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INTRODUCTION

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

For More Information...

Links relevant to Introduction

Fire Survivors

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

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

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

Graffiti: a Sampler

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

Faces of the Fight

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

RELEVANT WEBSITES

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

18 March 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously I would choose the latter were I able. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****          

(I). Our Mother Earth as an Abused Woman

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

In the Deepest Ocean Trenches, Animals Eat Plastic

Iconic Forests Reaching Climate Tipping Points in American West

Nothing resolved as Flint water crisis nears fifth anniversary

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

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

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

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

Flint water crisis claims its youngest Legionnaires’ victim to date

Measles outbreak in Ukraine claims eight lives

Popular Brands Of Beer And Wine Found To Contain Glyphosate Weedkiller

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

Game Over? Report Card on Our Planet’s Environment

 

(II). Dithering as Denial

The Environmental Implications Of A Trump Presidency

Dianne Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal

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

Top Democrats Are Enabling Climate Catastrophe

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

Democrats Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns

 

(III). The Apocalypse Is Already Upon Us 

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

American Exceptionalism: The Naked Truth

The New York Times Won't Stop Pushing Crank Economics

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

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

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

Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All

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

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

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

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

The Most Harrowing Revelation of the Cohen Hearing

Corporate and “Progressive” Democrats Threaten Medicare Itself

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

Joe Biden Has a History of Racist Comments

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

Immigrants endure inhuman conditions at ICE prison in New Jersey

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

Torture Fans and War Criminals Determine US Foreign Policy

Pelosi dismisses efforts to impeach President Trump

Free dental clinic draws hundreds in Nashville, Tennessee

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

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

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

Nearly 200 Immigrants in Texas Detention Facilities Have Mumps

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

Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America

No charges for Sacramento police officers who murdered Stephon Clark

Fascism by Another Name

The Global Assault on Indigenous Peoples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephon Clark Killed Twice by U.S. imperialism

President’s Budget Targets Key Health Care Programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job

The criminalization of environmental protest in Trump’s America

 

(IV). Their God Demands They Rape Our Mother5

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

Giving The Bomb To Saudi Arabia's Dr. Strangelove

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

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

Southern Baptist Convention Grapples With Sexual Abuse Report

Cuba's Evangelical Alliance Leads Crusade Against Gay Marriage

With Trump, White Protestantism Hits Rock Bottom

United Methodists Fracture: LGBT Plan Rejected - The Atlantic

The Cult of the Good Christian Woman

Anti-Vaxx Mobs: Doctors Face Harassment Campaigns on Facebook

Revealed: AmazonSmile Helps Fund Anti-Vaccine Groups

Abortion Restrictions Sweep Through GOP-Held Legislatures

Saudi Women Activists Stand Trial in Criminal Court

Trump Administration Rolls Out Implementation Plan for Transgender Military Ban

The Kansas Bomb Plot: What Has the Media Missed?

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

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

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

The shadowy network shaping Trump’s anti-immigration policies

The EPA and Evangelical (Anti)Environmentalism

Trump: The most anti-science president ever?

 

(V). A Few Vernal Sprouts of Wishful Thinking

Climate Change Could End Washington’s Global Dominion

FOCUS: A Future Without Fossil Fuels?

How long can we keep dodging nuclear war? 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse

Researchers: Violence, War And Climate Change Are Linked

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

It’s the Green New Deal or Else

Extinction Rebellion: “Green” capitalism versus world socialism

The Youth Climate Strike and the fight against global warming

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

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

 

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

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

How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism

Joining the dots: women, environmentalism and neoliberalism

What is Neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility

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

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action

The Secret Threat That Makes Corporations More Powerful Than Countries

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

Our Mania For Hope Is A Curse

In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve

 

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

How to Spin Wool (with Pictures)

Enjoying Horseback Archery Adventures of the Year 2017

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

Finding Freedom in a Frontier Life 

Making a Blacksmith Shop with No Power Tools

Western Science Is Finally Catching Up To Traditional Knowledge

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/25 February-15 March 2019

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14 January 2019

The New Year Births a Hefty Anthology of Provocative Reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

Please-Read Background Material Essential for Perspective

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

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

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

(snip)

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

(snip)

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

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

***

“Two Populisms, Not One”

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

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

(snip)

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

***

“The Working Class and the Environmental Crisis”

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

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

(snip)

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

***

"The Political Economy of Fascism”

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

***

“Undemocratic by Design”

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

“The Election Circus Begins”

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

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

*****

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

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

(snip)

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

Four Vital Essays from Black Agenda Report

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

“Raising the Bar on a Green New Deal”

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

***

“Ocasio-Cortez, Socialism, War and Austerity”

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

***

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

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

***

“The Diversity Hustle”

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

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

*****

Plus Even More Relevant News and Analysis

“Marching Towards a Fighting Women’s Movement”

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

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

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

(snip)

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

*****

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

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

*****

“Five Forces Driving the Rise of Fascism in 2019”

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

“Bordering on Fascism: Scholars Reflect on Dangerous Times”

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

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

*****

“Who or What Brought Down Dag Hammarskjöld?”

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

*****

“News Outlets Reveal Their Utter Contempt for the Incarcerated”

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

*****

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

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

*****

And Now We Close With Maybe the Biggest Story Ever

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

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

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

LB/13 January 2019

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Posted at 04:45 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Feminism, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Humanitarianism, Identity Politics, Immigration, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Science, Spirituality, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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31 December 2018

Government Lockout: Neoliberal Moral Imbecility Wins Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Astounding.

*****

How Democrats Intend to Suppress the Sanders Campaign

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

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

*****

Vengeful Republicans Kill Minimum Wage Hikes, Voter-Rights Expansions

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

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

*****

NYC Steam Plant Explosion Looks Like Imagined Onset of Alien Invasion

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

*****

Texas Persecutes Teacher-of-the-Year for Lesbianism

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

*****

Ralph Nader on Why We Desperately Need Canadian-Style Healthcare

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

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

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

*****

Eight LGBTQ Struggles the Mainstream Media Refused to Cover

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

*****

How New Jersey's Bergen County Ends Chronic Homelessness

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

LB/30 December 2018

-30-

 

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

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16 December 2018

U.S. Journalists Begin to Rediscover Their Moral Imperative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

***

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

*****

Four Texas Abortion Cases That Could Kill Roe v. Wade

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

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

 

*****

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

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

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

*****

A Cushy New Job Rewards Official Charged in Flint Water Deaths

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

“Is California About to Execute an Innocent Man?”

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

*****

French Yellow Vest Movement Acquiring Real Revolutionary Flavor

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

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

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

*****

A First Nations Astronomical Clock Older Than Stonehenge

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

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

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

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

LB/16 December 2018

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

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09 December 2018

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

With One Possibly Inspiring Environmental Report at the Very End

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

Teaching White Supremacy to Proletarians as Prelude to Total ChristoNazification

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

*****

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

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

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

          *****    

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

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

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

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

         *****          

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

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

*****

And Why Even the Most Minimal Reforms Are Likewise Doomed

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

*****

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

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

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

*****   

Capitalist Politicians Using Tax Cuts to Kill Few Remaining Social Services

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

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

***** 

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

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

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

*****

How Our Overlords' Respond to Tiny Expansions of Revolutionary Consciousness

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

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

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

***

Which Makes This Horror Story from New Jersey Especially Relevant

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

LB/9 December 2018

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Posted at 11:39 PM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Feminism, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Identity Politics, Immigration, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Transportation, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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25 November 2018

Bitter Bites: Reports on Capitalism's Happy Holiday Horrors

New Research Proves Most U.S. Whites Are Already Incurably Nazified

SOME READERS SCOFF at my oft-repeated assertion the Pew Foundation's post-Katrina polling is definitive proof fully 77 percent of the white Christian U.S. electorate is at least tacitly racist.

But now my 77-percent estimate is confirmed by a new study that defines the U.S. as probably the most viciously racist nation since Nazi Germany.

Hence – because the white Christian hatred of Jews and people of color is the epicentral malevolence of Nazism – I believe it entirely accurate to refer to these homegrown (and

NEWS REPORTS formerly published weekly in Dispatches are now published daily in the Tacoma (Harry Bridges Chapter) Facebook page of the Communist Labor Party. Most of these reports were suppressed or significantly downplayed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM), the world's first privately owned, for-profit version of the Nazi German Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Please scroll down this (slow-loading) FB page at least once per day for vital new information. Thank you.

 

 

probably home-schooled) bigots as “incipiently Nazi” though the vast majority of them conceal their malignancy save at critical moments.

Here is an excerpt from the study:

Evil disguised as common sense is as American as Thanksgiving, and now we have research to back it up...(in) Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. (Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Míriam Juan-Torres, Tim Dixon et al; More in Common: 2018). They asked...why is America so polarized?... the Hidden Tribes study clearly shows that this country is profoundly right-wing and segregated. Millions of Americans disguise their enabling of corrupt policies and our slide toward being an authoritarian society run by the rich by claiming to be disgusted, befuddled, and turned off to politics. Silence is consent. And the study shows a majority of people in the United States are remaining silent about Trump’s white nationalist horror show.

And here are two excerpts from a review of a book that (perhaps unintentionally) supplements the Hidden Tribes findings by examining the Capitalist miasma of socioeconomic despair, toxic ignorance and morally imbecilic Ayn Rand anti-humanitarianism from which USian ChristoNazism has – like its German forefather and its Manifest Destiny grandfather – grown so rapaciously.

How Fascism Works: the Politics of Us and Them (Jason Stanley; Random House: 2018)...Fascism’s taproot, (Stanley) finds, is harsh socioeconomic disparity...Particularly perceptive is Stanley’s intimately related reflection on how the political culture of pseudo-democratic duplicity and disingenuousness that is generated by modern capitalist inequality and plutocracy creates space for fascistic politicians who...signal authenticity by standing for division and conflict without apology. Such candidates, Stanley writes...come off to many jaded voters as “a breath of fresh air in a political culture that seems dominated by real and imagined hypocrisy.” Fascist politicos’ “open rejection of democratic values” is “taken as political bravery, as a signal of authenticity.”  

Stanley is especially critical of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: 

(Obama's) progressive-sounding "hope” and “change” policy bailed out and protected the Wall Street financial institutions that collapsed the U.S. and global economy...offered no remotely comparable bailout for working people and the poor...passed health insurance reform that only the big insurance and drug companies could truly love...abandoned his promise to...relegalize union organizing (and)...offer(ed) bigger cuts to Social Security and Medicare than the right...had dared to demand... 

Then came the Hillary “Goldman Sachs” Clinton campaign...undermined further when she called Trump’s “heartland” “flyover country” supporters a “basket of deplorables” in a sneering comment (one that accurately reflected her aristocratic progressive-neoliberal worldview) to rich Manhattan campaign donors.  

Nevertheless – as the reviewer makes clear – Stanley ignores how the neoliberal Democratic (sic) Party has collaborated with the Republicans in the creation of a single Capitalist party disguised by two names and already notorious for its New Gilded Age of “spectacular” inequality.  

Based on this review, Stanley also seems to ignore the seething hatreds – of Nature, of femaleness, of people of color, of LGBTQ people, indeed of any sort of alleged nonconformity – that I regard as the first cause and ultimate vector of ChristoNazism's terrifying momentum.  

Yes, Capitalism's socioeconomic horrors are indisputably amongst the causes of the Christonazi conquest of the United States and the rise of Nazism and fascism elsewhere.  

But the X factor – the factor that determines whether one becomes a ChristoNazi (or any other form of fascist) – is a depth and magnitude of anti-humanitarian hatefulness so extreme it is utterly irremediable.  

Which I believe is the defining characteristic of a newly emergent human subspecies: call it Homo sapiens horribilis – literally “consciously horrible human.”  

Whether the first cause of Nazism and fascism is the U.S.-defining legacy of 526 years of murderous white supremacist hatefulness or the socioeconomic savagery that defines Capitalism, the growing roster of its victims is making its reality undeniable even here in the Disneyworld of Self-Delusion.  

Here is a prime example:  

“I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …”

This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.

Poverty—both individual and social—is a policy, not an accident, and not some kind of natural law. These are deliberate choices about the allocation of resources. They are eminently undo-able by modest exercises of political power, although if the state- and city-level Democratic leaders of New York and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally left-wing party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social wealth to an extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women.

And another:  

What we know today is that America’s political and corporate elite would rather see humanity end within a century than disavow its imperialistic and self-aggrandizing ambitions. Their obsession is to rule to the bitter end, a bitter end hastened by their obsession to remain in control. America does not have a robust permanent national commitment to contain, ameliorate and possibly reverse climate change and ecological deterioration because that would necessarily require the overthrow of Imperial America’s capitalist elite and its classist and racist mentality.

And yet another:

With a black-ink pen, (Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions') initialed...a document formalizing the terms of what will be one of his abiding legacies: a Justice Department disengaged from its role in investigating and reforming police departments that repeatedly violate the civil rights of the people they’re sworn to protect...His memo places significant hurdles in the way of DOJ entering into consent decrees with state and city governments. It mandates closer control by the Justice Department’s most senior political appointees, requires sunset dates for consent decrees, and limits what the DOJ can require of state and city agencies...Current and former Justice Department officials note that the new policy also applies to other areas of the department’s work, such as efforts to curb pollution. They worry its effects will be most profound and far-reaching in those realms.

Meanwhile Hillary – no doubt in preparation for her next effort to capture the USian emperorship – now unleashes her inner Goldwater Girl and joins the ChristoNazis in blaming immigrants-of-color for all the world's apocalyptic ills:

In an interview with The Guardian, the 2016 presidential candidate...suggested Europe should end its attempts to resettle the world’s 25.4 million refugees whose home countries have become unlivable due to war, unrest, and poverty—frequently thanks to actions by the U.S. and its European allies...Clinton’s remarks echoed Trump’s frequent lies about the burden Central American immigrants have placed on the United States.  

Given the ever-more-evident Christo-Nazification of this “one nation under god,” I am hardly surprised Hillary the snickering sadist is again brandishing her moral twinhood with Ilsa Koch in an effort to convince the electorate she is as Trumpian as Trump himself.  

Nor am I surprised the white male Christian god's Prosperity Gospel government has abandoned Camp Fire California just as it abandoned the mostly-minority populations of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the entire Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil-spill disaster, and Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricane Maria. 

The Camp Fire, the deadliest in state history, took ruthless aim at older people. Paradise, the Northern California town erased by fire, was largely a retirement community, with a quarter of the population 65 and older. The fire’s death toll was 81 at last count, and nearly 1,000 people still unaccounted for — most of them seniors. The sheriff’s list of the missing includes many in their 70s and 80s. 

The response of government officials, Democrat and Republican, has been to downplay the extent of the disaster while seeking to deflect attention from those responsible. On Sunday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke absurdly declared that unnamed “environmental radicals” are to blame for preventing good forest management. This followed Trump’s tour of the state with Democratic Party officials, which was characterized by empty platitudes and mutual declarations of support.

But even when we add the equally unsurprising revelations that two of the United States' most relentlessly oppressive characteristics – the industrial world's most socioeconomically genocidal healthcare and the developed world's worst mass transport – are intentionally malicious expressions of racist hatefulness – I nevertheless found the following (which I did not know of until yesterday), to be painfully wrenching:  

I have long joked that “kill a tree for Christmas” or "kill a tree for Jesus" should be the midwinter slogans of the white male Christians, whose bottomless misogynistic vindictiveness is as much directed at Mother Earth as it is at femaleness in general. But I must confess its newest notional national variant, "torture a turkey for Thanksgiving,” shocked even my own jaded crime-reporter's sensibilities:

That is what the Yellville Turkey Trot festival is famous and infamous for, you see: living, breathing, squawking birds getting lobbed out of a low-flying aircraft.

Holidays and the rites and rituals by which they are celebrated are of course a primary element in how a people defines itself. 

As I said, H. sapiens horribilis.

LB/26 November 2018 

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Posted at 08:50 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Humanitarianism, Immigration, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Transportation, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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19 November 2018

Without a Revolutionary Agenda, Hope Is Only Another Opiate

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

IMG_1788 - Copy    Alex Hyland, as talented a teacher as ever lived, demonstrates the heartfelt patience that should inspire us all. 
(Photo by Loren Bliss © 2017)

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex himself, however, was anything but trivial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

 NEWS REPORTS formerly published weekly in Dispatches are now published daily in the Tacoma (Harry Bridges Chapter) Facebook page of the Communist Labor Party. Most of these reports were suppressed or significantly downplayed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM), the world's first privately owned, for-profit version of the Nazi German Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Please scroll down this (slow-loading) FB page at least once per day for vital new information. Thank you.

 

 

 

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***** 

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

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

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

*****

Cops Kill Elderly Man to Enforce Forcible Disarmament Decree

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

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

*****

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

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

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

*****

Soviet Scientists Were First to Identify Apocalyptic Climate Change

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

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

*****

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

Quoth Hedges:

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

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

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

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

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

LB/18-19 November 2018

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Posted at 07:48 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Transportation, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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29 October 2018

Is It Class Struggle? Or Is It Two Subspecies in Mortal Combat?

Our Fight for Survival Goes Beyond Proletarians Versus Plutocrats; It
Is Now a Doomsday War between Humanitarians and Moral Imbeciles

THE MARXIAN CONCEPT of class struggle was for many decades our most powerful tool of consciousness-raising and liberation.

It was understandable enough -- and therefore compelling enough -- to encourage widespread rebellion in the 19th Century and to fuel successful revolutions in the 20th Century. It also terrified the Capitalists into allowing a number of social-democratic reform movements as well -- the New Deal most assuredly included. 

But now in the 21st Century -- ironically just as We the People are awakening to the fact our Mother Earth is challenging our entire species to either abandon its ecocidal misogyny or become extinct -- we may need to re-think what class struggle is telling us.

That's because the enlightenment, solidarity and urgent call to action with which Marxism inspired the vast revolutionary and reformist majorities of yesteryear seem beyond the comprehension of all but a tiny minority today. 

An obvious and undeniably major part of our problem is the One Percenters' absolute mastery of propaganda and psychological warfare. Schooled by Josef Goebbels and his huckstering kindred, they have warped our minds with their profoundly seductive but ruinously divisive toxins of imposed ignorance, linguistic distortion and identity politics.

Now, brain-warped as we are by Capitalism's monstrous Big Lie of equal opportunity,  too many of us can scarcely fit class -- caste, actually -- into our notions of individual selfhood, much less into our collective expectations and demands.

In the past I have denounced these examples of our species' suicidal malfeasance as byproducts of how the Capitalists have dumbed down the formerly activist population of the United States into a hopelessly submissive Moron Nation -- the most apocalyptically ignorant realm of all the mentally enfeebled dunce-domains that rape our Mother Earth for fun and profit.

Yet now I think maybe we should look beyond what the One Percenters are doing to us and our planetary Motherland. Maybe we should instead be asking why the patriarchy's 6,000-year campaign of genocide1 -- the product of a tiny fraction2 of our species' lifespan --  has evolved into a campaign of undeniably terminal ecocide.

Marx, Engels and Lenin tell us the Capitalist Ruling Class behaves as it does because that is the present-day expression of the age-old self-protective momentum of tyrants -- an assessment with which it is surely difficult to disagree.

Meanwhile our own history reveals the notion of a "moral universe" that "bends toward justice" is naught but another variant of "change we can believe in": yet another Big Lie. It is this deception that sustains the self-betraying emotion we call "hope." It suborns our impulse to confront those alleged humans who prey upon us; it numbs us to the fact their boiled-frog ecocide is ultimately as deadly as an attack by rabid grizzly bears -- and it must therefore be battled accordingly.        

But why -- seemingly for the first time in our species' 200-thousand to 250-thousand-year experience -- have its tyrants become bipedal doomsday machines?

Might today's strife also be symptomatic of some hitherto unrecognized evolutionary division of our species into two warring subspecies -- humanitarians versus moral imbeciles? Homo sapiens humanitariensis versus Homo sapiens mala in sē.3 

The latter -- subspecies or not (and I am convinced they are a subspecies if not also a mutation) -- are now undeniably killing us all.

They have tabooed and suppressed the empathy and cooperative instincts that enabled our species to survive four ice ages and no one knows how many other long-term disasters. And now they are methodically replacing those instincts with exactly the same murderously acquisitive moral imbecility that characterizes trophy-hunting serial killers. Think Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer -- slayers no less possessed of  legal personhood than Monsanto and IBM -- or so rules the United States Supreme Court.

In other words, the moral imbecility that defines Homo sapiens mala in sē repudiates everything that defines the rest of us as fully human. Which argues for their existence as a subspecies if not also as a mutation.   

Moreover they have bred seemingly limitless mobs of humanoid puppets who are as gleefully predatory as the dictators, serial killers and mass murderers themselves, the latter three categories obviously the new subspecies' apex archetypes.

Meanwhile for all the rest of us it is as if one of the Pentagon's CBR4 warfare labs has -- after years of clandestine effort that no doubt began in some secret cellar on the outskirts of Berlin in 1936 or 1937 -- finally collected enough fossil DNA to bring the tyrannosaurs back to life as auxiliary infantrymen. 

But like the poison gas at Bhopal, the tyrannosaurs escaped from confinement.

And now these dread creatures are feeding on us in obedience to their breeders and their breeders' sadistic deity's scriptural mandate to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it" -- and as with that ill-fated city in Vietnam -- destroy the planet to save it for their god.

All this said, I hope it remains clear I am not disputing the reality of class war. Indeed I have it lived it in one form or another nearly all my life.

But I am suggesting what we define as class warfare has grown far broader (and often more complex) than its 19th Century name implies -- and that if it is to remain usefully compelling in the 21st Century, it must needs  be clarified,  expanded and given a more up-to-date, more descriptive label.  

I am also suggesting that Marx, Engels, Lenin et al -- none of whom could have recognized the scriptural Final Days as a blueprint for real-world apocalypse -- were seduced into a now-obviously excessive optimism by the very religions they repudiated.

Which leaves it up to us, Homo sapiens Humanitarienses, to transform our pessimism into the fuel we need for taking the next step -- lest Homo sapiens mala in sē complete their six-millennium effort to exterminate us all.

_______________                                                               
1Not the least because I see its predatory dynamics demonstrated in terminal form by the apocalyptic politics of present-day local, state, national and global governance, I accept the Gimbutas hypothesis -- of genocidal global conquest beginning about 6000 years ago by Indo-European nomads whose (unnatural) patriarchal doctrines mandated extermination of all (naturally) matrifocal humans -- as proven both by Ms. Gimbutas' relics and the historical logic of seemingly endless, ever-escalating patriarchal violence. 

2Assuming a 250, 000 year lifespan, 6000 years is a mere 1/42nd of it, 0.02 percent. 

3Most assuredly no Latin scholar, I followed the model of Homo sapiens Neanderthalensis to construct Homo sapiens humanitariensis. Naming our rival subspecies  Homo sapiens mala in sē -- "humans evil in themselves" -- required consulting the two Latin phrase books stashed amongst the 26 reference volumes I keep handy at my desk.

4CBR is a U.S. military acronym meaning Chemical, Biological and Radiological.

 *********                      

 

Exemplary News: First the Ugly, Next the Bad, Finally the Good

Fascist Death Squad Murders Columbian Women's Rights Activist
"Women's rights activist Maria Caicedo Muñoz was found dead in Rio Macay, Cauca department Friday. She was... kidnapped from her home in the municipality of Argelia, Cauca, (Columbia) by armed men, while her two daughters were tied." (This report was previously published on the Facebook page of the Communist Labor Party's Tacoma Chapter. It is included here for readers who do not normally peruse the CLP website.)

 ***

"Being Trans In America Was Already Scary. Now It’s Terrifying."
"A new federal order wouldn’t just deny civil rights protections to trans people. It would deny we exist altogether. I’m a trans woman, and I’m terrified. Already, on any given afternoon, I’m regularly and publicly catcalled, mocked, laughed at, and treated as an object of social disgust..."

 ***  

Technology Access Gap Leaves Millions of Students Struggling to Keep Up
"...lack of in-home internet access is an enormous problem for students in all 50 states. This has been corroborated by researchers at Pew Research who discovered that 17.5 percent of school children in grades 6 to 12 have ongoing difficulties completing school work due to a lack of internet access."

Comment: it's poverty -- the ever-worsening impoverishment deliberately inflicted on us by the H. s. mala subspecies -- that shoves Internet access out of reach for an ever-increasing number of households.  

*****  

 

Trump’s NLRB Just Quietly Ruled to Make Union Pickets Illegal
"An all-Republican panel of President Trump’s National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) recently ruled that janitors in San Francisco violated the law when they picketed in front of their workplace to win higher wages, better working conditions and freedom from sexual harassment in their workplace. The ruling could result in far-reaching restrictions on picketing that limit the ability of labor unions to put public pressure on management."

  ***                                  

"Disaster Waiting to Happen": Trump OKs Oil Drilling in Alaskan Seas
"Ignoring once more the existential necessity of keeping fossil fuels in the ground and transitioning to a global energy system powered by renewable sources, the Trump administration on Wednesday delivered another major victory for Big Oil by quietly approving a Texas company's plan to drill in federal Arctic waters six miles off the coast of Alaska."

Comment: such is H. s. mala in action, its relentlessly destructive behavior proof it is no longer fully human. 

   ***                                                   

The Sinister Reason the U.S. Persists in Waging Losing Wars
"If you ask — and few Americans do these days — why this country’s losing wars persist, the answer should be, at least in part: because there’s no accountability. The losers in those wars have seized control of our national narrative. They now define how the military is seen (as an investment, a boon, a good and great thing); they now shape how we view our wars abroad (as regrettable perhaps, but necessary and also a sign of national toughness); they now assign all serious criticism of the Pentagon to what they might term the defeatist fringe."

 *****                             

 

Two Spirits, One Heart, Five Genders 
"...all Native American societies acknowledged three to five gender roles: Female, male, Two Spirit female, Two Spirit male and transgendered...(but) Europeans and eventually Euro-Americans demanded all people conform to their prescribed two gender roles...(however) The Native American cultural pride revivals that began in the 1960s...brought about a new awareness of the Two Spirit tradition and has since inspired a gradual increase of acceptance and respect for gender variance within tribal communities."

   ***        

Call 1-844-WYT-FEAR: You're Scared! You're White! You're Probably A Racist!
"Because we've all likewise had (more than enough), The New York Times and Niecy Nash, actress and 'advocate for not calling 911 on black people for no goddamn reason,' took it one step further, partnering on a new infomercial and hotline, 1-844-WYT-FEAR, for white people 'feeling scared about a black or brown person in your proximity'- i.e., 'when it's not an emergency, just harassment.'"

   *** 

Muslim Groups Raising Substantial Funds for Synagogue Shooting Victims
"A crowdfunding campaign started by two Muslim groups has raised more than $55,000 for the victims of the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday...'The Muslim-American community extends its hands to help the shooting victims, whether it is the injured victims or the Jewish families who have lost loved ones,' the fundraising page reads. 'We wish to respond to evil with good, as our faith instructs us, and send a powerful message of compassion through action.'" 

Comment: Kudos to the Muslim groups. But I nevertheless must ask: what does it tell us about ourselves there is never such a massively diverse national outpouring of sympathy, empathy and helpfulness when the victims are people of color or LGBTQ people?  (Thanks to JP for alerting me to this story.)

    ***

Dog Scams McDonald’s Customers Out of Burgers by Pretending to Be a Stray
"A woman in Oklahoma City has resorted to dog-shaming after she caught her pet sneaking out at night to beg for hamburgers at a nearby McDonald’s." (Thanks to TigerLille1 for sending me this feel-good link.)

-- LB/28 October 2018

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Posted at 07:04 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Censorship, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, History, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Poor People, Religion, Science, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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15 October 2018

As Intended, Capitalism Makes Government Our Deadliest Foe

U.S. Freedom Dies Forever as Republicans and Democrats Weaponize Reagan's Biggest Big Lie into Our One "Self-Evident" National Truth

 Meanwhile Reality Compels Another Dispatches Format Change

NO, GOOD PEOPLE, ELECTIONS cannot restore humanitarian governance to the United States. 

Not now. Not ever -- not as long as our candidates are all chosen by our Capitalist overlords.

Yes, our most recent betrayal by the Democratic (sic) Party is obviously intended to help the Republicans by minimizing voter turnout next month. It's other purpose is tightening the already deadly ChristoNazi stranglehold on the national judiciary.

Now the only truly motivated voters will be the zealots themselves, the ChristoNazis and their secret Democratic [sic] allies, especially the forcible disarmament fanatics who want to render us defenseless in the face of the wildly escalating ChristoNazi threat.

In hideous truth, they're birds of a (proverbial) feather. The two groups are bound together by their hatreds.

The forcible disarmament cult is as much a hate group as any KuKluxKlavern -- and I have witnessed this firsthand. They despise all legal firearms owners with the same hurl-a-brick-through-your-window intensity the ChristoNazis aim at women and people of color.

But we real Leftists are the only ones they're reducing to compulsory pacifism and mandatory victimhood. As it is already, no one in the state of Washington can purchase a firearm -- any firearm -- without government approval. 

And now -- with the ChristoNazi takeover already emerging as the  most apocalyptic horror our species has ever contrived -- the forcible disarmament fanatics see their greatest opportunity. Once they win -- and it is obvious they're winning everywhere -- government at every level will be able to thoroughly investigate anyone who so much as inquires about firearms ownership. 

Which means, in the ChristoNazi Fourth Reich as the Original Nazi Third Reich, soon it's only the Nazis who will be allowed guns.    

All of this is predictable -- especially by anyone who knows history well enough to know that if there is any "arc of the moral universe," it most assuredly bends not toward toward justice but to ever-intensifying tyranny.

Obviously our ChristoNazi rulers want all of us except their own storm-troopers disarmed and thereby reduced to utter defenselessness, and just as obviously they are (again) using their Democratic (sic) puppets to make that happen. ` 

Meanwhile most of the rest of the population -- terrified by the fast approach of the which-side-are-you-on reality that defines revolution and civil war -- is in full retreat. They are cravenly flinging away their arms in the desperate hope their pathetic defenselessness will magically move our merciless conquerors to show them mercy. 

Moron Nation multiplying mindlessness.

But these are mere symptoms of the malignancy that is destroying us.

The real reason our elections are meaningless is that President Reagan's most outrageous Big Lie -- that government is the source of all our problems -- has become the nation's sole defining "self-evident" truth.

Indeed it has suppressed and replaced all those other "self-evident" truths cited by Thomas Jefferson as he wrote the Declaration of Independence. 

Our final subjugation -- and there were many such episodes beforehand -- began with the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963. It was then locked in place by an additional 11 years of governmemt-enabled murders.

In other words, Lyndon Banes Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon, Gerald Ford, James Earl Carter, Reagan, George Bush I, William Jefferson Clinton, George Bush II and Barack Obama are every bit as guilty as Donald Trump himself in the ChristoNazification of the United States. 

But given the true though hitherto-concealed purpose of the so-called "American Revolution"  -- a coup by slave-owners and their financiers in fear of British efforts to outlaw slavery -- it is doubtful any other outcome was possible.

As to its presidential perpe-traitors, they were of course "just following orders" -- specifically the commands of the bribemasters who own them.  

Here again we see how badness begets badness, whether one labels its momentum "cause-and-effect," as I do, or calls it by its popular name, "bad karma."  

That's why a global credo literally founded on the notion all femaleness is evil -- i.e., patriarchy -- can only beget the ultimate evil of our  own self-destruction.

Just as a nation founded by slave owners and ever afterward owned by their descendants can only become a nation of slaves.

Or just as the computer -- originally designed by IBM to grant the German Nazis maximum efficiency mass murder -- now fulfills its inherent momentum by granting our masters their first truly omnipotent overseer. Such is the total-surveillance mechanism against which we the people are eternally defenseless. 

In all such examples, the lesson is the same: in the ultimate sense, evil can only beget evil.

Or as Audrey Lorde so aptly put it, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those...who still define the master's house as their only source of support."

But we already know that even if we dare not say it aloud.  We live it every day. We can  no longer deny that what we were falsely conditioned to believe was "our" government has instead reduced us to but another of the world's innumerable Conquered Peoples. 

Obviously, if we are to beat back the horrors of ChristoNazi governance, we must have a government that is truly our own.

Dual power, anyone?  (Hint: had Occupy gone forward, expanding to include more minorities and thereby minimizing its seduction by anarchists, it might have begun providing us the requisite foundation.)

*****                                                 

MY PREVIOUS REVISIONS of Dispatches were intended to make it especially useful to those of us whose lives are sufficiently consumed by the demands of art and survival we keep abreast of current events more by reading weekly summaries rather than daily viewing or reading.

But those efforts fizzled.

And, in retrospect, one of the slap-myself-in-the-forehead reasons for their befizzlement is that those of us who are already living the lives of conquered people surely do not need a long litany of news-item reminders of the ever-more-merciless sadism of our conquerors. 

Hence my apology. Hence too my reversion to what I trust is a more attractive format: still weekly, but with only a handful -- say no more than five -- of the week's defining news reports.  Some accompanying commentary, of course. My photographs as relevant.

But also a far more determined search for a few heartening reports too.

And something new: excerpts from the mental visions that flare from the edges of my mind whenever I contemplate our apocalyptic reality. 

As below.

*****              

ESPECIALLY AS A STUDENT of history, I find the notion of art as prophecy set forth by Carl Jung and underscored by Marshall McLuhan to be profoundly reassuring. 

For just as the horrors of the 20th Century were foretold by Edvard Munch, I think in the music associated with the resurrection of Goddess-centered paganism -- enchanting in its own right -- is also sending us two messages.

One of these messages is that the Goddess is with us despite the 6,000 years of unspeakable misogynistic savagery with which the patriarchs repeatedly try -- as they are again trying now --  to destroy her, usually with maximum malice.  (Think of the misogyny that boiled over so often -- and so sadistically -- during the Kavanaugh hearings.)  

But the patriarchs are (again) learning they cannot murder the Goddess without killing nearly all females and many males as well. Archaeology tells us she has always been with us -- and perhaps with our Neanderthal ancestors as well. I believe she will be with us for as long as our species survives, never more distant than the edges of our minds, especially amongst those of us, female and male alike,  whose consciousness and conscience have not been poisoned by Abrahamic religion or other such patriarchal toxins. 

Indeed she is like an indescribably exquisite flower patiently awaiting the sunlight of our recognition, after which she bursts into bloom, first for the witches and bards who are her natural disciples, then presumably for all the rest of us who have not been so disabled by patriarchy we can at the very least sense her inestimable value as a revolutionary symbol of our Motherland, our Mother Earth, she whom we must either successfully defend lest we be reduced to extinction.         

It strikes me now -- and I have been studying our renaissance of folk music and folklore since 1959 --  this has gone far beyond the Jung/McLuhan parameters of prophecy into overt philosophical and ritual preparation for a post-apocalyptic future. Picture a midnight  ritual outdoors on some wild hilltop with either of the two previously linked songs as two thirds of a rite of invocation, concluded perhaps by this.   

Then the ritual itself, danced in the ecstasy of intensified lunar consciousness amidst the swirling fragrance of the needfire smoke, seasoned alder (the sacred name-tree of the god Bran)  at this Pacific Northwest latitude,  oak or ash or sweetgrass elsewhere. Here is but a glimpse of how that post-apocalyptic world might look and feel in its peaceful and contemplative moments. 

Note too the horse-people cadence of this last piece,  all the more obvious in this sequel to it. 

Perhaps, in a world liberated from fossil-fuel fascism  -- and thus finally and at long last truly beyond the reptilian age -- our descendants will again ride the steppe and the plains of elsewhere. And again, as in Scythian times, perhaps swift bands of horse-archers, most of them women, will protect us from all foes, singing to pass the time as they ride to and from their destinations.  

(Yeah I know; at some point -- except for the reality of the songs -- this last section becomes speculative fiction.)

Nevertheless...So Mote It Be.

LB/14 October 2018

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Posted at 03:07 AM in Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, History, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Music, Poor People, Religion, Science, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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08 October 2018

The Horrors of a ChristoNazi Theocracy Are Now Inescapable

Kavanaugh Finalizes the Boiled-Frog Coup Begun by JFK Murder;  Without the Court's Protection, We the People Are Naught but Slaves 

(The following is not how I had intended to resurrect Dispatches after its post-injury hiatus. But the end of the United States as we knew it is a pivotal story that demanded  immediate response.)

*****    

THE CHRISTONAZI CONQUEST of the United States Supreme Court means a vengefully white-supremacist, vindictively misogynistic  third of the homeland population now rules the Empire for its Capitalist masters. 

Like chain-gang guards or plantation overseers, these lavishly funded fanatics will try to lord it over all the rest of us for the foreseeable future.

And given the lifetime, multi-generational reign of SCOTUS appointees, their tyranny is effectively forever -- unless of course We the (determinedly humanitarian) People rise up and throw them out. 

But for now, we of the presumably non-Nazi two-thirds are naught but another entry on the Empire's long manifest of conquered subjects. The few remaining SCOTUS decisions that granted us minimal protections will soon be overturned. And then we'll be as vulnerable to our fanatically predatory conquerors as the peoples of Europe were to the Original Nazis c. 1938-1945. 

That's because the new makeup of the court frees the Capitalists to do with us as they have always wished -- to (literally) enslave us all and turn our nation into the planet's largest concentration camp.

And it encourages the Capitalists' Christian storm-troopers --  those raging white male evangelical zealots whose sadistic god demands misogyny, homophobia and genocide --  to persecute us with whatever tortures their Bible-twisted brains conceive.

Quoth Gary North, one of the ChristoNazis' most influential prophets:

“Why stoning? “There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost. Second, no one blow can be traced to any person. Third, public stoning makes it clear to everyone that the whole community is responsible for the prevention of criminal behavior. Fourth, executions are to be personal, not impersonal. The condemned man has the right to confront his executioners face to face. Stoning is therefore integral to the commandment against murder. The fifth and by far the most important reason is that stoning is literally a means of crushing the murderer’s head by means of a rock, which is symbolic of God. This is analogous to the crushing of the head of the serpent in Genesis 3:15. This symbolism testifies to the final victory of God over all the hosts of Satan.”

Such are the horrors with which we must reckon in what is now -- barring genuine revolution -- our only possible future.

Meanwhile far too many of us -- politically crippled by the brainwash of disinformation and ignorance with which the Capitalists try to blind us to the bloodstains and human ash on Capitalism's serpentine underbelly -- still refuse to acknowledge the venomous intensity of the hatreds by which we are now openly assailed and oppressed.

But I have lived amongst our conquerors' parents and grandparents; indeed I survived 15 involuntary boyhood and young adult years amongst these Southrons, and I will attest to their perverse malignancy. White Christian male cocks harden at the mere thought of raping and otherwise torturing and finally murdering women and people of color and LGBTQ people and humanitarian men and non-Christians and even disobedient children.

Which now our conquerors believe they can do with presidential-pardon impunity -- or perhaps even official prior approval.

And if North has his way, these good white Christian men will soon be allowed to kill us by hurling stones to rend our flesh and break our bones until we die moaning and convulsing  in pools of our own blood and vomit and urine and feces. Such deaths, it is authoritatively reported, take as long as two hours.

Indeed it is as if the entire Confederacy has risen from its grave and -- 153 years after Appomattox -- won the Civil War.

Picture the white Christian choreography of every lynching you ever read about or viewed in photographs. Try to imagine the infinite horror of facing such a death. Try to imagine Jeanne d'Arc's thoughts -- or those of any other woman so accused -- as she was led toward the stake at which  she would be burned alive.

Such atrocities are -- I say again -- now our only possible future. Egged on by the Trump/Pence Regime, USian hate-criminals are more brazen than ever.  

But won't the forthcoming elections give us a chance to change all that?

Don't make me laugh. Now with total ChristoNazi control of the Supreme Court, the Trump/Pence regime can now do literally anything it chooses, including cancel the elections and arrest the four remaining so-called "leftist" Supreme Court justices and machine-gun  any of us who dare protest.

That is why UltraViolet's newest anti-theocracy petition, which I signed (and we should all sign) for its protest value, is probably of no more consequence than the proverbial fart in a windstorm.  

And let us never forget -- nor forgive -- the Democratic (sic) Party's treachery in the prelude to Kavanaugh's appointment and the approval vote itself, more "change-we-can-believe-in" proof the Democrats are nothing more than Republican-enabler puppets dancing as directed by the  Capitalist puppetmasters,  stage-propping the Big Lie of U.S.  democracy.

*****

THE COUP THAT reduced us to a conquered people and left us with scarcely better prospects than antebellum slaves or modern concentration-camp prisoners was a long time coming.

But  despite innumerable warnings, far too few of us paid heed. Sure, the Christian fanatics were scary as rabid rats, but thanks to the Supreme Court, we had the law on our side. Or so we believed. 

And as to the murder by which the coup began, most of us -- cozened as we were by trinket materialism and Capitalist bribery --  remained in denial of what was being done to us.  

Verily, it is now too late. Any (conventional) resistance we might organize will either be ignored or crushed forthwith.

Rulings by SCOTUS  were already destroying our remaining defenses against Capitalism's obscene lust for a workforce ruled by zero-tolerance tyranny. And white Christian misogyny now rules openly; so does white supremacy.  Roe v. Wade will be overturned, as will Brown v. Board of Education and what's left of Miranda.

And then the court's ChristoNazi cabal will start citing biblical law to revoke parts of the constitution, no doubt beginning with the 19th Amendment.  

But the Christians, whom the Capitalists have hired as their Sturmabteilung, are relative latecomers to the war, which  began with the Bankster Plot of 1933-34, the Capitalists' first attempt to impose overt fascism on the United States.  Though the plot failed due to the heroic efforts of Smedley Butler and the U.S. Communist Party, its would-have-been perpetrators were too rich to jail and hence were never prosecuted.

It was in the wake of that episode the Capitalists seized upon the idea of adding Christianity to their arsenal of oppressive weapons  -- in all probability a suggestion (or perhaps an order) from their German Nazi collaborators.

And then the Capitalists -- more likely the sons of the original plotters -- tried a new approach, the slow-motion coup that began with the slaying of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and continued through ll more years of murder.  

*****   

MAINSTREAM MEDIA DISINFORMATION not withstanding, the primary reason Kavanaugh was  appointed to SCOTUS is religion -- specifically the intent of the Capitalist Ruling Class to suppress the rising anger of the Working Class by imposing a Christian version of Nazism on the United States.

And do not doubt even for a second it is a Nazism that will in every possible sense embody the One Percenters' Final Solution to what they perceive as the 99 Percenter problem -- the fact that from their murderous perspective, there are way way way too many of us, a herd that needs apocalyptic thinning,

Anyone who wants to understand what obtains -- to see beyond the charade of USian democracy and evade the thorn-bushes of its innumerable Big Lies -- needs to read three books.  These  are The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet, Harper: 2008); American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges, Free Press: 2006); and American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Kevin Phillips, Viking: 2006).

These writers, especially Sharlet,  explain with irrefutable evidence why the Democrats collaborated with the Republicans to ensure Kavanaugh's appointment: white Christian theocratic dictatorship is our Capitalist overlords' first choice for subjugating all the rest of us, whether here or in Mother Russia.

They also tell us why we are now ruled by a cabal of sneering, torturing, murdering sadists who will excuse whatever atrocities they commit as mandatory obedience to the divine will of their genocidal god: the newest variant of "I was just following orders."

Act quickly though. Such texts will soon be banned.  German Nazi-type censorship -- complete with death penalties for violators -- is already in the advanced-planning stage.

Still telling yourself, "no it can't possibly be that bad"?

Read some history, especially of the Original Nazis' occupation of Europe, the European Middle Ages, the Post-Reconstruction South and the Christian conquest of the Americas.

Then you'll see there is no hyperbole in the assertion we stand at the beginning of the darkest Dark Age in our species' 250,000-year experience -- and this time  (if our Evangelical overlords make all their End-Times fantasies  real), neither we nor our planet will survive the infinite malevolence of their drive to extermination and extinction.

What then will become of our Capitalist overlords, the patriarchs of plutocracy whose obscene wealth empowered the ChristoNazis? If they and their families survive at all, it will only be because they have found some means to escape this ruined planet.

Just as the Capitalists' German predecessors did in 1933, they woefully underestimated the apocalyptic momentum of fanatical hatred. Just as the German Capitalists and their USian collaborators financed the original Nazis for their own self-protection (and thereby enabled World War II and its preview of the apocalypse),  so now are the USian Capitalists and their overseas collaborators financing the ChristoNazis for the same caste-protective purposes.

And as in Nazi Germany, the hopelessly factionalized One Percenters are now discovering some of their Ruling Class vassals are out of control -- the real message of the post-2016 political infighting.  A big part of the Plutocracy is furious with the Trump/Pence Regime for its premature disclosure of Capitalism's death-camp/slave-pen agenda. Another part is terrified the regime will kill the planet before the plutocrats acquire the technology to leave it for elsewhere. 

(Might some secret escape-into-space program be yet another reason for the One Percenters' truly unprecedented regime of even more unapologetically savage tax cuts? Already they were robbing us literally to death before  they began their newest effort to relentlessly multiply their own already unfathomable wealth and perpetuate their veritable omnipotence. An escape-velocity Mayflower requires incalculably expensive technology that at present exists only in science fiction -- another form of Capitalist propaganda.)             

So ends the world, its final chapter neither bang nor whimper but the dying shrieks and groans of those of us our Capitalist masters and their ChristoNazi death-squads have condemned as unworthy of life.

Or maybe not...  

LB/6-8 October 2018

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Posted at 12:56 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Censorship, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Healthcare, History, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Music, Poor People, Religion, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (1)

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