Persistent White Racism Defines U.S. as Fascist Nation

Manhattan, Lower East Side, 1983, the slogan calling to mind 1979's Greensboro Massacre.  Tech data: Nikon FM, 24mm Nikkor, Tri-X, probably at 800 for D-76. Photo by Loren Bliss copyrights 1983, 2015. (Click image to view it full size.)  

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YES, THE SOUTH is every bit as malevolently Nazified as suggested by the jailing of a young black woman and her white assistant for pulling down a white supremacist banner in Charleston, South Carolina.

But it's not just the South. It's the whole damn United States.

The brutality of its racism and its kindred toxins of xenophobia, ethnic hatred and class prejudice was the one enduring lesson of the 177 (mostly miserable) months I involuntarily spent in the South during the post-New York City years of my childhood and early manhood. It's why I have not set foot in the South since 1969, and it's why I have no intention of ever going back.

However it was my subsequent years elsewhere that taught me the bigoted hatefulness of USian whites is truly ubiquitous. Though its expression may vary from region to region, its underlying malice is the same whether one is in Michigan, in New Jersey, in the Pacific Northwest or even in some parts of Manhattan.

Nor does it surprise me the Confederate battle flag  – the same icon of oppression the breathtakingly courageous Bree Newsome  yanked from one of the region's commonplace and officially defiant memorials to slavery and genocide – has become an international symbol of der übermenschen – the self-proclaimed “Aryan master race.”

After all, the Confederacy was our benighted species' first attempt to formally establish a system of government based exclusively on white supremacy. It predated the Nazis' Third Reich by 72 years. That's why. contrary to the Southern apologists' claims, any Confederate banner is unabashedly malignant, its public display the visual equivalent of shouting “nigger” in the face of any black who passes by. That's why the battle flag is now Hitler-saluted and zieg heiled by Nazis everywhere including Ukraine. 

And that's why Newsome and James Ian Tyson could no longer abide it flying – as if in smirking triumph – over the city made infamous by the most recent U.S. racial atrocity.

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ASTUTE READERS WILL note I have linked to two mainstream-media reports describing the laudable deed done by Newsome and her protest-comrade Tyson. That's because the reports are written from differing perspectives – one from South Carolina, the other from New York City – and because each therefore contains details the other lacks.

The same is true of the alternative media report linked here,  which unfortunately spells Newsome's companion's name as “Dyson” despite the fact it is spelled “Tyson” in every other dispatch I have read.

Normally that would cause me to reject the “Dyson” piece for reportorial incompetence. But apart from the apparent misspelling, it provides additional, very interesting information about Newsome herself. And knowing the South, I can rationalize the spelling conflict as likely the result of how so many Southerners often confuse the pronunciations of D and T.

Alas, without a means of contacting Newsome's colleague directly, there is no way I can confirm which spelling is correct. So I'll follow the lead of the Associated Press, which I know to be generally trustworthy on such matters, and I'll continue to spell his name “Tyson,” with profuse apologies if I am wrong.

Meanwhile Newsome and Tyson are each facing up to three years in prison on misdemeanor changes of defacing a monument, which means they were fortunate to have been allowed to make bail so quickly.

Because of the rampant racism in Southern jails, anyone arrested on civil rights charges is in potentially deadly danger, not just from the guards but from racist inmates also. Given the violation of law with which Newsome and Tyson are charged, had either of the two spent much time behind bars, they'd have been prime targets.

Particularly during the Civil Rights Movement era, white jail guards routinely bribed white racist inmates with cigarettes, food and additional privileges to beat and rape men and women who had been arrested in civil rights protests. The persistence of racist violence throughout the nation, especially as perpetrated by federally militarized local police departments, strongly suggests such jailhouse practices continue unabated.

That's essentially what happened to a white Congress of Racial Equality activist named Phil Bacon in 1962 at Knoxville, Tennessee's Knox County Jail. Bacon was beaten into a near-coma, and the resultant injuries hospitalized him for some time – if I remember correctly, for three or four weeks. A white woman whose name I have since forgotten, herself a civil rights activist, was similarly savaged by white inmates in the jail's women's section.

The Knox County Jail was part of my Southern experience too. Arrested in the newsroom of The Knoxville Journal and charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to write a racist lie,  I spent most of the night of 3-4 June 1963 in one of its filthy, piss-reeking cell blocks before being allowed to post bail.

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MY MOST REVEALING encounter with Southern hospitality occurred not during the overt antagonisms of the Civil Rights Movement but nearly two decades earlier, in the spring of 1944, when the entire nation was supposedly united in an all-out effort to defeat the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.

During most of 1943 my father was the acting vice-president for operations of a New York-based corporation called American Houses, the global pioneer in the manufacture of prefabricated housing. Before Pearl Harbor it had been building prefab single-family dwellings throughout the United States, and now it was erecting barracks on the nation's newly expanded military bases. Because of the grueling intensity of the war effort, my father was often working 16-hour days.

But my birthmother, a pampered and self-obsessed daughter of the Republican/isolationist bourgeoisie, refused to believe there was any (legitimate) reason for a “gentleman” to spend so much time on the job.

Fully cognizant of the damage her behavior would do his career, she stormed into my father's office atop the General Electric Building in Midtown Manhattan, interrupted a vital meeting with War Production Board officials and staged a wildly disruptive, utterly mortifying tantrum – toppling chairs, overturning water pitchers, hurling stacks of documents and shrieking out the spittle-punctuated venom of a (false and ludicrous) accusation he was working such long hours not to help fight fascism but to cover up a love affair with his personal secretary.

Just as my mother intended, the American Houses board of directors immediately canceled my father's pending formal appointment to the vice-presidential post in which he had been serving. Because the corporate world of that era regarded one's choice of a wife as a demonstration of one's personnel management skills, it would not promote men who were wedded to women who later proved themselves to be publicly vengeful harridans.

But the consequences of my mother's vindictiveness were far worse than she had anticipated. Not only was my father booted from the executive suite; he – and therefore his wife and I his son – were also exiled from New York City. He was sent to manage a plant in Jacksonville, Florida – the USian capitalist equivalent of exile to a Siberian hydroelectric power station, actually worse than Siberia because of the jungle-humid subtropical heat and the relentlessly predatory reptiles and insects.

Our new home was an upscale Jacksonville apartment complex called Catherine's Court, a cluster of recently erected red brick buildings in an attractively landscaped yard that fronted on the Saint John's River. Fenced, gated and locked, the tenants-only yard included an unsupervised playground with a large sandbox, probably 12 feet by 12 feet, filled with the white sand found on Floridian beaches.

It was there in that sandbox I learned what the South is really about, though now years later I would have to say the lesson exemplifies the attitudes that define not just one region of the United States but nearly the entire nation – particularly now that hard times permanently imposed by capitalist austerity provide a convenient excuse for any expressions of malevolence the Ruling Class cannot readily dismiss as “lone gunman” incidents.

As to the Catherine's Court sandbox, I think I had played in it several times before, but I had always been alone, and in any case my recollections are typical of those from early childhood in their frequent and often frustrating lack of contextual details.

However on this particular morning three other boys were there. They had a child-sized set of garden tools, a rake, shovel and hoe with light brown wooden handles and red-painted metal heads plus a smaller all-metal shovel, also red. I don't remember our conversation, though it's my impression they were building something, maybe a sand-castle like you'd build at the beach.

The day was cloudy, which diminished the usual sun-glare off the river, but it was also hot, and the fact I was out playing in the locked yard by myself suggests we had been living at Catherine's Court for several months, at least long enough to have become comfortable with our surroundings, which means it was probably the spring of 1944, and I with my Aries birthday was probably four years old.

As children do, I'm sure the other boys and I quickly established a hierarchy of age and size: they were older, five and six and maybe seven, and they were physically much bigger. I was small for my years, slender, dark haired, dark eyed, urban pale and vaguely Semitic-looking in contrast to their deeply tanned Aryan blue-eyed blondness. But I had that assertiveness New York City kids learn in earliest infancy, and I suppose I made it obvious I would not be intimidated by the presumptive superiority of their ages and statures.

Much of this contextual detail is, as noted above, the product of logical conjecture rather than specific recollection. The memory of what happened in the sandbox does not come into sharp focus until the three boys wanted to pull down my blue cotton overalls to see if I had a “Jew pee-pee.”

I did not. Though circumcision had been a medical commonplace in the United States of that era, I am one of those many males born c. 1939-1943 who were left uncircumcised in response to the widespread fear either the U.S. would turn officially fascist or the Nazis would win the war. Hence I would have easily passed the “Jew pee-pee” test.

But I had been raised in a dominantly progressive environment – my father had been a Communist during the 1930s and remained staunchly Marxian beneath his corporate disguise – and even as a child my sensibilities were outraged by the prospect of being forcibly disrobed. Somehow I convinced the trio – for by now I recognized them as unequivocal enemies – that de-panting me would get them in terrible trouble with their parents.

For a few blessed moments I thought I had escaped what to me was their inexplicable belligerence. Perhaps if I was motionless and quiet I could slip away from the sandbox without again provoking them.

But then these three native white Southern kids – these children of parents who apart from their Southern heritage were presumably the socioeconomic equals of my father – decided to bury my head in the sand because I “talked funny.”

I tried to run but never had a chance. Two of these Future Klansmen of America held me down while the third dug a hole in the sandbox with the red shovel. I remember realizing I would not be able to breathe once my head was in that hole. I remember watching with wordless, stomach-falling-into-a-bottomless-pit terror as the digger deepened the hole. The sand, beach-white and dry on the surface, was dark and damp in the hole's bottom.

When the hole was big enough to bury my entire head, the digger set aside the red shovel and the biggest boy grabbed my feet and stood me on my head while the other two held my arms. I kicked and fought and bit and screamed and pleaded and cried but they were too strong and they forced me face-first into the hole and began kicking in the sand and then my eyes and mouth and nose were full of sand and I couldn't see or breathe.

And then suddenly I was free again and spitting sand out of my mouth and snorting it out my nose and crying sand tears and trying to blink them out of my eyes and the three boys were fleeing in terror from the five-year-old next-door-neighbor girl who had descended on them like some relentlessly vengeful elf and snatched up their hoe and beat them with it and bloodied the scalp of at least one of them and in a wild flurry of ash-blonde hair chased them all away bawling like babies.

After that she came back to the sandbox and though I don't remember how or from where, she got some fresh water and a washcloth or a handkerchief and helped me clean myself up so my mother wouldn't have another of her frightfully hysterical tantrums as she would have surely had if I gone home obviously a victim.

The girl's name was Mary Alice Shotwell and I'm no longer sure about the color of her eyes because when I close my own eyes and try to picture them I sometimes see them as robins'-egg blue but usually as green as fire. If I remember correctly she was the daughter of a U.S. Navy officer.

We never did tell any adults what happened that day. Obviously Mary Alice sensed I was bitterly ashamed of the entire incident – after all, I had been defeated in what but for her intervention would have been mortal combat – and to my recollection we never spoke of it again, though we remained close, as near to lovers as children that age can be, until in 1946 we were permanently parted by the end of the war and her father's assignment to some far-off naval base or ship at sea.

I have often wondered what became of her, not the least because I owe her a huge debt of gratitude.

Thank you, Mary Alice, should you ever happen to read this. You no doubt saved my life.

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REALLY, THOUGH, AS I noted at the beginning and have implied throughout, it is dead wrong to blame only the South. Outside of certain genuinely civilized parts of Manhattan – which just as the late James Baldwin called it is indeed Another Country – xenophobia, white racism and Nazified attitudes in general are as “American” as the proverbial apple pie.

In fact the only difference between white-supremacist Southerners and white supremacists elsewhere in the United States is the former have remained pridefully ignorant of the methods by which the latter routinely conceal their venom until they can safely display it in secret, as via the ballot.  (Scroll down to “In the Seattle Area, Racism Means Wretched Mass Transit.”)

Though the denizens of Washington state like to hide their racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia behind a “progressive” facade, the ugly truth is revealed both by the so-called “Seattle Freeze”  and by the state electorate's relentless march toward a Wisconsin-type Republican majority. 

My own experience of the Seattle Freeze includes two managing editors of major Puget Sound daily newspapers who bluntly told me “(my) kind” (I was often mistakenly assumed to be Jewish) was not welcome in the area and that I should “do (myself) a favor and catch the next plane back to New York City.” Seattle – where I first heard my birthplace labeled “Jew York” and where I had the misfortune to live for nearly four years (1972-1976) – had by far the most bigoted and deliberately exclusive social climate I have ever encountered, infinitely worse than any place I ever dwelt in the South.

Bellingham, even on the Western Washington University campus, was nearly as bad as Seattle. By contrast, Tacoma, the working-class seaport town where I lived c. 1978-1982 and where I now have resided since 2004, is notably friendly.

Nor was my own family immune to the cancer of bigotry. As I would learn after puberty, my birthmother lived with constant horror I might become involved with a girl who was Jewish or of another race.

No doubt her paranoia was exacerbated by my father's antithetical values, one of the many reasons their marriage ended in 1945.

As an official of the War Production Board and later of the War Assets Administration (1945-1948), my father several times intervened to save African-Americans who had been seized without charges by Southern cops and shipped off to prison camps to fill vacancies on chain gangs.

After my father became a mortgage banker in 1950, he was the one such white man in Tennessee – more likely in the entire South – who would lend money to creditworthy African-Americans to buy houses in previously all-white neighborhoods.

Whenever and to whatever degree was possible, he lived his politics. His Marxism as much an expression of his heart as of his mind.

But in the final years of his life, white vengeance made him pay dearly for his earlier efforts toward integration and racial equality – another story for another time. For now, suffice it to say that when he died in 1971, this Boston-born former upper-echelon executive and federal official was running a gas station and automotive repair shop on the outskirts of Knoxville.

In this context, the passage from Richard Wright's 1945 non-fiction memoir Black Boy cited in a recent Guardian report is pointedly relevant.

The white population of the United States, wrote Wright, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.

The conclusion of Guardian reporters Joanne Braxton and Michael Sainato – the epicentral grafs of their analysis – is equally damning:

That cloak of righteousness shields white America from having to face its contemporary prejudices and the historical biases from which they are a result. This cloak of invisibility also inhibits white America’s moral and psychological capacity to acknowledge and understand the magnitude of those historical and contemporary prejudices, and the effects they have on our society.

The Charleston shooting was not an anomaly, but a manifestation of the violence cultivated in America towards black communities. The shooter, Roof, is a product of a system that has been breeding hatred and bigotry in America since the first Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported here in the 15th century as slaves under deplorable, inhumane conditions.

As to the breadth and depth of white racism in the United States, the history of New Orleans  is notably instructive. But the most irrefutable evidence is in post-Katrina polls that show four-fifths of the Caucasian population refused to recognize the bigotry  manifest in the deliberate withholding of rescue and relief. This data provides  an ultimate measurement of USian racism's real-world extent.

Relevant to these poll results is the legal concept of “countenancing” criminality – that is, of recognizing the commission of a crime while refusing to call the cops or otherwise act to stop or prevent it. By application of this principle of English law, we see that those who refuse to acknowledge racism are in fact “countenancing” it – which reveals them to be as racist as the perpetrators of overtly racist acts.

As if to underscore the post-Katrina results, the Southern Poverty Law Center's constantly updated “Hate Map” shows that each of the 50 states is the homeland of its own coterie of white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan klaverns and Nazi bruderbands.

One of the cornerstones of their solidarity is the U.S. doctrine of “exceptionalism” – the 21st Century equivalent of Hitler's Master Race, a malignant combination of white supremacy, Ayn Rand imperialism, divine-right rule and the Christian Prosperity Gospel merged into a hoo-yah ethos of global conquest.

A notorious white supremacist is already hailing the Charleston atrocities as “a preview of coming attractions.”

Meanwhile the self-proclaimed “Progressive Left” – our nation's sole (alleged) defender of all the precious freedoms We the People so desperately require if we are ever again to thrive and prosper – is demonstrating its ideological bankruptcy by collaborating with the Ruling Class to forcibly disarm us all, leaving us ever more  defenseless against the escalating fascist threat. 

LB/28 June 2015

-30-

Tired Blogger, Tardy Blog

Sorry, this week's installment of Outside Agitator's Notebook requires still more work and will not be posted until this afternoon.
Thank you,
Loren Bliss

How Charleston Exemplifies Our Imperial Malignancy

ASK YOURSELF WHAT the Charleston atrocity  has in common with the Vietnam War,  and you've got yourself the intellectual equivalent of a two-base hit.

Ask yourself what Charleston has in common with austerity,  with Ferguson and Baltimore  or with the ever-escalating savagery of the Gestapo-minded federal police  and the murderous brutality of their federally militarized local counterparts,  and you're rounding third base.

Ask yourself what Charleston and these other atrocities have in common with the the Trans-Pacific Partnership  and its implicitly genocidal war of austerity  against the U.S. and global 99 Percent, you've belted an out-of-the-park homer.

How, your critics will demand, could you possibly reach such an “unthinkable” conclusion about the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

First you probably noted, as we all did, the murderous bigotry underlying the statement attributed to suspected Charleston Terrorist Dylann Roof – “I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go” – “go” in this instance being synonymous with “die.”

Next maybe it dawns on you that “you have to go” was precisely the message in the slaying of Medgar Evers, in the church bombing  that killed Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair, and in the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy three months later. It was repeated ad nauseam in the years of political murders that followed: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner;  Malcolm X; Viola Liuzzo;  Martin Luther King Jr.; Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy; Fred Hampton;  the white kids gunned down by Ohio National Guard troops at Kent State  (Allison B. Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer); the black kids gunned down by white Mississippi cops at Jackson State  (Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green); and let us not forget the labor-movement martyr Karen Silkwood. 

Lastly maybe you realize the same übermenschen bigotry and arrogance and morally imbecilic indifference that killed all these people also explains why the One Percent is ramming TPP down our collective throats no matter the devastation it will inflict on nearly everyone else.

The One Percenters are utterly indifferent to the fact at least 62 percent of us  already opposed TPP and its fast-track coup last year, long before the associated controversy reached its present magnitude. And they're no doubt ecstatic over TPP's consequences – particularly that it will kill tens of thousands of us, possibly millions – in slow-motion executions inflicted by joblessness, loss of health care, increases in prescription-drug prices  and increased doses of (already genocidal) austerity in general.

“We have to do it,” say the One Percenters and their political vassals. 

What they dare not express – at least outside their posh boardrooms and luxuriant private clubs – is the reasoning their policies make undeniable.

Remember that under capitalism, greed is elevated to the ultimate virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever uttered. Remember too the sole purpose of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Atop that,  the One Percenters and their politicians believe there are too many of us 99 Percenters. They believe our needs are draining their bank accounts and diminishing their assets. They want those of us who are most obviously no longer exploitable for profit – that is, those of us who are elderly and/or disabled and/or chronically impoverished – to be exterminated first. That's why they're slashing the services -- food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, even Social Security-- on which our lives depend.

But since death camps are no longer fashionable, we're to be killed by austerity instead.

See it now? As it is in Charleston, so it is throughout the USian Empire, the de facto Fourth Reich.

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Sanders Calls Charleston What It Is: Racist Terrorism

The only non-opportunistic and therefore genuinely humanitarian statement issued by a U.S. politician in the wake of the Charleston atrocity was from Sen. Bernie Sanders, a declared socialist running as a Democrat for the U.S. presidency. 

I reproduce its full text here because its unpretentiousness and its laudable  absence of inflammatory rhetoric makes it so unlike the utterances of those politicians who are trying to co-opt the murders to bolster a favored cause.

Sanders seems to speak directly from his heart:

What transpired in Charleston, South Carolina last night was not just a tragedy, it was an act of terror.

Nine of our fellow Americans were murdered while praying in a historic church because of the color of their skin. This senseless violence fills me with outrage, disgust, and a deep, deep sadness.

This hateful killing is a horrific reminder that, while we have made important progress in civil rights for all of our people, we are far from eradicating racism.

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is one that has been attacked, burned, and rebuilt throughout its 200 year history. While their community mourns now, they will rebuild, and they will emerge stronger than before.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and their congregation. But we can add our actions to our prayers. The families and the community that have been hurt so very badly by this brutality need our help. Let us stand with them in their time of mourning.

You can help by making a donation to the Emanuel AME Church community today.

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Obama: It's Not Terrorism or Racism, It's Guns

(I began the following in response to a Reuters report republished by Reader Supported News. The report tells us President Obama is citing the Charleston murders not to engender a dialogue on USian racism but to bolster his campaign for forcible disarmament of the U.S. 99 Percent.) 

DESPITE THE ESCALATING campaigns of denial and distraction, let us not forget white racism is the sole cause of the Charleston atrocity and all other atrocities like it.

Post-Katrina polling shows about 75 percent of the nation's whites claimed they believed there was “no racism” in the government's deliberately genocidal (non) response – an obvious falsehood or self-deception only a racist could utter.

But addressing U.S. racism forthrightly would require public examination of the nation's (alleged) conscience, which in turn would require acknowledging the genocide committed against First Nations peoples, against African slaves and even now against their African-American descendants.

Because  our species has presumably progressed a bit since the days of Nazi Germany, all but the most racist whites generally closet their bigotry. In fact it's internationally embarrassing. That's why U.S. racism is allowed out only when it serves today's (equally genocidal) Ruling Class austerity agenda, typically as opposition to anything labeled "welfare," even health care, education, mass transit.

But now – with the Ruling Class so terrified of revolution it is hoarding ammunition – the refusal to confront racism has become psychological warfare. Note how the Ruling Class is trying to convince us it was Guns and the Second Amendment – not racism – that caused the Charleston atrocity.

What a clever Big Lie. How diabolically Machiavellian. Anything to further the total disarmament of the Working Class lest it unify in rebellion.

Not that I'm surprised by Obama's spin-doctoring. The One Percent's skyrocketing fear of economically provoked insurrection is increasingly obvious. 

Meanwhile, Reader Supported News – which does a vital and praiseworthy job of seeing to it we're kept abreast of what truly obtains – is in dire need of life-sustaining contributions. Any financially generous OAN readers please take note.

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In Seattle Area, Racism Means Bad Mass Transit

(Smiley-faced prose by Leonard Garfield in Crosscut, an eclectic, variable-quality Seattle on-line daily, prompted me to pen yet another diatribe denouncing the bigotry that fuels the Puget Sound region's self-destructive hostility to adequate mass transit.) 

GARFIELD'S PIECE IS PollyAnna propaganda/ lipstick-on-a-pig boosterism at its worst.

Yes, Seattle's long-ago accomplishments in the realm of public transport were very real.

But they are reduced to meaninglessness by the region's present-day hatred and contempt for those of us who are genuinely transit-dependent.

Goaded by a combination of "we-don-wanna-be-like-New-York" xenophobia intensified by racism and Ayn Rand socioeconomic bigotry, local voters have ensured the region's mass transit is at least a half-century behind its counterparts elsewhere in this (notoriously anti-transit) nation.

And now these voters are making it obvious – repeatedly obvious – they intend to keep it backward forever.

Given the electorate's haughty claim to environmental enlightenment, its anti-transit-user politics are astonishingly hypocritical – undoubtedly the most breathtaking example of political hypocrisy to be found anywhere in today's United States.

Hypocritical too is the not-unrelated anti-union malice that so frequently lurks behind the region's deliberately deceptive "progressive" facade. Local unions embrace mass transit, local voters reject it.

Indeed, the hypocrisies of Pugetopolis “progressives” remind me of the hypocrisies of old-time Southern Democrats: speak the New Deal language, walk the Ku Klux walk.

No doubt that's why some call this realm "Mississippi on Puget Sound."

However “progressive” its electorate might seem at first glance, its lack of adequate transit, its regressive tax structure and its worst-in-the-nation hostility to tenant rights proves it is reflexively fascist at heart.

Above all else it is aggressively white/bourgeois and relentlessly self-identified with the One Percent – with transit (or rather the maliciously sustained lack thereof) – employed as a gatekeeper to lock out "undesirables."

Which – obviously – includes anybody who can't afford to own and operate an automobile.

Here though is where Garfield's core hypothesis is absolutely correct. Puget Sound's (anti-transit-user) past, which includes widespread condemnation of mass transit as a form of "welfare,” will undoubtedly define its (anti-transit-user) future.

*** *** ***

Russia Vows Retaliation if U.S. Aggression Continues

(In keeping with this week's theme – that TPP and Charleston are kindred outrages – here is what I wrote after I recognized the news in the above headline as official U.S. policy toward anyone it regards as a threat to capitalist governance: “You're trying to take over our country...you have to die.”)

AS I HAVE been saying for at least three years now, the U.S. has become – both domestically and abroad – the de facto Fourth Reich.

Its foreign policy is the 21st Century equivalent of Hitler's: world conquest, the total subjugation of all peoples in capitalist slavery, the methodical albeit slow-motion extermination of those of us who for what ever reason are not exploitable for profit.

And just as a poster screen-named Dongi said on the news report's comment thread, the U.S. psyche has been taken over by “some sort of collective force” demanding wars of global conquest. (Precisely the same thing happened in Nazi Germany.)

That said, thank you, A_Har, for the video link.  It is not just informative; it also gives us a glimpse of the vast superiority of Russian intellectuals over the Moron Nation dunderheads who are bullying the world in an extinction-level conflict, thermonuclear jocks versus thermonuclear chess masters.

In fact U.S. foreign policy views the world as a U.S. school yard in macrocosm. The bullies rule. Boiling over with envious hatred, they ruthlessly attack and try to subjugate their intellectual superiors. But the school officials refuse to intervene because such might-makes-right savagery is the core truth of “the American Way.”

Sometimes though the victims retaliate...and in this instance they have intercontinental ballistic missiles. 

*** *** ***

Understanding Media (with apologies to McLuhan)

(A pointed but nevertheless inadequately damning Thom Hartmann column on what's wrong with mainstream media prompted me to offer my own somewhat more uncensored view. In keeping with our Charleston/TPP/Global-Conquest theme, I note that “exceptionalism” is most often a code-word for “white supremacy.”)

U.S. MASS MEDIA is what it is – a privatized version of Josef Goebbels' Nazi German Ministry of Propaganda – because it is owned by the same people who own the two major political parties and the federal, state and local government.

Whether labeled Ruling Class or One Percent, this cabal of capitalist aristocrats has the same absolute power formerly possessed by Adolf Hitler. They are the tyrants who not only rule us but shape our consciousness by their ever-more-total control of information.

Nor is there much hope for improvement. The triumphant imperial trade coalition – which defies the will of the U.S. electorate in its effort to  further slash wages, send still more jobs abroad and gleefully fling millions more U.S. workers into inescapable poverty – did everything in its power to serve the One Percent by blatantly destroying the last remnants of the American experiment in representative democracy and the so-called “American Dream.”

The One Percent's long-term, global goal is replacing the policy-making functions of local, state and national governments with zero-tolerance edicts handed down by dictatorially empowered boards of corporate managers. Under this system, the only purpose of traditional “government” is to maintain the goon squads of police and soldiers essential to enforce the corporate decrees.

For a prophetic view of existence beneath the boots of the resultant global imperium, look at the wretched conditions that prevailed in the coal towns of Appalachia, where the mine owners also owned everything else – houses, stores, schools, clinics – and every person as well.

As part of its march toward the global corporate imperium, the One Percent's more immediate goal is the reduction of the United States to fascist oligarchy – actually a uniquely USian form of Nazism in which the corporate cabal has replaced the individual despot, with the mandatory ideology a combination of (implicitly white) exceptionalism, Christian intolerance and Ayn Rand socioeconomic savagery. And – yes – exceptionalism with its implication of divine-right rule is indeed the 21st Century version of the Nazis' concept of übermenschen or Master Race.

Despite the implicit whiteness of exceptionalism, it is no accident the present U.S. figurehead is Barack the Betrayer, who makes no secret of being the tyrannical cabal's most cravenly obedient servant thus far. Indeed it is the Betrayer who personifies the One Percent's strategy and tactics. He is not just the most malicious liar ever to occupy the presidency, but in truth a hard-Right Republican who used his membership in the Democratic Party and his own skin color as false flags to scam the U.S. electorate into imagining he might provide desperately sought relief from the succession of One Percent vassals who have lorded it over us since the coup of 22 November 1963.

The One Percenters need the U.S. not for its (now-surplus) workforce or its (irremediably poisoned) agricultural lands, but rather for the cannon-fodder enlistments compelled by its otherwise-inescapable poverty and the goon-squad function of its imperial war machine.

Mass media's role in this era of unprecedented deception is merely to provide its imprimatur, thereby giving whichever Big Lie whatever appearance of truth the One Percent demanded.

As Goebbels repeatedly affirmed to Hitler, taking control of policy is only half the victory essential to total dictatorship. Full victory is achieved only when policy and the public mind are each controled with identical absolutism – precisely what happened in Germany after 1933, precisely what has happened here in the United States in the aftermath of 22 November 1963, the subsequent decade of political murders. and the Reichstag Firer of 9/11 – a slow-motion coup that gathers speed and momentum as it approaches its terminal events.

Which, by the way, explains the death-blow to representative democracy dealt by the anti-worker trade vote of 18 June. The national mobilization against fast-track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership made it clear a vast majority of the voters – I have seen figures ranging from 55 percent to 80 percent – oppose so-called "free trade." But, exactly as I predicted would happen, Congress dropped any and all pretense of representing anyone but the One Percenters, and even here in Moron Nation, such a brutal slap-in-the-face cannot be portrayed as anything other than what it was.

This means the era of charade democracy is over, and the era of unapologetic tyranny is upon us.

But I wonder how U.S. mass media – the world's first fully privatized government propaganda machine – will play the story. Will they try to explain it as yet another manifestation of how 9/11 "changed everything"? Or will they merely try to flush it down the Orwell hole?

*** *** ***

“Defining Issue" Is Whether Our Species Survives

(Thom Hartmann agrees with the International Monetary Fund's surprise conclusion that  “the defining issue of our time” is inequality  and argues accordingly. I usually agree with Hartmann, but this time he and the IMF are both dead wrong.)

ACTUALLY THE “DEFINING issue of our time” is whether life as we know it – including our own species – will survive capitalism.

As evidenced by our capitalist masters' escalating efforts to provoke an extinction-level war with Russia and their ongoing refusal to act against terminal climate change, they have already concluded we are a dead species on a dying planet.

Indeed it is an Occam's Razor moment of the most terrible sort: no other hypothesis explains the totality of Ruling Class behaviors, including the no-tomorrow savagery of their run-amok greed –  a global orgy of exploitation, oppression, contractual theft and outright armed robbery with no precedent in human experience.

That said, such an uncharacteristically humanitarian conclusion from the International Monetary Fund, which is one of capitalism's chief economic executioners, indicates the Ruling Class is finally awakening to the fact the global proletariat – even broken as it is by the One Percent's imperial omnipotence – is not so subjugated as to plod submissively into the grave.

And it makes no difference whether the genocidal intent is obvious (as when the killing is done by soldiers and police), or whether it is disguised by rhetoric (as when the mechanism of murder is euphemized as "austerity").

Obviously the real message of the IMF study is that the Ruling Class is becoming terrified.

Ninety-eight years ago, faced by the same sort of hopeless inequality and abject powerlessness that has been inflicted on us all by the One Percent of today, the Russian people rose up in a revolution that truly changed the world. Though that revolution was later betrayed and undone, its triumphs remain part of Russia's collective consciousness, the wellsprings of a yearning as profoundly heartfelt as Dark Age Britain's folk- remembrance of Arthur and their desperate longing for the rescue-from-chaos they symbolized as “the return of the king.”

Foolishly we regard our overlords as stupid, and in so doing we commit what to Sun Tzu was the warrior's ultimate and ultimately fatal error: we underestimate our enemy. We fail to acknowledge the horrid truth the One Percent is brilliant – diabolically so – and in its Machiavellian wisdom it no doubt recognizes that as the Russians once rose to fling off the shackles and hangman's-knots of capitalism, so might they rise up again.

And if it is not too late for our species – if it is not the ultimate absurdity of revolution by a doomed species on a ruined planet – this time the revolution might go as global as the malevolence of capitalism has already gone. 

If our species survives – or maybe as the very fulcrum of our survival – that is surely the legacy of the inequality thrust on us by capitalism. That is its teachable essence.

And because the Russians have already learned that lesson so well they were able, for a time, to teach it to the rest of the world, that is perhaps why the One Percent in the person of the United States government is now trying to provoke a war with Russia: anything to maintain capitalism's imperial power, anything to perpetuate its signature inequality, anything – even the dying gasp of one triumphant Kochroach to another,”we had to destroy the planet to save it.”

(With Solstice Greetings to all: may our species live to see the Sun turn North again.)

LB/21 June 2015

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Anti-Black Slander from the Democratic Party?

THE OLDEST QUARREL inside the Left is undoubtedly the fight between pacifists and those who believe humanitarian reforms can be wrest from the capitalist Ruling Class only by violence or credible threats thereof. 

Events in Ferguson  re-heated the dispute to a simmer, but Baltimore  brought it to a rolling boil, and last week it bubbled onto the pages of mainstream media. 

Yet that's only half the story. The other half is that one writer, Jonathan Chait of the aggressively upscale New York Magazine, is using the discussion to slyly blame U.S. African Americans  for the downfall of the Democratic Party.

Thus, in Chait's obliquely presented view, black rebelliousness is responsible for the party's reduction to the me-too fascism that has characterized Democratic foreign policy since the ascendance of Lyndon Baines Johnson to the presidency, and defined its domestic policy since President Jimmy Carter's theocratic signature  enshrined the Republican war against women as federal policy. 

Meanwhile the appearance of the violence-versus-nonviolence debate in mainstream publications is, I believe, of profound political and historical significance. It is unlike anything I have seen during the nearly 60 years I have been a professional writer, editor and/or photographer. Nor have I heard of its like occurring anytime during the 75 years I've been living this lifetime. 

Moreover – and let us not forget this all-important point – Chait and the writers he cites all represent the Ruling Class regardless of the political disguises assumed by their publishers. Thus it is arguable the widespread coverage suddenly being given this issue is the most accurate yardstick yet of Ruling Class fears that Working Class anger in the U.S. is approaching the ignition-point of revolution. 

That's why Chait's opening graf, which builds a pro-violence argument he soon demolishes with volleys of academic research, is worth quoting in totality, especially for its links: 

The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon . “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox's German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.” In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson  asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds to answer her own question in the negative.

But then three paragraphs later Chait not only refutes the writers he cited. He also reaches a conclusion I would expect to find – albeit stated in more obviously racist terms – only in an avowedly Rightist journal:

The 1960s saw two overlapping waves of protest: nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations, and urban rioting. The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson swept every region of the country except the South running a liberal, pro-civil-rights campaign; in 1968, Richard Nixon won a narrower victory on the basis of social backlash.

Because I (of course) do not read New York Magazine, I owe Margaret Flowers and her excellent on-line daily Popular Resistance a salute of thanks for making Chait's “Riots and Social Change” available to a proletarian such as I. PR routinely does a damn fine job of bringing to Working Class attention important stories we 99 Percenters would otherwise be denied by the nation's various mechanisms of de facto censorship, but this time Flowers outdid herself.

All of which is prefatory to what I said on the associated comment thread. But it is more than just another en passant response. It is important for two reasons: it addresses the revisionist history by which the Ruling Class increasingly beclouds what happened within the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It also – or so I hope – alerts a few significantly placed people to a new Democratic Big Lie as potentially malicious as the “welfare queen” Big Lie the Democrats borrowed from the Republicans to justify enactment of genocidal “welfare reforms” in 1995.

(My apology for the fact there are a few repetitions between the explanatory grafs above and those below. The repetitions are unavoidable because I have reprinted my original comment word-for-word.)

Let us not forget that as a writer for aggressively upscale New York Magazine, Mr. Chait's perspective is necessarily that of the Ruling Class.

Hence the subtle but nevertheless implicit race-bating and victim-blaming in his statement that "The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order."

The truth, however, is quite different. The New Deal coalition was not "crack(ed) open" by the Republican Party but rather by the Democrats themselves.

President Lyndon Johnson's 180-degree turn in foreign policy immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led directly to the Southeast Asian (aka "Vietnam") War.

In turn -- and exactly as the Ruling Class intended -- the war destroyed the Working Class solidarity that had created and sustained the New Deal. The war divided the U.S. Working Class -- what today we would call the 99 Percent -- into two venomously hostile camps: the sneeringly contemptuous draft-exempt elite and the equally embittered draft-bait, cannon-fodder majority of those of us who (because we lacked the money and influence to bribe our way out of the draft), had no choice but to serve.

Contrary to the implications of Mr. Chait's remark -- a clever falsehood that seems designed to protect white Ruling Class Democrats by blaming blacks for the party's troubles -- all the significant non-racial divisions in present-day U.S. politics date from that history-changing Vietnam-era divide.

As to racist hate-mongering by the Republicans, that indeed occurred, but again contrary to Mr. Chait's disingenuous claim, the class warfare implicit in the Vietnam draft had already destroyed the New Deal.

Vietnam had also -- because of the tacitly genocidal U.S. policy of sending a preponderance of African-American combat troops to fight its colonial wars -- radically inflamed the long-simmering racial injustices that underlay the riots.

The Republican Party, which since the 1920s has been the primary vessel of U.S. fascism, predictably pounced with malicious glee on the resultant white fear. Obviously -- at least in retrospect -- this too was precisely as the Ruling Class intended.

Subsequent U.S. history makes it equally obvious what happened next. The Ruling Class deftly expanded Vietnam's divisiveness by manipulating it into a plethora of profoundly emotional clashes over firearms, jobs, unions, welfare, immigration, education, abortion, sexuality, Christian supremacy and ultimately the prevalent definitions of patriotism and what it means to be a U.S. citizen.

Again exactly as the Ruling Class intends, the resultant hostilities -- perpetuated as they are by a media machine more psychologically effective than even Josef Goebbels might have imagined -- destroy any future possibility of ever again restoring 99 Percent solidarity.

(Disclosure: I am not a Vietnam veteran but am a Vietnam-era vet: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1965, three years active duty, overseas service in Korea 1961-1962, honorably discharged after completion of three-year reserve obligation).

LB/8-14 June 2015

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