*****
The Death and Resurrection of a Blog
Welcome to the evicted, forcibly redesigned and avowedly more defiant Outside Agitator's Notebook.
When I tried to post “Our Nation as We Knew It Is Dead: A Requiem in Seven Parts” on the original OAN, I discovered I had been locked out of my own blog.
The server, TypePad, is under new owners, a megabucks international advertising agency that calls itself Say Media, and Say Media was obviously saying “no” to my objections to capitalism.
TypePad inflicted the lockout, which slapped me in the face two Sundays ago (7 August), without advance warning.
Though it pushes my opening entry to the Blogger variant of OAN well past my customary 2500-3000 words per week, I have published the locked-out essay as a separate post below. Despite the fact its news items are as much as two weeks old, its linked dispatches are clearly those of an obvious turning point in our national history.
Besides which, I feel it needs to be archived on the Internet, for it to be seen in what newspapers used to call “the light of day.”
As to the timing of the lockout itself, I don't doubt I crossed some invisible line when I pointed out that knowingly murderous cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are in fact genocide, with the odium of deathcamps replaced by the less obvious Final Solution of abandonment and neglect.
TypePad's underlying malice is reflected in the nasty bit of Nurdly manipulation that made it impossible for me to discuss the blockage with the server's new gatekeepers. I changed email addresses three months ago, and TypePad obviously had my new address, as its staffers had contacted me a few times since then on unrelated routine matters. But they re-animated the dead e-mail address for responses to the lockout notice that (finally) answered my repeated attempts to log onto my blog.
Hence I was silenced in every sense of the word. Not only was I banished from my own web site; TypePad had also made sure I could not debate my banishment.
Probably I should not have been surprised. The advertising industry – from which Josef Goebbels learned the technique of the Big Lie he later perfected on Adolf Hitler's behalf – is (and always has been) the quintessential expression of tyrannocapitalism.
Nevertheless a TypePad representative had assured me the program under which I was blogging would run until mid-October. Here is the relevant correspondence, dated 1 November 2010:
Thanks for contacting TypePad One customer support! We've reviewed your request and have responded to your ticket 'When does my Journalist Bail-out expire?'.
Hi Loren,
Thanks for the note.
It looks like you have 356 days left for free access. We can look into perhaps extending you some additional credit at that time.
I hope this helps. Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.
Thanks,
Kymberlie
I don't doubt Kymberlie wrote what she thought was the truth. But – given the morally imbecilic nature of the advertising world (in which I too have worked) and the predatory nature of capitalism in general – I should undoubtedly have dismissed Kymberlie's response as meaningless and thus expected the worst.
In any case that makes four virtual realms from which I'm banished.
I was booted from Democratic Underground in 2006, retaliation for pointing out that KGB analysts had (correctly) viewed the “1960s Revolution” as nothing more than bourgeois delusion – the revolutionary potential of certain non-Caucasian communities specifically exempted.
My earlier blog Wolfgang von Skeptic was trashed to death by porn-spammers in 2007 – their attack escalating to ruinous intensity after I broke through the euphemistic fog to correctly describe “global warming” as “terminal climate change.” In the same piece, “Now the End Has Truly Begun: Notes on the First Death Tremors of the Petroleum Age,” I warned of the impending “double apocalypse” of climate change combined with the technological collapse implicit in petroleum exhaustion. Our suicidal non-response, I wrote, amounts to “terminal species failure.”
In 2010 Facebook broke the automatic link between itself and OAN – this literally minutes after I posted my 27 April essay suggesting the ongoing economic collapse was not an accident but instead a deliberate (and deliberately deadly) socioeconomic restructuring (see “Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke to Hated Public Services?”).
Then, by leaking confidential information to phishers, Facebook forced me to close my account entirely.
Now there's this outrage byTypePad aka SixApart. (The OAN posts on TypePad were still available on line as of this writing – just Google Loren Bliss – but it would hardly astonish me were they to be disappeared.)
Such is life under capitalism – precisely as the people of San Francisco are learning via the deliberate tyranny of oppression-serving cell-phone blackouts (next item). Once again we experience the imposition of classically predatory capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal profit for all the rest of us.
Now let's see how long it takes somebody amongst the great paranoid Them to figure out some way to shove me off Blogger.
*****
San Francisco's BART Turns Off Cell Phones to Suppress Protests
Hackers enraged by blocked cell phone service at some San Francisco transit stations broke into a Bay Area Rapid Transit website and revealed confidential contact information belonging to more than 2,000 customers.
The cyber attack came in response to BART's decision to turn off wireless service in several of its San Francisco stations as the agency tries to thwart protests over the fatal shooting of an allegedly disruptive homeless man by a transit cop.
Which begs the question: is BART's cell-phone shut-down a trial-run of tactics soon to be used everywhere in the United States?
The full text of a detailed but obviously pro-BART Associated Press report on the episode (with thanks to Common Dreams) is here:
*****
Visual Thinking: on the Abandonment of My Beloved Leicas
I made the above picture with a battered but fully functional Pentax MX, the 100mm f/2.8 Pentax SMCP lens and Kodak 400 negative film, a roll with a drop-dead date of January 2011.
Though I bought the film three years ago, it had been stored in my refrigerator until week before last, and it thus performed flawlessly, capturing a telling moment as a few of my neighbors and I enjoyed a potluck dinner on the patio of the lower-income senior apartment complex where we live.
Normally I wouldn't have attempted this sort of social-documentary photograph unless I had a Leica.
But my Leicas are gone forever, victims of old age – theirs and mine – and my own inescapable poverty.
The M4 was 43 years old, the M2 almost 50, and the last Leica mechanic on the West Coast had traded his workbench for retirement. Hence when these legendarily durable machines needed repair – as eventually they surely would – I would have had to send them far across the country, not to mention going without them for as long as three months.
And then I would have had to find some way to raise the sum of $225 plus parts and shipping – an utterly impossible amount on my budget, which now can only be expected to shrink even more ruinously: Barack the Betrayer and the treacherous DemocRats are proving themselves as hostile as any Republican to lower income people, especially to elderly and disabled persons like myself.
Besides, Leicas are thug magnets, and the older and more crippled I became, the more afraid I was to carry them in public, not just here in Washington state, where street photography is effectively forbidden by judicial edict, but anywhere in this nation where capitalism's maliciously disinherited young increasingly prey upon capitalism's malevolently ever-more impoverished elders.
Hence I sent my Leicas to the photographic equivalent of the glue factory to which aged horses were once consigned.
Nevertheless – despite the obviously karmic disasters that have always plagued my photographic efforts – I find I cannot give up the medium after all, that I remain a compulsive photographer.
Such is the quest implicit in the first word I ever spoke, “light,” almost – or so I was told – as much desperate plea as exclamation of joy.
Perhaps that is why a Shawn Phillips song, “The Ballad of Casey Deiss,” spoke so hauntingly to me even the first time I heard it, as I awoke one morning in 1971 Bellingham with my clock radio tuned to Vancouver's now-legendary CKLG-FM and my lover whispering to me “this is a song about you” as she handed me my coffee, as my mind seized wisps of lyrics like ephemera of fading dreams: “Twas a boy of sorrowful eyes...in his mind he cried for light...looking for and finding a goddess...he took Diana to be his wife.” Even in the half-consciousness of newly interrupted sleep I recognized Phillips' poetry as a perfect description of the artistic quest and its eternal dialogue, Robert Graves' assertion there is “one story and one story only.” Perhaps that is why even now it puts a lump in my throat and more often than not brings tears.
It is a damn fine piece of work, vividly representative of the lost ethos Walter Bowart so aptly named “Revolution in Consciousness”:
But I digress; the point I am backing into is Pentaxes are now the only 35mm machines I own, and the act of photographing during the potluck with a single-lens reflex – actually intended as nothing more than camera test – set me on a path to a rather jangling suspicion.
Note the utterly un-posed smiles, a blessed moment in which – yes – our strong senses of community and companionship let us escape the omnipresent and utterly rational fear we will all soon be savaged by intentionally deadly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cutbacks.
How, I asked myself, could I have gotten such a relaxed image with such an intrusive machine as an SLR – even the notably small, relatively quiet MX?
Always before I had assumed such visual intimacy was possible only with M Leicas or other comparably quiet, comparably unobtrusive rangefinder cameras, for example the VT Canons I used before I was able to afford M Leicas.
Now though I wonder: what if the intimacy seemingly produced by rangefinder cameras is not at least sometimes a pseudo-intimacy.
Yes the subject is reliably soothed to relative relaxation by the fact the rangefinder camera masks only one of the photographer's eyes, thus sparing the subject the implicitly intimidating Cyclops visage of the SLR photographer. But yes too the photographer is often thereby spared the task of actually getting to know the person being photographed – precisely the reason rangefinder cameras are so facile at seeming to bridge, for example, the ultimately unbridgeable socioeconomic and psychological chasm between say an employee of Ruling Class Media and a family just evicted into inescapable homelessness.
Which line of thinking brought me to consider just what makes the above picture work: I know these people; they are my neighbors here in the senior projects where I have dwelt since 2004. I am one of them. Because I know them – because they know me – a Cyclops-faced and noisy SLR is no longer an intrusion.
And it seems there's a lesson here somewhere.
Perhaps I am even better off with these Pentaxes. After all, if a body breaks, I can replace it for far less than it would cost to repair a Leica – and I no longer have to worry so much about being the prey of some robber.
LB/15 August 2011
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Our Nation as We Knew It Is Dead: a Requiem in Seven Parts
The journalist Jakob Augstein, a German who no doubt speaks for all of Europe (and probably the entire civilized world), says the the debt-ceiling crisis proves the United States “has more in common with a failed state than a democracy.”
Indeed, he adds, the U.S. is no longer part of Western Civilization – or for that matter civilization in general.
Writing for der Spiegel, Mr. Augstein describes the U.S. as “a country where the system of government has fallen firmly into the hands of the elite. An unruly and aggressive militarism set in motion two costly wars in the past 10 years. Society is not only divided socially and politically -- in its ideological blindness the nation is moving even farther away from the core of democracy. It is losing its ability to compromise.”
“The country's social disintegration,” he adds, “is breathtaking...The social cynicism and societal indifference once associated primarily with the Third World has now become an American hallmark.”
“This accelerates social decay because the greater the disparity grows, the less likely the rich will be willing to contribute to the common good...The name 'United States' seems increasingly less appropriate.”
“Hate,” Mr. Augstein writes, “has become routine in American political culture...reason has been replaced by delusion...The fact that Barack Obama is the country's first African-American president may have played a role there, too.”
Mr. Augstein's complete and infinitely damning text is here:
Though free registration may be required for access, I urge everyone to read it. Unlike our own Ruling Class media, der Spiegel dares show us what we have become.
***
As if elaborating on Mr. Augstein's indictment, Robert Reich reveals why President Obama's debt ceiling “deal” is as big a Big Lie as “change we can believe in”:
“The deal he just signed,” Mr. Reich notes, “makes it impossible for the President and Democrats to launch any major jobs program – no WPA or Civilian Conservation Corps, no major lending program to cash-starved states and locales, no new help for distressed homeowners, and so on. Nada.”
Noting how the President proclaimed "we've got to do everything in our power to grow this economy and put America back to work,” Mr. Reich says “the sad truth is (the President) and the nation remain hostage to the ideology of right-wing Republicans who won't let the government spend more money. Yet if the government can't spend more – at least this year and next, until the pump is primed and the economy is growing again – we won't see job growth. And without job growth, the economy will remain anemic.”
“That's why,” Mr. Reich concludes, “even the stock market is reacting badly to the end of the hostage crisis.”
***
Writing for the website Truthout, the University of Massachusetts economist Richard D. Wolff continues the threnody, describing our national transformation from constitutional democracy to capitalist tyranny.
Entitled “A Tale of Two Lootings,” it is the most clearly written, easy-to-understand economic reporting I've yet encountered, this in a worklife spanning more than half a century.
“The political posturing around the debt ceiling "crisis" was mostly a distraction from the hard issues,” Mr. Wolff explains. “The hardest of those – underlying US economic decline – keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains and injustices that threaten to dissolve society. Its causes – two long-term trends over the last 30 years – help also to explain the political failures that now compound the social costs of economic decline.”
He then defines the two trends:
“The first...is the attack on jobs, wages and benefits, and the second is the attack on the federal government's budget. The first trend enables the second...The first trend amounts to looting the US working class (the media softens that to 'disappearing middle class'). Since the 1970s, real wages have been flat to declining, while productivity per worker has risen steadily...The second trend was looting the government. This happened because exhausted and stressed workers turned away from participation or even political interests after the 1970s...”
Mr. Wolff's full text is here: http://www.truth-out.org/tale-two-lootings/1312292014
***
John Atcheson, a freelance journalist with publication credits that include The New York Times and The Washington Post, says much the same thing in a Common Dreams piece, “The Beast Is Starved: Welcome to the Next Great Depression.”
Mr. Atcheson's essay, which will surely get him blacklisted by the Ruling Class Media, concludes in dark sarcasm:
“With private industry sitting on top of some $2 trillion in profits, exporting jobs, and shutting down plants, only government spending stood between us and an economic Armageddon.”
“Now, nothing does.
“So, congratulations, America. You’ve finally gotten big bad gubmint off your back.
“Enjoy the coming Great Depression.”
In response, at 4:36 p.m. on 4 August (the date/time data is essential if you are to quickly find the comment itself), I wrote and posted what I have since realized is my own requiem for the United States:
Yes the capitalist aristocracy is the most diabolically manipulative Ruling Class in human history.
But the fact remains the United States willfully turned itself into Moron Nation and skipped gleefully into the capitalists' slave pens.
Identifying with its oppressor – "I too can become a millionaire and root like a pig through the ruins of my victims' lives" – Moron Nation then adopted as its own the morally imbecilic credo of the Ruling Class. Not just infinite greed, but infinite greed as ultimate virtue – Ayn Rand's reversal of every ethical precept humanity ever uttered.
Relishing its single-minded maliciousness, Moron Nation next traded off our freedom for a nutrition-less diet of trinket materialism and pornographic celebrity-worship. It fattened itself on the toxins of anti-intellectuality, racism, misogyny and xenophobia.
And when its moronic binge proved cancerous, when its gorging acquisitiveness murdered the American experiment in constitutional governance and slew the American Dream, Moron Nation took final refuge in virulently pathological denial.
Its culpability is no different from the culpability of the Germans who voted Hitler into power, no different from the Nazi electorate that unleashed the modern agenda of world conquest Moron Nation has since ironically fulfilled.
O yes: warfare based on lies is warfare based on lies, no matter the language.
And extermination is extermination, whether imposed in death camps or inflicted by abandonment and neglect.
Verily, as was Nazi Germany in 1944, so is Moron Nation today.
It's end is certain. All that remains to be decided is the means and timing.
Until then there is naught but deepening darkness, die Götterdämmerung, the pre-Armageddon twilight.
That and the rage and grief and terror of those of us who struggled to avert the apocalypse but now – because we stayed here too long fighting for a realm no longer our own – cannot escape the deadly undertow of its self-inflicted demise.
***
Later, in response to someone who implicitly questioned my choice of years, I added the following explanation:
I used 1944 rather than 1930 for three reasons. In 1930 Germany had not yet started World War II. Nor in 1930 were the Nazis yet in power. By contrast, in early 1944 -- despite the Red Army's epic victory at Stalingrad (2 February 1943) and the lifting of the siege of Leningrad (27 January 1944) -- the Germans (and for that matter nearly everyone save the people of the Soviet Union) still believed Germany would win the war.
But the rest of it is indeed familiar, terrifyingly so -- the same ends reached by different processes.
The U.S. effectively outlawed socialism during the post-World War II purge, of which the McCarthy Era was only a portion. The purge began literally the moment the war was ended, targeting not just Communists but all other socialists and progressives. It made "intellectual" a synonym for "subversive" and so destroyed the U.S. intellectual community forever. This was the critical first step toward Moron Nation.
Labor has been under constant attack since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1948. This was the first major postwar example of Republicans and Democrats openly collaborating in service to the capitalists. It effectively nullified the union-enabling Wagner Act. And Taft-Hartley is -- precisely as labor activists predicted at the time -- the death knell for U.S. unions.
Now, like Nazi Germany in 1944, we have no effective unions, no socialist parties, in fact no real opposition to the Ruling Class at all. Nor will the Ruling Class ever allow such opposition to arise again.
Which means the United States has indeed become the de facto Fourth Reich.
What will happen? My guess is a new more democratic Soviet Union will arise from an increasingly rebellious Russian Federation even as its more democratically structured Latin American counterpart is already arising south of the border.
The wild card is China: is its embrace of capitalism a classic Sun Tzu ploy -- turning an enemy's greatest strength into its greatest weakness -- or is it an actual transformation? If the former, the world will eventually unite against the United States much as it did against the Axis. If the latter, a new Axis -- the Washington-Beijing Axis -- will replace the old Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis.
I suspect World War III -- in which the United States becomes the ultimate nuclear suicide bomber and tries to end all life above the insectoid level ("we had to destroy the planet to save it") -- will begin about 2035 or so. Its outcome will depend largely on the ability of the American people to neutralize U.S. nuclear capabilities by rebellion, much as the Russian people neutralized the Tsar's war-making capabilities in 1917.
The postwar world will either be a bug planet -- uninhabitable by any other lifeforms -- or a gravely damaged but nevertheless healing planet in which the inhabitants recognize socialism -- actually eco-socialism- - as the only sane alternative.
Most of us -- certainly myself as I am 71 -- will be long in graves or ashes.
Vexing, in a sense: like dropping dead in the middle of a great epic and thus never learning the outcome.
***
Next there was Michael Moore's “30 Years Ago Today: The Middle Class Died,” an entirely legitimate denunciation of the Reaganoid war against the Working Class that nevertheless proves Mr. Moore suffers from the same induced ignorance of history that so afflicts his entire generation.
Not the least because an accurate knowledge of history is essential to effective political action, I responded accordingly:
In this instance Mr. Moore is dead wrong: the declaration of war against the Working Class – the attack on all of us who are not part of the capitalist aristocracy – was begun by Nixon in an interview with William Randolph Hearst Jr. in early 1973.
Nixon, who had just started his second term, surprised Mr. Hearst by complaining that the rebelliousness of the era proved American workers had it too good.
But the decades of pampering were over, said Nixon. Beginning with his second term, the purpose and policy of governance in the United States would be the imposition of ever-greater hardships on students, workers and lower-income peoples.
Though Mr. Hearst did not point this out in his report, Nixon was responding to the complaints of Ruling Class insiders (including Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) that the nation suffered from "an excess of democracy."
Significantly – though Mr. Hearst's report was carried on Page One by every Hearst newspaper – it has since been disappeared down the Orwell Hole.
Thus Mr. Moore's youth, and not his research skills, is the source of his error.
Thus too the Ruling Class despises my generation as potentially subversive. We remember when the United States was a very different country. We also remember the turning points in its march toward what it is today: a betrayer state, a realm that has failed its people by becoming a slave-powered goldmine for its rulers.
Which is yet another reason the Ruling Class wants us seniors dead. Not only are we unprofitable – that is, no longer exploitable for capitalist profit. We also experienced better times – the reality of the now-forever-lost American Dream, when our heads were not always on the capitalists' chopping-block.
***
Later still, when a historical revisionist claimed Nixon sustained and even expanded the socioeconomic-equality programs of the New Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society, I wrote the following rebuttal:
Not true. That's one of the Big Lie talking points of revisionist pro-Nixon propaganda.
What actually happened was the legislative impetus of the Great Society continued into the first years of the Nixon Regime.
But as soon as he could, Nixon began dismantling all LBJ's socioeconomic programs.
I know this because (A), I was there; because (B), I was a working journalist (photographer/writer/editor) intimately involved with covering or working in various Great Society programs; and because (C), I was a Vietnam-era military veteran booted out of college by Tricky Dick's malicious manipulations of GI Bill financial regulations. (These, by which hundreds of thousands of vets were victimized, delayed my BA by four years and screwed me out of grad school forever.)
So please let's not – on this site of all places – start parroting the clandestine Right's rehabilitate-Nixon falsehoods.
Nixon was an arch-criminal, a wanna-be Hitler who commissioned the Rand Corporation to study how to suspend the U.S. Constitution and – among his other crimes – engineered the murderous Pinochet coup in Chile.
***
Finally a New York Times report, “A Rush to Assess Standard & Poor's Downgrade of United States Credit Rating,” enabled me to write not of the past or of a future I will never see, but of the horrors that are bound to afflict us within the next few months. NYT's text, for which free registration may be required, is linked here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/business/a-rush-to-assess-standard-and-poors-downgrade-of-united-states-credit-rating.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1312696955-LrozwNpUiicNxfq5vwszDw My comment is nr. 193:
Given Standard & Poor's role as co-conspirator in the financial debacle of 2008, the political function of the downgrade is obvious: it is to provide the Republicans and their Democrat enablers with a veto-proof rationale for destroying Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and any other remnants of the New Deal/Great Society socioeconomic safety net.
The savage result of this newly resurrected paradigm of capitalist governance – death by abandonment and neglect inflicted on innumerable elderly, disabled and chronically unemployed people – will be genocide of a scale unknown on this continent since the Indian Wars. Capitalism will thus rid itself of those of us it deems unprofitable even as its government and politicians are cleverly spared the odium and embarrassment of death camps.
And were not credit downgrades among the historical precursors to various military coups in the second half of the 20th Century?
Ite, missa est.
LB/7 August 2011
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As usual ...an outstanding article Loren..glad you are "back"....see you on Saturday!
ReplyDeleteBill J
It's an unusual information combined in a such nice article. Glad you shared it in your blog. Thank you so much.
ReplyDeleteThank YOU, Stephan.
ReplyDeleteLB