A TERRIFYING ASSAULT on my always-fragile finances by an ongoing plague of so-called "billing errors" combined with attempted thievery by alleged "fraudsters" tells me I am again a target of the extra-legal secret-police malevolence for which the United States is increasingly infamous.
My alleged sin? I suspect it is writing about what should be obvious: that the only possible reason the One Percenters are not fighting climate change is they are weaponizing it as the plausibly deniable mechanism of their ultimate Final Solution: reshaping the remnants of human society into a global concentration camp with themselves as commandants, guards and executioners.
Thus it would appear I am being told to shut the fuck up, lest everything on which I am dependent -- apartment, telephone service, Internet connection, health insurance, food stamps, even my Social Security retirement pension -- be taken away from me without notice.
(Question: How do you fight a 76-percent overcharge accompanied by an immediate disconnect notice when [A], you've already paid your monthly bill; when [B] you're a 15-year customer who's never been late with a payment; and when [C], Century Link initially claims to have no record of either the overcharge or the pending disconnection? Answer: You stay on the phone for nearly seven hours, shouting yourself hoarse and repeatedly threatening legal action until CL employees eventually dig deeply enough into their computers to find the "error" and correct it.)
How did the "error" happen? The employees insist there is no explanation.
Such harassment is never "explainable"; that is often what identifies it as the product of malice rather than ineptitude. In any case the fact this allegedly inexplicable Century Link "error" was immediately preceded by a half-dozen bank-thwarted efforts at electronic "fraud" makes it obvious I am (again) under deliberate attack.
One or two such incidents might be coincidental, but eight -- the count so far (including a new, ongoing attack by Century Link similar to the first) -- is unquestionably enemy action, especially since I am meticulously protective of the relevant passwords and confirmation-of-identity information.
More to the point, the alleged "fraudsters" were able to access new, hitherto-unused replacement accounts, which means they had information only the credit-bureaus and the bankers -- or the secret police -- are able to obtain. And we already know each of the 17 U.S. secret police agencies are dominated top-to-bottom by the ChristoNazis and their fascist allies.
As in the Beatles' song, "I get by with a little help from my friends." But the friends and comrades whose caring and generosity sometimes sustain my survival have not the resources to save me from the death-sentence horrors that would result were my Social Security account to "inexplicably" vanish from the government's computers -- exactly as my Washington state unemployment compensation account vanished in December 1982.
This happened the height of the Reagan Recession -- here in Washington state a genuine depression with actual joblessness approaching 30 percent. The disaster inflicted by the surprise loss of my unemployment stipends thus reduced me to homelessness long before my repeated, increasingly forceful letters-of-appeal generated sufficient political pressure to compel notoriously recalcitrant bureaucrats to reconstruct and restore my disappeared account.
Significantly, inside sources I had developed during my years covering the legislature (1977-1981), told me the clerk who vindictively deleted my account was never punished. Supposedly she acted on her own initiative, in Nazi-minded revenge for my anti-Vietnam-War activities 11 years earlier. But the extent to which she was protected tells me she was obeying the orders of some higher authority or at the very least had been assured of such support.
As would be the case again today were my Social Security pension to suddenly vanish, in December 1982 my lover, friends and acquaintances were all too impoverished to provide more than minimal help. The best these folks could do was offer occasional free meals and a few nights on a living-room couch or in a spare bed. My lover, herself a victim of Reagan-inflicted economic woes, ended our relationship by returning to California.
By the time the state got around to paying my unemployment-insurance stipends, the money was nine months overdue. My increasingly desperate hunt for work and shelter had meanwhile forced me back to New York City, where my award-winning journalistic skills netted me immediate employment as a writer and editor and brought me regular freelance work both as a creative director and a photographer.
But I was compelled to leave behind in Washington state the photography and manuscripts that were already beginning to achieve recognition as my life's most important work. These filled a pair of four-drawer filing cabinets, their contents including a 150,000-word draft of "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" and the tens of thousands of photographs I had made since 1952, when my father honored my 12th birthday by giving me my first camera, a truly life-changing gift. Perhaps a thousand of these photos -- my intent was to edit them down to about 50 images -- provided the visual backbone of "Dancer," which by then had generated 24 years of file-folders bulging with research notes, outlines, clippings and earlier drafts. Also within the cabinets were notes, photos, maps and site drawings for a book on Washington state archaeological anomalies, and a comparable files for a third book about the people of the Pacific Northwest salmon fishery.
Because there was no way I could fit even one of these cabinets into my 1976 Honda Civic for the 2,900-mile drive across the country to Manhattan, I stored both cabinets and all the work they contained with an especially dear friend and trusted colleague; I would send for them as soon as I had achieved permanent housing in the City.
But my friend's house was destroyed by arson on 1 September 1983 -- a blaze ignited at the exact instant I began a meeting with the book editor who believed "Dancer" to be a cultural turning-point and had therefore promised to mother it to mainstream publication.
The timing -- literally to the minute -- makes it obvious the fire was no coincidence, that it was clearly an assault by the secret police or their Nazi allies.
And my loss -- as I'm certain was intended -- was ruinous. The destruction of my life's work was the destruction of my life. No matter how determinedly I tried, I was unable to recover either from the fire or from the preliminary blow dealt me by that vengeful clerk in the Bellingham office of the so-called (and laughably named) Washington Department of Employment Security.
I was never again able to afford a place of my own -- that is, an apartment or dwelling without room-mates -- until I returned to Washington state in October 1986. By the following year a stubborn bout of post-fire traumatic depression -- impossible to conceal from future employers after poverty forced me onto welfare and the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services vindictively shunted me onto Social Security Disability -- had ended forever my career as a newspaper and magazine staffer. And I would never again have a lover; my poverty had become too hopeless to hide.
What saved my life was my excellent physical health; I was in my 40s; my back and knee injuries had not been complicated by arthritis, and the onset of congestive heart failure was two decades in my future. I had the stamina essential for survival when survival itself becomes -- as it has under Neoliberalism -- an act of revolutionary defiance.
Now, at age 79, severely crippled by arthritis and slowly dying of congestive heart failure, there is no possible way I could successfully combat such a sudden loss of income. The magnitude of my poverty would again, exactly as it did in 1982-83, prohibit amelioration by friends or comrades. Again I would be homeless, isolated, alone -- and this time soon dead.
So endeth the lesson.
***
BUT THIS THREAT of fatal retaliation is only a small part of what pushed me over the proverbial edge into something that at first glance seems uncomfortably close to the scary intellectual death I fear actual retirement is bound to be.
Consider:
There is no question the One Percenters and their minions have achieved genuine omnipotence in their tyranny over this planet and its inhabitants. They do as they wish. Their technology has given them abilities hitherto attributed to the gods alone -- including the power to heal the global wounds inflicted by our man-made socioeconomic and environmental emergencies.
Instead our overlords have allowed these crises to merge and expand into an approximation of the Apocalypse traditionally prophesied by the Abrahamic zealots.
Have no doubt; our masters could have ended austerity anytime they chose to do so.
They could also have begun amelioration of what should be called "terminal climate change" when Soviet scientists -- freed of the anti-environmental fetters imposed by "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power" -- began in the 1950s to warn humanity of global warming and its consequences.
These warnings were of course rejected by the United States, the most earth-raping, atmosphere-poisoning, water-polluting empire ever.
The misogynistic depth of anti-environmental sentiment in "Christian America" -- the magnitude of its metastasis confirmed when the patriarchy's "one nation under God" gave the Trump/Pence Regime unfettered access to the doomsday button -- cannot be over-estimated. It is perhaps best exemplified by the startling messages that began appearing on church reader-boards during the early 1970s. Examples include "Organic Is Satanic" and "Environmental Is Of The Devil."
But since the death of the Soviet Union, no people on earth have demonstrated the leadership, organization and discipline necessary to slow the One Percenters' tyrannical momentum, much less to overthrow the ever-more-obvious One Percent agenda, a shock-doctrine of strategy and tactics cunningly camouflaged by political hurly-burly yet clearly based on the deliberate furtherance of ecocidal genocide and genocidal ecocide.
That is why -- though in ever-deepening despair we press our masters ever more frantically to use their infinite power and wealth to at least reduce the death and destruction wrought by their weaponized Apocalypse -- they respond with naught but dithering, obstructionism, disinformation, outright lies and defiant intensification of all the trumped-up persecutions at the heart of their global assault on democratic process.
Politics is never more than a euphemism for might-makes-right compulsion. But we the people are already so dis-empowered we cannot even compel our overlords to fling us lifejackets in an already raging sea of disaster.
At best our masters are sneeringly indifferent to our fate; at worst they want us dead. That's why our traditional democratic methods -- disclosure, dissent and non-violent demonstration -- no longer work.
And so it shall remain so unless some miraculous cataclysm evens the odds by nullifying the unbeatable technologies of oppression that grant the One Percenters their ever-expanding omnipotence.
Beyond that, we desperately need a new strategy and new tactics, all grounded on the elemental wisdom of Sun Tzu.
Until such measures evolve -- and the unprecedented creative paralysis inflicted by our powerlessness evokes rational fear that might never happen -- why should I who have already suffered the total destruction of my life persist in wasting energy on a doomed struggle that is not only therefore pointless but which -- if I continue (and as I have obviously now been warned) -- could result in my extra-legal (and therefore irreversible) condemnation to one of the most degrading fates imaginable.
As the Ku Klux Klan learned 56 years ago, the prospect of sudden death does not scare me. That's why, to the sadly limited extent allowed by worsening physical disability, I will continue volunteering for picket lines and helping discourage the increasingly violent ChristoNazis who are waging war on women's health services.
But slowly starving to death huddled abandoned and alone beneath piss-reeking blankets in some filthy urban doorway -- which is precisely what would happen to me were all my income to be disappeared as it was 36 years ago -- is more repugnant and frightening than I can describe.
***
SOME OF US -- especially those of us adept enough to transcend even the censorship imposed by price and paywall -- are discovering irrefutable evidence our overlords are indeed exploring how to manipulate the serial disasters inflicted by climate change and Neoliberal economics into plausibly deniable campaigns of ecocidal genocide.
In accordance with their shock-doctrine methodology, our masters are using the Apocalypse to impose the ultimate regime-change. They are reordering all human society into Neoliberal utopia: Ayn Rand opulence for our masters, including those who would rule from far above us; serfdom and slavery for the few of us 99 Percenters they allow to survive their deliberate conversion of our planet into Deathcamp Earth.
The post-hurricane atrocities that now define both New Orleans and Puerto Rico are already recognizable as our overlords' rat-lab experiments in proto-genocidal social-Darwinist engineering: that is, Nazism in action.
And at least some of the funding to weaponize global warming -- obviously our masters' response to the fact death camps remain unfashionable despite increasing efforts to the contrary -- is disguised as national-defense spending:
Weaponizing the Climate: Geoengineering's Military Potential
Global Climate Engineering: Who Controls the Thermostat?
(Both these vital reports, in Wired, may be censored by paywalls.)
Thus the One Perenters hide their malignancy behind the charade of our long-dead "democracy" as they dither and delay and disseminate all manner of deception in their malign intent to hasten and maximize our deaths.
Meanwhile we the people -- we the "surplus workers," we the surplus people -- watch ourselves and our planet slain by merciless plutocrats we now realize are already deciding how many of us and our descendants are to be exterminated.
Death panels? How better to describe the for-profit health insurance monopolies that slay at least 44,000 U.S. residents each year by defining health care as a privilege of wealth, thereby denying care to anyone too poor to pay the de facto tax on survival.
And that 44,000 -- a figure ten years old -- has since under Trump/Pence austerity policies begun swelling to a sum censorship now guarantees will remain unknowable.
Genocide? Name me one continent where mass murder not been melded into the everyday climate.
Ecocide?
Bear witness:
The Race Towards Extinction: Climate Change Versus The 5G Microwave Technology Roll Out
The Blue Ocean Event and Collapsing Ecosystems
How Much Ice Has Greenland Lost to Climate Change?
'Exhausted' Polar Bear Found 700 Kilometers From Home in Russian Village
Air Pollution Is Killing More People Than Smoking - and Fossil Fuels Are Largely to Blame
UK life expectancy continues to fall
U.S. Life Expectancy Drops Amid 'Disturbing' Rise In Overdoses And Suicides
A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy
The World Is Burning and Those in Power Are Stoking the Flames
***
ESPECIALLY NOTE HOW -- instead of working to ameliorate the crisis -- the Empire's Neoliberal owners have reshaped the U.S. into zero-tolerance ChristoNazi theocracy and are thrusting its puppet-states into ever-more-obvious fascism.
Future historians -- if indeed there is to be a human future -- will tell us U.S. constitutional rights were rendered forever meaningless by the events of 22 November 1963.
Peaceful protest and poverty or minority status, already crimes in this conquered nation, are now being criminalized throughout the globe.
Chelsea Manning's Appeal Rejected By 4th Circuit Court Of Appeals
Smearing Assange: The US Government's Plan to Silence Its Critics and Criminalize Journalism
Thought Police: US, Israel Increasingly Banning & Deporting Ideological Enemies
More than 30K immigrants have been deported via Boeing Field
Again the Democrats prove themselves liars and reveal the Big Lie of "progressive" Washington state.
RSN: America's "Hole-in-the-Head" Nuke Suicide Pact Gets Court Approval
'We Are Treated Like Animals,' Say Amazon Flex Drivers
Dear Mister President: Your Abortion Spreadsheet Takes the Cake
Florida deputy’s assault on high school student caught on video
US Gulf Coast still devastated six months after Hurricane Michael
States Are Trying to Stop Cities From Raising Minimum Wage
Supreme Court Will Decide if It Is Legal to Fire Someone for Being LGBTQ
The FBI Appears to Be Engaged in a Modern-Day Version of COINTELPRO
Arrests At London Climate-Change Protests Top 1,000
***
NOR WILL THE rulers of Moron Nation ever again allow us sufficient education to recover from our deliberately dumbed-down denouement:
An American Tragedy Is Unfolding in Our Classrooms
Officer Attack on Teen Reignites National Debate on Cops in Schools
Why Are There So Few Black Ph.D.s?
The Death of Education in America
The Price of Publishing Independent Thought
It is a bit of an aside, but if you have read the last of these linked reports, you surely understand the potentially terminal crisis facing Reader Supportive News, which provides the most relevant English-language, daily summaries of news and commentary on the Internet.
Though all progressive-minded alternative media are under Neoliberal and/or ChristoNazi attack, RSN is literally struggling against journalistic extinction. Please -- if you can -- make a contribution to help them survive.
Obviously our masters are inspired by the example of the Southron slave-owners we were fooled into believing our great-grandparents defeated in 1865. Our overlords are not only imprisoning us They are also destroying public education to make certain a skyrocketing number of us can neither read or reason.
Their intention is to make us as illiterate -- and therefore as helplessly ignorant -- as antebellum slaves for whom ability to read or possession of a book was a capital crime typically punished by agonizing tortures including whipping, amputation and death from the resultant infections.
And there is no question our masters are succeeding: note how, to bolster their charade of democracy, they maintain the Big Lie of a free press, all the while privately celebrating the damning fact we of the U.S. 99 Percent have already been brain-warped to such abject submissiveness, we cannot muster an effective response even to the looming threat of extinction.
Yet methodical human disempowerment is hardly a new phenomenon. Its large-scale imposition began with the advent of patriarchy some 6,000 years ago. It skyrocketed to its present intensity after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476CE elevated the Christians into all-powerful terrorists, setting the stage for the Capitalist tyranny that defines the Neoliberal present and its probably inescapable future.
Since then, every revolution by which we might have re-empowered ourselves has been crushed or co-opted. That which began 6,000 years ago now continues forever; that's because patriarchy -- our species' sole unnatural act -- cannot be sustained except by force.
Which is precisely why our masters have always sought omnipotence and now kill to perpetuate its impregnability.
All that remains is ever-intensifying tyranny -- the absolute rule of unconquerable despots perpetuated by eternally ineluctable technologies of mass surveillance that from conception were defined by same gleefully malevolent intent that defines weapons of mass destruction.
Since then -- and this is but one of the many dark historical truths kept hidden by Capitalist censors -- our masters have also become unfathomably devious in how they disguise their always successful, hence ever-intensified efforts to maliciously reduce us to inescapable poverty and finally to subjugation in serfdom and slavery.
Today the banks are their overseers; centuries from now it will be back to the mercilessly whip-wielding disciples of Simon Legree on struggling plantations from which neo-feudal barons rule the few remaining habitable regions of our devastated world as it dwindles to its final fate as a bug planet.
***
ALREADY OUR SPECIES has seemingly divided into two mutually hostile subspecies.
As a result -- as if in anticipation of one last apocalyptic battle -- a new clash is replacing class conflict.
It strongly suggests H. sapiens sapiens has already split in twain, the ruling subspecies threatening war-to-the-death between those of us who retain, cherish and strive to expand our ability to empathize with life beyond ourselves.
Meanwhile our enemies are breeding themselves free of all moral or ethical restraint. Their offspring -- perchance to define fascism as morality for moral imbeciles -- embrace the evils of tyranny as enthusiastically as they suck their mother's milk.
I label these new subspecies in accordance with their documented behavior.
Our masters are of the subspecies H. sapiens tyrannis -- the Neoliberal tyrants by whom we have been conquered and who now prey upon us without mercy.
We ourselves, their victims, are H. sapiens empathia, the 99 Percent, we the (dwindling) peoples who remain capable of humanitarian solidarity with our fellow humans and with life in general, those of us our overlords are methodically reducing to chronic desperation, whether by imprisoning us in serfdom and slavery or by slowly exterminating us for replacement by robots.
The most definitive difference? H. sapiens tyrannis has forever lost the ability for humanitarian empathy. Its members are born sociopaths; it is their moral imbecility -- indistinguishable from that of a Ted Bundy or any other serial killer -- which gives them their grotesque, increasingly glaring aura of extraterrestrial conquerors or genetic mutants run amok.
It is psycholinguistically impossible for our masters to hear us. They speak only the death-camp language of Neoliberalism. They do not just ignore our cries for mercy; they are literally deaf to them, unable to separate human voices from the other background noises of exploitation and profit.
That's why our charade of democracy is dead, never to be resurrected. We are ruled by creatures whose amorality has made them as relentlessly anti-humanitarian as the insectoid aliens of science fiction. In this way they are identical to their Nazi forebears, which means they can be removed from power only as the Original Nazis were overthrown in World War II.
But that can never happen. Our overlords' omnipotence -- the fact we the people are utterly defenseless against their surveillance technology, their weaponry and their conspiratorial malevolence -- has made them the first tyrants in all human history who are truly immune to overthrow whether by overthrow or invasion. They hold our entire planet hostage. They have more than enough thermonuclear bombs to nuke the world to cinders -- and there is no question they would do just that were they to feel genuinely threatened.
In the White House as in der Füherbunker, it's gone from "better dead than Red" to "better extinct than defeated."
Anyone who believes otherwise is a fool, seduced by the imbecility of hope.
Meanwhile H. sapiens empathia, ever more subjugated despite innumerable alternative-media claims to the contrary, continues to prove our powerlessness truly has no bottom .
Some of us, some few H. sapiens empathia, will undoubtedly survive for a time amidst the torture-chamber horrors of our masters' slave pens and their plans for global gentrification.
But the pampered übermenschen misogyny and racism that sustains our overlords' murderous hatefulness long ago defined us as mere üntermenschen -- no more than bipedal beasts of burden whose right to life is measured exclusively by our individual profitability.
Our masters justify their atrocities by viewing us as a separate (subhuman) species. Why then should we not regard them identically?
Of course I would like to believe they will eventually self-destruct in much the same way their German Nazi forebears did.
But -- again because I know history -- I know better. Even given the Third Reich's unbelievably arrogant self-destructiveness, it required the strength of the Red Army to prevent Hitler's Germany from becoming the absolute ruler of the Capitalist (i.e., already fascist) world.
And I know our masters will never again allow such proletarian strength to coalesce, much less to solidify.
Nor -- as the events of the past half-century have proven beyond any possibility of dispute -- will the stubbornly closed-minded, breathtakingly suicidal political naivety of the USian Left ever allow it to acknowledge the magnitude of sociopathic Evil that fuels the capabilities and intentions of our oppressors.
***
PROTECTED AS THEY are by total surveillance -- with neutron bombs and a variety of other chemical, biological and radiological (CBR) weapons available to impose and augment their Final Solutions -- it is obvious our overlords have already made themselves impregnable to any and all forms of revolutionary ferment including pacifism, the violent nullification of which foretold by Harry Turtledove has become a 21st Century commonplace.
Were an entirely nonviolent revolution to somehow seize one of our masters' cities, I cannot doubt they would they would resort to neutron-bombing, thereby preserving most of the buildings and office equipment -- the sacred "market value" that in their profit-besotted Neoliberal minds outranks all other values -- while simultaneously condemning all the rebels to unspeakably horrible deaths by radiation poisoning.
Indeed we should expect no better from a Nazi-worshipping global empire that claimed it had to destroy the Vietnamese city of Ben Tre to save it from Communists and is since resurrecting concentration camps in the imperial homeland.
That's why, at age 79, I am finally forced to admit I have been given sufficient perspective by a six-decade journalism career and a solid academic background in history and sociology to at last acknowledge what is undoubtedly our species most bitter, most embittering and most clandestine truth: that the so-called "moral arc of the universe" bends not toward justice, but toward an ultimate high-tech tyranny so unspeakably awful perhaps only an Edvard Munch could even approach portraying its horror.
Let us therefore never forget how our present condition is the logical product of its ideological and financial foundations:
"Dark Money" Funds Climate Change Denial Effort - Scientific American
Susan Collins Receives More Donations From Texas Fossil Fuel Industry Than From Maine Residents
Consensus Among GOP Candidates: Let The Planet Die
The return of the population bombers
Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability
How Thousands Of Nazis Were 'Rewarded' With Life In The U.S.
Most of these diabolically skilled war criminals and perpetrators of crimes against humanity worked with Teutonic diligence to help the equally criminal One Percenters meld the glaring fascism of United States history with the incipient fascism of its Ayn Rand socioeconomic ethos and the reanimated fascism of its puppets throughout the Capitalist world into a genuinely global Fourth Reich, precisely as the final orders of their various Third Reich Führers had commanded.
Which is precisely why I can no longer doubt our species and our planet are doomed -- that our masters will never allow us to evolve the socialist solidarity essential for our salvation, that now only the profoundly unlikely intervention of some genuine miracle can save us.
Nevertheless -- as I trust I made clear in the penultimate paragraph of the second section -- this is not a farewell letter.
It is instead the announcement of a refocusing of intellect, creativity and effort -- given my age, undoubtedly my last such transformation ever -- in the hope of finding some noun other than "failure" to define the life my politically innocent high-school peers honored 61 years ago with a comically ironic superlative: "boy most likely to succeed."
Quoth the I Ching:
Thus the Superior Man at nightfall
Goes indoors for rest and recreation.
LB/28 April 2019
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