No Blog This Week Due to Conflicting Obligations

A conjunction of obligations and disasters -- the deadline schedule of the monthly newsletter I write, edit and publish for the housing complex in which I live; the death of my computer's printer, which radically complicates and thereby at least quadruples production time of the newsletter; plus a friend's need for emergency assistance with a project that must be completed by the end of this month -- has denied me the opportunity to blog this week. In addition to the friend's emergency, which is imposed by the sudden illness of a colleague upon which his project was dependent, there's also the preparation required for the quarterly inspection of my premises next week. In other words, I am hopelessly jammed up, and the resultant demands on my time and energy will shut down OAN for at least two weeks and probably for the remainder of the month. My apologies to all, and my best wishes to all for a joyful holiday season.  

LB/7 December 2014

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Exclusive: A Black Woman's Perspective on Ferguson

(Editor's note: The following – one of the most thought-provoking commentaries on Ferguson I have yet read – is excerpted by permission from an exchange of e-mails between myself and a fellow writer I met in 2010 during a National Writers Union non-fiction workshop. Besides being a dear friend and a respected colleague, she is what might be termed “a true American”: her ancestry includes African, First Nations and Caucasian peoples and exemplifies the genetic melting-pot the American continents have been for at least the past 25,000 years. She was born in a small southern town, and though she appears white, her birth certificate defines her as “Negro” – a reality that gives her a unique perspective on life in the United States. So does her personal history: she spent a summer driving across the southeast, worked and camped in every section of the nation, and lived in apartments and houses in the suburbs and the hearts of four U.S. metropolitan areas as well as on a farm. For professional reasons, she prefers to remain anonymous. [LB/30 November 2014])

***

THE ONE THING I haven't seen or heard in all the Ferguson coverage is a comparison of the present-day policing of U.S. minorities with the strategy and tactics used against the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – specifically from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 through the Haymarket Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.

Militarization of law enforcement (then via the National Guard and the Pinkerton Agency), the ever-present possibility of provocateurs and the law-enforcement organizations' protection of the rights of the establishment over those of the individual – all are similar to what is happening to folks of color now, whether in Ferguson or on our southern border.

Then as now, the conflicts are about labor – though the pivotal elements tend to be obscured by the fact labor rights no longer threaten our economic establishment. With the advent of containerization, just-in-time production and stocking, and very speedy transport, the unionized jobs have gone – either overseas or to the "right-to-work" states – the outsourcing helped by various tax breaks.

But something had to be done with the remaining workers. Oh, we can start a new industry! Besides the military-industrial (and Congressional) complex, we now have the prison-industrial-Congressional complex. Like the 19th Century practice of giving away land and tax benefits to railroads, we now have 21st Century giveaways to private, for-profit prisons, and we can even guarantee them a certain number of prisoners – or detainees in the case of Immigration Detention Centers.

The reason we haven't heard such comparisons being made is there is no longer a Labor Radio or a newspaper sponsored by labor. There aren't even any labor programs on air or columns in the press any more. And without constant publicity, labor unions, corrupt or clean, begin to fade.

During the civil rights era, reporters and editors, even for the top newspapers and networks, earned middle class incomes. Newspaper workers lived in the neighborhoods where the average Joe lived. Now they earn enough money not to have to live with the hoi polloi. This only increases their lack of understanding of the real story.

At the heart of the Ferguson conflict is economics and education. Typically due to the tax breaks granted corporations (see above), there isn't enough money to fully fund good schools with good teachers for all students. In addition, few state governments are empowered to do more than minimally contribute to public school (K-12) funding. In most states, the critical budget decisions are made by local school districts. That's because most of the money spent in a given district is generated – mostly from real estate taxes – within that district. Thus the impoverished districts stay poor and the rich ones get richer.  And yes, I agree that teachers' unions have fostered some of the malaise in our schools, but that really didn't start until desegregation – until white teachers felt they had to fend off what they regarded as encroachment by "new" (often African-American) teachers.

Once upon a time, our land-grant colleges were supposed to be for workers' families. Now they, and community colleges (which used to be free to students in their service area), are beyond the reach of today's lower income families: a year at Washington State University costs about $28,176 a year for tuition, books, fees, room and board, transportation, and miscellaneous expenses. Tacoma Community College charges $109.59 per credit hour, plus fees, books, etc.

But even if a college education were free, the good jobs have been leaving the nation at least since the Reagan years. I watched a factory that was making tools for the auto industry get shipped piecemeal to Korea in 1982-1984. It went from 50-plus people per shift, three shifts a day, seven days a week, shutting down only on Christmas, to zero people in two years. None of those middle-aged men were retained by the company. Likewise, Boeing is slowly moving its work from the Seattle area to non-union states from Kansas to South Carolina.

And even if we reform the education system, where are the jobs? As in Egypt, Tunisia, Italy, and Spain – where are the jobs that would give these kids a purpose?

To speak to the particulars of Darren Wilson versus Michael Brown, a one-inch differential in height should not have cowed Officer Wilson so much he immediately pulled his gun. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't kick his door open as Mike Brown got close enough. Anyone behind the steering wheel of a car is at a definite disadvantage when it comes to getting a nightstick or pepper spray as opposed to a firearm that's on his hip. For both men, the final 90 seconds probably ran on pure adrenalin. But the outcome was determined the moment Brown reached inside Wilson's car.

Yes, I do believe Wilson was terrified. Lots of people are afraid of large people, and large people depend on that fear to get their own way. Wilson probably had used his height to keep from having to pull his gun before. This time, his opponent was bigger than he was – certainly heavier though not much taller. And Wilson's testimony reflects that.

Should he have been terrified? I don't think so. I think his training and fitness level should have overcome that. Wilson might be in excellent shape for a Ferguson cop, but he spends his days in a squad car, not being a physically active teenager. He needs to up his fitness profile and his awareness quotient. People caught off-guard as he was are generally used to terrorizing other people by their mere presence.

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Memoir: How We the People Gave Birth to Moron Nation

MANY PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY the younger folks I've come to know through recent political activism, tell me I'm being grossly unfair when I denounce the United States as Moron Nation.

But most of these critics weren't alive in 1957 and 1958, when We the People responded to the breathtaking Soviet triumph of Sputnik I.

Misleadingly, a new, post-Sputnik order seemed manifest in U.S. government policy. We would now focus on becoming genuinely educated. The result, the Ruling Class assured us, would be an era of capitalist technological brilliance in which the U.S. would perpetuate its world domination.

The government thus enacted the National Defense Education Act with loans and grants to encourage studies in mathematics, science and engineering. The high-school guidance-counselors – this was in those halcyon days before students were routinely drugged into submission – began dutifully pushing their charges in the requisite academic and military directions.

But at the grass-roots levels, the citizens were consciously choosing to become the nyekulturiny subjects of a realm now deservedly notorious for its savage anti-intellectuality and pridefully brandished ignorance.

Nor – despite the decades of disinformation that have (deliberately?) obscured what obtained – was this mandate for ignorance imposed from above.

It was instead truly the people's choice, a spontaneous choice made at the grassroots level by millions of citizens and expressed by thousands of local school boards.

That's why it is not a choice you will ever read about in the history books. But I was there, a part of the process by which the choice was made, which is why now when challenged I can report what truly happened.

***

From the perspective of U.S. high-school students, the Soviet Union's orbiting of Sputnik I on 4 October 1957 provided two unique opportunities.

One was for planned disruptions in study halls, a “beep, beep, beep” sound that mimicked the satellite's radio transmissions. In study-hall mode, it started with a single “beep” by one person at one side of the room, continued through its width via a human chain of beepers and ended at the other side, as if the little orbiter were passing overhead. Sometimes – depending on the size and configuration of the particular study hall (most were in auditoriums) – the disruptive sounds of bogus passage were uttered down the room's long access or even on a diagonal, typically the hypotenuse of the space as divided into two right triangles. But usually it was via linear progression across the study hall's width. And however it was perpetrated, it was invariably accompanied by exclamations of outrage from the teachers who were serving as proctors and giggles from the students – especially from the girls impressed by outlaw-minded boys' abilities to mouth the satellite sound without being caught and punished.

The other, more enduring opportunity Sputnik provided was participation in a serious national debate about pedagogy – specifically the U.S. versus the Soviet Union in their approaches to education.

As defined by school officials, the U. S. approach was to use school as a socialization facility to produce “well-adjusted” (that is, obediently conformist) graduates who would function profitably in capitalist society.

The contrasting Soviet approach – which is really the European approach (though few dared defy the omnipresent anti-Communist censors to say so) – was to immerse all students in grade-appropriate summations of the intellectual legacy of human experience and allow each student to pursue those inputs to the appropriate level of intensity and competence.

Again as claimed by school officials, the U.S. approach was “democratic” in that it (allegedly) treated everyone as equals through 12th grade. Regardless of one's interests or abilities, everyone was exposed to the same (deliberately mediocre) curricula. Thus in the public schools of Tennessee and Michigan, which I attended from fall 1954 through Spring 1958, the future carpenter, iron-worker or precision machinist had to pass the same two years of mathematics, three years of history and four years of English literature as the college-bound future scientist, professor, lawyer or journalist.

The end result was a one-size-fits-all diploma that, even when I was a teenager, seemed profoundly unfair. Why should a future machinist be required to labor away at studies of literature (save from genuine interest and therefore as an elective)? And why should a future academic be alienated to despair by mandatory study of literature so expurgated, diluted and Reader's Digest-ed to chaste respectability, the “Classic Comics” versions were certainly more entertaining and probably more informative as well?

One-size-fits-all high-school diploma requirements similar to those in Tennessee and Michigan – albeit with minor variations in electives and access to preliminary military training programs via the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) – were standard throughout the United States.

The so-called “Soviet” system, however – never mind it was producing 10th graders whose knowledge and understanding of the world was equal to that of many U.S. college graduates – was damned by my local public-school officials as “dictatorial” and “elitist.” Your life in such a regimen, or so the officials argued, was not your own; it was irremediably shaped and controlled by someone else. Your fate was not determined by your own free will but by a series of aptitude tests that defined the courses you studied and thus in turn determined whether you went to college or vocational school.

Yet selecting one's proper studies by aptitude testing – or so it seemed to my 17-year-old self (exactly as it does to my 74-year-old self today) – was infinitely more fair (and therefore infinitely more productive) than oppressing all students with low-grade materials that would be frustratingly irrelevant to some and infuriatingly alienating to others.

But the purpose of U.S. public education – forcible production of “well-adjusted” (i.e., submissive and malleable) citizens for the corporate state – was surely fulfilled by the adjustments its mediocrity necessitated. The future machinist went away disgruntled, feeling vaguely inferior and thereby already conditioned for exploitation by future bosses. The “normal” student did the required (mediocre) work without question and was typically rewarded with high grades, the dynamic of mediocrity so acquired thence to be duplicated throughout life, particularly in relationships with imperious bosses whether matrimonial or industrial. Meanwhile the brightest of us – kids like myself – became beatniks by default. We turned away in utter boredom, found solace in defiant sex and illegal booze and secret rowdiness and reluctantly set aside 15 cents from our cherished cigarette money for the relevant Classic Comic whenever we needed to pass a high-school English test.

A passage in a book entitled The Struggle for Control of Public Education and subtitled Market Ideology vs. Democratic Values (Michael Engel, Temple University Press: 2000) states the grass-roots pedagogic conflict very well on page 23: “While American school children were learning how to get along with their peers or bake a cherry pie, so the explanation went, Soviet children were being steeped in the hard sciences and mathematics needed to win the technological race that had become the centerpiece of the Cold War.” The quote, which Engel properly attributes, is from another work on education that's well worth reading, Herbert M. Kliebard's The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (Psychology Press: 2004).

Unfortunately neither of these books was ever allowed into the USian cultural mainstream. Each is (deliberately) censored by price – as high as $74 per volume. 

My teen-age involvement in this pedagogy fight was as a member of the first graduating class (1958) at Knox County, Tennessee's Holston High School. It began when Assistant Principal Edith J. Fewell asked me to participate in a Parent-Teacher Association-sponsored study, its title something like, “Which Is Better: U.S. Or Soviet Education.”

I was invited to join the discussion because, much to my own astonishment, I had become something of a Holston notable. A paid stringer for The Knoxville Journal and a photographer, mostly unpaid, for the school yearbook, my quest for news had quickly earned me the nickname “Scoop.” But the biggest exclamation-point of recognition came from my role as founder, managing editor and photographer of the new school's student newspaper.

Though I founded and organized the publication single-handedly, I had (significantly) understood the southern caste system well enough to recognize that I – the “Yankee” son of a “Yankee carpetbagger” (and therefore a subspecies of “white trash”) – would never be accepted as the paper's editor-in-chief. Thus I assured the properly southern, properly aristocratic Brenda Clement she would never be plagued with any real responsibilities or other demands on her already busy schedule if she were editor-in-chief and so maneuvered her onto the masthead in that role. It was that self-effacing ploy – complete with its he-who-knows-his-place submissiveness – that earned me not just the respect of my peers (who later voted me “boy most likely to succeed”), but also the approval of the school authorities.

Hence I was on the stage as a key speaker when the pedagogy discussion culminated maybe six months later in a debate before a standing-room-only audience of students, teachers and PTA parents in the Holston High School auditorium. 

I remember little of the actual debate save that I spoke as I felt: that the European aka “Soviet” approach to public education was infinitely superior to the U.S. approach because the former was intended to produce an informed and thoughtful citizenry just as the latter was intended to produce reflexively submissive drones. But I dared not use such phrases as “reflexively submissive drones” lest I reveal that beneath my views on education was already a healthy hatred and contempt and – yes – fear of capitalism. So conditioned in reflexive “Americanism” was I (and so conditioned are we all), I could not fully verbalize such thoughts – never mind the Marxian teachings in my father's household – until I was in my 70s and began recognizing capitalism as “infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue”: the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth, and more to the point, the deliberate and knowing choice of moral imbecility as one's personal ethos. Therefore in 1957 I argued in euphemisms, terms I am vaguely thankful are lost to memory.

But I will never forget that Dorothy Merritt, my English, speech and drama teacher – the only one of my high school teachers I genuinely respected – told me I had spoken “very convincingly.”

Not that it mattered. To the thunderous applause of the audience, the U.S. approach to education with its “well adjusted” product was proclaimed the hands-down victor. And as I would read in Scholastic Magazine  or some other such publication soon afterward, the same debate – with the same disheartening results – was occurring throughout the nation.

I think that was when I began to grasp the full magnitude of just how truly homeless I am in my own homeland. Which, save for my years in Manhattan – a place that was for me precisely as James Baldwin described it, Another Country – has been and remains amongst the core truths of my life.

Fifty-six years later, the result of our collective embrace of stupidity is undoubtedly amongst the greatest tragedies of human history: the fact we the people of the United States of America, when faced with the most pivotal choice of our lives, decided c. 1957-1958 we preferred the alienated and/or apathetic and/or bigoted and/or frightened and always, always, always vindictively anti-intellectual, cravenly submissive ignorance of Moron Nation to the informed activism required by a functional constitutional democracy.

That – our decision to become Moron Nation – is what leaves us unable to grasp the genocidal magnitude of the death-dealing inequality capitalism is forcing on us. It is what enabled the murder of the American Dream and facilitated the nullification of our constitution. It has killed the Democratic Party beyond hope of resurrection, the story I broke first  now confirmed again by still another timidly expressed half-requiem – this one for the nation as well.  It is what keeps us too opiated by celebrity, Abrahamic fanaticism and prescription drugs to see how Barack the Betrayer has again fucked us all by including in his otherwise-welcome immigration-reform executive-order 400,000 visas for high-tech scabs – his union-busting, worker-impoverishing payback to Bill Gates and the silicon aristocracy for their obscenely huge campaign contributions. It is what keeps Moron Nation indifferent to what some of us know is coming next – that Gates and his cronies, the counts of computerdom and the earls of electronic gadgetry (and exactly as AFL/CIO Chief Richard Trumka fears), will unleash these scabs to further reduce U.S. high-tech wages, now to the same ruinous graveyard-filling rock-bottom poverty that already defines life for the vast USian Working Class majority.

It is the nightmare reality perfectly expressed by an old black man in a wheelchair on the Pierce Transit Number 1 bus last week: “they got them young people so plugged in, they cain't even see what goin' on around 'em.” Such is Moron Nation, now and forever – that is, until the extinction of our species, which thanks to our national stupidity is looming ever closer by the day, perhaps even by the hour.

 

LB/16-23 November 2014

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An Apology, Then More Democratic Party Obituary

On a Bridge at Midnight. Photo by KD, OAN copyright 2014. (Click on image to view full size.)

SORRY, THERE'LL BE no separate blog essay this week. That's because production of a monthly newsletter – I am its (unpaid volunteer) founder, editor, writer, photographer, designer, production manager, typist and general roustabout – was so bedeviled by computer problems I am still suffering from post-production exhaustion. 

The publication, called Community Chronicle and typically containing at least six pages of text and photos, serves the senior housing complex in which I live. It has become one of many factors in the ongoing development of our sense of community and communal identity – a sense already so strong we are now planning to undertake collective gardening next year. 

Hence I approach the newsletter with the same dedication I approached my work as a professional journalist. Hence too when that insufferable prick Murphy shows up to enforce his law (anything that can go wrong surely will), I am just as upset as I would have been if one of my long-ago cub reporters had returned from a major society wedding to tell me “no story, sir; the church burned down.”

Or, worse, if the reporter had indeed written a Pulitzer-class report on the nuptials-turned-nightmare that would never see the light of day because the newspaper itself had burned to the ground. Yes, I am still that committed to my lifetime craft, even at the age of 74. But in a week as electronically disrupted this was, something had to be sacrificed to the Lords of Chaos, and in this instance it was OAN. Again my apology. 

But the superb Katelyn Driskill photography above – of which I hope we'll be seeing more – will surely help compensate for this week's lack of original OAN writing.

***

IN PLACE OF the usual essay there will at least be a another glimpse of the ongoing debate between those who believe the Democratic Party might yet be revitalized and those who, like myself, believe the party is truly dead – though as of now it seems I am the only writer who has yet dared write its obituary. 

Thus the following, my response to a rally-the-Democratic-troops piece written for Reader Supported News by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.  His is an essay that – whether coincidentally or not – almost seems as if it could be the party's reply to my assertion it has been corrupted beyond any rational hope of amelioration.

Beyond that, de Blasio is important for a couple of reasons.

Though I no longer have any sources inside the City's political apparatus and thus cannot say anything with any certainty about de Blasio's administration, it seems from what I read he may actually be trying to govern my home City as a place for everyone and not merely for the parasitic, obscenely wealthy Ruling Class who have governed it since the mid-1970s as if all five boroughs were their very own Winter Palace.  

If my understanding of de Blasio's intent is correct, his democratic resolve is profoundly heartening. The last mayor who outspokenly so governed the City was the late John V. Lindsay who, with his contemporaries John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Robert Francis Kennedy, were amongst the political heroes of my young adulthood.

The other reason de Blasio is important is he is trying – much as Sen Elizabeth Warren is trying – to put a new face on the Democratic Party. Hence the significance of his RSN text, an open letter to Democrats (and therefore to the nation) entitled “Don't Soul-Search. Stiffen Your Backbone.”

Its essence is contained in its second and third grafs:

“As a Democrat, I'm disappointed in last Tuesday's results. But as a progressive, I know my party need not search for its soul -- but rather, its backbone.”

“The truth is that the Democratic Party has core values that are very much in sync with most Americans.”

The apparent question is whether de Blasio and Warren are genuine would-be reformers or are merely trying to perpetrate another Obama-type Big Lie.

Vital as it may seem to many, I believe that question is irrelevant.

The bitter truth is the Democratic Party has always been a creature of the Ruling Class. It birthed the New Deal not in furtherance of humanitarianism and economic democracy but to protect capitalism from the consequences of its own savage greed.

Had there been no New Deal, a Communist revolution would have been inevitable. With the support of the Soviet Union and its Red Army, the revolutionaries would have won. They'd have established a soviet-type state in most (if not all) the U.S. beyond the old Confederacy. (The old Confederacy would have seceded again and – backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, established its own white-supremacist version of Hitler's Third Reich, with the Ku Klux Kross in place of the swastika.)

Yes, the New Deal was – while it lasted – an era of genuinely humanitarian, economically democratic reforms. But that which the master giveth, the master can just as easily taketh away. Hence – with the Soviet Union dead, Communist China hopelessly bought off and the socialist challenge to capitalism therefore nullified – the capitalists dropped all pretense of human kindness and again bared their true moral imbecility.

That's why, behind the Democrats' Big Lie smokescreen of “progressive” rhetoric, their policies are indistinguishable from those of the Republicans. The Republican opposition to the Democrats is nothing more than a clever charade – a means of enabling the Democrats to impose Ruling Class demands. Combined, the two parties are therefore the perfect, good-cop/bad-cop facilitator of capitalism's Ayn Rand malevolence.

Reform is therefore impossible. Neither party can be reformed, not now, not ever. Whether from misguided idealism or deliberate deviousness, de Blasio and Warren are both scamming us. As Audrey Lorde  so presciently observed, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” Why? Because the master – the Ruling Class – will not allow it.

Hence my reply to de Blasio's panegyric:

Sorry, Mr. de Blasio, you're beating a dead horse – or, rather, a dead donkey.

The issue is trustworthiness. Obama the Orator promised “change we can believe in” but quickly became Barack the Betrayer. That makes those of us who voted for him stupid, gullible suckers conned by the biggest Big Lie in U.S. presidential history.

And that's the real issue, Mr. de Blasio: the fact Democrats cannot be trusted. It's a lesson hammered into the electorate by every Democratic president after John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

Lyndon Baines Johnson – escalated Vietnam into a major war while Big-Lie campaigning as the "peace candidate";

Jimmy Carter – bible-thumped away the reproductive freedom of impoverished women, began the war against the New Deal;

Bill Clinton – outsourced our jobs, reduced us to permanent Third World poverty and, via “welfare reform,” made damn sure there will never again be a safety net to protect the millions of families capitalism hurls into permanent destitution;

Now Obama out-does them all: not just betrayals, but the methodical murder of the constitution too.

The lesson? Vote for a Democrat, get a Republican. (No wonder so many don't vote.)

As to the party's soul and backbone, it has neither. It lost both in the aftermath of 22 November 1963.

Face it, Mr. de Blasio: the Democratic Party is dead. Our only hope now is some new party – preferably one with enough Marxian discipline to shut down capitalism forever.

(But I ain't holding my breath.)

***

Then I answered a poster who said George Bush not Barack Obama deserved the “most lying president” award:

We – or at least I – always assume the Republicans will behave like the overt fascists and/or closet Nazis they truly are.

But we – or at least I – expected better from the Democrats, even after the betrayals by LBJ, Jimmy the Theocrat and Slick Willie.

Also, George the Second didn't maliciously resurrect the hopes of a nation – truly desperate hopes given our socioeconomic reality – then literally spit in all our faces by betraying us even before he took office.

But that's precisely what Obama did. He promised single-payer public-option health care, promised to sign the Employee Free Choice Act, and above all else promised to restore constitutional governance. And he had a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, too...

Worse – although exactly as he had secretly promised his Wall Street masters – Obama the Orator was becoming Barack the Betrayer even before he took office. Remember the secret meetings with the prescription drug lords and the health insurance barons?

We voted for a Democrat and got not just a Republican but a viciously conservative Republican at that.

Try as I might, I cannot find a comparable betrayal anywhere in U.S. history.

Obama's smirking treachery – I will call it what it is – has driven the final nail into the Democratic Party's coffin.

Given U.S. racism, his behavior has also discredited legitimate African-American aspirations for at least a century if not forever.

***

Lastly, for a poster who agreed with my original comment, I elaborated:

Reduced to its LCD (lowest common denominator), capitalism is quite simply infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

It is therefore the rejection and reversal of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. It is also moral imbecility, the ethos of the serial killer – literally the knowing embrace of evil.

That's why, when capitalism becomes capitalist governance, it means absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – exactly as we have in today's U.S., exactly as prevailed in Pinochet's Chile, Franco's Spain, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.

The only remedy – remember how quickly the New Deal was destroyed – is democratic socialism.

But now it is not just human liberty that's at stake. It's the very survival of our species.

Either we raise the Red Banner of international socialism or we become extinct.

Yes, it truly is that simple.

LB/16 November 2014

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The 2014 Elections Tell Us the Democratic Party Is Dead -- That It Was Slain by Its Own Lies and Contradictions

FORGET THE COMPENSATORY BULLSHIT the sorely beaten “progressives” are spouting. Forget Lakoff's “Democratic strategies,”  Nader's “people have to believe,” Rich's “change without hope,”  Cherlin's “the GOP is deeply divided” and all the other dementia spawned ad nauseam by the Democratic disciples of our national cult of self-deluded positive thinking. The post-election truth no vacuously happy-faced mainstream pundit dares say aloud is the national Democratic Party is dead: that Barack Obama will be its last president ever. 

 

To be sure, the party will survive in local jurisdictions for some years to come. It will endure in those domains where – despite its ever-more-contradictory words and deeds – the party apparatus is somehow able to maintain whatever Big Lies  are essential to convince a majority of local voters it represents them rather than the One Percenters to whom all Democrats have long been secretly pledged.  But even in benighted realms where Ruling Class media is able to guarantee the continued ignorance of a majority of the voters, the Democratic Party's days are obviously numbered. 

Moreover, the Democrats' death is entirely self-inflicted, though the date you perceive as the beginning of its death-throes is probably determined by your age.

For my generation – I was born in 1940 – the party's suicide began with its pathetically servile acceptance of the official verdicts scripted to reassure the world the U.S. is not a banana republic and ensure the assassinations of its own leaders would never be properly investigated much less avenged.  The party's unavenged dead – for those too young to remember – are President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was murdered in Dallas on 22 November 1963, and his brother Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy,  who was slain in Los Angeles on 6 June 1968.

Others see the Democrats' suicidal progression as beginning with President Lyndon Baines Johnson's  now infamous 1964 Big Lie campaign, which Daniel Ellsberg later truthfully denounced as “a conspiracy to manipulate the public into a war and to win an election through fraud.”

 

Or maybe it began with President Jimmy Carter's piously Christian assault on lower-income women.  Perhaps it started with President Bill Clinton's  dual offensives against the U.S. working class  and against the nation's welfare recipients. 

Possibly, for those too young to remember these earlier betrayals, it started when Albert Gore Junior surrendered the presidency  to George Bush.

Or maybe it was when Obama the Orator finally taught us the utter imbecility of hope by becoming Barack the Betrayer and making it obvious “change we can believe in” was an even more outrageous, more malicious Big Lie  than LBJ's bogus peace candidacy.

Whenever or wherever one assumes the Democrats' path to self-destruction began, the outcome is undeniable: now, in 2014, the Democratic Party has finally choked itself to death on the irremediable tangle of its own deceptions. 

***

FROM SUCH AN IGNOMINIOUS  end there is neither the triumphant rebirth of the Phoenix nor the possibility of resurrection.

The Phoenix arises from the ashes of honorable death. Resurrection – as Christianity teaches, and as European paganism taught long before Jesus was a gleam in his daddy's eye – is only for a Messiah who honorably suffers on behalf of all humanity.

But there is neither honor nor sacrifice in how the Democratic Party has killed itself.

Though it is true the USian people have been reduced to abysmal ignorance,  the resultant Moron Nation is not yet quite so pathetically stupid as to be continuously duped by a party that claims to represent the Working Class yet repeatedly throws working families, women, socioeconomic minorities and lower-income people (especially those of us who are aged and/or disabled) under the proverbial bus.

“At least the Republicans” – or so I have heard it said more times than I can count – “tell us no lies.”

In a sense, that's true. Unlike the Democrats, who still maliciously try to present themselves as humanitarians, the Republicans make no Big Lie effort to conceal the fascists they are. Their ultimate purpose is to make the United States the global model of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else – including “austerity” to guarantee extermination of those of us who are no longer profitable.

Besides which – though it pains me to admit it – we are now a nation in which the vast majority are vehement Ayn Randers, conditioned from birth to be reflexively anti-intellectual, unapologetically self-obsessed and aggressively selfish. Our national spirit – as once heroically proven at Iwo Jima,  Belleau Wood,  Gettysburg, New Orleans and Cowpens – is now evident only in fights-to-death over trinkets  at discount stores.

The mind-set that boldly rammed the New Deal down the capitalists' defiant throats – the humanitarian vision  that formerly empowered the Democratic Party – is obviously banished forever. And the attendant hopelessness so vividly expressed in 2014's low voter turnout – “let the Republicans win because it damn sure can't get any worse” – means there is no possible way the Democratic Party can ever recover.

This is because the Democratic Party has betrayed the electorate so many times it no longer has any credibility at all. Its populist posturing is rendered meaningless by its plutocratic policies. That's why it will lose the White House in 2016, after which even the most moronic of the Moron Nation voters will recognize it as a corpse.

Moreover, as the Democratic Party sinks into its grave, it is taking the entire USian Left with it.

The Democrats, of course, remain in vindictive denial.

At least since the closeted Republicanism and theocratic Christofascism of the Jimmy Carter presidency, the U.S. has been a de facto one-party nation. But the death of the Democratic Party now enables the U.S. to become a de jure one-party nation as well – a goal Republicans and their (anti-New-Deal) Democratic collaborators have sought at least since the Bankers' Plot of 1934.

Thus the now-inevitable 2016 Republican tsunami will no doubt sweep away all remaining pretenses of USian “democracy” as well.

***

MY EARLIER POST-ELECTION COMMENTS were all variants on this same theme. The most complete  are on “Dispirited America Votes for Change, Gives Up on Hope”:

Obama's broke his promises deliberately and with malicious intent: 

(1)-He killed single-payer public-option health-insurance by letting the insurance barons and the prescription drug lords write ACA, which ensures U.S. health care forever remains a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. This is now a wealth-protected principle of law, hence permanently unchangeable.

(2)-He killed the Employee Free Choice Act. This not only killed organized labor but ensured its death beyond any possibility of resurrection.

(3)-He killed the remnants of our constitutional rights. Obama is the most tyrannical president in U.S. history – note in particularly his persecution of whistle-blowers.

He has also, by his transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, proven himself the most brazen liar in U.S. presidential history.

Wake up, people. This Republican Congress – the intentional result of Obama's intransigence – is not an accident.

Nor is it a loss for this president. Now he can do what he was hired to do.

He will resume genocidal warfare against lower-income people, slashing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – and slashing food stamps yet again. He will complete the nullification of the constitution.

And in the process – given U.S. racism – he will eternally discredit all future black aspirations. 

That's why, from the perspective of his Ruling Class masters, the Republican Congress is Obama's greatest victory yet. 

I said much the same thing, albeit with links to documentation, in response to “If You Think DC Is Awful Now, Wait Until Wednesday”:

Only now, with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, is Obama the Orator able to finalize his transformation to Barack the Betrayer, which is the real reason the (white) Ruling Class paid his way into the White House.

The chief victims of this transformation will be lower-income people, especially those of us who are elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed.

While our victimization will be euphemistically described as “austerity,” its true purpose will be genocide. It will be accomplished by the same murderous cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid Obama has already attempted.  And there will be more of the deadly food-stamp cuts Obama has already approved. This is the real “change we can believe in” – the final fulfillment of Ruling Class intent.

Bank on it, these atrocities – and other far more deadly horrors – are exactly what await us. How do I know? I am no prophet. But as a Marxian I understand capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us, including the methodical extermination of those of us no longer exploitable for profit. This is our now-inescapable future.

On the comment thread of “What's in Store for New Senate? Much of the Same Gridlock And Grind,” I essentially repeated what I had said before.  And when another poster demanded to know if I had voted, I replied accordingly:

Yes; I have voted in every election since I came of voting age in 1961. But that does not change the fact our elections are meaningless.

Despite the Big Lie of the two-party system, we are ruled by one Ruling Class (capitalist) party.

But there are degrees of one-party rule.

There is de facto one-party rule, wherein the two parties maintain a charade of “democracy.”

Then there is the less euphemistic single-party rule resulting from the destruction of the national Democratic Party. (Its destruction, now a fact of life, provides the only plausible explanation for why Ruling Class bought Barack Obama the presidency.)

Lastly there is overt fascism – the historically inevitable final stage of capitalism – with de jure one-party dictatorship. This will no doubt be imposed after the Republican Party (which since the 1920s has been the primary U.S. vessel of fascism) wins total control of the federal government in 2016.

Of course it won't be called fascism or Nazism. It will be called something like Christian Republicanism. The name of the nation will probably also be changed, perhaps to the United States of Christ in America or the United States of God. This will fulfill the theocratic intent the Ruling Class declared by adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.

Given U.S. military might, it will also end forever any hope our species will achieve real democracy.

 

Today, recognizing the environmental dimensions of the Republican landslide – which is a victory for the JesuNazi hatred of Nature and Nature's embodiment as Woman – I realize it also ends forever any hope our species can escape self-inflicted extinction. In truth, there were no such hopes before; Obama the closet Republican is as much a misogynist  and Nature-hater  as his un-closeted collaborators. But now the Republican victory has given Barack the Betrayer precisely the cover he needs to pursue his real, ruthlessly anti-environmental, pro-capitalist agenda.

***

Truthout's William Rivers Pitt, in “Reaping the Whirlwind, Again,” brags he saw the Republican landslide coming. “Hell, I called it on the third of October,” he wrote.

But I called it eight months ago on 23 March:

...it seems Obama and his national Democratic apparatus are determined to facilitate Republican victory in the U.S. Senate, reinforce Republican domination of the House and foster Republican triumph at state and local levels as well...The Republicans openly declare their fascism and govern accordingly. By contrast, the Democrats lie. They get elected by pretending to be progressives, then govern like fascists, thereby rendering our votes meaningless.

By October I was already foreseeing the election's results:

What, therefore, will change if the Republicans – as expected – win a majority of seats in the Senate? Not much; arcane, pro-plutocracy Senate rules already give the Republicans de facto control,  so all that will happen is the nation's march toward overt fascism and Christian theocracy and its simultaneous descent to the total wretchedness of de facto slavery for the 99 Percent will merely accelerate a bit.

At this point I must also confess I am just a bit sardonically amused by the great irony the Democratic Party's festering corruption – the source of the lies, deceptions and betrayals that finally fulfilled Kevin Phillips' prediction  of The Emerging Republican Majority – may in our post-2016 future be used by gleefully back-stabbing Republicans to prosecute the selfsame Democrats who knowingly enabled their ascent to power.

In the alleged mind of Moron Nation, which rejects history as irrelevant, this will eternally damn the Democratic Party as a criminal organization.

But given the party's methodical, five-decade betrayal of the Working Class, it would surely be poetic justice.

***

WHAT NEITHER RULING CLASS propaganda media nor even the alternative media of the Second Amendment community dares acknowledge is the long-range Democratic Party cunning that's apparently behind the 59 percent voter approval  for Washington state Initiative 594.

This new law not only imposes mandatory background checks on all firearms sales. It also makes a felon of any legal firearms owner who merely hands a gun to another legal firearms owner – as for example in a “see-what-my-husband-bought-me-for-my-birthday” moment – without first having the temporary “transfer” approved by the federal government.

The anti-gunowner, anti-hunting fanatics who are now a majority amongst Washington state's game wardens are another legitimate I-594 worry.  Granted the same powers of arrest and confiscation possessed by any other police officers, they are justifiably notorious for their zero-tolerance enforcement of game and fish regulations – rules deliberately made so complex, unintentional violation is nearly impossible for the average citizen to avoid. That any of these wardens would mercilessly file charges against two licensed hunters who had held one another's firearms for a moment to facilitate climbing a fence or bending to tie a bootlace is an absolute certainty.

Such charges would, again by law, be accompanied by confiscation of the hunters' guns and vehicles – a huge windfall revenue source for the perpetually tax-hungry state government. 

And – yes – I-594 makes it an illegal “transfer” for one legal firearms owner to even touch another legal firearms owner's gun save under the most severely limited circumstances.

Though many of the state's federally licensed firearms dealers were essentially bought off by a section of the initiative that guarantees them substantial profits by allowing whatever-the-market-will-bear fees for processing the transfers and registering the guns, there is now growing concern the voter-enacted law has made it illegal for gun-shop employees to allow customers to handle intended purchases. If this concern is validated, it will put most of the gun stores in the state out of business.

When you read the initiative's frustratingly turgid 19 pages of text  – which most Washinigton voters were too lazy or too illiterate to do – you discover it is clearly intended to felonize everyday firearms handling. The unspoken purpose thus becomes obvious: making firearms ownership so legally hazardous most firearms owners will surrender their guns rather than risk inadvertent violation of the law.

To those of us aware of semiotics and symbolism, I-594's more subtle purpose is sneakily making real the forcible-disarmament movement's claim firearms ownership is an act of violence. Now because of the criminal liabilities imposed by I-594, legal gun ownership has become – if you're not careful to the point of paranoia – an act of violence against yourself.

The deadly consequences of imprisonment for an USian male without a previous criminal background – that is, without Mafia, street-gang, Muslim or Aryan Nations  protection – is repeated gang rape. Because AIDS is rampant in U.S. prisons,  such imprisonment is often a death sentence.  The law is thus clearly intended to be a fatal blow not only to a legally armed U.S. Working Class but to the centuries-long USian gun culture in general.

But the real back-story of I-594's triumph goes far beyond the emergence of the forcible disarmament movement as a political power in in Washington state.

The movement's strength was first evident in its takeover of the state Democratic Party, which spawned the 1994 Legislature's attempt to prohibit firearms ownership by anyone who was ever in outpatient psychotherapy or even grief counseling for more than two weeks.

That effort to forcibly disarm the public – it was based on the (then newly discovered) statistic that about half of all USians will in their lifetimes suffer at least one episode of mental illness  – was killed by gubernatorial veto. The veto was imposed after mental health professionals unanimously complained to the governor the legislation criminalized treatment. Veterans' representatives agreed, also protesting the measure's disproportionate impact on former soldiers.

However, the I-594 story actually begins a decade earlier, with now-suppressed testimony by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman – that Washington state is commonly used by the Ruling Class as a Skinner-box in which to test and refine strategies and tactics of oppression. (Ehrlichman's remarks, considerably more euphemistic than my paraphrasing, were given widespread local publicity during the mid-1970s, but the stories have since vanished down the Orwell hole, which is why I cannot link to them.)

One of the more devious but now obviously successful of these oppressive methods was the widespread closure of public access to hunting lands, a deliberately unwritten, mostly secret policy initiated by Democratic Governor Booth Gardner  in the mid-1980s. 

The closures, which eventually also shut down nearly all the state's once-numerous informal shooting ranges, have been forcefully continued by every governor since then, all of whom are Democrats.

Their clandestine purpose – repeatedly confirmed to me by two Democratic Party insiders – is to reduce the number of firearms owners in the state not by forcible disarmament (aka “gun control”) but rather by radically reducing the opportunities for legal firearms use – and thereby reducing the number of recreational firearms owners.

The strategy's apparent success is demonstrated at the ballot box. In 1997, Washington state voters rejected anti-gunowner Initiative 676  by a landslide 71 percent majority. Seventeen years later, the state's voters embraced the infinitely more draconian I-594 by a majority of nearly 340,000 votes. 

Even so, there is compelling evidence for an alternative hypothesis: that I-594 became law only because its proponents ran a classic Big Lie campaign, maliciously deceiving the electorate about the measure's true intent.  If deception rather than an overall reduction in firearms ownership is the correct explanation for I-594's passage, the state's legal firearms owners are about to suffer a brutally rude awakening.

These gun owners, whose per capita possession of concealed pistol licenses is one of the nation's highest,  will express their fury just as they previously expressed their ignorance of the measure's content. They'll vote – this time against I-594's proponents.

Once again, the Democrats – whose forcible-disarmament fanaticism has been driving Working Class men and women into the arms of the Republicans for nearly a half century – will lose badly. The result could be a Republican sweep of the entire state – another (self-inflicted) death blow to the Democratic Party.

******

THE COLUMN I HAD originally planned for today, already half written, was to have lauded the activities of Tacoma 15 Now, which brought 27 speakers and a petition of 1,308 signatures to the Tacoma City Council demanding it raise the city-wide minimum-wage to $15 per hour.

Though the council meets at 5 p.m. – a time obviously intended to exclude Working Class people from its allegedly “democratic” decision-making – presentation of the petition and its associated pleas for councilmanic action were nevertheless the highlight of the governing body's 14 October regular meeting.

Seemingly attentive – but in cold truth as arrogantly unresponsive as any Ruling Class governing body in Tsarist Russia or pre-revolutionary France – the council members accepted the petition as required by law.  Predictably, they have since declined to act upon it.

Such is the new aristocratic haughtiness of USian elected officials, who at all levels of governance – local, state, federal – are ever more brazen in pandering to the Ruling Class and effectively disenfranchising everyone else.

In all probability the council members hope the 15 Now campaign will dwindle in despair and – like the Occupy Movement from which it was born – eventually disintegrate as a result of its own internal conflicts.

But all this may now be either moot or irrelevant. It is rendered so by the national Republican landslide, which, as reported above, has removed the last obstacles in the way of President Barack Obama's implicitly genocidal “austerity” agenda.

This means lower-income workers will undoubtedly lose the food stamps and Medicaid programs by which they are now sustained.

And if one is too sick or too hungry to work – and thereby hurled into homelessness as many are now doomed to be – one's wage is of little concern.

The Republican triumph will also radically accelerate the imperial homeland's skyrocketing transition to overt fascism, under which all forms of resistance – labor activism included – will eventually be outlawed as domestic terrorism.

Not that it wouldn't have happened anyway. Fascism is the inevitable final-stage consequence of capitalism.

And as an exceptionally astute Occupy activist named Francesca observed in 2011, “the 99 Percent is (already) terribly broken” – perhaps so broken its organization into an effective resistance movement is no longer possible.

Which shows us, once again, our desperate need for a genuine Working Class party.

LB/3-9 November 2014

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