(Even so, let us preface our reading by contemplating the blessings given us by our Mother Earth, whom survival commands us to defend; thus may Her radiance empower us to forever dispel the patriarchal darkness.)
(Photo by KD ©2023)
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ORIGINALLY I HAD intended to lead this edition of Dispatches by exposing an outrageous example of the moral imbecility that fuels gentrification -- specifically a report on how the vindictively capitalist Tacoma mayor and city council back-stabbed the municipality's lowest-income renters, with the proverbial knife a provision deliberately hidden in the deceptive wording of an alleged “tenant rights” ordinance.
But then the World Socialist Web Site led its 1 September edition with an analytical report that – citing Dr. Anthony Fauci’s endorsement of “herd immunity” – noted how his statement included implicit praise of letting Covid run amok to exterminate those of us deemed economically burdensome, which in turn reveals the weaponized virus as "a form of homicidal eugenics, reminiscent of the Nazi regime's policy of murdering handicapped people.”
Thus I moved the Tacoma story to second place, below. At first I mistakenly regarded it as a separate issue, an especially outrageous demonstration of the lengths to which capitalist politicians will go in their efforts to further multiply the wealth they and their bribe-masters forcibly extract from the rest of us.
Now, in the context of Fauci's statement, I recognize the Tacoma episode as a legitimate part of the pandemic story -- that reducing people to homelessness is merely another way the ruling class ensures our vulnerability to extermination by Covid.
Quoth WSWS: ‘...Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases...declared that older people, the ill and disabled “will fall by the wayside” in the current surge of COVID-19. Fauci was not warning about what would happen unless urgent action was taken. Rather, he was seeking to justify the Biden administration’s policy of inaction and cover-up in the face of a new surge of the disease.’
‘Fauci’s comments reiterate the declaration in January 2022 by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky that the fact that COVID-19 predominantly kills people who are “unwell to begin with” is “encouraging news.”’
The global death-toll inflicted by the virus now exceeds 22 million persons. Though WSWS has steadfastly refuted as anti-Chinese propaganda any hypotheses that attempt to define the still-raging but relentlessly downplayed Covid pandemic as anything other than an evolutionary product of Nature, a report by the internationally prestigious New England Journal of Medicine analyzes all the competing hypotheses. It notes the evidence for laboratory origin, though limited, nevertheless remains compelling; it also includes, in its fifth paragraph, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs accusation that U.S. scientists designed the virus as a biological warfare weapon-- that it was vectored to Wuhan during an official visit by U.S. Army personnel. And we all know that just as the USian Empire is the global oberkommando of world capitalism's ecogenocidal game of thrones, so is the U.S. military capitalism's global goon squad.
While both NEJM and WSWS note how politicization of the question has gravely hampered the search for the pandemic’s origin, contextual elements suggest its deliberate employment as an USian bioweapon is by no means an unthinkable possibility:
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Firstly there is the fact the capitalist ruling class has long lamented a surplus of workers as its primary 21st Century problem. But the New-Deal-sized public-infrastructure project the linked article proposes as a solution is prohibited by the global triumph of neoliberal austerity. Thus the proposal was never more than "change we can believe in," yet another colossal deception intended to convince us the present-day ruling class is anything other than infinitely evil. Moreover, though the plutocrats seldom acknowledge it in public, their greatest common fear is of a 99.9 Percent united in revolutionary intent, and the working-class solidarity potentially growing from any such mega-project -- note how the New Deal's public works invariably bolstered organized labor -- is thus anathema to their long-range intent. And what is that? It is the ecogenocidal agenda ever more obvious in their radical escalation of the struggle they formerly sloganized as "better dead than Red," which they have shaped into an all-out war for ruling-class omnipotence structured to end only one of two ways: either with their victorious imposition of everlasting zero-tolerance tyranny, or with the extinction of our entire species and the reduction of our Mother Earth back to a bug planet.
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Secondly there is the fact plutocrats and environmentalists are again joining hands in proclaiming the 21st Century’s greatest problem is not just too many workers but too many people. The more radical environmentalists argue the only (final) solution is the forcible extermination of 90 percent of the human population. Unfortunately the Mainstream Media propaganda machine belittles this appalling truth by treating it as right-wing conspiracy theory – note the politics of the linked source – but I know from interpersonal contacts it was favored by the vindictively petite-bourgeois majorities of students at Western Washington State University’s Huxley College of Environmental studies in the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s. In other words, the targeted victims would surely all be members of the working class – which in post-Marxian terms is each and every one of us in the global 99.9 Percent.
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Thirdly there is the oft-proven fact the USian Empire has never hesitated to reduce us to involuntary lab-rats for biological warfare experiments. These atrocities include testing known pathogens on urban populations in New York and San Francisco – the choice of targets surely not coincidental given these cities’ histories as epicenters of anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal rebellion, likewise the obviously white-supremacist targeting of Blacks described in the same linked report.
The problem with such disclosures is that a fatal majority of propaganda-zombified USians refuse to believe them. Any time I dare mention anywhere outside Manhattan that the army conducted germ-warfare tests in the New York City subway system, the vast majority of those with whom I am conversing – never mind how presumably well educated they might otherwise be – damn me as a liar.
And I have some regretful personal knowledge of this atrocity too. In late 1968 or early 1969, when I was the news editor of Morristown, New Jersey’s Daily Record, I was approached by relatives of an elderly man killed by pneumonia in late June 1966; they claimed his doctor said he was a victim of the subway tests and begged our journalistic investigation. To my eternal shame I refused their request, answering that without more evidence than a lone doctor’s say-so, I could not assign a reporter to pursue the story. Fortunately the editors at Newsday took the opposite position and ferreted out confirmation the tests had occurred. Then in 1995, Newsday reporter Dennis Duggan, a fellow Lion’s Head regular I knew from my own NYC working-press years, resurrected the story as noted in the "testing known pathogens" link.
Nor was airborne dispersal the only method the USian Empire used for testing bacteriological warfare on its unsuspecting citizenry. The government also employed the experimental use of insects as disease vectors.
And let us not forget the governmental use of smallpox-infected blanks as but one of the many weapons, tactics and strategies in the (ongoing) 600-year campaign to exterminate the First Nations peoples.
All of which combine to bolster the hitherto-unspeakable possibility implicit in my “Dr. Anthony Fauci says” comment-thread assertion: that regardless of how it was vectored into an ever-more-obviously unstoppable pandemic, Covid-19 is designed as a modern, publicly acceptable substitute for Zyklon B, engineered both for maximum deadliness and maximized plausible deniability.
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Capitalist Viciousness Exemplified: Tacoma City Council's 'Tenant Rights' Bill Secretly Shafts Lowest-Income Renters
AS TOM WAITS sings in “Step Right Up,” a basic truth of capitalism is “the large print giveth and the small print taketh away” -- which is precisely how the less-than-impeccable Tacoma City Council sought to back-stab lowest-income renters by hiding its dagger in an alleged tenants’-rights ordinance. The large print of the measure, Substitute Ordinance 28894, imposes a 120-day-notice requirement on rent hikes, but the small print denies it to tenants in any sort of subsidized housing – impoverished persons who often need such notice more than anyone else.
Quoth Page 11 of the ordinance: “A landlord is required to provide at least 120 days’ the minimum written notice, as outlined in Chapter 59.18.140 RCW, as it currently exists or is hereinafter amended, whenever the periodic or monthly housing costs to be charged a tenant will increase by any amount charged the same tenant for the same housing unit, except as provided by RCW 59.18.140(3)(b) as it exists or is hereinafter amended for subsidized tenancies and for deed-restricted affordable housing.”
But note the take-away in the cited chapter of the Revised Code of Washington: “If the rental agreement governs a subsidized tenancy where the amount of rent is based on the income of the tenant or circumstances specific to the subsidized household, a landlord shall provide a minimum of thirty days' prior written notice of an increase in the amount of rent to each affected tenant.”
The city’s website continued the deception perpetrated by the wording of the ordnance, omitting any mention of its retention of the 30-day notice for Tacoma’s neediest tenants. Local media did likewise, yet another troubling example of how today’s so-called “journalists” – the very antithesis of the working-class-minded reporters of my generation – are too smug in their petite-bourgeois arrogance to trouble themselves with the less-than-five-minutes of online research necessary to discover the betrayal lurking within “except as provided.”
Such elitist negligence demonstrates the utter contempt for impoverished people and paycheck-dependent folks in general that defines bourgeois moral imbecility. It is all the more glaring given Tacoma’s demographics. A (formerly) working-class-affordable city of about 220,000 persons, its population is still defined by a (shrinking) majority of 99.9 Percenters, about half of whom, myself included, are definitively lower income, with approximately 13 percent of us officially poor. By freight volume, it is the third largest seaport on the nation's west coast, which contributes to the city’s relatively muscular union presence. (Disclosure: I have lived here twice, 1978 to 1982, and now since 2004, each time by choice; Tacoma's friendliness marks it as the sociological antithesis of maliciously elitist, vindictively xenophobic Seattle, and I am admittedly fond of it, as I have been since I moved here during 1978's Labor Day Weekend. In many ways -- diversity, solidarity and an ability to laugh at itself included -- I find Tacoma reminiscent of the Lower East Side I knew in the '60s and more generically of Brooklyn, where I was born.)
The city council’s deception came to light in an ongoing, fiercely fought local example of the class-war battles triggered by the nation’s runaway housing prices. Soaring housing costs elsewhere began metastasizing into Tacoma during the second decade of the new century, and by 2019 the city was declared the nation’s “hottest real estate market.” Though anti-inflationary interest hikes have hiked mortgage rates enough to exclude all but the more wealthy buyers, this has actually worsened the victimization inflicted by gentrification. Tacoma real estate values are in the stratosphere, forever beyond working-class reach; rents and homelessness have skyrocketed, the former by 43 percent in the past five years, the latter by 54 percent during the same period in Pierce County, with about 74 percent of these victims of capitalism inside the Tacoma city limits.
As a manifestation of the city’s working-class consciousness, the housing crisis and how it is literally flinging people into the street sparked a successful initiative campaign to put a strong tenants-rights measure on the November ballot. The city council – officially nonpartisan but dominated by the so-called “moderate” (i.e., closet-Republican) wing of the “Democratic” (sic) Party – attempted to sandbag the initiative by enacting Ordinance 28894 and then placing it as a competitive measure on the same ballot.
This bewilder-the-voters ploy was pioneered locally in 2015 by Marilyn Strickland to kill a $15-minimum-wage initiative when she was Tacoma’s mayor. Strickland was also, of course, a key perpetrator in the city's gentrification. When she left the mayor's office in 2018, her success was rewarded by appointment as president and chief executive officer of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, allegedly with a seven-digit salary package the actual amount of which has remained a closely guarded secret. But this time the scheme failed; the tenants’-rights group sued, and the court ordered the city’s measure deleted from the ballot.
Meanwhile about 15 percent of Tacoma’s homeless persons – approximately 1,046 human beings – remain unsheltered, prime targets of the Zyklon-B variant known as “herd immunity.”
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From the Comment Threads of Other Websites
On Dr. Anthony Fauci Says Many Will “Fall by the Wayside” in New Covid-19 Surge (also linked above; what follows is the complete text of my original comment)
Given the context of Dr. Fauci's statement -- that is, the relentless claims by the ruling class the world has too many workers and too many people in general -- it becomes entirely logical to assume the Covid virus is a modern substitute for Zyklon B, designed (of course) for both maximum deadliness and maximum plausible deniability.
Hence the unprecedented relevance of Comrade Damon's breathtakingly courageous analysis that capitalism's decision to let the virus run amok is indeed "a form of homicidal eugenics, reminiscent of the Nazi regime's policy of murdering handicapped people.”
Hence too the bravery demonstrated by the World Socialist Web Site in publishing Comrade Damon's work irrefutably proves the Fourth International is the only remaining defender of the working class -- the 99.9 Percent -- on this gravely afflicted planet.
Those of us who have the requisite skill and technological access should therefore disseminate this report as widely as is humanly possible.
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On Vox’s Student Loan ‘Expert’ Is Paid By Debt Collectors
While it is good to see Vox and Carey exposed for what they are, I am quite frankly appalled to see Biden's student-loan proposal treated as anything more than another "change we can believe in" -- that is. another of the innumerable bait-and-switch betrayals by which the "Democratic" (sic) Party serves the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column.
Authoritative analyses of the original form of Biden's loan-relief promise made it obvious it was purposed to seduce younger voters even as it was designed to fail.
Old enough to know the overwhelming proof the Democrats were forever nullified as anything more than a Republican Fifth Column by their complicity in the coup of 22 November 1963 -- note their treachery ranging from Vietnam to their refusal to protect abortion rights -- I cannot doubt they will continue their betrayals of student debtors. And every other member of the 99.9 Percent as well.
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On 21st Century Socialism: What It Will Become and Why?
My thanks to Ms. Fraad and Mr. Wolff for what I suspect will prove to be one of the most thought-provoking essays ever published on the Internet. This is because -- implicit in its focus on human relationships within families and enterprises (and its pivotal analysis of how socialism undermines itself by tolerating their patriarchal structure and thereby perpetuating the anti-socialist/pro-capitalist/ultimately pro-nazi conditioning that is the essence of patriarchy) -- is the dire necessity to at long last acknowledge the true magnitude of the gender warfare patriarchy has inflicted on our entire species. As the ultimate expression of misogyny -- fear, hatred and contempt of femaleness beginning with our Mother Earth (the real reason for the climate crisis) and reaching outward to include not only any creature or object defined as female, but also any creature or object lacking definitively male identity -- patriarchy gives modern males the same theoretical workplace and household omnipotence it gave to the emperors, kings, nobility and slave owners of earlier ages. And just as innumerable wars and atrocities measure the refusal of these older categories of oppressors to relinquish the governmental versions of their privilege without bloodshed, so is the refusal of modern males to give up its household, workplace and on-the-street versions measured by the skyrocketing incidence of domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape. Men of this ilk, rabid with a condition that should be recognized as "clitoris envy" -- the reaction to multi-orgasmic female consciousness with the limitless fear, hatred and contempt at present euphemized as "toxic masculinity"-- are probably incurable. And it is their in-curability that is violently, often murderously obstructing the very transformation Ms. Fraad and Mr. Wolff recognize is essential if socialism is to fulfill its potential as our species' (only) means of surviving the present, otherwise inescapably terminal crisis. (Footnote: I doubt it a coincidence that Weimar Germany, the scientists of which led the world in re-discovering the orgasmic superiority of women, was also the birthplace of nazism, the U.S. manifestations of which are ever-more-obviously fanatical expressions of male refusal to accept scientific truth.)
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Let us not forget that to be assailed by the forces of capitalism with such undisguised venom is a most encouraging measure of our burgeoning success. It proves the growing effectiveness of the World Socialist Web Site in fostering widespread recognition of the "change-we-can-believe-in" deceptions promulgated by the "Democratic" (sic) Party and its allegedly "socialist" (sic) puppets as they serve the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column. Let us hope this awakening is but the precursor to the far more pivotal understanding that the treachery of the Democrats and their DSA assets is every bit as deadly a weapon of national nazification as the outspoken campaign for zero-tolerance Christian white male supremacy led by Trump and his ideological kindred.
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Listening to Comrade Kishore, I realize the entire capitalist world, the "People's Republic" (sic) of China included, has – by its deliberately ecogenocidal combination of de facto enslavement, zero-tolerance sociopolitical oppression and defiantly continuing environmental destruction – weaponized the originally USian slogan "Better Dead Than Red" into a globalized mechanism of intentional apocalypse. Thus our choice is not "socialism or barbarism"; it is instead quite literally socialism or extinction. And I cannot thank you enough for this vital insight.
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On The Trump Indictments Are an Indictment of America (this comment suppressed by The New York Times; the story and its thread may be pay-walled)
Given the evidence a substantial number of Trump supporters are also admirers of Hitler -- himself a notorious liar -- it seems obvious they regard lying as a vital weapon in achieving for Trump what Leni Riefenstahl zieg-heil'd as "Triumph of the Will."
As for why the Trumpites and the Original Nazis share this particularly venomous brand of moral imbecility, I have no doubt it is because of their common recognition that lying -- the more sensationally the better -- is the only 100-percent-certain method for inflaming bigotry to genocidal intensity.
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On The Last Time A Foreign Military Threat Was Placed Near The US Border, The World Almost Ended
One of the little-known details of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the international magnitude of the Soviet preparations for war. As I was returning from Korea in August 1962 via the USNS Sultan, we were shadowed by a Soviet submarine from the moment we left Pearl Harbor – I don't recall the date -- until we entered San Francisco Bay early in the morning on 4 September 1962. Initially we saw only the Soviet sub’s periscope, but as we drew closer to the U.S., it would surface to charge its batteries and run along our port side maybe 1000 yards distant. Eventually we were waving to one another, the sub's crew on deck for a breath of fresh air and those of us going home aboard the Sultan behaving as if we were on a sea cruise. Years later, when the entire timeline of the crisis was declassified – when it became clear the Soviets were installing the missiles in August -- I realized why that sub was there. Had the proverbial balloon gone up, they'd have torpedoed us -- somewhat more than 4,000 trained and service-seasoned officers and enlisted personnel aboard an unarmed (and therefore utterly defenseless) WWII troop transport -- which would no doubt have killed us all and given them a pivotal (and utterly demoralizing) naval victory.
Timmy Taes: Given the classified Military Occupational Specialties of many aboard the Sultan, had she surrendered, the United States would have no doubt blown us out of the water, blamed the Soviets and turned the incident into a propaganda coup. In those days, it wasn't just infantry and artillery traveled by troop transport. It was every enlisted MOS and officers from captain down (though the commissioned officers and warrant officers were of course spared the tides of vomit that defined the troop bays). However it obtained, it would have been a substantial victory for the Soviets, because in 1962, all our senior NCOs were WWII and/or Korean War combat veterans, and even amongst troops who have never been tested by live fire, there is a vast difference in combat-readiness between raw recruits and those of us who have already completed most if not all of our active service (two years for draftees and; three years for Regular Army enlistees, as I was; I don't remember the active-duty requirements for warrant officers or Reserve Officers Training Corps [ROTC] and Officer Candidate School [OCS] graduates with reserve commissions, but I think it was three years). Plus in '62, those of us on the Sultan homebound from Korea, nominally a 13-month tour of duty, had been extended there in place at least three months (in some instances, depending on MOS, as much as twice that) due to the Berlin Crisis. So none of us were FNGs, i.e., greeenies. In other words, the loss of those aboard the Sultan would have been comparable in impact to the losses of seasoned personnel at Pearl on 7 December 1941.
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On Why America Deserves Donald Trump
Firstly, apropos Mr. Fancher's love-the-enemy-to-(our)-death nonsense, World War II proved decisively the only real antidote to nazism -- and the Trumpites are most assuredly nazis even if they are too cunning (or too ignorant) to lay claim to the name -- is the Red Army antidote. Secondly, that's precisely why Adameran's quotation from Thomas Greene is last-word, terminal-election, apocalyptically accurate: "Trump will not be defeated by educating voters...Workers now sense that economic justice...is permanently out of reach." Apropos which, note that when workers in the Weimar Republic reached the same conclusion, they turned to Hitler and the Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazis. Thirdly, in response to jdt7385, I voted Green in 2016, when I realized the "choice" between Hillary and Trump was a choice between World War III (triggered by the former's Goldwater-Girl apocalyptic hatred of Russia) or a new Holocaust (triggered by the latter's ecogenocidal hatred of everything female [our Mother Earth included], all Jews, all people of bolor and all sexual minorities. Now of course it is obvious the Greens, like the DSA, have been co-opted by the "Democratic" (sic) Party, which in post-JFK truth is -- and forever shall remain -- naught but the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. Because I suspect jdt7385 and I both recognize the importance of voting to preserve the franchise, I urge jdt to find a suitable alternative other than Trump, even if it is but to write in "None of the Above" merely to -- as I said -- sustain the franchise; I say that because for a person of conscience to vote for Trump will surely inflict the lifelong guilt that plagues many Germans who joined the NSDAP only because they felt they had no other alternative -- a guilt I know from German-born friends many of their children bear as well.
LB/1-5 September 2023
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