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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