(My
apology for the tardiness of this week's column. As does the second
week of every month, this past week belonged to the editing, writing and
production of the eight-page monthly newsletter I prepare for the
51-unit senior housing facility in which I reside. Due to technical
challenges, this month's issue required a much more extended effort than
usual, which radically diminished the time I could devote to OAN.)
***
COULD IT BE our capitalist overlords have secretly acquired incontrovertible proof the struggle against global warming
is already lost? Is that the terrible secret underlying the One
Percent's unprecedented orgy of greed ? Is that why their political
vassals refuse to unite in a common front against what increasingly
looms as the greatest threat to human survival in our species' 200,000-year history?
To understand what prompts me to ask such forbidden questions, it is essential we look with brutal honesty at present-day realpolitik. To do so we must set
aside our habits of denial and fantasy and wishful thinking and fear
and neediness and despair long enough to acknowledge what actually
obtains.
Our entire planet has fallen under capitalist control. It is rule so absolute, the capitalists sooner or later always get what they demand, most recently the environmentally suicidal right to drill for oil in the Arctic.
Nor
does capitalism tolerate any alternatives to its morally imbecilic
ideology of infinite greed as the ultimate human virtue. Capitalism
defeated and destroyed the Soviet Union by deluging its people with
propaganda intended to inflame their greed and selfishness. The Russian
successor state is so weakened, President Obama could in effect spit in the faces of all its people
– maliciously dishonoring the epic heroism of their grandfathers and
grandmothers who, at the cost of as many as 43.3 million dead, literally
saved the world from Nazi Germany. Capitalism also co-opted the
People's Republic of China. And unless its rulers are employing a
long-range Sun Tzu strategy,
China too is but another satrapy of Wall Street. As a result there is
no longer any force on this planet strong enough to compel the
capitalists to restrain their limitless savagery.
All
this happened because the Wall Street One Percent commands the military
and economic might of the United States and uses it to seize
unprecedented global hegemony. The resultant empire subjugates all the
inhabitants of Earth beneath the zero-tolerance mandates of the One
Percenters and their political vassals – moral imbeciles whose sole
purpose is the fulfillment of their own greed. They are reducing the
entire planet to the high-tech version of an antebellum slave
plantation. Already they rule the world as their own electronic concentration camp. They tyrannize every nation on earth.
In
the context of these events, the claim by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice” is proven to be the biggest Big Lie of all time. Indeed history
– at least history since the advent of patriarchy about 5,000 years ago
– teaches us the opposite is true. Interludes of justice are but rare
and fleeting sparks in a vast and seemingly endless darkness. Clearly,
what “the arc of the moral universe” bends toward is not the collective
good of economic democracy and “liberty and justice for all” but the
absolute evil of Ayn Rand totalitarianism and its agenda of enslavement
for all save the most ruthlessly greedy despots.
That's
why, of all humanity's ever-more-wantonly discarded virtues, justice
remains the most elusive. It is routinely betrayed even by those
societies which proclaimed the quest for justice as their reason for
being. Note the ultimate hypocrisy that underlies both the Preamble to the United States Constitution (“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice...”) and Article 156 of the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(“Justice is administered in the USSR on the principle of the equality
of citizens before the law and the court.”) Note how political
developments in both nations rendered “justice” not only meaningless,
but reduced it to a convenient euphemism for its antithesis.
Though
the governments of some nations still try to placate their own
populations with gestures of resistance, the horrible truth is that
governance itself – governance with all its implicit democratic
potential whether realized or not – has been obsoleted by capitalism's
mastery of electronic technology. The age of nations and national
governance – the age of real or potential human liberty – has ended. The
age of corporations – the age of tyranny beyond our conception – has begun. Increasingly we are enslaved by the corporate One Percent
– an imperial cabal that has taken the place of old-time despots and to
whom technology has given both omnipotence and hitherto-divine powers
of surveillance and retaliation. It is so powerful it is now attempting
to cast off its political vassals and impose its will directly through
its corporate managers – a primary purpose of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
Moreover,
the One Percent's tyranny is quite possibly forever – that is, fated to
prevail until our species is extinct. Because it is based entirely on
infinite greed, capitalism cannot be reformed: note its destruction of the New Deal in the U.S. and its imposition of austerity
on Europe. And now – with capitalism protected as it is by impregnable
electronic and thermonuclear defenses – it cannot be overthrown. It will
prevail until thermonuclear war and/or environmental disaster renders
its enabling technologies inoperable and thus reduces its tyrants to
impotence.
Then
and only then might humanity throw off the yoke of patriarchy and once
again rationally aspire toward the liberty of justice and the justice of
liberation.
But now and for all the foreseeable future there is only capitalism and the intensifying apocalypse of what is connivingly called “global warming” – a label obviously chosen to maximize confusion, conflict and misunderstanding.
Let
us therefore call it by a properly descriptive compound noun. Let us
call it what it is: “terminal climate change.” And let us finally and
unequivocally recognize that we have brought down the wrath of Mother
Nature on ourselves. Now as a result we are cursed to live in the
darkest most hopeless epoch of our species' experience and thereby
challenged to prove our selves and our species worthy of survival.
Why
then, given that the Wall Street One Percent now controls (or at least
leverages) all the leading politicians and therefore lords it over all
the governments on this planet, is there not unified action to minimize
the terrible impact of the already ruinous climate debacle?
Given
how our species has united to combat other global threats, the only
logical answer – almost too horrible to contemplate – is that the One
Percent knows the battle against terminal climate change is already
lost. That here is the real explanation for the global-warming squabbles
between the One Percent's Democrat and Republican political vassals at
home and among the One Percent's vassal governments abroad. That these
quarrels are pseudo-conflicts; that they are part of a diabolically
well-crafted charade intended to keep the global population from
panicking. That the One Percent fears the reduction of profits that
might result from the vengefully suicidal insurrection the kamikaze
warfare of World War II suggests might become the last recourse of a
doomed species on a dying planet. That sure knowledge of our impending
extinction is the real reason the One Percent no longer makes even a
pretense of restraining the Manifest Evil of its infinite (and
infinitely obscene) greed.
Perhaps,
in the serial-killer mentalities of the capitalist aristocrats, the
fulfillment of their greed has become their final competition. That all
the One Percenters care about now is who will amass the greatest hoards
of gold and pile the highest mounds of corpses, who will die smirking,
“fuck you all I am the biggest winner.”
Could
this be true? I hope with every cell of my being it is not. Yet what
else could explain all the variables of our circumstances?
*** *** ***
CONTRAST
HOW THE present-day Ruling Class dithers in the face of terminal
climate change with how it reacted to the Nazi threat in 1941:
This
is no time to moralize on the follies of countries and Governments
which have allowed themselves to be struck down one by one, when by
united action they could have saved themselves and saved the world from
this catastrophe...Let us learn the lessons already taught by such cruel
experience. Let is redouble our exertions, and strike with united
strength while life and power remains.
The
speaker was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; the excerpt is
from his speech to Parliament just after the Germans had begun their
invasion of the Soviet Union. The source is Churchill's six-volume
history of The Second World War, volume three, The Grand Alliance, pages 372-373 (Houghton-Mifflin Company, Boston: 1950).
I
ask again: why – given the far greater magnitude of the
terminal-climate-change threat – does the Ruling Class do naught but
dither?
*** *** ***
ASKING
THE ABOVE question in slightly different terms, why – if the One
Percent did not already regard us as a doomed species on a dying planet –
is it not commanding its political vassals to repair the increasingly
broken, crumbling and abandoned U.S. infrastructure?
Just
as our overlords routinely spend fortunes to maintain the value, decor
and comforts of their palatial mansions, so it would seem they'd also
maintain the value and functionality of what is now effectively their
own nation – unless of course they regard such expenditures as money
squandered on a doomed realm.
Which
in turn explains perfectly their breathtaking generosity toward the
ever-more-aggressive U.S. military and militarized police apparatus. Not
surprisingly, it is already practicing for the proverbial Last Roundup –
the mass arrest (and probable extermination) of unthinkably vast numbers of U.S. citizens.
*** *** ***
AGAIN
ASKING THE question, why else – if the purpose were not deliberate
obfuscation – would our formerly informative mass media behave as it
does? Not only has it been reduced to a uniquely privatized version of
the propaganda machine that defines any despotism. Far more ominously,
it now functions as a psychological warfare apparatus. It's apparent
mission is inflicting the intellectual paralyses of maximum confusion on
even the most well-informed segments of the population.
This
is a point I had not previously considered – probably because, as a
former member of the working press (though I was ousted before it was
fully corporatized into its present-day Josef Goebbels form), I was too
close to the metaphorical trees to see the proverbial forest.
But Truthout's Joseph Natoli pulls it into sharp focus. Here's his most telling passage:
Carrying
on such balanced discussion of anything in a society already seriously
bent in one direction is just a mockery, and at worse, a front behind
which the biases of that society can go on as if they were guided by a
rational discourse. This front of a media conducting relentless,
penetrating interpretation set on revealing lies and bullshit, set on
deconstructing edifices of truth, can only always and only be the truth
by which the status quo, bent as it is, perseveres. Our mainstream media
coverage is either a chaos of mindless venting, a deluge of
"information" whose only gatekeeper is Google's PageRank, the insulated
"de-friending" domains of Facebook communication, or the
disingenuousness of both balanced and biased reporting. In this way, our
communication is in one way or another serving to maintain our
inequitable order of things. Our media stand like the Baltimore police
as servants of that order, protecting it from exposure, which is what
the media are now doing, and from collapse, as what the police are paid
to do as they protect and serve.
*** *** ***
THE DETERIORATION OF the U.S. infrastructure is not just due to neglect but – in the case of public transport – the result of a deliberate assault on facilities and service.
It is as if the One Percenters were hastening to withdraw their money
from an industry they have decided is on the brink of collapse and is
therefore no longer worthy of investment.
Long-term
investment, of course, is precisely what mass transit requires. The One
Percent's refusal to invest therein thus suggests the One Percenters
believe we have no long-term future for which to prepare.
But a few days ago I set aside this issue as a bit too extreme for a Reader Supported News
comment threat. Instead I took it as an opportunity to vent my endless
bitterness at being stranded in the city with the worst most miserable
mass transit I have ever encountered anywhere in the urban United
States.
(No,
that's not hyperbole. Even in the 1950s, Knoxville, Tennessee, with a
population of only about 100,000, had significantly better bus service
than Tacoma, a major seaport of 200,000 people, has today.)
What follows is revised for re-publication here, hence is not italicized:
There
will never be a renaissance of public transport in the United States –
and the dismal fate of Pierce Transit, which serves Tacoma and
surrounding Pierce County, shows why.
By
any measure, the United States has by far the worst public transport in
the industrial world. We the people have been so damned ever since the
politicians were bought off by the automobile industry.
The resultant war against Working Class mobility
began in the 1920s, with the closure or downsizing of mass transit to
force us into the debt slavery of total dependence on privately owned
automobiles.
While
this variant of the class war is commanded from board rooms and
legislative chambers, its present-day storm troopers are the majority
whites, whose carefully conditioned hatred and contempt of
transit-dependent lower-income people perpetuates anti-transit policies
whether federal, state or local. The downsizing of Pierce Transit – a
2008-2012 service-reduction approaching 90 percent – is a textbook case.
The
Tacoma/Pierce County Chamber of Commerce is anti-transit, as is the
Pierce County Council. So, albeit less obviously, are majorities on the
Tacoma City Council and the other municipal governments within the PT
service area.
Thus
all it took to defeat the 2011 and 2012 ballot measures that would have
restored and maintained PT service was “transit-is-welfare”
hate-mongering by opponents. In other words, it was the voters
themselves who sneeringly proclaimed the PT service area the home of the
most vindictively anti-transit-user electorate in the nation.
***
To put Tacoma's transit crisis in somewhat sharper focus:
(1)-Slightly
more than half the population of Tacoma is officially lower-income; 18
percent of its households are officially impoverished. Nearly half of
PT's regular riders have no other means of transport.
(2)-The
“transit-is-welfare” meme is far too sophisticated to have originated
locally. Given the testimony of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman that
Washington state is a favorite Ruling Class rat-lab for perfecting
methods of oppression, the meme's initial use, in 2011, was obviously a
test run. Its success then and in 2012 means it will be used wherever
the One Percent wants to convince an appropriately bigoted white
majority to destroy a local mass transit system.
(3)-Though
Washington state is allegedly “progressive,” its policies reveal its
fascist heart. It has the most regressive state tax structure in the
U.S.; it is the only state in which renters have no tenant-right
protections whatsoever; and its electorate is relentlessly edging ever
further to the Right. With its government already controlled by a
Republican senate, next year's election will in all probability turn it
into another Wisconsin.
(4)-For more detail, see “Exclusive: How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies the Global Class War,” here.
(5)-The
state has become so inhospitable to lower-income people, I would gladly
move elsewhere if I could. Given the food-stamp cuts imposed by our Democrat president
and the absolute certainty both the Republican state senate and the
Republican Congress will side with Obama to impose additional,
deliberately genocidal cuts in all the programs upon which I am
dependent, remaining here may indeed prove fatal. Yet where is there to
go? In any case there is no way I can afford to leave. I am simply too
impoverished – and probably too physically crippled – to ever move
again. I am 75 years old, and (apart from Social Security), all my other
income sources – and any potential I might ever again have such
earnings – were slain by the capitalist downsizing known as the Great
Recession.
***
As
the fate of Pierce Transit reveals, it not just the lack of political
will that is destroying public transportation in the United States.
Even
more than that, it's the morally imbecilic lack of empathy that has
become a defining part of the U.S. national character. The U.S. has been
thoroughly Ayn Randified – a uniquely USian form of Nazification –
which means the harder times get, the more vicious the people become,
not toward their oppressors, but toward one another.
Save
in tiny (and therefore statistically insignificant) demographic
enclaves, the cooperative spirit that helped U.S. communities survive
the Great Depression has been methodically eradicated.
The
result is Moron Nation, the realm where moronation has eliminated class
consciousness – or any other sort of social conscience or consciousness
– and where the attitude of the people toward one another is
increasingly that of Ted Bundy toward his victims.
Which
is why the Republicans – who are actually neo-Nazis – are taking over,
not just here in Washington state, but everywhere else as well. It's
called "meanness," and it's why (precisely as exemplified by transit
policy), the U.S. is becoming notorious as the meanest nation in the
industrial world.
Alas,
history proves that once a population sinks to that reptilian level,
humanitarian reform is impossible...unless it is imposed from without by
force, as it was on Nazi Germany.
Once
more I ask: what is the purpose of this deliberately induced Ayn Rand
malevolence? Do the One Percenters already know terminal climate change
means there is nothing left in the U.S. – or anywhere else on this
planet – that can be preserved? Are they already chuckling with sadistic
glee at how we the people fighting over whatever miserly tokens they
let trickle down upon us from their inconceivably fat hoards of money
and resources?
Whatever
the answers to these questions, it is obvious the One Percent is
deliberately thrusting our nation – and indeed our entire world – into a
maelstrom of insanity.
Quoth Longfellow's Prometheus: “Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
LB/11-17 May 2015
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