New Photo; Why USian Revolution Is Naught but Fantasy

A joyful moment. From “Lives Apart,” a work in progress. Canon T5 DSLR, Canon 18mm-55mm f/3.5-f/5.6 zoom (35mm equivalent focal lengths 28mm-90mm). Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2015. Click on image to view it full size. 

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REGULAR OAN READERS are surely aware of my history-based hypothesis that revolution – whether nonviolent (as was the New Deal) or otherwise (as were the revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam) – has four prerequisites.

Reiterated for newcomers, these four requirements are: (1)-ideological solidarity, or at the very least a unifying statement of grievances from which such solidarity will logically evolve; (2)-leadership and its subsets, organization and organizational and ideological discipline; (3)-mastery of technology, including extant military technologies; and (4)-the assistance, both clandestine and overt, of a great foreign power (as provided by France during the USian Revolution, by Germany to the Russian Revolution and by the Soviet Union to the New Deal).

Regular readers also most likely know my argument that present-day conditions in the USian Empire effectively prohibit each of these prerequisites from ever again arising. Once more reiterating for new readers:

(1)-Ideological solidarity – or for that matter even the articulation of a unifying statement of grievances – is permanently obstructed by the reflexive anti-intellectualism in which the USian proletariat is methodically conditioned from birth. This prompts it to reject any demand for genuine analysis – witness the internal self-destruction of the Occupy Movement (2011-2012). Indeed the knee-jerk savagery of USian anti-intellectualism is repeatedly diagnosed as the pivotal element in the nation's ever-more-terrifying embrace of unabashed fascism.

(2)-The emergence of effective leadership, and therefore of its organizational and ideological subsets, is forever prohibited by the viciously self-obsessed yet maliciously conformist egotism in which the USian proletariat is also methodically conditioned from birth. This conditioning provides the mechanism by which the empire's defining anti-intellectualism and its headlong march toward fascism is enforced and perpetuated. Its workings are vividly portrayed in Joreen Freeman's essay “Trashing,” which focuses on the feminist movement but applies to the entire USian proletariat.

(3)-Mastery of extant technology is now eternally out of proletarian reach because of the increasingly esoteric nature of weaponry and the increasing exclusiveness of the training required for its operation. The resultant (unbridgeable) technology gap between proletarians and overlords is illustrated by the differences between jet-propelled aircraft and small arms. Only the USian Empire's most thoroughly vetted, therefore most trusted aristocrats or aristocrat wanna-bees are taught to fly; such knowledge is deliberately withheld from everyone else, with unauthorized disclosure punishable by imprisonment and even death. By contrast, though small arms are technically usable by anyone capable of learning proper sight picture, breathing and trigger-squeeze, they are utterly useless not just against aircraft but against a plethora of other Ruling-Class-only weapons including tanks and armored cars. Thus the proletarian seizure of arsenals (as in the Russian Revolution etc. and as might have occurred during the unrest associated with the New Deal era), is rendered irrelevant. And the very few arsenal-stored weapons that might narrow the gap are inoperable because no one in the proletariat is allowed the technical knowledge required to operate them. This implicit form of segregation is one of the (deliberate) consequences of abolishing the military draft and turning the defense of the empire over to well-paid, kill-hardened and therefore utterly reliable mercenary soldiers. Nor does the resultant technological gap prohibit only violent forms of revolution. Note how the empire's superior, indeed omnipotent powers of surveillance and electronic disruption  contributed to the downfall of the avowedly non-violent Occupy Movement and are routinely employed against any peaceful demonstrators  who dare question imperial policy.

(4)-The possibility of foreign support for a new USian revolution or even for resurrection of a New Deal ended forever with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the total co-optation of the Peoples Republic of China by Wall Street. But even before those counter-revolutionary victories, the potential of overseas support – so vividly displayed by France in the original USian revolution, by Germany in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and by the Soviet Union in the protection of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt  (scroll down to “Bankers Plot”) – had been diminished to near-zero by the anti-intellectualism that effectively stifles any such inclinations within the USian proletariat.

Note reports in the early 1990s Soviet intelligence analysts had evaluated the USian youth movements of the 1960s and concluded that – apart from the heartfelt rebelliousness of Vietnam and Vietnam-era veterans, ethnic minorities (i.e., the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement and MEChA  ) and the few feminists who remained faithful to Women's Liberation's Marxian roots – the epoch's hurly-burly was little more than bourgeois faddism, the collective tantrums of a vastly over-privileged, woefully under-educated and mostly cowardly generation of whites. (Unfortunately these reports of Soviet findings, many of them originating from Canadian media, have since been flushed down the Orwell hole and hence are summarized here from memory only. I did not save the clips because I thought it too big a story to be disappeared – more the fool I.)

Which brings us to the present moment and the evolution of a profoundly disappointing conclusion about Bernie Sanders and his campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination:

The beginning of this process was correspondence with a young friend whose intellect and Marxian ideological discipline is such any serious dialogue with her compels me to refine (and sometimes even radically revise) my thinking on any given topic. She sent me, without comment, a Washington Post piece reporting “Sanders’s predominately white backers are targeting black activists and journalists who dare question the candidate’s civil rights record.”  Here is my response, edited only for typos and clarity:

Apropos the WaPo piece, four thoughts:

Firstly, ask yourself: how many of those Sanders supporters are Hillary's clandestine operatives – or, more likely, federal secret police agents so assigned?

Secondly, it's especially necessary to distinguish between manifest Communophobia – specifically as manifest in identity politics and its fanatical refusal to acknowledge class struggle – and actual racism. (In which context note how identity politics is a standard Ruling Class tactic for perpetuating the divisions within the Working Class.) Indeed it is my experience – the unanimous experience of about 60 years I might add – that trying to educate a believer in identity politics about class struggle is like trying to teach an Abrahamic fundamentalist about the sacredness of Nature – in other words, utterly impossible.

Thirdly, based on post-Katrina polling, about 75 percent of the white citizenry is definitively racist – not merely indifferent to racism, but actually (albeit often clandestinely) supportive of it. Moreover, the 75 percent figure applies across the entire spectrum of U.S. politics (one of the surprises in the post-Katrina polling). In other words, racists – which is to say (usually closeted) white believers in identity politics – are undoubtedly as common in the white U.S. Left as in the Right. (The Right is merely more vocal about its racism.) Which, by the way, not only explains the lily-white (and hopelessly bourgeois) nature of U.S. feminism and the oppressive whiteness of Occupy, but also why I believe and am terrified Trump will be the next president.

The point here is that given this identity-politics reality, Sanders' best course of action may well be to remain silent until some Hillary disclosure or blunder gives him the opportunity to focus on the fact that, unless one is part of the Ruling Class, and regardless of one's race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality, a vote for Hillary is a vote for oppression.

Fourthly, there is the anti-Sanders media bias – remember the media is owned by the same aristocrats who own the government – that has, for example, almost totally suppressed the fact what Black Lives Matter silenced at Westlake Park in Seattle was not just a protest on behalf Social Security and Medicare but Sanders' intended announcement his new press secretary and campaign spokesperson – literally, apart from himself, the public face of his campaign – is a black woman named Symone Sanders. Sanders did make the announcement at his campaign rally in Seattle that night, but it was (deliberately?) obscured by the controversy generated by the Westlake Park event.

The relevant historical precedent in all of this is again a Russian one: specifically Father Gapon's role as an agent of the Okhrana in leading the Petrograd proletariat into the Bloody Sunday massacre on 22 January 1905 (9 January Old Style). USian protestors are no longer typically led into massacres by secret police agents, but the same tactics prevail: note in particular the CIA/FBI infiltration of the second wave feminist movement, its subsequent and total divorcement from its original Marxian roots and its re-emergence not just as identity politics but as a movement that, because of its fanatical support for capitalism, should properly be termed “Ayn Rand feminism.” I have no doubt the same strategy and tactics are at work through Black Lives Matter, which by every strategic and tactical principle known to humankind – from Sun Tzu through Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao Ze Dong, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh – should be building a united front against racism (fascism) rather than methodically alienating legions of potential supporters by its continuing attacks on the Sanders campaign.

Alas, there is – as Cornel West freely admits – a long history of black political ignorance that is parallel to and in fact co-equal with white political ignorance. As does its white counterpart, it results in the election and re-election of known oppressors. Note that black support for Obama remains at about 85 percent despite his now-innumerable betrayals. Note too that Hillary was a prime mover in both welfare “reform” (which flung millions of USians of all races into inescapable poverty) and in the Clinton crime legislation that is filling the prisons with blacks and Hispanics and has in effect resurrected slavery. Part of this problem is brainwashing by media which – I say again – is owned by the same people who own the government. The other parts are the economic blinders implicit in identity politics and the relentlessly conditioned anti-intellectualism that renders these paralyzing conditions permanently inescapable.

Aided by Madison Avenue, the U.S. Ruling Class has applied the principles of Josef Goebbels to an extent and with a magnitude of success not even Hitler himself could have imagined. That's why the black electorate is, in its own way, every bit as ignorant (and every bit as self-defeating), as the white electorate. In terms of real intellectuals – people who somehow manage to transcend the conditioning and thus see through the capitalist Big Lies and the charade of democracy and all its attendant bullshit – the number is pretty much the same regardless of race or ethnicity: about 10 percent. And the Ruling Class does everything in its (considerable) power to make certain all of us – black, white, Hispanic, First Nations, whatever – go unheard. Such is life in the Fourth Reich.

The real challenge for all of us is therefore to devise a genuinely memorable rebuttal to the Big Lies and a genuinely effective antidote to the toxins of conditioned anti-intellectualism. This is a challenge in which all races, ethnicities and genders have an absolutely vital role, but it won't be met unless and until we acquire enough ideological discipline to stop fighting amongst ourselves. And I frankly doubt – in a nation that is so methodically conditioned in Ayn Rand selfishness and egotism – such discipline is attainable.

Next was correspondence with a fellow geezer occasioned by Elizabeth Warren's endorsement of BLM,  which was accompanied by a blistering and long-overdue denunciation of racism. Again with editing only for typos and clarity:

Thank you. Too bad WaPo's link to her speech is (deliberately?) nonfunctional.  Will have to wait until it's up on YouTube. But thanks again. It's about time somebody said these words even if it's mere lip service, which coming from Warren – an avowed Hillary supporter – it undoubtedly is. Remember even the Nazis promised “justice.”

Dunno why Sanders didn't do this weeks ago. Since Warren is in the Hillary camp, Sanders' failure in this matter (1)-could ensure Sanders will never have any significant black support and (2)-probably therefore ensures Hillary of the nomination which (3)-probably also ensures a Trump presidency since no real Leftist will ever vote for (former Goldwater Girl/present-day fascist)  Hillary. 

All of which suggests the Sanders candidacy is of no more real substance than the biggest Big Lie in U.S. presidential history, Obama's “change we can believe in.”

Ok, Katie, I'm convinced. BLM is right to disrupt any Sanders appearance – even at a Save-Social-Security rally – because the fact he left the BLM endorsement to Hillary-operative Warren proves his campaign is merely a charade – the newest variant of the “change-we-can-believe-in” strategy perfected by Barack the Betrayer. To which my comment-thread rejoinder to Robert Reich's most recent regurgitation  of the Horatio Alger myth is a relevant postscript:

While Mr. Reich's indictment of the U.S. economy is indeed truthful, his increasingly frantic (and demonstrably false) insistence that capitalism can somehow magically be made to benefit “the many, not the few” is among the most destructively seductive Big Lies in human history.

Indeed Mr. Reich backhanded defense of capitalism provides a classic example of the foremost USian Empire disinformation tactic: concealment of a monstrous falsehood within a smokescreen of smaller truths – rather like a deadly spider or serpent hidden within a compellingly attractive bowl of fruit.

But when one recognizes the true nature of capitalism – the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever articulated, the replacement of those (often sacred) principles with unabashed greed and the elevation of that greed to the apex of virtue – one realizes capitalism is in fact cancer. And like cancer, it is either surgically eliminated or it kills the patient – in this instance not just our species but most life on this planet.

In this context, Mr. Reich's incessant efforts to disguise and defend the indefensible are not just obnoxious but irrelevant – the final verbal flatulence of an USian Empire propagandist who, had he even one scintilla of self-honesty, would have retired years ago in shame.

And as to the prospects of another USian revolution – or even a humanitarian renaissance within USian governance – note how my comment is thumbed-down.

Such is life in a land in which the proletarian majority remains so benightedly ignorant it stubbornly clings to capitalism and the Horatio-Alger/Ayn-Rand credo of “yeah if I play my cards right – and really if I fuck over enough other people – I can still get rich enough to be a Wall Street hero.”

LB/16-29 September 2015

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Real Leftists Know Capitalism Is Too Evil to Reform

“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.)

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(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.) 

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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 

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Economics Below the Salt: Bad News, Better News

The two reports below warn of the ongoing destruction of essential government services. This information is especially relevant to those of us who live “below the salt,” a late medieval term for the 99 Percent. The first report describes the sequester's impacts on several vital programs. The second tells how a local transit authority – forced by anti-transit voters to radically downsize its operations – nevertheless managed to save a fraction of its weekend and nighttime bus service. Those who fear they might be potential victims are urged to contact the appropriate local agencies for more information.

 

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How Sequester's Sword Slashes Programs for Lower-Income People 

 

ASKING THE POLITICIANS who perpetrated the sequester to acknowledge the devastating wounds they've inflicted on the people of the United States is like investigating a murder in a bad neighborhood: nobody knows nuttin' – and what's more, nobody seems to give a damn.

The best you'll get out of the elected officials who wielded the sword of sequestration – the Congressmen and the president who collaborated to put the service-slashing scheme together and impose it on the nation – is a spin-doctored variant of what street cops and prosecutors used to call the “SODDI” defense: “some other dude did it.” The Democrats blame the Republicans who are busy blaming the Democrats, each trying to hide the fact both parties are equally guilty.

But the politicians' game of hot potato and its accompaniment of journalistic jeering is no help to the millions of lower-and-middle-income people who now wait in fear to learn how badly they'll be hurt.

 

So here's a summary of just a few of the sequester's real-world consequences.

 

The sequester sword inflicts a $3.7 billion gash  on the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to one estimate,  at least 145,900 people are thus condemned to permanent homelessness. The members of least 417, 400 households will suffer other negative effects.

 

Part of the sequester-lacerated HUD budget is the housing-choice program more commonly known as Section Eight. It is a remnant of the many federal New Deal and Great Society programs that have been on bipartisan target lists since the Clinton Administration years, 1993-2001. (That's when the Democrats abandoned their longtime role as advocates for lower income people and joined with the Republicans in an ongoing campaign to shrink or eliminate social service expenditures.)

 

The money now routinely taken from all such services is typically diverted into various forms of so-called “corporate welfare” – taxpayer dollars doled out mostly to raise executive salaries and stockholder dividends at profit-making enterprises. Corporations that serve the world's largest and most expensive military establishment are especially favored by this upward redistribution of the nation's wealth.

 

But Section Eight – probably because of support from the powerful real estate industry – has somehow remained marginally functional despite decades of efforts to shut it down. Its vouchers provide access to privately owned, open-market housing. The associated subsidies ensure recipients' out-of-pocket expenditures for rent don't exceed 30 percent of their income.

 

Most of the applicants' needs are urgent. Many are disabled. Some are homeless or in danger of becoming so. But the sequester, by indiscriminately shrinking the Section Eight budget, imposes additional limits on the number of people it can serve.

 

Like other HUD programs, Section Eight is administered by local housing authorities. Sequestration's impact on the Tacoma Housing Authority, which serves a seaport city of about 200,000 persons, is typical.

 

Michael Mirra, THA's executive director, said the sequester downsized the group's $45 million annual budget by $2 million or 4 percent. It is, he acknowledged, a painful blow. But he and his colleagues, always attentive to political circumstances, had anticipated the cuts. Thus they reduced Section Eight expenditures accordingly, applying a policy Mirra describes as “thinning the soup, so we did not have to take any chairs away from the dinner table.”

 

Even so, the waiting list for Section Eight housing in Tacoma, already four or five years from application to approval, now becomes much longer.

 

Other local casualties of sequestration, Mirra said, include homeless college students and lower income people who were awaiting aid for first-time home purchases. The students were to have been participants in a new program that would have found them housing but was shut down by sequester's denial of funds.

 

Another cutback imposed by the sequester, this of $6.3 million,  has forced the nearby King County Housing Authority to suspend some of its Section Eight operations.

King County includes Seattle, which has its own housing authority. Excluding the people in Seattle, the county's population – that is, the number of persons potentially served by KCHA – is 1.3 million.

 

The sequester also slashes a number of education-related programs. These include work-study jobs and other forms of aid for college students as well as well as Head Start programs for pre-school children.

 

Though elderly and disabled people had been reassured Medicare was protected from sequestration, the reassurance may prove to have been misleading. Reimbursements to doctors, hospitals, health-insurance plans and drug companies are to be downsized by $2 billion over the next ten years. Whether these costs will be passed on to recipients is unknown at present, but the history of the health insurance business suggests they probably will be. An Associated Press analysis out of Washington D.C. says Medicare Advantage enrollees will be especially hard hit if the providers thus raise premiums, fees and prices.

 

Statewide, the sequester is hacking $1.05 million from nutrition assistance that provides meals for Washington seniors – some of whom would otherwise starve. It is the sort of cutback Rep. Alan Grayson says will kill people. Grayson, a Florida Democrat who is one of sequestration's few Congressional critics, calls it “a self-immolation,” adding it “will cause a lot of pain, a lot of hunger, a lot of disease, a lot of death.”

 

How severely will the shrunken funding wound Tacoma seniors? As of Friday, the relevant local officials didn't seem to know.

 

Nevertheless there's no doubt cuts similar to all those described above now afflict anyone who depends on federally funded programs. As is often the case, the circumstances in Washington state are a microcosm of what's happening throughout the nation.

Meanwhile Grayson is not the sequester's only outspoken adversary. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the feisty Democrat from Massachusetts, has denounced it as “irresponsible” and “just plain stupid.”

But it remains to be seen whether Grayson, Warren and their few like-minded colleagues can convince the bipartisan House and Senate majorities to sheath their metaphorical swords and undo the real-world damage they've already done. 

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Transit Board Backs Down on (Some) Service Reductions 

 

PERHAPS IN RESPONSE to increasingly bitter criticism by advocacy groups for lower-income people, the Pierce Transit Board of Commissioners has effectively defied its anti-transit constituents and discarded an already approved plan to abolish all weekend and nighttime bus service. 

Or perhaps – as an inside source implied last week – it was just too embarrassing to too many powerful people to think of a city as big and economically significant as Tacoma without any weekend or night-time buses.

In any case, the service reduction that goes into effect in September will be on the order of 25 percent rather than the 34 percent mandated by the board in January. Revoking its January decision, the besieged agency now says it will retain minimal night and weekend service. 

Even in their new and slightly revised form, the cutbacks will further shrink already radically-diminished bus service for the approximately 600,000 people who live in Pierce Transit's 292-square-mile service district. The area includes the seaport city of Tacoma, population about 200,000, which plays a significant role in the global economy.

Pierce Transit's downsizing, by nearly 70 percent since 2009, is mandated by local voters who damn public transport as welfare, denounce its users as bums and condemn its unionized employees as parasites.

But for once the “human decency” meme that emerged in reaction to last November's vote against transit and transit-users seems to have been paramount amongst the commissioners' considerations. The agency thus reshuffled its budgetary tarot cards and came up with an additional $6.2 million – $5.5 million from maintenance funds – to maintain (very limited) weekend and night-time bus operations.

“The risk,” said Pierce Transit's Lars Erickson, “is that we may have (unforeseen) maintenance problems.” The board is willing to gamble, the publicist says, “because we understand the effects of cutting weekend and nighttime service.” 

Nevertheless, Tacoma and its surrounding suburbs will still suffer from what – for a municipality of its size and economic importance – is probably most inadequate public transport in the industrial world.

At least one board member, Derek Young, says he fears Pierce Transit is “in a death spiral,” with the ongoing service reductions resulting in revenue losses and enough additional political antagonism to eventually terminate the agency's operations. Some transit opponents have already admitted this is precisely their intent.

In this context, the Polly Anna spin Pierce Transit attempts to put on the cutbacks – “extensive system redesign project, robust public outreach since 2009” – seems especially ironic.

The initial downsizing of the agency's operations, in 2009, was due to Washington state's notoriously regressive tax structure.

As a consequence, the state's transit authorities are funded almost entirely by sales tax revenue, which slumped radically during the Bush-Obama recession and has remained low ever since. In response, Pierce Transit reduced service by eight percent. It re-routed several bus lines and shortened operating hours but otherwise preserved pre-recession schedules.

In 2011, hoping to restore these cuts and expand existing service to accommodate growing ridership, the commissioners asked voters to approve a sales-tax increase of .03 percent, three cents on a $10 purchase.

But the far-right majority that dominates the suburbs, energized as they were by the success of the Tea Party, launched a nasty campaign based on spurious claims that transit is not a civil necessity but rather a means of placating lower-income people, pampering minorities and funding the Democratic Party via the Amalgamated Transit Union.

The transit opponents also tried to portray the agency as an exceptionally glaring example of government spending run amok – a bureaucracy that squandered taxpayer dollars at every opportunity.

Efforts at rebuttal – for example telling the story of how insightful planning gave Pierce Transit the first natural-gas-powered buses on the planet and locked in fuel prices that in today's market are equivalent to buying diesel at 71 cents per gallon – were either ignored or shouted down.

Thus the agency's 2011 special-election ballot measure, though narrowly approved in Tacoma proper, was overwhelming defeated in the suburbs, which contain about two-thirds of the population of the Pierce Transit service area.

The directors resubmitted the three-cents-on-$10 tax-hike to the voters in 2012, hoping the progressive majority expected to turn out for the November general election would at last rescue the system.

As expected, the transit opponents' responded with the same hateful rhetoric they had employed the previous year. But they became even more stridently anti-union after the agency's bus drivers and other workers represented by ATU Local 587 voted to give up their 2011-2014 raises and cost-of-living increases in a last-ditch effort to help save bus service.

The second vote thus went the same way as the first.

While the voters within the Tacoma city limits again approved the tax hike, an overwhelming number of suburbanites again voted against it. And even the Tacoma outcome was gravely disappointing to transit supporters. An unprecedented two-percent under-vote – about 15,400 ballots cast by people who declined to vote on the transit measure – suggests the presence of a decisive anti-transit plurality even inside the city limits.

Hence the Pierce Transit board's unannounced but obvious decision to abandon – at least for the foreseeable future – any further ventures in electoral politics.

LB/4 March 2013

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Warren, Norma Miedema and the Return of the Goddess

ENOUGH PARTISAN POLITICS for a while. Even after the energizing victory of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, I still doubt there is anyone in this nation – or for that matter anywhere on this tragically afflicted planet – who has the power and will to get us off the slide to extinction on which capitalism has launched us by its insatiable greed.

But if there is such a person, and if she is to save us from ourselves, surely her attributes will include not only the socioeconomic and political bravery of Warren but the death-defying courage and Gaian passion that makes Norma Miedema both a modern heroine and the back-to-the-future embodiment of a female consciousness seemingly absent from our species since the age of Celtic myth. It is not far-fetched to suggest Warren and Miedema represent parallel and entirely congruent aspects of a single impulse toward human survival. 

Warren of course is already becoming known throughout the world as a symbol of an electorate's awakening from political torpor. Miedema, who organized and led a  presumably impossible, deadly dangerous and therefore epic horse rescue in Holland, is scarcely known beyond her native land. As to the specifics of what Miedema did and why it is so psychologically and metaphysically important, I suppose these details too could be labeled political, albeit only in the broadest and yet most deeply personal sense of our win-or-become-extinct struggle against capitalism and patriarchy in general. I say this despite the fact most of the information I have about Miedema reached me only late Friday, and much of that was by inference alone – the ability of video-taped imagery to transcend the barriers of language – the entire package handed me by one of those Muse-haunted coincidences Carl Jung labeled synchronicity. Saturday I was still in joyous shock at the absolute correctness of the journalistic intuition that prompted my research and so moved by my discoveries I could not find words to write what I had learned. 

Hence it seemed there was naught to do but strap the ever-more-essential brace on my right knee and go for a long walk. The Internet said the outside temperature was 41 degrees Fahrenheit but it felt colder, maybe in the late 30s. The sun was setting a sickly storm-warning yellow behind the ramparts of the hospitals on the hill above the seasonally emptied expanse of Wright Park. Those who pay attention would have seen a graybeard geezer wearing a black beret and a faded olive canvas coat open to the wind and beneath the coat a bright red-and-yellow plaid wool neck scarf and under that a shirt of dark red coarse heavy wool girthed at the waist by a black belt-purse, all this above baggy black flannel workout pants with elastic cuffs tight over hiking boots: today's variant on my normal winter apparel. To others less attentive – and during the entire 45 minutes afoot I encountered only six humans total (two runners and four dog-walkers) – I was just a bespectacled vaguely foreign-looking old man hobbling with his hickory cane along formal tree-lined paths that had vanished beneath great drifts of brown and yellow leaves, maple and chestnut and birch and poplar, oak and ash too but without the bitter thorn that completes the trio of calendar trees by which one might curse an enemy, as Jack Orion, the Celtic Star Lord, had fatally cursed the interloping plagiarist who dared try usurp the bed he shared with the Goddess.

Now the pale sun was hospitalized and gone; now it was dusk, the lingering blue-shifted twilight of the Pacific Northwest, and I could not but see in Nature's temporary imposition of autumnal anarchy another harbinger of the apocalypse we now fear to be inevitable: this is how the park will look in the first fall of its abandonment, a mile of bare-branched silence, its summer children banished and surely dead and all our music lost forever. It was a terrible realization, lump-in-the-throat painful. 

Instinctively then I sought the ancient reassurance denied us by the we're-damned-forever sadism of the religions that still vainly seek to rule us, the Abrahamic cults of Christianity and Judaism and Islam and all the imperialistic science so derived, and I committed precisely the sort of reflexive heresy that surely would have gotten me arrested were the Christian fanatics yet as theocratically empowered as they were in the 1600s when one of my female ancestors was persecuted as a witch in Connecticut. I ungloved my right hand, reached out and touched the giant sequoia that soars near the middle of the park, then a few hundred yards later caressed the first of the smooth-trunked beeches that border its southern end. As I did so I realized I was mentally reciting, seemingly by instinct, the opening stanza from Robert Graves' reconstruction of “Cad Goddeu” or “The Battle of the Trees,” a mysterious and perplexing work by the ancient British poet Taliesin: 

The tops of the beech-tree have sprouted of late
Are changed and renewed from their withered state...

 

Graves believed the verses to be a poetically charged description of a historical event, but to me, the first lines have always had an aura of prophecy as well. The beech in European mythology is a tree of life, of restoration and regeneration. It is therefore a symbol of the Great Goddess – which makes it arguable Taliesin was prophesying her resurrection. So were the Ghost Dancers, 1500 years later and a continent away: 

The white man's god has forsaken him
Let us go and look for our Mother
We shall live again!

 

And poignantly forlorn as the park was in its dwindling light with the dark exclamation points of its few tall conifers and the fading mid-November ghosts of  October's bright deciduous color, the power I sensed beneath my fingers in that living wood, even in its dormancy, was so compelling it left me whispering fervent thanks to a deity who at the very least (and even if she has no objective existence) is the consummate symbol of our environmental salvation and whom I'm sometimes certain is real as life itself but nevertheless, more often than not, agnostically deny. 

All of which, as we shall soon see, has everything to do with Norma Miedema. 

*****

On the rare occasions I manage to suppress my cynicism enough to believe in the Goddess as I did for those moments during my walk in the park, to imagine her as objective reality and not just an essential symbol, I am invariably smitten, sometimes to tears, by joyful gratitude for the good fortune granted me by the women who inspired and clarified my words and pictures and blest me with sweet love and patient friendship sufficient to ease the wounds inflicted by a murder-minded mother. The essay entitled “Dancer Resurrected” expresses this gratefulness in detail, though it is entirely too long and desperately needful of a competent editor. In this context the historical events it references – the 1965 Blackout and the 1967 Easter Be-In – are prerequisites to the personal confirmation described in its penultimate section. The episodes related separately in “Abutments”  and “Doorways,” each of which remains personally compelling in its own right, are themselves assertions of faith and thankfulness. 

But always there is the relentless thrust of the counter-reasoning I describe in “Outlanders,” a memoir-chapter I wrote two years ago but have yet to publish because I am torn between the (seemingly impossible) task of writing plausible fiction sufficiently adept to hide the identities of the three women who are responsible for the most metaphysically pivotal, profoundly revealing, undeniably magical and yes shamelessly sensual weekend of my life. The alternative is to include essential details that would make their names unmistakable even behind the cover of aliases. Though one of the three has read the work and says “Do it; use my name. I'd love to see it in print,” she is a professional musician who yet smiles on cutting-edge outrageousness while the other two are seemingly beyond contact range and, I suspect, have in their elder years become far more private persons. All of which is irrelevant here; the relevant part of “Outlanders” is not subject to writerly angst, probably because it flatly contradicts the very evidence the rest of the chapter dares reveal: 

A big part of me rejects as patently absurd not just the idea of reincarnation but any other conception of life-after-death: at best a terrified byproduct of belief in the divine (itself the adult variant of the Santa Claus myth), at worst clinical dementia. By the same logic I likewise dismiss religious visions, past-life memories, ghosts and all the rest of the allegedly supportive evidence of a deity or a “hereafter” as genuine insanity – even when the phenomena in question is my own personal experience. In this frame of mind I regard all such episodes as but preliminary symptoms of the terminal madness that accompanies the unbearable moment-of-death realization that for each of us our death is truly the end of everything forever, the recognition of which destroys the human mind in the same way rot more gradually obliterates the body, the mind mercifully disintegrating into a chaos of hallucination much as the body deteriorates into an entropy of maggots; that death is not just the demise of one's physical body but the termination of one's consciousness and therefore a microcosm of apocalypse – the end of the world, indeed not just the end of all being but the end of all potential; that death proves the unspeakable meaninglessness of selfhood; that the nonsensical nature of life in general is thus established beyond dispute by the final destination of the passage from the Big Bang of conception through its siren-song aftermath of expanding possibilities that all lead nowhere save to ultimate betrayal, the hitherto-denied but now inescapable darkness of the Black Hole; infinite silence, an ultimate deafness never again to be relieved by the exquisiteness of music; every vestige of our own personal reality consigned to a grave thus the graveyard of reality itself – all such assertions condensed in one question that like everything else at the instant of death-as-oblivion is reduced to irrelevance. If such is death – and this mode of thinking allows me no alternative – then life is but a non sequitur, the dread knowledge with which irony-minded U.S. soldiers in Vietnam so often comforted their dying comrades: “it ain't nothing, bro; let it go; it ain't nothin.” 

 

And now, as if some presumably imaginary being had become so vexed at agnosticism and disbelief she materialized in emphatic rebuttal, there is that videotape I first saw on the Internet in 2006, Norma Miedema and six equestrian sisters rescuing a terrified and fractious herd of at least 100 horses marooned by a fatal storm – a rescue men with machines had thrice attempted and thrice failed. 

As is promised (or perhaps threatened) by a very old ballad: 

Cunning and art he did not lack
But aye her whistle it will fetch him back.

*****

True to form, by the time I got home from my walk, my cynicism had resumed its snarling negativity, but the video was there waiting. The previous night while watching a poorly subtitled cable-TV movie about Asian horse-herders, I had suddenly remembered the rescue I had viewed in 2006 and the atavistic echoes it evoked, and I spent whatever time it took to find it on the Internet and several more hours researching the event itself. It is an episode so powerful it suggests not just the reality or at least the psychological validity of the concept of a goddess but provides us a vivid and not-at-all-mystical portrait of Epona or a woman who is surely her priestess whether consciously or not.

For those unfamiliar with mythology, Epona is one of the innumerable representations of the Cosmic Mother – the womb that gives birth to all that ever was and ever will be – in this instance portrayed as the Bountiful Mare or a woman and mare together, the Goddess as she was (quite rationally) pictured by the ancient People of the Steppe, the Scythians and their genetically confirmed descendants the Celts. 

Such metaphysical constructs are always more instinctively familiar and comforting to me than those of the Abrahamic cults, and they have been so for as long as I can remember, which is probably no coincidence since DNA analysis has proven the equestrian tribes of Eastern Europe and Western Asia to have been amongst my earliest and most genetically dominant ancestors. Though my family name is English, probably originally German, far enough back maybe Jewish, my genetic heritage is almost pure Celt. Perhaps that's why the video in question invariably evokes delicious chills and affirmative gooseflesh and tears of recognition: Epona again, scarcely changed from when she was immortalized on England's White Horse Hill, some molecular part of me wordlessly remembering the age and truth so gracefully symbolized and – yes – mourning its loss and yearning for its restoration. 

The resurrection of the Goddess, which remains our species' most important yet most unreported story, was begun by (mostly male) scholars more than a century ago. But it's present-day impetus comes from a uniquely potent, utterly spontaneous combination of increasingly female artistic vision and breakthrough science. The former – precisely as Graves himself recognized – is always the realm of the Muse. The latter, though patriarchal in hierarchy and method, nevertheless shattered the patriarchy's biological and conceptual cornerstones, first by inventing the birth-control pill, which restored to women the control of their bodies men stole from them thousands of years ago, secondly by restating via the Gaia Hypothes the core principle of our species' first and oldest religion: that the Earth (and by extension the entire universe) is our Mother – alive, conscious and self-regulating. In this context, the misogynistic hatred and terror that motivates today's theocrats and their wars against women and nature are entirely predictable reactions. 

If Edward Whitmont (The Return of the Goddess, Crossroads:1982) is right about the re-emergence of Goddess-archetypes as survival mechanisms – and I cannot doubt his findings – it is to be expected that in this era of backlash and terminal climate change and the death and despair so inflicted, we would meet again an archetype approximating Epona, who let us not forget is also a warrior-goddess. Which I believe explains why – six years after her dramatic leadership of that epic horse rescue – the coverage the Dutch press is giving Norma Miedema suggests she is finally becoming one of our modern heroines, a role-model of the sort we have not seen in many lifetimes, as if she rode in from the plains of Scythia or materialized from the pages of Herodotus' Histories or Tacitus' Agricola.

Now that you've seen Norma Miedema's portrait, here is the video of what she organized and led. It's unfortunate the accompanying music is so distractingly modern; Faun's “OynengYar,” which I first heard only yesterday but seem to remember from forever, would be an infinitely better anthem. Too bad I have neither the Nurdish knowledge or skill to make it so: its “Dance My Love” is an invocation  not only of the Steppe but in the Kazakh tongue and almost certainly of pre-patriarchal traditions as well. But at least this Dutch version of the video is infinitely better and more detailed than the variant that first appeared in the United States six years ago, monitored as it is today by a maliciously Christian censor who – as I can personally attest – blocks any attempted reference to the pagan echoes the imagery so undeniably evokes. Note too this USian version is accompanied by an intrusively masculine and therefore obnoxiously inappropriate Vangelis piece, “Conquest of Paradise,” which some nyekulturniy malcontent has dubbed onto the tape no doubt in an attempt to assuage his threatened masculinity, his own small contribution to the war against women and nature. 
 

In resistance we have the brave precedent set by Elizabeth Warren, who alas may yet be betrayed by the opportunistic cowards and moral imbeciles with whom she must of political necessity interact. But in our time of need we are also given that which is beyond betrayal, the courage and sensitivity and wisdom shown us by Norma Miedema and the blessed memories of bonfires and moonlight sung us by Faun and in their symbiosis the quickening splendor of our species' oldest wellspring of mindfulness.

Let the roses and rosebuds bloom
Dance my love, dance my love.

LB/10-12 November 2012

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