.jpg) |
| “Human Rights Not Corporate Rights”/“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”: another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, as relevant now as when it was new. (The more conventionally journalistic pictures were published by Reader Supported News as the story developed in 2011 and 2012.) Pentax MX, 100mm SMC Pentax f/2.8, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded; posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view full size.) |
*
(Note: Apparently when I boasted last
week of feeling too healthy to work, I called down the wrath of the
gods. That very night I was smitten by a nasty bug, which kept me
bedridden six days and for which I am still taking antibiotics.)
***
SOMETIMES WHEN I write a comment for
some other website, the result is so relevant I have no doubt it
should be included here. Far more infrequent is the comment that
expands into its own Outside Agitator's Notebook essay, and
the comment that does so in such a way it suggests its own
illustration from my stock photo files is downright rare. But that is
what happened when I involved myself in a discussion about capitalism
that was sparked by Charles Pierce's most recent report on how the
breathtakingly outspoken but tragically ineffectual Sen. Elizabeth Warren is living up to her
poignantly defiant post-election pledge,
“I won't just be your senator, I'll be your champion.”
Pierce's piece,
titled “Senator Warren Won't Be Taking Your BS,” was picked up by
Reader Supported News from Esquire magazine on 5 July,
and is well worth reading, not the least for its combative joy. But
as I was quick to point out in the subsequent discussion – though I
said it there in far more gentle terms – anyone who still truly
believes capitalism can be reformed is either in stubborn denial of
the past 80 years of USian history or is suffering from clinical
dementia.
In this context, Sen. Warren's heroic
efforts – and they are indeed so heroic, some of us who remember
the fates of Sen Paul Wellstone and Sen. Robert Kennedy have already
begun to fear for her life – are a morality play, (yet another)
teachable moment in the nature of capitalism. It is capitalism,
remember, that seeks its ultimate fulfillment via fascism and Nazism:
think not just of Hitler and Mussolini, whom Wall Street financed
into power, but of the imperial USian puppets Francisco Franco,
Fulgencio Batista, Anastasio Somoza Debayle
and Augusto Pinochet, not to mention Ngo Dinh Diem and
the Shah of Iran. Now, today, it is capitalism matured into fascism
that, albeit without the strutting dictators, has been elevated into
the ruling ideology of the United States by the Mein Kampf
equivalents written by Ayn Rand. (“Mein kampf” means “my
struggle,” which beneath its specific historical identity is
nevertheless the same theme of übermenschen
versus üntermenschen
that Rand later spelled out in her own tedious prose.) And now in
its strident opposition to Sen. Warren's humanitarian courage, it is
the Randite brand of capitalism-cum-fascism that is revealing itself
by its ever-more-brazen embrace of the traditional fascist paradigm.
Nothing more need be said about a federal policy that – as if to punish
any youth of the 99 Percent who dares aspire toward a college
education – deliberately condemns entire generations to choose
between lifetimes of indentured servitude or “voluntary” service
to the empire in its cannon-fodder legions.
Hence when a reasonably articulate
poster on the Charles Pierce thread wrote of “peaceful protest”
as a means of forcing capitalism to “respond to the 'priorities of
the people,'” I replied with what to me is the most painfully
obvious lesson of all USian history: that capitalism will never
“respond to the 'priorities of the people.'” Why? Because
capitalism, by definition, responds only to the priorities of the One
Percent to produce more wealth at maximum profit – which
invariably means maximum wretchedness imposed on the 99 Percent. Thus
the only way to achieve the "priorities of the people" is
to abolish capitalism. Which (necessarily revolutionary) step the
USian 99 Percent is too viciously oppressed and fearfully bigoted and
greedily self-absorbed by trinket materialism to ever
dare take, peacefully or otherwise. Forget Occupy; stop
fantasizing about progressive resistance movements that will never
again be allowed to develop beyond the political equivalent of
embryos, their partial-birth abortions the precise fulfillment
of the domestic Gestapo purpose of the USian
total surveillance state. Note instead the obvious examples of the
South and the flyover midlands. Observe how so many 99 Percent USians
cut their own throats economically by habitually voting for
reactionary politicians and causes. And note too how the same trends
have metastasized far beyond their signature domains.
The busy Pacific Northwest seaport city
of Tacoma, Washington provides an especially repugnant example. I
have lived here twice, the first time from 1978 through 1982, the
second time since 2004, and I will no doubt die here. Though I have
harped long and bitterly on the manner in which an overwhelming
majority of Tacoma and Tacoma-area voters were persuaded by the meme
“transit is welfare” to destroy their own local public transport
system, it is a story that demands far more widespread notoriety than
ever I can provide. The destruction was inflicted via two elections,
the first in 2011, the second in 2012. The earlier election resulted
in a 55-45 landslide defeat for pro-transit forces. It should have
taught transit advocates the alleged pro-transit majority within the
city of Tacoma is too Ayn-Rand hateful toward public-transport users
to get off its socioeconomically bigoted arse and vote to sustain a
service desperately needed by local lower-income people. Nor is this
condemnation unfair; voting in Washington state takes only the
physical effort required to mail in a ballot, and the class and
racial conflicts inherent in the election were made obvious from the
beginning of the 2011 campaign. But transit advocates remained blind
to the realities underlying the defeat – a textbook example of how
suppression of the historical truth of class-struggle cripples
accurate analysis. Hence they merely hoped for the best in 2012,
persisting in their refusal to acknowledge the bipartisan magnitude
of local hostility toward lowest-income peoples – never mind the
huge irony that most of the anti-transit voters are themselves only a
little better off. While the second outcome seemed misleadingly close
– in the unofficial results available to me on 25 November 2012,
the anti-transit majority was only 695 votes – an additional 15,400
so-called “under-votes” indicate
the real anti-transit majority is much larger. (Under-votes
are otherwise filled-out ballots cast by people too disdainful of
transit and transit users to mark a preference on the save-transit
measure.) Not only do the under-votes echo the ruinously low turnout
in the February 2011 results; for that very reason they seem to
provide an accurate yardstick for measuring the true magnitude of
anti-transit sentiment. That this is a valid hypothesis is
substantiated by (A), the entire Seattle-Tacoma region's 44-year
anti-transit history (at least seven of at least nine proposals
rejected since 1968, a result documentably linked to xenophobia and
bigotry), and (B), by various statements made by the voters
themselves, typically to the effect “I won't vote against the poor,
but I don't believe in coddling those people with welfare either.”
Thus the anti-transit vote becomes a microcosm of the class hatreds
that now characterize the USian political macrocosm. It is also
probably the national unveiling of the newest and perhaps most
vicious form of gentrification the Randite forces have yet conceived.
I have been told the local transit
authority used the approximately the same reasoning about the
significance of the unprecedented number of under-votes when it made
its own determination that further electoral efforts are pointless.
In other words – particularly given the region's anti-transit
history (which, by the way, proves its haughty claims to
environmental enlightenment are rank hypocrisy if not Big Lies) –
there is no antidote to the class-warfare poisons stirred up by the
“transit is welfare” meme. Despite the hardships characteristic
of the (permanent) oppressiveness of the USian economy and the
increasingly zero-tolerance totalitarianism of the total-surveillance
state the Ayn Rand fascists have imposed for their own protection,
the USian masses remain hopelessly reactionary. They continue to
identify with the oppressor, imagining that with but a little good
luck, they too can be magically elevated into the One Percent
aristocracy, never mind even the mainstream propaganda media now
admits entry to such circles is by heredity only. Thus –
ultimately because its Working Class refuses to recognize itself as
such – Tacoma and its environs have already become notorious for
their lack of adequate public transport. Indeed their self-inflicted
shortcomings are the worst in all the comparably urbanized locales
of the United States – and therefore they are the worst in the
entire industrial world. If long-range projections are correct, the
area will within a few more years have no local transit at all. When
that happens, tens of thousands of women, men and children will be
forced to move elsewhere. The dispossessed will include students,
low-wage workers, elderly and disabled people, any others who cannot
afford the skyrocketing costs of automobiles and are not physically
strong enough to ride bikes nor desperate enough to risk their lives
pedaling amongst road-raging motorists already infamous for their
deadly hatred of bicyclists. Which is – or so I strongly suspect
– precisely the compulsory exodus the local Ruling Class intends.
Originally I intended to end this piece here, but then another
poster on the Charles Pierce/Sen. Warren thread supposed I was too
young to remember when the capitalists – terrified into a temporary
false-humanitarianism by the Soviet Union and the socialist
revolutions it represented and fostered even amidst its own huge
failures – made sure “life was affordable.” Yes, I replied, I
remembered that era very well, never mind the affordability was
shared only by those who were male, heterosexual, Caucasian and/or
not residents of some urban ghetto, rural shantytown, backwoods shack
or First Nations reservation. Indeed, born in 1940 as I was, I lived
at the apex of the so-called "American" Dream – the
irony quotes demanded by the fact the Dream never much extended
beyond the USian borders. Thus, thanks largely to my father, I was
also educated in economic reality, which means I was taught to
recognize capitalism as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue
(and therefore the closest approximation of Absolute Evil our species
has yet evoked). I also learned to see the Dream for what it was: a
capitalist Big Lie, the modern equivalent of the politically savvy
Roman emperors' panem et circenses. Like the free bread and
the spectacular events in the Coliseum and its myriad smaller-city
counterparts, the Dream and its sequel the New Deal was intended only
to opiate enough of the masses long enough to ensure the permanent
brain-death of their revolutionary instincts. That's why – once
the One Percenters had taken back all the power they lost during the
halcyon years of Communism and socialism – the New Deal and the
Dream itself were terminated forever, as was the so-called "American"
experiment in constitutional governance. Now, with the capitalists
once again free to be their innately savage Ayn Rand selves, it's
back to business as usual: absolute power and unlimited profit for
the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.
LB/6 July 2013
-30-
