies of the book as promotional gifts to new subscribers, though ostensibly it was to be peddled for $1 per copy.

It is also my recollection the AP claimed at the time its effort to publicize and disseminate the Warren Commission's assertions had no precedent in U.S. history. In any case it provides a telling example of an allegedly "democratic" method of imposing national conformity and the irresistible momentum behind it. 

As disclosed by the Church Committee:

The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.

In this context, the enormous  importance our overlords gave to squelching anti-Warren Commission debate becomes  evidence in its own right.

***

HENCE THE RELEVANCE of my own encounters with assassination-related censorship:

From August 1963 until just after Christmas 1964, I was the sports editor, crime reporter and general-assignment photographer for The Oak Ridger, a tiny afternoon daily that -- because Oak Ridge, Tennessee is the global birthplace of thermonuclear apocalypse -- was in Cold War retrospect undoubtedly no less a critical CIA station than The New York Times or The Washington Post is today.

Which probably explains  how and why Richard Smyser -- the diminutive, socially awkward, whiny-voiced managing editor of a paper with only about 10,000 paid subscribers -- quickly and somewhat mysteriously rose to chair the internationally prominent Associated Press Managing Editors'  Freedom of Information Committee.

It also suggests why -- as we buttoned down the newsroom after the 17-hour workday occasioned by the murder of President Kennedy -- Smyser meticulously collected every single scrap of assassination-related wire-service copy. Not only that: he also --  very uncharacteristically, I thought -- threatened each of us on the five-member news staff with instant firing should we be caught withholding even a single paragraph of the reams of post-assassination dispatches that had reached us via the AP's teletype machines.

At the time, Smyser acted as if his edict of confiscation was motivated by nothing more than editorial privilege, just as, nearly a year later, he acted as if it were mere curiosity that prompted him to interrogate all of us in detail  as to our views of the Warren Commission's verdict and the AP summary thereof. 

I remember that interrogation vividly because it was one of only two occasions in which Smyser  belittled me mercilessly and at the top of his voice in the presence of all my newsroom colleagues.

When he asked me for my opinion of the AP summary, I replied truthfully. I said I could not accept the report's ballistic conclusions because -- as a former Regular Army soldier, a firearms collector, the son of a national match competitor and a competitive shooter myself -- I found them improbable if not downright absurd.

At the time I was a bit more than halfway between my 24th and 25th birthdays. Smyser's response was to seize upon my age and poverty-inflicted lack of a college degree and then -- shouting as loudly as I ever heard him shout -- to denounce me as an arrogantly disruptive, grotesquely disobedient child who refused to accept the truth and wisdom of those who were not only my socioeconomic, educational and intellectual "betters," but were so far above my station in life, I had no right to question their findings at all.

It was indeed an interesting revelation of Ruling Class bigotry -- especially since it was voiced by the editor presumably charged with national responsibility for maintaining our (alleged) freedom of the press.  

Twenty years later, in a conversation with a half-dozen equally seasoned members of the working press during an evening in the late, lamented and now-legendary Lion's Head -- in essence the unofficial New York City Press Club -- I learned that identical confiscations-of-copy and post-Warren-Commission interrogations had occurred at most U.S. daily newspapers.

Why the confiscations? That too is obvious in retrospect. The AP dispatches included several reports that might have later revealed the Warren Report as fiction. One described the Dallas cops' discovery, in the parking lot behind the infamous grassy knoll, of a pair of Lee-Enfields -- British service-rifles that, as the fastest bolt-action rifles ever made, could in trained hands easily have produced the illusion of "three bursts of automatic gunfire" to which combat-veteran reporters and many other witnesses testified. Another report, less than an hour after the shooting, told of a light aircraft ignoring vehement protests by Dallas air traffic controllers,  taking off without authorization and fleeing toward Mexico; I remarked at the time, "there go the killers." 

As far as I am able to determine, all of this contrary evidence -- and there was a great deal of it on the wires that day -- has vanished down the Orwell hole. Thus is deniability made plausible.           

***

HERE FROM A slightly revised version of my 2013 essay entitled,  "Censorship: Lessons from Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity" are two additional examples of how U.S. the censorship apparatus functions. Each demonstrates how -- thanks to the founders' plutocratic foresight -- what today we recognize  as the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine is the world's first privately-owned, for-profit equivalent of  the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda: 

In 1964 Ralph Nader entrusted me with the revelations that, a year later, would be published in Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of capitalism in action, specifically of how the U.S. automobile manufacturers were maximizing profits by minimizing vehicular safety.

But this piece never saw the proverbial light of day. It was killed by Smyser, my second bitter schooling in the harsh realities of censorship that are cleverly hidden beneath the claim the United States has “freedom of the press,” and it was memorably painful because I had expected better -- much better -- from The Oak Ridger. Why? Because its top executives, Publisher Don McKay, Business Manager Tom Hill and Smyser himself had been courageous enough to hire me despite The Knoxville Journal's continuing effort to slander me into professional and personal oblivion.

That episode is a story unto itself. I had worked for The Journal since September 1957, first as a part-time sports stringer through the fall of 1959, when finances forced me to drop out of college and enlist in the U.S. Army. In September 1962, having served 18 months in Korea and finished my required three-year term of active duty, I was immediately rehired by The Journal as a full-time staff sportswriter. Obviously the paper liked me and my reporting; Assistant Sports Editor Ben Byrd once told me he believed I was destined for The New York Times or some equally prestigious publication.

But on 2 June 1963, a raid by a combined force of Knoxville cops and Knox County sheriff's deputies jailed a racially mixed group of 40 men and women on charges I knew to be utterly without basis in fact. I was one of those  arrested, but on the strength of my press card I was immediately released, and now – naive idiot that I was – I believed I could convince Journal Editor/Publisher Guy L. Smith and City Editor Dick Evans the arrests were at the very least a terrible mistake and more probably a deliberate atrocity. Instead Smith and Evans rejected everything I said, concluding I was what in the parlance of the Jim Crow South was called a “nigger-lover” – probably a Communist as well – and Smith had me re-arrested in his newsroom, then publicly fired me on Page One of his newspaper.

My termination notice was a maliciously slanderous story by Ron McMahan, who knowingly wrote a deliberate Big Lie that would have been equally at home in Adolf Hitler's Völkischer Beobachter: “Forty Negroes and whites, most of them students at the University of Tennessee, were arrested early Sunday morning during what police described as 'a drunken sex orgy' at a South Knoxville residence...Booked at county jail on a charge of disorderly conduct was Loren Bliss, 23, of 1537 Laurel Avenue, a former Journal sportswriter.”

There was of course neither orgy nor drunkenness; the gathering was nothing more than a quiet garden party, attended by nearly as many UT faculty members, civil rights activists, young local professionals and business executives as older students. It celebrated the graduation of a woman named Maline Robinson, who had just earned a master-of-fine-arts degree from UT and who would later teach art history at the University of Wisconsin. Despite The Journal's lurid prose (“partly-clad couples were lying all over the front lawn...on tables, in closets and on the floor...Lewdness charges were not placed against anyone because during the melee everyone scattered”), the sexual allegations were nothing more than typical fabrications of the forever undiminished, never-to-be-quenched hatefulness that rules the vindictively pornographic Southron mind. Such is the racist fear, blood-lust and never-to-be-acknowledged envy implicit in the old joke that asks, “what is ten inches and white,” then answers, “nothing.”

That the police raid occurred just as the local Ku Klux Klan and its many affiliated churches were pulpit-pounding against “interracial love feasts” was hardly coincidental. Martin Southern, the ironically named American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in Knoxville, said he believed the raid had been carefully planned by a cabal of high ranking officials at UT, the sheriff's office and the police department plus top executives of The Journal and The Knoxville News-Sentinel to facilitate purging the university of anyone the local Ruling Class deemed “trouble-makers” and/or “outside agitators.”

Southern warned me that because I was the one genuinely credible witness to everything that had actually occurred -- he said I was “the fly, as it were, in the segregationist ointment” -- my own life was in danger. Not many days later, a would-be killer tried to invade my ground-floor apartment via its kitchen window, but the attempted hit was thwarted by my vigilant German shepherd Brunhilda and my own expert-class skill with a handgun – a story for another time. 

Meanwhile Marion Barry, then Tennessee field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later the mayor of Washington D.C., had arranged for me to cover the mass-arrest story for a local African-American weekly. But that report too was intrusively censored, not by blacks but by two white civil rights activists, Congress of Racial Equality members Steve Wagner and Phillip Bacon, who claimed they feared accurate description of the incident's more telling moments would discredit the narrative as “sensationalism.” Thus to my eternal regret I allowed them to cut several key passages from my original draft. These included a word-for-word account of my confrontation with Smith, in which he made it clear my alternatives were either to fabricate a lie describing an imaginary sex orgy or suffer the consequences; details of the police assault on a Latin American diplomat who was a guest at the party; and a brief description of the attempt on my life that arguably confirmed Southern's hypothesis of a Rightist conspiracy far broader than a mere police raid. The following, under my own byline, is what remained after Bacon and Wagner finished censoring it. It's from the 3 August 1963 edition of The Knoxville Flashlight-Herald:

Although The Knoxville Journal had opportunity to publish a staff member's eye-witness account of the now-famed graduation party held for some University of Tennessee students by Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Ottaway, it declined to utilize that source and relied instead upon police and sheriff's reports.

That those reports were something less than reliable has since been proven in Knox County Sessions Court.

This writer, at the time a sports reporter for The Journal, attended the party with friends and was subsequently arrested, then freed after deputies learned he was a Journal staff member. He was re-arrested and booked some 14 hours later after unsuccessfully attempting to interest Journal City Editor Dick Evans in a factual account of events before and during the arrests...

Included in this writer's report would have been a statement that the party was quiet and proper despite the number of persons present and information that police and deputies had acted without grounds.

Those taken to city jail, where there is a drunkometer (a Breathalyzer by which suspects can challenge a drunkenness charge), were not charged with drunkenness, but those taken to county jail, where there is no drunkometer, were charged with drunkenness in addition to disorderly conduct...

Cases against those charged by Knox County, including this writer, were dismissed July 1. City Court cases were continued by order of Journal-supported Judge Charles Kelly and will be heard in October.

Included on the city docket is Milton Vargas, the Panamanian Vice-Consul here. Mr. Vargas, who has filed a full report with the Panamanian government, has charged he was slapped by police officers...

The only uncensored coverage of the arrests was provided by TASS – Tyelyegrafnoye agyentstvo Sovyetskogo Soyuza or Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. The story appeared on page one of Pravda, as I recall in the 5 June edition. It was also -- or so I was told by several UT students -- broadcast in English by Radio Moscow.

Given the prurient hatefulness that so often defines southern racism, The Oak Ridger's bravery in hiring me in mid-August, even before all the court cases had been decided, was beyond exceptional. Indeed, since The Journal's vindictively aggressive slanders were blacklisting me even amongst Northern employers, until The Oak Ridger came to my rescue I had feared my journalism career was over.

Which brings us back to Ralph Nader. Maybe a year after the Knoxville incident, he was in Oak Ridge visiting his sister, a scientist with some big-league connection to what today would be called the nuclear energy cartel.  Smyser arranged for me to interview Nader,  exactly where I no longer remember. What I do recall is that I questioned Nader for hours, that eventually we adjourned to continue the interview at his sister's apartment, and that after I photographed him with the paper's Polaroid-back Speed Graphic, we talked literally until dawn.

Nader doubted the story would run. Citing the paper's bold defiance of the region's characteristic racism, I assured him it would.

Then I drove from his sister's place directly to the The Oak Ridger building on Tyrone Road, put the sports page to bed as quickly as I could and hammered out the Nader story on my issue Royal Standard typewriter. My lead said something like “'Unsafe at any speed' -- that's how Ralph Nader describes many of Detroit's best-selling automobiles.” The second graf laid out Nader's credentials -- a Harvard-educated lawyer, he had been campaigning for safer cars since the late 1950s -- and the remainder detailed his complaints against Chevrolet's Corvair. The text ran to at least six takes – six double-spaced typewritten pages of about 300 words apiece.

Despite the befogged mind that even at age 24 is the penance we pay for a sleepless all-nighter, I thought I'd done a damn fine job of reporting. But -- perhaps because Smyser himself drove a sherbet-green Corvair -- the story evoked not the anticipated thank you for the warning but instead provoked him to rage at me, startling the entire five-person staff as he shouted his denunciations the length of the newsroom.

My memory still flinches at how he grimaced as he dropped the Nader copy into the circular gray waist-high trash bin that stood guard beside his desk. His expression suggested he was disposing of something grossly distasteful, at least as repugnant as a cat turd.

When I phoned Nader and apologetically told him there would be no story, he nevertheless thanked me for my effort. Years after that I realized I was the one who should have thanked him – not just for all the time he spent telling me about the built-in hazards of those Detroit cars, but for the lesson in journalistic reality.

Such is the USian variant of a “free press,” its invisible restrictions so effective, no official censorship is necessary, the result uncomfortably reminiscent of a slogan in George Orwell's 1984: “ignorance is strength.”

***

AS TO WHY ASSANGE is being targeted, I suspect -- despite suggestions to the contrary -- it has little or nothing to do with the sadistic vindictiveness of Hillary Clinton and her Democratic (sic) Party apparatus. 

More likely the effort against Assange -- which by its bipartisanship bares the despotic Neoliberal unity the Democrats and Republicans normally work so diligently to conceal --  is in reaction to such findings as this Harvard study that documents substantial public response to alternative media. Or, perhaps more pointedly, to how Assange and his colleagues are  nullifying even the carefully disguised censorship that defines the United States.

In any case it is yet more irrefutable evidence of our Neoliberal overlords' increasingly frantic efforts to silence dissent by any means possible -- thereby ending forever their pretense this "one nation under God" stands for anything remotely akin to "liberty and justice for all."  

Quoth  the 1971 Powell Memo:

There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.

A detailed analysis of the memo is here. 

***

ALL OF WHICH should alleviate -- or so I hope -- any need for explain further why I think the Assange story is so important it demands the most thorough coverage I am able to provide:  

UK Judge Calls Assange "A Narcissist," Sets Extradition Court Date

Why the Assange Arrest Should Scare Reporters

The Assange Arrest is a Warning From History

FOCUS: Julian Assange's Legal Proceedings Will Do Profound Damage to the Institutions of the Free Press

RSN: The Railroad That Awaits Julian Assange

The Martyrdom of Julian Assange

After 7 Years of Deceptions About Assange, the US Readies for Its First Media Rendition

Assange's Arrest Erases What America Suppposedly Stood For

Assange’s Indictment Treats Journalism as a Crime

Worldwide outrage over arrest of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange

While Much of US Media Plays Along, Critics Warn Assange Indictment an 'Obvious' Ploy With Deeper Dangers

*****         

This Week's Most Damning Juxtapositions of Evidence
The socioeconomic and environmental Apocalypse is undeniably upon us. But the lies, deceptions and betrayals promulgated by the One Percenters and their minions no longer hide how -- in accordance with their shock-doctrine -- they are using the Apocalypse to impose the ultimate regime-change: the reordering of human society into Neoliberal utopia: Ayn Rand opulence for our masters, serfdom and slavery for the few 99 Percenters they allow to survive.

Democrats 'Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns' With Insufficient Resolution
Another of the woefully uninformative, glaringly illiterate heads that so frequently define Common Dreams as one of our shoddier examples of nonprofessional alternative journalism. What the head should say -- corrected both for its misplaced modifier and its sloppy misstatement of fact -- is Friends of Earth Denounce Democrats for "Wasting Time" on Climate Crisis. Unfortunately the story fails to ask why the Democratic (sic) Party is diddling and dallying rather than moving to help sustain our species in the face of what is already the gravest-ever threat to human survival. But two other stories combine to reveal "over-population" as dog-whistle code for genocide and the trillion-dollar momentum that -- unless we are rescued by socialist revolution -- defines  the Neoliberal (neo-Nazi) "Final Solution" to the environmental crisis. Then we have

Republicans Push Anti-Wind Bills in Several States as Renewables Grow Increasingly Popular

In which context we should consider the implications of

The return of the population bombers

Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability , .

While never forgetting the post-World-War-II, build-a-new-Nazi-Reich inputs to the present-day governance of the U.S. Empire:

How Thousands Of Nazis Were 'Rewarded' With Life In The U.S.

As I trust we are learning, the conclusion fostered by viewing the evidence as expressions of capabilities and intent are entirely different from what one concludes when it is viewed as  manifestations of chaos and coincidence.  It is also useful to remember an axiom of analysis that is undoubtedly older than Rome: "once is happenstance; twice is questionable; three times is enemy action."

***

Our Mother Earth: the Patriarchy's Ultimate Rape Victim
The Abrahamic religions' fear and hatred of femaleness expressed as the ultimate misogyny of ecocide.

Arctic Is Warmest It's Been in 10,000 Years, Study Suggests

This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out

Researchers Warn Arctic Has Entered 'Unprecedented State' That Threatens Global Climate Stability

For some river towns, flood protection is simply too costly

FOCUS: A Lawyer Set Himself on Fire to Protest Climate Change. Did Anyone Care?

Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth

***

Imperial War-Mongering for God, Profit and Sadistic Delight

Another African Convicted In Another Racist, Chauvinist Western Court 

US Military Attack On Venezuela Mulled By Top Trump Advisors And Latin American Officials At Private DC Meeting 

US Military Threatens Syria-Like War In Venezuela, Awaits Trump's Order

The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process Is Dead. An Expert Explains Why.

Reckoning With Failure In The War On Terror 

Labeling The Iranian Revolutionary Guard 'Terrorists' Is A Step Toward War 

ISIS/Al Qaeda in the Middle East and Ukraine's "Neo-Nazis": Two Sides of the Imperial Coin

Venezuela Prepared To Defend The Revolution Against US Imperialism 

 

***

Atrocities and Outrages 
Events and patterns -- including slow-motion genocide disguised as "austerity" -- that define the U.S. as the (de facto) Fourth Reich

US Denies Entry To BDS Cofounder Omar Barghouti

Katie Bouman and the Black Hole That Made Her Famous
Badly misleading head: the story is about the Gamergating of a woman who dares to be great.

What Gentrification and the New NFL Stadium Mean for Longterm Black Residents of Inglewood, California

Breastfeeding Mother Hit with $115 Ticket for Breastfeeding in Midtown NYC Traffic

Trump officials discussed using troops to run migrant detention camps

What Gentrification and the New NFL Stadium Mean for Longterm Black Residents of Inglewood, California

Eleven-Year-Old Ordered to Be Deported to El Salvador Without Her Family

Trump Reportedly Pushed to Drop Asylum Seekers in Democratic Sanctuary Cities

Trump's Transgender Military Ban Takes Effect Today

West Virginia college axes liberal arts; Pennsylvania Historical Society slashes workforce

Wealth, Stealth, and Boeing

US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

The Trump Administration Is Abandoning the Dakota Tribes as They Face a Second Catastrophic Storm

Republicans Are Taking Ilhan Omar's Comments on 9/11 Out of Context to Smear Her

Why Has Congress Stalled on Investigating Money Laundering Allegations at Trump Properties?

A 3-year-old had to go potty, so he went in a gas station parking lot. That's when a deputy cited his mom for disorderly conduct.

Police tower casts a shadow over South Seattle Safeway

Monsters Inc: They Treated Us Like We Were Animals

On Toddler Torturers: There Are Some Lines That Simply Can't Be Crossed

Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax.

Scapegoating Unions For The Postal Service's Phony Crisis

Obama Pushes Neoliberal Myths on Health Care at Fundraiser

Homeland Security Purge Ushers in the Stephen Miller Administration

Kings Bay Plowshares: Peace Activists Face 25 Years for Action at US Nuclear Submarine Base

Right wing takes Wisconsin court seat in a strident hate campaign

Rising number of Michigan and US households unable to afford basic necessities

Obama, Pelosi push Democrats further to the right

 

***

Religion and Spirituality

Trump Administration Lets Foster Agency Turn Away Catholic and Jewish Parents

Trump and the Global Rise of the Christian Right

Clarence Thomas: Atheists Can’t Be Trusted Since Oaths Mean Nothing to Them

 

***

Racism

Trump's Attack on Ilhan Omar Is a Trap for Democrats

Let Freedom Ring
I had forgotten -- until I read this paradoxically triumphant yet damning report (which we should therefore all read) -- the Ku-Klux intensity of the racism manifest by the Daughters of the American Revolution. 

FOCUS: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Receives So Many Death Threats Her Staff Performs Visitor Risk Assessments  

 

***

Media and Censorship

The International Struggle Against the Fake News of the U.S. Empire: Remarks at the National Writers Union

US Government's Refusal to Confirm or Deny It Put American Journalist on Drone Kill List Called 'Chilling'

On False Dichotomies, Real and Fake, at MSDNC

If You Have Alexa, Amazon Is Listening

The International Struggle Against the Fake News of the U.S. Empire: Remarks at the National Writers Union

Missouri Bill Banning Anonymity of Atheist Plaintiffs in Lawsuits Passes House

 

***

Sparks of Anger, Murmurs of Rebellion
But absolutely nothing to indicate the emergence of effectively organized and disciplined resistance in the United States and its Empire. 

Turkey's Only Communist Mayor Scores Another Election Victory

Freedom Rider: Scoundrels and Reparations

AMNH Under Fire for Hosting Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro

Medicaid Work Requirements: Do They Actually Help?

Illinois Billboard Welcomes Missouri Women Who Want a “Safe, Legal Abortion”

Indian Country Today video news report for April 11, 2019, with Vincent Schilling - IndianCountryToday.com
Almost always some relevant stories here, but they are impossible to link separately because of the way the site is designed.

Will you Rise up for Climate Justice Next Week? Don’t Let Fatalism and Cynicism Hold you Back
Read my comment and its correction to see why environmentalism without anti-Capitalist revolution is doomed -- and why such pseudo-environmentalism is therefore in apocalyptic reality yet another form of anti-environmentalism.

'Huge Victory': French Court Finds Monsanto Guilty of Poisoning Farmer

Progressives hit attempt by Democratic Party establishment to crush primary challengers

A Reckoning for Al Sharpton and the Black Misleadership Class

Runaway Inequality Is a National Emergency, Billionaire Banker Warns

Tell Netflix: Speak Up for Women 

***

In Closing
Please, please, please heed the distress call by Reader Supported News for funding. The fact its founder and I have sometimes had our differences has nothing to do with the overall superb quality of the website's anthologies  of the day's most important stories.

LB/16 April 2019

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