Shitdown, New Betrayals, Hacktivists vs. Theocrats

“PATTY MURRAY LISTEN TO US! No cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits or education...” That's Kristiné M. Reeves, right, the South Sound Regional Director of Sen. Murray's staff, as she was confronted by Occupy Tacoma activists Francesca Carreras-Velez, left, and Joy Bonney, center, on 16 November 2011 during a demonstration that braved cold, relentless and often torrential rains. Bonney is the editor and publisher of the pop-culture magazine Wake Up 253, which is named after the local telephone area-code. This picture – relevant in 2013 given Murray's repeat role in the renewed effort to impose even harsher austerity measures on the subjects of the USian oligarchy – was originally published by Reader Supported News as part of my Occupy Tacoma coverage. Pentax K1000, SMCP 28mm f/2.8, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to view it full size.) 

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“SHITDOWN” WAS ORIGINALLY a typing error, the geezerly and perhaps Freudian slip of arthritic fingers. But I left it uncorrected after I realized it is the perfect name for the U.S. governmental shutdown, which is the piss-on-the-99-Percent policy of trickle-down economics expressed in solid rather than liquid form. Thus the childhood euphemisms for urination (Number One) and defecation (Number Two) become useful additions to the vocabulary of toilet-bowl capitalism. Now we can accurately describe how the One Percent and its Ruling Class support-staff of politicians, bureaucrats and thugs first hosed us into submission with decades of Number One and now assault us with Number Two, legions of assholes spewing projectile diarrhea intended to imprison us in the ever-expanding cesspool of wage slavery and indentured servitude.

I write of this fecal onslaught in the present tense because the shitdown was merely the most recent deposit of turds into the reeking effluent of the USian economy. Since President Nixon's 1973 declaration of war against the 99 Percent, nearly half the population has been reduced to lower-income status if not official poverty.  Now with the immediate crisis ended and the Big Lie of the Democrats' so-called “victory” over the Republicans, the ringmasters of the One Party of Two Names  have set the stage for (another) imposition of genocidal austerity  disguised as another bipartisan “grand bargain.” Meanwhile all we are witnessing is a temporary cessation in the One Percent's offensive. Nor is there any letup in the murderous campaign of fear and anxiety by which the Wall Street aristocrats hope to reduce the numbers of those of us who are dependent on Social Security, Medicare, food stamps or any other life-sustaining government subsidies. The only real unknown is how much more deeply we of the 99 Percent will be buried in shit once the bargaining resumes. 

To understand what is being done to us, we need to fight off our conditioned “American Dreamer” obliviousness  enough to recognize that if we are not actually part of the One Percent, we are all Working Class. That and the reality of class-struggle are the most important lessons of our time. Through them we see the core truths of our individual and collective existence. We understand that all the political tantrums and financial brinkmanship around the budget and the debt ceiling are nothing more than manifestations of the most maliciously dishonest strategy of governance in all USian history. We see how the plutocrats and their henchmen are methodically imposing a genuinely murderous depth of austerity, and we know they regard us as too hopelessly dumbed down to ever catch on to their scam. Verily, we are up the proverbial Shit Creek. Not only do we lack the metaphorical paddle; we have already been cast overboard from the requisite lifeboat.

But beyond the banks of that infamous creek there are a few glimmers of genuinely promising alternatives. They are barely more than flickers – and in the methane darkness of the septic-tank existence to which we have been condemned, they could prove either fatally implosive or explosively liberating. We of the USian proletariat, like the too-often-unacknowledged USian peasantry that lives on the First Nations reservations and in the migrant labor camps, are beginning to awaken.  That's why it is time to resurrect the forbidden revolutionary labels of proletariat and peasantry with all their former ferocity and pride. We are starting to understand the vital truth we are all sisters and brothers of the Working Class regardless of gender or race or any of the other apparent differences by which our overlords seek to shatter our implicit solidarity. We are glimpsing the almost inconceivable power inherent in our unified resistance resistance to the punishing realities of proletarian-and-peasant existence. As a result, we are also awakening to the hideous truth the greed and sadism of our plutocratic masters has no limit this side of our individual deaths and our collective extinction. Hence we are now asking of ourselves the same question Vladimir Lenin – a man some of us are beginning to suspect may have been more hero than villain – famously asked in 1902: “What Is to Be Done?”
 

Am I again falling prey to another example of what I have so often denounced as “the imbecility of hope?” Maybe yes, maybe no. Proud cynic that I am, my inclination is to point once more to “change we can believe in,” the biggest single Big Lie in USian political history, and to again sneer at how the alleged “audacity of hope” – the one emotion allowed the powerless – was proven to be the nadir of gullibility. But a tiny voice from my subconscious urges me to remember the eventual aftermath of the original Bloody Sunday.  Then I think of a song I have known at least since my earliest childhood, a now-taboo and mostly forgotten anthem of resistance translated by Paul Robeson into words that for reasons I will probably never fully understand made such an impact on my mind and spirit I cannot possibly forget them: “Far and away the road goes winding/Look and see how merrily the road goes.”

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Advent of Obamacare Reveals Another of Barack's Betrayals

An authoritative Kaiser Family Foundation report details yet another of Obama the Orator's Big Lies about health care “reform,” specifically that under Obamacare, people who like their present health insurance policies will be allowed to keep them.

The truth, however, is that hundreds of thousands USian who were taken in by the Obamascam are now being slapped with cancellation notices – and the stunning, often ruinous reality of skyrocketing premiums. Once again, the only winners – exactly as the nation's most dishonest president intended – are the capitalist pigs of the insurance industry. 

Kaiser Foundation, by the way, is a nonprofit think-tank and research organization not aligned with any of the so-called “stake-holders” or (in reference to the caduceus) “snake-holders”of the uniquely USian business of profiteering on sickness. Indeed Kaiser is considered the best independent source of health insurance information in the entire USian Empire. 

Which puts a spotlight of relevance on a recent Truthout discussion-thread wherein a writer who steadfastly denies he is an undercover Democratic Party activist implicitly calls me a liar by asserting that I “cannot honestly believe” both parties have been equally deceptive about the so-called Affordable Care Act. The truth, of course, is that no law in the nation's history has ever been so effectively smokescreened by falsehoods, disinformation and the deliberate withholding of facts – a carefully scripted campaign of obfuscation in which both parties are equally culpable. (Click on “Show Comments,” then scroll down for my several contributions to an unusually civilized on-line debate.) 

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Theocracy: a 'Good Christian Town' Virtually Lynches a Rape Victim

In Maryville, Missouri, where church attendance fills the local A&G Restaurant after Sunday services, the misogyny at the core of Christian doctrine has again become evident in the USian cult of the divine athlete and how it inspired the Internet lynching of Daisy Coleman, a formerly popular Maryville High School cheerleader who dared complain she had been raped by Matthew Barnett, one of the school's football stars. Nor was the girl the only target of the town's vindictive fury. Her entire family was persecuted. Her brothers were threatened and otherwise harassed, her mother was thrown out of work – and when they continued to fight back, their house was burned to the ground, a traditional tactic of the Ku Klux Klan and other Christian vigilante groups throughout the USian homeland. 

As is typical in such cases, the Maryville victim has not been allowed to confront her accused assailants in court. The charges against Barnett and other suspects were dropped under questionable circumstances. Moreover, Barnett is the grandson of Rex Barnett, a politically influential former legislator and Southern Baptist deacon. The inexplicable refusal to prosecute the cases plus the magnitude and viciousness of the retaliatory hate-campaign against Ms. Coleman and her family suggests – but certainly does not prove – an organized effort clandestinely driven by people who are members of the local Ruling Class if not of the actual One Percent. 

Though no other journalist has thus far dared link the Maryville atrocities with the town's ideology  – its above average number of avowed Christians, its overwhelming Teabagger Republicanism that repeatedly re-elects U.S. Rep. Sam Graves  and thus its implicit part in the thrust toward biblical-law theocracy that's sweeping the old Confederacy and the USian interior states – the connection should be obvious to anyone who knows the sociological underbelly of such locales. An on-line satirist who writes under the nomme de guerre Foster Disbelief understands it well enough to describe Maryville as “a good Christian town.”  And having spent nearly two-thirds of my boyhood and teenage years in the South, where the Ku Klux Klan  is colloquially called “the Saturday night men's Bible-study class,” I too know the relevant psychodynamics. 

Anyone foolish enough to regard the threat of Klannish hatefulness as remote should note the KKK still publicly claims to be “a Christian organization” and is again expanding its ranks,  not just in the South but throughout the nation.  The most recent (2012) edition of the Southern Poverty Law Center's “Hate Map” lists 21 such groups active in Missouri, though none are headquartered in Maryville.

 

Yet despite the apparent absence of any obvious Klan-type connections to the Maryville atrocities, the town is nevertheless behaving as if it were under the domination of a Christian version of the vicious Islamic Morality Police – and this is precisely one of the functions the KKK and other hate groups traditionally fulfill in the more rural districts of the USian interior. It's a terrain with which I am enough familiar to be profoundly thankful I live in a city on a distant seacoast and am despite being old and crippled yet able to maintain a few vital self-defense skills. But not even the alleged bastions of secularity are truly safe from these fanatics, as shown by frightening reports about the nationwide nature of the Christian war against female sexuality.  Similarly tyrannical Christian dogmas  that fueled the recent shutdown of the federal government. In this context, the relentless persecution of Daisy Coleman and her closest kin is a terrifying microcosm of the theocratic assault on all the rest of us. A recent essay by Chris Hedges summarizes the dangers quite succinctly. 

Meanwhile the anarchist hacker-collective Anonymous has announced it is targeting Maryville to avenge the attacks on Ms. Coleman and her family. Anonymous is also organizing an anti-rape protest demonstration scheduled for 6 p.m. on Tuesday (22 October). Not surprisingly, it already has the town fathers in a call-out-the-garrison panic.  

But the story's newest and potentially most controversial development is that the Anonymous announcement, which includes an implicit threat of hacking all the electronic files associated with the Maryville case, might be taken as a direct challenge to the Obama Administration Justice Department. That's because Obama Justice is effectively siding with the Steubenville rapists by investigating the hacktivist whose work exposed the town's protect-the-sacred-jocks coverup and compelled the prosecution of two of the rapists. Thus there is no doubt where the administration stands in the global struggle against patriarchy and its religious and political descendants – a revelation that should make feminists and all other civil libertarians profoundly wary. 

LB/20 October 2013

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