A plea to us all: an Occupy Tacoma
activist rests with his picket sign after a long march in the rain,
October 2011. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.
*
I WAS TRUDGING home in an
unseasonably frigid surprise downpour, my mind awash in hot anger
and cold fear provoked by President Barack Obama's smirking betrayal
of Social Security and Medicare recipients, when I finally understood
what is surely the most bitter truth of the post-American-Dream
United States: that its governments now serve only the One Percent.
This epiphany was so startling I'd
normally have stopped whatever I was doing and written of it the
little pocket notebook I always carry, a gift from Adrienne that can
often grow an initial realization into more detailed exposition. But
the April weather made any writing impossible. The hard rain of this
unpredicted terminal-climate-change storm was pouring off the broadly
protective brim of my brown felt Akubra, the sudden cold north wind
had already numbed my wet fingers beyond any ability to legibly use
a pen, and in any case the proverbial light of comprehension had
flared from my subconscious just as I was hobbling with my hickory
cane across a busy street, watchful lest some sadistic Tacoma
motorist use the gloomy afternoon as an excuse to play vehicular
dodge-em with a crippled old man.
By the time I got home and was
exchanging my drenched jeans and sweater and jacket for the sensual
pleasure of a warm and dry sweat-suit, I had recognized that perhaps
the most self-constraining intellectual error of my adult life was my
chronic failure to recognize that government – all government
(precisely because what used to be at least presumably our government
has been captured and turned against us by the One Percent) – is
now ironically the enemy the Right always claimed it to be.
The underlying truth of this new U.S.
paradigm is that government whether federal, state or local no longer
fulfills its original constitutional purpose. It no longer enables us
to do collectively what we cannot do individually. Instead –
exactly as it did to the Occupy Movement and is doing now to Social
Security and Medicare recipients – it aggressively obstructs us.
Thus what was once notable as government by, for and of ourselves
(even given its socioeconomically limited definition of “we the
people”), has become indistinguishable in purpose from the
governments of pre-revolutionary France or pre-revolutionary Russia.
Antoinette France, Tsarist Russia or the present-day United States,
such government exists only to protect the Ruling Class, to
perpetuate its wealth and power and to subjugate all the rest of us.
Coincidentally – or perhaps not
coincidentally at all if you believe in Jungian synchronicity or
telepathy – an old friend on the opposite side of the continent was
having similar thoughts and emailed me a long but stunningly relevant
quote by the 19th Century French revolutionary Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon:
“To be governed is to be watched,
inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated,
enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated,
valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right
nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at
every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted,
taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized,
admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It
is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general
interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced,
exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed;
then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be
repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed,
disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot,
deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked,
ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is
it's justice; that is it's morality.”
Reduced to sound-bite simplicity and
translated into modern terms, what Proudhon
is telling us
is that beyond the smokescreens of rhetoric, there's no
real difference between the government of North Korea and the government
of the United States.
The North Korean rulers claim to be
Communists but are in fact an (allegedly nonexistent) Ruling Class
that governs by old-fashioned despotism. Anyone who dares criticize
the dominant Kim Il Sung/Kim Jong Il/Kim Jong U personality cult is
denounced as an ultimate political criminal and liquidated in the
traditional manner: killed by a bullet to the back of the head or
worked to death in a slave-labor camp.
United States leaders are figureheads
who enact the clandestine decrees of an (allegedly nonexistent)
capitalist Ruling Class. These leaders whether Democratic or
Republican claim to be defenders of constitutional liberty but are,
like their Ruling Class masters, fanatical Ayn Rand fascists. The
ultimate USian political criminal is therefore not one who has broken
any written law but rather one who is no longer exploitable for
capitalist profit and/or whose poverty embarrasses the Ruling Class
by revealing the underlying savagery of its Ayn Rand dogmas.
Because
death camps are still considered unfashionable in today's United
States – “O what would the (international) neighbors think?” –
capitalism's undesirables are eliminated by more subtle means than
are used in North Korea. Our jobs are abolished, our unemployment
compensation is terminated, we're evicted from our homes, our gardens
are bulldozed, our schools are closed, our public transport is shut
down, our pensions are looted, our medical insurance is canceled,
our welfare is cut off, we're denied disaster relief and we're
abandoned in every other way conceivable. Thus we're slain by
whatever mechanism fate decrees: starvation, sickness, suicide. In
the end we're just as dead as the victims of the North Korean secret
police.
Even the reactions of the two
(allegedly nonexistent) Ruling Class hierarchies are undoubtedly
similar.
The North Korean commissars damn their
victims as “enemies of the people,” shrug self-righteously Maoist
shoulders and say “otso commen jo so wah,” which is in
their native language Hangul and means approximately “what can you
do?” Such dismissals are no doubt followed by the exclamation
“hiyu” and a Hangul phrase that would translate into
English as “these criminals brought their punishments on
themselves.”
In the United States, which has the
planet's largest numerical and per-capita prison population, the One
Percenters who are the masters of the Democrats and Republicans damn
their victims as “failures who chose the poverty lifestyle,”
shrug their self-righteously Ayn Randite shoulders and say, “the
poor will always be with us; better to let them all die.”
Perhaps if we were to see all this
as clearly as I saw it that afternoon in the rain, we could purge
ourselves of our traditional (and obsolete) belief in government as a
servant of the people and replace it with recognition that today's
USian government has become the goon squad of the One Percent and
will never again be anything else. Then maybe Left and Right could
together build a solidarity based on common grievances and open
ourselves to evolving an ideology that might enable us to effectively
resist what is being done to us.
But that's not likely. The directional
momentum of the USian population, controlled as it is by the One
Percent, is toward ever-deepening ignorance, which means
ever-intensifying subjugation.
Never in human history has the creation
of a dark-age mentality been so methodical, so sustained, so
perpetuated by zero-tolerance methods and technologies of oppression.
After a half century, our ignorance is already an inescapable prison.
Note again the example of Occupy: how the toxins of induced
ignorance – anti-intellectuality, selfishness, distrust, class
hatred, bigotry – destroyed the movement from within even as
government storm troopers were crushing it from without.
To understand what looms – to know
why I am ever more thankful my one child did not survive outside his
mother's womb – you need only look at the horrors of the
post-Minoan and post-Roman dark ages, each of which lasted at least a
thousand years and by some estimates continue into the present. But
no matter your view of history, this darkness that approaches now is
undeniably forever – that is, until the United States is torn
asunder by the baronial feuds of the One Percent and the fallout
whether literally or figuratively renders our species extinct.
***
Real Obama (I): New Deal Rhetoric
Hides Ayn Rand Economics
To strip away the Big Lies by which
Barack the Betrayer disguised himself as Obama the Orator and twice
scammed us into electing him president, it's necessary to apply only
two principles. One is that deeds reveal what words conceal, or as
the Bible puts it in the book of Saint Matthew, “By their fruits
shall ye know them.” The other is Occam's Razor, which tells us the
simplest, most straightforward explanation of a mystery is usually
the closest to the truth.
In 2008, presented as the antidote to
eight years of despotic misrule by George W. Bush, Obama ran as the
personification of “change we can believe in.” A compelling
orator, he promised restoration of the constitutional rights
nullified by Bush, promised single-payer/public-option health care
and promised to revitalize the union movement via the Employee Free
Choice Act.
But Obama's key promises, like “change”
itself, were soon proven to have been Big Lies.
Once in office, Obama refused to
reverse Bush's nullification of our constitutional rights. In
fact he escalated it.
Now, given the resultant omnipotence of the U.S.
surveillance-and-murder apparatus, we are far closer to serfdom than
we were in pre-revolutionary 1774 as subjects of King George III. Our
closest political and economic counterparts are the officially
powerless proletarians and peasants that characterized Tsarist
Russia.
Meanwhile, even before Obama took
office in 2009, he had engineered health-care reform into what may be
the greatest financial betrayal in U.S. history.
Making secret deals with top executives of the pharmaceutical and
health insurance cartels, he deliberately eliminated the
possibility of competition between for-profit insurance and any non-profit single-payer/public-option health-care system like Medicare
for All.
Obama also used his (Republican) brand
of health insurance to further abolish the remnants of our liberty.
Via the so-called individual mandate – the requirement we all buy
insurance – Obama reduced the entire U.S. population to chattel.
We are now – each and every one of us – de facto serfs
required to labor for the
trillion-dollar enrichment of our masters, the prescription drug
lords and the for-profit insurance-industry's sultans of sickness.
By the beginning
of the 2012 presidential election campaign season, Obama's serial
betrayals raised grave questions as to whether he could win a second
term. But the One Percent arranged for him to be opposed by George
Romney and Paul Ryan – a terrifying ticket of avowed Ayn Rand
fascists even the more rational Republicans found repugnant. Barack
the Betrayer then obscured the ugly realities of his presidency by
once more donning his Obama the Orator persona. And once again he
deceived the forgetful, frightened and hopelessly ignorant electorate
with a new set of promises, among which was the protection of Social
Security and Medicare – the biggest of his 2012 Big Lies.
***
Real Obama (II): the Most
Effectively Anti-Labor President Ever
If we apply Saint Matthew's deeds test,
we discover Obama is the U.S. One Percent's most effective class
warrior ever. His signature triumph is his methodical destruction –
almost entirely by stealth – of the nation's labor movement. He has
thus arguably done more to imprison the 99 Percent in permanent
poverty than any other politician in U.S. history.
In 2009, Obama killed the Employee Free
Choice Act, thereby terminating any possibility of a union comeback.
In 2011, despite his earlier promise to walk picket lines,
Obama ruinously back-stabbed all unionized workers in Wisconsin and
Michigan. In 2012 – no doubt to ensure the labor movement will
never arise from its grave – he neutralized the National Labor
Relations Board by the most
maliciously cunning political sleight-of-hand I have ever witnessed.
He filled NLRB vacancies by the legally questionable tactic of
recess appointments, thereby ensuring the support of organized labor
in the 2012 election even as he invited the post-election judicial
challenge that not only overturned the appointments but shut down the
NLRB.
Given political reality – the near
certainty Republican control of Congress will continue indefinitely
– the closing of the NLRB is effectively permanent. This means
there is no longer any federal mechanism for enforcing union
contracts
or otherwise protecting workers from the ever-intensifying
malevolence of capitalism.
Thus Obama again revealed himself as
Barack the Betrayer. He stripped organized labor of its last
remnants of power, giving lethal credence to the anti-labor stooges
who now argue it's a waste of money to continue paying union dues
when – thanks to Obama – unions are no longer defended by the
government. And tragically, there is truth in the stooges' claims.
Though unions were gravely diminished by the vicious realities of the
post-American-Dream economy, they nevertheless retained their legal
role as the (only remaining) defender of USian workers' rights. But
now with the de facto death of the NLRB so cleverly arranged
by the president, the entire concept of legally recognized workers'
rights is in jeopardy.
Verily, it is as if Congress has
repealed the Wagner Act,
as
if our (African-American) president has (ironically) reversed the
nation's departure from slavery and indentured servitude by signing
the Wagner Act's repeal, and as if the Supreme Court has ruled this
disempowerment of the entire 99 Percent to be precisely what the
Founders intended.
What unites all of Obama's
betrayals,
whether of our constitutional rights, of our pleas for adequate health care, of our
right to Social Security or of our need for jobs and unions – what
proves each betrayal to be no more than a separate outrage in a
single unprecedented economic atrocity – is the manner in which the
total package strengthens the paradigm of capitalist governance:
absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total
subjugation for all the rest of us.
Obviously here is the real Obama: a man
who has nothing but hatred for unions and contempt for the entire 99
Percent.
***
Shaving Away Deception (I):
Questions about Obama's Education
While the Right's “birther”
arguments are beyond absurd, another of the Right's questions – how
Obama was able to overcome the prohibitive barriers of racism, caste
and economics to attend Columbia and Harvard and teach at the
University of Chicago
– is well worthy of investigation.
Because I was an exceptionally bright
child whose academic ambitions were blocked by economic obstructions
that by the late 1950s were again becoming as insurmountable as they
had been before World War II, I know from painful experience that
even when you're a male Caucasian of acknowledged talents, no
combination of drive and intelligence is by itself sufficient to
unlock the gates of academe. No matter I had my first daily newspaper
reporting-and-writing job at age 16, no matter my verbal skills and
reasoning ability tested in the topmost percentiles; where I dwelt
with my father and stepmother in Tennessee, either your parents were
rich enough to pay your tuition, or you somehow raised the money
yourself. Otherwise you were locked out; you either enlisted in the
military or waited to be seized by the draft.
By 1979, when Obama reached college
age, the draft had ended, and the Ayn Rand,
admission-only-by-ability-to-pay standard that defined higher
education in the South had been imposed on the entire nation. But
beyond the obvious economic segregation, the requirements for
admission to such aristocratic realms as Columbia or Harvard were
much the same as they had been in the 1950s or are now: you must
either be to the manor born or you must somehow acquire influential
sponsorship by a member of the One Percent. To achieve the latter,
as Obama did, you must repeatedly prove yourself to be
unquestionably politically reliable – never left of center if you
seek a career in public service or journalism, avowedly apolitical if
your aspirations are in the arts and/or literature.
The same system functions at the lower
levels of the United States – that is, at the financial gateways to
state universities and even community colleges. At this level, the
unofficial guardians are the ministers, priests, rabbis and local
business executives required as references or endorsements on
applications for scholarships and most other forms of student aid.
Given my political history – perhaps more importantly given my
father's political history and my mother's psychological history of
spectacular and therefore scandalous matrimonial dysfunction – no
such testimonials or endorsements were ever forthcoming. Thus even
when I was on a dean's list for academic excellence, I was never able
to obtain more than the most minimal work-study supplements to the
already miserly Vietnam Era G.I. Bill. Indeed, without the G.I. Bill,
I would not have finished college at all, not even at the small,
inexpensive, relatively obscure state school that (reluctantly)
granted me a bachelor of arts degree in 1976.
At the higher levels, Columbia and its
ilk, the required endorsers are far more exalted: Big Business chief
executive officers, major newspaper publishers, senators, bishops,
cardinals, distinguished alumni and the like, people so far above me
I would scarcely be allowed to collect their garbage, much less set
foot inside their clubs and mansions.
How a
person of Barack Obama's socioeconomic status managed to pass such
impregnable barriers thus remains a legitimate mystery even
considering his mother's subsequent rise in academic and governmental
circles. Where did the money for her education come from? Was
her long employment by the U.S. Agency for International Development
a cover for a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency career?
Is this – and USAID's notorious association with far-Right
politicians abroad – perhaps the back-story to Obama's own ascent?
The Obama example is all the more
mysterious given the huge number of equally promising USian youth of
all races and genders who are marginalized merely because of their
socioeconomic status and thus cast forever into the cesspools of
poverty, welfare and prison.
In this context it
would be especially enlightening to know when – and by whom –
the plebeian Barack Obama was
first singled out for his future service to the One Percent.
Clearly it was long before he matriculated at Harvard. Who paid his
prohibitively expensive tuition at Punahou? Who arranged for his
admission to what is authoritatively said to be the most selectively
elitist private school in the state of Hawaii and amongst the top ten such
institutions in the entire U.S.?
Clearly, the choice of the young Obama
to eventually be the perfect facilitator of all Ruling Class intentions
suggests a level of long-range psychoanalytical skill and human
probabilities-analysis available only in the CIA.
Moreover, as his post-2008 conduct
demonstrates beyond argument, a core part of the conditioning that
elevated him first to Columbia, then to Harvard and finally to the
White House reduced Obama to a moral imbecile – the perfect One
Percent operative – a man unable to empathize with anyone other
than the obscenely privileged aristocrats he now so obediently
serves.
Which leads us to the pivotal question:
is Obama the ultimate creation of the shadow government that has ruled the U.S. since the coup of 22 November 1963?
***
Shaving Away Deception (II):
Questions about Obama's Intentions
Whatever else Obama might be, there is
no doubt that behind his Afro/Democrat camouflage, he serves the One
Percent as the perfect restoration of Richard Nixon, the
man who (before the still relatively free press exposed his
tyrannies),
was probably
slated by the One Percent to have been the nation's
first true dictator.
But how was Obama, an African-American
man of apparently modest background – a person one would assume
would have great empathy for the 99 Percent – trained to become
such a startlingly Machiavellian tyrant?
Was Obama's initial conditioning
gradual and subtle? Was there then a point at which his lily-white
proctors sat him down and described to him the devil's-bargain he (or
more likely his mother) had made with those who now effectively owned
him for life? Was he told the ugly truth that his color would forever
bar him from the arrogantly white-supremacist Caucasian aristocracy?
Was he then informed he could earn for himself, his family and their
descendants the privilege to live as aristocrats, complete with
limitless wealth and impenetrable defenses, if he faithfully served
the One Percent's schemes?
Was he taught that as an
African-American, his color was the perfect cover behind which to
impose the One Percent's tyrannical agenda – that even after the
most glaring betrayals he could still use race to silence or
marginalize his opponents and discredit even his most legitimate
critics as closet racists?
Was he made to understand how as a
Democrat he is a symbol of all Democrats, and that his lies and
betrayals will thus besmirch the Democratic Party for decades to
come? Is this indeed one of his clandestine purposes?
Was he cautioned that as an
African-American in a white-racist nation, he is a symbol of his own
entire race? Was he warned the blame for his betrayals will thus
unjustly fall on all African-Americans – that the resultant
re-inflammation of racial antagonisms will set back the cause of
black civil rights for as much as a century? Is this another of his
clandestine purposes?
Was his childhood rejection by blacks
and his parallel rejection by whites manipulated by his proctors into
his adulthood's haughty disregard for the 99
Percent – the deftly concealed malice that so
obviously defines his policies? Is this the emotional basis of his
indifference to lower income peoples, of his obscene favoritism
toward the One Percent?
Did his tenure at the University of
Chicago – which because of its economics department should be
renamed Ayn Rand Memorial University – include his training in the
Ayn Rand ideology he falsely denies even as he imposes it on the
nation and the world?
Did the aristocrats of the One Percent
thus anoint Obama as their perfect tool, the man who behind his
Afro/Democrat cover would at last complete their 80-year effort
to turn the United States into a one-party fascist state? Did they
hire him as the one man who would at last build their USian empire
into the global equivalent of a Fourth Reich, thereby fulfilling the
dreams of countless Nazi war criminals? Do the caricatures of
Obama as Hitler
thus ironically and unwittingly point to a terrible truth?
Occam's Razor suggests the answers
to most if not all of these questions are an ominous yes, confirmed
by Obama's betrayals, underscored again by his declaration of
genocidal war against elderly and disabled Social Security and
Medicare recipients like myself.
But why would Obama target us now, when
our prepaid pensions have no part in the deficit he and his masters
so loudly decry?
I think it is more than the money. I
think it is because the One Percent regards us as dangerous, even
subversive. We remember when this nation, in spite of its flaws,
was truly the hope of the world, with a representative government and
a healthy economy and all the promise and potential implicit in real
constitutional democracy. We tell stories of better times; we inspire
grandchildren and great-grandchildren with the possibility they could
bring such good times back again. Because of what we remember, the
Ruling Class wants us dead.
And when we are gone the true story of
Obama's ascent and his eradication of the last vestiges of USian
freedom will no doubt be suppressed. It will become the most terrible
story never told – an unchanted lamentation, an unsung dirge, an
unspoken epic of the brief flame of liberty that o-so-rarely
brightens the endless centuries of patriarchal darkness and how
methodically that flame was extinguished forever.
LB/6-11 April 2013
-30-