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| MODES OF RESISTANCE -- see "Thinking Visually," (below). Click on the image to view it full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. |
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(Please Note Outside Agitator's Notebook Remains Under Construction, Hence May Be Subject to Temporary Disruptions in Text and Design)
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Censorship: 3 Ways the Ruling Class Nullifies the 1st Amendment
As I implied last week (“San Francisco's BART Turns Off Cell Phones to Suppress Protest”), Bay Area Rapid Transit's newest tactics illustrate yet another dimension of the Bush-Obama economic agenda – actually a slow-motion coup – and the radically intensified capitalist tyranny it is imposing on all of us.
Once again the pattern should be obvious: as the capitalists outsource the U.S. economy and increasingly force working families into Third World poverty, they likewise impose Third World authoritarianism, an important aspect of which is limited access to information.
Hence not just the cell-phone shut-down – a defining trademark of dictatorships everywhere – but also the methodical destruction of more traditional media, for example the closure or downsizing of newspapers and magazines, the dumbing-down of public education and the redirection of broadcast news from substance to sensationalism.
In every instance these acts of oppression are signature manifestations of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us. Though such governance is a New Paradigm here in the United States – especially for those of us who are Caucasians -- it's business as usual in U.S. minority communities and elsewhere in Wall Street's global empire.
Many of the coup's component parts have been in place for years; some – for example the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act – date as far back as the 1940s. That's why – especially when it's camouflaged by the trauma of deliberate economic shocks (for which see Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine) – the transformation from liberty to tyranny seems so deceptively un-couplike.
And sometimes even those of us who pay attention are fooled. Note how I got the tense wrong on the anti-cell-phone tactic. I suggested widespread cell-phone shut-downs were “soon to be used” in the U.S. (as for example they've long employed in Iran), but it turns out they're already the norm here too.
As MediaCitizen's Timothy Karr reports in a disturbing piece given broader circulation by Reader Supported News:
“The San Francisco incident is not unique. Earlier this summer Cleveland's City Council passed an ordinance outlawing the use of Facebook and other social media to assemble unruly crowds. While a mayoral veto struck down the Cleveland ruling, the overreaction is part of a spreading official backlash against political organizing on new media.”
“Other governments have responded the same - see China, Burma, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and beyond. In many instances they simply direct the state-run service provider and cellphone carriers to shut down their networks.
“In the US, though, companies often flip the kill switch on their own. Verizon Wireless blocked text messages in 2007 that a reproductive rights group sought to send to its members. The carrier decided that the texts were 'controversial and unsavory' and implemented a rule buried deep within the company's terms of service that gives Verizon the power to cut off mobile communications 'without prior notice and for any reason or no reason.'”
Footnote: let us not overlook my own recent encounters with censorship, described last week in “Death and Resurrection of a Blog.”
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Another dimension of censorship is disinformation, and the aristocracy is using that too, not just the obvious techniques – for example the Big Lies about Iraq or “change we can believe in” (the latter possibly the biggest Big Lie in U.S. history) – but even the creation of bogus Facebook sites.
Lee Fang of ThinkProgress exposed the Facebook scam in a report circulated by CommonDreams:
“ThinkProgress obtained 75,000 private emails from the defense contractor HBGary Federal via the hacktivist group called Anonymous. The emails led to two shocking revelations. First, that an assortment of private military firms collectively called “Team Themis” had been tapped by Bank of America to conduct a cyber war against reporters sympathetically covering the Wikileaks revelations. And second, that late in 2010, the same set of firms began work separately for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican-aligned corporate lobbying group, to develop a similar campaign of sabotage against progressive organizations, including the SEIU and ThinkProgress.”
Footnote: alas, Common Dreams has been offline since yesterday – apparently again hacked to silence by the fascists – so I cannot guarantee the functionality of its links.
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While censorship by prior restraint (BART) and disinformation (Facebook) are gravely damaging, the most ruinous form of censorship is misconception – truths deliberately or ignorantly manipulated into a false conclusion – which is all the more insidious given it is often self-sustained.
Hence Dave Poklinkoski's analysis, “Let's Learn the Right Lessons from Wisconsin,” in Labor Notes via Truthout:
“The uprising here was the awakening that labor movement activists had long hoped for—disproving the modern notion that those who work will not stand up for themselves: Last winter several hundred thousand people rallied in communities across the state.”
“Saying 'Brother' and 'Sister' and expressions of solidarity had real meaning. People were exhausted but energized. Community/labor coalitions emerged to build for the future.
“But the recall elections turned out to be an education opportunity lost...the 'message people' saw the union question as a divisive issue...The millions of dollars in commercials in support of the Democrats did not talk about unions, the history of the labor movement, what we have done to create our modern society, or why it is important for our collective future that unions thrive.”
Footnote: Unfortunately Mr. Poklinkoski doesn't specify who the “message people” were, but he strongly implies they were Democrat operatives. Which, if true, is one more proof of the extent to which we workers are being betrayed by the people we elected to represent us – not just by Barack the Betrayer himself but by like-minded politicians and campaign professionals throughout the Democratic Party.
Such is the bitter legacy of class warfare – conflict begun with Taft-Hartley, fueled by Cold War conscription and radically intensified by the Vietnam War.
Atop the pyramid of power (Google IWW capitalist pyramid) are those who were the Vietnam Era's sneeringly privileged draft-exempt elite – the people whose malicious collaboration has since turned the Republican and Democrat parties into a single Ruling Class party.
On the bottom are all the rest of us, especially those of us who served in the Vietnam Era military.
When O when will organize our own Working Families Party?
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Obama's Ongoing Betrayals Heighten Black, Democrat Anger
Vexed with Obama's ongoing betrayals, the Congressional Black Caucus says it can no longer depend on the president to represent the African-American community.
The group's anger, expressed during an Atlanta town-hall meeting that is part of a five-city jobs fair, underscores a growing disaffection with Obama that began when he sandbagged the Employee Free Choice Act and manipulated health-care reform into a huge bonus for the insurance industry.
Since then, an increasing number of African-Americans have been privately scorning the president as an “Uncle Tom,” but only recently, with the blistering denunciation of Obama by Cornel West, has the controversy become public. Those who want to review Mr. West's remarks can find them here:
And here's Patricia Murphy of The Daily Beast (thanks to Reader Supported News) with additional details about what CBC members said Thursday in Atlanta:
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Meanwhile someone with far more readership than I has finally picked up on what for several months now I've been calling “the growing darkness under the Obama Bush.”
That someone is David Bromwitch of TomDispatch, linked here courtesy of a new website called Nation of Change:
“Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?”
“The usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president’s “debt deal” -- a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.
“Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.”
Footnote: Like most self-proclaimed “progressives,” Mr. Bromwitch reveals his socioeconomic caste-bias by focusing his opening paragraphs entirely on foreign policy – issues of little interest to those of us who are homeless or facing eviction or living in terror of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid reductions.
But his report is nevertheless worth reading because it confirms what we've long sensed: that Obama is not just the political reincarnation of George Bush but is George Bush on tyrannical steroids – that the man we elected as the embodiment of “change we can believe in” is in fact Barack the Betrayer.
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Two prominent public figures who were once among Obama's more emphatic supporters are increasingly skeptical not just of the president's true intentions but of his ability to win re-election in 2012.
Former Clinton Administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich says he fears the jobs bill the president promises to unveil in September will be nothing more than another example of empty eloquence: uplifting words followed, as per the Obama norm, by downpressing betrayals.
And Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio says he now doubts the president can win re-election – especially if the Republicans manage to lock down their JesuNazis, Christofascists, fundamentalist theocrats, anti-sex misogynists and Teabagger storm troops long enough to field an (apparent) moderate.
Mr. Reich – whose economic savvy is equal to Paul Krugman's – has been having second thoughts about Obama's policies for some time, but as far as I know this is the first time he has publicly questioned the truthfulness of the president's statements:
The story on Rep. DeFazio's concerns, which include the possibility Obama's betrayals have already irreparably alienated Oregon's definitively Leftist electorate, is here:
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/177481-dem-obamas-chances-of-re-election-very-tough
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Finally there is my own most recent commentary on the subject, written originally as a response to another of John Nichols' increasingly obnoxious if-only defenses of Barack the Betrayer as a Working Class hero who need only “call for economic justice” so “voters would know, finally, which side their president is on.”
Mr. Nichols' piece first appeared in The Nation, was then recirculated by Common Dreams, which as noted above remains offline. Nevertheless – since access to the former is by subscription only – here is the CD link, offered in hope it's soon operational:
Here too is the full text of my response:
I am appalled by these dishonest efforts to rationalize President Obama's indefensible duplicity.
The reality is painfully hard to admit: those of us who voted for him were scammed – deceived as U.S. voters have never been deceived in my lifetime.
Obama won the presidency by disguising himself in the Big Lie of "change we can believe in."
But ever since his inauguration, he has been showing us his true identity.
He has proven himself to be Barack the Betrayer, the nation's first Trojan Horse president, a Wall Street mercenary disguised as an African-American Democrat.
How could such an outrage happen?
Obama's candidacy was the most cunningly Machiavellian deception ever fostered by the U.S. Ruling Class.
(The damning proof is in the 2008 campaign-finance data revealed by OpenSecrets.org.)
Obama's election may be the most politically ruinous choice in our national history, not the least because he has disillusioned and embittered the electorate to an extent probably without precedent.
Not only has he damaged the credibility of the Democratic Party beyond any possibility of repair; his ever-more-blatant submission to the capitalist aristocracy facilitated the explosion of racism and demagoguery that reduced the Republican Party to a nation-destroying cult of Ayn Rand anarchists.
To those of us who see Obama clearly – especially those of us who now because of his betrayals must live our final years beneath the sword of death-dealing reductions in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – his Judas-like behavior is the defining characteristic of his presidency.
Indeed the last two years are naught but a chronicle of the deceptions for which Wall Street paid him so generously in 2008.
How does Obama do it?
He speaks eloquently of hope but hides behind the Democrat name while imposing hopelessness – the slave-state economy all capitalists secretly desire but no Republican dared make real until now.
And now too it's a Republican – Speaker of the House John Boehner – who applauds the damage inflicted by Obama's treachery.
Obama, says Boehner, gave me “98 percent of what I wanted."
Wake up, people. How many times are we to be fooled?
Obama is the seductively smiling mortician inviting us to participate in the burial of the American Dream, the glibly persuasive coroner at the inquest for the American experiment in constitutional democracy.
The fix is in; our coffin lids are being nailed shut.
Obama is imposing on us the same zero-tolerance capitalist governance we witness with such horror in the banana republics.
Absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us – that will be Barack Obama's legacy.
Unless of course we are bold enough to acknowledge the magnitude of our defeat – and courageous enough to organize for resistance.
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Miscellany: Is Climate Change Fostering Pacific Northwest Pythons?
The strange story of the 16-foot python discovered near Sedro-Woolley, Washington, a small town in the western foothills of the North Cascade wilderness, was transmitted by the Associated Press nearly three weeks ago.
But I put off writing about it because all my spare moments were consumed by trying to find my way around Blogger.
That's because learning the technological protocols of a new blog server is an anxiety-producing nightmare, especially for those of us who are intimidated by the alien technology implicit in the term “computer.” No matter I've been computerized for a dozen years now, it's obvious the associated fear and frustration will never vanish.
But I put off writing about it because all my spare moments were consumed by trying to find my way around Blogger.
That's because learning the technological protocols of a new blog server is an anxiety-producing nightmare, especially for those of us who are intimidated by the alien technology implicit in the term “computer.” No matter I've been computerized for a dozen years now, it's obvious the associated fear and frustration will never vanish.
There's also the fact I wanted to know a lot more about the big snake than the three-sentence AP dispatch provided. Though all the techno-hassles brought on by my ouster from TypePad took precedence, I was particularly interested in whether pythons could survive in the notably temperate climate of the coastal rain forests.
Not to worry, I told myself; I assumed one of our local journalists would eventually find a herpetologist to answer the question.
Not to worry, I told myself; I assumed one of our local journalists would eventually find a herpetologist to answer the question.
Dream on. What would have been a routine newsroom response to this story in my day is obviously too much to ask in this age of ever-more-restricted information. So I still have no idea if local temperatures, which were never very cold, might have been warmed enough by terminal climate change to allow pythons to become the self-sustaining invasive threat they already are in the Southeast.
But I did find, on an Internet forum for hunters in Washington state, an interesting albeit less-than-literate discussion of the snake. Scroll down a bit and you'll discover a poster who says the snake was not “road kill” as AP reported but was found dead in the Skagit River:
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Thinking Visually: on the Relevance of Urban Weeds and Wildflowers
At first glance the image above is one of my graffiti pictures – whatever the meaning of the letter “C” on the board fence, it is surely a graceful work of art – but after I studied the photo a bit, I realized it is also about the astonishing persistence of life even amidst the concrete-and-asphalt barrens of a city.
The weeds and wildflowers growing from the edge of the parking lot where the pavement abuts the fence are re-staking Mother Nature's claim to a realm from which she was presumably banished.
Such determination – or so it seems to me – could easily be a metaphor for the tactics by which we might resist the forces of capitalism that, having conquered us so easily, are now methodically reducing us to slavery.
Hence, though I'll add the photo to my graffiti file, thereby continuing my effort to resurrect another of the projects terminated by the 1983 fire, I'll also give some thought to maybe beginning a new project about urban weeds and wildflowers as symbols of resistance. (I'll post an expanded graffiti portfolio just as soon as I figure out how to do it.)
Meanwhile here's the tech data for the above: Pentax MX, 100mm F/2.8 Pentax SMCP, Kodak 400 negative film (the last of the long-refrigerated batch that was months past its drop-dead date).
LB/21 August 2011
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