Coup Fears and Supercomputers Highlight New Banana Republic Lifestyle; GOP May Make Obama Jobs Speech a Con Job; What Perry and Texas Tell Us About Our Future

Small-town poverty in Washington state c. 1971; one of a series of pictures I made for the Whatcom County Housing Coalition and showcased as a portfolio piece. The associated negative was among the few semi-preserved in files dug out of the ashes six months after the 1983 fire; the white spots visible throughout the image are emulsion damage due to heat and water. Tri-X at 800; Nikon F w/28mm f/2.8 Nikkor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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THIS WEEK'S ESSAY will be relatively brief, and not because of a lack of material.

No sooner was I recovering from the early, nasty-surprise influenza that struck me down last week than it was time for the physically painful ordeal of cleaning this apartment from top to bottom in preparation for its quarterly inspection. The pain – the fact it hurts terribly to bend over and the corollary fact I will be effectively bedridden for two or three days after preparing for the inspection – is the result of the steadily deteriorating back injuries inflicted on me by one of Washington state's notoriously coddled alcoholics, a habitual offender who, when he rammed his car into mine in 1978, had at least 19 arrests for drunken driving – every one dismissed.

Meanwhile the inspections are themselves noteworthy. They are among the insultingly intrusive measures by which occupants of lower-income senior housing are repeatedly reminded how we are viewed by the Ruling Class: as failures (else we would not be low income enough to qualify for such facilities), and as hopelessly irresponsible (hence not only the mandatory inspections but – for example – an unwritten but nevertheless total ban on gas cooking in all such accommodations locally). 

The latter has forced me into constant combat with the culinary atrocities characteristic of an electric range – decades of seasoning irreparably burned off my three cherished antique cast-iron frying pans, the pans themselves damn near useless as a result, and everything now prepared in them charred on the outside and raw in the middle. Though I never considered myself a gourmet cook, making meals on the gas stoves of my former life was a pleasant and sometimes genuinely rewarding adventure, but now – thanks to capitalism's relentless hostility toward old people as expressed by restriction to electric burners – it's a chore hardly less repugnant than cleaning a refrigerator of contents reduced to reeking compost by long abandonment. My nutritional intake no doubt suffers gravely as a result, though I try to compensate by dosing myself with vitamin supplements.

But enough kvetching. At least I still have a roof over my head...a commodity that under capitalism becomes ever more in doubt.

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Coup Fears and Computers: Life in a 21^st Century Banana Republic

Originally I planned to lead with a story e-mailed me by my sister Elizabeth Bliss, to whom many thanks for a credible report the capitalist Ruling Class is developing a supercomputer that can reliably predict the intensity of socioeconomic oppression likely to trigger insurrection.

Presumably the new computer will give enough advance warning of impending rebellion, the capitalist aristocracy can either neutralize our rage with pseudo-humanitarian reforms or mobilize the soldiers and police to complete our enslavement.

But that wonderfully heartening news, for which see below, was shoved out of the top spot by an exposé from the Justice Integrity Project via Reader Supported News implying Obama Administration policies are influenced by terror of a corporatist and/or military coup.

“President-Elect Obama's advisors feared in 2008 that authorities would revolt and that Republicans would block his policy agenda if he prosecuted Bush-era war crimes, according to a law school dean who served as one of Obama's top transition advisers,” said the Integrity Project report.

The dean, Christopher Edley Jr. of the University of California (Berkeley) Law School, was “the sixth highest-ranking member of the 2008 post-election transition team preparing Obama's administration,” the report said.

Voiced at a public forum earlier this month, the dean's disclosure “implies that Obama and his team fear the military/national security forces (the president) is supposed be commanding,” the document concluded. “It suggests also that Republicans have intimidated him right from the start of his presidency even though voters in 2008 rejected Republicans by the largest combined presidential-congressional mandate in recent U.S. history.”

If the account is true – and though it is in dire need of a competent editor, its turgid prose seems thoroughly credible – it adds yet another dimension to our understanding of how “change we can believe in” became the biggest Big Lie in U.S. political history and how the candidate of “hope” became Barack the Betrayer.

A real paranoid would thus presume the emergence of a new rationale for President Obama's treachery might be exactly the sort of temporary remedy suggested by the archons of Nurd who operate the supercomputers – such as the Nautilus at the University of Tennessee’s Center for Data Analysis and Visualization – that track and quantify our responses to oppression.

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Obama Jobs Speech: Many Promises, Few Rational Hopes of Fulfillment

The big story last week was of course Obama's jobs speech, but buried beneath all the Ruling Class Media boosterism was the fact the nation's two most relevant public intellectuals gave it mixed reviews at best.

Economist Paul Krugman  called it “bolder and better than I expected,” but added “it isn't likely to become law, thanks to GOP opposition. Nor is anything else likely to happen that will do much to help the 14 million Americans out of work.”

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich  meanwhile asked the sort of questions real journalists would have asked were they anything but stenographers for the Ruling Class and propagandists for capitalism:

“Why did the President include so many tax cuts, and why didn't he make his proposal sufficiently large to make a real impact on jobs and growth?” Mr. Reich then answered his own inquiry: “Because (Obama) crafted it in order to appeal to Republicans. To get it enacted, he needs their votes.”

The third significant commentary on the jobs speech came from AFL/CIO President Richard L. Trumka, whom MSNBC reported was in the audience as a guest of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

Mr. Trumka was optimistic but skeptical. “The plan announced by President Obama to create jobs is only the opening bid in a national conversation we’ve needed to have for a long time,” he said via an e-mail to the nation's AFL/CIO union members.

Then – no doubt to quell rank-and-file fears he had somehow been co-opted by Ms. Clinton's invitation – he quickly added a warning: “some politicians claim cuts to our social safety net, deregulation and lower taxes for the rich will fix our problems. But they’re flat wrong. If we continue down this road, it only will destroy more jobs and send us into a vicious downward spiral.”

The e-mail linked to a petition, Tell Congress:   Working families will judge our elected leaders by whether they act with integrity and energy to create good jobs now.  

While none of these three men are (yet) willing to concede that capitalism is evil incarnate – infinite greed as maximum virtue (and thus the implicit overthrow of every code of ethics or morality humanity ever uttered) – each is nevertheless a voice in the proverbial wilderness, a bold rebel who dares shout (some) truth in defiance of power. 
 

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And Beyond the Small Momentary Optimism, a New Prognosis of Doom

Alexander Cockburn  has long been one of my favorite columnists, and here with his customary lucidity he reads the omens in the jobs speech:

“You can find Amer­ica's fu­ture in blue­prints minted in busi­ness-funded think tanks 30 to 40 years ago at the dawn of the neo-lib­eral age: de­struc­tion of or­ga­nized labor, at­tri­tion of the so­cial safety net, ero­sion of gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion and a war on the poor that will be fought with­out mercy at every level.”

“Texas, near the bot­tom in so many so­cial in­di­ca­tors, is the model: Rick Perry is its lat­est sales­man. But who­ever the Re­pub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date may be, they face in Obama an op­po­nent who agrees with at least half of what they say. In 40 years, I've not seen a gloomier po­lit­i­cal land­scape.”

LB/10 September 2011

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Labor Day 2011: Sickness as a Teachable Moment

An abandoned factory, its employees victimized by Throwaway Worker Syndrome, the merciless downsizing and outsourcing that accompanies the capitalist quest for profit. I made this picture in  2008, when I still had Leicas; click on image to see it full size.  Leica M2, 135 Tele-Elmarit, Kodak BW400CN, photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

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A Man on a Bus, His Maliciously Uncovered Cough Spewing Clouds of Infectious Virus, Is an Apt Metaphor for America's Anti-Union Workers 

I am sick as the proverbial dog with an unseasonably early flu, and the associated mental fog makes writing a seemingly impossible task.

Were it not for Labor Day I would make no effort to fill this space until my alleged mind was far less beclouded.

Yes I know the capitalist intent behind Labor Day is to destroy the socialist solidarity of International Workers Day – May Day or May First – which indeed the capitalists have done, this with an oppressive global triumph that has no counterpart in human history.

But capitalism's victory makes what I am about to say here especially relevant.

For now under capitalism how many U.S. workers  retain our former choice to stay home from work when we are sick?

How many of us are forced – under threat of job-loss – to go to work no matter how sick we might be?

Surely this was true of the man who vectored his nasty malady onto a Tacoma city bus ten days ago.

Huddled in his seat he was a portrait of impoverished misery, late 20s or early 30s, pale complexion, long stringy hair, embitterment clad in dirty jeans and a once-plaid shirt faded mostly dull green – his entire being a telling archetype of the Third World nation capitalism has made of the United States.

His cough, which I could feel on the back of my head, was deep and raspy with phlegm and sounded like it belonged in a ward for terminal lung disease. Finally after he'd coughed on me three or four times I turned in my own seat and growled “hey cover your mouth damnit”

“Fuck you, old man,” he snapped back.

His eyes boiled with pre-fight fury of an intensity I had not seen since the schoolyard brawls of adolescence. But my protest had emboldened other bus riders who now muttered in anger at his defiance of common courtesy, and he yielded to our solidarity. A couple of stops later he got off the bus. I supposed he was a back-room employee in one of the nearby low-wage non-union retail establishments.

And I don't doubt his defiantly uncovered cough was the source of the bug that afflicts me today.

But even now I cannot remain angry with him. I know what capitalism has made of this country we live in. I understand how capitalism's new paradigm of U.S. governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and murderous poverty for all the rest of us – has turned the loss of a job into a potential death sentence.

Last night though it occurred to me the man's behavior – his refusal to cover his cough – was probably not just thoughtlessness but deliberate aggression, as if he were saying to himself “I gotta go to work sick so fuck em I'll make everybody around me sick too.”

Which, if true, would make him just like the Teabaggers who say to themselves “well I don't have a union to protect me so I'll make damn sure nobody else gets to have one.” Or “I don't get no goddamn Living Wage so ain't nobody else gonna get that kind of money either.” Same with medical care, education, adequate transit, Social Security – every public service we can name.

Mutually enforced victimhood while the fat-cat aristocrats cackle all the way to their offshore bank accounts – exactly the Moron Nation mentality makes people join the war against unions – a war against themselves, genocide by suicide.

But at least on this Labor Day we can take heart in the fact some of us are finally waking up and organizing and fighting back.

LB/5 September 2011

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