Baltimore: the Capitalist Pressure Cooker Blows a Gasket

MAY DAY IN TACOMA – An estimated 200 persons celebrated International Worker's Day with a peaceful demonstration in this seaport city. Participants included the Communist Labor Party, Socialist Alternative, South Sound Jobs with Justice, 15 Now Tacoma, and members of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 120, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 367/21 and Service Employees International Union Local 6. The flag shown above is the banner of the CLP, a new and rapidly evolving group  dedicated to empowering the Working Class. (Photo by Diane M. Knowles; click on image to view it full size.)

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BALTIMORE'S MOST IMPORTANT lessons are being methodically obscured by mass media, which predictably portrays peaceful demonstrators as frenzied black thugs threatening to escape their ghettos, invade what the white bourgeois considers the only “Real America” and seduce its darling daughters, the linked illustration chosen because it mocks the secret fear of sexual inadequacy that dwells in the Ku Klux depths of every racist white male's alleged mind. 

But alternative media is meanwhile working overtime to provide us with antidotes to these daily doses of distraction and deception, and from this aged news-hound's admittedly cynical perspective, its small but dedicated cadre of rogue reporters is doing a damn fine job.

Here are three examples of their best work: 

At the top of today's kudos list is the revelation – confirmed by reliable sources and courageously reported by The Real News – that the overkill tactics employed by federally militarized police against blacks in Baltimore and Ferguson and against entire Working-Class neighborhoods in post-bombing Boston are practice-drills in the same sense the Spanish Civil War was the Wehrmacht's dress-rehearsal for World War II. (The relevant discussion begins 14 minutes into TRN's videotape.)

These drills are intended to prepare the cops and the military for efficient collaboration in what radicals of the 1960s used to call “the Big Bust,” the day the Ruling Class drops all pretense of “democracy,” declares the entire Bill of Rights null and void, and orders the Last Roundup of everybody even a hundred-thousandth of an inch Left of the middle as defined by the One Percent. 

And who might be the doctrinal exemplars of this alleged norm? 

The Founders are clearly not among them. But the list undoubtedly includes Ayn Rand, James Dobson, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale and an Adolph Hitler so cleverly disguised by euphemisms, his identity is (deliberately) hidden by the Clausewitzian fog of class warfare. 

Next on today's news-honors roster is (additional) confirmation that here in the de facto Fourth Reich, any humanitarian dissent is now automatically criminalized as “terrorism.” As was the massive imperial secret police apparatus mustered against Occupy, so is it now being mobilized against Black Lives Matter. 

Third on the list is a report that gives us (another) real-time glimpse of the tyrannical future as envisioned by our overlords,  the looming era in which “due process” will be no more than a fond memory. 

As I said on the associated comment thread: 

Mark my word: the suspension of Due Process – including the indefinite detainment in military concentration camps authorized by the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act – will soon be the norm as resistance to the de facto Fourth Reich continues.

Meanwhile, hoping to ensure a maximum number of white voters are provoked to lynch-mob anger just in time for next year's elections, the Republicans – the true voice of the Ruling Class – are already using Baltimore as the foundation for an obviously pre-scripted campaign of racial hate-mongering.

Thanks to Reader Supported News – which because of Editor-in-Chief Marc Ash's eclectic editorial judgment is probably my favorite alternative information source – we now have access to Frank Rich's exposé of a significant escalation in race-baiting. Prepared for the socioeconomically privileged readers of New York Magazine, the piece becomes vital intelligence when presented to more proletarian-minded audiences. 

Its unspoken suggestion is the possibility the nationwide, implicitly genocidal campaign of violence by federally militarized police against U.S. blacks may be part of a much broader One Percent effort to frighten the white majority into voting for unabashed fascism in 2016.

Could local disorders be woven into another national Reichstag-fire-like scare campaign, thus to finalize the systemic transformation from representative democracy to capitalist oligarchy begun by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and so dramatically accelerated by the events of 9/11?

The historically pivotal consequences of President's Kennedy's murder are carefully documented by James W. Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books: 2008). This should be considered required reading for anyone who hopes to understand what is occurring in the United States today. 

As for creation of a new scare-campaign of Reichstag Fire magnitude, the capability unquestionably exists.

 

Mainstream media is owned by the same One Percenters who effectively own U.S. governance at every level. The psychological manipulation skill originally assembled by the advertising agencies of Madison Avenue is part of the mainstream-media package by which we are governed. It is as readily available to the One Percent's military/industrial vassals as it is to the One Percent's politicians. 

Once again, as in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's classic definition of fascism  (scroll down the linked text), the distinction between the public and private sectors is reduced to meaninglessness. 

Moreover, the Pentagon's authority over local police departments provides a perfect mechanism by which to initiate and direct the violence essential to any fear-mongering campaign. The key question is therefore whether the cops are already sufficiently indoctrinated to give such an effort their unquestioning obedience, particularly to no-leak security regulations. 

Some cops – perhaps most in places like Baltimore and Ferguson – obviously are. 

And there is Obama's unprecedented war on leakers to prohibit disclosure. Given the federal-state-local pyramid of command, the requisite documents would all be federal, which means the threat of retribution would be fearsome – all the more so since the life-expectancy of an ex-cop in prison is measurable only in negative numbers. 

Is this what is happening? Are the outbreaks of violence in Baltimore and other such ghetto-realms and the upsurge in hate-mongering part of the One Percent's anticipated Final Solution both to the alleged “problems” posed by racial minorities and the few remnants of democratic process?

 

As an old Soviet intelligence axiom supposedly said, “once is coincidence, twice arouses suspicion, three times is enemy action.” 

Hence my (slightly revised) comments on the “race-baiting” thread: 

Let us not forget the white majority in the United States is indeed viciously racist, whether as demonstrated by Nixon's victory in 1968 or by its malevolent indifference to the abandonment of New Orleans blacks to Katrina. 

Factor that in with simmering anger over Obama the Orator's transformation to Barack the Betrayer – a transformation no doubt calculated by the Ruling Class to further reinforce white racism even on the Left – and the likelihood of a Republican landslide next year looms ever larger.

Given that the Republican Party is simultaneously the voice of the Ruling Class and the vessel of the uniquely USian, uniquely white/Christian brand of Nazism known as "exceptionalism ," the anticipated Republican triumph will no doubt obliterate any remaining pretense of democratic process and political or socioeconomic freedom. 

Indeed it is at least arguable that, from the perspective of the Ruling Class, the primary underlying function of the Obama Administration is clearing the way for the Republican triumph that formally ends, forever, the USian experiment in representative governance. 

Hence the relentless, Ruling-Class-decreed campaign of genocidal violence against blacks by federally militarized police: the "gasoline" intended to provoke riots and thereby ignite a (pivotal) inflammation of white racism... 

The point also needs to be made that an unknown but obviously substantial percentage of the whites who voted for Obama did so not because some cosmic creature had plunked its magic twanger and miraculously cured them of their racism, but rather out of socioeconomic desperation. 

This is particularly true of the legions of Caucasian blue-collar workers who voted for Obama in response to his (now obviously false) pledge to sign the Employee Free Choice Act into law. 

In each instance, 2008 or 2012, the choice was between Obama and candidates pledged to methodically worsen the 99 Percent's already dire straits. And despite the Moron Nation ignorance that prevails beyond the dwindling ranks of workers informed by union political-education programs, the electorate nevertheless (dimly) perceived the Republican threat and voted accordingly – never mind their votes were ultimately rendered meaningless by pre-planned betrayals.

What this boils down to is a cauldron of quietly seething anger that is rationally based on the Orator/Betrayer transformation but is irrationally intensified by the re-emergent racism expressed in the phrase "we gave him (them) a chance, and he (they) fucked us"  – just as this most diabolically Machiavellian of all Ruling Classes so obviously intended.

 

* * *

“DIABOLICALLY MACHIAVELLIAN” IS not hyperbole. Its ugly truth is underscored by yet another report, this one from The New York Times, that tells us the Ruling Class has co-opted nearly everything into its secret police apparatus – maybe even your own trusted shrink.  

The story's headline, “American Psychological Association Secretly Aided CIA Torture,” says it all. Hence on the comment-thread I put the event in its broader historical context:

A competent investigative reporter with an unflinching employer should investigate the extent to which APA is responsible for making Skinnerian psychology, with its innately fascist behavior-modification tyrannies, the overwhelmingly dominant USian psychological methodology.

Significantly, this began at the University of Washington psych department, which in the early 1970s was the only Skinnerian psych department in the entire U.S., but was also by far the most heavily federally funded.

Torture fits perfectly into the Skinnerian scheme as it is the ultimate behavior-modification technique, infinitely more terrifying than death.

If APA was indeed the vector by which Skinnerian psych became dominant, that in turn would indicate it had been co-opted, probably by the CIA, long before it became a collaborator in torture.

In this context, it is also significant that Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman testified that Washington state (the Puget Sound area in particular), is a favorite Ruling Class rat lab for the perfection of techniques and technologies of oppression.

Too bad there is no longer investigative reporting of the depth and quality essential to put all these pieces together, as the resultant scoop would no doubt reveal yet another dimension of how the One Percent has become the most diabolically omnipotent Ruling Class in human history.

 

* * *

WHY MARTIAL LAW might be demanded by the One Percenters and obediently imposed by their political vassals, whether in Baltimore or anywhere else in the United States, is made obvious by the 99 Percent's ever-intensifying grievances. 

As noted in The Real News telecast linked above, the same unending Working Class despair that boiled over in Baltimore may eventually do likewise throughout the nation. 

The sneering, morally imbecilic indifference of the capitalist Ruling Class is already provoking demonstrations, strikes and riots. Despite the violence with which even peaceful dissent is routinely suppressed, Working Class discontent may eventually explode into open rebellion. 

And now, as if to vocalize that same anger, Sen. Bernie Sanders has announced his presidential candidacy. More than any other contemporary politician, he dares speak the language of the oppressed. 

He damned the $7. 25 federal minimum wage  as a “starvation wage” that cannot sustain U.S. families. He denounced so-called “free trade” as an ongoing disaster that has shut down “almost 60,000 factories in our country...since 2001.” 

But Sanders has no chance of winning the White House.

As to what will defeat him, its name – at least in this space – is Moron Nation, where labeling people “socialist” is akin to calling them sons-of-bitches or bastards. The product of 70 years of methodical conditioning, this anti-socialist bias was demonstrated by 60 percent of the respondents  to a recent Pew poll. 

No political campaign ever has undone such brainwashing in a year's time. 

That's why Moron Nation may truly be forever. It is the realm where the oppressed are reduced to such ignorance – and ever afterward imprisoned therein – they always vote against their own economic interests. 

Hence they do not respond to Sanders' long-overdue rhetoric. They are not mobilized by the ongoing disclosures and public acknowledgments of our overlords' viciousness. (Were it otherwise, U.S. censorship would be even more total than that of Nazi Germany.) 

But no formal censorship is necessary here because the denizens of Moron Nation are so self-obsessed they have no social conscience at all. They react only when they themselves are victims. And then – never mind capitalism has just reduced them to helplessness – they blame only themselves. Verily, Ann Rand rules. 

Meanwhile the alternative press works toward the hoped-for moment of Moron Nation's eventual awakening.

That's no doubt what prompted Reporter Deirdre Fulton to scoop the world on the latest Affordable Care Act atrocity – how the insurance barons are cheating women out of free birth control and reproductive health care.

Citing Women's Law Center investigative reports, Fulton revealed that insurance companies across the country are also “violating a slew of other women's health requirements related to maternity care and more.”

What Fulton did not tell us – though it was clearly implied by her report – is the sheer magnitude of the Obamacare problem strongly suggests three damning facts: (A)-the cheating is premeditated; (B)- the president is aware of the violations; but (C)-he has (typically) chosen to protect the lawbreaking capitalists from prosecution. 

Not that I am surprised. 

As I remarked: 

Given the vast sums of corporate money specifically underwriting the war against women (and generally financing the campaign to impose Christian theocracy on the United States), the Women's Law Center findings are hardly surprising.

Moreover, the fact the federal government is doing nothing to enforce these deliberate violations of ACA confirms the closeted misogyny of the Obama Administration first revealed by how he knowingly gave Christian fanatics the upper hand in writing birth-control policy, for which see Elizabeth Schulte's report entitled "How Obama allowed the right to take over the debate," at SocialistWorker.org.

As for Sen. Patty Murray, she is a typical Ayn Rand Democrat, talks like a New Dealer at election time (she's up for re-election in 2016), but reliably votes like a hard-right Republican on economic issues. Hence to expect her to actually remedy the problem would be like expecting the pope to endorse free abortion on demand.

(Note: Despite the fact I have been posting here for at least five years, Common Dreams' new [and newly malicious] management regards me as a "new poster," hence restricts me accordingly, including denying me the right to post links. Hence (1)-my apology for the lack of a link to the Elizabeth Schulte piece cited above [which is otherwise extremely difficult to find]; and (2)-the probability that – given the restrictions so maliciously imposed – I will never trouble myself to post here again.)

 

What makes it difficult to find is how the editors at Socialist Worker – for reasons known only to themselves – keep burying it. Their most recent ploy is to change its title: Now it's merely “How the right took over the debate” and is linked here. 

By the way, the malign influence of religious fanatics  on USian politics is a story older than the Republican Party or for that matter the republic itself. But the most informative work on the topic remains – at least in my opinion – Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). 

However the main point here is that despite investigation by the Women's Law Center and Fulton's bold reporting of its findings, nothing is likely to change.

And with Christian misogyny turned into official policy by a Republican landslide in 2016, the plight of USian women will radically worsen. 

(It was women, remember – the angry women of Petrograd's Lesnoy Textile Works, furious at their bosses for firing five union organizers and fed up with capitalist depredations in general – who started the Russian Revolution.)

* * *

THE BEST ESSAYS on Baltimore's immediate revolutionary significance appeared under Daniel Patrick Welch's byline in Consortium News and in a Morgan Freeman interview RSN picked up from Newsweek. 

Welch gets right to it: 

“The youth of Baltimore are rising and expressing a pent up rage that is centuries in the making. It is not for me to tut-tut and impose my idea of political organization. The Left needs to watch, and learn. Look at who is protecting whom, who is threatening whom, who is siding with whom. Judge the media. Judge the police state. Judge a white supremacist society in all of its tentacles that shape our perception and experience in so many fields. This is the lens through which to understand what’s going on.” 

Freeman is equally outspoken.  “That unrest [in Baltimore] has nothing to do with terrorism at all, except the terrorism we suffer from the police,” he is quoted as saying.

But for most black people, as for a significant number of Leftist whites, there remains the underlying anger, grief and hopelessness inflicted by Obama the Orator's obviously pre-planned shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. That's especially true now, as he ever-more-defiantly reveals the worshipful obedience with which he serves his white One Percent masters and the bottomless contempt with which he views Working Class people of all races. 

Or as Robert Reich put it, discussing why we feel so powerless,  “The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.” 

 

Reich's column prompted, via its comment thread, an angry exchange with a poster screen-named davidr, who refuses to accept that capitalism responds only to vastly superior force, that the sole former epicenter of that force was the Soviet Union, and that its absence is what now gives the capitalists absolute freedom to rule with infinite greed and whatever savagery they think they can get away with. 

Here is the concluding graf of what the poster said: 

We have learned what to do: break up overly concentrated power; diffuse social goods; organize & don't despair. There's no end point, no equipoise of power, just incremental change. But we can do as much in our 40 years as FDR did in his. (Emphasis added.)

Here is what I said in response:

With all due respect, you forget it was the One Percent's absolute terror of the Soviet Union and its Red Army that made the New Deal possible.

Capitalists are definitively Evil. They enact humanitarian reforms only when revolutionary violence or the threat thereof leaves them no other alternative.

But without that threat, the capitalists quickly revert to their true and truly savage moral imbecility, the mindset of a serial killer imposed, a la Ayn Rand, via morally imbecilic governance. 

Thus the New Deal: born to counteract the threat of revolution, slain when the threat itself had been slain. 

That's why the death of the Soviet Union was also the death, forever, of both the American Dream and the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.

 

Davidr answered, belittling my comment with the snide arrogance of a professional pedagogue lecturing the class dunce. My retort was polite but assertive: 

I have never read an essay on history that contains so many correctly stated facts but is yet so radically wrong in its conclusions.

On the eve of FDR's first election, the U.S. was on the brink of a Communist revolution. Even in comparison to the present, the party was the best-organized such group in U.S. history and the third largest ever.

Meanwhile, because of huge popular support for Nazism particularly in the South and southern Middle West, the U.S. was also on the brink of a civil war that would have erupted had the revolution begun. 

The Ruling Class meanwhile was divided. On one side were the One Percenters who had financed the rise of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany and now were financing Nazism here at home. (This is the same Ruling Class cabal that in 1934 plotted with Hitler in the Bankers Plot, the failed Nazi/Wall Street effort to overthrow FDR.) On the other side were the more liberal-minded One Percenters – of whom FDR was one – who like their pro-Nazi peers were terrified of Communism but regarded fascism as...well, unAmerican. 

That FDR prevailed was not a miracle at all when you factor in his election was – largely on orders from Moscow – supported by the most unified Left the U.S. has ever known. 

That said, there is not the space here to correct all your erroneous conclusions. I'm sorry to say if your propagandistic view is the byproduct of what passes for education in today's U.S., we are in deep trouble indeed.

 

My words prompted another dunce-cap diatribe, including a “sic” on my reference to the Bankers Plot. This time I was a bit less restrained: 

To put it in the most simple terms possible: 

Firstly, remember the core function of capitalist ideology: the repositioning of profound evil – specifically infinite greed and selfishness – to the height of virtue. 

Secondly, the Soviet Union – never mind it was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be – offered an apparently humanitarian alternative to capitalism's malevolence. 

By so doing, it forced the capitalists to ameliorate their infinite savagery.

Hence FDR's New Deal, JFK's New Frontier, LBJ's Great Society and the subsequent Democrats until Clinton who merely lip-served New Deal ideology.

Thirdly, the Soviet collapse, in 1991, was literally the death of capitalism's only competitor. (China, via its need for industrialization, had by then already been co-opted by capitalism.)

Lastly, with the world now and forever purged of rival ideologies and systems, the capitalists are again free to indulge the serial-killer moral imbecility of their true selves – this time forever...that is, until capitalist savagery renders our species extinct.

Do you get it now?

Or is this still too complex an argument?

(Grammatical asnide: "Bankers Plot" – no apostrophe – is accepted usage for the same reason "Veterans Administration" or "Drivers License" – again no apostrophes – are accepted usages, though each is technically incorrect.)

 

Yes, dear readers, my “asnide” was deliberate. 

* * *

DESPITE MY PESSIMISM about the likelihood of successful resistance to the imperial tyranny that has subjugated the land I loved and swore to defend, there remains Robert Parry to describe how the empire might destroy itself by its own folly.

And then a retrospective act of penance by one of Parry's colleagues reminds me nothing short of heroism can steer the proverbial ship of state back to a saner, safer course. 

*** *** *** 

MAY DAY is the common name for International Workers Day. It is officially recognized throughout the world. 

Nevertheless, celebrations of it are banned in many places. They are prohibited by capitalist authorities, including in parts of the United States, where it is denounced as a “Communist” holiday. 

May Day and the night before it is also Beltane, which on the old, more ecologically accurate calendar of pre-Christian Europe was the first day of summer. It is celebrated throughout the European continent, where Goddess-centered paganism is now the fastest growing religion. It is likewise celebrated – though not so publicly – in North America. 

As with May Day, celebrations of Beltane are forbidden in many places. They are prohibited by religious authorities and/or political authorities so influenced, including in parts of the U.S., which with its relentless wars against women's reproductive freedom is trending ever-more-officially toward Christian theocracy. 

Here, as a follow-up to this week's cover shot, are more views of May Day's political expressions.

And here, both for inspiration and cosmic balance, are footage and still photographs of how the Scots in Edinburgh celebrate Beltane.  (Hint: many of the photos are stunning – especially the professional work in Getty Images.) 

Given how enraged the capitalists are by all such expressions of freedom – their Ruling Class greed threatened by a labor movement that refuses to die and their vindictive Abrahamic prudery challenged by the resurrection of the Goddess and its threat to the entire patriarchal system – imagine what we might accomplish if the two groups were to unite. 

Imagine too what our overlords might do in retaliation.

In “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” the book that was approaching publication just as it was destroyed by the mysterious fire that in 1983 obliterated all my life's work, I noted the converging views of socialists and peoples of the Goddess and dared suggest such a coalescence might be our evolutionary salvation. 

To some extent, it's already happening. 

For those who wish to learn more about this resurgent paganism in which material being is not just acknowledged as the substance of the stars but is honored as the flesh of the divine, I (again) suggest Barbara Mor's The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (Harper San Francisco: 1991). 

LB/27 April-3 May 2015

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