From Synchronous Events of My Absence, a New Hope

 

Woman sharing a bowl of salad. From “Living Apart,” a work-in-progress. (Canon T5 DSLR, Canon 18mm-55mm f/3.5-f/5.6 zoom, 35mm equivalent focal lengths 28mm-90mm). Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2015. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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I BRING TO today's long-delayed writing an admittedly embryonic but unquestionably powerful sense of hope, its strength defined by its metaphorical similarity to concrete reinforced with steel or iron, the rebar beloved of structural engineers since the 15th Century or so.

Like concrete itself,  my new sense of hope contains seemingly disparate elements compounded into a robustly functional whole. The elements include one of this year's U.S. election results, Beat Generation poetry and a European musical phenomenon that began in Germany probably 15 years ago but really started with the folk-music revival  of the 1950s. Think of the political elements and the poetry as the aggregate, the music as the rebar, and the bonding element as the groundswell of obviously rising anger against capitalism's ever-more-methodical victimization of the 99 Percent.

Alas – albeit with apologies to those whose concept of dialectical materialism still stubbornly excludes the (misleadingly named) “supernatural” – we cannot discuss hope of this sort without first considering the prophetic function of art.

Like the core wisdom at the heart of the present-day Gaia Hypothesis  – the now-revolutionary notion our planet is alive, conscious and self-regulating – the prophetic function of art is a breathtakingly ancient concept. Its origins are lost in the ignorance and suppressed knowledge that unfortunately shrouds most of our species' 200,000 years. But what we are learning of so-called “primitive” peoples suggests it, like the Gaian ethos, was among the definitive characteristics of human society until the advent of patriarchy – a tragedy Barbara Mor  convincingly defines as humanity's one and only unnatural act – the precursor to the cancerous shrinking of human consciousness to the zomboid moral imbecility  necessitated by and for the maintenance of capitalist profit and growth.

During the five or six millennia that followed patriarchy's emergence, the tyrannies essential to expanding and sustaining it methodically marginalized art to exclude public awareness not just of its prophetic potential, but of all its psychological and ritualistic potencies, which the patriarchal authorities (correctly) feared as dangerously subversive. This was – and is – the fear implicit in the persecutions of art and artists launched even now by the Abrahamic religions and by the patriarchal authorities in general. It is the real reason that under capitalism, which is revealed by its master-slave dichotomy to be patriarchy in economic disguise, art has been officially marginalized, first to decoration and/or entertainment, ultimately to an esoteric medium by which the One Percenters declare their financial and cultural status, mostly to one another.

But some ideas – especially those powerful enough to evoke the spinal-chill imprimatur that signifies an encounter with poetic truth – refuse to be suppressed. Thus, just as the scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis would propose the Gaia Hypothesis in 1972 (appropriately, its name was suggested by the novelist William Golding), so in 1933 did Carl Jung rescue the notion of art-as-prophecy  from obscurity. Marshall McLuhan followed suit in 1964,  proclaiming art “a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”

Enter, as exemplars, three categories of art: Edvard Munch's four versions of The Scream (1893-1910) ; Allen Ginsberg's  “Howl” (1956) and Faun's  “Alba” (2011), here on the album Eden.

The four portraits in the Scream series are expressions of stark horror, all the more intense for the fact we are left to imagine their source. Though the anguish in the opening line of “Howl” could surely describe what it was Munch found so horrific:

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...

But 55 years later in “Alba,” we discover the suggestion those seemingly endless years of unmitigated darkness may at last be ending:

Lauf nicht davon, ich lann den Morgen sehen
Wir liefen writ, nun lassen wir den Winter ziehen.

In English, in the context of the piece itself, this translates to:

Do not run [anymore from the cold and darkness], I can see the morning.
We ran far [enough], let the winter pull us [as it might].

McLuhan's art-as-warning hypothesis provided, as many OAN readers will no doubt recall my having said before, a key part of the conceptual framework of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which defined the 1960s Counterculture – largely on the basis of its art and its expansion of female-male relationship models – as the first wave of a global revolution against patriarchy. That book, the product of 24 years of research conducted mostly in the spare moments allowed by a newspaper career, went unpublished because its manuscript, photographs and research notes were destroyed in a 1983 fire, probably arson.

Now, particularly with the addition of Jung's observations, the notion of art-as-prophecy applied to Faun (and thus to the renaissance of goddess-centered paganism that is sweeping Europe), gives us a profoundly reassuring glimpse of our post-apocalyptic future. It tells us the capitalists were not able to kill the Counterculture after all – that its anti-patriarchal aesthetic is thriving in Europe and, despite the vehement opposition of the One Percent, is now by a kind of cultural osmosis seeping back into the USian homeland – all of which, especially from the Jungian perspective, suggests our species is making psychic and psychological preparations for its future. The long term implication is that we will survive the disasters thrust on us by capitalism, and that we will eventually emerge from the shark-womb of capitalism's toxic darkness with a genuinely healing vision of ourselves, our Mother Earth and the universe of which we are part.

The point at which all these seemingly random impressions coalesced into a synchronistic whole was an apparently coincidental conversation with a much younger woman named Suzanne at the 15 Now Tacoma election-night party celebrating last week's vote by a 70 percent majority of Tacomans (see here,  here and here)  to raise the minimum wage.

Though the proposed $15 minimum wage did not win – the (obviously intimidated) voters overwhelmingly chose the $12 minimum instead – the victory was clearly 15 Now's. Their campaign so frightened theTacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, it ordered the Tacoma City Council to put the $12-eventually option on the ballot in competition with the $15-immediately proposed by initiative.

Persons unfamiliar with USian municipal government should note that “ordered” is most assuredly not hyperbole. As in most cities of the imperial homeland, the overwhelming economic resources of the local chamber of commerce grants it absolute power. Tacoma is no exception. Note the lockstep opposition the chamber mustered in its unsuccessful effort to unseat City Councilman Anders Ibsen.  In essence the chamber owns outright seven of Tacoma's nine city council members – precisely as a medieval baron might have owned the lesser aristocrats who were his vassals.

The result was a ballot that first asked whether the voter supported a minimum-wage increase and next asked whether the wage should be raised to $12 per hour or to $15. The chamber obviously hoped the question's complexity would result in a negative vote. And the chamber's hope was a rational one: Washington state voters have a long history of rejecting any ballot measure that requires careful thought.

But...as Bob Dylan prophesied back in 1964, “the times they are a-changing.”

The magnitude of that change is apparent in how a small and profoundly dedicated group of women and men – a cadre of about 25 people supported by about 115 additional volunteers (most of them avowed socialists) – gained a victory for the Tacoma Working Class that two years earlier was unimaginable.

(Disclosure: I was one of the original 15 Now Tacoma volunteers, but dropped out late last year after a potentially fatal kidney infection taught me to be less forgetful of my age – then 74 – and to be more miserly with my time.)

The broader significance of the minimum-wage victory lies in the fact approximately 60 percent of the Tacoma's workers – individual women and men but mostly families with children – are officially “lower income.” This means they struggle to survive on earnings of less than $30,000 per year. Forced into poverty by outsourcing, downsizing and other expressions of capitalist savagery, they (like so many other members of the USian 99 Percent) originally saw themselves as powerless to resist.

But the victory of raising their own pay by the electoral process has shown them they have the option of fighting back and winning.

Their triumph – and that is truly what it was – thus provides a potent object lesson in how organization and solidarity translate into a restoration of the collective power formerly provided by unions – the very power the local Ruling Class imagined had been abolished forever.

Suzanne, whose eyes, depending on the light, wondrously change from blue to green and back to blue again, broadened the focus of our conversation to what else might be done to foster Working Class resistance. It came to me then that in the wildly growing popularity of music by Faun and other such unapologetically pagan groups and individual musicians – all of them agitator-bards in service to the re-emergent Muse and the revolution she symbolizes – there is the promise of the far more elemental transformation necessary to bring about a society in which the ruling ethos is not infinite greed and selfishness but rather the ancient notion of “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

Which – never mind the fact Faun is a continent away – makes especially appropriate its transformation of the chorus from “Alba” into an anthem of joyful defiance.  On the foregoing linked video it follows, most appropriately I think, Yulya Ayuna Kholeva's exquisite but too-brief Belorussian fire dance.

      ...I can see the morning. We ran far...

LB/30 September-9 November 2015

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The 2014 Elections Tell Us the Democratic Party Is Dead -- That It Was Slain by Its Own Lies and Contradictions

FORGET THE COMPENSATORY BULLSHIT the sorely beaten “progressives” are spouting. Forget Lakoff's “Democratic strategies,”  Nader's “people have to believe,” Rich's “change without hope,”  Cherlin's “the GOP is deeply divided” and all the other dementia spawned ad nauseam by the Democratic disciples of our national cult of self-deluded positive thinking. The post-election truth no vacuously happy-faced mainstream pundit dares say aloud is the national Democratic Party is dead: that Barack Obama will be its last president ever. 

 

To be sure, the party will survive in local jurisdictions for some years to come. It will endure in those domains where – despite its ever-more-contradictory words and deeds – the party apparatus is somehow able to maintain whatever Big Lies  are essential to convince a majority of local voters it represents them rather than the One Percenters to whom all Democrats have long been secretly pledged.  But even in benighted realms where Ruling Class media is able to guarantee the continued ignorance of a majority of the voters, the Democratic Party's days are obviously numbered. 

Moreover, the Democrats' death is entirely self-inflicted, though the date you perceive as the beginning of its death-throes is probably determined by your age.

For my generation – I was born in 1940 – the party's suicide began with its pathetically servile acceptance of the official verdicts scripted to reassure the world the U.S. is not a banana republic and ensure the assassinations of its own leaders would never be properly investigated much less avenged.  The party's unavenged dead – for those too young to remember – are President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was murdered in Dallas on 22 November 1963, and his brother Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy,  who was slain in Los Angeles on 6 June 1968.

Others see the Democrats' suicidal progression as beginning with President Lyndon Baines Johnson's  now infamous 1964 Big Lie campaign, which Daniel Ellsberg later truthfully denounced as “a conspiracy to manipulate the public into a war and to win an election through fraud.”

 

Or maybe it began with President Jimmy Carter's piously Christian assault on lower-income women.  Perhaps it started with President Bill Clinton's  dual offensives against the U.S. working class  and against the nation's welfare recipients. 

Possibly, for those too young to remember these earlier betrayals, it started when Albert Gore Junior surrendered the presidency  to George Bush.

Or maybe it was when Obama the Orator finally taught us the utter imbecility of hope by becoming Barack the Betrayer and making it obvious “change we can believe in” was an even more outrageous, more malicious Big Lie  than LBJ's bogus peace candidacy.

Whenever or wherever one assumes the Democrats' path to self-destruction began, the outcome is undeniable: now, in 2014, the Democratic Party has finally choked itself to death on the irremediable tangle of its own deceptions. 

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FROM SUCH AN IGNOMINIOUS  end there is neither the triumphant rebirth of the Phoenix nor the possibility of resurrection.

The Phoenix arises from the ashes of honorable death. Resurrection – as Christianity teaches, and as European paganism taught long before Jesus was a gleam in his daddy's eye – is only for a Messiah who honorably suffers on behalf of all humanity.

But there is neither honor nor sacrifice in how the Democratic Party has killed itself.

Though it is true the USian people have been reduced to abysmal ignorance,  the resultant Moron Nation is not yet quite so pathetically stupid as to be continuously duped by a party that claims to represent the Working Class yet repeatedly throws working families, women, socioeconomic minorities and lower-income people (especially those of us who are aged and/or disabled) under the proverbial bus.

“At least the Republicans” – or so I have heard it said more times than I can count – “tell us no lies.”

In a sense, that's true. Unlike the Democrats, who still maliciously try to present themselves as humanitarians, the Republicans make no Big Lie effort to conceal the fascists they are. Their ultimate purpose is to make the United States the global model of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else – including “austerity” to guarantee extermination of those of us who are no longer profitable.

Besides which – though it pains me to admit it – we are now a nation in which the vast majority are vehement Ayn Randers, conditioned from birth to be reflexively anti-intellectual, unapologetically self-obsessed and aggressively selfish. Our national spirit – as once heroically proven at Iwo Jima,  Belleau Wood,  Gettysburg, New Orleans and Cowpens – is now evident only in fights-to-death over trinkets  at discount stores.

The mind-set that boldly rammed the New Deal down the capitalists' defiant throats – the humanitarian vision  that formerly empowered the Democratic Party – is obviously banished forever. And the attendant hopelessness so vividly expressed in 2014's low voter turnout – “let the Republicans win because it damn sure can't get any worse” – means there is no possible way the Democratic Party can ever recover.

This is because the Democratic Party has betrayed the electorate so many times it no longer has any credibility at all. Its populist posturing is rendered meaningless by its plutocratic policies. That's why it will lose the White House in 2016, after which even the most moronic of the Moron Nation voters will recognize it as a corpse.

Moreover, as the Democratic Party sinks into its grave, it is taking the entire USian Left with it.

The Democrats, of course, remain in vindictive denial.

At least since the closeted Republicanism and theocratic Christofascism of the Jimmy Carter presidency, the U.S. has been a de facto one-party nation. But the death of the Democratic Party now enables the U.S. to become a de jure one-party nation as well – a goal Republicans and their (anti-New-Deal) Democratic collaborators have sought at least since the Bankers' Plot of 1934.

Thus the now-inevitable 2016 Republican tsunami will no doubt sweep away all remaining pretenses of USian “democracy” as well.

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MY EARLIER POST-ELECTION COMMENTS were all variants on this same theme. The most complete  are on “Dispirited America Votes for Change, Gives Up on Hope”:

Obama's broke his promises deliberately and with malicious intent: 

(1)-He killed single-payer public-option health-insurance by letting the insurance barons and the prescription drug lords write ACA, which ensures U.S. health care forever remains a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. This is now a wealth-protected principle of law, hence permanently unchangeable.

(2)-He killed the Employee Free Choice Act. This not only killed organized labor but ensured its death beyond any possibility of resurrection.

(3)-He killed the remnants of our constitutional rights. Obama is the most tyrannical president in U.S. history – note in particularly his persecution of whistle-blowers.

He has also, by his transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, proven himself the most brazen liar in U.S. presidential history.

Wake up, people. This Republican Congress – the intentional result of Obama's intransigence – is not an accident.

Nor is it a loss for this president. Now he can do what he was hired to do.

He will resume genocidal warfare against lower-income people, slashing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – and slashing food stamps yet again. He will complete the nullification of the constitution.

And in the process – given U.S. racism – he will eternally discredit all future black aspirations. 

That's why, from the perspective of his Ruling Class masters, the Republican Congress is Obama's greatest victory yet. 

I said much the same thing, albeit with links to documentation, in response to “If You Think DC Is Awful Now, Wait Until Wednesday”:

Only now, with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, is Obama the Orator able to finalize his transformation to Barack the Betrayer, which is the real reason the (white) Ruling Class paid his way into the White House.

The chief victims of this transformation will be lower-income people, especially those of us who are elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed.

While our victimization will be euphemistically described as “austerity,” its true purpose will be genocide. It will be accomplished by the same murderous cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid Obama has already attempted.  And there will be more of the deadly food-stamp cuts Obama has already approved. This is the real “change we can believe in” – the final fulfillment of Ruling Class intent.

Bank on it, these atrocities – and other far more deadly horrors – are exactly what await us. How do I know? I am no prophet. But as a Marxian I understand capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us, including the methodical extermination of those of us no longer exploitable for profit. This is our now-inescapable future.

On the comment thread of “What's in Store for New Senate? Much of the Same Gridlock And Grind,” I essentially repeated what I had said before.  And when another poster demanded to know if I had voted, I replied accordingly:

Yes; I have voted in every election since I came of voting age in 1961. But that does not change the fact our elections are meaningless.

Despite the Big Lie of the two-party system, we are ruled by one Ruling Class (capitalist) party.

But there are degrees of one-party rule.

There is de facto one-party rule, wherein the two parties maintain a charade of “democracy.”

Then there is the less euphemistic single-party rule resulting from the destruction of the national Democratic Party. (Its destruction, now a fact of life, provides the only plausible explanation for why Ruling Class bought Barack Obama the presidency.)

Lastly there is overt fascism – the historically inevitable final stage of capitalism – with de jure one-party dictatorship. This will no doubt be imposed after the Republican Party (which since the 1920s has been the primary U.S. vessel of fascism) wins total control of the federal government in 2016.

Of course it won't be called fascism or Nazism. It will be called something like Christian Republicanism. The name of the nation will probably also be changed, perhaps to the United States of Christ in America or the United States of God. This will fulfill the theocratic intent the Ruling Class declared by adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.

Given U.S. military might, it will also end forever any hope our species will achieve real democracy.

 

Today, recognizing the environmental dimensions of the Republican landslide – which is a victory for the JesuNazi hatred of Nature and Nature's embodiment as Woman – I realize it also ends forever any hope our species can escape self-inflicted extinction. In truth, there were no such hopes before; Obama the closet Republican is as much a misogynist  and Nature-hater  as his un-closeted collaborators. But now the Republican victory has given Barack the Betrayer precisely the cover he needs to pursue his real, ruthlessly anti-environmental, pro-capitalist agenda.

***

Truthout's William Rivers Pitt, in “Reaping the Whirlwind, Again,” brags he saw the Republican landslide coming. “Hell, I called it on the third of October,” he wrote.

But I called it eight months ago on 23 March:

...it seems Obama and his national Democratic apparatus are determined to facilitate Republican victory in the U.S. Senate, reinforce Republican domination of the House and foster Republican triumph at state and local levels as well...The Republicans openly declare their fascism and govern accordingly. By contrast, the Democrats lie. They get elected by pretending to be progressives, then govern like fascists, thereby rendering our votes meaningless.

By October I was already foreseeing the election's results:

What, therefore, will change if the Republicans – as expected – win a majority of seats in the Senate? Not much; arcane, pro-plutocracy Senate rules already give the Republicans de facto control,  so all that will happen is the nation's march toward overt fascism and Christian theocracy and its simultaneous descent to the total wretchedness of de facto slavery for the 99 Percent will merely accelerate a bit.

At this point I must also confess I am just a bit sardonically amused by the great irony the Democratic Party's festering corruption – the source of the lies, deceptions and betrayals that finally fulfilled Kevin Phillips' prediction  of The Emerging Republican Majority – may in our post-2016 future be used by gleefully back-stabbing Republicans to prosecute the selfsame Democrats who knowingly enabled their ascent to power.

In the alleged mind of Moron Nation, which rejects history as irrelevant, this will eternally damn the Democratic Party as a criminal organization.

But given the party's methodical, five-decade betrayal of the Working Class, it would surely be poetic justice.

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WHAT NEITHER RULING CLASS propaganda media nor even the alternative media of the Second Amendment community dares acknowledge is the long-range Democratic Party cunning that's apparently behind the 59 percent voter approval  for Washington state Initiative 594.

This new law not only imposes mandatory background checks on all firearms sales. It also makes a felon of any legal firearms owner who merely hands a gun to another legal firearms owner – as for example in a “see-what-my-husband-bought-me-for-my-birthday” moment – without first having the temporary “transfer” approved by the federal government.

The anti-gunowner, anti-hunting fanatics who are now a majority amongst Washington state's game wardens are another legitimate I-594 worry.  Granted the same powers of arrest and confiscation possessed by any other police officers, they are justifiably notorious for their zero-tolerance enforcement of game and fish regulations – rules deliberately made so complex, unintentional violation is nearly impossible for the average citizen to avoid. That any of these wardens would mercilessly file charges against two licensed hunters who had held one another's firearms for a moment to facilitate climbing a fence or bending to tie a bootlace is an absolute certainty.

Such charges would, again by law, be accompanied by confiscation of the hunters' guns and vehicles – a huge windfall revenue source for the perpetually tax-hungry state government. 

And – yes – I-594 makes it an illegal “transfer” for one legal firearms owner to even touch another legal firearms owner's gun save under the most severely limited circumstances.

Though many of the state's federally licensed firearms dealers were essentially bought off by a section of the initiative that guarantees them substantial profits by allowing whatever-the-market-will-bear fees for processing the transfers and registering the guns, there is now growing concern the voter-enacted law has made it illegal for gun-shop employees to allow customers to handle intended purchases. If this concern is validated, it will put most of the gun stores in the state out of business.

When you read the initiative's frustratingly turgid 19 pages of text  – which most Washinigton voters were too lazy or too illiterate to do – you discover it is clearly intended to felonize everyday firearms handling. The unspoken purpose thus becomes obvious: making firearms ownership so legally hazardous most firearms owners will surrender their guns rather than risk inadvertent violation of the law.

To those of us aware of semiotics and symbolism, I-594's more subtle purpose is sneakily making real the forcible-disarmament movement's claim firearms ownership is an act of violence. Now because of the criminal liabilities imposed by I-594, legal gun ownership has become – if you're not careful to the point of paranoia – an act of violence against yourself.

The deadly consequences of imprisonment for an USian male without a previous criminal background – that is, without Mafia, street-gang, Muslim or Aryan Nations  protection – is repeated gang rape. Because AIDS is rampant in U.S. prisons,  such imprisonment is often a death sentence.  The law is thus clearly intended to be a fatal blow not only to a legally armed U.S. Working Class but to the centuries-long USian gun culture in general.

But the real back-story of I-594's triumph goes far beyond the emergence of the forcible disarmament movement as a political power in in Washington state.

The movement's strength was first evident in its takeover of the state Democratic Party, which spawned the 1994 Legislature's attempt to prohibit firearms ownership by anyone who was ever in outpatient psychotherapy or even grief counseling for more than two weeks.

That effort to forcibly disarm the public – it was based on the (then newly discovered) statistic that about half of all USians will in their lifetimes suffer at least one episode of mental illness  – was killed by gubernatorial veto. The veto was imposed after mental health professionals unanimously complained to the governor the legislation criminalized treatment. Veterans' representatives agreed, also protesting the measure's disproportionate impact on former soldiers.

However, the I-594 story actually begins a decade earlier, with now-suppressed testimony by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman – that Washington state is commonly used by the Ruling Class as a Skinner-box in which to test and refine strategies and tactics of oppression. (Ehrlichman's remarks, considerably more euphemistic than my paraphrasing, were given widespread local publicity during the mid-1970s, but the stories have since vanished down the Orwell hole, which is why I cannot link to them.)

One of the more devious but now obviously successful of these oppressive methods was the widespread closure of public access to hunting lands, a deliberately unwritten, mostly secret policy initiated by Democratic Governor Booth Gardner  in the mid-1980s. 

The closures, which eventually also shut down nearly all the state's once-numerous informal shooting ranges, have been forcefully continued by every governor since then, all of whom are Democrats.

Their clandestine purpose – repeatedly confirmed to me by two Democratic Party insiders – is to reduce the number of firearms owners in the state not by forcible disarmament (aka “gun control”) but rather by radically reducing the opportunities for legal firearms use – and thereby reducing the number of recreational firearms owners.

The strategy's apparent success is demonstrated at the ballot box. In 1997, Washington state voters rejected anti-gunowner Initiative 676  by a landslide 71 percent majority. Seventeen years later, the state's voters embraced the infinitely more draconian I-594 by a majority of nearly 340,000 votes. 

Even so, there is compelling evidence for an alternative hypothesis: that I-594 became law only because its proponents ran a classic Big Lie campaign, maliciously deceiving the electorate about the measure's true intent.  If deception rather than an overall reduction in firearms ownership is the correct explanation for I-594's passage, the state's legal firearms owners are about to suffer a brutally rude awakening.

These gun owners, whose per capita possession of concealed pistol licenses is one of the nation's highest,  will express their fury just as they previously expressed their ignorance of the measure's content. They'll vote – this time against I-594's proponents.

Once again, the Democrats – whose forcible-disarmament fanaticism has been driving Working Class men and women into the arms of the Republicans for nearly a half century – will lose badly. The result could be a Republican sweep of the entire state – another (self-inflicted) death blow to the Democratic Party.

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THE COLUMN I HAD originally planned for today, already half written, was to have lauded the activities of Tacoma 15 Now, which brought 27 speakers and a petition of 1,308 signatures to the Tacoma City Council demanding it raise the city-wide minimum-wage to $15 per hour.

Though the council meets at 5 p.m. – a time obviously intended to exclude Working Class people from its allegedly “democratic” decision-making – presentation of the petition and its associated pleas for councilmanic action were nevertheless the highlight of the governing body's 14 October regular meeting.

Seemingly attentive – but in cold truth as arrogantly unresponsive as any Ruling Class governing body in Tsarist Russia or pre-revolutionary France – the council members accepted the petition as required by law.  Predictably, they have since declined to act upon it.

Such is the new aristocratic haughtiness of USian elected officials, who at all levels of governance – local, state, federal – are ever more brazen in pandering to the Ruling Class and effectively disenfranchising everyone else.

In all probability the council members hope the 15 Now campaign will dwindle in despair and – like the Occupy Movement from which it was born – eventually disintegrate as a result of its own internal conflicts.

But all this may now be either moot or irrelevant. It is rendered so by the national Republican landslide, which, as reported above, has removed the last obstacles in the way of President Barack Obama's implicitly genocidal “austerity” agenda.

This means lower-income workers will undoubtedly lose the food stamps and Medicaid programs by which they are now sustained.

And if one is too sick or too hungry to work – and thereby hurled into homelessness as many are now doomed to be – one's wage is of little concern.

The Republican triumph will also radically accelerate the imperial homeland's skyrocketing transition to overt fascism, under which all forms of resistance – labor activism included – will eventually be outlawed as domestic terrorism.

Not that it wouldn't have happened anyway. Fascism is the inevitable final-stage consequence of capitalism.

And as an exceptionally astute Occupy activist named Francesca observed in 2011, “the 99 Percent is (already) terribly broken” – perhaps so broken its organization into an effective resistance movement is no longer possible.

Which shows us, once again, our desperate need for a genuine Working Class party.

LB/3-9 November 2014

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Activism and Renewed Vision at Age 74; 12 Revealing Reports and Essays on U.S. Fascism and Theocracy

PROUD AND ANGRY: A member of the 15 Now Tacoma organizing committee, I spent a bit more than an hour Sunday collecting signatures on our petition to the Tacoma City Council demanding the minimum wage inside this municipality be raised to $15 per hour.

In that brief span of time – never mind I am 74 years old and visibly crippled – I filled two petition-pages, front and back, with a total of 48 signatures complete with addresses and contact information.

The venue was very much in 15 Now's advantage – an annual celebration of Tacoma's diverse ethnicity, a food-and-music festival in a large and pleasant city park near my dwelling, and I should have brought many more than two of our petition-sheets with me, but alas I did not. It was my first time working alone as a signature-gatherer, and I had foolishly under-estimated the campaign's popularity.

Meanwhile, “15 Now” is becoming a slogan of the increasingly radicalized Working Class, not just in Washington state but throughout the U.S. imperial homeland, and minimum-wage data tells why.

Here, where the minimum wage is set by the legislature, it is $9.32 an hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. But neither provide a so-called living wage, the sum required for self-support without reliance on food stamps and other subsidies  the ever-more-unabashedly Ayn-Rand-fascist federal and state governments are relentlessly slashing or eliminating entirely.

(Note: the above-linked wage and cost-of-living data is not current. In one place the source-website says it's data is from the year 2010; in another it says it was updated in 2012. Thanks to bureaucratic lag – the increasing reluctance of U.S. governance to acknowledge how bad things truly are – these are the last full years available. However, the site is nevertheless useful as it does show the relationship between minimum wage and living wage.)

Had the federal minimum wage kept pace with inflation – that is, were the capitalists and their political servants not gleefully lining their own pockets by savaging workers and working families – the federal minimum wage would be $23 per hour.

Combine that with the fact at least half the population of Tacoma is lower income – 60 percent of the children in Tacoma schools are on free or reduced-price lunches  – and it becomes easy to understand why it took me only 75 minutes to gather all those signatures.

Despite my error in not bringing more petition-pages to the park, I am fiercely proud of my effort today. I frankly had no idea I could be continuously on my feet without serious discomfort for anything approaching that span of time and distance, equivalent to walking about three miles.

I was also reveling in the exquisiteness of my new eyesight, 20/20 in my right eye due to cataract surgery, its result a re-familiarization with the sensuality of seeing that is tantamount to discovery of a fountain of youth – an experience I would be denied had I not applied for, and gotten, a special medical-expense grant.

At the same time, I am again forced to confront the fact the United States of America – once a nation of which I was proud to be a citizen – is again expanding at every level its traditional economic hostility toward people of color.  But now it has gone much further. It has become the enemy of all working peoples everywhere, at home and abroad, regardless of our race and ethnicity.

It is from this perspective – pride in what I did today, pride in the fact I am able to remain defiantly active, anger in what this nation has become – I devote my Sundays to writing this blog.

******

On the Rise of Theocracy and Fascism in Obama's U.S.

Here is an analysis that reveals the connections beneath five seemingly unrelated reports:

“Right-Wing Militias Are Thriving - and the Media Won't Talk About It.” Nor is the Obama Regime protecting us against the depredations of these latter-day storm troopers.

The report's most revealing passage is frightening indeed:

“The problem is much more one of inter-agency coordination, leadership and simple recognition of the widespread threat of right-wing violence—a failure epitomized by the Obama administration’s knee-jerk disavowal of a Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism, leaked to right-wing media in April 2009. As Potok noted, this disavowal came despite two basic facts: first, that a similar report on the virtually nonexistent radical left had been issued six months earlier, and second, the fact the report itself was “a fair, sober and prescient analysis of what was going on.” In fact “virtually everything that was written in that report came to pass in one way or another. But it’s not just the government that’s been caught flat-footed. The media’s sensationalist approach obscured as much or more than it revealed...”

AlterNet's Paul Rosenberg, who wrote this otherwise excellent summary of material from the Southern Poverty Law Center, nevertheless failed in two significant ways.

He seems to regard the government's inactivity and the media's dissemination of disinformation as separate phenomena – never mind the fact governance and mass media in today's U.S. are each wholly owned subsidiaries of the One Percent. In other words, it appears the militia are – no doubt in anticipation of their future function as defenders of capitalism – definitively under Ruling Class protection.

And – though Rosenberg does report the intimate connections between the new storm troopers, the imperial war machine and Christian fanaticism – he fails to place these disturbing facts in the context of the much larger, lavishly financed, increasingly successful effort to impose biblical-law theocracy  on the United States.

Predictably, here too the U.S. government demonstrates its servitude to the One Percent. There's the Hobby Lobby case – which is turning out to be the Dred Scott decision not just for women but for the entire U.S. 99 Percent.  There's also President Obama's dramatic increase in funding for religion-based social-services that notoriously discriminate against non-believers.

Most of all there's the story implicit in “US Air Force Prepares to Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of Fundamentalist Christians Proselytizing War.” which details the forcible conversion of the imperial war machine into an onward-Christian-soldiers force of heretic hunters and infidel eliminators. These modern-day Crusaders are tasked with converting the world,  not at swords-point as in the previous Dark Age, but with cluster-bombs, napalm, depleted-uranium munitions, torture, deliberate collateral damage and other such technologies and tactics suitable to the new Dark Age in which we are befallen.

Here's the report's key paragraph:

“Look, let's just call it what it is. 'Spiritual rape' perpetrated by 'fundamentalist Christian religious predators' is how we at the civil rights organization I lead — the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF)— describe the profound sense of vicious, personal violation that is being mercilessly inflicted upon tens of thousands of our MRFF military clients, 96% of whom are practicing Christians themselves. Forced religious indoctrination, mandatory prayer sessions, active, abusive measures towards the promotion of one or another fundamentalist Christian sect, the shaming and savaging of freethinking, atheist, and agnostic service members – these barbaric tactics define the monstrous modus operandi of the Christian dominionist hegemony that lies as a cancerous plague metastasizing briskly across the whole of the Air Force and the U.S. Military.”

Another aspect of the theocracy issue – made so by the bottomless hatred of women that defines all Abrahamic fanatics whether Judaic, Christian or Muslim – is obliquely covered by “What I Learned Growing Up in the South as a Feminist, and the Problems With Today's Feminist Movement.” An essay by Lynn Stuart Parramore on the present-day plight of feminism, its most noteworthy paragraph promises much but delivers little:

“Part of this I blame on the Democratic Party, which often embraces a superficial 'hooray for women!' attitude while kicking women, particularly those at the lower rungs of the economic ladder, under the bus. Too often, mainstream moderate women's organizations seem to be class-blind and oblivious (or even hostile) to the need to confront economic structures that oppress both women and men.”

Too bad Parramore did not detail how the Democratic Party, beneath its never-ending Big Lie of progressive politics, proves itself to be as bad (if not actually worse), than the Republicans in effective hostility to women. How many millions of women have been robbed of their reproductive freedom – forever – by the loss of their jobs, and therefore the loss of their health insurance, as the direct result of Democrat “free trade” policies?

And now how many women who desperately hoped Obamacare would restore those freedoms are now suffering the cruelty of Hobby Lobby – the permanent, theocratic destruction of their hopes via Obamacare, the now-officially unconstitutional legislation presumably written and approved by the president whose first claim to fame was as a Harvard Law School constitutional scholar. 

Given the innumerable shape-shifts from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer that prove the president to be the most brazenly dishonest occupant of the White House ever, who can doubt the Hobby-Lobby outcome – the denial of free contraception to untold numbers of women – was intended from the very beginning?

The last two reports in this anthology, “Elderly Veteran Arrested For Asking County Officials To Speak Louder,” here and “We're Arresting Poor Mothers for Our Own Failures,” here, each illustrate the ever-more-zero-tolerance police-state malevolence that now increasingly afflicts the (increasingly Christian, hence increasingly brutal) imperial homeland.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere (in Case You Missed It)

 

“Obama Administration Eyes Significant Direct Involvement in Ukrainian Civil War,” Reader Supported News' republication of a terrifying New York Times report of looming escalation on behalf the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine War, sparked an unusually vitriolic comment thread, to which I added my own analysis:

Don't let the quibbling...obscure the terrifying fact escalations of this sort are bound to trigger World War III.

Because Russia is not North Vietnam – because Russia has a genuinely global military capability – U.S. intervention on behalf the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine can only lead to thermonuclear holocaust.

 

Remember too the sole purpose of the U.S. government (and therefore of the CIA or any of its agencies whether foreign or domestic), is the advancement and perpetuation of U.S. capitalism and its global empire, the de facto Fourth Reich. This role it now fulfills perfectly.

Capitalism today has only three goals, all subsets of its mandate for absolute power and unlimited profit. These goals are: (1)-total control of global resources; (2)-extermination of surplus populations (that is, of all workers and working families rendered unnecessary by automation); (3)-reduction of the remaining workers to de facto slavery.

These goals are evident wherever there is a U.S. presence – Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, New Orleans, Ukraine – anywhere the empire exerts itself.

That's because the U.S. government is capitalism personified: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, the rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth – moral imbecility writ into foreign and domestic policy.

Later on the same thread a poster screen-named “geraldom” seemingly tried to lead three of us into criminal statements:  “So what you, lorenbliss, and dsepeczi are basically saying (bottomline) is that Putin should surrender control of Russia to the U.S. in order to avoid igniting a hot-war and certain destruction of all life on earth.”

To which I responded:

The maliciously provocative nature of this false assertion – a statement to which nearly any rational response would be actionable by the secret police as treason – makes me wonder for whom geraldom is working.

 

Never forget Lev Bronstein's axiom: “in any gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”

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“Fear and Retaliation at the VA” exposes vindictive management within the Department of Veterans Affairs  – a grim reality no different from the oppressive management that characterizes the entire Obamanoid bureaucracy and indeed governmental bureaucracy throughout the United States. The excellent report, by Lydia Dennett of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), was reprinted by Popular Resistance.org, a website that is always worth reading. On the comment thread I pointed out how bureaucratic malevolence whether internal or external is one of the ways capitalist governance ensures itself against socialism:

As I said on Outside Agitator's Notebook...a few weeks ago, the problems with VA health care are a microcosm of the problems with U.S. health care in general –  (scroll down), an analysis that, whether coincidentally or not, was repeated by Paul Krugman  10 days later.

But these problems are also what is wrong with all government bureaucracies – federal, state and local – that are responsible for providing services to the Working Class people of the United States.

The ultimate source of these problems is class warfare – the fact that managers (who presume themselves to be part of the Ruling Class elite), are indifferent if not outright hostile to the needs of the people they are theoretically responsible for serving.

This hostility is a logical byproduct of extent to which the U.S. population – particularly the college-educated elite – have been trained in (indeed brainwashed in), the morally imbecilic credo of Ayn Rand.

Hence the attitude in the bureaucracies from the top down is essentially the same as on Wall Street: infinite greed as ultimate virtue – the conscious and deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

As a consequence, management is focused not on serving the people but on maximizing earnings while minimizing personal effort. Moreover, the same attitude applies, in varying degrees, at all levels of bureaucracy.

The result is one of the many ways the One Percent perpetuates the popular hatred of government that perpetuates hostility to socialism. It is also yet another dimension of the methodical reduction of the 99 Percent to abject serfdom.

******

“Coal exports from Bellingham could ramp up rapidly” reveals that railroad tracks are already being upgraded to carry billions of tons of coal to a proposed new international port near Bellingham, Washington. But Crosscut's usually skillful reporter Floyd McKay sidesteps entirely the obvious implication of the new construction – that the proverbial fix is already in, and the coal port will be built regardless of local opposition. I commented accordingly:

Anyone who doubts the Bellingham coal port is not already a done deal need only note how BNSF is upgrading the relevant rail lines.

The upgrading proves the associated political process – environmental-impact statements included – is nothing more than another charade of the sort that now exemplifies the Big Lie of U.S. democracy.

Under the new paradigm of U.S. governance, anything the capitalists want, the capitalists get – no matter how many will suffer or die as a consequence.

 

Were the fix not already in, the railroad would not be spending the money to bolster its tracks to support increased traffic.

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“The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist,” by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux, of The Intercept, reports the ugly details of how easily a political activist* can be damned forever as a public enemy.  I damn the government in response:

 

By these standards, anyone who exercises the First Amendment right to protest can be labeled a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer – and that is obviously the government's intent.

Participate in a demonstration wherein a few secret-police thugs trash a building to create an excuse for mass arrest, you're on the list – your life destroyed forever unless you manage to escape to political asylum somewhere else.

What this makes clear is that Obama will not be content until all of us in the 99 Percent regardless of ethnicity or gender are reduced to the endless fear and total subjugation that was originally the wretched lot of minorities in the Ku Klux Klanfederacy whether south or north.

Indeed, that very kind of terror-state (so akin to Tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany), seems to be the Obamanoid model for good governance.

And in Obama's wanton and willful embrace of tyranny – never mind the clamor of deliberate lies and misinformed protests by DUDs (Democrats Uttering Denials) – the Republicans can no longer be blamed as initiators.

Once again, in his transition from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, the president proves himself to be infinitely more tyrannical than Richard Milhous Nixon ever dreamed of being.

_________

*Under the Obama Regime, this applies only to activists on the Left. Those on the Right – even those advocating violence against the government – are clearly exempt. See “Right-Wing Militias Are Thriving,” above. 

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“How Anonymous Cops Online Are Reacting to the Death of Eric Garner” gives us an insider's glimpse of the savagery characteristic of capitalist governance. My response gets right to the point:

Envision these remarks as part of a dialogue amongst soldiers in an army of occupation inside a conquered nation and you have at last glimpsed the core truth of life in the imperial USian homeland.

******

“Federal Appeals Court Deals Blow to Obamacare” is a Washington Post report that discloses what I suspect is yet another deliberate betrayal of lower-income people maliciously built into the so-called Affordable Care Act.  Thus my comment:

It ain't just “the Republicans.”

The Affordable Care Act was written by Democrats – or more specifically by insurance-monopoly lawyers empowered by Democrats.

Which means this newest “failure” – actually another example of Obama the Orator shape-shifting into Barack the Betrayer – was intended from the very beginning.

Why?

Because Obama is the quintessential capitalist. Because he is the biggest Big Liar ever to occupy the White House. Because he rules by capitalism's credo of Ayn Rand moral imbecility: infinite greed as maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

Mostly because it's yet another truncheon with which to beat the Working Class into submission.

The victims of mandatory Obamacare – the people who cannot afford insurance without government subsidies – will be ruined by bankruptcies, foreclosures, families flung into permanent homelessness.

Meanwhile – with the subsidy money diverted to more profitable forms of corporate welfare – there'll be even bigger payoffs for Obama's One Percent masters.

Wake up, people. It's capitalism in action: absolute power and infinite profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Later, in response to a hostile poster, I added this:

I'm well aware of Obamacare's Republican origins.

So let's be honest about who inflicted it on the people of the United States. (It was Barack the Betrayer and the Democratic Party).

Also let's be honest about why it was inflicted on us.

(It pays off the health care cartel and the prescription drug lords with the most obscene windfall profits in their obscene-profit histories.)

(Plus – let us not forget this all-important point – Obamacare perpetuates forever the definitive USian policy of health care as a privilege of wealth.)

Lastly, let's be honest about why the Republicans pretend to oppose it.

(Opposing anything with a “Democratic” label is the Republicans' predetermined, carefully scripted role in maintaining the Big Lie of USian "representative democracy" – their function in the One Party of Two Names.)

Wake up, people. There is no democracy here. There is only the tyranny of the One Percent – camouflaged by charades performed by its wholly owned servants in government at every level.

 

And my next retort was unapologetically antagonistic:

I see by the negative numbers I'm getting, there's a bunch of DUDs – Democrats Uttering Denials – on this thread. Hmmmm...must be an election year, as the defenders of the indefensible are again out in force, trying once more to sell us their Big Lie of “change we can believe in” – never mind our reality is exactly as Audre Lorde said: “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”

Likewise my concluding comment, though its animosity was directed at the Democratic Party and not at the poster to whom I was responding:

...Wyden sounds like a male clone of the Patty Murray/Maria Cantwell duet here in the state of Wishywash.

 

But that's the sort of marionette mediocrity we get – Democrat or Republican it matters not – now that the Soviet Union is no longer around to scare the capitalists into a pretense of humanitarianism.

******

“No, Obama Has Not Failed” is a short essay by Charles Pierce of Esquire, republished by RSN, that disputes the growing conviction on the Left the president is “an incompetent, a sellout, or an incompetent sellout.”

 

My response is equally blunt:

Obama is also the best president the Bankers Plot conspirators ever had.

(These never-prosecuted criminals of 1934 wanted an officially fascist United States as part of a Rome/Berlin/Tokyo/Washington D.C. Axis and Hitler's New Order, a four-part global empire that was the conceptual forerunner of Bush's New World Order, the neocons' American Century and the Democrats' Global Economy.)

Indeed I would not be the least surprised if in the privacy of his own smugness, Obama already thinks of himself as “Imperator Mundi”– emperor of the world – not just POTUS but IMPOTUS.

LB/27 July 2014

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