Why I Was Gone So Long; Apology to Readers; U.S. Escalation in Ukraine; Protesters as 'Enemy Forces'

A NUMBER OF people have asked me why I withdrew so suddenly from the blogosphere last December and why I have been mostly absent since then, not only posting nothing significant in this space but making only minimal contributions to websites I formerly frequented daily.

As with so many things human, the answer is complicated. It has at least three parts.

The first of these, the fulcrum upon which fate leveraged everything that followed, was as I said at the time “a conjunction of obligations and disasters.” 

My obligations were to write, photograph, edit and produce the monthly newsletter that serves the community of elderly and disabled people in which I reside, and – at the same time –to help a friend with a suddenly essential project that had to be completed by 31 December.

The initial disaster was the death of my computer's printer, chiefly because I cannot edit my own writing effectively on a monitor. I'm not sure what the problem is that causes me to miss so many errors when I try to edit on-screen, but I am certain it has to do with only seeing a small part of the text at one time and also with being dyslexic.

Hence I if I am to write for OAN (or for any other medium in which it is imperative I not look like an illiterate idiot, a muddle-headed moron or a geezer doddering into dotage), I need the printer to provide me text I can edit in the traditional copy-desk manner, green visor, pica stick and all. I mark the corrections on the paper. Then – like an old-time Linotype operator (one of the many categories of highly skilled workers who were flung into permanent joblessness by that electronic scab known as the computer) – I type the changes into the virtual text.

As I do so I hope desperately I do not make other errors – for example the dyslexic but comically literal “fucendate” (from “fecundate”), or the arthritic-fingered blunder that turns “working press” into “wormking press.”

(I leave it to you readers to decide the Freudian appropriateness of “wormking press” as it applies to the so-called “mainstream media” of the United States. Suffice it to say that in historical truth it is our species' first wholly privatized Ruling Class propaganda machine, a microcosm of the larger socioeconomic triumphs achieved in the U.S. by Ayn Rand, Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels.

Remember too – especially in the context of the warning to never eat yellow snow – how this “main stream” functions to facilitate the trickle-down economics in which we are all...well, er, drowning.)

Returning to the circumstances of my departure, I had intended, as noted in December, to resume blogging after the first of the year.

By then, thanks to the continuing generosity of Adrienne, who was my second wife and is now amongst my dearest friends, I had a new printer – the highly rated Hewlett-Packard Envy 5530.

But the new printer crashed my old computer, forcing me to undertake a project I had long dreaded: replacing my old familiar machine with the new, substantially more powerful but totally alien Samsung NP355E5C Adrienne had given me the previous Christmas.

I had not started using the new computer – in fact I had not even unpacked it – because I knew from past experience the process of changing computers would probably keep me off-line for at least a month. And I wanted to re-start OAN before my absence cost me too many more readers.

Fate, however, had other plans. The old computer could not be resurrected without the expenditure of far more money than I had. Nurds here in Bill Gates land charge as much as $265 per hour, and what the old computer needed – a near-doubling of its random access memory plus upgrading from an Ubuntu 10.10 operating system to the present Ubuntu 12-whatever – would take many many many more hours than one.

That was the bad news. The worse news was the crash had obliterated my e-mail address book, which I have since been able to only partially reconstruct.

The most devastating news of all was that Samsung and Microshaft had cut a maliciously monopolistic deal that made it impossible to reconfigure the new laptop to run Ubuntu, which I had come to love for its clarity, simplicity, intuitive protocols and a friendly discussion board to help compu-ignoramuses like myself navigate its Nurdly esoterica.

Thus I had to learn Microshaft Windows 8.1, which after running anything Ubuntu was like being told the only allowable route to Portland, Oregon was via New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago and Hungry Horse, Montana rather than by the direct route 143 miles (230 kilometers) south from Tacoma on Interstate 5.

Finally, near the end of March and with the help of two computer-savvy friends and an auxiliary keyboard, I was able to run the Microshafted Samsung without having to call for help every 15 minutes.

But on my 75th birthday – literally just as I was writing the preceding paragraph – yet another crisis arose.

For the past six months, the faceless, mostly nameless executives who lord it over the apartment complex in which I'm a tenant have been harassing us with threats of a one-or-two-day temporary eviction, ostensibly so the entire building can be renovated in the shortest time possible.

The temporary evictions, we are told, are non-negotiable.

But the executives refuse to tell us when these evictions will occur – only that we will have 48 hours notice to prepare, which of course means we should box up our belongings now and then live as denizens of storage lockers until management deigns to act.

Needless to say, the dislocations we are suffering as a result are in some respects worse than the life-disruptions of a full-fledged move to a new address. At least with an address-change, there's a known schedule, presumably with reasonable time for planning, packing and unpacking.

What in landlord-speak is dismissed as a minor inconvenience is for us a debacle. Add in that we're all either old and/or disabled, many of us both, some genuinely fragile, and the stress and anxiety inflicted by the temporary-eviction threats ramps up into the stroke-and-heart-attack zone.

Moreover the fact the need for such haste has never been explained combines with the fact the neighborhood is a known gentrification target to evoke strong suspicions we are being not-so-subtly encouraged to move elsewhere.

Then on my birthday – happy birthday from Jesus – we were hit with the written threat of a $75-per-month rent increase and its unexpressed but implicit and abjectly terrifying threat of instant homelessness.

Hence, acting both as the volunteer founder and editor of the apartment-complex newsletter and in my own defense, I consulted with a local lawyer. On his advice, I wrote, assembled and filed a 51-page formal complaint complete with 11 pages of narrative and 40 pages of documentation.

Though there is no effective tenant-protection apparatus in Washington state – tenants here have probably fewer rights under state and local law than anywhere else in the U.S. – the fact this particular apartment complex was at least partly financed with federal funds means we may have some rights under federal law.

Or so the lawyer said. Hence the complaint – which took me 16 gruelingly long 14-hour days to prepare – was mailed to U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer (Democrat/Washington state) on 13 April.

Truly I have not worked so hard since I was a full-time investigative reporter. Worse, it was the first time I had written about anything so damnably complex since I quit tobacco, 20 years ago this coming 23 September. I was not even one day into the project when I began to fear I could not finish the work without starting smoking again. Indeed I became so fearful of yielding to nicotine seduction I enrolled in a quit-smoking program offered by Group Health Cooperative, which is my Medicare (health care) provider and in which I am a voting member.

My problem, as regular readers of OAN know, is that I am dyslexic.  In days of yore, when I was a member of the working press, my two-and-one-half-pack-per-day cigarette addiction was a key part of my compensatory mechanism.

The nicotine one imbibes by smoking is a potent neurotransmitter, and one of its deadly benefits – the oxymoron is deliberate – is that it temporarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction. It thereby evokes an instantaneous clarity of expression that now without nicotine often takes me hours – and sometimes literally days – to achieve.

In the instance of the complaint to Congressman Kilmer, it took me a total of 224 hours – the equivalent of 6.4 35-hour workweeks compressed into 16 days – to write a seven-sentence summary and a 5,000-word, 10-part report and then to assemble the supportive documents. In the old days, as a smoker, I'd have done the writing in maybe three days max and – working no more than my usual seven-hour days – had the entire project finished within a week.

But at last the complaint is now done and mailed.

Will our Democratic Congressman defend us? Or will he act upon his de facto Republican, military-industrial-complex ideology and throw us under the proverbial bus?

Surely we shall soon know the answer.

The question is legitimate. Not only are we lower-income people. Because we are elderly and/or disabled, we are truly surplus – no longer supportable for profit.

And now finally – for the first time since last December – I actually have the time and energy and inclination to again start doing this blog right.

***

IT OCCURRED TO me last night because of an “I-hope-you-keep-writing” note sent by a reader with the seemingly Eastern European name of Marija (as in the late Marija Gimbutas), that perhaps the explanation for OAN's readership in Ukraine and Russia was its regular linkage to the accurate Consortium News reports of events therein.

Consortium News and Reader Supported News,  a separate website that often republishes the Consortium reports, are the only indigenous U.S. sources that dare reveal how the USian Empire has imposed and is now defending its newest Nazi puppet state.

These websites also report how ethnic Russians are resisting the U.S./Nazi onslaught with the same breathtaking courage as defined the Soviet partizanska during World War II, which for the peoples of the U.S.S.R. was indeed what it is called in Russia even now: “the Great Patriotic War against Fascism.”

Could it be that due to electronic censorship by the U.S./Nazi regime in Kiev, OAN was one of the few reliably available sources of those Consortium and RSN reports? 

Obviously I don't know. But the suspicion alone is enough to fill me with guilt for my nearly four-month absence.

Hence my profuse apology if my personal problems made it more difficult for 

Ukrainians and Russians to get those reports. Providing the relevant links is a purpose – indeed an obligation – I will damn well take seriously in the future.

***

YET ANOTHER REASON I withdrew – maybe the most important reason of all – I confess in a letter to a colleague here in Tacoma:

During our recent telephone conversation my explanation of why I so suddenly dropped out of sight was less than articulate. Like most men I find it extremely difficult to talk about my own emotions, but unlike many men I do possess some small skill at writing about such things. Hence this hopefully more informative (and therefore more honest) explanation:

As you no doubt know from your work, as we approach our personal graveyards we often become brutally honest with ourselves. Though I have been in that general mode for several years, my brush with death via kidney infection and incipient septicemia last fall radically intensified the attendant process of self-evaluation.

When I was maybe 12 or 13, and without really giving it much thought,  I adopted a Boy Scout rule  – "always leave the campsite in better condition than you found it" – as the  motivating principle of my life. For many years my choice was scarcely conscious, and I am only now realizing the extent to which it nevertheless ruled my most important decisions: how, for example, it prompted me to choose journalism and journalistic activism as my primary career. 

But sitting one day last fall in Group Health hooked up to intravenous Cipro I had the darkest, most wrenching epiphany of my life: I realized that every cause to which I had committed time, energy and passion – including causes for which I sometimes willingly risked my life – has either failed or was later defeated.  

Organized Labor is dead beyond any hope of resurrection. Today's U.S. is every bit as racist as it was in the Jim Crow era. Women's reproductive rights are being reduced to pre-Roe-v-Wade levels (and in most states have already been abolished entirely). Vietnam taught us nothing. The alternative press is no more (its electronic ghost is but a flash-in-the-pan), and the mainstream press has been corrupted into the most diabolically effective Josef Goebbels propaganda apparatus our species has ever known. Meanwhile the Environmental Movement  is so impotent in the face of Christo-capitalist ecocide, it can do nothing to protect us from becoming a doomed species on a dying planet.

 

The mental list continued,  etc. ad nauseam for the entire two hours I was in the clinic that day and continues to haunt me – with the additional weight of shame for yielding to despair – to this very minute.  

In other words, though I participated in probably 60 years of efforts to leave the campsite of this nation and this planet in better shape than it was, every one of those efforts failed abysmally.

Why then, I asked myself, should I squander the final years of my life fighting for causes that either have no possibility of ever winning or that – even if they might seem to achieve small victories – are certain to be undone by the now-unavoidable extinction of our species? (The newest projections of terminal climate change say we will have rendered our planet uninhabitable by mammalian life – and ourselves extinct – within a hundred years.)

Obviously I am still debating this most vexing of all personal questions, which is why I remain unable to commit to anything much beyond the demands of living day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute. Factor in the growing probability of a thermonuclear apocalypse resulting from U.S. provocations of Russia in the Ukraine and I often feel as if I am living, albeit in slow motion, the script of Nevil Shute's On the Beach.  I therefore hope – because your friendship means a lot to me – you will forgive my angst-ridden retreat.

 

(It is so foolishly easy, even thrust ever deeper as we are into the de facto concentration camp Ayn Rand economics and total surveillance is making of the USian homeland, to forget that others have it infinitely worse, that for beleaguered people elsewhere, as in the eastern Ukraine, yielding to despair is possible only if one is willing to submit to immediate extermination. I understand this, not the least because of the violently dangerous wretchedness of my childhood. Hence my oft repeated statement that in times such as these, survival is itself an act of revolutionary defiance. Hence too my hope I have sufficient strength I do not falter again.)

***

  
BUT THE WEIGHT of despair is nevertheless undeniable. We are facing a magnitude of oppression that is unique in our species' experience. And if we are to survive it – which grows less likely every day – it will require evolution of an entirely new set of strategies and tactics.

This was the main point of my response to “Three Reasons Why the United States Is Broken, Bloated and Bleeding,” a Truthout piece in which Pierce Nahigyan posits the astonishingly arrogant, absurdly pompous argument all we need do to cure the nation's ills is “have a serious conversation about the big idea: What we want the United States to be”  – as if that alone would save our species from itself.

Needless to say, my retort was blistering. 

Here is an excerpt, edited and condensed from four separate posts:

Alas, it is far too late to have “a serious conversation about the Big Idea."

Indeed it has been too late since the Eleven Years of Political Murders (22 November 1963 to 13 November 1974), and the slayings of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Sen. Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, Phillip Gibbs, James Green and Karen Silkwood.

Everything that has happened since then, the Patriot Act and the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act included, has been nothing more than what the military calls a "mopping-up operation," the consolidation of victory, albeit performed in slow motion lest Moron Nation awaken to what obtains.

Though the Occupy Movement was in fact an awakening, it was predictably crushed. (For those of literary inclinations, our situation is identical to that described in the Harry Turtledove short story called "The Last Article," for which Google.

As a result there are now only two sorts of people in the United States.

There are those like Mr. Nahigyan, who believe we are still allowed significantly effective remnants of our former freedom and political power, but who thus by their breathtaking ignorance prove themselves to be utter fools if not victims of clinical delusion.

Then there are those like Chris Hedges or myself who know enough history to understand the USian Empire's technological supremacy means its de facto Fourth Reich is forever – that is, until capitalist savagery and/or the resultant nuclear war and/or environmental ruin reduces our species to extinction.

Nor will the oft-promised “technological solutions” ever save us. Murphy's Law is absolute reality. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And scientists with their breathtakingly selfish arrogance are Murphy's most devastating facilitators, witness Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island etc.

Though it is considered heresy to say so, Rev. King's statement that the arc of the universe moves toward justice is meanwhile proven to be the biggest Big Lie of all time. In fact the reverse is true. The few interludes of "justice" in human history are but fleeting sparks in an infinity of darkness -- and the frequency and duration of those sparks are in inverse proportion to technological development.

The more advanced the technology, the less it tolerates individual liberty.

Technology's ultimate function is thus proven by its consequences: it is to grant our overlords ever-more-godlike powers and simultaneously reduce ourselves to ever-more-abject powerlessness.

Besides which there is the fact the notion of revolution is rendered meaningless when it arises amongst a dying species on a dying planet.

Most of us also fail to understand how revolutions succeed. The Germanic risings against Rome succeeded because they were part of a continent-wide onslaught that denied Rome any possibility of assistance from without. Likewise Islam, again part of a continent-wide onslaught that denied large parts of post-Roman Europe and finally Byzantium -- Constantinople -- any possibility of outside reinforcement. But in the modern world -- as the Marxians themselves concluded -- such widespread risings are impossible. Hence all revolutions have four requirements. These are: (1)-ideological solidarity; (2)-leadership and organizational discipline; (3)-access to, and know-how to use, extant military technology; (4)-the intervention (or at least the clandestine assistance) of a major power. In today's world, no revolution can succeed without all four of these prerequisites in place.

The movements that in the 20th Century dismantled the British Empire would not have succeeded without Soviet and/or Chinese assistance. Gandhi's pacifism was backed by the Red Army and its threat of violent revolution. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1858 would never have occurred without the agitation of Tsarist intelligence operatives. The American Revolution of 1776 could not have succeeded without French assistance and intervention. Nor would the Russian Revolution of 1917 have succeeded without the clandestine help of Imperial Germany.

But evolution of the requisite pre-revolutionary conditions is impossible today and will remain so for as long as present-day surveillance technology and weaponry exist. Thanks to that technology, the USian Empire's total control of the world's economy is also total control of the world's peoples.

Domestically, the truly savage anti-intellectuality in which we have all been conditioned since World War II means that no ideological solidarity is possible beyond that organized by the Ruling Class: note the emergence of the Tea Party and then of Occupy (of which I was part). Contrast the two, and note why one has gone on to become an incipient Nazi Party, while the other is dead beyond resurrection, torn apart as much by forces within as it was crushed from without.

Conditions abroad are even more hopeless: the instant the global surveillance apparatus detects effective resistance, the Central Intelligence Agency sends in its death squads (for the newest example of which see the Ukraine reports below). Or take Venezuela: without the Soviet Union to back it up, its progressive government is no more sustainable than the proverbial snowball in hell. And there, of course, you have it: with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the co-optation of China, any realistic hope for humanitarian revolution or even humanitarian reform anywhere on this planet died forever.

Those who doubt this should remember the New Deal happened only after the U.S. Ruling Class was terrified into concessions by the prospect of a U.S. Communist revolution backed by the Red Army.

Any Ruling Class responds only to force, and this is more true of the Capitalist Ruling Class than of any of its historical counterparts – for what is capitalism but infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue?

Thus without the sort of leverage the USSR provided – even if there were not the nullifying issue of a dying species on a dying planet – humanitarian change is impossible. Thus too the unspeakable reality of the present: the darkest, most hopeless epoch in all human experience.

But our individual and collective powerlessness does not prohibit (and may in fact encourage), small-scale community efforts to improve the immediate circumstances of our lives. For example, an environmentalist friend and comrade in Maine has reduced her mass-movement involvements and refocused her efforts into teaching organic gardening methods to individuals and grassroots organizations.. As she puts it, We the People are so totally disempowered, all we activists can do now is work to help our neighbors transcend the present and looming adversities and thus live better lives.

The essence of such efforts is embodied the Zen/Taoist phrase "nothing special." Anything beyond that is grandiose if not delusional. But ironically it is from reconfiguring the ordinary – the "nothing special" – that true community is born, thereby transcending (and at least potentially nullifying) the divisions hitherto inflicted by ideological, ethnic, racial or sexual differences. Thus – when you think about it -- there is no greater, more effective antidote to capitalism than true community.

(My apology to the family of Allison Krause for misspelling her name in the on-line version of this commentary, which is corrected above.)

***

EMPHATICALLY RECOMMENDED READING: “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust”: on the 70th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the U.S. puppet neo-Nazi government in Kiev honored the Ukrainian fascists  who helped the German invaders exterminate the region's Jews.

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports, the text also documents the (predictable) emergence in Ukraine of neo-Nazi death squads. They are (unsurprisingly) similar to the death squads the Central Intelligence Agency trained and operated elsewhere  throughout capitalism's New World Order, the de facto Fourth Reich.

Also emphatically recommended is the Al Jazeera America/ Agence France-Presse report the U.S. has already sent at least 300 paratroopers  into Ukraine to help Kiev bolster its death-squad governance.

As I noted in the comment thread, “This invasion of Ukraine is from the Russian perspective as great a threat as Soviet missiles in Cuba were to the U.S. in 1962. Indeed it is arguable the U.S. has just made World War III inevitable.”

In that same comment thread – somewhat revised for publication here – is my speculation on why the U.S. Ruling Class so fanatically despises the Russians, it would rather blow up the world than coexist with them – never mind the Russians our are natural allies in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

I have long assumed this anti-Russian hostility is a response to the fact the Russian people, in the person of the Red Army, beat back the capitalist powers' attempt to reconquer Russia  immediately after the revolutions of 1917. Even now, 24 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party remains the second largest party in the Russian Federation. This means the Communists could again become Russia's ruling majority, the mere thought of which is sufficient to terrify our plutocratic overlords into the suicidal madness of thermonuclear war-mongering.

Another toxic spasm of the U.S. Ruling Class hatred for Russia is no doubt evoked by the fact that – more than any other country (and at a cost of about 45 million people killed) – it was Russia in the form of the Soviet Union that saved the world from German Nazism. As proven by the Bankers Plot of 1934,  the Ruling Class wanted the Nazis to win.  But for the plot's failure, the U.S. would have been the fourth and ultimately dominant Axis power.

But now – given the neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi taints metastasizing through the nation (most noticeably in how the federally militarized police are murdering African-Americans, but also in radically intensified misogyny, the growing popularity of genocide euphemized as “austerity” and of course in the 2010 and 2014 election results ) – maybe the real reason the Ruling Class hates Russia dates back to the U.S. Civil War.

Had it not been for Imperial Russia's support of the Union  – note the Russian fleets in New York  and San Francisco c. 1863 – Britain and France would have recognized the Confederacy, entered the war on its side and probably facilitated a Confederate victory. But not even the two empires together dared confront a fully mobilized Russia.

The resultant U.S.-Russian alliance was subsequently immortalized by Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Bleak are our shores with the blasts of December, Fettered and chill is the rivulet’s flow; Thrilling and warm are the hearts that remember Who was our friend when the world was our foe. Fires of the North in eternal communion, Blend your broad flashes with evening’s bright star; God bless the Empire that loves the Great Union Strength to her people! Long life to the Czar! [15]

As I know from firsthand experience, the Ruling Class aristocrats have long and vindictive memories. Could it be they're still enraged at the Russians for helping Lincoln end slavery?

*

GLENN GREENWALD'S EXPOSÉ on the deceptive propaganda peddled by NBC  via the Richard Engel kidnapping tells a story that is, just as its headline says, “More Troubling Than Brian Williams Scandal.” 

But it also gave me an opportunity to write a concise summary of how the USian Ruling Class has actually outdone Josef Goebbels. It has followed Goebbels' rules for propagandizing a people so effectively, they reflexively reject any unofficial narratives. It has done so by designing and imposing the world's first fully privatized governmental propaganda machine.

What follows is a slightly revised variant of the comment-thread original: 

The ugly truth behind NBC's behavior in the Engel case is found in the fact so-called "mainstream media" is owned by the same cabal of plutocrats who own and control government at every U.S. level.

This means "mainstream media" is nothing more than a fully privatized, obscenely profitable government propaganda apparatus: same owners, same bosses, same goals of world conquest as those who own and control the government. In other words, just as government has been reduced to the executive-action agency of the Ruling Class, so has mass media been reduced to its mouthpiece.

This is not only fascism as defined by Benito Mussolini; it is in fact the ultimate, most perfected form of fascism, in which governance itself is a profit center – not just in "mainstream media" as state propagandists, but as in the prison-industrial complex, for-profit schools, etc. ad nauseam.

Meanwhile the "mainstream media's" deceptions about Iran are identical in magnitude and purpose to the German deceptions about Poland, authored by Josef Goebbels, that started World War II.

What we have here in the U.S. is not just fascism, but when you add in the master-race implications of U.S. "exceptionalism ," is in fact a new form of Nazism.

And let us not forget that fascism and Nazism are direct derivatives of capitalism. In fact they are capitalism's final, mature forms -- the only destinations allowed by capitalism's core value, the Ayn Rand precept of infinite greed as ultimate virtue.

Whether the goal is lebensraum and slaves or maximum profit by other means of exploitation, capitalism's corpse-littered pathway is identical and identically evil.

*

FINALLY THERE IS this: National Guard troops called out to suppress anti-racism protests in Ferguson, Missouri considered the protesters “enemy forces,”  never mind the demonstrations were – as one discussion-thread contributor aptly put it, “American Citizens exercising their First Amendment right to 'petition the Government for redress of grievances.'”

To which I replied: “Ferguson or Ukraine, it's the same war: on one side, the capitalist New Order, the de facto Fourth Reich. On the other side, all the rest of us, We the People of the World.“

LB/12-19 April 2015 

-30-

Another Inspection Again Wrenches My Life

I CAN'T OBJECT to the idea behind the federally mandated quarterly inspections of the individual dwelling units in any lower-income senior housing complex that was built with even a tiny percentage of public funds. Officially the purpose is to make certain the facilities are fully functional – that the plumbing, exhaust fans, alarm systems and electric ranges are all operational.

(I should note here we seniors are forbidden gas cooking, which means that 10 years after encountering my first electric range, I still can't successfully cook even the most simple meals. Indeed I despise electric ranges, which as far as I am concerned are worthless for anything save boiling water or heating soup. With a gas flame, you can see what you're doing; with electricity, you can only guess, which in my case means everything has to be burned on the outside to make sure it is not raw in the middle. But that is another issue for another time.)

Unofficially, the purpose of the quarterly inspections is to monitor the mental health of the occupants: detection of an unkempt or dirty apartment that might indicate the onset of Alzheimer's, hoarding that might endanger an occupant or create fire hazards for an entire complex, that sort of thing.

 

Nevertheless and in reality I resent these intrusions more than anything that fate and bureaucratic tyranny has ever dealt me. This is not just because of the violation of my privacy; the medical truth is that each inspection literally steals six or seven days from my life. Four of these days are taken by the preparatory cleanup, which for me – because of my arthritic spine, shoulders, left wrist and right knee – is an excruciatingly painful ordeal of dusting, vacuuming, mopping and, finally, on the morning of the inspection, neatening my bed into semi-military, Suzi-homemaker presentableness. This is in fact the most agonizing chore of all, which due to its hurtful extremes of bending and reaching takes me at least 30 minutes and sometimes half again that, the very reason I do it as seldom as possible. The remainder of the stolen time – the post-inspection hours of inspection day plus one or two days afterward – is required for recovery, most of it in my newly made bed.

But I have not verbalized these objections – at least not emphatically – until now, when the combination of the surprise state inspection inflicted on us at the end of last month and the upcoming regular inspection Tuesday is stealing 12 whole days from my life. (The interval between the first inspection and the second was just long enough all the cleaning had to be repeated.) The result – because the time-theft occurs at a peak of volunteer obligations (this blog; the monthly newsletter I produce for my fellow tenants; work for the organizing committee of 15 Now Tacoma; public relations for a friend who is a playwrite and musician) – is I am more frantically jammed up and therefore more jaggedly stressed than I have been at any time in memory, including the many years I worked at two and sometimes three jobs.

Another very big part of the problem is the wrenching time-theft imposed by my dependence on Pierce Transit. PT's bus service was only marginally adequate in 2009, the year my car died, and now after five years of anti-transit-user downsizing, it has been shrunken by least 70 percent. The transit authority bureaucracy will no longer disclose the actual size of the cuts, but the result is unquestionably the worst bus service I have ever seen anywhere in the urban U.S. Indeed there was more frequent bus service – far more frequent – provided by Knoxville Transit Lines in Knoxville, Tennessee during the 1950s. (For example, KTL buses ran until 1 a.m.; most PT buses cease operations at 9 p.m., some as early as 5 p.m. – and Knoxville in 1954 had half the population of Tacoma in 2014.) Bottom line, because of the bus service here – or rather the abysmal lack thereof – an errand that took me maybe 45 minutes when I had an automobile can now take up to an entire day.

 

I was of course prepared for the interruption inflicted by this month's quarterly inspection, but the additional seven days stolen by the surprise state inspection was the proverbial straw that broke the metaphorical camel's back. Such are the punishments capitalism maliciously inflicts on those of us it exploited into inescapable poverty.

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because so much time during these past few weeks has been stolen by inspections, OAN again gets shortchanged; again no real essay, and only five Internet posts during the past seven days:

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote about the mix of theocratic Christianity and Hard Right populism that enabled a Teabagger to beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor last week. But “David Brat: Free-Market Purist, Ayn Rand Devotee” said nothing about the campaign's historical precedent, and I responded accordingly:

What we are witnessing in David Brat – and mark my word (because you read it here first) – is the combination of strategy, tactics and rhetoric that will leverage the USian Homeland's final transition to unabashed neo-Nazism.

Doubt me? Read William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Simon and Schuster: 1959, 1960, 1987, 1988, 1990).

It's by studying Shirer we see what we might aptly dub the "Bratley Method" is precisely how the Nazis sold themselves and their programs to the seemingly ultra-civilized German people as Germany suffered from the devastation inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression.

***

Yes (Rise and Fall) is long, but it's vividly written, and its well worth the effort. For me it was the perfect sea-cruise book, and I had lots of time to read it – on the troopship returning from Korea, the U.S.N.S. Sultan, which in 1962 made the passage from Inchon to Oakland Army Terminal in about three weeks. For me, that was the blessed passage of return to civilian life after the three-year, Regular-Army active-duty portion of a six-year enlistment. (The remainder was in the reserves, but – luck of the draw or blessing of the Goddess – I was not recalled for Vietnam.) And of course I've reviewed Rise and Fall many times, as it's been part of my library ever since.

******

Alan Pyke exposed another atrocity of USian governance  in “Impoverished Mother Dies in Jail Cell Over Unpaid Fines for Her Kids Missing School.” I noted how it exemplifies capitalism in action:

What this Dickensian tragedy tells us is that in the merciless new world of the former United States – a realm transmogrified into the de facto Fourth Reich – any one of us who is not part of the Ruling Class could suffer the fate of Eileen DeNino

Indeed the death of Eileen DeNino – and the deaths of so many others like her, always from the denial of basic human needs that now under the savagery of Ayn Rand economics have become privileges of wealth – makes me think perhaps the Hans Christian Anderson story of the “Little Match Girl” is replacing the Horatio Alger tales as the epic that properly symbolizes our present and future. (Indeed, recast in a 21st Century setting by cinematographer Filip Matevski's 12-minute film, it becomes just that.)

Apropos which, perhaps (an anti DeNino poster) would say the Match Girl too "refused to help herself" when, as in Matevski's work, the child chose to spend the night in the freezing cold rather than submit to sexual abuse, or – as in the older versions of the story – refused to go home to be beaten by her father.

Meanwhile let us all mourn Eileen DeNino, a mother dead in debtor's prison, another victim of capitalism's New World Order.

******

Trevor Timm of Guardian UK revealed another of the dark and menacing secrets of Obamanoid tyranny in “The US Government Doesn't Want You to Know How the Cops Are Tracking You.” I pointed out an even darker truth:

It is a great irony the wanna-be Nazis of the Confederate-Flag/Swastika-Banner Hard Right – the Christians who claim the U.S. Constitution gives them the right to persecute non-believers; the white racists who believe their god gives them dominion over non-whites; the misogynists who think all women are sluts at heart – were the first to caricature Obama as another Hitler.

Perhaps it was just one of those oddball examples of accidental prophecy from a wildly incongruous source.

More likely it was a case of psychological projection, the mechanism of recognition embodied in a taunt once commonplace on Southern schoolyards: “it takes one to know one.”

However it came about, its terrifying truth becomes more evident every day. Barack Obama is worse than Bush, even worse than Nixon. He is the first genuine tyrant to hold the office of President of the United States, and by his embrace of the modalities of tyranny, he is methodically transforming this nation and its empire into the de facto Fourth Reich.

But the greatest irony of all is how it is his own race – more than any other group of us who, because we are lower-income people, are being scapegoated into equivalents of Nazi Germany's Jews – that is already bearing the brunt of this looming new holocaust in which federalized local police are trained and equipped to function as the new Gestapo.

******

Charles E. Cobb Jr. discussed his forthcoming book, which boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis.” Reader Supported News titled Cobb's important essay “Guns Made Civil Rights Possible: Breaking Down the Myth of Nonviolent Change,” but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted the actual title of the book, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). Then my comment-thread response got right to the point:

A similar volume, Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense (University of North Carolina Press: 2004), was marginalized by the same zero-tolerance codas of political correctness with which the U.S. Left fanatically suppresses all positive references to firearms.

Meanwhile, with the Working Class more in jeopardy than ever, the USian Left's signature effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – i.e., mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is surely amongst the greatest ironies of human history.

Contrary to its claims, pacifism cannot succeed without the threat of violence. The British surrendered to Gandhi's pacifism only because it was backed by the potential of armed revolution organized by the Soviet Union. The same is true of Rev. King's nonviolence.

Indeed all the humanitarian gains of the 20th Century – unions, labor rights, civil rights, safety-net programs – were wrested from the capitalists only by the Soviet threat. That's why, now the U.S.S.R. is dead, capitalism is methodically abolishing all those concessions.

But with the USian Left embracing pacifism and thus functioning as the chief spokesperson for the One Percent's effort to disarm the 99 Percent, these bitter truths are now also tabooed.

***

It was the armed Anglo-Saxon and Cymru yeomanry with their deadly longbows – the massed repetitive firepower of which was not equaled until the invention of the machine gun – that eventually brought the invading Norman kings (of England) to heel. Nevertheless it took what amounted to 300 years of intermittent civil war, some of which is immortalized in the epic of Robin Hood.

Though it is another truth suppressed by political correctness, the most important historical difference between Britain and the continental nations originated from Roman forcible disarmament of conquered peoples. Universal throughout the imperial mainland, it was for a number of reasons never successful in the province of Britannia. Hence even before the Anglo-Saxon conquest, the British peasantry was always at least minimally armed, which is why the remnants of what we know today as "democracy" were never totally exterminated there, seeds that began thriving in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

******

Juan Cole wrote a piece on the criminality of the Iraq War,  but “Blair-Bush & Iraq: It’s Not Just the Quagmire But the Lawbreaking & Deception” ignored what may be the most important aspects of the story:

(1)-That it was the perfect distraction from the questions about 9/11 that were then gathering momentum;

(2)-That, apart from Turkey (which is now hopelessly lapsing back into Islamic theocracy), Iran was the only genuinely secular society Islamic culture has ever produced. Thus its destruction brought about the immediate re-imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy, whether Sunni or Shiite, with all its misogynistic savagery. This is an obvious victory for the One Percenters whose intent is to make capitalism safe by imposing Abrahamic theocracy – Jewish in Israel, Christian or Islamic everywhere else – on the entire world.

I keep hoping maybe next week won't be so grim, but then I remember we're all residents of a dying planet – a world we ourselves are killing. 

LB/15 June 2014

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OAN: Some Thoughts on Content and Direction

I'VE RECOVERED FROM the frantic and painful preparation for last week's surprise apartment inspection – one of the punishments inflicted on seniors and disabled people impoverished enough to qualify for publicly funded housing. Nor was I amongst the unfortunate 20 percent whose dwellings were chosen at random for de facto warrantless searches by state bureaucrats. But the aftermath of the mandatory house-cleaning left me abed for a couple of days while the grade-6-to-7 arthritis pain in my back, shoulders and right knee dwindled to its omnipresent norm, typically a grade 2 on the 1-to-10 medical-discomfort scale.

Because my gender exempts me from the agony of childbirth, I have two grade-10 pain significators. One is the legacy of a tooth that in 1969 became simultaneously impacted and abscessed at the beginning of what turned into the longest four-day holiday-weekend in human history. The other is the (literally) bite-a-hole-in-my-pillow-to-keep-from-screaming interlude that followed a radical meniscectomy in 1978 – the removal of all the cartilage from my right knee. The anesthesia wore off quite suddenly, and all at once I hurt so badly, it took me several eternities to focus enough to invoke the Nurse-Angel of Narcotic Salvation, though once I found the magic buzzer, she immediately blessed me with a syringe full of morphine.

But all that is something of an aside. The point here is my two post-inspection-recovery days of what-do-I-wanna-be-when-I-grow-up contemplation was mostly spent pondering whether to take OAN daily or continue it as as a weekly. Given my age, in either case it will undoubtedly remain my final expression of a truth I have known since The Grand Rapids Herald hired me as a copyboy and sports stringer shortly before my 16th Christmas – that real journalism is a 24/7 way of life rather than a 35-hour-per-week job.

If I were to take OAN daily, it would mean posting material as events warrant and as frequently as my schedule permits. The idea was (and remains) powerfully attractive. But finally – with a bit of help from the I Ching (Wilhelm/Baynes translation, Princeton University Press: 1967) – I realized, somewhat bitterly I admit, I lack sufficient time, which is the prime requirement for daily blogging. Too many hours of my life are stolen by geriatric medical appointments and household-errands turned to day-long bus-odysseys because I can no longer afford an automobile but live in the most anti-mass-transit seaport in the entire anti-mass-transit United States.

Thus OAN will continue as before, its contents posted both here (thanks again to my benefactors at Typepad) and on my secondary website at Blogger.  Save for the fact I am going to spend more time covering local events – albeit always in a global context – its contents will be mostly unchanged. “In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere” will present its anthologies of recommended reading, including my often-sarcastic comments of course. And OAN's weekly single-topic columns, written by myself or by an occasional guest author, will focus as always on personal perspectives about major issues:   

• USian warmongering and the One Percent's escalating efforts at global conquest;
• The intensifying class war and the increasing savagery of capitalism;
• The stealthy but relentless imposition of Christian theocracy on the USian homeland;
• The bipartisan Big Lies that protect the Obamacare profiteers and victimize the rest of us;
• The unprecedented surveillance that sustains Ayn Rand plutocracy – the newest form of fascism – by clamping high-tech slave-collars around all our necks;
• The shock-doctrine schemes of the One Percenters, who are leveraging terminal climate change into a neo-Nazi restructuring of human society, ensuring their survival by enslaving or exterminating everyone else;
• Other such topics as they arise.

As before, these columns will include examples of how, in an economy and political system based on exploitation and oppression, the personal is always political, just as, for the same reasons, the political is always personal. Here though I hope to make a subtle change in approach, focusing less on the reality of our abject powerlessness – which I think we are at last beginning to acknowledge – and more on overcoming the challenges we face merely to survive.

 

Such is life and death amongst the 99 Percent in the United States of America, the former “sweet land of liberty” that capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent; total subjugation for all the rest of us – has transformed into the most unapologetically vicious nation in the industrial world.

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

I seldom write about 9/11 simply because in my view there is nothing worthwhile to be said about this great atrocity unless one starts by acknowledging how it marks the end, forever, of constitutional governance in the United States. But I was intrigued by William Boardman's Reader Supported News piece, “Museum World Trade Center Evidence: No Plane Hit Pentagon?” And eventually I added my own remarks to its predictably contentious comment-thread:

What matters most about 9/11 is the use to which it has been put.

Just as the Reichstag Fire enabled Hitler to nullify the Weimar constitution and turn Germany into a Nazi dictatorship, so did 9/11 enable the One Percent and their political servants to nullify the U.S. Constitution and turn the United States into a plutocratic dictatorship.

In other words, just as the Reichstag Fire was the birth of the Third Reich, so was 9/11 the birth of the de facto Fourth Reich, the zero-tolerance global empire of the USian plutocracy.

Moreover, just as the truth of the Reichstag Fire is lost due to Nazi secrecy, so is the truth of 9/11 lost by USian secrecy. In either case, public knowledge of what truly happened will never be allowed.

But the debate is allowed because it serves two purposes. It distracts us from the use of 9/11 – the permanent nullification of our constitution (and our reduction to powerlessness thereby) – and it helps preserve the Big Lie of USian democracy.

Indeed, the fact the debate is tolerated tells us it can never unearth the truth. Were it otherwise, it would be suppressed as quickly and violently as the Occupy Movement was suppressed.

Given the influence of Nazi war criminals on the U.S. government after World War II, the Reichstag-Fire pattern is itself suggestive. So is the fact the Department of Homeland Security structurally duplicates the dread SS Reichssicherheitshauptamt.

***

My next comment on the thread was a response to a poster who seems to regard the quest for “9/11 truth” as the most important endeavor in human history:

While I surely agree “a great deal...has already come out,” the same can be said of the assassinations – JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK – that were the gateway to the road that ended at 9/11.

Again taking the Reichstag Fire example, Soviet intelligence (and the worldwide Communist Party) knew the truth within hours – that the Nazis set the fire and framed the halfwitted Marinus van der Lubbe and the Communists for the crime – but the official German version was never refuted, even after the war.

Much the same is true of 9/11: no matter how much contrary evidence is ferreted out, the official version will remain unchanged until the USian Empire is no more – which, given the givens – will probably not occur until our species itself is extinct.

To believe otherwise is to be in denial about not only about our own powerlessness but about the absolute determination of those who oppress us.

 

***

Later I elaborated:

To paraphrase Thomas Paine, these are indeed times that try our souls, infinitely more so than in 1776, when we had a seemingly endless future, while today the core truth of our lives is that we live on a dying planet.

 

In this context I see my own duty as mandated by the genocidal malevolence of the One Percent, which is transforming the survival of the 99 Percent into revolutionary defiance. My obligation is to aid that survival as best I can -- never mind I'm a crippled, impoverished old man.

That's why I give several hours each week to 15 Now Tacoma, the purpose of which is to make workers' lives a bit less wretched. It's why I edit and produce two journals, a local tenants' newsletter and (this) internationally read blog.

 

For the record, since early 2005 I have assumed 9/11 was either a Reichstag-Fire re-run or was deliberately allowed to happen.

After all, Nazi war criminals were the primary tactical and strategic influence in the postwar USian Empire, and false-flag aggression – Google “Operation Himmler” (no quotes) – was a standard Nazi tactic.

Given the morally imbecilic nature of capitalism, such atrocities are inevitable – and the tyranny of capitalist governance leaves us powerless to avenge them.

Hence I do not waste my time on causes – like the hunt for 9/11 truth – that offer no hope of easing the fear and misery in which we 99 Percenters increasingly live.

******

Cynic though I am, I was nevertheless taken aback when Reuters reported the notoriously brutal Seattle Police were filing a federal lawsuit to uphold their alleged right to maximum brutality.   Thus my contribution to the comment thread of “Seattle Police File Federal Lawsuit Over 'Use of Force' Policy”:

The fact the Seattle cops would file such a lawsuit – in essence demanding the right to inflict unlimited police brutality and generally behave as an army of occupation in a conquered land – tends to confirm what I have long suspected:

That the national epidemic of police brutality is the product of of very explicit post-9/11 federal policy and directives.

 

The (obviously intentional) result is a homeland in which the sole function of the police is to serve and protect the One Percent by savaging all the rest of us, just as the (imperial) military serves and protects the One Percent in exactly the same murderous manner abroad.

More specifically, because all local police units have been federalized and federally militarized, the Seattle lawsuit is essentially an appeal up the chain of command for judicial support – rather like the president obtaining judicial support for his alleged right to issue imperial death warrants.

 

Indeed, to understand this lawsuit any other way is to be in denial about what the United States has become, no longer the "sweet land of liberty" but rather the de facto Fourth Reich.

******

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports on the Ukraine blaming “neocons” for President Obama's warmongering  provoked me to reluctantly criticize a journalist whose bravery is beyond reproach and whose reporting is flawless save for his apparent inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the unprecedented magnitude of the chief executive's self-protective deceptiveness.

 

Hence on the comment-thread of “How Neocons Constrain Obama's Message,” I penned the following rejoinder:

The only flaw in Mr. Parry's courageous reporting is his assumption President Obama is himself a victim of neocon conspiracies.

The truth, made obvious by the president's shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, is that Barack Obama is ideologically a white Republican. His African/American heritage was never more than a prop by which the One Percent sought to bolster the Big Lie of U.S. “democracy.”

Indeed, apart from the color of his skin, Obama's implicitly fascist politics are indistinguishable from those of any other U.S. president, Republican or Democrat, for whom the One Percent has purchased the office since the coup of 22 November 1963.

But like President Johnson, whose clandestine purpose was obviously to provoke the Vietnam-related class-war that destroyed the New Deal Coalition and thereby thrust the nation permanently to the right, Obama too is obviously a dual-purpose president. That purpose is revealed by how domestic racists are parlaying his betrayals into re-segregationist bigotry that says minorities are untrustworthy.

Because minorities were the nation's only source of genuine radicalism, the suppression of their voices is another rightward thrust – this time all the way to a Fourth Reich of unabashed Ayn Rand fascism.

Thus do the One Percenters achieve the goal their fathers and grandfathers sought via the Bankers' Plot, which would have made the U.S. the leading partner in the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo axis.

 

***

As to (Mr. Parry's) often subtle but nevertheless implicitly apologetic portrayal of Barack the Betrayer as a victim of neocon manipulation, that unfortunate meme – probably the result of an understandable reluctance to admit the unprecedented magnitude of the president's deceptions – is evident throughout Mr. Parry's otherwise superb reporting.

 

Because I voted for Obama twice – the first time because I believed his Big Lie of “change we can believe in,” the second time because I was (just as the One Percent intended), terrified by the Romney-Ryan assault gun – I can surely understand the reluctance to acknowledge we are now ruled by a president who is truly more ill-intentioned, and infinitely more authoritarian, than Richard Milhous Nixon.

Indeed, Obama is undoubtedly the most brazenly dishonest and effectively tyrannical politician ever to inhabit the White House. Think “change we can believe in,” total surveillance, the war against undocumented immigrants and the relentless persecution of whistle-blowers.

And until we acknowledge Obama is indeed an obedient servant of the One Percent (and therefore a white Republican in disguise) – until we admit how he conned us and how it facilitates the permanent end of USian democracy – we will remain imprisoned in the very darkness Mr. Parry is otherwise working so diligently and courageously to overcome.

******

Carl Gibson, reporting for Reader Supported News, wrote a scathing denunciation of how capitalism has perverted the USian justice system – zero-tolerance prosecution of minorities, lifetime imprisonment for nonviolent offenders, perpetual above-the-law immunity and billion-dollar bonuses for the most malevolently greedy robber barons in human history. But in the end, “Our Fraudulent Two-Tiered Justice System” was just another call for reforms we now know will never be allowed, and I responded accordingly:

I was applauding Mr. Gibson's reportage, especially his description of the USian criminal injustice system as "two-tiered," which is absolutely correct.

 

But then I read his concluding paragraph and realized he is just another reformer – that his outrage is rendered meaningless by his deluded belief in the integrity of the USian electoral process and in the Big Lie of USian "democracy" in general.

Which, when you analyze his rhetoric, means he's blaming us – we the people – for oppression that was maliciously imposed on us by the One Percent and that under present conditions is hopelessly beyond our capability to abolish or even ameliorate.

That's because the oppression Mr. Gibson so rightfully deplores – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – is endemic to capitalism. Indeed it is the quintessence of capitalism's inevitable transition to fascism. 

And until we recognize the true extent of our powerlessness – until we acknowledge that capitalism by its predatory nature deliberately and methodically renders the 99 Percent as powerless as the masses of Tsarist Russia were before the revolutions of 1917 – we will remain enslaved.

******

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports on the Ukraine Crisis describes how its outcome is seemingly a huge loss for U.S. interests. But on second thought, it seems to me “The State Department's Ukraine Fiasco” was written from the (clearly obsolete) perspective the U.S. wants world peace and socioeconomic stability – this opposed to the chaos that furthers the USian Empire's goals of maximum profiteering, shock-doctrine global conquest and endless war to kill off the 99 Percent and justify ever-more-tyrannical oppression in the homeland. Therefore:

Mr. Parry's closing statement is indisputably true – there is no way the Ukraine Crisis has served U.S. national interests – but only if "national interests" are defined as what we the people need for our wellbeing.

More to the point, the interests of the neocons are always antithetical to our own. That's because the neocons' interests are those of their One Percent masters, whose goals are maximum short-term profits rather than long-term political stability.

From this perspective it is apparent the Ukraine Crisis is serving the One Percent's interests exactly as intended. The increasing military tensions are already boosting profits for military industries, while the socioeconomic chaos in Ukraine itself provides yet another opportunity for the imposition of shock-doctrine capitalism, which – as under Pinochet in Chile – means absolute power and unlimited profit for the rulers, total subjugation for everyone else.

 

Moreover, the manufactured need for vastly increased U.S. military expenditures provides the One Percent and their servants in both parties with a perfect rationale for further slashing social services including Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Psychological preparation for these genocidal cutbacks is undoubtedly the purpose behind the otherwise inexplicable hate-Russia media campaign.

Such is the realpolitik of plutocracy – actually sociopathocracy (rule by moral imbeciles) – that defines today's United States.

***

In response to another poster's question, I wrote:

The “problem with Obama” is he is a white Republican in disguise, and now that he does not have to scam us into voting for him again, he is ever-more-defiantly revealing his true self.

(Yeah, I'm one of those useful idiots who voted for him twice. First time because I stupidly let myself be conned by his Big Lie of "change we can believe in," second time because the One Percent's Romney-Ryan assault-gun did just what it was intended to do and terrified me into voting for him again.)

***

And as I said to an anti-Parry poster on the same thread:

(For you to) liken the National Endowment for Democracy to Amnesty International is rather akin to likening Reinhard Heydrich to Albert Schweitzer. And that calls into question (your) entire analysis, particularly since the only Ukrianian "human rights" NED cares about are those of the One Percenters and their anointed oligarchs.

******

As if in follow-up to my own ongoing coverage of the war against mass transit in Pugetopolis,  the Olympia-Tacoma-Seattle-Bellingham metropolis on the eastern shore of Washington state's Puget Sound, Seattle's on-line daily Crosscut published a disheartening update of the worsening transit crisis.

 

For me, the usefulness of Bill Lucia's report, “No silver bullets among last ditch efforts to stave off bus service cuts,” extended beyond its factual content, which gave me a rare opportunity to contrast the (seemingly) humanitarian concerns of Seattle politicians with the Ayn-Rand/Marie-Antoinette attitudes of the politicians who rule Tacoma and Pierce County:

From the perspective of Tacoma – specifically its local politicians' chilly indifference to the ruinous impact of Pierce Transit's wrenching cutbacks on the transit-dependent urban population – the role of Seattle and King County politicians in the fight to preserve Metro Transit bus service is laudable and exemplary.

Indeed, until now, and with the notable exception of Kshama Sawant and her election to office, I never imagined I would find myself admiring anything about Seattle or any of its residents. That's because, to me, Seattlites will always be the most relentlessly vicious xenophobes I have ever encountered anywhere at any time. That includes my years in the South as an involuntary court-decreed school-year dependent of my father and stepmother, 1950-1956 and 1957-1958, then later, after three years of military service, as an outspokenly pro-civil-rights journalist, 1962-1965, including the summer of 1963 as a civil-rights activist.

Yes, the Ku Klux Klan tried to kill me – three times in fact – but other Southerners were faithful friends, and two Southerners were long-term lovers. By contrast, my four years in Seattle were the loneliest of my life; Seattleites were without exception relentlessly hostile, constantly damning me as “a fucking New York intellectual,” repeatedly telling me I should “go back where (I) belong,” and their vindictive Seattle-Freeze tactics, which included nasty notes, slashed tires, physical assault, the kidnapping of a dog and even defiant thefts of published and unpublished works, eventually ran me out of town.

 

I left Seattle in 1976, and I will never return. But I remained in the Pacific Northwest – the back-country trout fishing was too good to abandon – and now I must confess I have at last encountered one thing (apart from the election of Ms. Sawant) that is compellingly positive about Seattle. At least some of its politicians actually represent – or at least pretend to represent – the people like myself who can no longer afford automobiles and who are therefore utterly dependent on mass transit.

The irony, of course, is that fully half the population of Tacoma – where the politicians have never lifted so much as the proverbial finger to preserve Pierce Transit service – is officially lower income, and a substantial percentage, as I remember about 25 percent of the city's approximately 100,000 lower-income residents, have no other means of transportation. (The no-option-save-buses figure is deftly concealed by the local bureaucracy, but it is available via a bit of research, and I apologize for the fact I do not have time to ferret it out today.)

More to the point, the refusal of the local politicians to protect the bus service vital to our survival proves that, in Tacoma and Pierce County, we lower-income people have no political representation at all. Not only is there the politicians' total indifference to the consequences of PT downsizing. Now – as if to clear up any misunderstanding about whose side the politicians are on – these same politicos, Democrats and Republicans alike, have approved PT's shift to a new policy of penalizing pro-transit Tacomans by withholding intra-city service even as service to the (notably wealthier) anti-transit suburbs is radically expanded. The contempt and hatefulness in the message this new policy sends the urban poor is unmistakable.

Hence – much as it grieves me to admit it – for purposes of transit, and more generally for politicians who will at least publicly acknowledge the existence of lower-income people and the pressing reality of our needs, anyone who like myself is now a member of the urban underclass is probably better off living in Seattle.

Such was the output of a week in which – theoretically speaking – I had no time to write. I guess it's true: journalism is like organized crime – you never get to retire. And never want to, either...

LB/1 June 2014

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