THOUGH
THE UKRAINE EMERGENCY continues to intensify – see below for
recommended reading and a list of the web sources I've found to be
reliable – our justifiable fear USian aggression could trigger World War
III should not distract us from the One Percent's atrocities that
obtain elsewhere on our grievously sickened planet. There is always the
possibility sanity will once more prevail as it did during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, in which case our earthly lives will continue toward
some other denouement, and additional outrages – events perhaps now
seemingly rendered moot by the prospect of thermonuclear extinction –
will again become important, if nothing else as textbook examples of
capitalism in action. That's the good news.
The
bad news is the USian One Percenters – having nearly completed the
total subjugation of their imperial homeland – will continue their
efforts to hasten capitalism's inevitable transition to fascism and thus
impose on the rest of humanity the zero-tolerance ideology they have
adopted from Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf and Triumph of the Will.
This
means the increasingly vicious class warfare that's being waged over
mass transit in the Puget Sound area could become as relevant in London
or Moscow or Kiev as it is in Seattle and Tacoma. The latter two cities,
Washington state's largest and busiest seaports, are the economic
pillars of the Puget Sound metropolis, a
region of 3.5 million people who self-righteously claim to be exemplars
of environmental enlightenment but repeatedly prove themselves to be the most reliably anti-mass-transit voters
in the most notoriously anti-mass-transit nation on Earth. They sustain
Pugetopolis as the global epicenter of anti-mass-transit activism and
the racial and socioeconomic anti-transit-user hatefulness such activism
invariably expresses. The associated hypocrisy is breathtaking, all the
more so given the region's supposedly “progressive” mindset.
But
the 46-year success of the strategy and tactics that underlie the
transit crisis – how the Ruling Class fires up normally closeted bigotry
to goad majorities of white, allegedly “environmentalist,” purportedly
“progressive” 99 Percenters into voting against their own interests –
tells the true Pugetopolis story: that apart from its ecotopian
rhetoric, the region's only significant difference from more urbanized
parts of the Ku Klux South is its lack of a southern drawl. As an
elderly African-American gentleman told me one afternoon while we were
sharing a ride on a Pierce Transit bus, “This state be named after a slave-owner; that's why the whole damn place be cursed.” (Pierce and King Counties share the antebellum odium; they are named, respectively, after the pro-slavery President Franklin Pierce and the slaveholder William Rufus deVane King.) The regional transit crisis is thus at least partly an eerily lingering 21st Century reminder of the pro-slavery invaders who drove out the First Nations occupants and seized their lands in the name of 19th Century Manifest Destiny.
The
class-war dynamics of the transit crisis – the essence of which is the
malicious denial of public transportation to the growing numbers of
people who desperately need it because they can no longer afford the
staggering and ever-increasing cost of an automobile – provide a
teachable example of why progressive economic change is truly and
forever impossible in the USian homeland. The stark contrast between the
Ruling Class refusal to solve the transit crisis, which is definitively
an economic issue, and Ruling Class flexibility on so-called social
issues, is profoundly revealing. It tells us that marriage equality,
legal marijuana and legal firearms ownership (albeit to a steadily
diminishing degree) are tolerated only because the Ruling Class regards
them as modern manifestations of panem et circenses, all
supportive of – or at least non-threatening to – the increasing tyranny
of capitalist governance. The key to understanding their function is
that such breads and circuses cost the One Percent nothing in terms of
increased taxes, higher wages or restoration of workers' rights. But
they keep us 99 Percenters reliably distracted if not smugly sedated.
And above all else, they preserve, for maybe a few more years, the Big
Lie of USian “democracy.”
While the recent vote to downsize Seattle/King County Metro Transit
was easily predictable – even a tiny sales-tax increase of one-tenth of
one percent (one penny on a $10 purchase) is too much for the
vindictively auto-centric, ever-more-openly bigoted suburban voters –
the radically pro-suburban policy-shift at Tacoma's Pierce Transit is appalling even to cynics
like myself. Its efforts to maintain vital bus service twice defeated
at the polls, the transit authority's board of directors is now openly pandering to the dominantly white, economically privileged, rabidly
anti-transit, hatefully anti-transit-user suburbanites who brought the
agency to its proverbial knees via a special election in 2011 and the
general election the following year. To date, the doling out of rewards
at the center of this previously untold story includes at least three new
suburban bus routes, all financed by increases in sales-tax revenue
generated by up-ticks in the local economy – this as the board punishes
the impoverished, racially diverse but notably pro-transit voters in Tacoma proper by ongoing denial of service inside the city limits. While the same suburbs-versus-city antagonism is evident in Seattle,
only in Tacoma has the transit board openly sided with the
suburbanites, in essence telling us city-dwellers the revenue-increases
we were formerly assured would gradually restore intra-city bus service
are now earmarked for the suburbs instead.
Despite
the region's history of anti-transit populism, the trigger of the
present crisis was Washington state's notorious tax code, which is the nation's most regressive and therefore the most favorable to the state's preponderance of billionaires and millionaires,
whose wealth and power ensure both the permanence of the state's
uniquely anti-transit financial structure and its
tax-the-poor/exempt-the rich fiscal policies in general. Dependent as
the state's transit systems are on sales tax, their fortunes are thus
shackled to the ups and downs of capitalism, which means they are forced
to reduce services whenever the periodic panics and recessions deprive
the 99 Percent of the money to buy, maintain and operate automobiles and
thereby send transit ridership soaring. Thus Washington state's transit
operations reliably function as a picture-perfect example of the
savagery implicit in “austerity” – the practice of victimizing (and
sometimes genocidally reducing) the Working Class by slashing social
services whenever they are most necessary for working families'
survival.
In
the past, the legislature sometimes ameliorated such crises by granting
municipalities special funding powers. Even so, on transit policy there
is little meaningful difference between the Democratic and Republican
parties – as per usual, the latter are blatant fascists, while the
former still try to hide their fascism behind deceptively “progressive”
rhetoric. But now, with the legislature deadlocked by a permanent
Republican majority in the state senate and the entire state government
therefore under a de facto Republican dictatorship – there is no possibility of even temporary reforms: not now, not in the foreseeable future.
There
are also, as I suspected in 2012 and have since traced to the suburban Pierce Transit operating area,
disturbingly credible rumors of privatization schemes, including alleged
offers from a shadowy French multinational to provide for-profit bus
service should anti-transit voters succeed abolishing Pierce Transit
entirely. These measures would please the white Republican suburbanites
and their representatives on the Pierce Transit Board not just because
of compliance with Ayn Rand doctrines but because the Republicans and
their constituents make no secret of the fact they despise the democracy
of mass transit. They recognize privatization would create a
country-club transit system lower-income people could not afford to use.
It would also be a step toward re-gentrification of those sections of
the suburbs that are becoming sanctuaries for lower-income urbanites who are being forcibly gentrified from the cities.
The privileged riders of Pierce County's hypothetical Country Club
Transit would thereby exempt themselves from any need for contact with
“undesirables” – those of us who are elderly, homeless, disabled,
unemployed or members of castes and ethnicities other than executive,
professional and mostly lily-white.
Here again we see how USian government at every level – federal, state, local – serves only the interests of the One Percent.
We see too how the death of the Soviet Union – never mind it was never
the workers' paradise it claimed to be – has allowed the capitalists to
shed their velvet gloves and again don their characteristic jackboots.
But this is still the United States of America, where capitalism's Ayn
Rand (fascist) malevolence is yet (somewhat) disguised by euphemisms
such as “austerity” and hidden by denial (“no matter how it looks, it's
not really genocide”). In all the six decades I pounded a keyboard for
pay, I don't recall anything in local governance anywhere – not even in
Ku Klux Tennessee – quite so fuck-you brazen as Pierce Transit's
decision to back-stab its friends and pamper its enemies. More bus
service for the privileged people who don't need or want it, less bus
service for those of us who can't survive without it – such is Pierce
Transit's “future strategic direction.” As always in the USian homeland, Ayn Rand rules.
For
the record, the three new Pierce Transit routes – and there may be more
I don't know about as the agency seems to have adopted a new policy of
minimal public disclosure – are numbered 503, 504 and 425.
The municipalities these buses serve – Puyallup, Fife, Milton and
Edgewood – are small incorporated towns just beyond the eastern city
limits of Tacoma. As noted in “How Republican Hatemongering Wrecked an
Urban Transit System” (linked above), the official 2012 election results
archived at the Pierce County Auditor's Office
show the mostly Democratic voters in Tacoma's electoral precincts voted
by about 55 percent to maintain Pierce Transit service. But the
overwhelmingly Republican voters in the four suburban municipalities
that are getting the new bus service voted by as much as 64 percent to
shut Pierce Transit down.
While
the transit authority board is theoretically non-partisan, a recent,
seemingly inexplicable reorganization somehow took control away from
Democratic Tacoma and gave it to the Republican hinterlands. The process
by which this was accomplished remains mysterious: I'm told I may not
be able to access the relevant minutes without the hassle and indefinite
delay of a formal freedom-of-information request. But there's no doubt
the Republicans are using their newfound power to impose a classic Ayn
Rand solution: rob the afflicted and give to the comfortable. Obviously
these Republicans aren't “anti-transit” after all; they're merely
opposed to transit that serves folks who are needy. It's another variant
of standard Republican dogma: they love welfare for the rich, they hate
it when it helps the poor. (As previously noted, the Democrats are
scarcely different. They merely closet their Republican-ness behind a
curtain of Big Lies. Such is the One Party of Two Names that rules USia
on behalf the One Percent.)
Meanwhile The News Tribune,
the local outpost of the McClatchy media monopoly – for which “news” is
defined not by its old-time definition of majority significance but
instead by its relevance to the upscale consumers – has suppressed this
entire story as not worth covering. That's because in the Ayn Rand
economy of the USian Homeland, buying power is now the only officially
recognized measure of citizenship. Just as the Supreme Court has again ruled,
money trumps votes. The extent to which we are actually citizens is
determined not by the Constitution, as it was in days of yore, but only
by our net worth. And the net worth of the typical Tacoman – fully half
of us definitively lower-income – is so negligible, TNT
routinely omits news that to us is vitally important. Just as we're
denied bus service, so too are we denied essential information. Here in
this little enclave of the Ayn Rand New World Order, those of us who are
transit-dependent obviously no longer matter. Which means what you're
reading today is (another) OAN exclusive, a genuine scoop.
******
Apropos the Ukraine Crisis,
I spent so much time this week ferreting out and reasoning together the
transit story, I had little time to comment on developments in Ukraine –
and in any case I feel I have already said pretty much anything I might
add to the Ukraine comment-thread dialogues. Nevertheless I raised an
intriguing question on the thread of “Rebels Down Ukraine Helicopters,” here,
in which I noted the irony of how USian aggression seems to be forcing
the Putin Administration substantially further to the Left:
Obama/Kerry
warmongering is compelling Putin to resurrect socialist traditions (for
example the May Day labor celebration) in the interest of Russian
national unity...What will be especially interesting is whether Putin
will now expand the popular anti-capitalist reforms he began after
Yeltsin's Ayn Rand economic policies, which were forced on post-Soviet
Russia by the U.S., nearly provoked a second revolution. Yeltsin/Rand
economics was fast reducing the entire Russian 99 Percent to the
hopeless poverty that now defines the USian Homeland's 99 Percent. But
Putin ameliorated these savage policies with a kind of Russian New Deal,
which is the primary reason for his huge popularity. In this context,
the relevance of the renewed May Day celebration is that it suggests
Putin's economic reforms might now go beyond anti-capitalist
amelioration to an actual resurrection of Russian socialism...The
additional irony is how these events parallel the way Castro's Cuba was
driven into the Soviet bloc by U.S. aggressiveness, with the U.S.
government, then as now, acting as the storm troopers of the global One
Percent.
***
Leading my In-Case-You-Missed-It list of recommended reading is an especially thoughtful der Spiegel staff report entitled “War in Europe? Ukraine and the Threat of Wildfire.” It
is the first mainstream media acknowledgement I've seen anywhere of the
frighteningly real threat of World War III implicit in the U.S.
decision to militarily confront Russia literally at its own borders.
***
“Ukraine's Government Has Lost Control of East, Says Acting President” is a Guardian UK dispatch that details the developments
summarized in its headline. What is unique is its on-the-scene portrait
of the determination of the pro-Russian rebels, including the woman who
said of herself and her companions, “We'll fight to our last breath.”
Given the astounding courage displayed by Soviet partizanska during World War II, such
assertions should not be taken lightly; as proven by what happened to
the Persians, the Mongols, the Teutonic Knights and the armies of
Bonaparte and Hitler, to attack Mother Russia is to fight all her
children, female or male, youth, adult or senior.
***
Another of Robert Parry's superb Consortium News reports, republished by Reader Supported News, is “Prepping for a Ukrainian Massacre,” which says we USians are being psychologically prepared to accept “and perhaps even cheer” anti-Russian genocide in eastern Ukraine.
Despite being nearly two weeks old – I accidentally omitted it from
last week's Ukrainian anthology – unfolding events tell us it remains
hair-raisingly relevant.
***
Sources on the Ukraine Crisis I find especially useful are: The Moscow Times, which despite its pro-western editorial stance seems to do a fair and thorough job of reporting; The Guardian; the aforementioned Consortium News and Reader Supported News plus of course RT, the U.S.-based, English-language service of the Russian state television network. I've been a regular viewer of RT since the eloquently sarcastic and gorgeously appealing Alyona Minkovski
was its main evening news anchor. (Yeah, I admit it: old as I am, my
appreciation of womanhood has not diminished – and Goddess forbid it
ever does.) Moreover I will assure newcomers to RT's broadcasts it is not the Soviet-type propaganda outlet it is sometimes alleged to be. In fact, RT
has broken many stories the so-called “mainstream media” (that is, U.S.
Ruling Class media) dares not report. And I have not found anything in RT's Ukraine reporting that was not fully confirmed by other sources.
******
When Guardian UK revealed that “Germany, Under US Pressure Blocks Edward Snowden From Testifying,” I commented accordingly:
Utterly
predictable: with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank
functioning as the USian Empire's equivalent of a 19th Century colonial
ministry, the USian colonies – which include all the nations of Western
Europe – have no alternative but obedience. Just as the European nations
bow to USian austerity – the will of their peoples be damned – so now
do these de facto colonies also bow to the Empire's other,
ever-more-oppressive demands. (Could it be that here we are glimpsing
the true core of Obama's legacy-quest – to be the first U.S. president
hailed as “imperator”?) In any case, Snowden is undoubtedly the
beneficiary of this banishment, for once in Germany – even with
political asylum – he would have been within easy reach of the USian
death squads.
******
“Barbarians in Oklahoma,”Charles Pierce's account of an agonizingly botched execution,
engendered a discussion thread that asked why the Christian fanatics
who dominate that state and so many other domains in the USian interior
are not denounced for their bloodlust by the broader Christian
community, which supposedly favors pacifism and forgiveness. I replied
accordingly:
In
English and USian law there is a concept called "countenancing." To
"countenance" something is to allow it to happen without interference or
objection. "Countenancing" is what the non-fanatical USian Christians
are doing in response to the Bible-thump, Biblical Law fanatics who rule
the Land of Bumpkins – Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Dakota,
Texas and all the other USian backwaters of barbarism. The acts of
countenancing are of course carefully rationalized, as are all such
hypocrisies. In the instance of Christianity, countenancing is said to
be "ecumenical” – that is, essential to Christian unity. Hence even a
JesuNazi like Rick Warren – the notorious misogynist and homophobe of
Barack the Betrayer's inaugural invocation – remains above Christian
criticism.
******
Adam Lee's Alternet piece entitled “10 Things I Learned About the World From Ayn Rand's Insane Atlas Shrugged” prompted an unusually longed comment thread when it was republished by Reader Supported News, which gave me an opportunity to repeat my view of Ayn Rand's books and the close kinship between capitalism, fascism and Nazism:
Actually the best way to understand Ayn Rand is to acknowledge that her work is the capitalist equivalent of Mein Kampf
– written in prose so bad it is effectively unreadable, nevertheless
guiding a nation's morally imbecilic embrace of evil. We of course know
what Hitler did, but how many of us recognize that as Mein Kampf blueprinted
the Holocaust, so do Rand's texts blueprint capitalism's inevitable
transformation into fascism and thence to a distinctly USian form of
Nazism – with all of us who are poor, disabled, elderly and/or
chronically unemployed destined for same sort of terminal scapegoating
Hitler imposed on the Jews.
******
Joshua Holland of Moyers and Company asked the ultimate question of our time: “Can America's Descent Into Plutocracy Be Reversed?” I expressed my gravest doubts:
The
fact there is controversy over the value of the voter franchise (rather
than over our corrupted elections) proves that battle too is lost. Such
is Moron Nation – by which the Ruling Class suppressed the
rebelliousness of the 1960s. Meanwhile (the) notion capitalism can be
used to defeat capitalism – that members of the One Percent will work
against Ruling Class interests – is not just pathetically naïve; it is
literally beyond absurd. It is the best proof I've yet seen of the Audre
Lorde axiom: “the Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's
house.” What we fail to recognize is the magnitude of those tools. Moron
Nation is not just the byproduct of moronated classrooms and
prison-industrial pedagogy. It is the fulfillment of an irresistible
methodology of oppression derived from Nazi psychological experiments.
Its primary instruments are a deliberately punitive economy and mass
media in every conceivable form, advertising and entertainment included.
Its consequences include the destruction of community and even of our
ability to form communities. It has obliterated our collective and
individual connections to the environment; it has eradicated every other
quality that fosters solidarity. Contrast the birth and death of the
New Deal with the birth and death of Occupy. It is not that We the
People have willfully surrendered. It is instead that we have been
methodically stripped of any and all capabilities for effective
resistance.
LB/4 May 2014
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