U. S. Supreme Court OKs More Theocracy; Defiant Workers Mobilize Nationally for $15 Minimum Wage

FR. WILLIAM BICHSEL S.J., the 87-year-old radical Roman Catholic priest who has been repeatedly jailed by USian Empire authorities in retaliation for his support of world peace, urges $15 Now activists to persevere in their nonviolent efforts despite the intensification of capitalist opposition. For details, see “$15 Now Tacoma Rallies in Downpour,” below. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2014; click on image to view it full size.)

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AT FIRST GLANCE, the two statements in the above headline may seem unrelated, perhaps even two halves of a perplexing non sequitur. 

But on further reflection we see they are opposite sides of the same proverbial coin, just as Fr. Bichsel – Bix to his friends and comrades – represents an ancient but revolutionary interpretation of Christianity that is the antithesis of the authoritarian, pro-capitalist dogmas espoused by the theocrats and their enablers.

Prompted by the oppressive example of how Christian theocracy polices the former Confederacy, the One Percent and the Ruling Class in general have long been major financiers and facilitators of the campaign to impose Biblical Law on the USian homeland – this as the most successful means of suppressing anti-capitalist dissent. And just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court hastened the national march toward a Christian state and state Christianity, ruling that government-sponsored public prayers can now be addressed exclusively to Jesus.

The court also effectively said anyone who is offended by such theological discrimination can go to hell.

Meanwhile, the $15 Now movement – which was begun by Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative to counteract the selfsame capitalist savagery the expansion of Christian theocracy is intended to justify and preserve – has exploded across the USian homeland and is catching fire even in overseas realms of the USian global empire.

In the context of this growing rebellion, the Supreme Court's decree becomes doubly significant. It's obvious intent is to back the nation further away from the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, thereby thrusting us closer to the Taliban-like Biblical-Law dictatorship long sought by the lavishly funded Christian fanatics. But its clandestine purpose – note the court's obvious anti-democracy bias – is clearly to bolster the white Christian prosperity-gospel prohibitions against organized labor, especially any notion the USian Working Class deserves better pay and conditions.

Exemplifying these restrictions, white Christian fanaticism in the South has long been a formidable barrier to unionization, also to women's rights, racial or sexual equality and intellectual freedom in general. The white Southern workforce is conditioned from birth to believe bosses and aristocrats are god's chosen representatives and that disobeying or even questioning their orders is therefore a sin. Observing the results in a century-long succession of debacles like the recent defeat of the United Auto Workers union at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant, the One Percenters have concluded Abrahamic theocracy is capitalism's best friend. That's why USian policy invariably favors Christian theocracy in the homeland and various other forms of theocracy throughout the empire, Judaic in Israel, Islamic in the remainder of the Middle East.

Thus the implacably pro-plutocracy Supreme Court overturned a longstanding judicial precedent that required public prayer to be non-sectarian, referencing a deity only in the most generic terms. The former policy, as explained to The Washington Post by George Washington University Law Professor Ira Lupu (see the “exclusively to Jesus” link above) was intended to make public prayer mutually acceptable to the followers of all three Abrahamic religions, and to render it at least not gravely objectionable to Buddhists, Wiccans, First Nations traditionalists and any others including agnostics or atheists.

The widespread imposition of prayer to open public meetings and other governmental proceedings including public school ceremonies and sporting events was begun about the same time the phrase “under God” was added to the national pledge of allegiance.  (See also Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Harper: 2008; pgs. 195-204, especially pgs. 198-199.) As critics have been pointing out ever since, the addition of that phrase to the pledge in 1954 was the declaration that formally set the nation on its present-day course toward theocracy.

And now, thanks to the court's newest religious ruling, it is legal to flaunt Christianity as if it were the one state-approved religion, thereby theologically spitting in the faces of all non-Christians.

Those of us who are offended by the references to Jesus or to the Christians' triune god of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, says the court, can simply “leave the room” – never mind such public acts of dissent will, in many parts of the USian interior, surely invite a visit from the Ku Klux Klan or some other vigilante group.

Nor, as I can personally attest, are such realms limited to the South, where the Klan functions much like the dread Islamic morality police and is therefore colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Parts of Whatcom County, Washington – the northernmost county in the lower 48 states – are similarly “policed” by JesuNazi vigilantes.

Earlier OAN reports documenting the escalating threat of Christian theocracy are here,  here  and here.  Other relevant reports on the the court's new endorsement of Christian supremacy are here and here.  Another oppressive aspect of USian Christian theocracy – the purity ball, a public ritual in which young girls are forced to pledge to their fathers they'll be totally chaste until they give themselves to men in male-supremacist marriage – is covered here.

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Conditions in Ukraine continue to deteriorate into warfare as neo-Nazi stormtroopers, now part of Kiev's “national guard,” repeatedly assault enclaves of pro-Russian separatists. Meanwhile the putsch regime in Kiev is being advised by USian Empire secret agents, much as the Saigon regime was advised during the early stages of the Vietnam War. Given the givens, I can only hope the USian drive for global domination, which in this instance is tantamount to goading a mother bear in her own den, does not trigger World War III. Here, In Case You Missed It, is an anthology of last week's most telling dispatches:

“Putting the Ukraine Crisis in Context,” a Consortium News analysis by William Blum and “What Obama Can Do to Save Ukraine” by Robert Parry are probably the most vital of these reports. The former reveals additional historical and geopolitical details of how USian aggression precipitated the crisis. The latter implies President Obama has lost control of his administration, a chilling likelihood further detailed by “Putin's Subtle Message to Obama,” another of Parry's superb reports.  The remainder, “Burning Ukraine's Protestors Alive,” also by Parry, and “Odessa Atrocity Erupts in Peaceful City and No One Wonders Why?,” by William Boardman for Reader Supported News, portray the neo-Nazi horrors that have begun to characterize the crisis.

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More Indications the President Is Secretly a White Republican: Momentarily displaying his former Obama the Orator persona and his now obviously bogus promise of “change we can believe in,” the Janus-faced USian president (sort of) condemned skyrocketing income inequality but then demonstrated his true Barack the Betrayer values by honoring Wal-Mart as a leader in the fight for environmental sustainability – a claim that is  a huge exaggeration  if not an outright Big Lie. Though Obama's Wal-Mart endorsement has already generated an angry petition campaign, his heartfelt fondness for the nation's most anti-union employer is proven by his appointment of former Wal-Mart Foundation President Sylvia Mathews Burwell to head the Department of Health and Human Services, for which see the “huge exaggeration” link above. The appointment indicates the petition will be ignored – if not passed on to the various secret police agencies to fulfill the Father Gapon function  of identifying any and all opponents of capitalism and capitalist governance.

Meanwhile the prospect of federal health and welfare programs administered by a Wal-Mart executive makes perfect and terrifying sense in the context of a president who slashed food stamps, killed single-payer/public-option health care, sandbagged the Employee Free Choice Act and just issued yet another gag-order directive that (again) proves his promise of “governmental transparency” was just another Big Lie.

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An analysis by Crosscut, the Seattle on-line daily, “How the Metro Transit vote ran into a deep ditch,” says the resounding defeat of the recent mass-transit sustainment-measure was inflicted by “alienated suburban voters... (expressing a mindset) that cannot simply be attributed to anti-transit sentiments.” The piece, published on Friday 9 May, is written as if it were a response to my OAN column of Sunday 4 May, “Exclusive: How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies the Global Class War,” which cites the “transit is welfare” meme and defines anti-transit activism as part of the One Percent's war against any government service that benefits the 99 Percent. The comment thread associated with “deep ditch” gives me an opportunity for Outside Agitation Elsewhere: I argue at length the real cause of the defeat is a suburban shift to the Hard Right – a change also manifest in the (permanent) Republican takeover of the Washington State Senate – never mind the fact Seattle's PollyAnna progressives are loathe to recognize its reality.

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Thom Hartmann asks, “Are Banksters responsible for autism?” He then praises various measures by individual members of Congress, bills that – if ever enacted – might indeed ease the nation's inconceivably oppressive student debt. But I recognize all of these efforts will never become law and are therefore nothing more than maliciously deceptive Big Lies, intended to opiate increasingly angry students into believing relief might actually be forthcoming:

Lifetime enslavement by student debt will never be eliminated in the U.S. precisely because the One Percent views it as a primary method of suppressing student activism – which is precisely the motive behind the policies that created the indebtedness.

Indeed, the rationale for targeting students and academics – academe damned as "the single most dynamic source" of anti-capitalist resistance – is the primary topic of the infamous Powell Memo of 1971,  which is widely considered the original operations plan for the imposition of zero-tolerance Ayn Rand fascism on the USian homeland. (The memo is reprinted in full here.)

Meanwhile Sen. Elizabeth Warren's interest-reduction measure, like Mr. Hartmann's notion of  a jubilee of student-debt abolition, are nothing more than pie-in-the-sky manifestations of the imbecility of hope.  Neither Sen. Warren's mildly ameliorative bill nor any other genuinely humanitarian measure will ever again be enacted by the U.S. Congress simply because the Republican majority in the House has been gerrymandered into permanence.

This means de facto Republican control of the U.S. government is literally forever. It will not end – it cannot be ended – until the entire system is overthrown or the nation itself is toppled, most likely by the looming environmental apocalypse, at which point the entire student debt issue becomes moot. 

Until then – precisely as the diabolically clever, inconceivably powerful  One Percent intend – impossible-to-enact initiatives Ms. Warren and her ilk will perpetuate the Big Lie of USian representative democracy even as we of the peasantry and proletariat, students and professors included,  are driven ever deeper into slavery.

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Another Hartmann piece, “Austerity 'savings' are built on 'blood money,'” details how austerity kills. I emphatically agree:

As I say almost every week in OAN, "austerity" is nothing more than a euphemism for genocide: the deliberate extermination of the Working Class. albeit without the odium of death camps.  Such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. In other words, fascism.

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Different Strokes from Different Folks: I got at least three thumbs-up clicks on the Reader Supported News comment thread of “The Bundy Ranch Militia Is Wearing Out Its Welcome,” Sara Morrison's 5 May report on the aftermath of the now-infamous retreat of federal officers from vigilantes gathered to protect an anti-government scofflaw. But when I posted an abbreviated but pointedly relevant form of the same speculation on the RSN thread of “Disturbing New Pictures of the Arrest of Cecily McMillan,” Michelle Dean's text of 7 May that accompanies Stacy Lanyon's photos of the incident, I got nine thumbs down.

Here is what won three thumbs-up on the “Bundy Ranch” thread:

The probable significance of the government's alleged retreat is at least as terrifying as Barack the Betrayer's National Defense Appropriations Act and its Supreme-Court-approved repeal of the Bill of Rights.

 

The alleged retreat may be an act of accommodation and alliance rather than an act of surrender. If so, it is directly analogous to Obama's appointment of the Christofascist Rick Warren to give the 2009 inaugural invocation. Just as Rev. Warren's appointment gave the Biblical Law theocrats the clandestine kiss of Obamanoid acceptance and encouragement, so too might the regime's departure from the Bundy Ranch communicate acceptance and encouragement to the burgeoning USian neo-Nazi movement and its storm-trooper “militia.”

Like the Rev. Warren appointment, the withdrawal could be a telling indication of how the Obama Regime sees our future – a scenario in which opposition from the Left becomes so overpowering, the government can defend itself only by open alliance with the extreme Right – exactly as occurred in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic.

This is the likelihood that links the gestures to Rev. Warren and the storm troopers with NDAA, the slaying of the Bill of Rights and the total-surveillance apparatus of the emergent USian secret-police state. As others have noted, were the Bundy Ranch defenders from Occupy, by now they would all be dead or disappeared.

All of which suggests the crude and repugnant portrayal of Obama as a second Hitler may have been eerily prophetic.

And here is what got nine thumbs-down – two days later and still with no militia arrests – on the “Disturbing New Pictures” thread:

The obvious conclusion (to be drawn from the contrast between the government's ongoing tolerance of the armed Bundy Ranch militia and the persecution of unarmed and nonviolent Occupy Movement activists) is the Obama Regime is tacitly siding with the militia – no doubt because because its long-range fascist agenda is so bottomlessly malevolent, the regime and its One Percent masters believe it will need all the help it can get – vigilante militia, Ku Klux Klan, American Nazi Party, armed Tea Baggers, whatever – to suppress the additional Leftist resistance that's bound to arise. That's why a terrifying example is being made of Ms. McMillan – same reason the regime is trying so hard to start World War III in Ukraine.

Why the big difference in the Rule of Thumbs? I've no idea, particularly since my other comments on the “Pictures” thread – a discussion of the photos themselves – drew clicks of approval. Perhaps on that thread, the Obama-can-do-no-wrong disciples – of whom there remain far too many on the USian Left – were out in force.

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$15 Now Tacoma Rallies in Downpour: Especially during the Pacific Northwest Coast's rainy season, which lasts nearly nine months, the increasingly painful arthritis in my spine and shoulders often dissuades me from photographing. Though back in the day I comfortably carried three cameras, typically two M Leicas around my neck and a single-lens reflex off my right shoulder, now even one camera around my neck quickly becomes uncomfortable. And the combined weight of two cameras – as I was using to shoot the $15 Now Tacoma rally on 3 May – has left me hurting ever since, with a stiff nagging soreness in my upper back, neck and right shoulder I haven't yet managed to wriggle out from under.

Nevertheless the effort was worth it, both for the rally itself, which despite the rain drew about 100 persons, and for the work it produced, more of which – including digital camera and cellphone imagery by other photographers, is on the $15 Now Tacoma Facebook page.  Never mind the weather – I shelter my cameras with an old GI poncho – it was damn nice to be out photographing again, and the fact the event produced two pictures I'd have considered portfolio pieces back in those thrilling days of yesteryear more than compensates for the aftermath of lingering geriatric discomfort. The two pix are the portrait of Father Bix above (which perhaps because I recognize him as a genuine saint reminds me of an old-time holy card), plus a lucky grabshot, also in black-and-white, of a rally-visitor's kid joyfully running across the rainy meadow of Tacoma's People's Park, for which see the Facebook link.

(Disclosure: I am a member of the $15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee and in that capacity was also manning an informational table at the rally.)

Photo data: Pentax MX, Tokina f/4 70-210mm zoom (mostly at 210mm and f/5.6), Sigma f/4 35-70mm zoom (mostly at 35mm and f/5.6), Fujicolor 800 and Kodak Professional BW400CN, the latter the last two rolls of a batch I'd stored in my refrigerator since 2008. One MX body contained the color, the other MX the B/W, and I switched the lenses back and forth as necessary. Exposing about 50 24-exposure rolls of the BW400CN for a commissioned story c. 2006-2008, I had discovered its actual daylight ASA is closer to 600, and I set the meters accordingly. Yes, even after years of shooting color, I still see better in chiaroscuro.

LB/11 May 2014

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How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies Global Class War

THOUGH THE UKRAINE EMERGENCY continues to intensify – see below for recommended reading and a list of the web sources I've found to be reliable – our justifiable fear USian aggression could trigger World War III should not distract us from the One Percent's atrocities that obtain elsewhere on our grievously sickened planet. There is always the possibility sanity will once more prevail as it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which case our earthly lives will continue toward some other denouement, and additional outrages – events perhaps now seemingly rendered moot by the prospect of thermonuclear extinction – will again become important, if nothing else as textbook examples of capitalism in action. That's the good news.

The bad news is the USian One Percenters – having nearly completed the total subjugation of their imperial homeland – will continue their efforts to hasten capitalism's inevitable transition to fascism and thus impose on the rest of humanity the zero-tolerance ideology they have adopted from Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf and Triumph of the Will.

This means the increasingly vicious class warfare that's being waged over mass transit in the Puget Sound area could become as relevant in London or Moscow or Kiev as it is in Seattle and Tacoma. The latter two cities, Washington state's largest and busiest seaports, are the economic pillars of the Puget Sound metropolis, a region of 3.5 million people who self-righteously claim to be exemplars of environmental enlightenment but repeatedly prove themselves to be the most reliably anti-mass-transit voters in the most notoriously anti-mass-transit nation on Earth. They sustain Pugetopolis as the global epicenter of anti-mass-transit activism and the racial and socioeconomic anti-transit-user hatefulness such activism invariably expresses. The associated hypocrisy is breathtaking, all the more so given the region's supposedly “progressive” mindset.

But the 46-year success of the strategy and tactics that underlie the transit crisis – how the Ruling Class fires up normally closeted bigotry to goad majorities of white, allegedly “environmentalist,” purportedly “progressive” 99 Percenters into voting against their own interests – tells the true Pugetopolis story: that apart from its ecotopian rhetoric, the region's only significant difference from more urbanized parts of the Ku Klux South is its lack of a southern drawl. As an elderly African-American gentleman told me one afternoon while we were sharing a ride on a Pierce Transit bus, “This state be named after a slave-owner; that's why the whole damn place be cursed.” (Pierce and King Counties share the antebellum odium; they are named, respectively, after the pro-slavery President Franklin Pierce  and the slaveholder William Rufus deVane King.)  The regional transit crisis is thus at least partly an eerily lingering 21st Century reminder of the pro-slavery invaders who drove out the First Nations occupants and seized their lands in the name of 19th Century Manifest Destiny.

 

The class-war dynamics of the transit crisis – the essence of which is the malicious denial of public transportation to the growing numbers of people who desperately need it because they can no longer afford the staggering and ever-increasing cost of an automobile – provide a teachable example of why progressive economic change is truly and forever impossible in the USian homeland. The stark contrast between the Ruling Class refusal to solve the transit crisis, which is definitively an economic issue, and Ruling Class flexibility on so-called social issues, is profoundly revealing. It tells us that marriage equality, legal marijuana and legal firearms ownership (albeit to a steadily diminishing degree) are tolerated only because the Ruling Class regards them as modern manifestations of panem et circenses, all supportive of – or at least non-threatening to – the increasing tyranny of capitalist governance. The key to understanding their function is that such breads and circuses cost the One Percent nothing in terms of increased taxes, higher wages or restoration of workers' rights. But they keep us 99 Percenters reliably distracted if not smugly sedated. And above all else, they preserve, for maybe a few more years, the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

While the recent vote to downsize Seattle/King County Metro Transit was easily predictable – even a tiny sales-tax increase of one-tenth of one percent (one penny on a $10 purchase) is too much for the vindictively auto-centric, ever-more-openly bigoted suburban voters – the radically pro-suburban policy-shift at Tacoma's Pierce Transit is appalling even to cynics like myself. Its efforts to maintain vital bus service twice defeated at the polls, the transit authority's board of directors is now openly pandering to the dominantly white, economically privileged, rabidly anti-transit, hatefully anti-transit-user suburbanites who brought the agency to its proverbial knees via a special election in 2011 and the general election the following year. To date, the doling out of rewards at the center of this previously untold story includes at least three new suburban bus routes, all financed by increases in sales-tax revenue generated by up-ticks in the local economy – this as the board punishes the impoverished, racially diverse but notably pro-transit voters in Tacoma proper  by ongoing denial of service inside the city limits. While the same suburbs-versus-city antagonism is evident in Seattle, only in Tacoma has the transit board openly sided with the suburbanites, in essence telling us city-dwellers the revenue-increases we were formerly assured would gradually restore intra-city bus service are now earmarked for the suburbs instead.

Despite the region's history of anti-transit populism, the trigger of the present crisis was Washington state's notorious tax code, which is the nation's most regressive  and therefore the most favorable to the state's preponderance of billionaires and millionaires, whose wealth and power ensure both the permanence of the state's uniquely anti-transit financial structure and its tax-the-poor/exempt-the rich fiscal policies in general. Dependent as the state's transit systems are on sales tax, their fortunes are thus shackled to the ups and downs of capitalism, which means they are forced to reduce services whenever the periodic panics and recessions deprive the 99 Percent of the money to buy, maintain and operate automobiles and thereby send transit ridership soaring. Thus Washington state's transit operations reliably function as a picture-perfect example of the savagery implicit in “austerity” – the practice of victimizing (and sometimes genocidally reducing) the Working Class by slashing social services whenever they are most necessary for working families' survival.

In the past, the legislature sometimes ameliorated such crises by granting municipalities special funding powers. Even so, on transit policy there is little meaningful difference between the Democratic and Republican parties – as per usual, the latter are blatant fascists, while the former still try to hide their fascism behind deceptively “progressive” rhetoric. But now, with the legislature deadlocked by a permanent Republican majority in the state senate and the entire state government therefore under a de facto Republican dictatorship – there is no possibility of even temporary reforms: not now, not in the foreseeable future.

There are also, as I suspected in 2012 and have since traced to the suburban Pierce Transit operating area, disturbingly credible rumors of privatization schemes, including alleged offers from a shadowy French multinational to provide for-profit bus service should anti-transit voters succeed abolishing Pierce Transit entirely. These measures would please the white Republican suburbanites and their representatives on the Pierce Transit Board not just because of compliance with Ayn Rand doctrines but because the Republicans and their constituents make no secret of the fact they despise the democracy of mass transit. They recognize privatization would create a country-club transit system lower-income people could not afford to use. It would also be a step toward re-gentrification of those sections of the suburbs that are becoming sanctuaries for lower-income urbanites who are being forcibly gentrified from the cities.  The privileged riders of Pierce County's hypothetical Country Club Transit would thereby exempt themselves from any need for contact with “undesirables” – those of us who are elderly, homeless, disabled, unemployed or members of castes and ethnicities other than executive, professional and mostly lily-white.

Here again we see how USian government at every level – federal, state, local – serves only the interests of the One Percent.  We see too how the death of the Soviet Union – never mind it was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be – has allowed the capitalists to shed their velvet gloves and again don their characteristic jackboots. But this is still the United States of America, where capitalism's Ayn Rand (fascist) malevolence is yet (somewhat) disguised by euphemisms such as “austerity” and hidden by denial (“no matter how it looks, it's not really genocide”). In all the six decades I pounded a keyboard for pay, I don't recall anything in local governance anywhere – not even in Ku Klux Tennessee – quite so fuck-you brazen as Pierce Transit's decision to back-stab its friends and pamper its enemies. More bus service for the privileged people who don't need or want it, less bus service for those of us who can't survive without it – such is Pierce Transit's “future strategic direction.” As always in the USian homeland, Ayn Rand rules. 

For the record, the three new Pierce Transit routes – and there may be more I don't know about as the agency seems to have adopted a new policy of minimal public disclosure – are numbered 503, 504 and 425. The municipalities these buses serve – Puyallup, Fife, Milton and Edgewood – are small incorporated towns just beyond the eastern city limits of Tacoma. As noted in “How Republican Hatemongering Wrecked an Urban Transit System” (linked above), the official 2012 election results archived at the Pierce County Auditor's Office  show the mostly Democratic voters in Tacoma's electoral precincts voted by about 55 percent to maintain Pierce Transit service. But the overwhelmingly Republican voters in the four suburban municipalities that are getting the new bus service voted by as much as 64 percent to shut Pierce Transit down.

While the transit authority board is theoretically non-partisan, a recent, seemingly inexplicable reorganization somehow took control away from Democratic Tacoma and gave it to the Republican hinterlands. The process by which this was accomplished remains mysterious: I'm told I may not be able to access the relevant minutes without the hassle and indefinite delay of a formal freedom-of-information request. But there's no doubt the Republicans are using their newfound power to impose a classic Ayn Rand solution: rob the afflicted and give to the comfortable. Obviously these Republicans aren't “anti-transit” after all; they're merely opposed to transit that serves folks who are needy. It's another variant of standard Republican dogma: they love welfare for the rich, they hate it when it helps the poor. (As previously noted, the Democrats are scarcely different. They merely closet their Republican-ness behind a curtain of Big Lies. Such is the One Party of Two Names that rules USia on behalf the One Percent.)

Meanwhile The News Tribune, the local outpost of the McClatchy media monopoly – for which “news” is defined not by its old-time definition of majority significance but instead by its relevance to the upscale consumers – has suppressed this entire story as not worth covering. That's because in the Ayn Rand economy of the USian Homeland, buying power is now the only officially recognized measure of citizenship. Just as the Supreme Court has again ruled, money trumps votes. The extent to which we are actually citizens is determined not by the Constitution, as it was in days of yore, but only by our net worth. And the net worth of the typical Tacoman – fully half of us definitively lower-income – is so negligible, TNT routinely omits news that to us is vitally important. Just as we're denied bus service, so too are we denied essential information. Here in this little enclave of the Ayn Rand New World Order, those of us who are transit-dependent obviously no longer matter. Which means what you're reading today is (another) OAN exclusive, a genuine scoop.

(Other relevant articles on the Puget Sound transit crisis are here, here and here.) 

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Apropos the Ukraine Crisis, I spent so much time this week ferreting out and reasoning together the transit story, I had little time to comment on developments in Ukraine – and in any case I feel I have already said pretty much anything I might add to the Ukraine comment-thread dialogues. Nevertheless I raised an intriguing question on the thread of “Rebels Down Ukraine Helicopters,” here, in which I noted the irony of how USian aggression seems to be forcing the Putin Administration substantially further to the Left:

Obama/Kerry warmongering is compelling Putin to resurrect socialist traditions (for example the May Day labor celebration) in the interest of Russian national unity...What will be especially interesting is whether Putin will now expand the popular anti-capitalist reforms he began after Yeltsin's Ayn Rand economic policies, which were forced on post-Soviet Russia by the U.S., nearly provoked a second revolution. Yeltsin/Rand economics was fast reducing the entire Russian 99 Percent to the hopeless poverty that now defines the USian Homeland's 99 Percent. But Putin ameliorated these savage policies with a kind of Russian New Deal, which is the primary reason for his huge popularity. In this context, the relevance of the renewed May Day celebration is that it suggests Putin's economic reforms might now go beyond anti-capitalist amelioration to an actual resurrection of Russian socialism...The additional irony is how these events parallel the way Castro's Cuba was driven into the Soviet bloc by U.S. aggressiveness, with the U.S. government, then as now, acting as the storm troopers of the global One Percent.

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Leading my In-Case-You-Missed-It list of recommended reading is an especially thoughtful der Spiegel staff report entitled “War in Europe? Ukraine and the Threat of Wildfire.” It is the first mainstream media acknowledgement I've seen anywhere of the frighteningly real threat of World War III implicit in the U.S. decision to militarily confront Russia literally at its own borders.

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“Ukraine's Government Has Lost Control of East, Says Acting President” is a Guardian UK dispatch that details the developments summarized in its headline. What is unique is its on-the-scene portrait of the determination of the pro-Russian rebels, including the woman who said of herself and her companions, “We'll fight to our last breath.” Given the astounding courage displayed by Soviet partizanska during World War II, such assertions should not be taken lightly; as proven by what happened to the Persians, the Mongols, the Teutonic Knights and the armies of Bonaparte and Hitler, to attack Mother Russia is to fight all her children, female or male, youth, adult or senior. 

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Another of Robert Parry's superb Consortium News reports, republished by Reader Supported News, is “Prepping for a Ukrainian Massacre,” which says we USians are being psychologically prepared to accept “and perhaps even cheer” anti-Russian genocide in eastern Ukraine. Despite being nearly two weeks old – I accidentally omitted it from last week's Ukrainian anthology – unfolding events tell us it remains hair-raisingly relevant.

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Sources on the Ukraine Crisis I find especially useful are: The Moscow Times,  which despite its pro-western editorial stance seems to do a fair and thorough job of reporting; The Guardian;  the aforementioned Consortium News  and Reader Supported News  plus of course RT,  the U.S.-based, English-language service of the Russian state television network. I've been a regular viewer of RT since the eloquently sarcastic and gorgeously appealing Alyona Minkovski was its main evening news anchor. (Yeah, I admit it: old as I am, my appreciation of womanhood has not diminished – and Goddess forbid it ever does.) Moreover I will assure newcomers to RT's broadcasts it is not the Soviet-type propaganda outlet it is sometimes alleged to be. In fact, RT has broken many stories the so-called “mainstream media” (that is, U.S. Ruling Class media) dares not report. And I have not found anything in RT's Ukraine reporting that was not fully confirmed by other sources.

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When Guardian UK revealed that  “Germany, Under US Pressure Blocks Edward Snowden From Testifying,” I commented accordingly:

Utterly predictable: with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank functioning as the USian Empire's equivalent of a 19th Century colonial ministry, the USian colonies – which include all the nations of Western Europe – have no alternative but obedience. Just as the European nations bow to USian austerity – the will of their peoples be damned – so now do these de facto colonies also bow to the Empire's other, ever-more-oppressive demands. (Could it be that here we are glimpsing the true core of Obama's legacy-quest – to be the first U.S. president hailed as “imperator”?) In any case, Snowden is undoubtedly the beneficiary of this banishment, for once in Germany – even with political asylum – he would have been within easy reach of the USian death squads.

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“Barbarians in Oklahoma,”Charles Pierce's account of an agonizingly botched execution, engendered a discussion thread that asked why the Christian fanatics who dominate that state and so many other domains in the USian interior are not denounced for their bloodlust by the broader Christian community, which supposedly favors pacifism and forgiveness. I replied accordingly:

In English and USian law there is a concept called "countenancing." To "countenance" something is to allow it to happen without interference or objection. "Countenancing" is what the non-fanatical USian Christians are doing in response to the Bible-thump, Biblical Law fanatics who rule the Land of Bumpkins – Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Dakota, Texas and all the other USian backwaters of barbarism. The acts of countenancing are of course carefully rationalized, as are all such hypocrisies. In the instance of Christianity, countenancing is said to be "ecumenical” – that is, essential to Christian unity. Hence even a JesuNazi like Rick Warren – the notorious misogynist and homophobe of Barack the Betrayer's inaugural invocation – remains above Christian criticism.

******

Adam Lee's Alternet piece entitled “10 Things I Learned About the World From Ayn Rand's Insane Atlas Shrugged” prompted an unusually longed comment thread when it was republished  by Reader Supported News, which gave me an opportunity to repeat my view of Ayn Rand's books and the close kinship between capitalism, fascism and Nazism:

Actually the best way to understand Ayn Rand is to acknowledge that her work is the capitalist equivalent of Mein Kampf – written in prose so bad it is effectively unreadable, nevertheless guiding a nation's morally imbecilic embrace of evil. We of course know what Hitler did, but how many of us recognize that as Mein Kampf blueprinted the Holocaust, so do Rand's texts blueprint capitalism's inevitable transformation into fascism and thence to a distinctly USian form of Nazism – with all of us who are poor, disabled, elderly and/or chronically unemployed destined for same sort of terminal scapegoating Hitler imposed on the Jews.

******

Joshua Holland of Moyers and Company asked the ultimate question of our time: “Can America's Descent Into Plutocracy Be Reversed?” I expressed my gravest doubts:

The fact there is controversy over the value of the voter franchise (rather than over our corrupted elections) proves that battle too is lost. Such is Moron Nation – by which the Ruling Class suppressed the rebelliousness of the 1960s. Meanwhile (the) notion capitalism can be used to defeat capitalism – that members of the One Percent will work against Ruling Class interests – is not just pathetically naïve; it is literally beyond absurd. It is the best proof I've yet seen of the Audre Lorde axiom: “the Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house.” What we fail to recognize is the magnitude of those tools. Moron Nation is not just the byproduct of moronated classrooms and prison-industrial pedagogy. It is the fulfillment of an irresistible methodology of oppression derived from Nazi psychological experiments. Its primary instruments are a deliberately punitive economy and mass media in every conceivable form, advertising and entertainment included. Its consequences include the destruction of community and even of our ability to form communities. It has obliterated our collective and individual connections to the environment; it has eradicated every other quality that fosters solidarity. Contrast the birth and death of the New Deal with the birth and death of Occupy. It is not that We the People have willfully surrendered. It is instead that we have been methodically stripped of any and all capabilities for effective resistance.

LB/4 May 2014

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Thoughts on Ukraine, Gentrification, White Racism

NO ORIGINAL ESSAY specifically for OAN this week because I'm working on what I hope will be next week's lead story.

Meanwhile I'm still groping toward a satisfactory format for links to material on other websites. So here are my “in-case-you-missed-it” picks from last week's work by other journalists, with my own Outside Agitation on the comment threads as indicated. 

First of course are dispatches about the ongoing USian attempts to inflame the Ukraine Crisis into World War III, again our lead story because the outcome of the crisis may determine whether we have any future at all.

“Clashes Spread Across Eastern Ukraine As Russia Begins Military Drills on Border”By William Booth and Michael Birnbaum of The Washington Post. This Ruling Class propagantorial piece provoked a discussion thread about why the USian Empire “always” supports Nazism. My contribution was a short summary of modern history:

When the U.S. One Percent welcomed all the Nazi war criminals after World War II, the Nazis made no secret of their intent – to use U.S. resources to spread Nazi ideology (hence "U.S. exceptionalism") and eventually to use U.S. wealth and military power to create a Fourth Reich.

That's what fostered Pinochet, what drove the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and what's fostering the Ukraine Crisis, where the neo-Nazi presence is NOT an accident. That's also why the Russians are so (rightfully) alarmed.

Most of all, it's why this crisis is far more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis...The One Percent clearly wants war...Furthermore, with the One Percenters believing they will be safe in their obscenely posh bunkers, they no doubt see war as the best way to suppress the rising anti-capitalist dissent and exterminate all us "takers" – We the People who are unemployed, elderly, disabled and/or members of ever-more-openly oppressed minorities.

***

“Beneath the Ukraine Crisis: Shale Gas” Nat Parry of Consortium News reveals how USian aggression is (again) motivated by the quest for fossil fuel.

Though I contributed a bit of Outside Agitation to the associated discussion thread, my remarks were more relevant to the thread than to the article itself, hence my decision not to repeat them here. That said, note the unusual spelling of Parry's family name; could Nat be kin to Robert Parry, also of Consortium News? The latter Parry's reporting on the Ukraine Crisis is without peer, but this piece too is filled with vital information.

******

In the fall of 1974 the jazz pianist and chanteuse Melinda Mohn told me of a dream that had deeply disturbed her. She had been hired to perform at a nightclub in Seattle, but first she had to obtain a “city pass” – an official document that instructed the armed guards to let her past the concertina wire and minefields and through the gates in the high stone medieval-fortress-like wall and finally into the city itself. Some sort of apocalypse had occurred, she said, and now in her dreamtime all cities were reserved for the Ruling Class of the neo-feudal realms that had replaced the United States. And Melinda, like any housemaid or nanny or secretary or janitor or scribe or teacher or other worker who served the aristocracy, now had to ensure her papers were in order before she was allowed into the main baronial compound of the Puget Sound region.

What made the dream a nightmare, she said, was its Catch-22 element: not only was she required to have a pass to enter the city so she could sing for the pay she needed to save herself from starvation; she also had to find some way to first enter the city without a pass in order to apply for the requisite pass, and she did not have enough money to bribe the guards...

I do not remember how the dream resolved itself; I remember only it had troubled Melinda to tears, and as I told her at the time, I strongly suspected it was prophetic. Now I know it was. “The Bleaching of San Francisco: Extreme Gentrification and Suburbanized Poverty in the Bay Area,” by Adam Hudson of Truthout, describes how the cities are becoming bastions of the One Percent and the Ruling Class in general:

“Taken together, what's going on in San Francisco is deeper than just a fight between well-to-do tech workers and longtime San Francisco residents. San Francisco is microcosm of what's going on in metropolitan areas around the world. From San Francisco to New York City to London, urban areas are being redesigned into playgrounds for the very rich. The poor, working and almost-nonexistent middle-class people who can't afford to live in these rich Elysiums are forced to live farther away, with few resources to support themselves. By pushing poor and working-class people to the suburbs, gentrification...reconfigures the geographic lines of racial and economic inequality, granting improvements to the lives of the moneyed classes, at the expense of the needs - and sometimes, even the survival - of everyone else.”

Myself a victim of gentrification – that's what forced me out of Manhattan – I too can attest to the miserable consequences of exile to wretched locales, likewise to the bumpkin viciousness one all too often encounters in such places.

One of the realms on my involuntary post-NYC itinerary was a rural area ruled by zero-tolerance Christian fanatics who believed my non-attendance at church, my organic gardening practices and my two very large black dogs identified me as a witch. These prosperity-gospel vigilantes harassed me mercilessly for nearly three years. They trampled my vegetables, flattened my tires, flung rocks onto my roof at midnight, wired newly-slain kittens to my car door and finally poisoned one of my dogs. After the dog recovered, I let it be known via the local grapevine I was not only armed, but a military veteran demonstrably skilled at marksmanship, after which the harassment stopped.

The last destination on my dismal itinerary of exile was the city of Tacoma, where it seems I will live out the remainder of my life. Like Seattle, Tacoma is a major seaport on Puget Sound, and according to the prevalent Big Lie, the regional mindset is “progressive” and “green.” But beneath that shallow facade is a bottomless miasma of reactionary hypocrisy. Though Tacoma and Seattle certainly contain pockets of genuinely enlightened voters – note the Seattle election of Kshama Sawant – the Puget Sound norm is increasingly set by suburbanites who are as maliciously xenophobic as any Ku Klux Southerner. The resultant trend toward ever-more-unabashed fascism has already paralyzed the state government, and the next election or two will no doubt put it solidly under Rightist control.

Meanwhile – the ultimate proof of the region's environmental hypocrisy – it has a 46-year record of nastily opposing mass transit, a scorecard of negativity that has no counterpart anywhere in the notoriously anti-transit United States.

Even in the region's cities, the voters cling to their automobiles with a stubborn vindictiveness that routinely spawns hate-campaigns against the growing numbers of us – all victims of capitalism – for whom mass transit is the only affordable mode of travel.

The local One Percenters want us gone. They say we lower their property values and stink up their neighborhoods. Their newest and most successful gentrification tactic is now to denounce publicly-subsidized transit as “welfare,” an angry buzzword that prompts the reliably racist, reliably Ayn-Rand-minded electorate to react accordingly: to demand the privatization of transit (thereby making it unaffordable to “undesirables”), and to vote at every opportunity to dismantle public transit systems throughout the region, exactly as occurred last week in and around Seattle.

(Despite my obviously-strong feelings on this topic, I added no Outside Agitation to the associated thread because – having been outrageously censored under Truthout's anything-to-protect-Obama election-year policy – I no longer dare post there.)

******

At last the small but increasingly effective USian Real Left is beginning to recognize the harsh truth reportedly asserted in KGB analyses of the rebelliousness that characterized the U.S. in the 1960s: that while the nation's minorities possessed genuine revolutionary potential, the mostly white New Left was scarcely more than a fad.

According to Canadian media reports during the early 1990s – at least one of these appeared in MacLean's Magazine, but I can find no links to it today – KGB analysts concluded the New Left of the '60s was too anti-intellectual to accept the need for disciplined ideological study, too bourgeois comfortable and Ayn-Rand selfish to repudiate capitalism, and above all else, too racist to accept leadership from its only genuinely revolutionary sources, which were within the African-American, Hispanic, Asiatic and First Nations communities.

Moreover, the New Left's individual members were deemed too ageist to accept input from the remnants of the Traditional Left and too arrogantly self-obsessed to build any solidarity with others apart from their own socioeconomic kindred.

Thus the Soviet spooks predicted the New Left would eventually abandon or betray its minority comrades, stop its lip-service assertions of humanitarian values and become a New Right as soon as the military draft was ended – a prediction confirmed to the letter by the post-Vietnam emergence of the so-called “me generation,”  the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the outcomes of all elections thereafter.

But now the collapse of the U.S.S.R. has freed the capitalists to disclose their infinite greed and innate savagery without fear of revolutionary reprisal. They have discarded their velvet gloves and donned their original jackboots. This has fostered the evolution – actually re-evolution – of a Real Left in the USian Homeland, which in turn has prompted renewed examination of USian racism, starting with acknowledgment we Caucasians are subtly but methodically inoculated from birth with racism's toxins, the ultimate barrier against 99 Percent solidarity.

Hence “The Unbearable Whiteness of the American Left,” a Nation essay by Gary Younge that was picked up by Reader Supported News and – like a pry-bar wielded in a long-abandoned house – brought the termites out in force.  Hence too my comment-thread response:

Mr. Younge is – if I may lapse into the parlance of my radical youth – right on. The problem is that we USian whites have been conditioned from birth to think of ourselves as the personification of “American exceptionalism” – that is, of the global master race.

Not only that; we've been conditioned so thoroughly and effectively, our USian-supremacist/white-supremacist (and therefore incipiently Nazi) attitudes have been planted so deeply in our subconscious minds, they are exceedingly difficult to uproot.

Such is the psychological reality of the Fourth Reich.

But the effort to transcend that conditioning – painful as it invariably is – must nevertheless be made. Otherwise, exactly as KGB studies reportedly said of U.S. revolutionary prospects during the 1960s, racism will always nullify our efforts toward solidarity.

***

It needs be said there are two pseudo-Lefts in the U.S., also a much smaller Real Left:

The fad pseudo-Left is dominantly white and idiotically useful; it helps maintain the Big Lie of USian democracy. Its chief characteristics are the rowdiness, conformity and anti-intellectuality one finds in fraternity and sorority houses. Its members are pampered college and university students enjoying the political variant of Spring Break self-indulgence. Its exemplar is Jerry Rubin, who climaxed his “radical” activism by a career as a millionaire stock broker.

The bourgeois pseudo-Left is mostly wealthy, dominantly white and also idiotically useful. Its defining traits are its indifference to 99 Percent concerns, its “progressive” anti-unionism and its opposition to socialism and Marxism. It endorses “New Capitalism” – capitalism with its evils camouflaged by human-potentialist rhetoric. Its members include New Agers, Ayn Rand feminists (consumeroid consumption as women's liberation), most USian environmentalists (“green capitalism”), etc. ad nauseam. Its exemplars include Gloria Steinem and the One Percenter Bill Gates.

The Real Left, small but growing, acknowledges the struggles for equality, economic democracy and environmental protection as part of the historical truth of class war. It recognizes the relevance of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. It strives toward maximum solidarity by embracing maximum diversity. Its exemplars include Kshama Sawant and Angela Davis.

******

My final recommendation for the week, “Racism and Criminalization in the Media,” is a scathing exposé of “the hiding-in-plain-sight but never-discussed racism that characterizes the United States and the ways US media subtly sustain that racism.” By Truthout's Bethania Palma Markus, it is surely the most enlightening such reportage I have yet encountered – and I with a journalism career spanning a bit more than half a century. Again I added nothing to the associated thread, but in this instance there was nothing I could say – save kudos to Maya Schenwar for having the courage to publish Markus' work.

LB/27 April 2014

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Kerry's Contradictions – Peace-Candidate Big Lie versus Warhawk Reality – Exemplify How the Two Parties Collaborate to Dupe Voters, Sustain Sham 'Democracy'

(Note: TypePad, the primary publisher of Outside Agitator's Notebook, has been shut down by an ongoing denial of service attack and has been offline since Friday 18 April. Thus until further notice this will be OAN's only edition.)

* 

(Updated 14:56 Monday 21 April with a new Robert Parry dispatch on the Ukrainian Crisis, for which see "Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Imperative," below.)

 

MOST OF US have already noted the apparent paradox of how U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the former antiwar-activist and Democratic presidential (peace) candidate, has become a frighteningly aggressive, propaganda-spouting war-monger. 

But even the most Leftward-leaning of the big-time pundits has not dared point out the bitter lesson – another irrefutable proof USian “democracy” is a naught but a cunning charade – implicit in Kerry's (apparent) transformation.

Stupefied as we are by the so-called “mainstream media” and its dire fulfillment of Josef Goebbels' plan to create the most hypnotically effective propaganda machine in human history, the majority of us have not heard of Kerry's murderous record in Vietnam.  We do not know his riverine operations reveal a penchant for inflicting death on civilians that would have earned him a hearty, Zieg Heil welcome into the most kill-hardened units of the Schutzstaffel, the Nazis' dread SS. 

Jeffrey St. Clair, the author of the above-linked Counterpunch report, says the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. revealed that Kerry's murderousness created a great many problems for Vietnam commanders. Zumwalt, himself a warrior of international renown, is quoted in the 2013 exposé as saying, “we had virtually to straitjacket (Kerry) to keep him under control.”

Thus in the context provided by St. Clair's disclosures last year and Kerry's conduct today, the 2004 election becomes a perfect, textbook example of how the One Percent defrauds the USian public with the Big Lie of “free elections.” The Democrats ran “peace candidate” Kerry as the antithesis of “war-criminal” George Bush, but also emphasized Kerry's Vietnam combat record, thereby appealing to Democratic warhawks. The Republicans then reinforced Kerry's “peace candidate” image  by attacking him for his anti-Vietnam War activities, by questioning the validity of his medals – three Purple Hearts for wounds plus the Bronze Star and Silver Star for bravery under fire – finally labeling him “unfit for command” and implicitly suggesting he was a coward.

It's a classic example of how the two halves of the One Party of Two Names perfectly fulfill the functions assigned them by the One Percent.

The same pattern, obvious once we have learned to recognize it, is apparent in the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. In the former, the One Percent allowed the Democrats a victory to preserve the deception of a functional representative democracy. Obama raised the electorates' hopes by promising “change we can believe in,” and the Republicans ensured the outcome, first by selecting a terrifyingly ignorant candidate for vice president, then by rabidly denouncing the proposed “change” as “socialist” conspiracy, thereby convincing desperate voters Obama's promises were surely more than rhetoric. In 2012, after Obama the Orator was clearly revealed as Barack the Betrayer, the Republicans again served the Democrats with the “accidental” revelation of Romney's contempt for 47 percent of the U.S. population. 
 
Meanwhile Warmaster Kerry, whose belligerence on behalf the violently greedy One Percent may well trigger World War III, is merely fulfilling the role for which he, like Obama himself, was obviously trained and scripted long ago.
 

****** 

In Case You Missed It (and apropos the fulfillment of assigned roles), “The Plot to Overthrow FDR: How the New Deal Sent Conservatives Into a Rage,” implicitly defines the imposition of fascism on the United States  as a multi-generational project. But as I said on the comment thread, Moyers and Company narrator Joshua Holland tells the story wrong – or very differently from how I heard it as a child and a young man.

Firstly, the coup was known as "the Bankers' Plot," under which search-engine entry you will find the most complete information.

Secondly, it was organized by Hitler and Mussolini. Its goal was to make the American Legion an SS equivalent; the objective was to make the U.S. part of the Axis. (The U.S. One Percent was already the prime financier of world fascism; now the U.S. would also be the primary source of food, natural resources and materiel for global conquest.)

Thirdly, the plot was exposed by Soviet agents. Despite Gen. Butler's efforts, it first became public knowledge only via the Communist and Communist-influenced alternative press.

What indicates these assertions are probably true is how they solve at least three riddles of history. They explain why FDR trusted Stalin (his agents literally saved FDR's presidency and USian democracy too); why the postwar U.S. harbored Nazi war criminals (back-door fulfillment of the plotters' intent); and why the postwar U.S. so savagely purged Communists, socialists and intellectuals (fear these elements would obstruct further efforts to impose fascism).

Obviously the plotters and their descendants have won. The results – the death of the “American Dream,” the imposition of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us) – are obvious.

******

In Case You Missed It, Robert Parry of Consortium News is continuing to slay the Big Lies spewed by the USian propaganda machine and courageously filter out the truth about the Ukraine Crisis. I did not comment on “The Dangerous Neocon Role in Ukraine,” linked here. But I said a few words about its sequel, “Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Imperative,” where I pointed out U.S. aggression is forcing the Russians to see themselves as the modern-day equivalent of the Spartans at Thermopylae or their own grandfathers at Fortress Brest. I also had a bit to say about the media issues raised by “Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass,” in which Parry describes the current coverage of the crisis as “utterly Orwellian...including accusing others of 'propaganda' when their accounts – though surely not perfect – are much more honest and more accurate than what the U.S. press corps has been producing.”

Parry reiterates the warning that – had we USians not been numbed by lies and disinformation – should rightfully terrify us all: “There’s also the added risk that this latest failure by the U.S. press corps is occurring on the border of Russia, a nuclear-armed state that – along with the United States – could exterminate all life on the planet. The biased U.S. news coverage is now feeding into political demands to send U.S. military aid to Ukraine’s coup regime.”

As another poster on this thread said in very different words, our submissive response does indeed demonstrate the terrifying reality of Moron Nation – we the people imprisoned in ignorance by decades of deliberate moronation, so dumbed-down we like the most abjectly broken slaves instantly believe everything our masters tell us – even when it is filled with obvious contradictions.

But what to me as a long-ago-blacklisted professional journalist is far worse is the relentless, never-challenged deluge of false information that proves how the One Percent – by subsuming the nation's formerly independent media into a half-dozen monopolies – have created a one-voice propaganda machine far more formidable than the ground-breaking model for all such apparatuses Joseph Goebbels built for Nazi Germany.

As a result the USian Empire has the most hypnotically effective propaganda in our species' history. And because the machine that produces it is disguised as a civilian business rather than a government bureaucracy, its tyranny and the diabolical cleverness by which we are brainwashed into submission remains forever unrecognized.

Once again we see capitalist governance in action: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Thus does capitalism fulfill its moral imbecility: not just as fascism, but as fascism sustained by modern technology and therefore more inescapably evil than anything our species has ever before encountered.

******

In Case You Missed It, Thom Hartmann has decided “American Democracy No Longer Works,” in support of which he cites a newly released study  that shows We the People are We the Powerless when it comes to influencing public policy. (Unfortunately, Hartmann does not provide us a link to a more detailed summary of the study's findings, an omission I correct here.) 
 
Meanwhile the fact it took a formal academic project and its 20-year collection of data to prove what our ancestors recognized at least a century ago – that the United States is an oligarchy in which the rich are omnipotent and the rest of us are impotent – prompts me to lapse into parody on the Hartmann comment thread: 

Five axioms concerning capitalist governance:
   
Definitions: The One Percent is the hereditary capitalist aristocracy that owns the nation's wealth. The Ruling Class consists of the politicians, bureaucrats, police commanders, military officers and business executives who serve the One Percent. The purpose of capitalist governance is absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else.

Hence: 
    
(1)-The non-responsiveness of the Ruling Class to the popular will is directly proportionate to the extent the Ruling Class is indebted to – and therefore effectively owned by – the One Percent.
   
(2)-The probability of revolution is directly proportionate to the non-responsiveness of the Ruling Class.

(3)-The probability of successful revolution is based on the presence of four historically proven prerequisites. These are (A)-a unifying ideology; (B)-effective leadership and disciplined organization; (C)-mastery of extant technologies; (D)-support by one or more foreign powers.

(4)-The probability of violent revolution is directly proportionate to the Ruling Class capability of violently suppressing non-violent revolution.

(5)-The negative consequences of violent revolution – death, famine, disease, destruction – are directly proportionate to the refusal of the One Percent and its Ruling Class to yield to the popular will.

(In other words, no matter who wins, life in a post-revolutionary United States would be no more or less wretched than life in a land that combines the violent anarchy of Somalia, the toxicity of Fukushima and the poverty of post-earthquake Haiti. Which is why I am so very glad I'm old – so old I probably won't be alive when the revolution happens.)

***

My next entry on the thread, in response to another poster, dropped the academic affectations: 

The unified ideology described by axiom (3)-(A) is already taking shape amidst the grassroots. It is beyond the domain of the two Ruling Class parties (actually one Ruling Class party with two names), and even beyond the Tea Party and its various overtly fascist subsets, (i.e., the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the other such groups whose banners are part of the international fascist solidarity demonstrations now taking place in Kiev). It is also beyond the domain of any specific organization of the Left, which is why this new unified ideology has yet to acquire a name and formal structure.

Nevertheless it is a hybrid of democratic socialism (cooperative and/or public ownership of vital services and the means of production); Marxism (recognition of the historical truth of class struggle and the necessity of disciplined Working Class solidarity); traditional anarchism (healthy distrust of hierarchal organizations) and classical Jeffersonian populist democracy (one person/one vote, fostered by the Internet). 

It has already made itself apparent in innumerable small ways, particularly as the (failed) Occupy movement and its  more localized successes, including the relief efforts of Occupy Sandy in and around New York City, the rapidly growing popularity of the Socialist Alternative Party in Seattle and Minneapolis, and the brushfire-fast nationwide spread of SA's $15 Now! campaign to raise the minimum wage to livable-income levels.
 
When and if this incipient movement coalesces and comes to power, it would be absolutely compatible with the U.S. Constitution and would in fact be its fulfillment. 

The vital questions are therefore how and when its self-recognition will progress to the point of formalization, and whether it will have the solidarity (strength) and courage to withstand the inconceivably violent reaction by which the One Percent and the Ruling Class will try to suppress it, the forces for which are already in place. 

Apropos a civil war, I too see that, but probably not as you do. Assuming a successful revolution – note again its four prerequisites – a situation would probably evolve similar to what obtained in the old Russian Empire after 1917, with the One Percent trying (with the support of various overseas allies) to regain power, and the revolutionaries equally determined to hang on to the "liberated" parts of the U.S. 

The One Percent, in keeping with the lavish funding it is pouring into establishment of theocratic governance, would no doubt declare its territories ruled by Biblical Law, thereby ensuring the fealty of the South and the Midwestern interior, but both coasts and no doubt Alaska too would side with the revolution. The nation as we know it would cease to exist (as it nearly has anyway), and the land would be sundered in such ways that, combined with terminal climate change, would probably take at least a thousand years for recovery. Hence my vision of "the violent anarchy of Somalia, the toxicity of Fukushima (as the One Percent would not hesitate to nuke rebellious cities), the poverty of post-earthquake Haiti."
 
As a result, the global power center would of course shift far eastward: China unquestionably, Russia more than likely. As to what remained of the former United States, part of it would be absorbed by expansions of Mexico and Canada and probable Russian reclamation of its former Pacific Northwest possessions; the remainder would either be uninhabitable due to the lingering toxicity inflicted by CBR (chemical, biological, radiological) warfare or so impoverished by isolation its habitable lands would be realms of famine and disease. 

Were the One Percent to win – and I believe the odds are 50-50 – most if not all of the same conditions would apply save that the residents of lands under One Percent control would have it far worse: they would be de facto slaves...which is of course what the One Percent already intends for all of us in the Working Class anyway.

As I said, I'm damn glad I'm old.

***

Then when another poster seemed to romanticize revolution, I added this:

Make no mistake: there is nothing desirable about violent revolution – which would leave the lands wherein it is fought looking, at best, like Europe in 1945 and, at worst, like Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the Bomb. 

Yet given how quickly the One Percent now resorts to violence – note again the example of the brutal suppression of Occupy, also the Gestapo-like disregard of neighborhood civil rights that characterized the search for the Boston Marathon bomber –   I fear an eventual violent reaction by the citizenry is inevitable. 

(Indeed, provoking a rebellion may be the clandestine purpose behind such tactics – the creation of an incident that will give the Ruling Class an excuse for exterminating large segments of the U.S. population, the Final Solution to the problems of unemployment,  poverty and homelessness.) 

And the mercilessness of the Ruling Class response has already been made clear: it was demonstrated in Vietnam: “we had to destroy the village to save it.” 

Remember too that morally there is not one scintilla of difference between the USian policy of exterminating an entire village for harboring alleged "terrorists" and the Nazi German policy of imposing exactly the same reprisals for harboring partisans. That the USian (Fourth) Reich does the extermination from afar with drones, while the German (Third) Reich did it up-close-and-personal with machine guns, rifles, bayonets and pistols, does not alter the moral depravity or karmic malignancy of the event itself.  In fact it is at least arguable the drone-exterminations are more reprehensible merely by how they protect the drone operators from being splattered with blood and gore – and how that bloodlessness is then diabolically used to assure the drone operators they are without sin.
  
As to your notion of a coordinated revolutionary effort by socialist countries – Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam etc. – that capability perished with the Soviet Union, and it is already clear the USian Empire will do anything it can to prevent its resurrection.  China, meanwhile, has been totally co-opted (and totally corrupted) by capitalism; the USian Empire has achieved with money precisely what its British Empire antecedent sought in the 19th Century to accomplish with opium. The one remaining wild-card is Russia, where the Communist Party remains the second largest (and by far the best organized) political party in the nation – so much so it is at least arguable it was only by Putin's New Deal-like repeal of the most viciously capitalist Ayn Rand “reforms” imposed under Yeltsin the country was steered away from another Communist revolution.

(This is no doubt one of the reasons why the USian Imperial One Percent – the oberfuehrers of fascism's Global New Order – are now trying to provoke a war with Russia: they are terrified by what might happen should that vast nation again go Communist.)

LB/20 April 2014

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