08 June 2013

Secret Police Operations Refute Big Lie of 'Free Society'

This photograph has no connection to the story below, which mentions President Obama's genocidal efforts against life-sustaining social services only in passing. The image is an accidental sandwich, an inadvertent double exposure with a camera so old it lacks automatic double-exposure prevention. As to whether it might have been a compensatory gift from the Muse, with poetic or subconscious relevance to the reason this posting is so tardy, I leave that for viewers to decide. Rolleicord III, Kodak Tmax 100 in D-76, each of the two exposures 1/100th at f/16; colorization – to intensify the ethereal mood – by Gimp software. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS precipitated by a medical crisis – discovery I am going blind due to cataracts but may be denied corrective surgery by another medical condition for which there is no cure – delayed this week's posting. It is also the reason I'm filling this space with a commentary I wrote six days ago: anything more recent would be too bitter for public consumption. Hence the following, my pre-threat-of-blindness response to a story in Crosscut, the Seattle on-line daily, in which a local journalist – apparently too afraid of the secret police to tell the truth about what the United States has become – cravenly described our subjugated nation as a “free society.” 

The journalist, Floyd McKay, is a former long-time member of the Pacific Northwest working press and a professor emeritus at Western Washington University. I do not know him personally, but we are nevertheless indirectly connected. WWU is the descendant of Western Washington State College, the last of my own several almae matres, which through its Fairhaven College granted me an interdisciplinary bachelor of arts degree in 1976 – and 34 years later made it unmistakably clear I am one alumnus its officialdom would surely strike from their roster of graduates if they could. Though McKay joined Western's faculty long after I left its student body, I am familiar with his work via Crosscut's coverage of the ongoing Puget Sound coal-port struggle. His reporting of that wrenching conflict seems not only fair but exceptionally well researched – the sort of in-depth writing that was routine on the New York, New Jersey, Michigan and East Tennessee papers for which I worked during my first two decades in journalism but which has since gone the way of Archaeopteryx. (Apropos the coal port, the usual suspects intend to build it just outside Bellingham, a blatant “fuck you” to what is probably the most environmentally conscious city in all USia. Moreover, the obvious vindictiveness of the coal-port scheme has a nasty parallel in the equally assaultive Roman Catholic campaign to abolish female reproductive freedom here in the nation's most officially pro-choice state by buying up all the local hospitals and clinics. Might these developments be part of a multi-pronged effort to turn the entire realm into a West Coast version of Appalachia? Asking such an allegedly “unthinkable” question is well within the purview of the investigative reporter, at least as I learned the craft, but it is the one element McKay has failed to explore. Perhaps he has forgotten – or never knew about – the testimony of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state is the One Percent's favorite proving ground for its strategies and tactics of oppression.) Be that as it may, I was appreciative enough of McKay's reports on the coal-port fight, I turned directly to his analysis of the recently exposed secret police investigations of journalists, part of the (still-unfolding) story of the Obama Administration's unprecedented efforts to nullify the entire First Amendment.  

But I was sorely disappointed; McKay's lead set the (cringing) tone of his entire text: 

“Technology changes, but the basic tenets of journalism and the codes that govern reporting in a free society remain remarkably the same.”

Finally, hours after McKay's essay appeared – I had been busy all day with regular first-of-the-month errands – I wrote a response on the associated comment thread: 

(Note: Crosscut does not allow embedded live-links in comment threads, hence the URLs  below appear as in the original, this to spare me the necessity of revision. My apology for the resultant awkwardness.) 
 
Seems to me there are three points of contention in this story. These are: the nature and motives of the Obama Administration; the nature and role of the nation's informational media; and – pivotally – whether the United States remains “a free society.” 
 
It also seems to me – this from behind my own 50-plus years doing journalism – McKay's understanding of these questions is...well, less than adequate. Indeed, based on the foregoing comments, the one poster with whom I come closest to agreement is dbreneman. Given our total disagreements on public transport – I like most New Yorkers believe it is a civil right, dbreneman seems to share the defining local conviction transit is a form of welfare – our near-consensus over what should be termed the “USian press crisis” is probably an irony of the first order. 
 
The biblical admonition “by their fruits shall we know them” is at least as applicable to politicians, governments and economic systems as it is to matters of metaphysics and morality. Viewed from this perspective, Democrat Barack Obama emerges as the most carefully camouflaged and willfully deceptive Republican tyrant ever elected to the presidency. That he is in fact a latter-day Richard Nixon has been posited by many pundits both Left and Right, but none more convincingly than Jonathan Turley. Here Turley shows us how Nixon – in the persona of Obama – has achieved every imposition of tyranny the Watergate-criminal president ever imagined: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/03/25/nixon-has-won-watergate/2019443/ .
 
More than any figure in history,” says Turley, “Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality.”

At the same time, the nature of USian informational media has also been transformed. In the era McKay and I joined the working press, about 90 percent of the nation's newspapers were locally owned. Now, today, something like 95 percent of the (shrinking number of) print news outlets are owned by monopolies, with lockstep reportorial conformity enforced nearly as rigidly on today's USian papers as it was on Hitler's Voelkischer Beobachter or the Stalin-era Pravda. (Coincidentally, my newest blog post [http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/loren-bliss-outside-agitators-notebook/2013/05/notes-on-life-after-uselessness-the-old-man-with-an-old-rolleicord.html] describes the personnel-office methods the monopolies – which also own or control all the nation's broadcast media – use to ensure the political reliability of their employees.) The result is news coverage and opinion that is almost never more than the approved, quasi-official voice of what the Occupy Movement labeled “the One Percent” – the Big Business/Wall Street aristocracy that, by its financing of both the Democratic and Republican parties, has become a genuine Ruling Class in the ancient and most arrogantly despotic sense.

Meanwhile the cult of personality that now silences Democratic criticism of Obama has again, just as it did under presidents Carter and Clinton, forced the Democratic Party to abandon its own egalitarian New Deal principles. Therefore let us not forget it was cults of personality that enabled the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, the former in the name of a prototypical Ayn-Rand-type master race, the latter in the name of the very socialist humanitarianism he so wantonly betrayed. Perhaps the far-Right's odious characterization of Obama as a new Führer is eerily prescient.

In any case we see the United States is clearly no longer the “free society” McKay claims it to be. A growing number of citizens, myself among them, would argue the nation we formerly thought of as “ours” is now but a modern, globally imperial version of pre-Revolutionary France, with the former middle class now permanently reduced to the status of the sans culottes. The politicians no longer represent us – “we the people” – at all. In fact – note the impending cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare and food stamps – “our” elected officials now make no secret their only loyalties are to the bankers and chief executive officers who are their financial masters.

In this context any discussion of “the role of informational media” is a form of denial. USian mass media is, as an institution, no less compromised – that is, no less a wholly owned subsidiary of the One Percent – than the political system or the economy. Hence the only relevant question is not how the (hopelessly corrupt) judicial system might rule on reportorial and photographic rights, or whether the (irremediably compromised) politicians will enact an effective shield law; it is instead whether individual journalists will recognize today's United States gives them only two choices: submission or revolution. Hence too the new relevance of an old Appalachian song of resistance, “Which Side Are You On” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SB0fc9CobQ ).

The problem, of course, is that today's journalists are hired precisely for their conformity and obedience. 

But history shows us even the most hopelessly submissive serfs sometimes rise up angry. History also suggests the brazen, piss-on-our-constitutional-rights intrusions the USian secret police are now tyrannically inflicting on all of us – not just journalists but everyone in the 99 Percent – might finally awaken any number of hitherto suppressed revolutionary instincts. 

Too bad resistance is now futile, exactly as under the (fictional?) Borg. Whether nonviolent or otherwise, the result – as we have already glimpsed in the Obama Regime's suppression of the Occupy Movement and its expansion of Bush Regime surveillance into Orwellian monitoring of all 99 Percenters all the time – would be a bloodbath of Third Reich magnitude and Greasy Grass futility.

Thanks to the very technology that was supposed to save us not enslave us, the One Percent has finally achieved its ultimate divine-right fantasy: re-creation of itself in the merciless and sadistic image of Yahweh/Jesus/Allah, the vengeful and implacably misogynistic god of patriarchy. Now as a result the USian Fourth Reich is truly omnipotent and eternal – that is, until the Mother of All Gods blows the whistle on our entire species. 

LB/7 June 2013

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