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INTRODUCTION

  • DISPATCHES FROM DYSTOPIA, dispatchesfromdystopia.net, which evolved during the past eight years from the less sharply focused "Outside Agitator's Notebook," has become precisely what this blog's new title and domain name describes. It is an ongoing anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-Capitalist testimony from the Dystopia that Capitalism has made of our world. It's epicenter is the post-humanitarian United States of America: our species' self-inflicted Moron Nation and its empire of global-conquest malevolence, the de facto Fourth Reich, the true birthdate of which will eventually be recognized – if indeed our species somehow miraculously survives the present era – as 22 November 1963. ¶Dispatches thus chronicles our relentless subjugation by Capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery and – just as Capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism – as it now matures into a Nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the details of what is occurring, DfD shows how ours is a Dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's Zieg-Heil-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the genocidal, ultimately ecocidal atrocities the Capitalist Ruling Class perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “Exceptionalism.” ¶Why “USian” rather than American? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or Nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist USiaNazi enslavement. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which Capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, too each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – Nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn. ¶But what then is Capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, its only possible offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), Capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation, filth, deadly danger of untreated disease and constant fear of enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care. ¶Ultimately Capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male One Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of Capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under Capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of Nazi governance. Not that We the (formerly exempt) People should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the Capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all the Capitalist victim realms abroad. ¶Moreover our plight is of our own making. We the People long ago surrendered to our Capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the Capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp. ¶Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by Capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide.  ¶Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly Nazi puppet government. And now, in the person of Donald Trump and his appointees, the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, the people who by their prideful ignorance and hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world. But in these times our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the Capitalist “education” system; by Capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the physical and psychic terrorism of Capitalism's manufactured crises. ¶Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. And as it says in a breathtakingly apt, wrenchingly poignant anthem grown increasingly popular far beyond its video-game origin, “shadows fall and hope is gone; steel your heart; the dawn will come.”

For More Information...

Links relevant to Introduction

Fire Survivors

  • After the Demonstration Failed
    These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including three books in progress and all the associated research. Some of these photos shown here escaped the flames because they were with me in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the One Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost and what might have been. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

  • Goddess emergent (1), 1968 (blue variant c. 2009)
    In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfilment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

Graffiti: a Sampler

  • Gun Graffiti
    When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the mammalian practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Faces of the Fight

  • Health Care For All!
    Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of health care reform's opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally set for Lakewood City Hall, the event was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

RELEVANT WEBSITES

  • Americans United for Separation of Church and State
    A vital website that is often our only source of accurate information about the terrifying effort to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States.
  • Best Site for Suppressed Assassination Facts
    The late Mae Brussell was our most relentless researcher into the murder of President John Kennedy and many other such outrages. Her legacy is a damning list of the USian Empire's darkest secrets.
  • Best, Most Thorough Documentation on the CIA's Destruction of the 1960s Counterculture
    Ms. Brussel outdid herself in her nobody-dares-publish-it investigative report exposing how the CIA's Operation Chaos destroyed the 1960s Counterculture. (My assumption is the Agency, with its Ivy-League analysts and their knowledge of pagan mythology, recognized the Counterculture's anti-patriarchal, resurrection-of-the-Goddess direction, understood it as a far greater threat to Capitalism than Marxism and responded with the murderous efficiency inherited from Gestapo predecessors.)
  • Communist Labor Party
    Communism as it is evolving in the United States after the murder of the American Dream and the slaying of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.
  • Communist Labor Party's Harry Bridges Club (Facebook)
    Communism as it is evolving in Tacoma, Washington.
  • Consortium News
    Superb reporting and analysis. Founder/Editor Robert Parry exposed Reagan's Iran-Contra scheming and has been persecuted by the capitalists ever since.
  • der Spiegel
    Mainstream German newspaper that is often a valuable source of news about Western European politics.
  • Global Research
    A genuinely independent news site -- neither definitively Left nor Right -- that often covers stories suppressed by U.S. Mainstream Media, which (let us never forget), is owned by the same One Percenters who own the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties and thereby control all U.S. governance at every level.
  • Gun Owners of America
    Fanatically hard-Right (and often ChristoFascist as well), it is nevertheless the best source for information about the One Percent's efforts to forcibly disarm the U.S. 99 Percent.
  • International Marxist Archive
    All of Marxism's defining texts defiantly uploaded to the Internet by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as its final contribution to humanity's eternal struggle for economic democracy -- without which there is no democracy at all.
  • Popular Resistance
    A daily newsletter featuring essential tactical and strategic analysis plus vitally informative reports of news suppressed by the "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Rewire
    Probably the most in-depth coverage of women's issues, LGBTQ issues and general human rights issues available on the U.S. Internet today, bolstered by decidedly professional reportage and editing.
  • RT
    Formerly "Russia Today," it accurately covers U.S. news the "mainstream media" propaganda machine routinely suppresses. Its notable work includes the nation's best coverage of the Occupy Movement (2011-2012), and the ongoing struggles of Black Lives Matter, Water Protectors and other such groups against the Empire's now-openly-fascist policies of homeland governance.
  • Second Amendment Foundation
    Unmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.
  • Socialist Worker
    An informative Marxist website in the United States, with news reporting and analysis that is usually far superior to anything fed us by capitalism's "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Southern Poverty Law Center
    Best source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, ChristoFascist and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.
  • TASS, the Russian Wire Service
    Vital reading, especially now that the USian Empire's plans for global conquest have rekindled the so-called Cold War.
  • Theocracy Watch
    Cornell University's in-depth source on the escalating campaign to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the USian Homeland. It is flawed only by its refusal to recognize the Democratic (sic) Party's mostly clandestine collaboration with the openly theocratic Republicans -- a collaboration revealed in frightening detail by Jeff Sharlet's "The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" (Harper: 2008).
  • TruthOut
    Generally reliable crowd-funded news site sometimes featuring cogent sociological analysis by Henry Giroux. Discussion thread's potential limited by Discus, which discourages posting of comments written off-site.
  • Ultra Violet
    Perhaps the most powerful racially integrated gender-equality organization in the United States.
  • World Socialist Web Site
    The day's news, typically with the most in-depth Marxist analysis available on the U.S. Internet -- this despite constant interference by the Empire's privatized, for-profit censorship apparatus.
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Memoirs

18 March 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our masters have been quietly smuggling their traveling holocaust of horrors home, one private jetload at a time, since 22 November 1963.3  But now the triumph of the genuinely Nazified Donald Trump and his burn-all-witches running-mate Michael Pence has blown the One Percenters' cover and revealed -- over an entirely bogus storm of objections --  the hideous truth of what actually obtains in this "one nation under (their  sadistic) God."     

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously I would choose the latter were I able. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****          

(I). Our Mother Earth as an Abused Woman

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

In the Deepest Ocean Trenches, Animals Eat Plastic

Iconic Forests Reaching Climate Tipping Points in American West

Nothing resolved as Flint water crisis nears fifth anniversary

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

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

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

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

Flint water crisis claims its youngest Legionnaires’ victim to date

Measles outbreak in Ukraine claims eight lives

Popular Brands Of Beer And Wine Found To Contain Glyphosate Weedkiller

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

Game Over? Report Card on Our Planet’s Environment

 

(II). Dithering as Denial

The Environmental Implications Of A Trump Presidency

Dianne Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal

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

Top Democrats Are Enabling Climate Catastrophe

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

Democrats Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns

 

(III). The Apocalypse Is Already Upon Us 

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

American Exceptionalism: The Naked Truth

The New York Times Won't Stop Pushing Crank Economics

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

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

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

Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All

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

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

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

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

The Most Harrowing Revelation of the Cohen Hearing

Corporate and “Progressive” Democrats Threaten Medicare Itself

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

Joe Biden Has a History of Racist Comments

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

Immigrants endure inhuman conditions at ICE prison in New Jersey

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

Torture Fans and War Criminals Determine US Foreign Policy

Pelosi dismisses efforts to impeach President Trump

Free dental clinic draws hundreds in Nashville, Tennessee

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

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

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

Nearly 200 Immigrants in Texas Detention Facilities Have Mumps

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

Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America

No charges for Sacramento police officers who murdered Stephon Clark

Fascism by Another Name

The Global Assault on Indigenous Peoples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephon Clark Killed Twice by U.S. imperialism

President’s Budget Targets Key Health Care Programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job

The criminalization of environmental protest in Trump’s America

 

(IV). Their God Demands They Rape Our Mother5

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

Giving The Bomb To Saudi Arabia's Dr. Strangelove

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

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

Southern Baptist Convention Grapples With Sexual Abuse Report

Cuba's Evangelical Alliance Leads Crusade Against Gay Marriage

With Trump, White Protestantism Hits Rock Bottom

United Methodists Fracture: LGBT Plan Rejected - The Atlantic

The Cult of the Good Christian Woman

Anti-Vaxx Mobs: Doctors Face Harassment Campaigns on Facebook

Revealed: AmazonSmile Helps Fund Anti-Vaccine Groups

Abortion Restrictions Sweep Through GOP-Held Legislatures

Saudi Women Activists Stand Trial in Criminal Court

Trump Administration Rolls Out Implementation Plan for Transgender Military Ban

The Kansas Bomb Plot: What Has the Media Missed?

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

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

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

The shadowy network shaping Trump’s anti-immigration policies

The EPA and Evangelical (Anti)Environmentalism

Trump: The most anti-science president ever?

 

(V). A Few Vernal Sprouts of Wishful Thinking

Climate Change Could End Washington’s Global Dominion

FOCUS: A Future Without Fossil Fuels?

How long can we keep dodging nuclear war? 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse

Researchers: Violence, War And Climate Change Are Linked

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

It’s the Green New Deal or Else

Extinction Rebellion: “Green” capitalism versus world socialism

The Youth Climate Strike and the fight against global warming

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

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

 

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

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

How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism

Joining the dots: women, environmentalism and neoliberalism

What is Neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility

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

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action

The Secret Threat That Makes Corporations More Powerful Than Countries

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

Our Mania For Hope Is A Curse

In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve

 

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

How to Spin Wool (with Pictures)

Enjoying Horseback Archery Adventures of the Year 2017

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

Finding Freedom in a Frontier Life 

Making a Blacksmith Shop with No Power Tools

Western Science Is Finally Catching Up To Traditional Knowledge

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/25 February-15 March 2019

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Posted at 01:16 AM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Feminism, Film, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Humanitarianism, Identity Politics, Immigration, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Music, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Spirituality, Television, Transportation, Visual art, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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24 February 2019

Truly Our Last Chance to Prove Ourselves Worthy of Survival

Climate Change Reveals the Patriarchal Gods as the Deadliest of Demons; the 1% Perpetuates the Crisis to Impose Shock-Doctrine Tyranny; Our Mother Earth Issues Her Ultimate Challenge

IMG_2731 - CopyApocalyptic Wonderland: late February in Tacoma. Photograph and posterization by Loren Bliss © 2019.

*

TO (MOMENTARILY) DUCK the shrapnel already ensuing from the issues implicit in the above typography, I feel obligated as a writer and editor to explain (or perhaps confess) that this is the first time I have ever written the headline before I knew exactly what the story might say. Magic? No, nothing so exotic; merely an exceptionally telling encounter with journalistic intuition -- precisely the kind of power-to-envision-outcomes that in darker times was damned as witchcraft and all-too-often got you burned at the stake.

Apropos which, the story I seined up after I wrote the head is now no doubt predictable: the ecocidal misogyny at the doctrinal core of Abrahamic religion and thus manifest in all societies so influenced or founded; how its adherents' belief in "End-Times" salvation obstructs even minimal environmental protections; how reading Chris Hedges' American Fascists (Free Press: 2006) and Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy (Viking: 2006) and most of all Jeff Sharlet's The Family (Harper: 2008), which by its subtitle tells the sordid understory of our national paralysis today: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. 

But presumably we -- the collective we of readership -- already know all that; and in any case,  does  repetitive disclosure of the same painful truth not eventually become a form of bludgeoning?  

As for the unapologetic paganism my headline acknowledges, those metaphors for our cosmos and our solar system and our planet and our place upon it and within its warp and weft are derived from visions at least as old as our species itself, so I most certainly cannot be blamed for citing their 200-thousand-year integrity. 

Though I would most assuredly be derelict in duty were I not to point out how the breathtaking magnitude of  such a vast expanse of time becomes mother macrocosm to microcosms of human consciousness and thence to visual representation. Picture a tranquil sea invaded by a contagion of predators;  picture a Mother Earth that even during her periodic storms and quakes and eruptions was embraced as the proper head of the household suddenly and now terminally invaded by a relentlessly militant hate-the-planet cult.

An alien species?

(Now that I am old and no longer have a career to protect I can ask such forbidden questions aloud.) 

A mutation?

Might then the introduction of patriarchy -- which is prerequisite to Earth-hating -- be an earlier, much more ambitious application of the same tactic employed in gifting First Nations peoples with smallpox-infested blankets? Or invading their lands with missionaries bearing bibles and touting paths to salvation by self-destruction? 

Preparing to transfer all I had written in response to letters of the Roman alphabet behaving as if they were runes, I began one last quick entirely routine pre-posting perusal of favored websites. That's  how I came  upon "Diane Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal" -- an infinitely damning report that epitomizes our circumstances as well as any of the 61 bookmarks from which I chose the eight definitive reports linked below. 

Thus in response I posted the following:

If one studies Feinstein's record -- studies it analytically, as a (real/uncensored) investigative reporter might – it becomes obvious her one true cause is forcible civilian disarmament.

Though Feinstein's purposes are typically concealed by her deft manipulations of Democratic (sic) Party rhetoric, it's clear she is intent on ensuring our terminal defenselessness in the face of ever-escalating violence by the ChristoNazis and their allies. She is thereby aiding and abetting the Nazi takeover of the United States even as we the people she claims to represent increasingly embrace socialism as the only alternative to extinction.

Obviously Feinstein hopes her allies in the mainstream media will minimize disclosure of the near-100-percent alliance between the law enforcement and military machines and the Nazis themselves, particularly their burgeoning neo-Sturmabteilung units.

Which means that even as the cops, the secret police and the soldiers are making sure the Nazis are allowed to keep their firearms, Feinstein and her fellow Democrats are devoting maximum energy to reducing all the rest of us to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood.

(Exactly as if she were a willing agent of some Ruling Class plot to use the looming environmental apocalypse to facilitate the ultimate shock-doctrine reconstruction of human society into a global concentration camp.)

Which led me to a couple of other realizations: that if, precisely as Hitler's Germany proved it to be, so-called "national socialism" is socialism only for the Ruling Class, the One Percent, and fuck-off-and-die abandonment (or extermination) for all the rest of us, then what we have in the United States is indeed not only socialism for the rich, it is indeed "national socialism" precisely as envisioned by der Führer himself.

Neoliberalism as national socialism. Or vice-versa. Hmm; explains a lot.

Which in turn inevitably brings me back to the Occam's-Razor answer to what has become the pivotal question of our species' existence: why is the global One Percent doing everything in its virtually godlike power to  retard and obstruct even the most mildly ameliorative anti-ecocide measures?

Obviously: they intend to continue using the entire crisis just as they are already using it now: as I said, to reconstruct human society into a perfect replica of their mentor's vision: that is, a concentration camp, with themselves in command and all the rest of us damned to unimaginable wretchedness.

*****                    

The Eight Promised Links:

'Terrifying': Rapid Loss of Biodiversity Placing Global Food Supplies at Risk of 'Irreversible Collapse'

Trump EPA OKs 'Emergency' to Dump Bee-Killing Pesticide on 16 Million Acres

What You Need to Know About Trump’s Attacks on the Federal Family Planning Program

Groundwater Contamination Devastates a New Mexico Dairy - and Threatens Public Health

Rare L.A. Mega-Storm Could Overwhelm Dam and Flood Dozens of Cities, Experts Say

Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job

Insisting on Resistance in an Age of Ignorance

Its Too Late. You've Lost Your Guns.

*****               

ANOTHER RECENT OFF-DISPATCHES post of mine is also relevant to the whys and wherefores of the environmental apocalypse: 

As far as I am concerned, what killed (Carbon Tax Initiative) I-1631 is Washington state's policy as defined by the fact it has the most viciously regressive tax structure in the nation (and probably in the world) combined with the nation's largest state-tax exemptions for Big Business.

Given this history, many decidedly pro-environment voters recognized the 99.9 percent probability our Neoliiberal, Capitalist-owned state government would do as it always does, scheme some sneaky way to exempt the Ruling Class from any I-1631 taxes and -- as with every other taxation measure in the state's history -- vindictively ensure the I-1631 burden was borne exclusively by those of us who can least afford it.

I did not vote against I-1631 -- I will not vote against any rational environmental-protection measure -- but I did not vote for it either. I simply did not vote on the I-1631 question at all. Why? Because having witnessed time and again the state's policy of deliberately burdening the lowest income people with the greatest percentage of the costs of governance, I saw no reason to allow the state to do what I cannot doubt it would have done: weaponize I-1631 as yet another tool for socioeconomic cleansing.

If Washington state wants voter approval of a carbon tax, it should first`impose fairness on the most deliberately unfair state tax system in U.S. history.

Let the demand for tax fairness -- that is, to tax the rich to recover at least some of what they have stolen from the rest of us -- be everywhere fulfilled. 

LB/24 February 2019

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Posted at 10:40 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Feminism, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare, History, Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Photography, Religion, Spirituality, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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03 February 2019

Censorship by Facebook Forces Yet Another Format Change

PERVERSELY CURIOUS AS to how long Facebook's overtly Neoliberal, incipiently ChristoNazi censors might allow it to remain up, I posted the following to the Tacoma Communist Labor Party's FB site a few minutes ago:

THE END: Facebook's censors locked me out of this page for the past five days, thereby destroying the day-to-day connection and relationship between FB and my blog, Dispatches from Dystopia. Obviously I can no longer trust FB to carry any genuinely relevant news; the first report it suppressed last Wednesday (30 January 2019) was "If the Supreme Court Doesn't Stay a Louisiana Law Next Week, Roe v. Way Will Be All but Dead," and though FB censors finally allowed the story to appear a few moments ago, its old-news tardiness has reduced it to nothing more than a historical footnote. Because this is not the first time my reportorial efforts have been undone by FB censorship -- see today's Dispatches for details -- I will no longer attempt to post  on any FB site and am re-formatting Dispatches accordingly. My apology to those who may thusly be inconvenienced. 

Obviously FB's censors and their robotic slaves (whether human or electronic) have figured out "Loren Tacoma" is the Loren Bliss they permanently banished in 2010 for daring to suggest the so-called "Great Recession" was deliberately inflicted as a means of expediting Neoliberal/ChristoNazi destruction of governmental social services and indeed all other governmental services that do not serve our Capitalist overlords specifically as armies of conquest, death squads, domestic stormtroopers, secret police and any other tyranny or apocalypse-facilitating functions.  Not only was that 2010 post disappeared literally within minutes of its posting; FB also severed (and obstructed forever) the permalink between itself and my blog -- a definitively hostile act Typepad technical experts said they had never before encountered. Hence eight years later, when -- at the insistence of my CLP comrades -- I resumed my relationship with FB, it was of course not as Loren Bliss but as "Loren Tacoma." 

Vital reports from last week's alternative Internet news sources obstructed by this episode of FB censorship include the following:

European Colonizers' Genocide of 56 Million Native Americans So Devastating "It Literally Cooled the Planet"

The United States Is the Most Corrupt Country in the World

The U.S. is a Political Prison, Kamala Harris is a Prison Guard

Anthropologist Debunks Bill Gates' BS Narrative That Free-Market Capitalism Has Solved Crisis of Global Poverty

Joshua Tree National Park May Take 300 Years to Recover' From Shutdown
Without zero-tolerance policing by park rangers, nature-hating vandals ran amok.

Trump Supports “Bible Literacy” Classes in Public Schools

Here's How the Saudi Press Has Been Smearing the Teen Who Fled Her Family Abrahamic religion – in this instance Islam – in typically misogynistic action.

Revealed: FBI Investigated Civil Rights Group as 'Terrorism' Threat and Viewed KKK as Victims Yet most of Moron Nation still refuses to believe U.S. law enforcement – local cops and feds alike – is Nazified from top to bottom.

Measles Outbreak Sparks Concerns Over Anti-Vaccination Movement
Another of the innumerable ways Abrahamic religion – in this instance Christianity – works to bring on the apocalypse.

Democrats Killed the Green New Deal
And so collaborated with their more overtly ChristoNazi Congressional colleagues to ensure the extinction of our species and the reduction of our Mother Earth to a bug planet. 

(Heads from original texts are in boldface; my comments are in lightface italic.)

Obviously I knew FB's censors would eventually see through the "Loren Tacoma" deception, so I am not at all surprised by what obtained. Moreover because of my old age and the sort of traditional liberal-arts education we USians are now forever forbidden, I am wise enough and knowledgeable enough to resist the must-use brainwashing by which younger USians have been conditioned to believe they cannot survive without 100 percent dependence on electronic media -- a system that was from its earliest conceptual moments intended to function as the most effective surveillance apparatus our species has yet developed. Indeed I cheer the Russian countermeasures -- reversion to typewriters, mimeograph machines and non-electronic transmission -- as the only truly effective defense against the 100-percent surveillance to which all social-media users must submissively surrender each time we turn on a cellphone or a computer. 

As a result, it's back to the drawing board for Dispatches. Don't know when I will resume regular posting, but it will be as soon as possible, so  please stay tuned.

Meanwhile  a slightly belated Joyous Imbolg with an evocative blessing for us all and a heartfelt thank-you for your faithful readership. 

LB/3 February 2019.  

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Posted at 07:09 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Feminism, Healthcare, History, Memoirs, Misogyny, Mother Earth, Religion, Science, Spirituality, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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28 January 2019

Deceit, Dystopian Depression, Deliverance by Discarded Dogs

Workers -- Not Politicians -- Saved Us from Shutdown/Lockout; Grief Intensifies Our Fight for Mother Earth; Dogs Gather Vital Eco-Data

TO START, FORGET all the politicians-as-saviors/"change-we-can-believe-in" bullshit the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine and at least one of its reformist counterparts is excreting about how the latest effort to drown the federal government in a bathtub was finally 

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

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ended by the alleged wisdom of the Founders' system of checks-and-balances as manifest in the allegedly merciful collaboration of Neoliberal and NeoNazi bureaucrats and elected officials to finally end the crisis.

What actually happened was a bunch of rightfully pissed-off workers voiced an undeniably credible threat of shutting down the entire Empire in the one way that would be sure to inflict substantial losses on the pornographic profits of its morally imbecilic owners:

...Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) international president Sara Nelson all but called for a general strike to stop the government shutdown.

Speaking after receiving an award given in honor of Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson, who leads the 50,000-member union affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, said King “called on us to come together with the ‘fierce urgency of now’ to fight for justice …. There is a humanitarian crisis unfolding right now for our 800,000 federal sector sisters and brothers who are either locked out of work or forced to come to work without pay due to the government shutdown.”

After noting the shutdown had the potential to degrade her members’ safety and job security, Nelson said, “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. What is the Labor Movement waiting for? Go back with the Fierce Urgency of NOW to talk with your Locals and International unions about all workers joining together – To End this Shutdown with a General Strike.”

Then some of her wildcat-minded comrades began publicly flexing their muscles:

A shortage of air traffic controllers on Friday morning at airports on the East Coast of the United States, but particularly in Washington, D. C., and Florida, caused the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to substantially slow air traffic throughout the region, the most populous part of the US.

And the Trump/Pence Regime understandably flinched:

President Donald Trump retreated from his demand that Congress approve a border wall before he would end the partial shutdown of the federal government, announcing Friday that he would approve a temporary, three-week restoration of funding for those federal agencies where workers have gone without pay since December 22.

Note the truth told by the timing: general-strike threats Wednesday and Thursday; wildcat slowdowns Friday morning; last-minute ChristoNazi surrender Friday afternoon.  

Obviously the fight is not over. But as I have said all along, if there is any constituency within the Empire yet capable of saving us from ourselves, it is organized labor -- particularly if it embraces the unique ability of oppressed minorities to provide the most effective revolutionary leadership.

At the very least, We the People are (re)discovering our socioeconomic weapons and how they might be used. 

Which I damn well hope is as wildly inspirational to our 99 Percent comrades as I know it is absolutely  terrifying to our One Percent overlords.

*****

Contrasting (Real-Leftist) Perspectives on the Los Angeles Teachers' Strike  

Black Agenda Report Managing Editor Bruce Dixon says the strikers achieved significant gains, particularly in terms of fostering neighborhood/parent/teacher/student solidarity.  World Socialist Web Site's  Alan Gilman says the teachers -- and by extension all the district's students -- got royally fucked. 

First the discouraging analysis by Mr. Gilman:

The betrayal Wednesday of Los Angles teachers by the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) epitomizes the anti-working class character of unions and the depths these organizations will go to suppress social opposition.

Teachers returned to their classrooms Thursday still shocked and outraged over how the UTLA pushed through a contract that ignored their most critical demands to increase wages and school funding, reduce class sizes and stop the expansion of charter schools. One teacher described feeling like there was “a hole in her heart” and reported seeing teachers crying because nothing they went on strike for was realized.

Then the encouraging analysis by Mr. Dixon:

Corporate media absolutely won’t tell you this, but this year’s Los Angeles teachers strike is the latest chapter in the long running struggle against the privatization of public education in the US. With massive public support, 30,000 teachers have voted a settlement that increases their wages a little, brings back nurses, librarians and counselors to each and every one of the city’s 900 schools, caps class sizes and charter school expansion and more. Striking teachers managed to bring issues to the table that were supposed to be impossible to address, like the manipulation of school board real estate, school closings and charter policies to gentrify neighborhoods, among others.

*****                         

But Let Us Not Forget: White Christian Imperial Malevolence Yet Reigns Supreme

A school nurse and vice principal at Binghamton East Middle School stripped searched four Black girls because they were acting “giddy” at lunch and school authorities suspected they were using drugs. Normal behavior for 12 year olds was used to justify strip searching four young Black girls in front of adults and traumatizing them. Three of the girls were forced to strip down to their underwear, while a fourth girl refused a search and was served with an in-school suspension instead. (Emphasis as in original.)

Protest petition included. I signed; how about you?

  ***                  

Get ready, folks, because the government— helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget)—is embarking on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a national DNA database.

  ***                                  

While soybean farmers watched the drift-prone weed killer dicamba ravage millions of acres of crops over the last two years, Arkansas beekeeper Richard Coy noticed a parallel disaster unfolding among the weeds near those fields.

When Coy spotted the withering weeds, he realized why hives that produced 100 pounds of honey three summers ago now were managing barely half that: Dicamba probably had destroyed his bees’ food.

In October, the US Environmental Protection Agency extended its approval of the weed killer for use on genetically modified soybeans and cotton, mostly in the South and Midwest, for two more years. At the time, the EPA said: “We expect there will be no adverse impacts to bees or other pollinators.”

But scientists warned  the EPA years ago that dicamba would drift off fields and kill weeds that are vital to honeybees. The consequences of the EPA’s decisions now are rippling through the food system. (Emphasis added.)

  ***                             

Charlottesville Police say they will not be investigating an incident in which a popular white supremacist slogan, “It’s Okay to Be White” was tagged over a Zeta Phi Beta mural at the University of Virginia. According to the historically black sorority, members of the UVA chapter of Zeta Phi Beta painted the mural on Beta Bridge, a city-owned University landmark, to honor their Founder’s Day on Jan. 16. By the next morning, the mural was vandalized.

  ***

Donald Trump’s decision to change definitions of domestic violence and sexual assault has rolled back women’s rights by half a century, campaigners have warned.

The Trump administration quietly changed the definition of both domestic violence and sexual assault back in April but the move has only just surfaced.

The change could have significant repercussions for millions of victims of gender-based violence.

The Trump Justice Department’s definition only considers physical harm that constitutes a felony or misdemeanor to be domestic violence – meaning other forms of domestic violence such as psychological abuse, coercive control and manipulation no longer fall under the department’s definition.

*****

Have We Then the Consciousness and Discipline to Achieve Socialism?

Government shut downs, Green New Deals, “socialist” leaning Democrats, and the specter of millions of young Americans sympathizing with socialism ultimately leads us to the question: how do we get to socialism? A new social order such as socialism cannot be achieved unless ordinary Americans, especially poor and working Americans, understand and embrace the idea. Socialism certainly won’t arrive because a Democrat speaks its name. However, the fact that the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have said the word points to a growing antagonism. This antagonism is characterized by the growing misery of the masses worldwide at the hands of endless austerity and war imposed by the global capitalist elite. Many Americans think socialism is attractive, but most don’t ascribe to a single definition of what it is.

The global capitalist elite led by the United States is in a race to the bottom that has brought those attracted to socialism to believe that the contradictions of capitalism have reached their terminal stage. But a dying system is a dangerous system, and global capitalism has employed the most ruthless imperialist policies as an act of self-preservation.

*****

Meanwhile the Democratic (sic) Party Connives to Thwart Its Few Progressives

There are a lot of Democrats who have announced themselves as candidates for the 2020 Presidential election, and even more are considering a hat fling. But of all those candidates, only three are truly progressives: Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard and Elizabeth Warren.  Sherrod Brown, Senator from Ohio, might possibly fit the progressive idea.  And of course, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez certainly would, except that she’s five years too young to be President.

The unfortunate things is that Sanders, Warren, Gabbard, and Brown risk drawing votes away from one another, opening the race to a more conservative Democrat. 

Comment: What we're witnessing here is the political equivalent of stacking the deck. The more divided the so-called "progressives," the easier it will be for the party's closet-Republican leadership to prevail. After all, such is the bitter truth of "change we can believe in": our conquerors remain in power, and our own circumstances become ever more intolerable.  Thus at least one of those candidates is a false-flag operative, running for specifically disruptive purposes as assigned by the Democratic (sic) National Committee or its Wall Street cabal of billionaire owners. 

*****   

Mourning the Apocalypse: Three Essays on Our Future...or Lack Thereof

(A) small minority of scientists...believe that an extinction event is baked-in-the-cake, inevitable, inescapable within current lifetimes because of excessive human-caused greenhouse gases such as CO2, which, in turn, disrupts James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, meaning the biosphere has a self-regulatory effect on Earth that sustains life. Destroy one ecosystem and all others will fail in time and most of Earth becomes uninhabitable...

  ***

The issue before us is death. Not only our individual death, which is more imminent for some of us this morning than others, but our collective death. We have begun the sixth great mass extinction, riven by our 150-year binge on fossil fuel. The litany of grim statistics is not unfamiliar to many of you...Past mass extinctions on earth were characterized by abrupt warming of 6 to 7 degrees Celsius. We are barreling toward those numbers. The mathematical models for this global temperature rise predict an initial 70 percent die-off of the human species, culminating with total death.

 *** 

No one knows if the biosphere will completely collapse. Our future is uncertain. Given the fact that a rapid increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coincided with previous mass extinctions and that we could well be facing our own extinction, we should be asking ourselves, “How shall I use this precious time?” Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us of the value just in being present with what is happening to the planet: “When your beloved is suffering, you need to recognize her suffering, anxiety, and worries, and just by doing that, you already offer some relief.”

*****

Meanwhile the Gentrification of Roadkill Continues Apace (Verily: an Omen?)

In the past few years, a handful of states, including Washington, Oregon and Montana, have started to adopt the attitude that Alaskans have always had toward eating roadkill. A loosening of class stigma and the questionable ethics and economics of leaving dinner to rot by the side of the road have driven acceptance of the practice in the Lower 48.

*****

And a Few Discarded Dogs Demonstrate Their Species' Superiority

In the UW's Conservation Canines program, rescue dogs find a home and a purpose in tracking wildlife scat for science. Photographer Jaymi Heimbuch runs, sniffs and rolls in the dirt to highlight how the four-legged detectives explore their world.

Comment: If after six millennia of patriarchy our Mother Earth has any remaining love for us at all, surely dogs are her favorite emissaries.  

LB/27 January 2019

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Posted at 03:34 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Feminism, Film, History, Immigration, Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Photography, Religion, Science, Spirituality, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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21 January 2019

Reinforced by Catholic Teens, ChristoNazis Turn Ecumenical

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

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

Viral footage of (white) teenagers mobbing a Native American man and his companions at Friday's Indigenous Peoples March is sparking outrage. In the video, the man—identified by Indian Country Today as Omaha elder Nathan Phillips—is seen singing

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

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

and drumming with fellow marchers while encircled by chanting teens, many of whom are wearing President Trump's Make America Great Again apparel. One youth pointedly stands directly in front of Phillips, smirking.

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

The Psychological Underbelly of the ChristoNazi Malignancy

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

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

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

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

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

***

White Racist Malevolence at Border Revealed as Policy Not Accident

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

***

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

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

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

***

No Surprise: White Supremacy Remains Dominant in Mainstream Media Machine

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

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

***

“Kamala Harris Is No Friend of Black People”

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

***** 

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

U.S. Elders Embracing Marijuana for Anesthesia and Contemplation

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

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

*****

Three Relevant Perspectives on the Los Angeles Teachers' Strike

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

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

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

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

LB/20 January 2019

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Posted at 04:53 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Identity Politics, Immigration, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Religion, Science, Seniors , Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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14 January 2019

The New Year Births a Hefty Anthology of Provocative Reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

Please-Read Background Material Essential for Perspective

“The Roots of Fascism and the Seeds for Its Defeat”

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

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

(snip)

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

(snip)

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

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

***

“Two Populisms, Not One”

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

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

(snip)

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

***

“The Working Class and the Environmental Crisis”

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

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

(snip)

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

***

"The Political Economy of Fascism”

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

***

“Undemocratic by Design”

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

“The Election Circus Begins”

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

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

*****

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

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

(snip)

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

“Banksters Get Shutdown Relief after Appeal to Trump Regime Officials”

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

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

*****

Four Vital Essays from Black Agenda Report

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

“Raising the Bar on a Green New Deal”

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

***

“Ocasio-Cortez, Socialism, War and Austerity”

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

***

“Freedom Rider: Phony Resistance Can’t Beat Trump”

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

***

“The Diversity Hustle”

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

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

*****

Plus Even More Relevant News and Analysis

“Marching Towards a Fighting Women’s Movement”

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

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

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

(snip)

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

*****

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

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

*****

“Five Forces Driving the Rise of Fascism in 2019”

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

“Bordering on Fascism: Scholars Reflect on Dangerous Times”

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

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

*****

“Who or What Brought Down Dag Hammarskjöld?”

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

*****

“News Outlets Reveal Their Utter Contempt for the Incarcerated”

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

*****

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

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

*****

And Now We Close With Maybe the Biggest Story Ever

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

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

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

LB/13 January 2019

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07 January 2019

An Introductory Anthropology of Apocalyptic Imperialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****                              

The Ruling Class Again Weaponizes Identity Politics for Maximum Divisiveness

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

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

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

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

*****                            

Yale Psych Prof Says Trump Is More Dangerous Than Ever

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

*****  

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

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

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

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

*****                 

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

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

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

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

LB/6 January 2019

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Posted at 05:07 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Feminism, History, Identity Politics, Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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31 December 2018

Government Lockout: Neoliberal Moral Imbecility Wins Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Astounding.

*****

How Democrats Intend to Suppress the Sanders Campaign

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

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

*****

Vengeful Republicans Kill Minimum Wage Hikes, Voter-Rights Expansions

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

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

*****

NYC Steam Plant Explosion Looks Like Imagined Onset of Alien Invasion

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

*****

Texas Persecutes Teacher-of-the-Year for Lesbianism

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

*****

Ralph Nader on Why We Desperately Need Canadian-Style Healthcare

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

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

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

*****

Eight LGBTQ Struggles the Mainstream Media Refused to Cover

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

*****

How New Jersey's Bergen County Ends Chronic Homelessness

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

LB/30 December 2018

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Posted at 01:53 AM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Feminism, Film, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Humanitarianism, Identity Politics, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Spirituality, Television, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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23 December 2018

Yes, Virginia, the Government Is Committing Humpty-Dumpty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

*****        

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

*****    

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

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

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

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

***** 

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****                 

Meanwhile, Anticipation of a New Holocaust Looms Amidst the Fragments

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

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

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

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

*****   

Trump-Mattis Breakup Exemplifies How the Government Is Falling Apart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****      

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

***** 

Lastly, Here Are Some Midwinter Meditations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/23 December 2018

-30-

 

 

 

 

 

Posted at 11:29 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Feminism, Healthcare, History, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Religion, Science, Spirituality, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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16 December 2018

U.S. Journalists Begin to Rediscover Their Moral Imperative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

***

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

*****

Four Texas Abortion Cases That Could Kill Roe v. Wade

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

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

 

*****

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

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

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

*****

A Cushy New Job Rewards Official Charged in Flint Water Deaths

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

“Is California About to Execute an Innocent Man?”

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

*****

French Yellow Vest Movement Acquiring Real Revolutionary Flavor

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

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

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

*****

A First Nations Astronomical Clock Older Than Stonehenge

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

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

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

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

LB/16 December 2018

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Posted at 11:58 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Healthcare, History, Identity Politics, Immigration, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Science, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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