Democratic (sic) Party Treachery Makes New Party Mandatory

FIRST THOUGH, ANOTHER (WELCOME?) FORMAT CHANGE: Just as newspapers typically confine (admitted) expression of their overlords' opinions to inside pages, so will I now similarly structure Dispatches. Ergo, save in exceptional circumstances, the news items will precede the rants. For explanatory details, see “MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS OWNED BY THE SAME ONE PERCENTERS," after the last of today's recommended reports and below the photograph. 

NOW AS TO THE SEEMINGLY SUICIDAL DEMOCRATS: The Democratic (sic) Party's (mostly) unspoken response to our poverty and desperation – “fuck you/your lives don't matter anymore/hurry up and die” – is for many of us an everyday experience. We also know the Republicans are scarcely different, merely less dishonest about their malevolence. 

That's why so many of us don't vote; we already recognize we're tyrannized by one Capitalist party that hides behind the Big Lie of two names. Such is life – and death – as Capitalism morphs into its uniquely USian form of Nazism. But if we are to organize ourselves into a new political party that truly represents the 99 Percent, or even into an effective anti-Capitalist resistance, it is essential we learn as much as we can about our enemies.

 

Hence the relevance of these two obituary-like analyses of Democratic (sic) tactics and strategy:

 (To read the rest, go here.)

In Ugly Truth, Trump's Brutality Is Characteristically USian; So Is the Democratic (sic) Party's Effort to Rescue Capitalism by Co-opting and Betraying the Anti-Trump Resistance

(NOTE: Because Dispatches from Dystopia is as much work of art as journalistic fulfillment of the core socialist ethos – “from each in accordance with ability/to each in accordance with need” – it is sometimes more subject to spontaneity, i.e., visitations by the Muse, than to schedules and deadlines. Thus it was this morning. I began the day's work with what I imagined would be no more than maybe 10 minutes of memory-confirming research on how the USian Homeland became the primary sanctuary for Nazi war criminals; I'd assumed I'd be posting the finished text by mid-afternoon. But one Internet topic led inexorably to another, and 12 hours later I had learned our species' obscene history of genocidal medical experiments began not in the German death camps but on USian slave plantations nearly a century earlier. No wonder our Capitalist overlords want to replace net neutrality with Nazi-style censorship.)

*

INNUMERABLE PEOPLE CLAIM to be part of the anti-Trump “resistance,” and the number grows as Trump's Nazism becomes ever more undeniable. But how might we as revolutionary socialists distinguish between the reformers, who will inevitably betray us (precisely as history proves they have always done), and those who are at least potentially our comrades.?

An immediate answer to this question is provided by whether the individual in question has reasoned and/or been emotionally thrust beyond the slogan “no justice, no peace” to the invariably painful realization there can be neither justice nor peace – nor long-term human survival – without the total and permanent elimination of Capitalism.

The fact Capitalism cannot be reformed – and the corollary fact all reformers are ultimately betrayers – is proven unequivocally by the fate of the New Deal. The USian Working Class – the We-the-People 99 Percent – returned from World War II whole-heartedly believing we and our allies had at long last fulfilled the World War I goal of making the planet “safe for democracy” – that we had defended the four freedoms  abroad even as we had forced the New Deal on our Capitalist overlords at home to guarantee those freedoms for ourselves and our descendants.  

But the truth was of course far different...

(Read the rest here.)

Clarke Appointment May Truly Mark the End of the U.S.

YES I HAVE substantially revised and re-titled this essay.  In retrospect, its original form (which began with a rant about how Microshaft had nullified all my blood pressure meds with the rage and frustration evoked by Windows 10 updates), was absurdly selfish in the context of the news of Trump's appointment of David Clarke to the Department of Homeland Security as what is essentially the reichsführer over all U.S. local police departments.

Indeed Clarke's appointment may literally mark the historical end of the U.S. as we have known it and signal the beginning of its (necessarily murderous) deconstruction into an openly proclaimed  JesuNazi empire as malevolently theocratic as Saudi Arabia or the so-called  Islamic State (ISL). 

Think George Orwell's 1984 combined with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Read the rest of the revised report here.

 

 

 

Hope as the New Paralytic Dope-iate of the Masses

A COUNTERPUNCH WRITER named Gregory Barrett – someone whose work I had not hitherto read – thrice prodded my alleged mind to heightened wakefulness Wednesday morning. The first prod was his title: “Hope is Our Enemy: Fighting Boiling Frog Syndrome.” The second prod was his reference to East Tennessee street preachers, a sidewalk spectacle I had neither witnessed nor consciously thought about since my boyhood years in Knoxville, but nevertheless an image painfully relevant to our present circumstances. The final prod was his bold assertion “hope...makes things hopeless,” which for a vastly larger audience succinctly summarizes a point I have been making in this space for at least seven years.

My original argument, dating from 2010,  was essentially that We the People are being drowned in “the Politics of Hopelessness” even as our overlords are elevating hope to a synonym for patriotism and attempting to damn as traitors any of us savvy enough to reject their latest Orwellian language-warp.

Given the Democratic (sic) Party's ever-intensifying efforts to co-opt the Left-leaning reawakening provoked by Trump, whom Seattle Crosscut's frequent comment-contributor DBreneman aptly calls L'il Duce,  (for which scroll down), it is significant to note 2010's “politics of hopelessness” also gives us a slap-in-the-face reminder of the breathtaking Neoliberal treachery of U.S. Sen. Patty Murray...

(To read the rest, go here.) 

Beware Co-optation by Democratic (sic) Deceptiveness

(Readers please note the new Dispatches format.)

OUR MOST IMPORTANT but most likely overlooked reading last week is a vitally provocative analysis by Shamus Cooke that warns against the Democratic (sic) Party's already frighteningly successful campaign to co-opt the Leftward shift provoked by Trump's ever-more-unabashed Nazism.

Alas, Cooke's vital work was obscured both by “mainstream media” censorship and the ever-more-deliberately blinding fog of Trumpwar. The report's undeserved obscurity was further facilitated by a woefully non-descriptive title, “The Trump 'Resistance' Is Slipping Through Our Fingers.”

To read more, including a summaries of  the past five days' most important news stories, go here.

'Health Care Reform': USia's Newest Euphemism for Genocide

 (I again feel the need to apologize for the long delays between posts: I am still recovering from a nearly fatal illness, a process my physician tells me will probably take at least seven more weeks. Hence I have decided to try a new approach to filling this space, writing shorter, more specifically focused and therefore more frequent essays rather than allowing material to accumulate into long multi-topic texts as I have done in the past. While I can't promise I'll succeed – health crises and other unanticipated interruptions seem to be the bane of my old age – I'll damn sure do my best to better serve you, my faithfully patient readers, to whom my most emphatic thanks.)

*****

THE PATHETIC OPTIMISM of the Empire's self-proclaimed “progressives” – those corporate Neoliberals (aka “Democrats”) whose pretend obliviousness  to the tyranny of USian governance reduces their claims of humanitarian consciousness and democratic values to Big Lies – was never more obvious than in the prelude to the gleefully genocidal atrocity  approved last week by the Republican House of Representatives. Up until the moment the so-called “American Health Care Act” passed by a 217-213 vote, We the People were repeatedly assured this euphemistically disguised program of mass murder by denial of health care would probably again be defeated  as it was in March.

Read the rest here.

LB/7-8 May 2017

-30-

An Apology, an Explanation and a New Apporoach

My apologies to my readers here on Blogger for the confusion of the past nearly three months. I purchased the domain name "Dispatches from Dystopia.net" earlier this year and applied it here,  only to learn that it is probably technically illegal for me to use it outside its original source, the Rolls-Royce-class blog server Typepad that -- in recognition of my former working-press status -- has so kindly provided me a lifetime subscription since 2009.  Hence -- to avoid any possible legal complications in the Internet world (a realm wherein I am hopelessly ignorant of the applicable laws) -- the change here at Blogger back to the original "Outside Agitator's Notebook."

Beyond that, my apologies also for my extended absence, the result of the fact I have been extremely ill. First was a bout with flu that obliterated all my February -- apparently a subspecies of influenza  somehow omitted from the 2016-2017 flu shot -- with the result I was bedridden for 21 days and in a severely weakened state for about 14 days after that: by far the most devastating encounter with flu in my entire life. Then the last week in March I was hospitalized for five days by sepsis, and now I am coming down with another chest cold the cough and congestion of which suggest something considerably more severe. Such is the beginning of my 77th year and another reason -- this in addition to Trump's assumption of Hillary's former role as the personification of thermonuclear apocalypse --  I am starting to question whether I will live to see 2018. Indeed never in my life -- not even with childhood diseases -- have I been so relentlessly, seemingly incurably ill. But then never in any of our lives have We the People -- not just of the USian Empire but of the entire planet -- been in such apocalyptic jeopardy, so perhaps my aged body is only behaving as a microcosm of the broader human condition. In any case, though Trump has reduced me to the resigned hopelessness of utter nihilism, be assured I will continue writing and photographing and working to resist Capitalist tyranny as long as I am able.

Thus the following format change:

I began posting here during the relatively brief period my avowedly Marxian politics got me banned from Typepad, and after Typepad restored my subscription, I have posted the same material here I post there primarily because  -- for reasons I do not understand -- my European and Asiatic readers are seemingly more readily able to access my work here. However in discussions with a couple of comrades who are both friends and Nurds, it was pointed out to me that perhaps all I need do is post here a link to Typepad -- especially since the latter URL also accesses my photographic portfolios. Hence, as an experiment, here are the URLs to my two "Dispatches from Dystopia" posts on Typepad, the first, dated  23 March  2017, and the second, dated today, 13 April 2017:

http://www.dispatchesfromdystopia.net/2017/03/new-name-new-urgency-as-capitalism-bares-its-nazi-fangs-.html

http://www.dispatchesfromdystopia.net/2017/04/notes-on-the-trumping-of-planet-earth-how-prosperity-gospel-christianity-capitalism-and-moron-nation-spawned-the-fourth-rei.html 

My hope is this approach will enable my European and Asiatic readers to more easily access my work, and for this reason I would appreciate whatever feedback might be possible via this site's comment thread. If this approach does not work, I will go back to posting the complete text of my essays here, never mind the fact it requires about two additional hours of precisely the sort of computer drudgery I despise and therefore prefer to avoid.  
 
Meanwhile thank you all.

Loren Bliss
13 April 2017