Fight over West Coast Port Shutdown Rekindles Vietnam Era Class Conflict, Threatens Labor-Occupy Solidarity

An Occupy Tacoma activist during informational picketing and leafleting on 12 December  at the main roadway entrance to the Tacoma port facilities. Port workers -- unhappy with Occupy Oakland's efforts to close West Coast seaports in defiance of union contracts -- were nearly  unanimous in their horn-honking applause for Occupy Tacoma's refusal to participate in the closure campaign. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. 

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It's Divide et Impera again: Port Shutdown Fight Renews Schism

Whether by tactical brilliance or dumb accident, Occupy Tacoma has dodged a bullet – actually an ideological artillery barrage – that is blasting a huge gap between organized labor and the Occupy Movement on the West Coast.

The barrage has been launched by an Occupy Movement faction that claims to be “pro-worker,” but by its hostility to collective bargaining agreements is as effectively anti-union as any band of Teabaggers.

Originating in Oakland (California), this faction – notably intolerant of other viewpoints – now dominates most of the West Coast seaport cities, with Tacoma among the very few exceptions.

While Occupy Oakland was giving collective bargaining the finger by demanding a 12 December shut-down of all West Coast seaports – an action that would have violated any number of labor contracts – Occupy Tacoma's General Assembly followed the advice of its union members and voted instead for informational picketing at the main entrance to the Tacoma shipping terminals.

Ostensibly OT's decision was based on the fact the Oakland faction's corporate targets are not present in the Tacoma seaport. But the strength of organized labor was surely a factor: Washington state has the third highest per capita union membership in the U.S., 19.8 percent, and union membership in Tacoma, which in addition to being a major seaport has managed to retain a small but relatively healthy industrial base, is said to rank third amongst the nation's cities.

Oakland's supporters claim to be “progressives.” But they spout the same anti-union rhetoric uttered by the Green Party or the staunchly capitalist MoveOn.org branch of the Democratic Party. The union-bashing content of such rhetoric is indistinguishable from that spewed by the traditional enemies of economic democracy, but the “progressive” disguise of its sources makes it far more insidious.

Not surprisingly, the antagonism between pro-union and anti-union Occupiers is often fierce and contentious, as in the heated debate that preceded the 7 December GA vote.

Thus on the 12th about a dozen supporters of the Oakland faction stormed out of Tacoma's Occupation Park to join the port-closure effort in Seattle, which was unsuccessful but culminated in several arrests.

The validity of the accompanying charges of police brutality – typical at all such events in Seattle – is underscored by recent U.S. Department of Justice findings that confirm the institutional savagery of the city's police force.

Unfortunately the arrests whether in Seattle or any other seaport city obscure the fact the core issue in the port closure controversy is not police brutality but class struggle – specifically how the One Percent, the Ruling Class, has already divided the 99 Percent, the Working Class, into mutually hostile factions.

In this instance the divider is the arrogant refusal of the Oakland group to recognize the elected leadership of two unions – the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters – and the unions' jurisdiction in matters relative to the West Coast ports.

Contrary to the anti-union propaganda disseminated by some Occupiers, the power of ILUW and Teamster locals to strike – a requirement if the ports were to be closed – is severely restricted by contract. The same collective bargaining agreements also typically prohibit unions from recognizing unsanctioned picket lines.

Those who denounced the two unions for refusing to endorse the proposed closure were seemingly indifferent to the fact violations of such contracts are typically punished by hefty fines.

Most likely the port-closure advocates were from such comfortably bourgeois backgrounds they were simply ignorant of labor law and unionism in general. But it's also possible some were agent provocateurs, infiltrators planted by the Ruling Class to destroy Occupy Movement solidarity.

In any case the growing size of the Oakland faction has turned what began as a local squabble into an increasingly bitter controversy that could jeopardize vital labor/Occupy partnership throughout the nation.

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At the root of Oakland's stance are a pair of well-documented beliefs unique to the United States and particularly prevalent on its West Coast.

One of these is a perverse notion of anarchy as an ultimate form of permissiveness, a viewpoint not derived from Bakunin or any other advocate of utopian anarchy as the most humanitarian form of governance, but rather from Ayn Rand and her doctrine of predatory selfishness as the highest virtue – the formal basis of capitalism's credo of infinite greed as maximum good.

The other belief, which begins at the Appalachian divide and intensifies as one goes westward, is contempt for what is generally termed “East Coast intellectual bullshit” – an ethos of essentially European values and principles that include strategic and tactical mindfulness and the discipline required to maintain worker/veteran/student solidarity.

Not surprisingly, this is precisely the solidarity that remains characteristic of Occupy Wall Street and its more faithful daughters. These include Occupy Tacoma, in which union members remain influential enough to have rescued OT from the anti-union juggernaut that – despite its superficially pro-worker rhetoric – became so evident on 12 December.

Again we see the influence of local union strength on local Occupations: New York state has the highest per capita union membership in the United States, 24.3 percent, with NYC's top amongst the nation's cities.

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Union sources say the Oakland faction's defiance has provoked anger far beyond ILWU and Teamster ranks, driving a wedge between the entire labor movement and nearly all the Occupation groups on the West Coast.

Sadly what is occurring is the re-inflammation of the socioeconomic differences by which the One Percent divided us – the 99 Percent – into mutually hostile camps during the Vietnam Era.

The elitist scorn expressed by the Oakland faction's effort to position itself as superior to the ILWU and the Teamsters in the port-closure matter is ultimately no different from the arrogance of those bourgeois Caucasian liberals who tried to take over leadership of the African-American Civil Rights Movement during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Another manifestation of this same arrogance – which is by definition an expression of identifying with and supporting the oppressor – occurred when the draft-exempt academic elite of the Vietnam Era positioned themselves as morally superior to those of us whose economic circumstances left us no choice but to serve in the military.

As in each of these historical instances, the resultant divisiveness served the One Percent by severely weakening our 99 Percent solidarity.

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The lessons here are many, each vital to the Occupy Movement's success.

Of greatest importance is to note how quickly cultural differences – for example the West Coast's xenophobic disdain for what it considers “East Coast attitudes” – can be manipulated into toxic barriers to solidarity. The antidote is making reinforcement of 99 Percent solidarity the central consideration in every action – precisely the principle Occupy Oakland ignores.

Equally significant is the divisive potential of socioeconomic differences: blue collar, pink collar, white collar. Men and women from non-union white-collar and pink-collar backgrounds have long been conditioned to believe they are innately superior to those of us from blue-collar and union backgrounds.

But this is another Big Lie that cleverly protects the One Percent by fostering divisions amongst the rest of us. If we are to achieve genuine solidarity, we in the 99 Percent must grow beyond such prejudices. Growth includes but is not limited to learning to defer to union leadership in such matters as port closures. Unions are after all among the last remaining vestiges of our constitutional democracy.

I realize that for some – especially those reared on capitalist notions of white-collar job-superiority – the required process of letting-go is a difficult and even terrifying prospect. It is made harder still by the fact we in the U.S. 99 Percent have all been conditioned to live our lives by Ayn Rand's heartless principles: “me first (fuck you).”

But revolution is never easy. And the alternative – another triumph of the One Percent (exactly as the One Percent triumphed over all but two of the rebellions of the 20th Century) – is infinitely worse.

LB/18-31 December 2011

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Because I have been invited back to Typepad (lorenbliss.typepad.com), this essay appears simultaneously on Typepad and on BlogSpot. After the New Year, I will again post on Typepad exclusively, and eventually the Outside Agitator's Notebook material that appeared on Blogspot (August-December 2011) will be transferred to Typepad. Meanwhile, thank you for your faithful readership...and to all of you the most fulfilling and contented New Year possible.

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More 'Change We Can Believe In': Obama Oks Gestapo Powers for Military; Anti-Sex Ban on Morning-After Pill Expands Imposition of Woman-Hating Christian Theocracy

Occupy Tacoma pickets at the entrance to the Tacoma seaport facilities on 12 December. Recognizing the need to maintain solidarity with organized labor, OT's General Assembly rejected Occupy Oakland's demand for a union-defying closure of West Coast ports and instead opted for informational picketing in support of port workers. Based on the reaction – honked horns by truckers, applause from longshore personnel – it was not just a hugely popular move but another successful effort to circumvent increasing hostility from Ruling Class Media. Yet civil libertarians fear even such peaceful and obviously benign demonstrators as these could be arrested without warrants or charges and imprisoned indefinitely under the powers granted the government by the Patriot Act and expanded to Gestapo-like oppressiveness by this year's newly enacted National Defense Authorization Act. Click on image to view it full size. (Data: FujiFilm800; Pentax MX, 135mm f/2.5 Takumar.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

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'Change We Can Believe In': Gestapo Powers for the U.S. Military

The axe held above our necks by this year's National Defense Authorization Act becomes obvious when we remember the Patriot Act defines domestic terrorism so broadly anyone who participates in a peaceful protest can be arrested as a “terrorist.”

All that's required to make a demonstration “dangerous to human life” is a decision by the authorities to fire rubber bullets or pepper-gas canisters into a crowd of protesters (see “PATRIOT Act,” below). As we learned from the nearly fatal wound inflicted by Oakland cops on Marine Corps veteran and Veterans for Peace activist Scott Olsen recently, any such projectiles are potentially deadly at close range.

Likewise, the Patriot Act's sweeping definition of terrorism enables the government to denounce a labor union or any other activist group as a “terrorist organization” and now, with the concentration-camp authority provided by NDAA, use the military to round up entire union locals or every participant in a protest march.

Moreover the powers granted by NDAA, which will become law within days if not hours, let the military hold such activists indefinitely and without charges or trial.

Even an internationally recognized pacifist – for example Tacoma's Fr. William J. Bischel S.J. (Outside Agitator's Notebook, 25 October 2011) – could be branded a “terrorist” and so disappeared.

As a few of us have been warning since late November, NDAA turns the U.S. armed forces, National Guard included, into a latter-day Gestapo. The military will soon operate throughout the United States and its global empire with much the same powers of arrest, torture, indefinite confinement and murder as the dread Nazi German organization possessed in both the Third Reich and throughout the conquered territories of Grösse Deutschland.

The timing of these unprecedented changes in federal law is surely no coincidence. Due to the now-obviously permanent downsizing of the economy, almost half the U.S. population has been reduced to low-income status or flung into official poverty (see “Census” below). What was once the most optimistic citizenry on the planet has been battered by capitalist greed into a seemingly bottomless state of Third World pessimism.

Public anger is rising fast. Support for the Occupy Movement climbs steadily, 44 percent as of 15 December, with support amongst Democrats at 60 percent (Pew Research Center). And We the People are again looking at alternatives to capitalism. Sales of The Communist Manifesto, for example, are skyrocketing – it's now number two on a Tower Books categorical best-seller list. All of which suggests the nation's revolutionary potential may already be approaching an all-time high.

Predictably, the Ruling Class is terrified. And NDAA, like the Patriot Act, is its response.

The fact the government seeks the tyrannical capabilities these unprecedented measures provide is absolute proof of its intention to use them. The fact these new capabilities have not yet been employed does not diminish the gravity of the threat.

Our few remaining liberties – the remnants of freedom essential to all of us in the 99 Percent whether we are politically active or avowedly apolitical – are in jeopardy as never in U.S. history.

Meanwhile, as an ACLU spokesperson lamented to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on 14 December, NDAA's approval merely passes the associated issues on to the judiciary and eventually to the Supreme Court.

As a result, thousands of women, men and – yes – children, even hundreds of thousands, could be hauled off to military concentration camps long before any judge is allowed to rule on the constitutionality of such wholesale arrests.

And there is no rational hope the Patriot Act/NDAA nullification of the Bill of Rights would be overturned. The Roberts Court – more aptly the Robber Court – is irremediably compromised, reduced to nothing more than a tool of the Ruling Class, a bitter truth proven beyond dispute by the Citizens United decision (for which Google).

In any case the many years it typically takes for lower-court verdicts to wend their way to Chief Justice John Robert's dependably despotic tribunal would be no comfort to anyone who had been disappeared into the Guantanamo savagery of military detention. From what we know of its horrors, all but the strongest would already be dead – or harried to drooling madness – by the time their quests for redress reached Roberts' domain.

Here are several reports confirming the frightening details of what obtains:

• An amendment to the military budget authorization nullifies critical rights granted by our Constitution...One provision authorizes the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process is abolished…A second provision mandates military custody for most terrorism suspects. “Congressional Tyranny, White House Surrender,” an analysis by Ralph Nader.
  
  

• DemocRats and GOPorkers alike collaborated to nullify the Constitution, subjecting U.S. citizens to warrantless arrest and indefinite imprisonment by a military newly armed with national police powers. Includes texts of relevant sections of the NDAA. “Obama Broke His Promise,” an analysis by Jonathan Turley, constitutional lawyer and Georgetown University law professor.

• Ray McGovern, a retired 27 year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, provided the morning intelligence briefing to multiple presidents and security advisers. Now he tells Occupy Washington D.C. he believes the provisions of the NDAA legalizing domestic use of the military as security police and granting it powers of indefinite detention were added because of fear of civil unrest at home. “Is the Use of the Military Designed for the Occupy Movement?” A Truthout report in which the lead, slightly rewritten above, is buried in the fourth paragraph. (May be painfully slow to load because of delays imposed by Truthout's embrace of the Discus comment system.)

• Local police admit they've used two unarmed Predator drones lent them by the U.S. Air Force, the most alarming example yet of the federally imposed militarization of local law enforcement agencies. “Police Now Use Predator Drones on Home Front,” a Los Angeles Times report.
  
  

• Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act (Pub. L. No. 107-52) expanded the definition of terrorism to cover 'domestic,' as opposed to international, terrorism.   A person engages in domestic terrorism if they do anything 'dangerous to human life' that is a violation of the criminal laws of a state or the United States, if the act appears to be intended to:  (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion...The definition of domestic terrorism is broad enough to encompass the activities of several prominent activist campaigns and organizations.” “How the USA PATRIOT Act Redefines Domestic Terrorism,” an ACLU analysis.
  
  

• “This confusion about the definition of terrorism comes at a time when the economy is terrible, the domestic government is more unpopular than ever, and there is quite a lot of radical and even revolutionary political agitation going on right here at home. There are people out there - I've met some of them, in both the Occupy and Tea Party movements - who think that the entire American political system needs to be overthrown, or at least reconfigured, in order for progress to be made. It sounds paranoid and nuts to think that those people might be arrested and whisked away to indefinite, lawyerless detention by the military, but...such niceties as American citizenship and the legal tradition of due process seem to be less and less meaningful to the people who run things in America.” “Coming Soon: the Indefinite Detention of American Citizens,” a Rolling Stone report by Matt Taibbi.

• As to just how savagely oppressive capitalism truly is, newly released federal data shows nearly half the nation's population is officially impoverished or low income – a finding that depicts a viciously exploited people economically ripe for rebellion. “About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.” “Census: Nearly Half of Americans Are Poor or Low Income,” an Associated Press report.

• Though the story was woefully under-reported by the propagandists of the U.S. Ruling Class Media, international rebellion against capitalism has returned home to Russia. Imagine what happens if an Occupy the Kremlin movement now emerges to join with Occupy the World. Imagine how that development – participation in the global Occupy Movement by the nation that gave birth to the world's first corps of professional revolutionaries – would terrify the already frightened One Percent. Here's an early Reuters report on events within the former Soviet Union.

• All of which explains another curiously downplayed story, the addition of the commandant of the National Guard to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. equivalent of what in less-euphemistic Europe is called a General Staff, as in Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. If the armed forces are now the de facto national police – complete with Gestapo powers and concentration-camp authority – obviously the most readily accessible source of trained and dependable personnel is the same organization that imposed President Nixon's oppressive malice via the Kent State Massacre of 4 May 1970. (Those too young to remember it, please Google.) Meanwhile here's a  PRNewswire report on the NDAA measure that facilitates the Guard's permanent federalization. 

• Lastly it should surprise no one there are already reports from many sources – all unconfirmed at this writing – that military officers in at least four branches of the service are interrogating subordinates to determine whether they will obey orders to fire on U.S. citizens. The good news is that – according to this account (which is, I say again, UNconfirmed) – all the enlisted soldiers in one National Guard unit, everyone from the top sergeant to the buck privates, not only vowed they'd refuse such orders but laid down their arms in protest.

Disclosures: (1)-I was the first reporter in the United States to heed Ralph Nader's indictment of the automobile industry, though my story about his findings, written in 1964 for The Oak Ridger, went no further than the managing editor's garbage can. This was all the more surprising because my employer, a small daily that served Oak Ridge, Tennessee, had been courageous enough to hire me as a combination sports editor, public affairs reporter and photographer despite my notoriety as a civil rights activist. Moreover the paper was nationally recognized for its journalistic excellence. But the greatest irony of all was that Dick Smyser, the ME who trashed my Nader story, was at the time chairman of the Associated Press Managing Editors Freedom of Information Committee. As for Mr. Nader, though I cannot imagine I would ever vote for him, I nevertheless hold him in the highest regard. He has unfailingly proven himself one of our nation's most trustworthy news sources. Hence my decision to lead this collection of links with his analysis. (2)-I was a member of the ACLU most of my adult life, and it has twice commended me (1978, 1994) for my role in fights to protect the First Amendment. But I permanently canceled my membership to protest the ACLU's supportive role in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2008 Supreme Court case that gave unlimited financial power to the predatory One Percent. By its endorsement of Citizens United, the ACLU publicly rejected the democratic principles it had always claimed to defend and revealed that – behind its camouflage of rhetoric – it exists only to protect and sustain capitalist despotism. Nevertheless – albeit with this clear stipulation of organizational intent – ACLU analyses often remain useful, as indeed they are above. (3)-The preceding report was assembled with the help of several readers, to whom my deepest gratitude.

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'Change We Can Believe In': Pill Ban Gift to Christian Misogynists

Acting through Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the Betrayer-in-Chief has broken yet another election promise, notably his pledge to overturn the Bush Administration's theocratic banishment of scientific considerations from federal policy-making.

And this time the victims of Obama's Christianity are all the nation's women, denied by federal edict a vital means of emergency birth-control.

Such is creeping theocracy, the plague that has afflicted us since the birth of the republic but became obvious when the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, in which context it should be noted that “God” – capital G – is a proper noun, always male, a synonym for Yahweh, Jesus or Allah, the variously named deity of the Abrahamic religions.

In this same context – religious dogma elevated to political mandate – we should also note this deity's First Commandment: “I am the Lord thy God...thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”

In other words, inclusion of “under God” in the pledge implicitly excludes not only all other deities but all of us who decline to recognize God.

Alas those of us who are agnostic (as I am) or atheist or at least secular-minded enough to be indifferent to organized religion fail all too often to recognize how the phrase turns recitation of the pledge onto a ritual of commitment to theocracy.

The resultant threat is both frighteningly real and dreadfully immediate, for which see The Family (Jeff Sharlet), American Theocracy (Kevin Phillips) and American Fascists (Chris Hedges). The danger is many times intensified by the fact the Abrahamic creeds whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic define their adherents as divinely chosen subjects of “the One True Religion.”

Not surprisingly, each of these religions is already infamous for murderous despotism. Much of the Old Testament was spawned by the Israelite penchant for genocidal aggression. The same tendency is manifest in the Christian Inquisition and the run-amok misogyny of the Burning Times. Now the plague of Islamic terrorism adds yet another blood-mark to the Abrahamic religions' relentless Jihad – already 2600 years long – against female independence, sexual freedom, individual liberty and any other surviving remnant of the pagan beliefs that sustained our species through its first one thousand centuries.

Christian hostility to these values is indisputably proven by history. Moreover it is a hostility expressed not just by the ranting of fundamentalist preachers but by the refusal of the mainstream churches to condemn the fundamentalists for their openly tyrannical beliefs.

The Christian mainstream's compliant silence is in fact tacit endorsement of theocracy. The motive for the silence is thus obvious once we realize the extent to which all Christian organizations, fundamentalist or not, profit from the (ever-encroaching) situational theocracies of the “faith-based” education systems and social services with which the U.S. Ruling Class is methodically replacing public schools and other traditional government programs.

In any case the mainstream/fundamentalist distinction hardly matters: polls show about 63 percent of the U.S. population believes the Bible is truth not fiction – literally “the word of God,” caps again as used by believers. Our nation is already definitively fundamentalist, hence too already ripe for the formal imposition of theocracy.

Which is much closer than we realize. Having (involuntarily) spent two-thirds of my boyhood in the South – a de facto theocracy since the post-Civil-War southern aristocracy figured out how to use religion to nullify the socioeconomic and political changes threatened by Reconstruction – I am painfully familiar with what theocracy looks like.

Though Christianity is always as Karl Marx described it – the opiate of the masses – in the South it is also the brain police. It proclaims the Ruling Class – preachers, politicians and above all capitalists – to be the modern-day equivalent of divine-right monarchy, men ordained by God to rule in His name, caps once  more as in theocratic invective.

Sin – deadly sin – is thus defined as anything that jeopardizes Ruling Class power and profits. The enjoyment of sexuality is forbidden because what used to be called “industrial psychology” long ago proved that sexual frustration readily sublimates into compulsive productivity and frantic acquisitiveness – in other words, “growth.” Union organizers, civil rights activists, feminists, homosexuals and any others who openly defy “God's holy plan” are not just sinners but heretics. And to punish those heretics who can neither be subjugated nor banished there's the Ku Klux Klan, its colloquial name – not coincidentally – “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.”

Such is theocracy, U.S. Christian style – different from theocracy, Middle Eastern style, mostly in nomenclature only.

Chief amongst its legacies – and again I speak from personal experience – are hypocrisy and guilt, each of such depth as to approach bottomlessness.

The hypocrisy is that of teetotaler-aristocrats, “good Christian men” who proclaim their support for prohibition but patronize criminals – bootleggers – in order to drink in secret, whether behind the doors of mansions or inside the gates of country clubs. It is the hypocrisy of “good Christian legislators” who in the Tennessee of my puberty had raised the age of consent to 21 and yet ravaged teenage girls, smug in the protections granted by aristocratic status. It is the hypocrisy of “good Christian businessmen” who smile their Dale Carnegie smiles as they rob us blind. Sometimes it is the hypocritically hateful sadism of the “good Christian woman” who agitates a lynching.

Most of all it is the unbearable burden of guilt imposed on adolescents of any gender by the Christian hatred of sex and sexuality. It is guilt as retaliation for desire – guilt so omnipresently powerful it reached deeply even into my own decidedly non-Southern, non-religious family. It is guilt so huge that (though I lost my virginity at age 14), my first experience of sex as truly boundless naked-soul pleasure – shameless, eyes-open, lights-on mutual enjoyment of unhurried sensuality and orgasmic ecstasy – would not occur for another 11 years, not until an unabashedly City Woman in a great City far from Knoxville let down her hair, invited me into her bed and shared with me what I now in old age recognize as the most priceless gift life has to offer.

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The following may sound like a non sequitur but bear with me a few sentences and you'll see it isn't.

My last name is English but we Blisses are mostly Celt, a mixture that includes some very old families with perhaps – given our often-perplexing psychic sensibilities – a touch of the blood of the legendary Tuatha de Danaan, “Children of the Goddess Danu.”

Intuition bolstered by studies of archaeology, myth and folklore long ago convinced me our pagan ancestors believed orgasm is our most intense connection with the divine. And even if this is but fantasy – or perhaps genetic memory borne by my oldest blood – the vision yet holds true: as one who in blessed moments of sexual mindfulness has soared on the bright galactic spiral of orgasmic infinity – no doubt the significance of the spirals we see graven on the stones at ancient sacred sites – I cannot possibly question what seems such pure and obvious wisdom.

Admittedly this sort of thinking may appear absurdly mystical in today's world. But until only about 3500 years ago our ancestors lived in a very different kind of society – matriarchy, not woman as dictator  (dictatorship is a logical extension of patriarchy), but rather woman as mother of her own children  and literally everything else as well: cosmos, stars, sun, moon, planet, ocean, homeland, community, family, life itself.  

Archaeology suggests that property, hierarchy and caste as we know it today did not exist during that first 100,000 years of our species' existence. Indeed one very compelling explanation for the eternal seductiveness of Marxism (and socialism in general) is that it would restore for us a working semblance of community as mother, the supportive community we lost with the imposition of patriarchy and the suppression of our tribal impulses toward democracy, often at sword's point and invariably by misogynistic slaughter, whether inflicted at the burning-stake or maintained by denial of reproductive freedom.

All of which is prefatory to understanding why the Abrahamic religions – the ultimate psychodynamic mechanisms of patriarchy – must  of necessity despise sexuality, especially female sexuality, and hate not just women but Woman and thus, since all life is female at conception, the totality of nature: Gaia herself, whether the abstract symbol at the core hypothesis of environmentalism or the deity  formerly sustained and now resurrected by the liturgies of paganism.

Which leads us to the very epicenter of the ancient war symbolized by the Christian effort to subjugate us in theocracy. The issue is not just the implicit (and often unacknowledged) clash over the gender of the deity; it is the resultant  unresolvable conflict between the associated symbioses of ideologies and systems: Gaia-centered (matrilineal if not matriarchal, eco-socialist, democratic, unabashedly orgasmic) versus God-centered (patriarchal, environmentally destructive, exploitative, hierarchal, unabashedly greedy).

Penultimately it's our eternally compelling experience of divinity – orgasm – versus the litanies of prohibition attributed to the chilly abstraction of a divine sadist who perpetually threatens us with the unspeakable horror of eternal damnation – the most terrifying possibility the human mind can conceive – should we dare disobey his edicts.

Ultimately its the ethos of sensuality and love versus the ethos of terror and hatefulness.

Given how the latter has ruled our planet for at least 3500 years, woman in the Christian context – no doubt the Muslim context too – is from birth potentially the perfect revolutionary. Her being is a microcosm of all Nature, of everything patriarchy would destroy or suppress. Her womb contradicts the Abrahamic myth of sexless creation. Her capacity for multiple orgasms – and thus multiple partners – subverts the patriarchal order more effectively than any rhetoric yet uttered. Hence the sexual mutilation of women as inflicted by Islam. Hence too the parallel psycho-sexual mutilation imposed by Christianity, the taboos against female sexual expression, as the in war on reproductive freedom, the war of misogynistic aggression in which Barack the Betrayer's pill-ban is but the latest fundamentalist victory.

LB/17 December 2011

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    Pictures and essays published in Outside Agitator's Notebook prior to 1 August 2011 remain available at lorenbliss.typepad.com.

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Welfare Update, with Taste of Crow; a Person Named 'Important' Demands My Ouster in OT Censorship Fight; Chris Hedges on How U.S. Churches Serve Capitalist Tyranny; Religious Unity as an Excuse for Surrender

PRAYING IN THE RAIN, participants in a prayer circle sponsored by Tacoma's Associated Ministries turn their backs on Occupy Tacoma protesters outside the building housing U.S. Sen. Patty Murray's office. The positions of the religious celebrants, an unavoidable consequence of their circular formation, nevertheless symbolize the reaction of most U.S. churches toward Occupy Wall Street and its local daughters. See Christoper Hedges' superb essay “Where Were You When They Crucified My Lord?” (linked below), also my own piece on AM's refusal to endorse the Occupy movement either locally or globally, a stance AM officials rationalize by citing an alleged need “to unite people of faith” taking precedence over any need to resist oppression. (This picture is another of those I made during the 16 November picketing: FujiFilm 800, 135mm f/2.5 Takumar, Pentax K-1000. Click on image to view it full frame.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

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Yes, Virginia, There Is an Ongoing Medicare Subsidy

As I reported last week, I got a disturbing letter from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services falsely accusing me of failure to comply with an eligibility-review deadline and informing me the Medicare subsidies on which my life depends would terminate as of the end of November.

The nastygram I received is but one of tens of thousands of similar notices with which lower-income seniors and disabled people are now routinely terrorized.

Hence on the last day of the month I gathered up all my welfare files and trekked to the Tacoma DSHS office to protest, arriving at 7 a.m. to be sure I was at the head of the line when the doors officially opened an hour later.

There I learned the termination notice I had gotten is another expression of Gov. Christine Gregoire's approach to managing state government – a telling example of why I have dubbed her Christine the Cruel.

The frightening letter was automatically spewed out by a computer, not because I had been terminated, but because DSHS staff has been reduced to the point its employees can no longer keep up with routine paperwork – so said a case worker who was notably courteous, apologetic and obviously concerned.

A few minutes later the caseworker said my Medicare subsidies were indeed approved for another year – my $101 food stamp allocation too – and I would receive official notice in the mail within a few days, as in fact I did.

Which brings me to the obligatory eating of crow. The Tacoma caseworker obviously cared about my wellbeing. And the Tacoma caseworker's colleagues were obviously of a similar mind.

I was shabbily dressed that day, as I am most days at this stage of my life. Perched on a walker at the office-door end of the agency's long entrance hall, I no doubt looked like what I have become – an impoverished old cripple – a repugnant sight to the typical and typically self-obsessed citizen celebrating our Holidays of Conspicuous Consumption.

But every one of the female DSHS employees who passed me on their way to work paused for a moment to wish me good morning or inquire if I was ok. So did a couple of the normally far-more-aloof male employees. And in every instance their eyes, which never lie about such matters, told me their concern was genuine – this in marked contrast to the unanimous hostility of the DSHS caseworkers with whom I was confronted as a disabled person in Bellingham during the late 1980s.

Needless to say I was quite moved. Obviously, at least in Tacoma, the welfare bureaucracy has awakened to the fact it is part of the 99 Percent. Thank you, case workers. Please pass the crow.

(Disclosure: Though my normal orthopedic appliance is a cane, my spinal and circulatory problems make it excruciatingly painful for me to stand in one place for more than about 10 minutes. Hence I borrowed a neighbor's walker to provide myself a seat.)

*****

OT Blues: a Clash with 'Important' Helps Me Occupy My Mind

When I heed Occupy Tacoma's best slogan to date – “Occupy Your Mind” (for which thanks to Nikki Weatherhead, Joy Bonney and Autumn Jacobs) – the resultant introspection insists that above all else I am still a journalist, whether with camera or keyboard or both.

My commitment to journalism is nearly lifelong. It dates from 1952, when my father gave me a Kodak Brownie Reflex for my 12th birthday. Two years later he gave me a Polaroid Land Camera. In 1955, via the what-will-I-be-when-I-grow-up unit of my 10th grade English class, I declared myself a future reporter and photographer. Late the following year I was hired by The Grand Rapids Herald, a Michigan daily. I was a combination copyboy and stringer, in the latter role a regular contributor to the sports and youth sections. That's also when I got my union card, becoming – at age 16 – a fiercely proud member of the American Newspaper Guild.

Since then I have tried to live in accordance with journalism's oldest creed: “to comfort the afflicted...and afflict the comforted.”

It was in the latter context I wrote a blistering retort to two posters on the OT Forum.

The two were trashing a thread-starter who was trying to alert us to the huge danger implicit in the National Defense Authorization Act, which is wending its way through Congress bearing a concentration-camp provision that would turn stateside-stationed armed forces into national police, enable the imprisonment of citizens without trial and thus move the United States that much closer to becoming the de facto Fourth Reich.

Because the trashers' onslaught against this latter-day Paul Revere seemed not only unfair but vindictive, I opened the ball accordingly:

“The reactionary anti-intellectuality implicit in (the first respondent's) attack is surprising even here in the region of the United States most noted for its vindictive xenophobia and venomous anti-intellectuality.”

The first trasher, clearly enraged, misquoted me to the forum's moderator, then withdrew in a huff after the moderator pointed out the distortion.

Meanwhile the second trasher, whose screen name is “Nobody Important” and who claims to be an Occupy Seattle website moderator, was already boiling over with self-important arrogance.

Important had been subtly protecting the One Percent by denying the ruined state of our constitutional democracy, telling us the system was working and we had nothing to worry about – a tactic typical of capitalist-party operatives whether DemocRat or GOPorker.

My response was intended to end what I already recognized as pointless confrontation: “It seems – please correct me if I'm wrong – your underlying purpose is to defend the status quo, including the infinity of betrayals perpetrated by Barack the Betrayer. That being the case I see little point in debating you.”

But this gentle rebuke provoked an on-line tantrum that lasted nearly two days, with Important repeatedly proving the screen name to be not just devoid of its implied humility but a classic example of passive-aggressive camouflage.

In the parlance of the old-time newsrooms in which I learned my craft, obviously I drew blood.

Important then asserted a despotic sense of privileged entitlement, demanding ever more fiercely I be banished for “hate speech.” Apparently  Important searched not just the OT Forum but even Outside Agitator's Notebook to cobble together a less-than-literate denunciation based on my characterizations of our neo-feudal politicians (Barack the Betrayer, Christine the Cruel); our treacherous political parties (DemocRats, GOPorkers); and my factually correct, historically proven statement Nazism (and fascism in general) are logical fulfillments of capitalism.

But one brave moderator persisted in defending my right to write as I see fit, and Important finally left in a hissy, still spewing venom, a trail of petulantly self-deleted posts littering the path of departure.

***

Despite the Occupation Movement's outspoken commitment to transparency, the forum incident was not my first encounter with OT's would-be censors.

When OT was formed, Tacoma's First Methodist Church offered its facilities as an indoor locale for meetings of OT's governing body, the General Assembly. The offer was gratefully accepted; the frigid rains characteristic of winter on the Pacific Northwest Coast are of such monsoonal intensity as to discourage extended outdoor meetings – and GA sessions tend to last two, three, even four hours.

But not long after OT took its first collectively approved policy stance – a list of formal demands it presented to Washington state's U.S. Sen. Patty Murray – the church withdrew its offer, forcing the GA outdoors in the rain and cold and thereby effectively excluding most elderly and disabled people from the decision-making process.

The reasons for the church's sudden reversal have never been adequately explained, though it should be noted most OT activists emphatically assert the cause was nothing more ominous than administrative error and organizational confusion.

Nevertheless it's difficult to overlook the fact the excluded seniors and disabled people had been amongst those most active in shaping the demands OT addressed to Murray. Citing Murray's position as co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, OT insisted she block proposed cutbacks in Social Security and prevent further slashing of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits and federal aid to education.

Coincidence? Probably – though the demographic identity of the chief victims of the church's sudden denial of its meeting facilities surely arouses my investigative reporter's suspicion.

But that's only half the story.

Soon after OT was limited to outdoor GAs, the Teamsters (a union to which I have strong social and familial connections despite the fact I have never been a member), were reportedly kind enough to offer OT their local meeting hall as a permanent meeting place.

But one of the leaders who have emerged within allegedly “leaderless” OT arbitrarily turned down the offer without bothering to consult the membership.

This was literally an anti-union coup, an outrage not merely because of its breathtaking arrogance but because – if we are to avoid the mistakes made during the Counterculture era – OT like OWS should be building Working Class solidarity, not implicitly insulting our union sisters and brothers.

Hush, I was told. “Your words are divisive and not conducive to positively working out the issue.”

***

Since the beginning of my involvement with OT I have sensed – particularly amongst its younger leaders – an underlying bias against those of us who are elderly, especially those of us who are lower-income elderly.

What brought this into sharp focus was OT's decision to center itself on a 24/7 online presence and on computer technology in general.

Recognizing the prohibitive nature of computer costs, I spoke up at several GAs citing current statistics that fully half the nation's lower-income households are economically denied computer access and thus remain cut off from an increasingly computer-oriented world. I myself, I admitted, am nearly at the economic bottom of the 99 Percent; I live in constant fear my computer will die and leave me irremediably isolated. I have no funds with which to replace a computer and short of a miracle will never have such funds again.

To exclude me and all the others who are in these dire circumstances, I said, is to nullify the core purpose of the Occupy Movement.

Again I was told I was being divisive.

The expressions on the faces of those around me left no doubt it was the majority opinion.

And now because of the lack of indoor meeting space, OT's GAs are held without regard to the limits imposed by age-related disabilities.

There's also the fact the success of U.S. capitalism's war on public transport has so radically diminished local bus service it is often impossible for those of us without automobiles to get to and from the site of the meetings.

A GA dominated only by younger, healthy women and men with enough money to own and operate automobiles is not representative of the 99 Percent.

Meanwhile OT's computer-centric mode of organization has fostered creation of a technocratic elite that has become its de facto ruling elite as well.

***

Now after considering these matters I could hardly doubt all those OT members who had tried to silence me as “divisive” also agreed with Important.

But how could avowed supporters of transparency so quickly abandon their principles?

Perhaps I was (again) encountering proof of how Seattle Sucks even in Tacoma and Bellingham and how the Seattle Freeze extends from Olympia to the Canadian border.

I even wondered if Important might have been among those who – despite my 1974-1976 role as founding photographer of The Seattle Sun – were so hatefully unforgiving of my East Coast origins they never failed to convey the region's characteristic message to outlanders: “we don't want you here.”

The bigots of those years actually slashed the tires on my car, sticking an ironically dimwitted note on its windshield: “Go back where you came from” – as if my vandalized Fiat Spyder, all four of its tires cut beyond repair, could have been driven anywhere.

I remembered too how some people I had foolishly believed were friends cavorted in nyekulturniy joy when I announced my 1983 return to Manhattan: “O goody we're finally getting rid of another obnoxious New York intellectual.”

Pugetopolis xenophobia never lets me forget I'm “not from here.” But as I wrote last Sunday to the one OT website moderator who dared favor my continued presence, “I refuse to apologize for who and what I am: not just a New Yorker, but an old, impoverished, crippled, justifiably angry and above all else still reasonably articulate New Yorker.”

Beyond the issues of age and caste and censorship, I was (again) obviously learning “a Rudyard Kipling truth that applies as much to the United States as to the old British Empire: 'East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet...'”

For a time I was convinced I should withdraw not only from the OT Forum but from OT itself.

Subsequent conversation with several OTers on-line and off convinced me withdrawal would be petulant and selfish – a pointless, stupid gesture that no matter how I rationalized it would be a rejection of solidarity.

Though I damn well won't bother posting in the OT Forum again. Apart from a few notably eloquent writers like Alan OldStudent and the knowledgeable NormaJean, it's discussion boards are a waste of time, dominated by people who are obviously amongst the One Percent's trained idiots – that or malicious egotists like Important – and since I'm nearing age 72 I don't have that much time left to squander.

So I wrote this commentary instead, invoking the principle of transparency, obeying the suggestion to Occupy (my own) Mind, discovering yet another dimension of how this strange and compelling movement is indescribably more than the sum of its parts.

*****

Chris Hedges: “Where Were You When They Crucified My Lord?”

My rejection of Christianity for its anti-sex prudery and its breathtaking socioeconomic hypocrisy led me through Zen, Taoism, Gaian paganism and finally to agnosticism long before I knew of Chris Hedges. Therefore to become an aficionado of his writing, it was often necessary for me to sidestep his frequently subtle but always undeniable Christian bias, which in a less perceptive writer would probably have driven me away.

But Hedges is not just an uncommonly talented journalist, he is also unique: a private-schooled, Ivy League aristocrat who abandoned privilege in the name of conscience. Now, a declared socialist, he reliably sides with the 99 Percent, even unto imprisonment for nonviolent civil disobedience.

Thus I read whatever I see beneath his byline and am almost never perplexed or disappointed by its message. And the Hedges piece with which I began yesterday's reading is – despite its thematically Christian core – among his most powerful essays to date.

Here are its first and third paragraphs:

“The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalize traditional Christianity in the United States or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance. The mainstream church, battered by declining numbers and a failure to defiantly condemn the crimes and cruelty of the corporate state, as well as a refusal to vigorously attack the charlatans of the Christian right, whose misuse of the Gospel to champion unfettered capitalism, bigotry and imperialism is heretical, has become a marginal force in the life of most Americans, especially the young. Outside the doors of churches, many of which have trouble filling a quarter of the pews on Sundays, struggles a movement, driven largely by young men and women, which has as its unofficial credo the Beatitudes...”

“It was the church in Latin America, especially in Central America and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, which provided the physical space, moral support and direction for the opposition to dictatorship. It was the church in East Germany that organized the peaceful opposition marches in Leipzig that would bring down the communist regime in that country. It was the church in Czechoslovakia, and its 90-year-old cardinal, that blessed and defended the Velvet Revolution. It was the church, and especially the African-American church, that made possible the civil rights movements. And it is the church, especially Trinity Church in New York City with its open park space at Canal and 6th, which can make manifest its commitment to the Gospel and nonviolent social change by permitting the Occupy movement to use this empty space, just as churches in other cities that hold unused physical space have a moral imperative to turn them over to Occupy movements. If this nonviolent movement fails, it will eventually be replaced by one that will employ violence. And if it fails it will fail in part because good men and women, especially those in the church, did nothing.”

If you read no other commentary today, please read this.

Of course I hope Mr. Hedges is wrong about the revitalization of traditional Christianity. If he is right, the women and men of tomorrow will suffer a realm in which all pleasures especially those of sensuality and sexuality will again be forbidden and those born with the psychic sensitivities characteristic of my own ancient bloodline will again be persecuted for witchcraft as they were in colonial Connecticut and in the British Isles and mainland Europe long before.

In any case I'm sure Mr. Hedges knows that charity and humanitarianism in general are not Christian principles per se but rather far more timeless virtues, as in Lao Tzu's “If you are at one with them in poverty, the poor will come to meet you joyfully” (which dates from maybe 1000 BCE), and in the still older customs of collective nurturing implicit in tribal societies everywhere on our planet.

But there is no question the back-turned stance of the churches (which after all are wealthy beyond imagination and are thus as much a part of the One Percent as Wall Street) is intended to ensure the Occupy Movement's defeat.

Exactly as Mr. Hedges predicts, if the movement is crushed, what will take its place will be neither nonviolent nor forgiving.

*****

The Ecumenical Surrender to the 1% (w/Notes on Visual Thinking)

When I went to the corner of Pacific Avenue South and 11th Street last month to photograph Occupy Tacoma braving the rain to picket the building that houses Sen. Patty Murray's local office, I also encountered a prayer service convened by Associated Ministries, an interfaith (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish) organization that serves Tacoma and surrounding Pierce County.

The prayer service was not just kept separate from the OT demonstration, but segregated in a manner that made it quietly obvious most of the ritual's participants, many of whom were aristocratically dressed, wanted no part of the rowdily proletarian protest occurring only a stone's throw away.

We proles were on the rain-swept sidewalk in front of the building; the pastors and their parishioners were in an attractively landscaped stairway-park next door, the park's design one of many similar architectural concessions to Tacoma's notably alpine slopes.

Having asked enough questions to determine the two events were not just separate but – from the AM perspective – avowedly so, I put my reporter's notebook back inside its waterproof rubber bag and returned to shooting film.

It may seem an aside, but covering an event as both reporter and photographer is always difficult because the process demands you work simultaneously from antithetical modes of consciousness.

The photographer's sensibility is entirely right brain, a byproduct of sensual oneness with the spiral dance of light and shadow and the quest for the decisive paradas therein, the visual equivalents of orgasm.

By contrast, the writer's sensibility is definitively left-brain, the implicitly abstract and often internally contentious distancing-from-events inflicted by words and psycholinguistics, vision eternally imprisoned in the grammatical and stylistic structures by which effective prose must always be framed. The associated perception is linear, A-B-C-D-E, and the resultant expression can never be anything else.

Thus when I give myself over to the Zen of photographing an event – and Zen it always is – the reporting invariably suffers. But if I become the emotionally disciplined remote observer I must always be to function effectively as a reporter, my ability to photograph is sorely diminished. To attempt both simultaneously is crazy-making, literally a kind of self-induced schizophrenia.

My preference is of course to photograph, for me always an act of passion, and to let someone else do the reporting, which for me is never more than an intellectual exercise, reliably interesting, yes, but in the actual writing also a disheartening and often mortifying struggle against dyslexia.

Nevertheless and out of economic necessity I years ago evolved a kind of compromise in which I scribble notes to myself – typically in the same left-brain interlude triggered by the need to reload a camera – and then follow up with reporter-type interviews the next day.

Which I did by digging through the business cards I had collected during the demonstration and telephoning Rev. Heidi M. Calhoun, AM's director of mission and development.

What, I asked, was AM's stance toward the Occupy Movement? Would AM endorse it? (There was a rumor it already had.) And if no endorsement were forthcoming, why not?

It was clear by Rev. Calhoun's hesitant response she was on uncomfortable ground, but I have no doubt she answered honestly when she said there probably would be no such endorsement, either of OWS or its local offspring.

Why? “We're trying to unite people of faith,” she said. “We're an organization that mobilizes the faith community and is working toward finding ways in which we can speak and act together.”

In other words – mine not hers – though the “faith community” will piously pray for the enlightenment of the capitalist tyrants, it discourages any resistance more effective than the tactics of Father Gapon (for whom – if you don't know Russian history – please Google).

LB/7 December 2011

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    Pictures and essays published in Outside Agitator's Notebook prior to 1 August 2011 remain available at lorenbliss.typepad.com.

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