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| Say hello to Mister Wretched: a likeness of the face drawn on the window of a Pierce Transit bus, no doubt by an employee soon to be jobless due to radical downsizing maliciously imposed by the voters' hatred of public transport and their sneering, we-don't-want-you-here contempt for those of us who are so poor we have no alternative ways to access medical appointments, shopping and other necessities. |
*
I WAS RIDING Pierce Transit bus 240,
the Number 1 Route. It was 16 January 2013, a Wednesday afternoon,
and there drawn in the exterior grime coating the window adjacent the
front door was a big freehand caricature of a frowning face, its
grimace nearly filling the frame, the perfect metaphor for why I
have been so long absent from this space.
The startling graffito, most likely
made by one of the many Pierce Transit workers about to be hurled
into inescapable poverty by the Ayn Rand hatefulness of
Tacoma-area suburbanites and the supportive cowardice of Tacoma City
Council members, was the most succinctly apt political commentary I
have seen since the November election.
It was a phantom image, too faint to
photograph – and in any case the aches and pains of geriatric
disability long ago forced me to give up regularly carrying a camera
– but I yet possess a modicum of drawing skill and so have
reproduced it above. The frown says it all: the news in the United
States has become so overwhelmingly bad – and our political and
socioeconomic circumstances so undeniably hopeless – there is
nothing left to smile about.
True, the newest consequences of the
Puget Sound area's 44-year hostility to public transport are not
going to be quite as bad as Pierce Transit officials predicted. These
same politicians and bureaucrats – whether deservedly or not
increasingly notorious for deliberately misleading the public – now
say the reduction in service-hours will
be 34 percent, not the 53 percent cutback they originally
claimed the November election loss would inflict. And instead of
imposing the cuts next month, as originally threatened, or in June,
as the transit authority's Chief Executive Officer Lynne Griffith
demanded, the downsizing is delayed until September.
But the voter-inflicted cutback
remains the most calculatedly vicious electoral decision I have
witnessed anywhere in the United States, a deliberate atrocity
against transit users.
It means the end, probably forever, to
local weekend, holiday and nighttime bus service, which not only
leaves thousands of riders with no way to get to jobs, shopping or
life-sustaining medical appointments, but according to transit
advocates makes Tacoma and its environs the most populous urban area
in the industrial world without adequate public transport.
Nor is there any rational hope for a
reprieve. Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland has already made it clear
she and her fellow city council members lack the political courage to
save bus service within the city limits, which they could do by
funding it through their recently created Public Transportation
Benefit District. Instead the PTBA's taxation authority will serve
only motorists, mostly by street improvement. Never mind Tacomans
voted by 55 percent to restore and maintain the now doomed bus
service; never mind the anti-transit-user majorities are entirely
outside the city limits; the city council members are nevertheless
too indebted to their notoriously anti-transit Ruling Class masters
to muster any effective resistance.
Not surprisingly given her
all-too-typical transformation from self-proclaimed progressive to
real-time reactionary, the mayor recently led opposition to a city
council resolution protesting the notorious Citizens United
decision, the Ruling Class judicial coup by which the U.S.
Supreme Court gave the absolute power of unlimited political
expenditure to the capitalist aristocracy. Earlier last year,
Strickland had already revealed a hitherto-secret opposition to organized
labor.
Though nearly half Tacoma's
population is definitively lower income, all such people – myself
among them – are effectively disenfranchised. As everywhere else in
today's United States, in Tacoma the politicians represent only
their de facto owners.
In this same context, President Obama's
carefully scripted and ultimately ruinous surrender in the so-called
“fiscal cliff” negotiations once again demonstrates how beyond
the Big Lies of rhetoric, the Democrats and the Republicans are
ideological twins. Their shared antagonism to the Bill of Rights is
confirmed by their unanimous approvals of the National Defense
Authorization Act, renewal of the Patriot Act, etc. ad nauseam.
The hidden ideological unity of these (allegedly) separate parties is
further confirmed by their increasingly deadly hostility to the
Working Class, especially toward those of us who are elderly and/or
disabled and/or chronically poor – that is, no longer exploitable
for profit.
Any notion we of the 99 Percent have
even a scintilla of representation in the White House or in Congress
is now obviously as absurd as belief in a flat earth. We are at
least as powerless in today's United States as were the sans
culottes of pre-revolutionary France or the proletarians and
peasants of Tsarist Russia. In fact we are infinitely more
powerless. These earlier oppressed peoples had at least the hope of
eventual revolution, while for us there is naught but the
inconceivable technological superiority of the Ruling Class, the
real-world equivalent of the fictional (?) Borg, to which resistance
is ever more obviously futile.
Such
is the reality of the present-day United States of America – our
circumstances summarized by the face drawn on the bus window, the
iconic Mister Wretched.
***
Because I no longer see any point in
pounding my head against the indestructible wall of capitalist
tyranny, my deepest preference is to abandon not only all political
activity but even all political thought. We are enslaved,
irremediably so, and so we shall remain until our species renders
itself extinct by its suicidal greed and sacrilegious disregard for
Mother Earth. But I who would rather spend my final years
contemplating the Gaian mysteries and perhaps also finishing an
unapologetically pagan memoir am instead still diverted by the habits
of a near-lifetime of activism. Hence I yet dare utter small
declarations of defiance. As I commented on the thread generated by
Robert Reich's Happy New Year piece, “Lousy Deal on the Edge
of the Cliff”:
“Vintage Obama” indeed: the
shape-changer-in-chief, Obama the Orator (again) transforming himself
into Barack the Betrayer; a White (hearted) Republican enabler
disguised as an African-American Democrat; a mortal enemy of lower
income, elderly and disabled people deftly concealing his own Ruling
Class malevolence behind the purposeful smokescreen of Republican
rhetoric; most of all the president who slaps us in the face with
irrefutable proof U.S. elections are the biggest of Big Lies: vote
for a Democrat, get a Republican. Happy New Year from the rulers of
Moron Nation, where the One Percent in its now-eternal omnipotence
has reduced all political participation to a doomed and therefore
pointless, ultimately meaningless waste of time.
Not that I was surprised. Matthew
Rothschild had reported two weeks earlier how Obama was
“Caving on Social Security,” to which I responded accordingly:
A 72-year-old physically disabled
man who will now be one of Obama's victims, I admit I voted for him
again last November, though only in the frightened hope his campaign
transformation from Barack the Betrayer into Obama the Orator might
have some enduring substance.
Obviously it did not.
The result is a perfect example of
the imbecility of hope: Barack the Betrayer is back with a vengeance,
and our fate – the fate of every lower-income person in the United
States – is forever sealed.
But what else was one to do? This is
Moron Nation, which means – particularly given the malevolent
selfishness and savagely reflexive anti-intellectuality of the
majority population – there is absolutely no possibility of a
viable third-party movement: not now, not ever.
Thus we were allowed only a choice
between a declared fascist or a congenital liar, the latter seducing
us with humanitarian falsehoods only to later reveal he is every bit
as much a fascist as the candidate he defeated.
Could it be our only remaining
alternative is to vote in the declared fascist – and thereby, like
some frenzied Samson, bring the metaphorical temple down on our own
heads?
***
Nor am I shocked by how President Obama
and his administration are using “gun control” – actually
forcible civilian disarmament – as a red herring to distract us
from his impending betrayals on the vital issues of job-creation and
the debt-limit threat to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and
food-stamp payments. I have long predicted something akin to this Obamanoid
variant of the bait-and-switch scam, and though I got the timing
wrong, the president and his cronies are nevertheless doing what I
foresaw. As I wrote in response to a Politico report on
Obama's fiscal “cliff” treachery:
Interesting
synchronicity in how – just as Obama the Orator shifts back into
Barack the Betrayer – the massacre of school children in
Connecticut diverts our attention from the potentially far more
deadly abandonment of lower-income seniors and disabled people our
one DemoPublican Party is now obviously organizing on behalf the One
Percent. A conspiracy theorist would argue such an ultra-convenient
confluence of events could hardly be coincidental, though surely the
Ruling Class of the United States would never stoop so low.
Later the same day, commenting on a
Guardian report headlined “Obama Will Act
Swiftly on Gun Control,” I elaborated:
Because the politicians have
repeatedly proven their true allegiance to the One Percent and its
single-party (capitalist) ideology by voting unanimously to strip us
of all rights guaranteed by the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments,
it is only logical they would now strip us of our Second Amendment
rights as well.
Only then – with the entire
Constitution rendered meaningless – will the members of the Ruling
Class be able to impose the Nazi-style dictatorship by which they and
their ancestors have sought for nearly 80 years to subjugate the
United States. Only then will they have fulfilled their
grandfathers' and great-grandfathers' dreams of reshaping the United
States, both at home and abroad, into the true successor of the Third
Reich.
Meanwhile the fact the (alleged)
Left in this ever-more-oppressed realm openly collaborates with the
Ruling Class to rid the proletariat of its final means of defense
tells us all we need to know about the bourgeois toxins that
neutralize USian "progressivism." Thus the fascists,
though admittedly empowered by their lockstep discipline, are carried
to ultimate victory not by their own dreadful prowess but rather by
the willfully blind ineptitude of the so-called Left.
***
In bitter truth, the Obamacrats –
here differentiated from other Democrats by the anti-Second-Amendment
fanaticism of the former – are now attempting to disarm the very
people who most need firearms for self-defense. A majority of gun
owners owners live in rural areas,
where police response times can range up to an hour. But estimates
on Rightist websites – usually reliable in such matters and
therefore probably true – say the Obamacrats intend to outlaw
about 80 percent of the handguns in current U.S. use and likewise ban
about half the rifles and shotguns.
But that's only part of their forcible
disarmament effort.
H.R. 137, just introduced in the House,
would dramatically expand the roster of persons permanently
prohibited firearms ownership.
It would do so by redefining “mental defective” to include
anyone who has ever had any formally diagnosed condition – learning
disabilities included – that required therapy, counseling or
medication. Because the Center for Disease Control estimates about 50
percent of the U.S. population will at some time require mental
health treatment, H.R. 137 would therefore automatically disarm
approximately half the U.S. citizenry,
no exceptions, no appeal.
Thus to label the Obamacrat effort
anything other than “forcible disarmament” is to propagate
deliberate disinformation if not outright lies.
***
Based on the political consequences of
President Bill Clinton's similarly dishonest war against legal
firearms owners during the early 1990s, Obama's far more draconian
effort probably guarantees another long-term period of minority
status for the Democratic Party.
USians love legally owned firearms and
cherish even more their legal rights of self-defense. The voters
(dimly) recognized Clinton's efforts at forcible civilian disarmament
as an attempt to impose mandatory pacifism and thereby create the
uniformity of compulsory victimhood that is an essential precursor to
a slave state. The angry reaction gave Republicans control of
Congress in 1994, a dominance that despite varying majority-minority
numbers the so-called Grand Old Party has never since lost.
The backlash provoked by Obama's far
more draconian campaign against legal firearms ownership is likely to
be proportionately more intense. Unless Obama manages to enact a
job-creating, safety-net-restoring resurrection of the New Deal, his
forcible disarmament efforts virtually guarantee a Republican sweep
of the 2014 congressional elections and in all likelihood a landslide
GOP presidential victory in 2016.
Why then would a Democrat undertake a
program that is so obviously suicidal for his party?
If one reasons from two now-proven
premises – that the party labels are meaningless (that the
Democrats and Republicans are merely factions of a single Ruling
Class party), and that the GOP is the true voice of the Ruling
Class – the answer becomes obvious.
From the perspective of the One
Percent, the greatest domestic threat to capitalist governance is the
increasing radicalization of USian youth. To nullify this incipient
rebellion, the Democrats must co-opt the rhetoric of the Occupy
Movement and organize the youth into a “new” or “revitalized”
Democratic Party – precisely as they are already doing.
Obviously the minority status to be
inflicted on the party by Obama's forcible disarmament campaign would
ensure the youth movement's failure even as the Gestapo powers of the
police and military mercilessly crush any genuinely radical
opposition from beyond the party's ranks. But this would appear to
be its clandestine purpose: creation of a youth movement that –
exactly like the Democratic party's resistance movement in Wisconsin
– was secretly intended to fail.
Thus the status quo – absolute
power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation
for all the rest of us – is preserved in perpetuity.
Machiavellian? Indeed. But that is
precisely what happened in Wisconsin
and later in Michigan and is sure to happen elsewhere as well.
The common denominator in all such
ruinous defeats? It's how the alleged Left in the United States –
hopelessly disempowered without the ideological analysis and
discipline provided by a genuine Left – chronically underestimates
the malevolent cunning of the One Percent.
***
Another Obamanoid betrayal cleverly
obscured by the firearms frenzy is the administration's continuation
of its relentless war against marijuana users – a campaign
of oppression so merciless marijuana arrests already exceed
by 24 percent the arrests for all violent crimes combined.
And now, as Naomi Wolf reports, Obama is threatening to sue the
states of Washington and Colorado, apparently just for allowing
the question of legalized marijuana to be placed on their ballots.
Again I'm not surprised:
Ms. Wolf asks if the President
respects "local democracy," but I think we all know Barack
the Betrayer respects only his masters: the lords of Wall Street and
the barons of Big Business.
And since his masters make more
money enslaving marijuana users in for-profit prisons than by ending
Prohibition II, the Betrayer's position is obvious – never mind the
irony of a (pretend) African-American Democrat actively supporting
the newest corporate variants of the old antebellum plantation
system.
But there's one issue Ms. Wolf
overlooks – the claim by marijuana users it alters forever one's
spiritual views, invariably reducing patriarchal religion to
absurdity.
If this metaphysical construct is
true, the capitalist servitude in Obama's stance is doubly confirmed.
Capitalism depends on theocracy to maintain the fear and oppression
essential to maximum profit –hence Obama's support for forcible
Christianization as evidenced by his dramatic expansion of
faith-based initiatives and the methodical conditioning of the
military to fundamentalist zealotry.
Thus Obama's war against marijuana
users emerges as both a fanatical crusade against what Christianity
defines as heresy and – in the medical context – endorsement of
the "pain is punishment by god" doctrine underlying
prohibitive U.S. restrictions on painkillers readily available
everywhere else in the civilized world, including across the border
in Canada.
***
Meanwhile no one on either the alleged
Left or the all-too-real Right has dared comment on the multiple
lies and contradictions implicit in present-day political
controversies. Why? Because each side is silenced by its own brand of
political correctness.
In Obama's case, forcible disarmament
is an effort he reportedly
promised in private as early as 30 March 2011, even as he
was repeatedly implying in public he
had no such intention. The Washington Post quotes
Sarah Brady as saying the president told her, “I just want you to
know that we are working on it. We have to go through a few
processes, but under the radar.”
If this is what Obama actually
said, the implication is beyond damning: that the president and his
staff were working on a forcible disarmament proposal but hiding it
until some atrocity like the Newtown massacre gave the administration
the chance to agitate the requisite levels of outrage, which brands
this newest campaign as the most grotesquely opportunistic such
effort to date.
Moreover, the lynch-mob intensity of
Obama's anti-gun-owner rhetoric tellingly contrasts with the craven
submissiveness of his post-2008 refusals to fulfill his campaign
pledges of unyielding support for single-payer/public-option health
care, restoration of labor rights via the Employee Free Choice Act
or personal efforts on behalf beleaguered workers, as he notably
declined to provide in Wisconsin and Michigan. These word-versus-deed
differences not only reveal the extent to which “change we can
believe in” was the biggest of Big Lies; they also expose the
Betrayer's true values and intentions more effectively than any other
sequence of events since he took office.
The same distinctions also show us the
hopelessly bourgeois nature of the Democratic Party, which despite
its protestations to the contrary is at its psychological core as
anti-Working Class as its Republican counterpart.
Nevertheless there is one historical
difference between the two parties. The Republican hostility to the
99 Percent is an expression of the fact it is – and always has been
– the party of the capitalist aristocracy. But as the late Jack
Newfield observed in a number of Village Voice essays now
curiously excluded from the Internet, Democratic hostility to the
Working Class dates from the conflicts of the Vietnam Era:
specifically the fear, hatred and contempt with which the
draft-exempt elite belittled those of us whose socioeconomic status
left us no choice but military service.
Precisely as Newfield foresaw, the
party's post-Vietnam antagonism toward the 99 Percent
provides a yardstick of the extent to which the Democrats, despite
their former New Deal populism, now operate from the Republican
psychodynamic paradigm of total identification with the One Percent
or the Ruling Class, i.e., the oppressor.
Hence the emergence of a unique and
definitive brand of USian female consciousness that can only be
described as Ayn Rand feminism: for example, pretend support within
the Democratic Party for “universal” reproductive rights – no
matter that for Working Class women, the huge loss of jobs imposed by
Democrat-enabled free-trade profiteering is also the loss of health
insurance, which means the loss of access to birth control and
abortion and therefore the revocation of all sexual freedom formerly
so provided.
Hence too – and again as I
repeatedly predicted – the arrogantly triumphant, anti-Working
Class hatefulness implicit in this newest forcible-disarmament
campaign has silenced all Obama's critics on the alleged Left –
“alleged” because there has been no real Left in the United
States since the post-World-War II purges.
Indeed the emergence of the forcible
disarmament campaign has turned the vast majority of Obama's
allegedly Leftist critics, female and male alike, into sycophants
now trying to outdo one another in proclaiming his sainthood: “at
least he's getting the guns off the streets” – in other words,
out of the hands of legal firearms owners.
The Republicans, who in earlier years
might have pounced on at least some of the Democrats' glaring
inconsistencies, are effectively silenced by their embrace of two
ultra-reactionary doctrines: one is Abrahamic misogyny – the hatred
of females at the core of Jewish, Christian and Islamic dogma; the
other is the Ayn Rand variant of fascism – infinite greed as
ultimate virtue – particularly the concept of the all-deserving
ubermenschen versus
undeserving untermenschen,
the latter destined for extermination, whether via death camps as
under the Nazis or by the deliberately murderous policies of
abandonment pioneered by the United States.
Never
mind the Democrats' turn-abouts are so brazen they reek of
premeditated treachery. Hitherto presenting themselves as defenders
of “working families,” they have not only abandoned their efforts
to create jobs or preserve social services but, in Obamacrat mode,
are now expending many times more energy, political capital and
campaign dollars to fanatically attack legal firearms ownership. This
radical difference in expenditures reveals as truth a longstanding
Rightist claim: that the Democrats' one true agenda – their only
real agenda – is the forcible disarmament of the civilian
population.
But
the Republicans' own brand of fanaticism – zero-tolerance
opposition to female reproductive freedom, health-care reform,
unionism, mass transport, unemployment insurance, Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps or anything else that might
conceivably benefit the 99 Percent – prohibits the very criticism
previous generations of (Rockefeller/Evans) Republicans would almost
certainly have uttered.
***
Objective analysis – reasoning from
the premise all political conflict is class warfare whether
acknowledged or not – shows us the USian Ruling Class is waging
two-front war on the Working Class.
The Republicans, on one front, are
attacking economically – downsizing, outsourcing, union-busting,
destroying government services, imposing Christian theocracy to
ensure Working Class subjugation – while the Democrats, on the
other front, claim to defend “working families” but in truth
repeatedly surrender and thereby facilitate the Republican assault.
Now the Democrats have gone over to the
offensive; now they reveal their true function by redirecting their
efforts to forcible disarmament. The combined results of the
Republican/Democrat onslaught – loss of jobs, medical care,
pensions, homes, police protection, mass transport and now the
looming loss of any rational means of self-defense in an ever more
violently needy world – form a perfect storm of incipient
enslavement.
Here too in the imperilment of
self-defense is yet another glaring measure of the grotesque
inequality that has become the defining trait of the United States.
The aristocrats are increasingly protected not just by soldiers and
cops but by squads of kill-hardened mercenaries employed as armed
guards. Meanwhile we of the 99 Percent are increasingly abandoned by
the downsizing of local police forces and/or their conversion to
paramilitary units tasked primarily with the suppression of dissent.
Once again we see how the Republicans
and the Democrats are now merely separate factions of a single Ruling
Class party. Our betrayal – the final betrayal of the ideals
implicit in “we the people” – has clearly advanced well
beyond the point of no return.
Such is the neo-feudal Ruling Class
response to the impending environmental apocalypse: death to everyone
below the salt.
***
Apparently I spoke another truth when I said long ago the murder of Sen. Robert Kennedy took from us the last man who might have saved us from ourselves.
Never since RFK has there been anyone
with the paradoxical mix of established power and unyielding
selflessness required to lead a genuine resistance. Nor is this
deficit entirely the result of the Ruling Class skill at neutralizing
all such potential leadership.
As I said in reply to Noam Chomsky's
lament of our nationally defining rejection of
humanitarian ethics:
Alas, Mr, Chomsky fails to recognize
the concept of noblesse oblige
has – at least in the United States –been ousted from human
consciousness by the Ayn Rand doctrine of infinite greed as ultimate
virtue.
What's worse is the resultant moral
imbecility is as characteristic of the 99 Percent as it is of the One
Percent.
Contrary to Mr. Chomsky's
nonsensical optimism, history proves that a people so deliberately
self-degraded – the ultimate example is of course Nazi Germany –
are incapable of self-restoration.
Indeed the only cure is of the sort
imposed on Germany in 1945 – and given the renaissance of Nazism in
Germany today, that (apparent) healing may have been nothing more
than a too-brief period of remission.
***
Finally, after the courtier-journalist
Jonathan Chait inadvertently revealed his caste-bias via a New
York Magazine piece making light of the debt-limit crisis, I
penned what feels like a denouement:
The
most damning revelation yet of the extent to which the United States
has descended into moral imbecility is the cavalier manner in which
the courtiers of the pseudo-Left joke about non-solutions to the
looming debt crisis.
Indeed it is as if they are all
channeling Marie Antoinette:"The masses need money? La, let them
have platinum."
Thus elderly and disabled people and
anyone else whose lives will be destroyed by default – if indeed we
are not murdered outright by the end of our pensions and the sudden
termination of our health care and access to life-sustaining drugs –
are again reduced to abject terror.
But because we do not matter –
because we are not members of the Ruling Class and in fact have no
representation anywhere at any level of government in the savage
plutocracy the former United States has become – we are ignored or
implicitly made the butt of the aristocrats' jokes.
Meanwhile major media – serving
its Ruling Class masters by agitating yet another forcible
disarmament frenzy to distract Moron Nation from the real crisis –
shrinks the default story to an obscure, badly headlined print
report most USians are too illiterate to read.
“This is the way the world ends”:
cacophonies of gibberish so loud the pleas and curses of the victims
go forever unheard.
* * *
Welcome to the new year – at least as
bad as the old year if not many times worse – what the ancient
Chinese reputedly labeled “interesting times.”
LB/17-22 January 2013
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