We Are Slowly Boiled Frogs, Yet No Leftist Dares Admit it

THE BOILED FROG analogy of politics – the notion we the people are being gradually but deliberately subjugated, so that like a frog in water warmed ever-so-slowly to a boil, we will not be aware of the danger until it is too late to escape – is seemingly anathema to the U.S. Left.

Not once in all the years I have written about politics, roughly from late 1963 until the present, have I heard even one Leftist spokesperson use the boiled-frog comparison to explain the tactical and strategic significance of the ever-increasing restrictions imposed on our political and economic freedom – especially the latter.

Nor is there any widespread recognition the recent culture-war victories – marriage equality and legalized marijuana – are entirely illusory. Neither costs the One Percent a penny. Hence neither does a thing to alter the wage-slavery dynamic that defines capitalism.

Though I support marriage equality, I am equally aware the freedom to marry is meaningless if you can aspire to nothing better than a grueling minimum-wage job, a miserable lifetime of debt slavery and an early death imposed by the lack of adequate health care – the sure fate, regardless of their sexual preferences, that already awaits at least half the families in the United States.

Legalized marijuana in this context becomes merely another opiate by which to numb ourselves against our abject wretchedness, thereby ensuring our masters we are that less likely to rebel.

And yes, the One Percent is indeed that cunning.

But rejection of the boiled-frog analogy leaves the Left without any effective means to describe the gradual imposition of tyranny that has followed, “as the night the day,” the now-undeniable coup of 22 November 1963.

As of now, the most blatant of these tyrannies is the Hobby Lobby decision, which already was becoming the women's equivalent of the Dred Scott decision, as I argued last week.  (Scroll down to “Outside Agitation Elsewhere.”)

But now it looks as if Hobby Lobby may be the Dred Scott equivalent for the entire 99 Percent.

“By declaring that “closely held” corporations may hold religious beliefs, the court may have provided businesses with a new tool for crushing workplace unionization drives,” an MSNBC analyst wrote on 15 July.  “In addition to declaring themselves exempt from contraception mandates and non-discrimination laws, religious employers may soon be able to argue for an exemption from collective bargaining laws.” 

If so, any boss will be able to make such a claim. Not only will it be a giant step toward the One Percent's goal of reducing the U.S. to an officially Christian theocracy.  It will also be a huge stride toward fulfillment of what seems to President Barack Obama's primary domestic goal: reducing the entire U.S. Working Class to the inescapable socioeconomic wretchedness that formerly defined only the nation's racial and/or geographic minorities.

What the frog analogy would show us is how these restrictions on our freedom are parts of a relentless, multi-generational, multi-faceted war of subjugation waged against us by the One Percent.

Though traceable to the 19th Century, the war's present form took shape at least as early as 1934 with the so-called Bankers Plot.  (Scroll down for my addition of historical facts to the comment thread.)  According to the era's Communist Party sources, this was a joint Wall-Street/Nazi-German effort to impose fascism on the United States and make it part of the greater fascist New Order proposed by Hitler. 

Had the plotters succeeded, this nation with its vast natural and industrial resources would have become the chief financier and primary supply source for what would have been the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo/Washington D.C. Axis and der Führer's plan for global conquest.

The U.S. plotters, placed above the law by their status as members of the uppermost ranks of the (unacknowledged) capitalist aristocracy, were never punished.

And their descendents are to this day continuing the One Percent effort to impose fascism. This is manifest in the violent suppression of dissent (as in the crushing of the Occupy Movement) and in the wars against organized labor and against the rights of women and minorities. The power of the One Percent – now defined as the right of corporate “personhood” – is used to abolish the rights of all the rest of us. That's why the struggle has now (predictably) morphed into a war against every civil right we the people ever imagined we might have.

But the Left seemingly dare not use the one English phrase that would make all those connections obvious.

The same lack of language – or, more accurately, avoidance of language – illustrates vividly how the One Percent uses wedge issues to perpetuate the powerlessness of the 99 Percent. It also demonstrates how the U.S. Left, weakened by its signature rejection of formal ideology and thus by its lack of analytical ability, often unwittingly serves the very oppressor it seeks to topple.

What then actually prompts the Left to reject the boiled-frog analogy?

I strongly suspect it is misguided political correctness. In my lifetime, the frog likeness was first applied to U.S. politics by the Second Amendment community. That happened at least 38 years ago, even before the membership of the National Rifle Association – in furious and embittered response to the de facto national gun registration imposed by the Gun Control Act of 1968 – elected a revolution-minded board of directors who radically transformed the organization into what it is today.

Founded in 1871, the NRA had been, until the enactment of GCA '68, an avowedly apolitical group of target shooters and firearms experts with close connections to the War Department and its successor the Department of Defense. The academic credibility of its journal, The American Rifleman, had elevated it to the world standard as the definitive source for historical and technical material about firearms.

NRA's primary purpose in those pre-GCA-'68 years was the promotion of rifle marksmanship – a realm in which, until the previously widespread familiarization of youth with firearms was abolished by the ongoing escalation of cleverly fostered anti-gun hysteria – the U.S. led the entire world. But now, in response to the often subtle but nevertheless undeniable Ruling Class effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – that is, to reduce the 99 Percent to mandatory defenselessness and compulsory pacifism – the NRA has become one of the most powerful advocacy groups in the nation.

It has also, of necessity, become one of the nation's most outspokenly anti-government organizations, in the course of which it has (unfortunately) allowed itself to not only be captured by the Hard Right, but to become a front organization for the Republican Party, also known as the “Grand Old Party” or simply the GOP.

Though the GOP is one of the two U.S. Ruling Class parties, it is the only one that dares speak openly for the racist, sexist, imperialist (and thus definitively fascist) One Percent.

The NRA – though it actively courts women and minorities as members and participants in marksmanship training and shooting sports – has nevertheless by its association with the most reactionary elements in the Republican Party become the favorite hate-object of a huge majority within the U.S. Left. 

But this so-called “Left” is actually a pseudo-Left. It is proven so by its anti-intellectuality and rejection of ideology (and the resultant lack of ideological discipline) that fosters its reflexive identification with the oppressor – its petit-bourgeois arrogance and its carefully closeted Ayn-Rand-conditioned selfishness.

Thus it fears an armed Working Class far more than it fears the ever-escalating depredations of the One Percent.

Never mind how the One Percent's coterie of politicians, judges, generals, academics, executives, bureaucrats and police commanders have destroyed the American Dream and are now methodically nullifying the last remnants of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy. The U.S. Left will not use the best phrase in the English language to describe what is being done to us all merely because those words were first uttered in a political context by the people it most despises.

Moreover – and uniquely – the present-day U.S. Left has little or nothing to do with Working-Class consciousness.

Therefore its most intense hatred is not directed at the One Percenters, nor at their obscenely well-recompensed servants in the upper echelons of government and industry, but rather at the (mostly blue-collar) men and women of the 99 Percent who yet own firearms and hold to the right of personal self-defense.

This particularly vicious twist in the class war is amongst the lingering legacies of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In its immediate aftermath, newly inaugurated President Lyndon Baines Johnson – as faithful a servant of the One Percent in 1964 as President Barack Hussein Obama is today – reversed the policies of the murdered President Kennedy and so ballooned a shrinking U.S. involvement in a Vietnamese civil war into a World-War-Two-sized windfall to military-industrial profiteers.

But that wasn't all LBJ gave his masters. The war's biggest bonus to the One Percent was its destruction, forever, of the New Deal coalition, a united front of white-collar and blue-collar interests – revolutionaries and reformists alike – brought together by their demands for socioeconomic relief from the malevolence of capitalism.

The New Deal coalition had (sort of) kept the more obvious forms of institutional fascism out of (most of) the U.S. homeland since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic reforms saved U.S. capitalism from the revolution its savagery had nearly provoked. Not only did the New Deal co-opt a looming Communist rebellion – an uprising that, given the aid of the Soviet Union, would undoubtedly have succeeded. It also prevented the civil war – including a second secession by the South – that would have inevitably followed such a revolution.

But only three decades later, the domestic conflict inherent in the Vietnam War – the schism within the 99 Percent between the white-collar and blue-collar classes (and the breathtaking hatred and contempt with which the draft-exempt children of the white-collar elite viewed those of us whose poverty and lack of influence left us no choice but prison or service in the imperial war machine) – killed the New Deal coalition just as surely as the assassins' bullets slew President Kennedy.

Soon afterward, the smirkingly draft-exempt white-collar elite became the snarlingly anti-gun elite, which redefined us no-choice-but-to-soldier blue-collar folk accordingly. We who had been “baby killers” and “war criminals” were now “gun-crazed thugs” instead.

Thus, by the diabolical cunning of the One Percent, was any sort of 99 Percent solidarity rendered forever impossible.

From then on, the Boiled Frog Protocol was the One Percenters' primary method.

It would take the One Percenters a few more decades – and even then they could not be sure of victory until the Soviet Union was destroyed – but the end result would be a USian Empire as thoroughly fascist, inside and out, at home and abroad, as anything the aristocrats' Bankers Plot ancestors might have imagined.

Yet the alleged Left – robbed of appropriate language by its fanatical hatred of firearms owners and all the craven fears and intimations of inadequacy that fuel its loathing – never dares speak of the Boiled Frog.

Meanwhile, as the One Percent slowly turns up the heat, we flounder about ever deeper in ever-hotter water.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere (In Case You Missed It) 

When the Bill Gates division of the New World Order hurled an unprecedented number of workers under the unemployment bus,  it seemed a perfect example of capitalism in action, complete with a vicious lesson for those 99 Percenters who reject the historical truth of class warfare and mistakenly assume they and the One Percenters have common interests. Hence my less-than-sympathetic remarks on the comment thread of “Microsoft Announces Largest Layoffs in History, Stocks Rise”:

Nurds and techies are amongst the most fanatical fans of Ayn Rand, whose fictionalizations of Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") formalized capitalism's philosophy of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the emphatic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. 

But now so many of these women and men and have been flung out of work – at least 18,000 human beings cast off by Microshaft as if they were nothing more than obsolete software.

Given the relentless savagery of the economy so many of these newly jobless persons hitherto celebrated and served, most likely they will soon discover they have been permanently condemned to minimum-wage slavery.

I wonder if they will then finally begin to recognize the true nature of capitalism – that it is not just moral imbecility, but moral imbecility run amok – and that they who were previously its prideful facilitators are now its abject victims, utterly defenseless against the smirking malevolence of their creditors.

The only sure beneficiaries of these layoffs are the secret police. There is no person on this planet more dangerous than an angry Nurd turned revolutionary – which means the government agents assigned to spy on these newcomers to the Golden Arches slave-pens will soon be collecting unprecedented hours of overtime pay.

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Reader Supported News, which along with Consortium News are my favorite sources for uncensored reporting, uncharacteristically posted a curiously anti-Russian story on the latest Ukraine crisis,  a dispatch all the more perplexing for its usually reliable Guardian UK origin. My addition to the comment thread of “Recording Strongly Suggests Russian Separatist Shot Down Malaysian Jet” was therefore notably skeptical:

With the CIA and its neo-Nazi militias running the Ukraine government, this tragedy could have been scripted well in advance, much as the Gulf of Tonkin incident was scripted by President Johnson to justify massive U.S. intervention to support the fascists in Vietnam's civil war.

Therefore what we should fear most is capitalist media turning the shooting down of the airliner into an episode equivalent to the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and/or the sinking of the Lusitania – that is, a pretext for escalating the Ukrainian Civil War into an all-out war against Russia – with the U.S. commanding the action exactly as in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the truly pivotal question – why was a civilian airliner flying in the midst of a war zone – remains not just unanswered, but shamefully unasked.

Such is capitalist media, of which Josef Goebbels would be justifiably proud.

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Late last night, in one of those geriatric moments of brutally honest self-evaluation, I was thinking about why I persist in political activism despite the fact my knowledge of human history tells me it is almost certainly pointless – that barring a genuine miracle (an event in which I cannot believe) – conditions in the United States will continue to worsen until this nation is no more.

Not only have the capitalists made themselves as powerful as the sadistic Abrahamic god they so obviously emulate; they have perpetuated their omnipotence by mastery of the most malevolent technologies of oppression. And now they are deliberately herding us into a new Dark Age from which – because their depredations are also killing our planet – our species will most likely never emerge.

That's why, when I discovered the dreadful detail that dooms Vermont's brave effort to declare health care a human right  (and thereby overturn Obamacare's deliberate reinforcement of the capitalist mandate that health care is to remain forever a privilege of wealth), I became quite angry at Tara Culp-Ressler for burying this pivotal fact and otherwise writing as if the Vermont plan were fait accompli. Hence my antagonistic words on the comment thread of her well-written but nevertheless deceptively optimistic “Beyond Obamacare: Health Care as a Human Right”:

I am sick unto death of these “there's a better tomorrow” stories, which are secular versions of the Santa Claus or Jesus myths and are thus actually nothing more than propaganda cunningly designed to stave off rebellion by perpetuating false hopes.

The key sentence in this report, which contains the fact that should have been its lead, is “Vermont plans to apply for a waiver to sidestep the Affordable Care Act beginning in 2017 so it can implement its own single-payer system.”

What this means is Vermont's plan is doomed without federal approval, which in turn means it is nothing more than pie-in-the-sky. Indeed to hope for such approval under present conditions is as absurd as hoping for Congressional relief from the Hobby Lobby decision.

Neither recognition of health insurance as a human right nor restoration of female sexual freedom will ever be allowed under the present system. The U.S. experiment in representative democracy, like the so-called “American Dream,” is dead beyond any hope of resurrection.

The hideous truth is that government at every level in this savagely oppressed nation has been reduced to a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. Until we the people recognize that without economic democracy there is no democracy at all, we will continue to suffer beneath the truncheons of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Why then do I persist in humanitarian activism, as for example my ongoing involvement with 15 Now Tacoma and its quest for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour? Why, for that matter, do I even bother to write this blog?

Because when I was a child age 11 or so and a Boy Scout on my first camping trip, I rather joyfully embraced the notion of leaving the campsite in better condition than I found it. Later, as a young adult, I realized that precept was amongst the rules by which I governed my life – that in fact it was an apt metaphor for one of the instincts that led me into journalism. And though I now know such improvement is no longer possible – that our campsite, which is our planet, is trashed beyond repair – I cannot live with myself unless I keep trying, in my own small way, to clean up the mess.

LB/20 July 2014

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U. S. Supreme Court OKs More Theocracy; Defiant Workers Mobilize Nationally for $15 Minimum Wage

FR. WILLIAM BICHSEL S.J., the 87-year-old radical Roman Catholic priest who has been repeatedly jailed by USian Empire authorities in retaliation for his support of world peace, urges $15 Now activists to persevere in their nonviolent efforts despite the intensification of capitalist opposition. For details, see “$15 Now Tacoma Rallies in Downpour,” below. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2014; click on image to view it full size.)

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AT FIRST GLANCE, the two statements in the above headline may seem unrelated, perhaps even two halves of a perplexing non sequitur. 

But on further reflection we see they are opposite sides of the same proverbial coin, just as Fr. Bichsel – Bix to his friends and comrades – represents an ancient but revolutionary interpretation of Christianity that is the antithesis of the authoritarian, pro-capitalist dogmas espoused by the theocrats and their enablers.

Prompted by the oppressive example of how Christian theocracy polices the former Confederacy, the One Percent and the Ruling Class in general have long been major financiers and facilitators of the campaign to impose Biblical Law on the USian homeland – this as the most successful means of suppressing anti-capitalist dissent. And just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court hastened the national march toward a Christian state and state Christianity, ruling that government-sponsored public prayers can now be addressed exclusively to Jesus.

The court also effectively said anyone who is offended by such theological discrimination can go to hell.

Meanwhile, the $15 Now movement – which was begun by Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative to counteract the selfsame capitalist savagery the expansion of Christian theocracy is intended to justify and preserve – has exploded across the USian homeland and is catching fire even in overseas realms of the USian global empire.

In the context of this growing rebellion, the Supreme Court's decree becomes doubly significant. It's obvious intent is to back the nation further away from the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, thereby thrusting us closer to the Taliban-like Biblical-Law dictatorship long sought by the lavishly funded Christian fanatics. But its clandestine purpose – note the court's obvious anti-democracy bias – is clearly to bolster the white Christian prosperity-gospel prohibitions against organized labor, especially any notion the USian Working Class deserves better pay and conditions.

Exemplifying these restrictions, white Christian fanaticism in the South has long been a formidable barrier to unionization, also to women's rights, racial or sexual equality and intellectual freedom in general. The white Southern workforce is conditioned from birth to believe bosses and aristocrats are god's chosen representatives and that disobeying or even questioning their orders is therefore a sin. Observing the results in a century-long succession of debacles like the recent defeat of the United Auto Workers union at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant, the One Percenters have concluded Abrahamic theocracy is capitalism's best friend. That's why USian policy invariably favors Christian theocracy in the homeland and various other forms of theocracy throughout the empire, Judaic in Israel, Islamic in the remainder of the Middle East.

Thus the implacably pro-plutocracy Supreme Court overturned a longstanding judicial precedent that required public prayer to be non-sectarian, referencing a deity only in the most generic terms. The former policy, as explained to The Washington Post by George Washington University Law Professor Ira Lupu (see the “exclusively to Jesus” link above) was intended to make public prayer mutually acceptable to the followers of all three Abrahamic religions, and to render it at least not gravely objectionable to Buddhists, Wiccans, First Nations traditionalists and any others including agnostics or atheists.

The widespread imposition of prayer to open public meetings and other governmental proceedings including public school ceremonies and sporting events was begun about the same time the phrase “under God” was added to the national pledge of allegiance.  (See also Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Harper: 2008; pgs. 195-204, especially pgs. 198-199.) As critics have been pointing out ever since, the addition of that phrase to the pledge in 1954 was the declaration that formally set the nation on its present-day course toward theocracy.

And now, thanks to the court's newest religious ruling, it is legal to flaunt Christianity as if it were the one state-approved religion, thereby theologically spitting in the faces of all non-Christians.

Those of us who are offended by the references to Jesus or to the Christians' triune god of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, says the court, can simply “leave the room” – never mind such public acts of dissent will, in many parts of the USian interior, surely invite a visit from the Ku Klux Klan or some other vigilante group.

Nor, as I can personally attest, are such realms limited to the South, where the Klan functions much like the dread Islamic morality police and is therefore colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Parts of Whatcom County, Washington – the northernmost county in the lower 48 states – are similarly “policed” by JesuNazi vigilantes.

Earlier OAN reports documenting the escalating threat of Christian theocracy are here,  here  and here.  Other relevant reports on the the court's new endorsement of Christian supremacy are here and here.  Another oppressive aspect of USian Christian theocracy – the purity ball, a public ritual in which young girls are forced to pledge to their fathers they'll be totally chaste until they give themselves to men in male-supremacist marriage – is covered here.

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Conditions in Ukraine continue to deteriorate into warfare as neo-Nazi stormtroopers, now part of Kiev's “national guard,” repeatedly assault enclaves of pro-Russian separatists. Meanwhile the putsch regime in Kiev is being advised by USian Empire secret agents, much as the Saigon regime was advised during the early stages of the Vietnam War. Given the givens, I can only hope the USian drive for global domination, which in this instance is tantamount to goading a mother bear in her own den, does not trigger World War III. Here, In Case You Missed It, is an anthology of last week's most telling dispatches:

“Putting the Ukraine Crisis in Context,” a Consortium News analysis by William Blum and “What Obama Can Do to Save Ukraine” by Robert Parry are probably the most vital of these reports. The former reveals additional historical and geopolitical details of how USian aggression precipitated the crisis. The latter implies President Obama has lost control of his administration, a chilling likelihood further detailed by “Putin's Subtle Message to Obama,” another of Parry's superb reports.  The remainder, “Burning Ukraine's Protestors Alive,” also by Parry, and “Odessa Atrocity Erupts in Peaceful City and No One Wonders Why?,” by William Boardman for Reader Supported News, portray the neo-Nazi horrors that have begun to characterize the crisis.

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More Indications the President Is Secretly a White Republican: Momentarily displaying his former Obama the Orator persona and his now obviously bogus promise of “change we can believe in,” the Janus-faced USian president (sort of) condemned skyrocketing income inequality but then demonstrated his true Barack the Betrayer values by honoring Wal-Mart as a leader in the fight for environmental sustainability – a claim that is  a huge exaggeration  if not an outright Big Lie. Though Obama's Wal-Mart endorsement has already generated an angry petition campaign, his heartfelt fondness for the nation's most anti-union employer is proven by his appointment of former Wal-Mart Foundation President Sylvia Mathews Burwell to head the Department of Health and Human Services, for which see the “huge exaggeration” link above. The appointment indicates the petition will be ignored – if not passed on to the various secret police agencies to fulfill the Father Gapon function  of identifying any and all opponents of capitalism and capitalist governance.

Meanwhile the prospect of federal health and welfare programs administered by a Wal-Mart executive makes perfect and terrifying sense in the context of a president who slashed food stamps, killed single-payer/public-option health care, sandbagged the Employee Free Choice Act and just issued yet another gag-order directive that (again) proves his promise of “governmental transparency” was just another Big Lie.

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An analysis by Crosscut, the Seattle on-line daily, “How the Metro Transit vote ran into a deep ditch,” says the resounding defeat of the recent mass-transit sustainment-measure was inflicted by “alienated suburban voters... (expressing a mindset) that cannot simply be attributed to anti-transit sentiments.” The piece, published on Friday 9 May, is written as if it were a response to my OAN column of Sunday 4 May, “Exclusive: How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies the Global Class War,” which cites the “transit is welfare” meme and defines anti-transit activism as part of the One Percent's war against any government service that benefits the 99 Percent. The comment thread associated with “deep ditch” gives me an opportunity for Outside Agitation Elsewhere: I argue at length the real cause of the defeat is a suburban shift to the Hard Right – a change also manifest in the (permanent) Republican takeover of the Washington State Senate – never mind the fact Seattle's PollyAnna progressives are loathe to recognize its reality.

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Thom Hartmann asks, “Are Banksters responsible for autism?” He then praises various measures by individual members of Congress, bills that – if ever enacted – might indeed ease the nation's inconceivably oppressive student debt. But I recognize all of these efforts will never become law and are therefore nothing more than maliciously deceptive Big Lies, intended to opiate increasingly angry students into believing relief might actually be forthcoming:

Lifetime enslavement by student debt will never be eliminated in the U.S. precisely because the One Percent views it as a primary method of suppressing student activism – which is precisely the motive behind the policies that created the indebtedness.

Indeed, the rationale for targeting students and academics – academe damned as "the single most dynamic source" of anti-capitalist resistance – is the primary topic of the infamous Powell Memo of 1971,  which is widely considered the original operations plan for the imposition of zero-tolerance Ayn Rand fascism on the USian homeland. (The memo is reprinted in full here.)

Meanwhile Sen. Elizabeth Warren's interest-reduction measure, like Mr. Hartmann's notion of  a jubilee of student-debt abolition, are nothing more than pie-in-the-sky manifestations of the imbecility of hope.  Neither Sen. Warren's mildly ameliorative bill nor any other genuinely humanitarian measure will ever again be enacted by the U.S. Congress simply because the Republican majority in the House has been gerrymandered into permanence.

This means de facto Republican control of the U.S. government is literally forever. It will not end – it cannot be ended – until the entire system is overthrown or the nation itself is toppled, most likely by the looming environmental apocalypse, at which point the entire student debt issue becomes moot. 

Until then – precisely as the diabolically clever, inconceivably powerful  One Percent intend – impossible-to-enact initiatives Ms. Warren and her ilk will perpetuate the Big Lie of USian representative democracy even as we of the peasantry and proletariat, students and professors included,  are driven ever deeper into slavery.

***

Another Hartmann piece, “Austerity 'savings' are built on 'blood money,'” details how austerity kills. I emphatically agree:

As I say almost every week in OAN, "austerity" is nothing more than a euphemism for genocide: the deliberate extermination of the Working Class. albeit without the odium of death camps.  Such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. In other words, fascism.

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Different Strokes from Different Folks: I got at least three thumbs-up clicks on the Reader Supported News comment thread of “The Bundy Ranch Militia Is Wearing Out Its Welcome,” Sara Morrison's 5 May report on the aftermath of the now-infamous retreat of federal officers from vigilantes gathered to protect an anti-government scofflaw. But when I posted an abbreviated but pointedly relevant form of the same speculation on the RSN thread of “Disturbing New Pictures of the Arrest of Cecily McMillan,” Michelle Dean's text of 7 May that accompanies Stacy Lanyon's photos of the incident, I got nine thumbs down.

Here is what won three thumbs-up on the “Bundy Ranch” thread:

The probable significance of the government's alleged retreat is at least as terrifying as Barack the Betrayer's National Defense Appropriations Act and its Supreme-Court-approved repeal of the Bill of Rights.

 

The alleged retreat may be an act of accommodation and alliance rather than an act of surrender. If so, it is directly analogous to Obama's appointment of the Christofascist Rick Warren to give the 2009 inaugural invocation. Just as Rev. Warren's appointment gave the Biblical Law theocrats the clandestine kiss of Obamanoid acceptance and encouragement, so too might the regime's departure from the Bundy Ranch communicate acceptance and encouragement to the burgeoning USian neo-Nazi movement and its storm-trooper “militia.”

Like the Rev. Warren appointment, the withdrawal could be a telling indication of how the Obama Regime sees our future – a scenario in which opposition from the Left becomes so overpowering, the government can defend itself only by open alliance with the extreme Right – exactly as occurred in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic.

This is the likelihood that links the gestures to Rev. Warren and the storm troopers with NDAA, the slaying of the Bill of Rights and the total-surveillance apparatus of the emergent USian secret-police state. As others have noted, were the Bundy Ranch defenders from Occupy, by now they would all be dead or disappeared.

All of which suggests the crude and repugnant portrayal of Obama as a second Hitler may have been eerily prophetic.

And here is what got nine thumbs-down – two days later and still with no militia arrests – on the “Disturbing New Pictures” thread:

The obvious conclusion (to be drawn from the contrast between the government's ongoing tolerance of the armed Bundy Ranch militia and the persecution of unarmed and nonviolent Occupy Movement activists) is the Obama Regime is tacitly siding with the militia – no doubt because because its long-range fascist agenda is so bottomlessly malevolent, the regime and its One Percent masters believe it will need all the help it can get – vigilante militia, Ku Klux Klan, American Nazi Party, armed Tea Baggers, whatever – to suppress the additional Leftist resistance that's bound to arise. That's why a terrifying example is being made of Ms. McMillan – same reason the regime is trying so hard to start World War III in Ukraine.

Why the big difference in the Rule of Thumbs? I've no idea, particularly since my other comments on the “Pictures” thread – a discussion of the photos themselves – drew clicks of approval. Perhaps on that thread, the Obama-can-do-no-wrong disciples – of whom there remain far too many on the USian Left – were out in force.

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$15 Now Tacoma Rallies in Downpour: Especially during the Pacific Northwest Coast's rainy season, which lasts nearly nine months, the increasingly painful arthritis in my spine and shoulders often dissuades me from photographing. Though back in the day I comfortably carried three cameras, typically two M Leicas around my neck and a single-lens reflex off my right shoulder, now even one camera around my neck quickly becomes uncomfortable. And the combined weight of two cameras – as I was using to shoot the $15 Now Tacoma rally on 3 May – has left me hurting ever since, with a stiff nagging soreness in my upper back, neck and right shoulder I haven't yet managed to wriggle out from under.

Nevertheless the effort was worth it, both for the rally itself, which despite the rain drew about 100 persons, and for the work it produced, more of which – including digital camera and cellphone imagery by other photographers, is on the $15 Now Tacoma Facebook page.  Never mind the weather – I shelter my cameras with an old GI poncho – it was damn nice to be out photographing again, and the fact the event produced two pictures I'd have considered portfolio pieces back in those thrilling days of yesteryear more than compensates for the aftermath of lingering geriatric discomfort. The two pix are the portrait of Father Bix above (which perhaps because I recognize him as a genuine saint reminds me of an old-time holy card), plus a lucky grabshot, also in black-and-white, of a rally-visitor's kid joyfully running across the rainy meadow of Tacoma's People's Park, for which see the Facebook link.

(Disclosure: I am a member of the $15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee and in that capacity was also manning an informational table at the rally.)

Photo data: Pentax MX, Tokina f/4 70-210mm zoom (mostly at 210mm and f/5.6), Sigma f/4 35-70mm zoom (mostly at 35mm and f/5.6), Fujicolor 800 and Kodak Professional BW400CN, the latter the last two rolls of a batch I'd stored in my refrigerator since 2008. One MX body contained the color, the other MX the B/W, and I switched the lenses back and forth as necessary. Exposing about 50 24-exposure rolls of the BW400CN for a commissioned story c. 2006-2008, I had discovered its actual daylight ASA is closer to 600, and I set the meters accordingly. Yes, even after years of shooting color, I still see better in chiaroscuro.

LB/11 May 2014

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Unabated Climate Change:1%'s Final Solution for 99%?

(Note to readers on Blogger: a much more graphically sophisticated version of this blog -- identical text, slightly different headline due to format spacing -- is available at http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/. The TypePad version also includes several portfolios of my photography, much of it previously published, some of it dating back to the 1960s.)

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(Editorial note: I've omitted the usual “Outside Agitation Elsewhere” feature because I think the following disclosures, which are even more damning than I anticipated, should be presented without distraction.)

*

 

IS CLIMATE CHANGE to be the One Percent's doomsday weapon – the Final Solution by which it hopes to exterminate most of the 99 Percent and thereby win, forever, the class-war that now rages with intensifying fury everywhere on this planet?

Consider the evidence. The global aristocracy's continuing refusal to ameliorate the apocalyptic impact of climate change – were that refusal a singular phenomenon – could be dismissed (as it often is) as nothing more than unfortunate coincidence. It could be, as so many people assume, an ultimate (and ultimately deadly) example of what happens when political ineptitude interacts with man-over-Nature arrogance and general human folly. But when you add the murderous consequences of deliberate policies and policy-decisions – austerity; the proliferation of genetically modified and therefore toxic foods; unprovoked wars of aggression as in Vietnam and the Middle East; the abandonment of disaster-stricken populations as in post-earthquake Haiti, post-tsunami Southeast Asia, post-Katrina New Orleans and post-Sandy New York City – what emerges is a far more ominous likelihood.

Is there, then, behind the locked oaken doors of some palatial Ruling Class mansion – or more likely intimately connected via an invisible network of indecipherable electronic signals – a secret cabal of global oligarchs who dictate such policies? Is it their homicidal purpose to methodically worsen the human condition until the entire global Working Class is starved, sickened, shot and otherwise terrorized to eternal submission? Is it their intent to emerge as all-powerful übermenschen from their climate-controlled, nuclear-bomb-proof bunkers, thence to reorder the world in accordance with the morally imbecilic principles set out by Ayn Rand in her fictional diatribes on the themes of Mein Kampf?

Evaluate the damning evidence for yourself:

Most of us recognize U.S. Ruling-Class academics Paul and Anne Ehrlich  as the popularizers of the present-day arguments for forcible population control. But too few of us recognize how closely some of the Ehrlichs' proposals duplicate the policies of Adolf Hitler and his colleagues.  Nor is it common knowledge Der Führer modeled his genocidal seizures of lebensraum  on the U.S. doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”  and its methodical extermination of First Nations peoples.  Most of us flinch at the admission such atrocities remain as “American” (that is, USian), as the proverbial apple pie. Yet the formerly top-secret U.S. “National Security Study Memorandum 200”  implicitly endorses population control by whatever means are necessary to ensure the prosperity of the USian imperial future:

“The U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries...Whether through government action, labor conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbance, the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized. Although population pressure is obviously not the only factor involved, these types of frustrations are much less likely under conditions of slow or zero population growth...In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.” (Emphasis added.)

Youth in particular are targeted by this 1974 document: “The young people, who are in much higher proportions in many LDCs (less developed countries), are likely to be more volatile, unstable, prone to extremes, alienation and violence than an older population. These young people can more readily be persuaded to attack the legal institutions of the government or real property of the 'establishment,' 'imperialists,' multinational corporations, or other-often foreign-influences blamed for their troubles...” (Emphasis added.)

Beneath all such theorizing are the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian doctrines that claim most of us in the 99 Percent are genetically programmed to mindlessly over-breed until we exceed our environment's capability to keep us fed. Barring the intervention of humanitarian aid – which Malthus and his present-day disciples vehemently oppose – we will then in our frenzies exterminate ourselves by self-inflicted famine, disease and violence.

Unfortunately, the only sustainable counter-arguments to Malthusianism are based on Marxism, which – given the realities of capitalist governance – means they are deliberately marginalized, often censored and generally unavailable to the global masses.

Though I was already aware of anti-Malthusian reasoning – chiefly that Malthusian doctrines are so mean-spirited in their support of the capitalist status quo, they ignore the ameliorative potentials of science, industry and mass movements – it took me several hours of research to ferret out sources appropriate for citation on OAN.

Early in the quest I found John Bellamy Foster's “Malthus' Essay on Population at Age 200: a Marxian View,” an informative, historically detailed and refreshingly thought-provoking study available here, albeit with a caution it is hardly material for quick-and-casual reading over lunch or coffee.

But eventually I discovered “The Population Issue: Marx vs. Malthus,” by Martha E. Gimenez, which is both brief and compellingly well-written. Its essence is a quietly dire warning:  “as long as population control remains the main or only concern of the various international and national organizations which in one way or another are trying to foster economic development in underdeveloped societies, their action will only consolidate the economic backwardness they are avowedly aiming to solve.”

But what if perpetuating that economic backwardness in the developing world – not to mention re-imposing it on the industrialized world via austerity – is precisely the Ruling Class intent?

What if the One Percent's long-range plan is to destroy all allegedly “surplus humans” – especially those of us who are elderly or disabled or chronically unemployed or otherwise unexploitable for maximum profit – in order to clear the way for imposition of a new, Ayn Rand World Order?

Far-fetched? Not at all; that is precisely what Rand advocates in Atlas Shrugged.

Nor it is coincidence the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian credo closely parallels the Ayn Rand dogma by which the global economy is ever-more-openly ruled. The latter – the assumption our species is divided into a few innovators whose lives should be preserved at all cost and legions of parasites who should be abandoned to die if not actively exterminated – is indeed the logical extension of the former. Hitler's concepts of übermenschen and lebensraum, derivatives of the Nazi concept of geopolitik, were merely German-nationalist variants  of the same basic ideology. Its modern-day version is the U.S. geopolitical policy of global domination, complete with all its genocidal consequences.

To quote an axiom that supposedly originated from the intense and thorough training given Soviet intelligence operatives but is probably as old as espionage itself, “once is accident, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” “Accident” might be the paralysis that blocks, now obviously forever, any ameliorative action on what should properly be labeled terminal climate change. “Coincidence” might be the climate-change failures combined with the abandonment of disaster-stricken populations. But when you factor in all the rest – austerity, the mass poisoning inflicted by genetically modified foods, the now-permanent regime of unprovoked wars – the conclusion of “Enemy Action” becomes ever-more undeniable.

As I have said so many times before, such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

LB/6 April 2014

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Censorship on the USian Left: Is Truthout Now in Pre-Election, Anything-to-Protect-the-Democrats Mode?

UNTIL LAST WEEK I had – past tense – a long and pleasant relationship with the website Truthout. As a former member of the American Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO, I applauded its decision to grant its employees guild representation, and as a former news editor and editor-in-chief, I am both impressed and moved by the unique facts-with-feelings reportorial style of Maya Schenwar, who is Truthout's executive director and probably its best writer as well. I had posted on the site's comment threads for many years, and only one of my comments had ever been suppressed – that by Truthout's comment-server Discus, which does not allow posters to link to their own blogs unless the blogs themselves have achieved the status of mainstream journalism. And Discus did let me repost the material as soon as I had removed the link.

But last week Truthout – not Discus (as the message that suddenly appeared on my post maybe five minutes after I had uploaded it made clear) – deleted the following:

The huge flaw in Obamacare is that it creates the illusion of insurance – precisely what it was intended to do – while imposing a structure of co-payments  and deductibles that are prohibitively expensive. Daily Kos provides a good basic explanation of how it works. 

If you're a member of the One Percent or the petit bourgeoisie, those co-pays and deductibles are of no concern even if you choose the least expensive plan. But if you're unemployed, or chronically impoverished, or disabled, you may well be worse off than before: forced by law to buy insurance from the for-profit insurance barons, but prohibited by co-pays and deductibles from ever actually getting health care. Indeed I know several younger people who are so afflicted – not surprising since by any reasonable standard, half the U.S. population is now impoverished.

 

Here, of course, is the truly obscene windfall profit Obama handed his insurance-barony benefactors: not just the all the new policy-holders, but all the policy-holders who will never be able to afford to use their insurance: pure profit for the profiteers, exactly as our closet-Republican president obviously promised them.

Medicare is a similar scam. If one is well off, Medicare is wonderful. The co-pays are 20 percent, the deductible is $1,000 per year. But if one is destitute, as I have been since 2009, Medicare is a nightmare of deprivation unless one (A) supplements it with what used to be called Medicare Plus (an LBJ idea made real by the Clinton Administration, then seized by Bush, restructured and renamed Medicare Advantage, with the advantage going to the for-profit insurors at the expense of non-profits); and (B) is willing to endure the loss of freedom and dignity attendant on becoming an oppressed subject of the welfare system  in return for Medicaid supplements.

(Yes, contrary to one of the bigger of the many Affordable Care Act Big Lies, Medicaid IS welfare, with all the restrictions and humiliations attendant thereupon.  And for those of us us who are elderly, it is not even a grant. It is instead a loan that will be repaid by the seizure of our meager estates – including all our personal property [books, tools, etc.] – after we're dead.) 

The common policy-thread through all this is retention of the Ayn-Rand/healthcare-as-a-privilege-of-wealth savagery that is the defining characteristic of the U.S. system. Go to a civilized country, there are no co-pays or deductibles.  But – note again the example of Medicare – we'll never see anything that humanitarian here even under a public-option plan, which we'll never be allowed anyway: not as long as the Citizens United decision remains in force – and the only way that will be overturned is by revolution.

The censored comment was my response to another poster, who asked me to clarify my stance on the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. The question's context was a discussion prompted by a Thom Hartmann exposé entitled “Is Rick Scott Guilty of Murder?” In it, Hartmann revealed how the Florida governor's refusal to allow a federally funded expansion of Medicaid had seemingly killed a young woman by denying her the care that might have sustained her life.

My original remarks had focused neither on Scott nor the dead woman but on the austerity policies that are being inflicted on us by both halves of the One Party of Two Names:

The purpose of austerity – no matter whether blatantly imposed by Republicans or stealthily imposed by Democrats – is genocide: specifically the extermination of those of us who are poor, chronically unemployed, disabled, elderly or otherwise unexploitable for maximum capitalist profit.

Yes, it is an outrage Charlene Dill was murdered by denial of health care. But she was slain not just by Republican policies in Florida. She was also killed by the endlessly more damning fact that – thanks to Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer and Democrat treachery in general – the United States remains the only industrialized nation on this planet in which health care is a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.

Nor is that too harsh a judgment. Obama and the Democrats promised us public-option health insurance. But they were lying. Once their deceptions had won them the White House and control of both houses of Congress, their (premeditated) treachery insured the savagery of health care as a privilege of wealth is now eternally locked into place. It is – and will be for as long as the USian Empire survives – now sustained by Obama's permanent elimination of all public-option alternatives, which has indentured us forever to the for-profit insurance barons. So much for "change we can believe in" – the biggest Big Lie of USian presidential history.

In this context, the most bitter truth of Charlotte Dill's death is that it is merely (another) deadly example of capitalism in action. It is a microcosm of Bhopal, of Bangladesh, of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 123 woman and 23 men on this very day 103 years ago.

The lesson taught us by Charlotte Dill – if we but had the courage to heed it – is the same lesson we should have been taught by the unspeakable sound of human bodies hitting the pavement of Washington Place below the Asch Building in Manhattan on the afternoon of 25 March 1911. Until we eliminate capitalism – which is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue (literally the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever set forth) – such atrocities will continue unabated.

As Neil Young so memorably said to honor Allison Krause,  who was yet another of capitalism's victims, "what if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?"

Later, when my accurate summary of Obamacare's most damning truths was deleted, I again addressed the poster who had asked me to clarify my position:

I responded to your question politely, truthfully and in some detail, but Truthout suppressed it. (No, not Discus; the notice specifically said Truthout.) Apparently – with the Republicans heading for a landslide victory in November (not that it will make life in the USian Imperial Homeland that much worse) – Truthout is now in do-anything-to-protect-the-Democrats mode, even unto suppressing unpleasant truths about the Affordable Care Act. Obviously I have become persona non grata here, so this will be my last post on this website. Indeed I'm not even sure you'll be allowed to see this. But if you are, and you're curious about what was censored, Google my name, then after next Monday you can read it in my blog. 

Yes, Truthout allowed that post to live – as if its censors were quite proud of how they had helped the Democratic Party in its ongoing campaign to suppress the ugly truths about the unprecedented rip-off sarcastically known as Obamacare.

******

Outside Agitation Outside the Notebook: Because today is my 74th birthday and the sun is shining – a rare phenomenon in the coastal Pacific Northwest at this time of year – I am not going to spend my usual 10 or 15 hours assembling this week's column. Instead I am going to merely post the headlines of and links to the reports on which I commented, plus of course the main comments themselves. These, with the notable exception of the next item, all focus on a common theme: Obama the Orator's ongoing shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, the results of which include the Ukrainian Crisis and its threat of World War III, the government's self-imposed disadvantage in Hobby-Lobby case (which greatly bolsters the probability it will further abolish women's reproductive rights), and the regime of unprecedented censorship and secrecy by which We the People are now afflicted.

Indeed it seems Obama intends to spend his second term giving us all the finger. His fuck-you, break-all-promises policies ever-more-defiantly serve his Ruling Class masters. His treachery is wrecking the Democratic Party and inflaming white racism into an unprecedented barrier against minority aspirations. He's ensuring not just Republican dominance for years to come, but the irreversible transmogrification of the United States into a fascist (and almost certainly neo-Nazi) empire, the de facto Fourth Reich. In other words, he's doing exactly what the One Percenters hired him to do.

***

“Kent State Truth Tribunal Addresses the United Nations Human Rights Committee”  Laurel Krause, sister of the murdered Allison Krause, reports on ongoing efforts to expose government secrets about the Kent State Massacre, which occurred on 4 May 1970. Via the comment thread, I give Ms. Krause what may be new and useful data:

There is one Kent State mystery that suggests the shooting was planned in advance.

I know of this because The Jersey Journal (Jersey City, N.J.), for which I was then the investigative reporter, published nine editions a day in that era. The last of these rolled a few minutes after Wall Street closed at 4 p.m. EDT. 

But all we had out of Ohio in that Monday afternoon's Market Final was a page-one bulletin the National Guard had fired on and wounded several students.

Across the river in Manhattan, where I lived, the final of The New York Post, the City's last remaining p.m., had no more than we at the JJ did.

The next day, because the shootings had occurred at 12:24 p.m. EDT, I asked why we missed the story. Our telegraph editor said the wire services – AP, UPI – hadn't moved anything more detailed than what we ran.

More curious than ever, I queried a UPI friend, who told me, “Ma Bell pulled the plug on everything in Ohio at about five minutes after 12.”

(I should explain here, for those unfamiliar with 1970s technology, that wire-service dispatches were transmitted over lines leased from AT&T and managed by the regional Bell systems.)

If it is true the Ohio wire-service connections were shut down just before the shootings – and I have no reason to doubt what my friend told me – this would suggest a conspiracy already in place, perhaps a scheme to terrorize the anti-war movement with an example of dead and wounded students.

*****

“It's Time to Put America First” Thom Hartmann decries the obscenity of lightning-fast, no-debate enactment of $1 billion in loans and $100 million in direct aid to Ukraine by the same Congress that killed unemployment compensation for 2 million USians and slashed food stamps for 1.7 million more. Vexed as always by Hartmann's refusal to acknowledge such savagery as nothing more than capitalism in action, I focus on economic reality:

Actually, the difference between the Ukrainian and USian Working Classes – why Ukrainia gets money and USia gets more austerity – should be obvious to anyone who is not a die-hard supporter of capitalism.

The Ukrainians – all but their oligarchs desperately impoverished – are therefore easily exploitable for maximum profit.

Not only that, Ukraine's industrial potential is enormous. It is the breadbasket of Europe – the most vast, most productive agricultural land on the entire continent – and it now effectively belongs to USian imperial agrobusiness. It will thus be farmed by minimum-wage laborers. And since the new Ukrainian government includes declared fascists, its agriculture will no doubt use slave labor too. The profits to the oligarchs and their new USian overlords will be near-infinite. 

Ukrainia also contains significant natural resources, including major fossil fuel deposits. And because of its post-coup chaos, there are no environmental regulations to stop or even slow the rape of the land – which again means maximum profit for the One Percent,  total subjugation of the Ukrainian Working Class.

Contrast this to the USian Imperial Homeland: it is but a husk of its former self. Its natural resources have been been bled dry by the One Percent, its industry has all been outsourced, its Working Class has been methodically disempowered by union-busting. We the People have mostly been reduced to hopeless poverty and are now being slowly exterminated by deliberately genocidal cutbacks in social services.  In short, the USian homeland no longer has any of the ingredients of a functioning economy. This means the so-called American Dream is dead; it also means there will never, ever be an USian economic rebirth. 

But the USian Homeland still has a charade of constitutional democracy, and – in a few places – still has some semblance of genuinely representative local government. Thus the One Percenters' hands remain much more tied here than in Ukrainia. 

By contrast, Ukrainia is now ruled by a cabal that includes many declared neo-Nazis in significant positions of power. This means – exactly as happened in Germany during the 1930s – Ukrainia will soon be ruled by an exclusively neo-Nazi government. In its inevitable imposition of a torture-state, it will soon be indistinguishable from Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile. It will thus become a major element in the USian Empire's 21st Century plan of global conquest – another slave-state in the USian Empire's de facto Fourth Reich. 

That summarizes the main reasons the USian Empire instantly invests money in Ukrainia even as it continues to inflict ever-worsening genocidal poverty on its own people.

We the People are being  cast away, discarded as if we were worn-out machinery. We are literally a surplus workforce, deemed useless and abandoned because we are no longer exploitable for significant profit.  Such are the consequences of capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever espoused.

As more and more of us recognize what is happening and awaken to the core truth our deepening misery is the quintessence of capitalism –  the fulfillment of all Marxist predictions about capitalism (and therefore the ultimate validation of the entire Marxist analysis) – we by our numbers and our intensifying anger will become ever more dangerous to the One Percenters.

What then will be their response? Will it be the same as that of tyrants throughout history? If so, they  will start a major war – a war big enough to exterminate the surplus Working Class population and  ruinous enough to enable the Ruling Class to abolish, forever, any last remnants of constitutional democracy. And by their continued provocation of Putin, it seems they are trying to start just such a war.

At the very least, it seems the One Percenters have convinced themselves the bloody lessons taught Darius, the Mongols, Bonaparte and Hitler no longer apply. At the very worst, their obscene, live-it-up-now-and-fuck-tomorrow arrogance – a subset of the same capitalist greed that fosters their morally imbecilic indifference to the impending environmental apocalypse – has rendered them equally indifferent to the fact such a war would be the death of our species.

Russia – with a long history of having some of the most astute and farsighted intelligence analysts on the planet – is obviously aware of all these factors. (Note that one should never underestimate Russian intelligence capabilities: One example of Russian skill is the Sepoy Mutiny of 1858, engineered by Tsarist agents, which forever stopped British Empire aggression into the underbelly of the Russian Empire. Another example is the devastatingly effective spy-saboteur-and-resistance network the Nazis eternally cursed as "the Red Orchestra," which GRU established during the late 1920s and early 1930s in anticipation of the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. [See The Red Orchestra, V.E. Tarrant, John Wiley & Sons Inc.: 1995])

With those sorts of analytical capabilities backing him up, it becomes obvious why Putin is responding as he is.

That's why I'm terrified the Ukrainian Crisis is the beginning of World War III – a war in which the  USian Empire suicidally underestimates the indomitable Russian will to “fight to the death.”

***

What many people don't know is in 510 BCE, Darius disastrously invaded Scythia, which the ancient Greeks defined as roughly equivalent to modern Black-Sea Russia, the Crimea and the Ukraine. Nevertheless the true Scythia was probably much larger, perhaps as large as the old Russian Empire, since archaeology suggests a significant Scythian presence nearly as far west as modern-day Germany and as far east as China.  DNA evidence meanwhile substantiates certain folk tales that claim Scythian origins for the Celts. Like the Celts, the Scythians were an equestrian people, and their horse-archers, at least 20 percent of whom were women – were with their long-range recurve bows considered the most formidable light cavalry of their time.

But Darius was deterred neither by the vastness of the Steppe nor by the Scythians' fierce reputation, and he marched his massive army – the era's largest and best equipped – deep into Scythia. To make a long story short, the Scythians did as the Russians have so successfully done: they retreated and retreated and retreated – then closed the door behind Darius and savaged the Persians until they fled in ever-increasing panic. (For those interested in the details, see Herodotus, The Histories, in any complete translation.) 

Nor have the Russians – many of whom themselves bear Scythian genes – forgotten this chapter of their Motherland's history: the Budenovka, for which Google, the pointed hat worn by the Red Cavalry during the Russian Civil War, was consciously patterned after the pointed hats of the Scythian horse archers, thereby implicitly linking the revolutionaries with ancient Russia. 

 

Presumably we all know what happened to the Mongols -- the mounds of their skulls the medieval Russians made as monuments at the sites of Mongol defeats – as we know the fates of Bonaparte and Hitler.

As to “Svyashchennaya Voyna” (“Sacred War”), do not be misled by the Soviet flag motif of the YouTube video I posted above. I chose that specifically for its English translation of the lyrics. The song remains popular in Russia today, and often highlights the widely attended performances of the Russian Army Chorus and Dance Troupe, the successor to the world-famous Red Army Chorus and Dance Troupe. 

       

*****

“Obama's Preposterous Defense of the Iraq War” Reliably caustic Charles Pierce of Esquire describes with appropriate venom how Obama, in his efforts to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin, has reversed his “wrong-war-in-the-wrong-place” stance against the unprovoked U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now – in another classic example of his Orator-to-Betrayer shape-shift, Obama has a become a staunch defender of the entire operation. This – no surprise to me – means he's now implicitly siding with the entire band of Bush League perpetrators, that gang of war criminals he has carefully protected since the first minute of his presidency. My response was surely predictable, but I think it's worth reprinting nonetheless:

Obviously the world has learned to recognize Obama the Orator as not just Barack the Betrayer but Barack the Belligerent – and Barack the Big Liar as well.

The dire question is whether – now the president's true persona is known – he will try in some way to do to the world what he is already doing to the United States, savaging the 99 Percent with ever-more-brazenly fascist policies.

(Note his proposals of more cuts to Medicare and new obstructions to disability insurance. Note too how he is tacitly backing Hobby Lobby in its war against women's reproductive rights, or how – like the devotee of shock-doctrine capitalism he is – he is using the shock of the bed-bug plague to repeal tenant rights in public housing, thereby making the housing easier to sell to profiteers.)

Yup: vote for a Democrat, get a sneaky, maliciously dishonest hard-right Republican – such is life under the One Party of Two Names.

What Obama is doing stateside is bad enough.

As to what he might do to Russia, be afraid; be very afraid.

*****

“The Danger of False Narrative” Robert Perry continues his superb Ukraine-Crisis reporting and analysis by noting how the USian propaganda machine deluged us with Big Lies to justify the war against Iraq and is now fabricating the same sort of Josef Goebbels narrative to gin up fear and loathing against Putin and Russia. I seize the opportunity to describe a couple of seemingly-revalidated suspicions:

Apropos observed reality, the appearance of Nazi, Confederate and Ku Klux Klan flags in conjunction with the Ukrainian coup (for which see the “Confederate battle flag” link within Mr. Parry's text), tends to confirm two suppositions many old-time Leftists accepted as ugly truths:

(1)- The existence of a secret organization – originally part of the Nazi German government, but since World War II either within the US government or facilitated by it – that aids and coordinates the imposition of fascism everywhere. (Its long-term purpose is the subjugation of all the world's peoples into a single, global fascist empire.)

(2)- Clandestine but pivotal support within the US government for the Klan and other such fascist, racist, misogynist and/or neo-Nazi organizations. (Given how the US government crushed the Communist Party, the various socialist parties and the Occupy Movement, the fact the Klan and its kindred are still functional is indisputable proof they are tacitly supported by the U.S. government and its capitalist masters.)

Why does the US foster and support fascism? Because fascism is the mature form of capitalism – that is, capitalism expanded into capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else.

In this context, the Obama Administration is not just a false-flag operation; it is false-faced as well.

*****

“Women Justices Rock the Hobby Lobby Argument”  Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker applauds how the Supreme Court's three female justices obviously support women's reproductive rights – of course they do – but then buries his lead: “Notably, the Obama Administration chose not to contest Hobby Lobby’s assertion that use of an I.U.D. was tantamount to abortion.”

My rim-rat reflexes as good as they were 44 years ago, when I was a news editor or sat a telegraph desk, I put the most important element of Toobin's story up where it belongs:

In other words, the president tacitly supports Hobby Lobby, and has hamstrung his solicitor general accordingly.

Then I elaborate:

Apparently the president is not only a closet Republican but a closet Christian theocrat as well. Note his dramatic expansion of Bush's Faith Based Initiatives, which trumps the Constitution by using federal funding to punish non-believers. (Google “faith based initiatives obama,” no quotation marks.)

This means the president is also a closet misogynist – a tacit supporter of the effort by Christian fanatics to force women back into Biblical subjugation. Once again we see Obama the Orator shape-shifting into his true persona: Barack the Betrayer.

As if that were not dismaying enough, there is also the fact the advocates of theocracy are malevolently powerful and obscenely well funded. The One Percenters lavish money on Abrahamic theocracy whether Christian, Islamic or Judaic.

Why? Because the Abrahamic dogmas of divine-right management and prosperity as divine reward ensure the perpetuity of capitalism.

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are thus hugely courageous to defy such might. Let us hope the Supreme Court includes two equally brave male justices.

 

Important development in a related story: Hobby Lobby's anti-birth-control lawsuit is part of the vast and irresistibly well-funded Christian effort to impose theocracy and Biblical Law – the Christian equivalent of Sharia – on the United States. Another part of the same well-coordinated campaign is the Vatican's sneaky effort to abolish women's reproductive rights by leveraged buyouts of formerly secular regional hospitals, after which the ecclesiastical authorities ban birth control, abortions, assisted suicide and even termination of life support in cases of medically hopeless disease or injury. The result – exactly as the Christians intend – is tantamount to the imposition of theocracy on entire hospital service areas. Hence the relevance of “Washington State Case Study: A Difficult Miscarriage Made Worse by Hospital's Religious Restrictions on Care,” a newly published Huffington Post reprint of a profoundly disturbing academic report  that describes the medical horrors – torture, actually – inflicted on a woman by the Roman Catholic hospital that is the only care provider in the region where the victim lives. I did not comment on the report – HuffPo banished me years ago for my uncontrite socialism – but I nevertheless link it via OAN because it is a vital and revealing microcosm of the broader Hobby Lobby issues.

*****

“Barack Obama: The Least Transparent President in History”  Amy Goodman's report is perfectly summarized by its head, on which I could not possibly improve. My response perfectly summarizes the last six years of our political history:

 

As Obama the Orator, the president preached "hope" and "change we can believe in" and shamelessly exploited the African-American progressive tradition to leverage himself into office.

Meanwhile the Republicans ensured his victories by terrifying us with their McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan assault guns.

Yes, that's how the system works: the good-cop/bad-cop routine – with all of us as the prisoners.

Bill Moyers tells us it's all a charade, and the evidence ever-more-powerfully confirms it.

If Moyers is correct – and I'm sure he is – our so-called “free elections” are merely dramas carefully scripted by the One Percent and played out by actors chosen from One Party of Two Names. USian politics is as false as professional wrestling, the political sound and fury meaningless save as yardsticks of deception and preludes to (ever-intensified) oppression. 

 

Such is the context of Obama the Orator's (obviously premeditated) shift into Barack the Betrayer.

His presidency is not only the least transparent; it is also founded on the biggest Big Lies in presidential history. He has probably discredited the Democratic Party beyond repair. Given USian racism, he has undoubtedly obstructed equality for people of color. He is probably fostering more “why-bother” non-voters than any politician in US history.

And when he leaves office, his Ruling Class masters will lavish him with obscene wealth and prestige to reward him for all the damage he's done.

LB/30 March 2014

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