FBI Probes Steubenville Rape-Case Hero as Obama's War on Whistleblowers Expands into Local Government Issues

Occupy Tacoma demonstrators, 4 November 2011. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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IN THE MOST disturbing demonstration yet of the magnitude of President Barack Obama's promise-breaking war on the public's right to know, its campaigns of fear and intimidation have been expanded into the affairs of local governments. 

This newest and most dramatic escalation of the assault on the First Amendment begun by President George Bush via the Patriot Act is revealed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's targeting of Deric Lostutter, the Anonymous “hacker” who exposed the perpetrators of the now-infamous Steubenville, Ohio rape case. 

But the USian Left has, as of today (21 June 2013), remained stubbornly silent about the significance of federal entry into the Steubenville case. Not even ThinkProgress (linked above) had dared report on its broader meaning – that Obama's effort to suppress public scrutiny of government has no jurisdictional limits. Nor have the two petition sites that rallied to Lostutter's defense, UltraViolet.org and Watchdog.net.

 

The perplexing silence in response to this newest expansion of anti-First-Amendment warfare is almost certainly a measure of how the so-called Left – which ideologically would be considered middle-Right anywhere else in the industrial world – is still gagged by its lingering sense of obligation to protect the Democrat who is also the nation's first African-American president. Never mind notably Left-leaning constitutional experts already label Obama “worse than Nixon.” 

Meanwhile two of the Steubenville rapists – high school football stars whose arrogance reflected the cultoid view athletes are above the law – have each gotten two-year sentences in juvenile penitentiaries. 

But Lostutter – if the FBI continues to prosecute him – is facing 10 years in adult federal prison. For a male without prior criminal experience, this is probably a death sentence. Without Mafia affiliation or gang protection he would be repeatedly raped and most likely infected with AIDS. Thus, ironically, the hero in the Steubenville case is confronted by horrors infinitely worse than those suffered by the victim he protected. 

There's another irony too. While feminists have tried for years to make rape a federal crime – thus to bypass misogynistic local governments in much the same way federal civil rights legislation bypassed the racist governments of a half century ago – they have failed abysmally. Meanwhile, under Obama, it has become a federal felony to make a rapist's crimes public or to expose a local government's efforts to cover them up.

The message is clear: Lostutter – or any other citizen activist or official who courageously exposes secret wrongdoing – can expect the same merciless treatment Barack's federales are meting out to John Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Edward Snowdon and PFC Bradley Manning. 

Nor are the victims of Obama's anti-First-Amendment blitzkrieg limited to government officials, soldiers and citizen activists. Working journalists are now also under attack, not just in the Associated Press and Fox News incidents but on a much broader front. New assaults are reported almost every day by the website Photography Is Not A Crime  or PINAC. As I posted there on 14 June: 

I speak from experience when I say it cannot be an accident this sort of thing is happening throughout the United States. I covered cops during a journalism career that spanned half a century -- police officers and detectives in New York City and New Jersey as well as in Tennessee and Washington state.

While there are probably a few malfeasants in any given department, most cops are dedicated civil servants performing a dangerous, difficult job in obedience to established law and departmental regulations. The key word here is of course "obedience" -- specifically the fact the cops would not be waging war on photographers (and on the working press in general) had they not been ordered to do so.

Moreover, the nation-wide character of this war against public scrutiny of police activities -- and a war is precisely what it is -- indicates the existence of a nation-wide (and probably secret) directive mandating the suppression of all such scrutiny. This would be a logical precursor to the imposition of the zero-tolerance dictatorship long feared by political dissidents of both Rightist and Leftist persuasions...

 

That I was immediately denounced as “tinfoil behatted” by another poster suggests the site has already been infiltrated by government operatives, which should surprise no one in the maximum-surveillance despotism the U.S. had become. Quoth the late Lev Bronstein: “In any gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.” And whether we are dissidents exercising our (former) constitutional right to protest or members of the Working Press merely trying to do the jobs we were hired to do, the government now considers all of us to be revolutionaries – or in the parlance of the Department of Homeland Security, “terrorists.” 

Such is – how many times must I say it? – the new paradigm of USian governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

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Longtime readers who suspect they detect in the above text a subtle but profound change in my attitude toward current events are indeed correct. I am back, as it were, from a harrowing of hell, though whether I will prove stronger for the experience remains to be seen.
 

Two years of dreadful events had reduced me to a nadir of political and socioeconomic despair such as I have never known. It was so deep – “the darkness here under the Obama Bush,” as I many times described it – it had prompted me to begin turning this blog into little more than a journal of geriatric musings. 

Wretchedness seemed the order of the day. I had ridden with Occupy in its skyrocketing autumnal ascent to defiant resistance and its equally sudden late-winter collapse into factionalism and submission. I had allowed myself to be frightened away from alternative presidential candidates by the One Percent's brandishing of its Romney-Ryan assault gun and the Republican threats to Social Security, Medicare and women's reproductive freedom. I had been reduced to wallowing once more in the imbecility of hope and squandering my ballot on a Democrat who had already proven himself nearly as fascistic as his opponent. I had then watched his predictable but nevertheless breathtakingly malicious post-electoral re-transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer. No, I was not surprised; I had long ago acknowledged the (now-obvious) seizure of our former “government by the people” by a malevolent plutocracy bent on suppressing all opposition to its Ayn Rand variant of fascism. And now it seemed I was emotionally and intellectually paralyzed by the resultant combination of sadness, anger and disgust.

There was guilt, too, and a profound sense of failure as well. Newspapers, for my generation, were a base from which those of us who were of Working Class or déclassé origins and thus denied the privileges of caste and credentials might nevertheless occasionally succeed in improving the human condition. It was the old traditional Boy Scout mandate – leave the campsite in better condition than you found it – borne into the adult world of politics and economics. And I dare say it was a powerful motive shared in those days by nearly all of of us who took up the craft of journalism – surely all of us who stayed with it after we learned journalism is not just a job but a (very demanding) way of life. Yet now it seemed it had been all for nothing. We failed – I failed – and the proof for our failures was everywhere we looked, in collapsed bridges and closed libraries and shut-down transit systems and boarded-up schools, but most of all in the reproachful eyes of people who were jobless and foreclosed and evicted and homeless and unjustly imprisoned. 

As if that were not depressing enough, now in the outrages committed by the National Security Agency I saw confirmed beyond argument the plutocracy's glaring rule-the-world ambition, the terrible truth revealed by exposure of NSA's global surveillance network. The conquest-driven mandates for the military and police to have immediately actionable intelligence leave no doubt as to the network's aggressive purpose. It is the vital precursor to imposition and perpetuation of an empire literally as big as the planet – more ambitious, more powerful than anything in any former conqueror's dreams. It is therefore already the most oppressive apparatus in human experience. 

In all probability this new imperialism is the ultimate expression of “the secret (Christian) fundamentalism at the heart of American power” (for which see Jeff Sharlet's The Family). It is thus already an empire deliberately shaped, as man himself is said to be, in the patriarchal, zero-tolerance image of the god of eternal damnation, the most sadistic deity ever conceived. Already it is imposing theocracy at home.  And already it possesses powers hitherto reckoned as divine, including a Sodom-and-Gomorrah, “destroy-the-village-to-save-it” vengefulness that literally has no limit. Speak out against it, you're forever in its book of the damned; speak out effectively, you're dead. (That clearly was what befell Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton and Karen Silkwood. It was probably the doom of Sen. Paul Wellstone and his entire family. Hence I cannot but wonder if Michael Hastings  met a similar fate.) 

I've also had plenty of personal troubles during the past two years. Indeed it often seemed I was being stripped of all the (few) remnants of my selfhood. The most recent such trauma was the discovery I am going blind – and the cataract surgery that could restore my vision may be proscribed by other medical conditions. The question will not be resolved until mid-July – and I am not good at coping with prolonged uncertainty. Hence, whether personally or politically, I have learned to assume the worst. It is the only defense against the anguish of shattered optimism. That was the great lesson taught me in 1983, when the strong likelihood my book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” would at last achieve mainstream publication had raised my expectations to their all-time high just before a house-fire brought them to their all-time low, not only destroying the manuscript and all the rest of my life's work but obliterating all my journalistic ambitions. Now at age 73 what mattered was not recognition (which to be blunt is meaningful only when you're young enough it gets you laid) – but rather the quest for some comforting sense of having made a positive difference, however small, in the human condition: that is, of having not lived entirely in vain and to no meaningful purpose.  As I admitted in a letter to a friend on the night of 15 June, “it seems the one psychological constant of my old age is acceptance of my worthlessness, recognition of the infinitely bitter truth that nearly all my dreams, all my goals and aspirations and wishes, were never more than grandiosities.” 

Then the very next day I read a Truthout book review entitled “The Structural Genocide That Is Capitalism.” When I posted a comment on the associated thread,  I was still caught in the mental miasma that had been mine since the end of Occupy:

Mr. (Garry) Leech (the author of Capitalism: a Structural Genocide) argues much as I have for the past five years. Though I wonder if – caught up as he is in legalistic debates – he has allowed himself to see the (to me clear and obvious) progression from patriarchy to male gods to the one male god of Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), thence to capitalism and finally to capitalism's logical fulfillment in fascism, our Führer who art in heaven or on the chief executive officer's throne, whether as expounded by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet or Ayn Rand.

In this context, the alleged excesses of socialism -- including the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (which is better stated as dictatorship by and of the proletariat) -- make perfect sense. It is the vital surgery necessary to excise individual greed and moral imbecility, the psychological cancers that ensure capitalism's continuity and most especially fulfillment of its genocidal mandate.

Indeed what has killed socialism, probably forever, is not any intrinsic ideological or conceptual weakness. It is rather the inability of socialist governments to adequately defend their constituents against the ultimate incentives to greed and moral imbecility provided by capitalist propaganda. These incentives not only destroyed the Soviet Union and co-opted China; they are also ensuring the destruction of our own species (and most life on this planet) in the now-looming apocalypse of nuclear war and/or environmental collapse.

Given these givens, perhaps the most useful metaphor is to think of patriarchy, and thus of its direct descendant capitalism, as the global equivalent of the smallpox-infected blankets by which Europeans weakened the First Nations people of North America to prepare them for genocidal conquest.

A few hours later, I responded to a relevant question by another thread-contributor: 

As far as I know, the only qualitative difference between Asiatic capitalism and Occidental capitalism is how the latter variety requires its local Ruling Class to manufacture illusions of consent. This (rapidly vanishing) pseudo-democratic process is seemingly a relic of lingering traditions that apparently date from the earliest, presumably matrifocal (if not actually matriarchal) tribal societies. Like charity and justice, these are among the ancient mores patriarchal religion was unable to co-opt or suppress, but which advertising has now effectively nullified. With or without religion, both types of capitalism are ultimately dependent on patriarchy – that is, on the class hierarchies and definitions of property and success unique to patriarchy. Thus the rejection of patriarchal religion is not, by itself, indicative of real change; what must be rejected is the entire ideology of male supremacy. 

 

Feminism has amassed compelling evidence that – just as capitalism is a logical extension of patriarchy, so was what might be termed tribal proto-communism a logical extension of matriarchy. Unfortunately all such information and evidence is methodically suppressed in the United States, where feminism has tragically acquired the same Ayn Rand taint that infects the broader society. But elsewhere there is growing recognition the world-wide dispersion of various ancient trade goods suggests the existence of one or more genuinely global trading commonwealths that apparently functioned for almost unimaginably long periods of time – a thousand years or more – without the slavery and genocide necessitated by capitalism or its patriarchal forebears. 

 

Returning for a moment to the Occidental necessity for the illusion of democratic process, the original fascists' rejection of that need was perhaps the real underlying issue in why the Western allies declared war on the Axis. Nazism, and to a slightly lesser degree fascism in Italy and Spain, discarded all pretense of humanitarianism and revealed capitalism for the infinite savagery it truly is, a development that was probably fully understood only by a few Soviet intellectuals. (Indeed – particularly given the interest in ancient societies exhibited by Engels – it is at least arguable modern-day communism was an effort to restore our species' collective sanity by re-establishing the communal ethos of the tribal world.) In any case, the Western allies were not ready for the glaring revelations implicit in fascism merely because their populations, ourselves included, had not yet been sufficiently conditioned in the requisite slave mentality.

It was commentary of an intensity I had not been able to write for some time. (In retrospect, my chief self-criticism is I did not note how the tacit support of fascism in Spain by the U.S. and its allies proves the point I made in its closing paragraph.) In any case, by the next day my subconscious had finished digesting the significance of Leech's message – at least his message as understood by book-reviewer Javier Sethness – and again I wrote to my friend, this time with a very different tone:

“There has been a rather strange and entirely unexpected turn of events apropos what I said about (worthlessness)...That a mainstream Leftist author  has written a book on (the genocidal consequences of capitalism) and thus achieved intellectual immortality by its publication – never mind I am not credited in the bibliography – confirms and vindicates what has been my main point of argument since at least 2008, essentially that Nazism (and fascism in general) is not an aberration of capitalism but is instead its logical fulfillment...Now though by this book, Capitalism: a Structural Genocide, I am not just vindicated but absolved of my despair...The book proves what I was doing IS important. Hence, and instead of the recent acts of abandonment to which my blog bears witness, I will take up the fight again, first by abjuring my own acts of hopelessness, next by reading the book, finally by resuming the verbal warfare for which I seem, after all,  to yet have some proven talent.”

Thus in one sense I am restored, though in nearly every other sense I remain the same. I still doubt our species' capacity to survive its self-inflicted apocalypse – verily our patriarchal hatred and contempt of Nature has brought down upon us the implacable wrath of Gaia, the Goddess, the one deity (if indeed there are any deities at all), the denial of whom is not just death but extinction. I still believe the present-day Ruling Class is omnipotent, protected by its technology from any possibility of overthrow or even reform. But I also recognize what a huge conceptual breakthrough Leech has made – a breakthrough without which, as I recognized years ago, any effort to build a sustaining human society is doomed. In this context, the fact I am prohibited by caste from ever sharing in his intellectual triumph is irrelevant. Perhaps best of all, Leech has ended my rejection of what might be termed the wild-card factor – history's penchant for sometimes dealing improbable hands – which until now I believed had been nullified forever by the One Percent's technological superiority. But now again I think of Petrograd, 1917, where so-called “conventional (Ruling Class) wisdom” yet supposed Tsardom was forever – until a demonstration by the women of the Lesnoy Trextile Works grew into the February Revolution (8 March by today's calendar). I also think of Paris on 14 July 1789, the storming of the Bastille. Most of all I think of Concord, Massachusetts on 19 April 1775, and an event of which there has been no better reporter than Ralph Waldo Emerson:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag unfurled to April's breeze,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Make no mistake; I am not advocating violent revolution. Indeed I believe it would be suicide. The fate of Occupy proves the government will mercilessly suppress any revolution whether peaceful or violent, the only difference being the weapons it will use: truncheons and pepper gas against the former; small-arms ammunition, napalm, white phosphorous and possibly even tactical nukes against the latter. And of course I am afraid; I already fear I have spoken too critically. In these terrible hard times, anyone who is not afraid is a fool. Given the dreadful reality of government by, for and of the One Percent and its lethal hostility toward all of us who dwell below the salt – survival itself has become a revolutionary act.

LB/19-21 June 2013

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