18 Subversive Stories Sandwiched between 2 Rebellious Rants, Each Sentence Cobbled Together in Horrifically Harried Haste

EXPLANATORY RANT (AKA PREFATORY WHINING): because I am more jammed up than ever – not only the time normally consumed by the monthly newsletter I edit and produce as an unpaid volunteer for the low-income senior housing complex in which I live, but as never before has happened during the newsletter's production week, the time stolen by the excruciatingly painful labor of preparing for the federally mandated quarterly premises inspection by which our overlords ensure we impoverished tenants are spit-in-our-faces reminded of our place as subhuman, god-cursed garbage near the very bottom of Biblical Capitalism's malicious caste system – the text accompanying the following links will be unusually abbreviated, for which I apologize in advance.

My alternative is to post no Dispatches at all until Sunday, a surrender to circumstance I am not willing to make, never mind the necessarily thorough pre-inspection housecleaning damns me give it approximately 18 of the hours I would normally devote to volunteer journalism. Thus instead of sitting comfortably at my desk reading and thinking and writing as I would be doing either in relaxed mode for the newsletter or at peak intensity for Dispatches, I am forced by the looming inspection to suffer the truly agonizing bending and twisting the cleaning chores inflict on my officially disabled 77-year-old flesh, my disability the legacy of long-ago back, shoulder and knee injuries that were formerly dormant but which about a decade ago became hopelessly arthritis-inflamed and will therefore remain inescapably painful until my sufferings are at last relieved by the total anesthesia that is the one great blessing of death. Plus there's the oppressive sense of exhaustion that is the consequence of both the intensified pain and the breathlessness – the chief symptom of my slowly but steadily worsening congestive heart failure – that like some monstrous leaden straitjacket crushes my chest whenever I engage in unaccustomed exertion, as is required by scrubbing a dirty linoleum floor or cleaning rugs the thickly woven material of which makes vacuuming nearly as difficult as mowing tall grass with a very dull version of an old-fashioned hand-powered mower.

As they really do say in the theater whether on Broadway or off – this from the actresses I dated during my Manhattan prime – “the show must go on.” Hence, without further ado, here's the news:

CAPITALIST POLITICIANS AGAIN SHOW THEIR PLUTOCRATIC HATEFULNESS, this time by reducing the minimum wage and imposing statewide legislation that prohibits minimum wage hikes by any of the given states' cities or counties. An additional report is here.

NAOMI KLEIN'S AWAKENING, LIKE THAT OF THE USIAN LEFT IN GENERAL, amounts to re-inventing the wheel that was first invented by Marx, Engels and Lenin. Nevertheless it makes for encouraging reading.

THEOCRAT PENCE MEETS WITH FELLOW MISOGYNISTS BUT refuses to disclose what was discussed or which JesuNazis participated in the discussions.

TRUMP'S CIVIL RIGHTS HONCHO BUILT HIS CAREER ON MISOGYNY AND HATRED OF LGBTQ PEOPLE, a no-surprise appointment by the ever-more-brazenly theocratic regime that has already resurrected the traditionally Christian claims of divine-right sadism and hatefulness.

IN YET ANOTHER ATROCITY OF THE JESUNAZI WAR AGAINST WOMEN, the USian Supreme Court has revived a Wisconsin law that effectively criminalizes pregnancy...

(Read the rest of it here.)

First Lots of Bad News, but Then – As If to Bolster the Opiate of Hope – a Little Good News (Though Only from Two Locales)

REVOLUTION OF 1776 SPAWNED BY SLAVE-OWNERS' FEARS OF ABOLITION: New scholarship confirms beyond argument something my Marxian father taught me 67 years ago – that the hidden motive  behind the so-called “American revolution” was the preservation of slavery. In other words, what the “patriots” intended was nothing more than the 18th Century equivalent of a Nazi coup – an intent repeatedly underscored by its subsequent history,  for which see also here, here, here,  and here. (Disclosure: my paternal ancestors include Margaret Blisse and Mary Blisse, mother and daughter who were independent women farmers in Connecticut during the mid 1640s and were imprisoned on charges of witchcraft but somehow managed to beat the rap. By the time of the revolution, the family had moved to Boston, where they were lawyers and merchants, one a graduate of Harvard, another of Yale. All were Loyalists; thus their lands were confiscated, and they were driven – at bayonet-point and with only such possessions as they could carry on their backs – into permanent exile. The men then served as officers in the British Army, while their wives and children fled to Canada. My immediate paternal ancestors did not return to the United States until the early 1900s.)

CAPITALIST GOVERNANCE AS GENOCIDE (I): The real significance of Trumpcare is it formalizes the final destruction of the social contract, thereby completing the descent into officially sanctioned Ayn Rand moral imbecility the Capitalists have sought long before the matriarch of monetary murderousness exhaled her first malignant breath.


CAPITALIST GOVERNANCE AS GENOCIDE (II): A true-to-life portrait of plutocracy shows us Trump is the Capitalist rule rather than the exception and likewise proves both his morally imbecilic twinship with the Clintons and the ideological twinhood of the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties.


CAPITALIST GOVERNANCE AS GENOCIDE (III): The defining clash of our time is the fight between the plutocrats who believe healthcare should forever remain a privilege of wealth versus those of us who believe healthcare is a human right that should...

(To read the rest, go here.)