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.
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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...
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“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...
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“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.”
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"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.
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“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.”
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“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.
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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...
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“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.
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“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.
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“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...
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“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.
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“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.
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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.
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“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.
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“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?”
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“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.
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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.
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“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.
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“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.
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“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.”
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“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.
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“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.
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“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.
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“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.
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“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.
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“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.
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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.
LB/13 January 2019
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