Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

MY RECENT BOUT with Covid, 21 June to 9 July – this despite vaccination and three boosters – has robbed me of any expectation of longevity beyond the immediate present. My illness – exemplary both of “long Covid” and of “herd immunity” fulfilling its genocidal intent – has radically worsened my (hitherto-stable) congestive heart failure; the doubled and quadrupled medications so necessitated have set me on an inescapable path to kidney failure and agonizingly reactivated my decades-dormant esophageal re-flux problems. Long Covid has also permanently inflamed my osteoarthritis severely enough I am now so painfully crippled, I am often effectively bedridden; and three months after the fact, it is obvious the virus has slain forever my senses of taste and smell. As many of you know, I am 83 years old; while my doctors refuse to estimate how much longer I might live, there is now no question my departure is looming. At the beginning of the pandemic, three oracles, I Ching, runes and tarot, predicted Covid would kill me, and though eventually I came to believe I had misread their messages, now I know I did not. These days when I dream, it is almost always either of conversations with dead people, usually my father, or of activities in which I am companioned by long-dead favorite dogs. Thus when I fall asleep, I am never sure I will awaken. But as dreadful as all this may sound, it is also a liberation, for now I am free to lift my social-fingers to the arsonist(s) who destroyed my life’s work and write without any concern my words will precipitate my disappearance or the more commonplace removal by alleged accident or suicide.

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HERE THEN, AS a prelude to all that follows, is a list of eight present-day horrors that views their known-to-be-deadly effects as cleverly disguised expressions of intent:

Covid-19 – a lethal virus most likely engineered for biological warfare. Regardless of the pandemic's origin, the fact it mutates too rapidly to be controlled by immunization makes “herd immunity” a clever euphemism for deliberately inflicted genocide. Statistically, most victims are members of the working class, aka the 99.9 Percent. Pivotal question: who (or what) is served by the resultant extermination of millions of humans?

Climate change – a modern apocalypse inflicted on our species and planet by patriarchal ignorance and now deliberately, continuously worsened, allegedly by political paralysis imposed by capitalist greed and associated bribery, but in terrifying truth by our masters’ definitively ecogenocidal choices. Pivotal questions: why are the owners of this planet destroying its ability to support life as we know it? Who (or what) benefits from Earth’s reduction to lifeless twinship with forever-barren Mars?

Abandonment of infrastructure – a modern crisis that seems to have begun in the USian Empire but has since metastasized throughout the globe. Typically dismissed as the unavoidable consequence of “neoliberal austerity,” it is the cause of soaring fatalities due to train wrecks, structural collapses and other such disasters. Pivotal question: why are the world’s governments –  the executive agencies that serve the de facto owners of these properties (i.e., the ruling class) – abandoning their investments? Hint: why are factories abandoned and left to rot?

Unprecedented escalation of warmongering – the risk of our species’ extinction by chemical, biological and thermonuclear warfare is at an all-time high; indeed, its terrifying magnitude may be taken as the ultimate declaration the global ruling class now considers itself well-enough bunkered to survive whatever ecogenocidal horrors it inflicts on the rest of us. Pivotal questions: why is this happening now? Apart from the smirkingly bunkered aristocracy, who (or what) benefits from such an ecogenocidal event? And how do the aristocrats benefit if there are no (enslaved) humans to serve them?

Replacement of humans with robots and artificial intelligence – the skyrocketing replacement of workers with machines is creating an ever-expanding “surplus” of unemployed workers who have no real possibility of ever again finding living-wage jobs. Pivotal question: why do our masters so despise humans they are literally sentencing millions of us to death by poverty, disease, homelessness and starvation?

De-educating the working class – aka “dumbing down” the citizenry. Astronomer Carl Sagan defines the problem, and Psychiatrist Niall McLaren analyzes its deliberately toxic economics. Pivotal questions: why do our masters rob us of the intellectual tools we need to thrive as humans? What do they gain from such atrocities?

Destruction of social services – aka “austerity,” in truth slow-motion genocide targeting women and the neediest members of the 99.9 Percent. Pivotal questions: who (or what) benefits from this policy? How is genocide on such scale beneficial to our masters?

Prohibition (or destruction) of health care as a human right – another process begun by USian malevolence – in this instance by its relentless insistence health care remain a privilege of wealth – but now, disguised as “austerity,”  metastasizing rapidly throughout Europe and the rest of the world. (The foregoing data is somewhat dated, though the deadly trends obviously continue both in the U.S. and Europe.) Pivotal question: who (or what) benefits from this growing tsunami of sickness and death?

Ultimate question: what do all these atrocities tell us? What singular purpose does the ruling-class-induced atrocity of global warming – that is, ecogenocidal climate change – have in common with the (other) ecogenocidal atrocities of ruling-class-induced austerity? What terrible truth does that purpose suggest?

Note that universal education and health care are investments in our species’ future, and that their methodical reduction – like the abandonment of infrastructure – is a message from our masters they believe we no longer have a future worthy of investment.

What we see in the above – though it is a truth too terrifyingly painful for most of us to acknowledge (one therefore rendered “plausibly deniable” by the boiled-frog pace of our terminal subjugation) – are eight aspects of a total war against our species and against our Mother Earth’s ability to support human life, the latter possibly aimed at reducing her to irremediably barren twinhood with Mars.

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I SHOULD PREFACE this next section by stressing I have no prior history as a devotee of the unidentified-flying-object cult. Moreover I remain profoundly antagonistic to the notion all of our species’ ancient achievements were fostered by extraterrestrial visitations, which I regard as an especially devious means of vilifying the matrifocal, probably matriarchal potlach-communism that characterized our collective history until the decidedly curious, unquestionably violent imposition of patriarchy some six-or-seven-thousand years ago. Though I have heard many credible UFO stories, especially during my years in the working press, I always ranked them among the many seemingly inexplicable anomalies of modern life, and never until now felt any compulsion to write about UFOs or even give them much more than momentary thought.

Also there’s the fact that in all the time outdoors (often in the back country and some of it at sea) that characterized the best of my 83 years, I myself witnessed only one genuinely UFO-ish phenomenon, this in 1959, as best I recall in May or June, just past sunset while sitting outside with friends quietly chatting as we routinely awaited the scattered pinpoints of gracefully floating green and amber light that are the opening movements of suburban  Knoxville’s  breathtakingly exquisite seasonal choreography of fireflies. Instead there was suddenly a bright orange fireball maybe a hand-span above the north-northeast horizon; it was astonishingly big, about a quarter the size of the full moon at its smallest mid-heaven zenith; it glided eastward for maybe 10 degrees almost parallel to the surface of the earth, wobbled violently, showered sparks, descended in a shallow curve, briefly ascended, again wobbled and spewed sparks, then plunged out-of-sight behind the silhouetted peaks of the Great Smokies. It left us startled and muttering exclamations. I immediately telephoned a friend, WKGN News Director Tom Combs, and reported what we had seen. He said he’d already received a half-dozen calls about it. He told me the next day it had been witnessed by at least a hundred persons; that because of its erratic flight, some had feared it was a crashing airplane. All a University of Tennessee astronomer would tell Combs – note the wording – is “we can say it was a meteorite,” and like so many other incidents of its kind, it was soon consigned to official oblivion. But it stuck in my mind because even then I had sufficient background in astronomy to know meteorites do not momentarily gain altitude in their descent from outer space.

Now, given the combination of newly acknowledged UFO incidents with the undeniably apocalyptic perpetuation of the eight atrocities I described above, I am compelled to suspect it is probable we’ve already been conquered by interstellar predators – and that the global ruling class, capitalist and communist alike, is merely functioning as the invaders’ own obscenely recompensed SS-Totenkopfverbände, its present task the reduction of our world to a planet-sized Auschwitz.

Indeed, per Occam’s Razor, this is the only hypothesis that explains all of today’s afflictions – most especially the self-imposed pseudo-paralysis by which the global ruling class, capitalist and communist alike, relentlessly attempts to excuse its ever-more-apocalyptic refusal to reduce the causative abuses, much less its refusal to ameliorate their disastrous results. Mind you, I’m not saying extraterrestrial conquest is the final, definitive truth of our species’ increasingly hopeless present-day circumstances. But the unprecedented solidarity of malevolent cunning the global ruling class exhibits in the success of its universal promotion of the originally USian ethos of self-obsessed moral imbecility and in the veritable omnipotence demonstrated by its diabolical skill at co-optation and/or suppression of any and all forms of organized humanitarianism most assuredly suggest an equal capability for beneficence -- the glaring absence of which is therefore both infinitely damning and all the more suggestive of purposeful choice.

There is also the fact the present-day plague of atrocities is entirely the function of patriarchy and is therefore arguably the final revelation of  its unspoken purpose. Note too how the imposition of patriarchy is biblically attributed to talking snakes, divine apparitions, flaming wheels in the sky and loquacious brush-fires underscored by the (thermonuclear?) destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. With its misogynistic war against our Mother Earth, against all femaleness and implicitly therefore against all being, patriarchy is increasingly recognized as a death cult. Dialectic-materialist efforts to define patriarchy as a logical outgrowth of the agricultural revolution not withstanding, it is not unthinkable to suppose it to be a  long-term interstellar expression of the same strategic scheming evident in smallpox-infected blankets.

At the very least, the body of evidence demands the probability of our terminal victimization by extraterrestrial conquerors ought to be given serious consideration and thorough investigation.

Investigated or not, the likelihood we are already the powerless subjects of some conquering alien species becomes obvious when we examine the undeniably anti-human, sometimes undeniably genocidal or ecogenocidal consequences of the afflictions in question. Though it is clear there is no longer any rational hope we might yet save ourselves, at least we would then be able to correctly identify our executioners and thus yet retain some minimal authority over the courses of our individual lives.  

In this context, let us now consider the likelihood the burgeoning official acknowledgment of unknown aerial and oceanic phenomenon is – in much the same way European acknowledgment of Nazi German technological superiority was the prelude to psychological acceptance of defeat, enslavement and extermination – the precursor to admission we are a conquered species. Note how we are being methodically robbed of all our former freedoms – and more importantly of even any expectation of freedom – literally everywhere on the planet. It is thus at least arguable our minds are being conditioned for enslavement. Is it then mere coincidence that, after denying the reality of UFOs and their underwater counterparts for at least 80 years – often ridiculing and even slandering as mentally ill anyone who dared admit encountering UFOs –  the world’s governments are now finally acknowledging such things are real? Or that the propaganda apparatus which serves the global ruling class now deluges us with documentaries that claim humans are routinely kidnapped and used as lab rats by extraterrestrials?

Typical of the aliens-as-conquerors documentaries is “Alien Endgame,” an hour and 25-minute film available on Max that claims a “massive military cover-up” of the fact “our very existence is at risk.” It includes testimony about incidents in which UFOS rendered nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) unlaunchable, notes that UFOs operate with speed and maneuverability far beyond human capabilities, that they can become invisible and are sometimes undetectable by radar. The film also describes naval encounters with unidentified submerged objects that demonstrate the same seemingly inexplicable characteristics. “If the aliens decide to attack,” the film concludes, “we don’t stand a chance.”

Significantly, the aliens’ oberführers – the terrifying medical-experiment sadism associated with their kidnappings prompts me to describe them with the terminology of nazism – are often said to look like bipeds descended from giant preying mantises. This brings to mind a 1974 or 1975 comment by a prominent astrophysicist that only exoskeletal creatures can survive the gravitational forces generated by right-angle turns at mach 10 and other such astounding maneuvers even then attributed to UFOs. I’m sorry I don’t remember the astrophysicist’s name, but I do remember his comment generated a lively, mostly apprehensive discussion midway through the astronomy course I was then taking as an overage undergraduate. Now, knowing how insect biology is a prime inspiration in robotics and artificial intelligence, I find the notion of insectoid conquerors horrifying beyond words. Is our obviously methodical reduction to moral imbecility the beginning of our replacement by dependably emotionless machines? And let us not forget that female mantises, like female spiders, eat their mates, nor that a large enough plague of locusts – or greedy patriarchs – could leave our Earth as barren as present-day Mars. Are we humans being bred to be our masters' Soylent Green? Might irremediably desolate Mars exemplify the ecogenocidal ruin Earth too is now fated to become?

Even so, a few documentaries present the invaders as benign. “Encounters,” a four-episode program on Netflix, describes the extraterrestrials as claiming “the environment is our first priority,” warning us our species is “actually making harm on the world,” that “technology is not going to do humans any good” and urging us to care for nature. It also quotes Japanese sources who describe the aliens as “kind and comforting,” which echo many First Nations accounts of encounters with beneficent “Star People.”

The notion of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrials and their implicit competition for human allegiance is obviously the newest variant of the ancient traditions, common to all cultures, of cosmic warfare between the forces of good and evil. From any such perspective of universal dualism, the pivotal question becomes the one poised by the coal miners’ anthem, “Which Side Are You On?” But the oft-demonstrated omnipotence of the ruling class – specifically its uncanny genius at deception and co-optation (which history shows us is at least as old as patriarchy itself) – makes any such discernment impossible. Note the paradox of Christianity: is it, as the late and oft-persecuted Jesuit Fr. William Bischel believed and practiced, a benevolently revolutionary credo of peace, humanitarian love, social liberation and the harmonious healing of Nature? Or is its equally documented function as the credo of ecogenocidal hatred embraced by capitalists, Trumpists, prosperity-gospel fanatics, Ku Klux Klaners, Nazis, witch-burners and other misogynistic moral imbeciles the true expression of its essence? The same functional schizophrenia – and thus the same (unanswerable) question – seemingly applies to every religious or political movement our species has generated. Nor is it mooted by the growing suspicion many of our most iconic figures – Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Our Lady of Fatima – may have themselves been extraterrestrials. Quoth St. Paul (2 Corinthians 11:14, New International Version): “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” And despite its apparent absurdity, let us not overlook the claim Hitler's Nazis – and now their USian successors – achieved power as the willing puppets of extraterrestrial masters.

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MY ARSON-DESTROYED  and thus forever lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” hypothesized via approximately one hundred photographs and some  one-hundred-fifty-thousand words of extensively footnoted text that the 1960s Counterculture was simultaneously the resurrection of the Great Goddess,  our species first and oldest deity, and – as demonstrated by the aesthetic solidarity that underlay the dissonance of its politics – the first wave of a global revolution against patriarchy. Another writer's parallel work, The Return of the Goddess (Edward C. Whitmont, Crossroad Publishing: 1984), offered a kindred but less obviously revolutionary  hypothesis based on Jungian psycho-analytic analysis of dreams. But as proven by the flames that burned "Dancer" like a witch slain in obvious retaliation for her alleged heresies,  my bluntly expressed conclusions – which noted in passing the Goddess-worship origins of Marxism’s red star and hammer-and-sickle symbols – were obviously tabooed as too dangerous for public consumption. "Dancer"  was thus destroyed just as it seemingly approached mainstream publication. Nor is it insignificant its would-have-been editor, the late Cicely Nichols, regarded "Dancer" as potentially one of the "most influential books of the 20th Century";  indeed the arsonist(s) lit the fire at the very moment Cicely and I began the meeting intended to finalize our working agreement.     

“Dancer” defined  the '60s Counterculture in its broadest sense; it sidestepped the obvious self-indulgence of the white petite-bourgeois faddists who later proved their proto-nazi moral imbecility by their votes for Ronald Reagan; it focused specifically on the aesthetic solidarity of feminism, environmentalism and the back-to-the-land movement as demonstrated by its music, visual art, literature and science, including the folk renaissance, the Whole Earth Catalog and – perhaps most importantly – the Gaia Hypothesis, which in essence is the modern scientific restatement of the inconceivably ancient pagan core-belief our Mother Earth – the Great Goddess who was our species' first and longest-lasting deity – is a living being, conscious, self-regulating and thus at least arguably invocable.

What “Dancer” omitted – this in the admittedly selfish interest of preserving my journalistic credibility – was a pair of decidedly curious events that seemed to confirm not just the project's  relevance and validity but its cosmic/karmic necessity. These incidents – there were also a half-dozen lesser events easily dismissable as coincidence – are the childhood experience I describe in the essay “Abutments” (note the element of missing time, which today might be taken as indicative of a UFO encounter), and  the brief but profoundly moving vision I experienced during an absolutely intoxicant-free moment of reflection in 1970: this occurred in the Cascade foothills beneath the August full moon of 1970, almost exactly 18 years after the 1952 incident. As I described in an earlier essay:

I had walked alone and lonely into the Innis Creek water meadow, an unkempt span of lowland maybe thirty yards wide that was now dry but was annually drenched by the creek's vernal floods. It was at least four times that distance beyond the corn fields, buildings and gardens of the Wickersham, Washington agricultural commune where I was then a long-term guest who contentedly paid my way by contributing a full share of physical effort to the requisite daily labor, and now I stood amidst Nature's shadowy harbingers of early Autumn: blown thistles, bright clumps of pearly everlasting, iridescent cobwebs bejeweled with dew. The communards were meeting in their main building but were ensnared in psychodrama intensified by the unresolvable ideological disputes that invariably arise from caste differences, and I had left the session in disillusioned bitterness and disgust. Seeking to restore my inner peace, I sprawled face-upward on the weedy ground and gazed at the zenith-high improbably brilliant moon as if it were some mandala of last resort.

Then to my astonishment there was a decidedly strange kind of jolt, as if – albeit eerily without the physical reality –  I had heard and felt some unseen door burst open, and all in the same breathtaking instant the moon spiraled into a rainbow that expanded to fill the entire sky, contracted to a vortex of flowing bands of color, plunged tornado-like to earth and shaped a magnificently ageless woman pale and translucent as mist yet undeniably real. She was majestically naked but loosely wrapped in the lunar blonde infinity of her own hair; she smiled, reached out her hands as if to embrace me and then like some impossibly magical dancer swirled her endless mane into rainbow hues that swept her aloft, dissolving herself back into rivers of color that expanded once more from horizon to horizon and shrank into the moon again – a millisecond's vision, a mere glimpse so brief and so ephemeral I could scarcely believe I had seen it and yet so vivid it could not be denied.  But now as if nothing at all had occurred there was only the commonplace moon again, the midnight sky and its diamond constellations, the fragrant crush of wild chamomile beneath my head, the vast nocturnal stillness of Pacific Northwest woods so unlike the firefly-bright insect-rowdiness of the fields and forests in which I'd spent the summers of my boyhood and adolescence.  When the night's chill finally urged me to my feet, I remember there were faint tendrils of fog rising from the creek, and for a moment, just once, it seemed I heard the clear cold water chuckle.

There is also the matter of the carefully disguised remnants of pagan liturgy that scholars including Olaf Nygard and Robert Graves argued are preserved in much of traditional folk music, most assuredly including that which was re-popularized by the folk-music renaissance that immediately preceded and obviously helped mother the advent of the Counterculture.

Though it may seem something of an aside, the mechanics of such disguises – Graves calls it “riddling” – are obscure enough to exemplify here. The following is from an explanatory note I recently sent a dear friend:

All true pagans should know how to decode the liturgy of the Goddess that is hidden in so many traditional ballads, disguised to protect singers and celebrants from being burnt at the stake as witches.

Firstly we should remember most of these stories began as seasonal celebrations, the feasts that mark the turns of the year, specifically the Winter Solstice (Yule, Midwinter’s Day); 1 February (Imbolc or the feast of the Goddess as Brigit, originally the first day of spring); the Vernal Equinox (Ostara); 1 May (Beltane, originally the first day of summer); the Summer Solstice (Litha or Midsummer’s Day); 1 August (Lughnassadh or Bron Trograne, originally the first day of autumn); the Autumnal Equinox (Mabon); and Hallowe’en or Samhain (the night the year dies, originally the first day of winter).

Secondly we should remember the two primary seasons, winter and summer, were anciently personified as the domains of male twins, the king/god of summer and the king/god of winter, perpetual rivals for the love of the Goddess, their mother and the “mother of all being,” personification of earth and cosmos. The Summer King died on the Summer Solstice, slain by his winter twin; the ballad John Barleycorn describes his fate. But he was reborn on the Winter Solstice. Eventually this anthropomorphization became a single god – aka “the dying god” and “the once-and-future king” representing the entire year, hence Samhain as “the night the year dies” and Midwinter’s Day as his rebirth. Hence too the Christianization of this ancient story, with Jesus as the year god and Satan as his rival. (Note that in the Celtic Church, violently suppressed by the Roman Papacy, Jesus was the newest incarnation of the dying god, while his mother – “Mary mother of god” – was the newest incarnation of the Goddess.)

The following is a ballad entitled Willy o’ Winsbury as sung by Pentangle’s Jacqui McShee, with my apology for the extremely infuriating fact TypePad does not allow the normal, line-by-line formatting of poetry:

The king had been a prisoner/ And a prisoner long in Spain/ And Willy of the Winsbury/ Has lain long with his daughter at home

From earthly perspective in the northern hemisphere, the sun turns south at Summer Solstice, then turns north again at Winter Solstice. Spain is to the south of Scotland, the source of this ballad. In other words, the sun is again traveling northward. According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition,  “Willie” is not just a foreshortened version of William – the name means strong-willed protector – but is also an archaic euphemism for penis.

"What ails you, what ails you, my daughter Janet?/ Why you look so pale and wan?/  Oh, have you had any sore sickness/ Or yet been sleeping with a man?"

Janet means “gift of god”; it is the time of Ostara; the land is pregnant with spring,

"I have not had any sore sickness/ Nor yet been sleeping with a man/ It is for you, my father dear/ For biding so long in Spain"

"Cast off, cast off your berry-brown gown/ You stand naked upon the stone/ That I may know you by your shape/ If you be a maiden or none"

Such songs as these were originally danced amidst the standing stones that often encircled stone altars. “Berry-brown gown” symbolizes our Mother Earth's bare brown winter soil and its winter cloak of dead brown leaves.

And she cast off her berry-brown gown/ She stood naked upon the stone/ Her apron was low and her haunches were round/ Her face was pale and wan

"Oh, was it with a lord or a duke or a knight/ Or a man of birth and fame? Or was it with one of my serving men/ That's lately come out of Spain?"

"No, it wasn't with a lord or a duke or a knight/ Nor a man of birth and fame/ But it was with Willy of Winsbury/ I could bide no longer alone"

And the king has called on his merry men all/ By thirty and by three/ Says, "Fetch me this Willy of Winsbury/ For hanged he shall be"

Significant math here: 30 by 3 yields a digital root of nine, as in “the nine-fold Muse.” another name of the Goddess. And the Vernal Equinox is three months – approximately 90 days – after the sun turns north at Winter Solstice.

But when he came the king before/ He was clad all in the red silk/ His hair was like the strands of gold/ His skin was as white as the milk

"And it is no wonder," said the king/ "That my daughter's love you did win/ For if I was a woman as I am a man/ My bedfellow you would have been

And will you marry my daughter Janet/ By the truth of your right hand?/ Oh, will you marry my daughter Janet?/ I'll make you the lord of my land"

"Oh yes, I will marry your daughter Janet/ By the truth of my right hand/ Oh yes, I will marry your daughter Janet/ But I'll not be the lord of your land"

In other words, he’ll not be the lord of winter.

And he's mounted her on a milk-white steed/ And himself on a dapple gray/ He has made her the lady of as much land/ As she shall ride in a long summer's day

Thus the "long summer's day" proclaims the solar supremacy of Janet, and the rule of the Goddess as a cosmic deity rather than merely the Earth Mother is again affirmed, albeit in a manner that conceals her ritual invocation from the Christians, thereby protecting the pagans from the unimaginable agony of death at the stake.

Another key fact, one that “Dancer” repeatedly implied but carefully avoided stating outright, is  the hitherto-unacknowledged extent to which the folk-music renaissance was obviously among the primary cultural influences that psychologically mothered both second-wave feminism and the Counterculture in general.

The related conclusion I dared not even suggest is that what might be termed “Goddess-magic” remained powerful even in its most thoroughly disguised forms. Magical or not, the archetypal woman of the traditional ballad – examples here, here and here – is the diametrical opposite of the oppressive archetypes of empty-headed, athletic-hero-dependent prom queens and submissive housewives that USian females of the 1950s and postwar ‘40s were relentlessly conditioned to believe were their gender’s only acceptable norms. And we should never overlook the fact the private-schooled, Ivy-League-graduate aristocrats who serve the ruling class as its intelligence analysts were unquestionably well-educated enough to recognize the spontaneous and often unwitting resurrection of the Goddess by an entire generation as a burgeoning threat to patriarchy – no doubt the underlying reason for Operation CHAOS (caps as in original). If I could see it all with nothing more than journalistic curiosity shaped by a solidly proletarian education bolstered by supplemental reading, there's no doubt an aristocracy carefully spoon-fed a vastly superior quality and depth of learning could do likewise.

Not surprisingly, the girls and women of allegedly extra-terrestrially inspired Nazi Germany were subjected to misogynistic conditioning notably similar to that which was (temporarily) overthrown here in USia by feminists and elsewhere on the planet by Marxians and democratic socialists.

But that brain-warping oppressiveness is now being everywhere restored with such vengeful permanence it is obvious the Goddess-centered anti-patriarchal revolution I joyfully predicted in "Dancer" will never be allowed. Here in USia, it was in fact slain in its infancy by the government and its nazi-minded auxiliaries. And now, a half-century later, every humanitarian effort our species ever attempted anywhere on the planet is methodically targeted for suppression. 

Thus it should surprise no one the Christonazis and their Neoconfederate allies are re-imposing maximized misogyny as a key part of their MAGA scheme. Their overseas allies are doing likewise in their own domains. Prohibiting abortion, banning birth control and formal persecution of alleged violators are just the opening atrocities of USian encouragement in  what amounts to a globally expanding pogrom against women.  

Nor have the Counterculture’s once-promisingly beneficent legacies remained unbesmirched by the aforementioned good/evil dichotomy that sooner or later seems to contaminate all mass movements with venomously contradictory identities which ultimately kill or at least neutralize a movement simply because they are too impossibly confusing for most humans to resolve. Once-presumably species-saving environmentalism has thus evolved an academic sub-cult that claims our only salvation is genocide, specifically the extermination – probably by bio-weaponry – of 90 percent of the human population, a thoroughly documented conviction that nevertheless remains unspeakable outside the hard right, never mind it has simmered in USian environmental colleges at least since the early ‘80s. Feminism has meanwhile fallen prey to what might be termed the Valerie Solanas virus, to which I no doubt over-react because – just as Solanas would have murdered Andy Warhol and an associate – so would my birthmother have slain my father and me.

Both women were well educated and academically accomplished; in 1933 or ‘34 – I’ve forgotten which – my birthmother was one of the first three women to graduate from Michigan State with a BA degree in urban planning and landscape architecture. But while Solanas chose a day of no particular cosmic significance for her crimes – it was 3 June 1963 – my birthmother selected the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945 for her premeditated effort at post-partum abortion and her spontaneous attempt to murder my father when he intervened to save my life. The best evidence indicates she planned my slaying to pay the Satanic debt she believed she had acquired by bargaining with a demon to ensure the pregnancy by which she ensnared my father in marriage.

Alleged supernatural elements aside, my birthmother’s thwarted but always potentially murderous anti-male hatred clearly mirrors the ideology of the Valerie Solanas faction of feminists – which my birthmother would surely have publicly embraced had she been less fanatical in her vindictively hypocritical struggle to preserve her lifelong lies of psychological normalcy and socioeconomic superiority. A recognizably similar constancy of broad-spectrum hatred fuels the wanna-be mega-holocaust deadliness of the salvation-by-genocide cult of environmentalists and the mass murders that are becoming part of everyday human life. Its apocalyptic intensity, of a magnitude seemingly without peer in our species’ experience, parallels the cannibalistic behavior of over-stressed and underfed lab rats. I believe it is a symptom of the global pandemic of self-obsessed moral imbecility that increasingly infects our entire species, the same affliction that enables the entire global ruling class – literally every .01 Percenter no matter whether capitalist or socialist – to justify waging their war of ecogenocidal extermination against our entire species. I've no doubt its truth is to be found in how imperialism perpetuates the morally imbecilic dynamics of patriarchy: just as some tribal chieftains and their modern-day quisling counterparts guaranteed their own survival by serving as their conquerors’ slavemasters, so might our masters seek to perpetuate their survival by functioning as vassals of extraterrestrial insectoid or reptilian masters, thus volunteering as the commanders, overseers, executioners and guards of slave-plantation/death-camp earth.

When I consider the impending loss of all human achievement atop the nullification of untold millennia of evolutionary advancement, I am left with a grief so bottomless no language can describe it. Nor can any quantity of tears relieve it. The Goddess herself – that is, our Mother Earth – is obviously dying;  the atrocities and disasters that increasingly beset us are undeniably both her proclamations of our irreversibly  looming extinction and – as she twitches and spasms like any other victim of rape and murder – her own increasingly violent agonies of death.  

LB/25 September-13 October 2023

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(Even so, let us preface our reading by contemplating the blessings given us by our Mother Earth, whom survival commands us to defend; thus may Her radiance empower us to forever dispel the patriarchal darkness.)  

(Photo by KD ©2023)

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ORIGINALLY I HAD intended to lead this edition of Dispatches by exposing an outrageous example of the moral imbecility that fuels gentrification --  specifically a report on how the vindictively capitalist Tacoma mayor and city council back-stabbed the municipality's lowest-income renters, with the proverbial knife a provision  deliberately hidden in the deceptive wording of an alleged “tenant rights” ordinance.

But then the World Socialist Web Site led its 1 September edition with an analytical report that – citing Dr. Anthony Fauci’s endorsement of “herd immunity” – noted how his statement included implicit praise of letting Covid run amok to exterminate those of us deemed economically burdensome, which in turn reveals the weaponized virus as "a form of homicidal eugenics, reminiscent of the Nazi regime's policy of murdering handicapped people.”

Thus I moved the Tacoma story to second place, below. At first I mistakenly  regarded it as a separate issue, an especially outrageous demonstration of the lengths to which capitalist politicians will go in their efforts to further multiply the  wealth they and their bribe-masters forcibly extract from the rest of us.

Now, in the context of Fauci's statement, I recognize the Tacoma episode as a legitimate part of the pandemic story -- that reducing people to homelessness is merely another way the ruling class ensures our vulnerability to extermination by Covid.    

Quoth WSWS: ‘...Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases...declared that older people, the ill and disabled “will fall by the wayside” in the current surge of COVID-19. Fauci was not warning about what would happen unless urgent action was taken. Rather, he was seeking to justify the Biden administration’s policy of inaction and cover-up in the face of a new surge of the disease.’

‘Fauci’s comments reiterate the declaration in January 2022 by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky that the fact that COVID-19 predominantly kills people who are “unwell to begin with” is “encouraging news.”’

The global death-toll inflicted by the virus now exceeds 22 million persons. Though WSWS has steadfastly refuted as anti-Chinese propaganda any hypotheses that attempt to define the still-raging but relentlessly downplayed Covid pandemic as anything other than an evolutionary  product of Nature, a report by the internationally prestigious New England Journal of Medicine analyzes all the competing hypotheses. It notes the evidence for laboratory origin, though limited,  nevertheless remains compelling; it also includes, in its fifth paragraph, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs accusation that U.S.  scientists designed the virus as a biological warfare weapon -- that it was vectored to Wuhan during an official visit by U.S. Army personnel. And we all know that just as the USian Empire is the global oberkommando  of world capitalism's ecogenocidal game of thrones, so is the U.S.  military capitalism's global goon squad. 

While both NEJM and WSWS note how politicization of the question has gravely hampered the search for the pandemic’s origin, contextual elements suggest its deliberate employment as an USian bioweapon is by no means an unthinkable possibility:

• Firstly there is the fact the capitalist ruling class has long lamented a surplus of workers as its primary 21st Century problem. But the New-Deal-sized public-infrastructure project the linked article proposes as a solution is prohibited by the global triumph of  neoliberal austerity. Thus  the proposal was  never more than "change we can believe in," yet another colossal deception intended to convince us the present-day ruling class is anything other than infinitely evil. Moreover, though the plutocrats seldom acknowledge it in public, their greatest common fear is of a 99.9 Percent united in revolutionary purposefulness,  and the working-class solidarity potentially growing from  any such  mega-project -- note how the New Deal's public works invariably bolstered organized labor -- is thus anathema to their long-range intent. And what is that? It is the ecogenocidal agenda ever more obvious in their radical escalation of the struggle they formerly sloganized as "better dead than Red," which they have shaped into  an all-out war for ruling-class  omnipotence structured to end only one of two ways: either with their victorious imposition of everlasting zero-tolerance tyranny, or with the extinction of our entire species and the reduction of our Mother Earth back to a bug planet. 

• Secondly there is the fact plutocrats and environmentalists are again joining hands in proclaiming the 21st Century’s greatest problem is not just too many workers but too many people. The more radical environmentalists argue the only (final) solution is the forcible extermination of 90 percent of the human population. Unfortunately the Mainstream Media propaganda machine belittles this appalling truth by treating it as right-wing conspiracy theory – note the politics of the linked source – but I know from interpersonal contacts it was favored by the vindictively petite-bourgeois majorities of students at Western Washington State University’s Huxley College of Environmental studies in the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s. In other words, the targeted victims would surely all be members of the working class – which in post-Marxian terms is each and every one of us in the global 99.9 Percent.

• Thirdly there is the oft-proven fact the USian Empire has never hesitated to reduce us to involuntary lab-rats for biological warfare experiments. These atrocities include testing known pathogens on urban populations in New York and San Francisco – the choice of targets surely not coincidental given these cities’ histories as epicenters of anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal rebellion, likewise the obviously white-supremacist targeting of Blacks described in the same linked report.

The problem with such disclosures is that a fatal majority of propaganda-zombified USians refuse to believe them. Any time I dare mention anywhere outside Manhattan that the army conducted germ-warfare tests in the New York City subway system, the vast majority of those with whom I am conversing – never mind how presumably well educated they might otherwise be – damn me as a liar.

And I have some regretful personal knowledge of this atrocity too. In late 1968 or early 1969, when I was the news editor of Morristown, New Jersey’s Daily Record, I was approached by relatives of an elderly man killed by pneumonia in late June 1966; they claimed his doctor said he was a victim of the subway tests and begged our journalistic investigation. To my eternal shame I refused their request, answering that without more evidence than a lone doctor’s say-so, I could not assign a reporter to pursue the story. Fortunately the editors at Newsday took the opposite position and ferreted out confirmation the tests had occurred. Then in 1995, Newsday reporter Dennis Duggan, a fellow Lion’s Head regular I knew from my own NYC working-press years, resurrected the story as noted in the "testing known pathogens" link.

Nor was airborne dispersal the only method the USian Empire used for testing bacteriological warfare on its unsuspecting citizenry. The government also employed the experimental use of insects as disease vectors. 

And let us not forget the governmental use of smallpox-infected blanks as but one of the many weapons, tactics and strategies in the (ongoing) 600-year campaign to exterminate the First Nations peoples.

All of which combine to bolster the hitherto-unspeakable possibility implicit in my “Dr. Anthony Fauci says” comment-thread assertion: that regardless of how it was vectored into an ever-more-obviously unstoppable pandemic, Covid-19 is designed as a modern, publicly acceptable substitute for Zyklon B, engineered both for maximum deadliness and maximized plausible deniability.

*****

Capitalist Viciousness Exemplified: Tacoma City Council's 'Tenant Rights' Bill Secretly Shafts Lowest-Income Renters

AS TOM WAITS sings in “Step Right Up,” a basic truth of capitalism is “the large print giveth and the small print taketh away” -- which is precisely how the less-than-impeccable Tacoma City Council sought to back-stab lowest-income renters by hiding its dagger in an alleged tenants’-rights ordinance. The large print of the measure, Substitute Ordinance 28894, imposes a 120-day-notice requirement on rent hikes, but the small print denies it to tenants in any sort of subsidized housing – impoverished persons who often need such notice more than anyone else.

Quoth Page 11 of the ordinance: “A landlord is required to provide at least 120 days’ the minimum written notice, as outlined in Chapter 59.18.140 RCW, as it currently exists or is hereinafter amended, whenever the periodic or monthly housing costs to be charged a tenant will increase by any amount charged the same tenant for the same housing unit, except as provided by RCW 59.18.140(3)(b) as it exists or is hereinafter amended for subsidized tenancies and for deed-restricted affordable housing.”

But note the take-away  in the cited chapter of the Revised Code of Washington: “If the rental agreement governs a subsidized tenancy where the amount of rent is based on the income of the tenant or circumstances specific to the subsidized household, a landlord shall provide a minimum of thirty days' prior written notice of an increase in the amount of rent to each affected tenant.”

The city’s website continued the deception perpetrated by the wording of the ordnance, omitting any mention of its retention of the 30-day notice for Tacoma’s neediest tenants. Local media did likewise, yet another troubling example of how today’s so-called “journalists” – the very antithesis of the working-class-minded reporters of my generation – are too smug in their petite-bourgeois arrogance to trouble themselves with the less-than-five-minutes of online research necessary to  discover the betrayal lurking within “except as provided.”

Such elitist negligence demonstrates the utter contempt for impoverished people and paycheck-dependent folks in general that defines bourgeois moral imbecility. It is all the more glaring given Tacoma’s demographics. A (formerly) working-class-affordable city of about 220,000 persons, its population is still defined by a (shrinking) majority of 99.9 Percenters, about half of whom, myself included, are definitively lower income, with approximately 13 percent of us officially poor. By freight volume, it is the third largest seaport on the nation's west coast, which contributes to the city’s relatively muscular union presence. (Disclosure: I have lived here twice, 1978 to 1982, and now since 2004, each time by choice; Tacoma's friendliness marks it as the sociological antithesis of maliciously elitist, vindictively xenophobic Seattle, and I am admittedly fond of it, as I have been since I moved here during 1978's Labor Day Weekend. In many ways -- diversity, solidarity and an ability to laugh at itself  included -- I find Tacoma reminiscent of the Lower East Side I knew in the '60s and more generically of Brooklyn, where I was born.)  

The city council’s deception came to light in an ongoing, fiercely fought local example of the class-war battles triggered by the nation’s runaway housing prices. Soaring housing costs elsewhere began metastasizing into Tacoma during the second decade of the new century, and by 2019 the city was declared the nation’s “hottest real estate market.” Though anti-inflationary interest hikes have hiked mortgage rates enough to exclude all but the more wealthy buyers, this has actually worsened the victimization inflicted by gentrification. Tacoma real estate values are in the stratosphere, forever beyond working-class reach; rents and homelessness have skyrocketed, the former by 43 percent in the past five years, the latter by 54 percent during the same period in Pierce County, with about 74 percent of these victims of capitalism inside the Tacoma city limits.

As a manifestation of the city’s working-class consciousness, the housing crisis and how it is literally flinging people into the street sparked a successful initiative campaign to put a strong tenants-rights measure on the November ballot. The city council – officially nonpartisan but dominated by the so-called “moderate” (i.e., closet-Republican) wing of the “Democratic” (sic) Party – attempted to sandbag the initiative by enacting Ordinance 28894 and then placing it as a competitive measure on the same ballot.

This bewilder-the-voters ploy was pioneered locally in 2015 by Marilyn Strickland to kill a $15-minimum-wage initiative when she was Tacoma’s mayor. Strickland was also, of course, a key perpetrator in the city's gentrification. When she left the mayor's office in 2018, her success was rewarded by appointment as president and chief executive officer of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, allegedly with a seven-digit salary package the actual amount of which has remained a closely guarded secret. But this time the scheme failed; the tenants’-rights group sued, and the court ordered the city’s measure deleted from the ballot.

Meanwhile about 15 percent of Tacoma’s homeless persons – approximately 1,046 human beings – remain unsheltered, prime targets of the Zyklon-B variant known as “herd immunity.”

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

From the Comment Threads of Other Websites

On Dr. Anthony Fauci Says Many Will “Fall by the Wayside” in New Covid-19 Surge (also linked above; what follows is the complete text of my original comment)

Given the context of Dr. Fauci's statement -- that is, the relentless claims by the ruling class the world has too many workers and too many people in general -- it becomes entirely logical to assume the Covid virus is  a modern substitute for Zyklon B, designed  (of course) for both maximum deadliness and maximum plausible deniability.

Hence the unprecedented relevance of Comrade Damon's  breathtakingly courageous  analysis that capitalism's decision to let the virus run amok is indeed "a form of homicidal eugenics, reminiscent of the Nazi regime's policy of murdering handicapped people.” 

Hence too the bravery demonstrated by the World Socialist Web Site in publishing Comrade Damon's work irrefutably proves   the Fourth International is the only  remaining defender of the working class -- the 99.9 Percent -- on this gravely afflicted planet. 

Those of us who have the requisite skill and technological access should therefore disseminate this report as widely as is humanly possible. 

*****

On Vox’s Student Loan ‘Expert’ Is Paid By Debt Collectors

While it is good to see Vox and Carey exposed for what they are, I  am quite frankly appalled to see Biden's student-loan proposal treated as anything more than another "change we can believe in" -- that is. another of the innumerable bait-and-switch betrayals by which the "Democratic" (sic) Party serves the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column. 

Authoritative analyses of the original form of Biden's loan-relief promise made it obvious it was purposed to seduce younger voters even as it was designed to fail.

Old enough to know the overwhelming proof the Democrats were forever nullified as anything more than a Republican Fifth Column by their complicity in the coup  of  22 November 1963 -- note their treachery ranging from Vietnam to  their refusal to protect abortion rights -- I cannot doubt they will continue their betrayals of student debtors. And every other member of the 99.9 Percent as well.   

*****

On 21st Century Socialism: What It Will Become and Why?

My thanks to Ms. Fraad and Mr. Wolff for what I suspect will prove to be one of the most thought-provoking essays ever published on the Internet. This is because -- implicit in its focus on human relationships within families and enterprises (and its pivotal analysis of how socialism undermines itself by tolerating their patriarchal structure and thereby perpetuating the anti-socialist/pro-capitalist/ultimately pro-nazi conditioning that is the essence of patriarchy) -- is the dire necessity to at long last acknowledge the true magnitude of the gender warfare patriarchy has inflicted on our entire species.  As the ultimate expression of misogyny -- fear, hatred and contempt   of femaleness beginning with our Mother Earth (the real reason for the climate crisis) and reaching outward to include not only any creature or object defined as female, but also any creature or object lacking definitively male identity -- patriarchy gives modern males the same theoretical workplace and household omnipotence it gave to the emperors, kings, nobility and slave owners of earlier ages. And just as innumerable wars and atrocities measure the refusal of these older categories of oppressors to relinquish the governmental versions of their privilege without bloodshed, so is the refusal of  modern males to give up its household,  workplace and on-the-street versions measured by the skyrocketing incidence of domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape. Men of this ilk, rabid with a condition that should be recognized as "clitoris envy" -- the reaction to multi-orgasmic female consciousness with the limitless fear, hatred and contempt at present euphemized as "toxic masculinity"-- are probably incurable.  And it is their in-curability that is violently, often murderously obstructing the very transformation Ms. Fraad and Mr. Wolff recognize is essential if socialism is to fulfill its potential as our species' (only) means of surviving the present, otherwise inescapably terminal crisis. (Footnote: I doubt it a coincidence that Weimar Germany, the scientists of which led the world in re-discovering the orgasmic superiority of women, was also the birthplace of nazism, the U.S. manifestations of which are ever-more-obviously fanatical expressions of male refusal to accept scientific truth.)            

*****

On “Left-wing Vitriol is Unwarranted”: Jacobin Defends Ocasio-Cortez and Denounces Socialist Criticism of DSA

Let us not forget that to be assailed by the forces of capitalism with such undisguised venom is a most encouraging measure of our burgeoning success. It proves  the growing effectiveness of the World Socialist Web Site in fostering widespread recognition of the "change-we-can-believe-in" deceptions promulgated by the "Democratic" (sic) Party and its allegedly "socialist" (sic) puppets as they serve the "Republican" (sic)  Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column. Let us hope this awakening is but the precursor to the far more pivotal understanding that the treachery of the Democrats and their DSA assets is every bit as deadly a weapon of national nazification as  the outspoken campaign for zero-tolerance Christian white male supremacy led by Trump and his ideological kindred.    

*****

On The Origins of Pabloite Revisionism, the Split Within the Fourth International and the Founding of the International Committee

Listening to Comrade Kishore, I realize the  entire capitalist world, the "People's Republic" (sic) of China included, has – by its deliberately ecogenocidal combination of de facto enslavement, zero-tolerance sociopolitical oppression and defiantly continuing environmental destruction – weaponized the originally USian slogan "Better Dead Than Red"  into a globalized mechanism of intentional apocalypse. Thus our choice is not "socialism or barbarism"; it is instead quite literally socialism or extinction. And I cannot thank you enough for this vital insight.

*****

On The Trump Indictments Are an Indictment of America (this comment rejected by The New York Times; the story and its thread may be pay-walled)

Given the evidence a substantial number of Trump supporters are also admirers of Hitler -- himself a notorious liar -- it seems obvious they regard lying as a vital weapon in achieving for Trump what Leni Riefenstahl zieg-heil'd as Triumph of the Will.

As for why the Trumpites and the Original Nazis share this particularly venomous brand of moral imbecility, I have no doubt it is because of their common recognition that lying -- the more sensationally the better -- is the only 100-percent-certain method for inflaming bigotry to genocidal intensity.

*****

On The Last Time A Foreign Military Threat Was Placed Near The US Border, The World Almost Ended

One of the little-known details of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the international magnitude of the Soviet preparations for war. As I was returning from Korea in August 1962 via the USNS Sultan, we were shadowed by a Soviet submarine from the moment we left Pearl Harbor – I don't recall the date -- until we entered San Francisco Bay early in the morning on 4 September 1962. Initially we saw only the Soviet sub’s periscope, but as we drew closer to the U.S., it would surface to charge its batteries and run along our port side maybe 1000 yards distant. Eventually we were waving to one another, the sub's crew on deck for a breath of fresh air and those of us going home aboard the Sultan behaving as if we were on a sea cruise. Years later, when the entire timeline of the crisis was declassified – when it became clear the Soviets were installing the missiles in August -- I realized why that sub was there. Had the proverbial balloon gone up, they'd have torpedoed us -- somewhat more than 4,000 trained and service-seasoned officers and enlisted personnel aboard an unarmed (and therefore utterly defenseless) WWII troop transport -- which would no doubt have killed us all and given them a pivotal (and utterly demoralizing) naval victory.

Timmy Taes: Given the classified Military Occupational Specialties of many aboard the Sultan, had she surrendered, the United States would have no doubt blown us out of the water, blamed the Soviets and turned the incident into a propaganda coup. In those days, it wasn't just infantry and artillery traveled by troop transport. It was every enlisted MOS and officers from captain down (though the commissioned officers and warrant officers were of course spared the tides of vomit that defined the troop bays). However it obtained, it would have been a substantial victory for the Soviets, because in 1962, all our senior NCOs were WWII and/or Korean War combat veterans, and even amongst troops who have never been tested by live fire, there is a vast difference in combat-readiness between raw recruits and those of us who have already completed most if not all of our active service (two years for draftees and; three years for Regular Army enlistees, as I was; I don't remember the active-duty requirements for warrant officers or Reserve Officers Training Corps [ROTC] and Officer Candidate School [OCS] graduates with reserve commissions, but I think it was three years). Plus in '62, those of us on the Sultan homebound from Korea, nominally a 13-month tour of duty, had been extended there in place at least three months (in some instances, depending on MOS, as much as twice that) due to the Berlin Crisis. So none of us were FNGs, i.e., greeenies. In other words, the loss of those aboard the Sultan would have been comparable in impact to the losses of seasoned personnel at Pearl on 7 December 1941.

*****

On Why America Deserves Donald Trump

Firstly, apropos Mr. Fancher's love-the-enemy-to-(our)-death nonsense, World War II proved decisively the only real antidote to nazism -- and the Trumpites are most assuredly nazis even if they are too cunning (or too ignorant) to lay claim to the name  -- is the Red Army antidote. Secondly, that's precisely why Adameran's quotation from Thomas Greene is last-word, terminal-election, apocalyptically  accurate: "Trump will not be defeated by educating voters...Workers now sense that economic justice...is permanently out of reach."  Apropos which, note that when workers in the Weimar Republic reached the same conclusion, they turned to Hitler and the Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazis.  Thirdly, in response to jdt7385, I voted Green in 2016, when I realized the "choice" between Hillary and Trump was a choice between World War III (triggered by the former's Goldwater-Girl apocalyptic hatred of Russia) or a new Holocaust (triggered by the latter's ecogenocidal hatred of everything female [our Mother Earth included], all Jews, all people of bolor and all sexual minorities. Now of course it is obvious the Greens, like the DSA, have been co-opted by the "Democratic" (sic) Party, which in post-JFK truth is -- and forever shall remain -- naught but the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.  Because I suspect jdt7385 and I both recognize the importance of voting to preserve the franchise, I urge jdt to find a suitable alternative other than Trump, even if it is but to write in "None of the Above" merely to -- as I said --  sustain the franchise; I say that because for a person of conscience to vote for Trump will surely inflict the lifelong guilt that plagues many Germans who joined the NSDAP only because they felt they had no other alternative -- a guilt I know from German-born friends many of their children bear as well.   

LB/1-5 September 2023

-30-

Fearing Revolution, the Plutocrats Unite for Class War against
Legal Gun Owners, Retaining the 2nd Amendment as Propaganda but
Imposing Prohibitive Fees and Taxes, Thus Redefining Self-Defense  
as the Exclusive Privilege of Our Masters and Their Collaborators

***
Still Doubt the DemoPublicans' Back-Room Unity? Read On

***
Plus See Below for DfD's Long-Promised New Monthly Format

WHAT I HAVE ASSEMBLED  here is hitherto obscured but nonetheless compelling proof the Trump/Pence Regime -- secure behind its ever more crippling effluent of Nazi-style Big Lies and other Josef-Goebbels-type deceptions -- is so terrified by the intensifying likelihood of socialist revolution, it is now collaborating with the Democratic (sic) Party to forcibly disarm all U.S. Working Families. 

The proof is in the following jig-saw puzzle of reports, which with an uplifted social-finger of journalistic defiance are hereby assembled into a revealing whole. Which I assure you is no -- say again NO -- conspiracy theory; it is instead the geography of an infestation.

Firstly, for context -- the historical framework inside which we'll piece the puzzle together --  we should review the Powell Memo, the Mein Kampf of Imperial Neoliberalism, thus to confirm our understanding of the fascist ideology¹ by which we are subjugated and enslaved.

Secondly let us note that gunowner taxation is implicitly approved by Heller's Paragraph 2, a fact concealed by the media hysteria --  a cunning cacophony of equally distracting pros and cons --  engendered by its revocation of the Washington D.C. ordinance that outlawed handgun ownership:

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited...For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms... (Emphasis added.)

Note too the date of the Heller decision -- 2008 -- and that it was authored by the late arch-conservative Anton Scalia; for deeper background, see also the Encyclopaedia Britannica's clearly written, exceptionally unbiased and therefore contextually useful history of the Second Amendment, including its Imperial Roman origins. 

Then, as if in (surely coincidental) climactic conclusion, we add the following links, watching, perhaps smirking as the topic-puzzle comes together, dates-of-occurrence punctuating its relentless unfolding:

2009 -- Targeted Taxes on Getting Abortions, Buying Guns, and Exercising Other Constitutional Rights
2013 -- New gun control strategy: Tax 'em
2015 -- Why Exactly Are We Taxing Guns?
2017 -- Hey, NRA! What About Patients' Gun Rights?
2018 -- A Gun Rights Group Says Trump Has Gone From Supporter "To The Gun-Grabber In Chief"
2018 -- Repeal the Second Amendment? Gun-Control Advocates Say No - The Atlantic
2019 -- Elizabeth Warren Introduces Sweeping Gun Control Plan
2019 -- Here’s The Document The White House, Barr Are Using To Push Gun Control On Republicans
2020 -- Florida REPUBLICAN Senators Vote for Massive Gun Control Bill
2020 -- NH: Republican Gun Confiscation is Still Moving

(Capitalization and punctuation as in originals)

I trust I need not thrice repeat this is NOT conspiracy theory. It is instead a choreography of the evolution of an idea mostly as shaped by reactions to Heller -- a decision blessed or cursed as a pivotal victory for the right to keep and bear arms -- hereby revealed as its (presumably) unintentional death-blow instead. 

*****

WHAT WE SHOULD be asking ourselves is how often the Republicans join with the Democrats in expanding and sustaining tyranny. 

The immediate answer is  found in the Democrats' reliably overwhelming support for the Patriot Act, most recently last November.

But a more damning answer is to be found in the historical fact that whatever tyrannies our Capitalist Masters demand, their vassal-politicians immediately set aside their charade of squabbling, then unite to grant it with bipartisan obedience -- a malevolently Capitalist bipartisanship exemplified by its Neoliberal destruction of public education and its robbery of Working Families' ability to think rationally; by the re-enslavement of women through outlawing abortion, radically restricting access to birth control and tacitly encouraging sexual harassment to drive females from the workplace; and by subjugation of the entire 99 Percent through forcible disarmament.

Thus we confront the re-emergence of class struggle's original and ultimate forms: not between Workers and Bosses, but between Masters and Slaves. 

As regular readers know, I closely watch certain Rightist websites. Why? Because -- with malicious censorship on the Left now at least as prevalent as on the Right -- such sites (especially after we've learn to read between their lines of bias),  are surprisingly reliable sources for news the Left wants to keep hidden.

Meanwhile our shock-doctrine² Masters weaponize their bipartisan terror of socialist revolution and further weaponize climate change as the ultimate form of regime change. 

Apropos firearms, our Masters' bipartisan intent is to disarm us all, to thereby reduce us to the helplessness of mandatory pacifism  (yes, even in the face of murderous attacks by criminals),  thus condemning us to the compulsory victimhood that has always defined serfdom and slavery.

Apropos women's rights, our Masters' bipartisan intent is to (again) reduce "female" to  a synonym for "powerless" -- not the least because every real revolution since 1789 has been started by women. Thus the Machiavellian anti-abortion cunning of the Democratic (sic) Party -- first exemplified by Carter the Christer's endorsement of the Hyde Amendment, next by Barack the Betrayer's cunningly obscured betrayal of abortion rights, more recently by voting records they try to hide behind lies and disinformation -- is ultimately more effective than Republican demagoguery at imposing compulsory Working Class motherhood, complete with all its mandatory impoverishment and ever-expanding criminal liability.

Thus the Democrats' ultimate Big Lie -- "change we can believe in" -- yet prevails.       

But -- precisely as our Masters have already done with the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments and are now doing with the Second Amendment -- they leave the wording of the Bill of Rights intact.

Ask yourself: what more effective propaganda to preserve -- particularly amongst the pridefully ignorant³ -- the truly monstrous, ultimately apocalyptic Big Lie of "American democracy"?

Nor is this on any way a new strategy; it merely expands the deluge of Big Lies intended to sustain the core Moron Nation deception: that we the people of our species' most ecogenocidal Empire are yet allowed the protections provided by our (alleged) constitutional "rights." 

Note how the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments have already been nullified by the Patriot Act. Note too how their nullification is broadened and  pointedly underscored by the Robbers' Court's subsequent repeals of gay, lesbian and transsexual (LGBTQ) rights and of religious freedom for atheists, agnostics and spiritual nonconformists -- now soon to expanded by the Robbers' Court's intent of outlawing abortion nationwide.      

Thus the Second Amendment has also been nullified -- this by judicial sleight-of-hand including the censorship-obscured anti-legal-gunowner carte blanche cunningly buried amongst the pro-Second-Amendment distractions of  Heller.

And since Citizens United has now clearly defined money as speech, what is to prevent our Masters from further defining prohibitive cost -- whether for firearms,  contraception or anything else -- as "constitutional" forms of prohibition, censorship and regulation? 

*****

Indications: Stuff I Already Read, Here in Case You Missed It

(Capitalization and punctuation as in originals)

 

Our Mother/Our Selves

Verily, as we do unto our Mother Earth, so we do unto ourselves.

Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don't Know Why

Earth Just Had Hottest January Since Records Began, Data Shows

Worst Locust Swarm to Hit East Africa in Decades Linked to Climate Crisis

UN warns of major shock as Africa locust outbreak spreads

Ozone Layer Recovery Is Being Undermined by Pollution From US Companies

UN Biodiversity Chief: Humans Risk Living in an 'Empty World' With 'Catastrophic' Consequences

Bumblebees Face Extinction From the Climate Crisis

5,000-year-old tree in Scotland is changing from male to female⁴

 

Calamity by Contagion

Even after her metamorphosis from bugs to mammals, our Mother Earth remains fatally buggy. 

The coronavirus pandemic: A global disaster

World Health Organization warns of global risk from coronavirus outbreak

Top 10 Myths About Bedbugs

Climate Change May Release Ancient Viruses From Melting Tibetan Glacier

Viruses, Epidemics and Experiments: The History of Biowarfare

 

Theocracy Triumphant

Too many of us remain oblivious to the threat of resurgent patriarchal religion, especially when its deadly misogyny is financed by our Masters and hybrid with fascism.

El Salvador: The Country Where Having a Miscarriage Can Land You in Prison

Rick Wiles: God Has Sent the Coronavirus to “Purge a Lot of Sin Off This Planet”

Trump Spiritual Adviser Paula White Orders End to 'Satanic Pregnancies'

There's a Video Posted on the Official White House YouTube Page Calling Homosexuality the Devil's Work

Writer Calls Egalitarian Marriages “Functionally Homosexual”

Christian School Expels Girl for Wearing Rainbow Sweater on Her Birthday 

Tampon tax break faces resistance in Tennessee

The FBI Makes a Bizarre Claim About Pro-Choice Terrorism

FOCUS: America May Be Nearing the End of the Roe Era

 

Josef Goebbels Prevails

After all that’s gone down, who among us still doubts the predatory Neoliberal cunning that prompted our morbidly Machiavellian Masters to pervert our so-called “mainstream media” into our species first-ever privately owned for-profit Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Indeed our Masters brought it home with their Nazi fellow-collaborators after Germany lost the war.  

The “Afghanistan papers”: The criminality and disaster of a war based upon lies

Why the Buttigieg Campaign Tried to Have Me Arrested for Handing Out Information About Medicare for All 

Listening to Mike Pence’s history, you might think it wasn’t Soviets but Americans who liberated Auschwitz

The FBI Has Been Lying About Seth Rich

The US Government Lies Constantly, And The Burden Of Proof Is On The Accuser

 

World’s Highest Standard of Living

For a broader perspective on the unchanging bounty of USian Exceptionalism, go here. And here. And here. 

Marianne Williamson Is the Canary in the Coal Mine for American Democracy

The Trump administration’s surveillance dragnet

Black Lives Matter Excluded from Los Angeles Women’s March

“The Cops & the Klan Go Hand in Hand!”

A Bank Called the Cops on a Black Man Trying to Deposit the Money He Won in a Racial Discrimination Lawsuit

Cops and Spies Chase Blacks and Leftists While Violent Whites Grow Bolder

Oakland, California: With guns drawn, police evict homeless mothers from house

Keeping Homeless Families Homeless, by Force

Homelessness in Koreatown: a parallel neighborhood of unhoused people has grown up around the existing community.

The Shame of Child Poverty in the Age of Trump

Seattle bureaucrats aid Amazon charge Sawant with ethics violations

Why Are Democratic Candidates Taking Money From Union-Busting Lawyers?

Florida: Man arrested after allegedly driving van into GOP registration tent

After 18 Years of US Occupation, Poll Finds Zero Percent Of Afghans Thriving, 85 Percent "Suffering"

Taxpayers Shell Out $1M After Officers Force Mom to Give Birth into a Toilet, Letting Baby Die

 

Enslavement as Convenience

In keeping with the strategy and intent of Neoliberalism, our Masters long ago conditioned us to value convenience over freedom. Hence the unstoppable popularity of self-enslavement by electronic media: the irrestably seductive opiate cunningly engineered to dumb us down -- and numb us down -- even as it tethers us to 24/7 surveillance. (Hence too the notorious, convenience-centered inability of USian whites to liberate themselves, much less anyone else.)    

The Joys of the Digital Revolution Bring the End of Privacy

Freedom Rider: The Internet Does Washington’s Dirty Work

 

Lest We Forget

Claiming to focus on human life while ignoring or denying the determinism of its socioeconomic and political contexts is no different from pretending to study mammalian  reproduction while ignoring or denying the sexuality by which it obtains. How so? Because -- once we transcend the ideological blindness imposed on us to sustain Capitalism -- we recognize the extent to which contexts determine how we live and die, just as sexuality determines reproduction. 

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

How American Racism Influenced Hitler

Wall Street's Fascist Plot to Seize the White House

How IBM Helped Nazi Germany Exterminate Those It Deemed 'Unworthy of Life'

The Modern Education System Was Made to Foster “Punctual, Docile, and Sober” Factory Workers

Poverty Is the New Draft

Why the Left-wing Needs a Gun Culture

 

But Is It Really Ecogenocide?

Why else – save to exterminate “surplus” Working Families, permanently enslave the survivors and reorder all human society into the global equivalent of an antebellum slave plantation – would our Neoliberal Masters feign such total paralysis in the face of humanity’s deadliest disaster?

The Toxic Reach of Deepwater Horizon's Oil Spill Was Much Larger - and Deadlier - Than Previous Estimates, a New Study Says

Environmental Protesters Are Being Criminalized Around the World

US Listed Climate Activist Group as Extremists Alongside Mass Killers

Wall Street Invading Wet’suwet’en Territory

Puerto Rico's Disasters After the Earthquakes

The Evil List: 30 Tech Companies That Are Doing the Most Harm

No Safe Level of Air Pollutions;: Major Study Links Cardiac Arrests With Fine Particulate Matter Exposure

How Economic Despair Drives Workers to Their Deaths

Study: Nearly 500 Million People Worldwide Struggle to Find Adequate Work

Where United States' Climate Migrants Will Go As Sea Level Rises

Japan Races to Build 22 New Coal-Burning Power Plants, Despite Climate Risks

Latest UN plan to address catastrophic decline in biodiversity—more empty platitudes

The Environmental Burden of Generation Z

 

Sparks Against Despair

Though history proves the “arc of the universe” bends toward tyranny rather than justice, we should also cherish a certain truth powerfully evoked by Peter Gabriel: “You can blow out a candle/ But you can’t blow out a fire/ Once the flames begin to catch/ The wind will blow it higher.”

Global Poll Finds Majority Believe Capitalism More Harmful Than Good

Gallup: 60% of Americans Say They Could Vote for an Atheist President

Making Rebellion Attractive: Why the Establishment Still Hates John Reed

Bernie Sanders Leads Trump, All 2020 Candidates in Donations From Active-Duty Troops

Just Get On And Go! Olympia Transit System Goes Fareless

Atlanta Turns 7-Acre Vacant Lot Into Largest Free Food Forest In The Country

Dog sleuths sniff out crop disease hitting citrus trees

Orangutan in Borneo offers its hand to;rescue a man from snake-infested water⁵

Takes a village: Bear foster mom raises cub saved by dog

Thunberg: Indigenous Peoples Lead the Fight Against Crisis;

We Need to Ask Many Questions of Our Nation;s Mainstream Media. Here Are Just a Few.

Propagandists Cry About Bernie’s Online Base Because It’s Effective, Not Because It’s Mean

 

Yes, dear readers, this is at last the long-promised new Dispatches format. I will post monthly, with occasional "extras" as events demand.

(Sorry, Charlie; our Masters only want intimidated tuna -- especially now, with survival itself increasingly criminalized as revolutionary defiance -- the real meaning of the ever-escalating wars against refugees and homeless people.)  

_____________________________________________

¹When we consider the patriarchal origins of the Empire's ecogenocidal capabilities and intentions, it is at least arguable the Powell Memo is the Capitalist aristocracy's 20th Century update of the colonial aristocracy's outraged reaction to the 1772 British Supreme-Court Equivalent's ruling that Blacks are humans and therefore have human rights -- which historical truth I learned in childhood from my second-generation British (English/Scot/Canadian) father. Thus the so-called "American Revolution" was the antithesis of liberation. Indeed it was the original "regime change." Then as now it is intended to preserve what today -- Neoliberal euphemisms not withstanding -- we recognize as the core mindset of Nazism: genocide (against all First Nations peoples);  enslavement (of Africans); and murderous discrimination against all other minorities -- precisely the precedents Adolf Hitler borrowed from the United States. Nevertheless I find it more useful to regard 1934 as the visible starting point of present-day USian Ruling Class malevolence, specifically the One Percenters' aborted-but-never-prosecuted fascist coup, which would have reduced the U.S. to a slave state while making it the resource-dominant and therefore ultimately triumphant fourth member of Hitler's later Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis. Even then, our Masters' long-term motive was global conquest, and from their morally imbecilic perspective, alliance with Hitler and enhancement of his horrors was the shortest, cheapest path to victory. Remaining free to subvert our freedom at will, the same cabal of unimaginably rich aristocrats helped perfect the Nazis' genocide machine even as they financed the seditious rise of ChristoNazism and countenanced (if not mandated and commanded) the coup that, on 22 November 1963, not only murdered President John Fitzgerald Kennedy but slew the Republic as well.

²We all owe Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, New York: 2007) a debt of gratitude for what amounts to a breakthrough volume of strategic intelligence-analysis detailing how our Masters are weaponizing Nature to re-order human society into their Neoliberal global (slave-plantation) model.  Indeed it Ms. Klein exposes the malevolence and manipulative cunning by which the Powell Memo  is ever-more-lethally enforced, not the least as the 20th Century revision of the Declaration of Independence.                  

³As I noted in a recent "what-is-to-be-done" e-mail to friends, we the people are so dumbed down, there is no longer any antidote for the submissiveness of the Moronic Majority -- the vast number of U.S. citizens, minorities included, who by socioeconomic definition are Working Class but reflexively side with our Masters -- even now, when there are no longer any rational doubts about Ruling Class capabilities and intentions: the former the de facto omnipotence granted by the diabolical combination of total surveillance and cell phones, the latter the ever-more-obvious ecogenocidal reordering of human society into a global slave plantation. Note too how how the Moronic Majority will break down shopping-center doors -- even commit murder -- to fit itself with the 21st Century slave collar, i.e., the cellphone. As a friend of mine observes, we have thus become a nation of "I-Phone Zombies."    

⁴Thanks to Tigerlille for spotting this story and sending me its link. The story prompts at least two significant questions. (1)--Is accelerated gender plurality a multi-species response to patriarchy-inflicted apocalypse? (2)--What relevant lessons does our Mother Earth thus beseech us to learn?

⁵Thanks to Tigerlille for this story too, which -- vitally, I believe -- shows us a truth of mammalian solidarity too long rejected as "primitive superstition."    

LB/15 February 2020

-30-

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

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

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

It's an old and troublesome story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

From Mr. Abdul-Jabbar's text:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did she suppress the story?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

Here are its opening paragraphs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

*****  

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

LB/20-28 September 2019

30-

 

 

       

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/25 February-15 March 2019

-30-

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 20^th century under social democratic or liberal governments such as social security or unemployment insurance...It has nothing to do with fascism and until we get that figured out, we will be next to useless careening from one antifa adventure to another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Astounding.

*****

How Democrats Intend to Suppress the Sanders Campaign

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

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

*****

Vengeful Republicans Kill Minimum Wage Hikes, Voter-Rights Expansions

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

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

*****

NYC Steam Plant Explosion Looks Like Imagined Onset of Alien Invasion

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

*****

Texas Persecutes Teacher-of-the-Year for Lesbianism

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

*****

Ralph Nader on Why We Desperately Need Canadian-Style Healthcare

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

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

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

*****

Eight LGBTQ Struggles the Mainstream Media Refused to Cover

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

*****

How New Jersey's Bergen County Ends Chronic Homelessness

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

LB/30 December 2018

-30-

 

New Hillaryite Rule Locks Out Sanders, Any Others the DNC Won't Ok as Real Democrats, Thus Formalizing the Party's Hatred of Reformers

'"We just came off a devastating presidential loss in 2016. It would seem to me the actual impetus would be to expand the Democratic Party. I just for the life of me don’t see any motivation for this beyond personal spite,' Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, told Yahoo News.'I scratch my head and ask why they would want to make the party more narrow and more exclusive.' Other progressives echoed Longabaugh’s critique of the new rule on social media, with many noting that such restrictions could demobilize large constituencies that are disaffected with both major political parties...'Democrats don't want Bernie-Most-Popular-Politician-In-America-Sanders running for President, but they're perfectly fine with Mark-Raise-The-Social-Security-Retirement-Age-Warner, because although he commonly votes with Republicans, he IDs as a Democrat...'''

See also: "The Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee adopted a new rule on Friday that would prevent outsiders like Bernie Sanders from seeking the party’s nomination in the 2020 presidential race. The move seems to be the latest salvo in the ongoing jockeying over the party’s future that emerged following the...bitter primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Sanders in 2016... the move could only have been motivated by lingering animus from the primary race between Clinton and Sanders."

Comment: despite the false pseudo-Left optimism by which these reports attempt to soften the Democratic (sic) National Committee's terminal blow to any rational hope for a progressive takeover of the party, by this new rule the DNC awards itself the absolute power to determine who is and is not a real Democrat. The rule therefore locks in ideological cement overshoes the party's suicidal, already thoroughly documented malice toward Sanders. It also radically expands the party's hateful efforts to exclude all would-be reformers, a brazenly pro-Republican purge exemplified by its maliciously triumphant slandering of Laura Moser. Thus once again we are taught our only possible exit from JesuNazi theocracy is the formation of a genuinely socialist -- and genuinely revolutionary -- party of the Working Class. Indeed the Democrats' fuck-you message to all of us in the 99 Percent was never clearer -- so unmistakable (and such an unmistakable endorsement of Capitalist malevolence) -- even those in the deepest depths of denial can no longer reject it.

*****        

And Here is Always Insightful Paul Street to Tell Us Why the Democrats So Ruled

"The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-exterminist right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their own party."

Comment: Street's essay -- though it is entirely too pseudo-Leftish for my taste -- was written before approval of the DNC's rule to exclude progressive reformers, but it explains perfectly why the rule was enacted and -- most importantly -- why those of us on the Real Left should forever abandon any (1930s/Stalinist) notion of infiltrating the Democratic (sic) Party and attempting to make it the mechanism of our national redemption.

Additional late-night insight:  today's Democratic (sic) Party -- in an exceptionally grotesque example of Orwelliano-Machiavellian deception proven by its ever-more-fawning obedience to its  Capitalist masters -- is now the Republican Party's most colossally ambitious false-flag operation ever. It positions the Democrats as a Fifth Column to bolster by discouragement the more obvious Republican effort to shrink voter turnout even as the illusion of two parties helps perpetuate the apocalyptic Big Lie of "American democracy." (Please remember where you read this hypothesis first: on Dispatches' weekend update, 9 June 2018.)

*****        

T/P Regime Resumes Obama's Anti-First Amendment War on Journalists

"Now we know that the Justice Department secretly seized the phone and email records of Ali Watkins, a New York Times reporter, in a leak investigation involving a former Senate staffer. It is the first time the Trump administration is known to have engaged in such an aggressive tactic against a reporter, and it is exactly the kind of press surveillance at which the Obama administration excelled. For years, conservatives attacked Obama for using such tactics to spy on reporters. Of course, there was no outcry from the right on Friday over Trump’s willingness to do the same thing."

*****   

Why We Must “Beware the Democrats and Their Good Billionaires"

"(Starbucks) Executive Chairman Howard Schultz...(fashioned) for himself a shining reputation as a moral capitalist... As a result, he’s become that favored species of Democratic Party hacks: the Good Billionaire...Schultz has political ambitions, perhaps presidential ones. He almost certainly would have been Hillary Clinton’s secretary of labor...And let’s be honest:The psychopathic acquisitiveness required to actively hoard $3 billion is a close relative of the titanic self-regard and absolute megalomania that drive most presidential candidates...On CNBC, Schultz worried that the Democratic Party has drifted too far to the left...and identified the national debt as the great crisis of our time...There you have it..(worsening) austerity, but with a few rainbow flags and diversity seminars. America’s shining, post-Trumpian future.”

*****        

G7 Summit Reveals Europe's Intensifying Hostility to U.S. JesuNazi Imperialism 

"This weekend’s summit of the G7 is the most contentious meeting in the body’s 43-year history. It has revealed deep and growing fissures between the United States and its European allies...Looming over the summit is Trump’s June 1 decision to impose sweeping tariffs of up to 25 percent on steel and aluminum imports from the EU and other countries...At the same time, Trump has opened the prospect of cooling off the United States’ two other major geopolitical conflict areas: with North Korea, including a US-North Korean summit scheduled in Singapore immediately after the conclusion of the G7, and with Russia, to which Trump held out the prospect of regaining membership in the G7 after it was ejected in 2014...However, as with the (Nazi) fractured geopolitics of the 1930s, the 'deals' offered by Trump to one or another country are merely the prelude to military conflict. War is on the horizon, though it is not yet clear between whom."

*****     

Poll Shows Seattle Citizenry's Growing Contempt and Hatred of Homeless People

How Elite Colleges Protect Their Young Aristocrats from Police-State Savagery

"American police...(are) militarized...occupying forces for America’s poor neighborhoods, not unlike the American military abroad. If one lives in America and is poor, especially black and poor, the police are your oppressor, not your protector...Encountering a police officer, let alone confronting one for their injustice, is a dangerous activity for many in this country. The poor have been abandoned by our government yet they are arrested for petty and necessary crimes done to survive. Once in the system it is even harder to make a legal living and people have no choice but to turn to alternative methods of survival. The police in this country consistently use a call to them as an excuse to hit the victim with a crime of their own. The right to protest is considered a criminal offense, as evidenced by Standing Rock and the protests against President Trump. ICE is becoming an increasingly insidious force that obtains people in extraordinarily inhumane conditions.On the other hand, you have elite college campuses that aim to protect their students of crimes at all costs."

*****       

New Evidence in RFK Murder Prompts Demands for Reopening Case

"Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5 and died June 6, 1968, fifty years ago today. A new examination of evidence is forcing human rights organizations -- including the (Organization of American States) -- to consider probing the case."

See also: "We now live in a country that would be unrecognizable to anyone who died prior to 1968."

*****       

The Empire Escalates Its Efforts to Drag Assange into a Death Chamber

"One day after Ecuadorian Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa declared that her government would continue blocking WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from all communications and deny him any personal visitors, she was elected president of the United Nations General Assembly...There is little doubt that the treatment of Assange...is the outcome of pressure and threats by the US and other powers. Washington is demanding Assange’s head...to silence him while Washington (seeks) his extradition to stand trial on espionage charges that potentially carry the death penalty.”

*****

Millennials Favor Unions Over Corporations

"Pew Research Center has just released its annual survey on public opinion and unions in the United States. As in the last few years, the general public views the decline of organized labor negatively.... Sixty-eight percent of people aged 18-29 said they have positive views of unions, while just 46 percent of young people said the same of corporations."

*****    

Last Words (I): Eulogies for Anthony Bourdain

"Anthony Bourdain was the only major American celebrity who succeeded in depicting publicly the Palestinians as rational, caring human beings rather than as irrationally angry 'inciters' to violence. He was the anti-Bernard Lewis. Lewis smeared the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims with the charge of 'Islamic Rage' (as though large swathes of humankind are angry for no reason). Bourdain said, 'The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinians, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity.'"

See also: "Anthony Bourdain, who was found dead  Friday in an apparent suicide, opened his viewers' eyes to issues within and beyond the borders of the United States through food. He also championed many of the communities that affected his work in the kitchen and on screen. Whether it was global poverty, systemic racism in the United States or sexual abuse of women in the workplace, Bourdain frequently used the publicity he earned through his celebrity to draw attention to the issues affecting the people behind the food that he brought into Americans' living rooms. Here are some examples..."

With heartfelt thanks to my dear friend and comrade Brie, who in a poignantly teachable moment told me of  Bourdain's significance in her own life and then opened my eyes as to his significance for the rest of our species.

And here is Brie's own tribute to him: "Anthony Bourdain taught me from a young age that food is love and a way to connect with others when language-barriers are present. It's a way to respect and honor your elders and your younger comrades too. He taught me that food is what can bring us together when we think that there is no common ground to be found. Food is also love, service, honor and much more. It's what binds us together and fuels our bodies, minds and souls for the fight we all face daily -- and I'll always treasure the ways Tony Bourdain taught me to serve my comrades and community with love, dignity and respect. For that alone I mourn the loss of a man I never had the pleasure of meeting."  

 ***                   

Last Words (II): Cossacks Dare Verbalize what All Warriors Secretly Know

"There's something dashing and soulful about Russian folk music, especially when it originates with the Cossacks, Russia's warriors of the steppe. This is perhaps the most famous Cossack song, sung at dinners, concerts and campfires. It's a song about a love that is always just out of reach, a strange mix of longing and recklessness. Listen to it. You won't regret it." (The lyrics translated to English are here.)

LB/9 June 2018

 -30-

Federally Militarized Police Add Middle-Class Minorities to Target List

“Another day, another black man violently assaulted by five rogue police officers for the ever-increasing crime of BWB (breathing while black). This time it was NBA player Sterling Brown...It’s hardly news that people of color are continually harassed, but what’s been making the news lately is the frequency with which upwardly mobile, middle-class people of color are being targeted. From the two black men waiting for a friend at a Philadelphia Starbucks, to a black Yale graduate student napping in her dorm’s common room, to three black women facing down seven cop cars and a helicopter as they checked out out of an Airbnb house they were renting...there is an overlooked long-lasting collateral damage to the black community’s faith in the promise of the American dream and the sinister effect on their children that is much worse than that single assault.”

See also: "I am speaking for Dontre Hamilton of Milwaukee, Laquan McDonald of Chicago, Stephon Clark of Sacramento, Eric Garner of New York and the list goes on...The common denominator in all of these (killings) has been racism towards the minority community...The lack of repercussions for the police officers involved in so many of these cases is...a slap in the face to the victims’ families and communities."

And this: "American police shoot and kill far more people than their peers in other countries...(but) are almost never prosecuted and convicted for use of force."

Plus this: "The technology giant Amazon is providing police agencies and private intelligence contractors in the United States with facial recognition and video tracking algorithms to (intensify) mass surveillance on the population."

Comment: I posted the above material as this weekend-update's lead story because, once again, we cannot comprehend the true horror of the Empire's domestic and foreign agendas without first examining the capabilities and intentions demonstrated by its ever-expanding catalogue of atrocities. 

These newest outrages -- clearly another expansion of the Empire's lifelong, 242-year history of hate-motivated, often genocidal persecution of non-whites -- are precisely what prove "American Democracy" to have never been more than a Big Lie. 

What further condemns the United States -- what defines it as a nation ever-more-dictatorially ruled by a multi-generation cabal of  Nazi-minded Capitalist overlords -- was first revealed in 1934 by exposure of the too-powerful-to-prosecute/too-rich-to-jail One Percenters who formulated the Bankers' Plot.

But now, 85 years later, the cabal's once-thwarted lust for the savagery of Nazi governance is methodically approaching fulfillment in the Trump/Pence Regime.

It should therefore surprise none of us that the regime's sadistic intensification of signature expressions of its hatred of non-whites -- especially the ever-more-commonplace police violence against Blacks, Hispanics and First Nations people -- is now expanding to include even those minority folk who were hitherto granted some protection by bourgeois occupations and appearance.

Significantly, this ongoing expansion of official USian hatefulness ominously parallels Hitler's step-by-step intensification of Germany's official hatred of its own doomed minorities. `

Meanwhile the ever-more-obvious JesuNazism of the Empire's rulers underscores the apocalyptic nature of their schemes for global conquest and environmental destruction, thereby redefining the Big Lie of "American Democracy" into the most potentially terminal Big Lie in all human existence.

But I have to disagree with those comrades whose focus on class warfare unfortunately blinds them to the bottomlessly sociopathic nature of the white-supremacist hatred of Blacks, Hispanics, First Nations people and Asiatics. To minimize how race hatred drives the USian Empire's domestic and foreign policy is tantamount to minimizing how hatred of Jewish, Slavic and Roma people drove the German Nazis' domestic and foreign policy. To reason that such murderous moral imbecility is the byproduct of class struggle alone is like trying to comprehend a mass murder without reference to the murderer's psychological state; it does nothing to address the hideous truth that a seemingly irremediable hatred of non-whites has become -- especially since the advent of the Abrahamic forms of patriarchy -- the defining characteristic of nearly the entire Caucasian race. In this context, the woeful inadequacy of the class-struggle-only analysis is emphatically demonstrated by how racist malice prevails even within groups and nationalities of whites who, theoretically, have long been securely affluent enough to have  cleansed themselves of fear and loathing toward people of color.  

Which is most assuredly not to reduce the importance of class struggle; it is instead an urgent plea to continue our examination of intersectionality -- how various forms of bigotry and hatred  combine and interact synergistically, rather as if its victims are trapped in the middle of intersections and "hit by cars from many sides."  As the Combahee River Collective asserted in 1977, "...Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further..."

This is especially true if one is to understand the unique role of hatred in the formulation of governmental policy, whether in Hitler's Third Reich or the emergent Fourth Reich of the Imperial United States.

*****      

Meanwhile Our Species Has Already Destroyed Most Earthly Life

"Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds."

*****      

When the Empire Inflicts "Regime Change," Murderous Chaos Often Results

"When the United States uses its impressive military machine to topple a tyrant...it’s impossible to predict the course of the chaos that follows. Fracture a society, it seems, and the most nefarious (and well-armed) actors often rise to the top: militiamen, criminal elements, Islamists and sociopaths of various stripes...Still, Washington never seems to learn. Since October 2001, our military has been ordered to topple at least three sovereign governments—those of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya—and is theoretically seeking to overthrow another regime in Syria. Republican and Democratic presidents alike have ordered these ill-advised operations, demonstrating the striking bipartisanship of American militarism. Let us, then, take a tour of the tragic outcomes unfolding today in each of these victims of U.S.-imposed regime change."

See also: "The question is: has the Trump administration already made a decision to go to war with Iran?...several developments have come together to suggest that the rationale for using sanctions to force a re-negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is cover for an eventual military assault by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia aimed at regime change in Teheran."

And this: "...national security adviser John Bolton, the formidable chairman of the new 'war cabinet,' was never agreeable to the idea of U.S.-North Korean diplomacy."

Comment: I for one believe the murderous chaos is deliberate -- another of the many forms of genocide by which the Empire seeks to ensure Earth and all its resources remain under forever under Capitalist control.

*****          

Democrats Again Show True Colors in Votes to Enable Warmongers, Banksters

"While the world responds with alarm over President Donald Trump's...(cancellation of) diplomatic talks with North Korea scheduled for next month—(talks) which aimed to ease rising nuclear tensions—131 Democrats in the U.S. House joined with the overwhelming majority of Republicans to pass a $717 billion Pentagon spending bill that includes massive expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal" (emphasis added). The roll-call vote is here.

And: "Handing President Donald Trump a major legislative victory and delivering a huge gift to Wall Street banks on the very same day (these banks) reported record-shattering profits, 33 House Democrats joined nearly every Republican...in passing a deregulatory measure that independent analysts say will significantly increase the risk of another financial crisis."

Comment: two entirely predictable fuck-off-and-die betrayals of the 99 Percent by the Democratic (sic) faction of the One Capitalist Party of Two Names (OCPOTN) provide yet another illustration of how "American Democracy" is by far the most potentially deadly of all humanity's Big Lies. 

Despite the fact Washington state's Puget Sound area with its five major military bases is already the most target-rich environment on this planet, Tacoma-area representatives Adam Smith and Derek Kilmer voted to sate the imperial war machine's thirst for blood money by approving the Trump/Pence Regime's bring-on-the-apocalypse budget. So did Puget Sound Democrats Suzan DelBene, Rick Larsen, and Denny Heck, all five (predictably) joining with their state's four Republican representatives.

The one Washington state Democrat with the courage to vote against the let's-make-Earth-a-bug-planet measure was Pramila Jayapal; obviously she is the only Washington representative who understands that expanding the thermonuclear capabilities of the submarines based at Bangor will not protect her beloved Evergreen State from reduction to a black-and-brown radioactive wasteland. (Disclosure: I salute and applaud Ms. Jayapal for her bravery on this war-machine budget issue, though I nevertheless emphatically oppose her schemes for forcibly disarming all civilian firearms owners. )

While Larsen was the only Washington state Democrat to also vote for unleashing Capitalism's most predatory banksters, the unspoken message of the two bills is nevertheless clear: the One Percent and its Ruling Class Vassals are now --  as a growing number of regime's former opponents forgive its premature disclosures of Capitalism's ultimate Evil -- predictably uniting behind its JesuNazi agenda.     

*****   

Empire Escalates Its Campaign to Enslave Venezuela and Steal Its Petroleum

"Of particular interest to the United States is Venezuela, who is full of oil. They want the oil and anyone who doesn’t give it to them is illegitimate. But there are people in Venezuela too. And they have been wonderfully resilient in response to U.S. power. This was why it was such good news that Nicolás Maduro won reelection in Venezuela."

*****      

 

More Genocide: Bureaucrats OK $7 Billion Cut in Children's Health Program

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday approved President Donald Trump's 'despicable' proposal to slash more than $7 billion from the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which helps impoverished families provide healthcare to their kids. The approval came by way of a GAO report delivered to Congress early Tuesday. The cuts to CHIP are part of a broader plan by the Trump administration to cancel $15.3 billion in previously approved funding.

*****   

Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine Ignores Poor People's Campaign 

"The Poor People’s Campaign remains invisible to much of America. Corporate media have chosen to dismiss this call for a national moral revival, but the establishment will not be able to ignore the growing community that is calling for it much longer."

See also: "The Art of Resistance."

*****     

Activist Blames West Virginia's Wretchedness on "Corporate Domination"

"West Virginia has the highest rate of obesity in the country. The highest rate of smoking. The highest rate of drug overdose deaths. Why? Corporate domination of the state...(says) Stephen Smith...director of the West Virginia Healthy Kids and Family Coalition."

*****     

India's Massacre of Environmental Protestors Exemplifies Capitalism in Action

"The barbarity of social life and class relations in contemporary India were laid bare in Tuesday’s police massacre of working people demanding the closure of a copper smelter that has long befouled Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu, polluting its groundwater and environs with toxic chemicals. The massacre...left 12 people dead and more than 60 others injured..."

*****       

History Shows Invasion of Russia Would Be "Military Nightmare"

"The Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) recently examined the most difficult countries in the world to invade, which include Russia, Switzerland, and New Zealand. The paper said an invasion of Russia would become a 'military nightmare' for foreign armed forces. While SvD did not define who precisely that enemy would be, our suspicions point to the countries intertwined with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)."

*****     

Can Resurrected Indian Country Today Maintain Editorial Independence?

"SCRAPPY AND RESILIENT as the population it covers, a reinvented Indian Country Today recently announced its return after a nine-month hiatus...(but) ICT’s comeback brings with it concerns for the publication’s editorial independence."

*****      

Despite JesuNazi Hate-Mongering, Support for Gay Marriage Rises to 67% 

"Sixty-seven percent of Americans support same-sex marriage -- the highest level in Gallup's trend. In each of the past three annual polls, Gallup has recorded three-percentage point increases among Americans who say same-sex marriages should be legally valid. The current figure is up 40 percentage points from the 27 percent who supported gay marriage when Gallup first polled on the question in 1996."

*****      

Georgians Pick First-Ever Black Gubernatorial Nominee

"Stacey Abrams...became the first Black nominee for governor in Georgia by either party."

*****   

Two Petitions from UltraViolet: (Please Sign Each One)

"The Trump administration is about to literally BAN the word abortion from the doctor's office. Yes, you read that right. For clinics and hospitals that accept dollars from the Title X program--the nation's program for affordable birth control and reproductive health care--doctors, nurses, and other health care providers would be banned from providing, counseling on, or referring any patient for an abortion. Even if it was needed to protect a woman's health or save her life. Even if she asked."

    *

"Did you know that Target, which boasts a family-friendly brand, provides employees who've just given birth just two weeks of paid leave? It's neither enough to recover from childbirth or medically advisable to keep a newborn away from her mother. This year, big companies like Starbucks, CVS Pharmacy, and Walmart caved to organized public pressure and are now allowing their employees meaningful paid time off to take care of their newborns. Combined, that's millions of people finally gaining access to essential parental leave time. If we push Target, the second largest retail employer in the United States, to follow, we can win paid family leave for hundreds of thousands more people..."

*****

Last Words: a Flicker of Optimism in This Darkest of All Human Eras

"Thousands of teachers and students are walking out of schools, marching in the streets, and raising their hands and signs in protest against the war on education. Most recently, South Carolina has joined the wave of teachers' protests and strikes taking place across the nation. In the age of illiberal democracy and the growing fascism of the Trump administration, the unimaginable has once again become imaginable as teachers inspired and energized by a dynamic willingness to fight for their rights and the rights of their students are exercising bold expressions of political power. The power of collective resistance is being mounted in full force against a neoliberal logic that unabashedly insists that the rule of the market is more important than the needs of teachers, students, young people, the poor and those deemed disposable by those with power in our society. Teachers are tired of being relentless victims of a casino capitalism..." 

LB/26 May 2018

  -30-

 

 

*****   *****   *****   *****  *****          

How Soon Will Imperial Warmongering Bring on the Apocalypse?

"The countries of the West are effectively heading for war with Russia but relatively few among the public seem to know or even care...With the reckless neoconservative warmonger John Bolton now part of the Trump administration, it seems we could be hurtling towards major war much faster than previously thought...Most of the public remains blissfully ignorant of the psy-ops being directed at them through the corporate media." See also: "a twenty-first-century version of the Cold War (with dangerous new twists) has begun and hardly anyone has even noticed." And this: "Russia is the only country that has put its military forces in the way of a U.S. program of regime change—indirectly in Ukraine, where Russia would not get out of the way, and directly in Syria..." Comment: the text mentions the offshoring of production facilities -- a perfect way to move manufacturing outside the U.S., so that when the country is rendered uninhabitable by retaliatory Russian and Chinese thermonuclear bombs, the Capitalists' losses will be minimal. And of course We the Surplus People will all be dead or dying. Not to worry, folks; its just Ayn Rand moral imbecility in action, with a big boost from apocalyptic JesuNazism as well. 

*****           

Is Blaming Russia for Skripal Poisoning a Warmongers' Hoax?

"It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that the claims of the Conservative government of Theresa May charging Russia with responsibility for the poisoning of the Skripals are fabrications." See also: Scientists at the U.K.’s Porton Down military laboratory have not identified Russia as the source of the nerve agent used in the alleged attempted assassination of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia...(the) admission confirms that the British establishment is guilty of a criminal hoax, surpassing even that of the dodgy “intelligence” dossier manufactured to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003...(Meanwhile) the U.S. and British media have been almost silent on (this development)." And this: "The United Kingdom unknowingly admitted that its government has been lying..."

*****               

Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine Hides Israeli Atrocities

"Major American media outlets, led by the New York Times, are treating the Israeli military’s mass killing and wounding of unarmed, peaceful Palestinian protesters in Gaza as a non-event." See also: "... you will search in vain for a statement condemning this or the previous Israeli massacres in Gaza from the Congressional Black Caucus or for the most part, its individual members."

*****            

Democrats Signal Tacit Approval of Trump's Anti-Immigrant Pogrom

"Without any opposition from the Democratic Party and little attention in the corporate media, President Donald Trump and his fascist advisors are quietly carrying out the most dramatic rightwing shift in US immigration policy in a century. They are laying the basis for mass roundups and the brutalization of hundreds of thousands of immigrants in an expanding network of internment camps nationwide."

*****          

Martial Law on the U.S. Borders -- and Maybe in Legal Pot States Too?

"President Donald Trump’s announcement...that the government will deploy the military to the US-Mexico border is a threat to the safety of undocumented immigrants and a fundamental attack on the democratic rights of the entire population...the deployment of the military on U.S. soil to arrest or deter immigrants raises the specter of martial law..." Update 5 April: "Should President Donald Trump follow through on his plan to deploy the National Guard to the southern border to deter migration from Mexico and Central America, he won't be able to count on Oregon's 5,800 soldiers." Comment: this Trump/Pence Regime ploy also mobilizes troops that could be used for Nazi-sized mass arrests, the regime's only option if it is to terminate legal marijuana.

*****                 

Trump's Expanding Propaganda Machine Is Bill Clinton's Brainchild

"...the engine of Donald Trump's propaganda machine was constructed by none other than Bill Clinton. In 1996, Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act...allowing a single entity to own as much as 35 percent of market share...(if) the far-right Sinclair Broadcasting Group...is successful in its acquisition of the Tribune Media Company, that number could climb to 72 percent." See also: "Sinclair has already forced its stations to air commentary...described by more than one observer as 'Orwellian'...(that) makes explicit the corporation’s efforts to undermine trust in the press." Comment: Seattle's KOMO, cited in the linked text, is a Sinclair property. 

*****             

Supreme Court Says It's OK for Cops to Gun Down Innocents

"The US Supreme Court established an interpretation of qualified immunity this week that effectively grants police legal impunity to use lethal force at will." See also: "The Supreme Court...shielded a police officer from being sued for shooting an Arizona woman...four times outside her home because she was seen carrying a large knife...Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in dissent the victim did not threaten the police or a friend who was standing nearby."

*****          

The Race Hatred That Killed Stephon Clark Defines the United States   

"Stephon Clark died as did black people who died at the hands of Ku Klux Klan raiders during the Reconstruction era, as did thousands of blacks lynched over the course of decades, as did so many killed in dozens of massacres carried out by white people between the Civil War and the 1920s." See also: "on the police murder of Stephon Clark and the reverberations of this barbaric act in the city and around the country."  Comment: emphatically recommended reading.

*****      

At Least Seven States Intend to Felonize Environmental Activism

"Efforts to prosecute environmental activists with felony or eco-terrorism charges...are coming to a head in Louisiana and Minnesota, where newly introduced bills seek to make it a felony to plan to trespass, damage, or disrupt pipeline operations — even if the individuals didn’t physically participate or go through with the action. See also: "in the wake of the massive protest movement at Standing Rock...at least seven states have introduced or passed (such) legislation."

*****          

Michigan City Maliciously Multiplies Misery of Its Poison Water Victims

"The ‘fix’ for Flint (Michigan) promised by politicians never came, instead residents face a final indignity – residents’ water supply is being cut off for unpaid bills for water that made them sick." See also: "More than 17,000 Detroit households face having their water turned off as the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) resumes mass water service shutoffs to city homes this month."  Comment: two more examples of moral imbecility -- i.e., Capitalism -- in genocidal action.

*****             

Lest We Forget: MLK Was Slain for Denouncing War and Capitalism

"April 4 mark(ed) the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support the struggle of African-American sanitation workers for decent wages and human dignity." See also Cornel West: "In this brief celebratory moment of King’s life and death we should be highly suspicious of those who sing his praises yet refuse to pay the cost of embodying King’s strong indictment of the US empire, capitalism and racism in their own lives." And this: "Because he took on those...powerful economic forces that dominated politics in this land, they killed him." Plus this corrective history from Black Agenda Report:  "All 100 of Columbus (Georgia) Black churches shut their doors on Dr. King, rejecting any outside interference in their long accommodation with white supremacy."  

*****

Will the Plutocrats Restore 21-Year-Old Voting Age to Stifle Protests?

"The result (of ongoing student protests) may be sweeping changes to legislation in various states...(not) gun laws...but rather laws that will make it more difficult for young Americans to vote." Comment: I frankly would not be surprised to see an effort to raise the voting age back to 21. Moreover — given the many polls that document younger voters’ growing preference for socialism and hostility to capitalism — I suspect the corporate Democrats will be eager collaborators with the Republicans. Nor would I be surprised were the corporate parties to collaborate on presenting younger voters with a genuine devil’s bargain: raising the purchase age for all firearms to 21 as a trade-off for restoration of the higher voter-eligibility age.

*****

The "One Nation Under God" Declares War on Sex Workers

"With Congress passing the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, many sex workers are worried they’ll be forced to go back on the streets...SESTA has already begun to (criminalize) ways in which sex workers communicate online: shared resources, communal bad date lists, and sex worker-only threads." Comment: Christian theocracy in action. But how many times must that be said before we the people get our heads out of our arses and wake up to the fact we're the ones being nailed to crosses? 

*****   

Facebook Begrudgingly Admits Near 100% Exposure to Data Thieves

"Buried in Facebook's announcement that Cambridge Analytica had improperly gathered data from up to 87 million users—rather than the previously reported 50 million—was the stunning admission that 'malicious actors' exploited the social networking site's search features to collection information from 'most' of its 2 billion users. Comment: when the hell are we going to wake up to the fact the primary purpose of social media -- indeed of the entire Internet -- is to facilitate total surveillance by the secret police and all the other definitively hostile agencies that serve our Capitalist overlords? Stop and think: given what we know of the moral imbecility and infinite malevolence of Capitalism and Capitalist governance, why else would the Internet and any of its social-media spinoffs ever have been invented, much less opened to public access?

*****                       

Aggressive Teenage Misogyny Making British Schools Unsafe for Females

"...sexual harassment has been 'normalised' in adolescent culture... (with the result that) schools are no longer safe for girls... 'upskirting' - where photographs are taken up girls’ skirts without their knowledge - has led to 'girls wearing shorts under their skirts so that [boys] are not going to find anything.'"

*****       

McDonald's Shafts Workers and Taxpayers, Withholds Promised Pay Hike

"McDonald’s failure to deliver on wage increase promises...costs taxpayers roughly $1.2 billion because of the employees’ dependence on social safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid to help cover costs that their wages cannot." See also: "...settlement of a landmark case against McDonald’s at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) deals a blow to Fight for $15’s union ambitions, widening the chasm between the campaign’s astonishingly successful wage demand and its faltering union aspirations."

*****     

The Genocidal Abandonment of Puerto Rico Claims Another Victim

"Months later, without running power or water, Hector Ramon Ortiz’s business remained closed. He struggled to reopen, and failed, every week...Ortiz is one of 236 Puerto Ricans who killed themselves in 2017... His death also belongs to a growing number of suicides on the island that increased by 55 percent in the last four months of 2017 following Hurricane Maria, compared to the same period in 2016."

*****      

Hedges Reveals How Guaranteed Annual Income is Capitalist Scam

"A number of the reigning oligarchs...are calling for a guaranteed basic income...But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in Silicon Valley, that the world these oligarchs have helped create is so lopsided that future consumers, plagued by job insecurity, substandard wages, automation and crippling debt peonage, will (otherwise) be unable to pay for the products and services offered by the big corporations."

 

*****   *****   ***** 

Striking Teachers Hope to End Austerity's War on Public Schools, Students

"The (teachers') rebellion has caused The New York Times to worriedly comment about a 'wildfire' of strikes by teachers who are using social media to 'organize and act outside the usual parameters of traditional unionism.'" See also: "Teachers in the US and internationally are demanding the restoration of (funds cut) over the last decade and an end to the corporate-driven campaign to privatize and dismantle public education." And this: "...striking teachers...are taking a stand  not only about their own financial situation, but also about the conditions of their students, their schools, and their communities." 

 

 

*****   *****   *****          

Last word: Metaphors as Mechanisms of Transformation

"Emerging psychological research tells us that something as simple as a single metaphor can have consequences for how we think. They can also be powerful tools in the hands of those looking to shape our opinions." Comment: vital information, especially as a sequel to George Orwell's groundbreaking essay "Politics and the English Language." 

LB/5 April 2018   

  -30-

 

*****   *****  *****  *****  *****      

Growing 99% Militance Terrifies the 1% and Its Ruling Class Vassals

(Important Notice: given the reawakening of U.S. Working Class consciousness and the increasing violence of the JesuNazi/fascist response, I am once again going to attempt publishing Dispatches on a twice-weekly basis, with projected publication days late Thursday (to accommodate the newest material from Black Agenda Report) and late Saturday (to include material withheld until late Friday in the regime's hope of it being obscured by weekend distractions). I don't know if I will be able to continue this schedule, as when I attempted it last year, it was constantly interrupted by other obligations. However, the most time-consuming of those obligations is no more. This was the editing, writing, photographing and designing of a monthly newsletter for the senior housing complex where I live, but the newsletter has since been killed by lack of printing funds, which in effect gains me all those days to work on Dispatches -- enough time, I hope, to make this twice-weekly schedule permanent.--LB.)

*****              

"In the wake of the unions’ shutting down of a nine-day strike by 33,000 West Virginia public school employees on 6 March, there are growing calls for strikes and protests by teachers and other sections of the Working Class throughout the United States, which are threatening to break free from the control of the trade unions...placing (workers) in direct conflict with the entire Ruling Class and the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties." Comment: the question -- ultimately the only question in terms of the revolutionary potential of U.S. workers' new-found militance -- is whether the Ruling Class and their political allies (who include the JesuNazis and the fascists in general), will be able to resurrect an identity politics toxic enough to head off the 99 Percenters'  evolving solidarity.

*****                                               

"American 'progressives' are divided over the politics of class and identity...(but) can the demands of class warfare and identity politics be reconciled into a common political program that speaks to the vast majority of Americans?" Comment: as I said in the foregoing.

*****                       

Fukushima Continues to Poison the Oceans and Ultimately the Whole World

The (Fukushima) crisis is ongoing...radioactively contaminated water is still pouring into the Pacific Ocean (permanently contaminating and altering sea life which bio-accumulates and bio-concentrates the radioactivity)...two principle government and corporate lies demonstrate how bad faith brought about the worst reactor accident in history. Comment: Capitalism in (typically apocalyptic) action. And just for starters, why we should never again dare eat seafood. 

*****                     

Meanwhile, the JesuNazi Onslaught Continues Unabated

"(with) the most far-reaching and sinister implications for democratic rights within the United States...Google, Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies, in close coordination with the government, have moved extremely rapidly to censor content online through the manipulation of search results and news feeds." Comment: thus -- in response to our increasing solidarity and militance --  the One Percenters impose on us a regimen of zero-tolerance oppression so savage it will make all previous tyrannies seem mild in comparison.  Wake up, people; just as I have argued for decades, the Internet was never the electronic freedom road it was portrayed as being. Indeed it is only now fulfilling its always-intended purpose of sustaining Capitalism by total surveillance and total censorship.     

*****          

"Trump is giving (the Christian theocracy movement) what it wants, so they are willing to overlook his many moral flaws and reckless behavior." Comment: informative reading, though as always the liberals underestimate the magnitude of the JesuNazi threat.

*****          

"God Wills It...The US may be sinking ever deeper into the moral morass of the Trump era, but if you think the (theological) malevolence of this period began with him, think again."

*****        

"The (federal) Title X program, which has provided family planning services to low-income Americans since 1970, is under threat from the Trump administration...(which is) funding...unscientific and ineffective family planning programs." 

*****                

"Reproductive justice activist Alejandra Pablos has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in what immigrant rights advocates are calling an act of 'retaliation' for protesting in Virginia earlier this year." 

*****                

"A recently leaked trove of internal communications among white supremacists show that many believed members of the police and military are on their side."

*****            

"Hillary Clinton’s favorite think tank is still trying to make sure single payer health care never happens...(unveiling) their counterfeit, sound-alike health care plan, dubbed 'Medicare Extra for All,' whose sole purpose is to distract and confuse a public that is demonstrably 'ready' for single payer." Comment: this is the best analysis I've yet seen on the Democratic (sic) Party's newest Big Lie.

*****        

"So it stands, in 2018, that instead of a sensible 'go home' option, America’s generals and civilian policymakers have handed us the worst of all worlds...Forever war." 

*****                

And Once Again, "Forever War" Brings Its Deadly Consequences Home

"A hostage situation (at a veterans' home) in Northern California ended Friday evening with the discovery of four people dead...the gunman and (his) three women...hostages."

*****       

Some Fascists Leaving Congress; Is It Just More "Change We Can Believe In"?

"Congress will be a very different place in 2018, no matter what the Democrats manage to accomplish, due to the departures of several seemingly eternal conservatives."

*****       

Book Review: How Fascists Use Music to Seduce Ignorant White Youth

"Nancy Love's 2016 book Trendy Fascism (State University of New York)...(is) an important work to make sense of how today's fascists have made significant use of song and lyric to attract youth. Comment: as is so often the case with such vital analytical tools, the book is censored by price: $85 for a hard-cover volume, $22.95 for the paperback.

*****                  

Relevant History: the Inspiring Example of Edward R. Murrow

"'We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,' said Edward R. Murrow as he denounced Sen. Joseph McCarthy on CBS television. 'We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.' Today, with unreason having a time of it...we need Murrow more than ever."  Comment: the URL includes a total replay of Morrow's breathtakingly courageous, history-making broadcast, a pivotal event I urge us all to witness.

LB/9-10 March 2018.

  -30-