NOW WE ARE WITNESSING how the Supreme Court's Citizens United
decision ensures our eternal enslavement by the One Percent. It has not
only slain our fragile experiment in constitutional democracy; it is
murdering our collective conscience as well.
In fact I cannot doubt the Citizens United
date of 21 January 2010 will live in infamy centuries after 7 December
1941 is forgotten. Pearl Harbor was but an initial loss in a victorious
war. CU marks the end of the United States as We the People had
known it, the moment of our descent into terminal Ayn Rand barbarism
and resurrected Ku Klux bigotry – as deadly to our civilization as the
events of 4 September 476 were to Rome's.
Meanwhile the ugly extent to which Citizens United has transformed our elections becomes ever more obvious. It was most recently demonstrated by a scoop-the-world New York Times exposé of the blatantly racist anti-Obama hatemongering planned by one of the many Republican political action committees.
Though The Times failed to note how the proposed attacks were facilitated by the CU decision, the omission – or more likely the deliberate suppression of fact – was partially remedied by Lee Fang,
a United Republic investigative reporter. The ruling, wrote Fang, “may
unleash a new level of ugliness in (U.S.) campaigns. Technically, the
decision only allows corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts
in elections. But in practice, Citizens United might fuel a wave of advertising designed to stir racial divisions and hatred against minority groups.”
Unfortunately
Fang's use of “may” and “might” severely weakened his analysis, a flaw
all the more perplexing given his Asian-American ethnicity. But even the
timid wording of his conclusion could not dilute the obvious – that Citizens United
has bolstered to new extremes an already raging resurrection of white
racism in the United States. The burgeoning bigotry Fang curiously
reduced to mere potential became clearly visible during the 2008
election campaign. It was already apparent three years beforehand in the
genocidal aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Its resurgent Ku Klux
hatefulness is evident on even the earliest Teabagger picket-signs and
in literally all the pronouncements of the anti-Obama birther cult. Now –
bolstered by CU's approval of limitless expenditures for
election propaganda – the One Percent are using their inconceivably
vast wealth to catapult white racism out of our national closet and back
into the Moronic Majority's mental mainstream.
At the very least, Citizens United allows the Republicans the endless funding to fulfill their Southern Strategy, methodically restoring bigotry to all its de facto Jim Crow venom and perhaps even launching the re-imposition of de jure segregation. At the worst, CU gives the Ruling Class carte blanche
to infect the huge Moron Nation segment of our population with the Nazi
mindset the barons of Wall Street and Big Business have fervently
sought to impose on the U.S. since the days of Adolph Hitler.
Are they succeeding? Note the Trayvon Martin target,
a best-selling outrage that would have been unthinkable outside a Ku
Klux Klavern even a few months ago. Surely somewhere in Hell Josef
Goebbels is chortling with glee.
Within the same week, as The Times
revealed and as Fang repeated in his own lead, Joe Ricketts, the
billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade, was close to finalizing the plans
for a $10 million race-baiting advertising blitz intended to guarantee
Obama's defeat. The ads – a formidable combination of video and print –
were to be launched so late in the campaign Obama could not muster an
effective counterattack. And even if the plan were canceled, as seemed
likely late Saturday, Citizens United denies us any protection against advertising that would be equally vile if not far worse.
A day earlier, after Fang's report was further disseminated by Truthout, I had realized Ricketts' ploy – or any other such defamation now encouraged by CU
– would doom the Obama presidency as surely as the Willie Horton ad
doomed the Michael Dukakis candidacy in 1988. I commented accordingly:
I
don't normally make election predictions this far in advance, but the
outcome of the 2012 presidential vote just became obvious.
Given
the malevolent racism of U.S. whites – a national characteristic
already evident in the statistically proven hostility of Caucasian males
toward a Black President in the White House – Citizens United's hatemongering will combine with the bitter legacy of Obama's multiple betrayals to ensure his defeat in November.
The
president's oft-repeated transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack
the Betrayer has turned the energized progressives of 2008 into the
dejected nonparticipants of 2012 – a mass of voters whose initial
chants of "yes we can" have become a barely audible mumble of
"whatever."
Given
the ruinous magnitude of those betrayals, I cannot but wonder if Obama
himself intended he would never be more than a one-term president. Could
it be his real service to Wall Street – his actual repayment of its
overwhelming financial support in 2008 – was opening the political
doors to the final triumph of imperialism abroad and ChristoFascism at
home?
Surely
that's what happened in 2010, when Barack's betrayals cleared the way
for unprecedented Republican victories. And now – note how Obama's
Democratic National Committee has abandoned the Wisconsin recall effort –
it's obviously happening again.
As
bad as the theocratic misogyny of the Romney presidency will be for
women, its tacitly Nazi atrocities will be infinitely worse for those of
us who are elderly and disabled (I am both) or otherwise no longer
exploitable for capitalist profit.
Indeed,
for us – we who face extermination via the cancellation of Social
Security pensions and the end of Medicare and Medicaid – the deadly
realities of a Romney presidency are tantamount to the horrors facing
German Jews as Hitler was sworn into office.
Welcome
to the Fourth Reich, where methodical destruction of the social safety
net serves the same murderous Ayn Rand purpose that was served by the
Third Reich's death camps.
Such is “change we can believe in.”
***
But are the Caucasians of the United States truly so irredeemably racist such hatemongering would ensure the president's defeat?
Sadly, I believe the answer is an unequivocal yes. And not just because of the Trayvon Martin target.
A
white male in the southern Civil Rights Movement (Knox County Jail,
1963), I was publicly damned by my fellow Caucasians as a “nigger-lover”
– all the more vehemently since I had been raised partly in the South.
The denunciations and the accompanying attempted murders and other acts
of violence
gave me a unique opportunity to experience the
hatefulness suffered by African-Americans literally from birth. Perhaps
because I myself was always something of an outcast – a vindictively
unwanted child, an abused and bullied teenager – I had developed as a
survival mechanism what I suppose is an acute sensitivity to hatred and
contempt. Thus in the context of the struggle for black civil rights I
found myself in constant agreement with blacks who saw many
manifestations of race-hatred to which most other whites were
self-servingly blind.
But
the evidence for the toxic depth of the white citizenry's lingering
hatred of blacks is far more political than personal. The most telling
examples come from the genocidal intent implicit in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
An academic study entitled “Perceptions of Racism in Hurricane Katrina”
is also worth reading. Not only does it reveal the substantial number
of blacks who (justifiably) suspect the New Orleans levees were bombed
by the government to murderously flood the black neighborhoods of the
city, it recovers the forbidden 1927 history in which the levees were so
destroyed.
The most telling part of “Perceptions” is its public-opinion data. In a Pew survey
conducted shortly after the disaster, 77 percent of the white
respondents denied the racism 66 percent of the African American
respondents recognized in the lethal sluggishness of the government’s
response. An even higher proportion of blacks – 71 percent of compared
with 32 percent of whites – felt the disaster revealed the persistence
of white racism as a major cultural undercurrent in the United States.
More
significantly, 70 percent of the black respondents told Pew they were
angered by the events that followed the storm. But only 46 percent of
whites expressed similar sentiments. In other words, 54 percent of white
America was sufficiently racist it was not troubled by Katrina's
genocidal aftermath.
Combined with present-day statistics on the skyrocketing growth of hate groups in the United States, that 2005 number – 54 percent – is probably the margin by which Obama will lose.
***
Lest we forget, one of the parties to blame for the Citizens United decision is the American Civil Liberties Union, which provided an amicus curiae
brief in support of corporate personhood and the One Percent's
contention there should be no limits on the money spent to obliterate
constitutional democracy and replace it with ever-more-authoritarian
capitalist tyranny.
In
response to the ACLU's back-stabbing revelation of its true colors,
untold numbers of its members, myself included, resigned in protest.
Untold more people refused to renew their memberships. But the
organization – which lives entirely on dues and grants – seemed
curiously immune to the boycott.
Which
raises three questions. (1)-When and for how much money did the One
Percent buy off the ACLU and turn it into another instrument of
oppression? (2)-When did the ACLU receive sufficient corporate funding
to immunize it against disaffected members? (3)-Given its obvious
servitude to the One Percent, was the ACLU functioning as a latter-day
Father Gapon? That is, was it collecting names of dissidents to be
turned over to the secret-police agencies that protect and serve the One
Percent?
Question
(3) is made especially relevant by the police-state reality of today's
United States, which beyond the obvious technological differences is
increasingly indistinguishable from that of Tsarist Russia.
As Lev Bronstein observed, “In any gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”
***
During the on-line discussion triggered by Fang's analysis of The New York Times
report, a poster who hides behind the screen name Howienica denounced
me for characterizing the United States as the Fourth Reich, calling me
“extreme even for Truthout.”
Because
my response reviewed many taboo elements of U.S. history, all of which
can be Googled for confirmation, it too is worth reproducing here:
Not extreme, Howienica, just historically accurate, as demonstrated by the following points:
(1)-We
are ruled by capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.
Exactly as urged by Ayn Rand, capitalism is the deliberate rejection of
every humanitarian principle our species has ever uttered. This is
indisputable, proven so by capitalism itself.
(2)-Capitalist
governance – the principles of capitalism expressed in federal, state
and local policy – means absolute power and unlimited profit for the
One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest
of us. This is the New Order gradually imposed on the United States
following the coup of 22 November 1963. It too is indisputable, proven
beyond argument by the history of the subsequent decades, particularly
the methodical destruction of the New Deal and the equally methodical
reduction of the 99 Percent to inescapable debt slavery.
(3)-“The
Fourth Reich” is an entirely appropriate label for the present-day
United States because its roots – the roots of the New Order – extend
to fascist Rome and Nazi Berlin (each financed by Wall Street). These
toxic roots then snake back from the Third Reich to Wall Street via the
(failed) Bankers Plot of 1934; thence to the official embrace of
thousands of Nazi war criminals immediately after V-E Day (especially
Hitler's entire intelligence apparatus, which eventually became the
CIA); thence to the purge of Leftists and intellectuals that began
immediately after World War II; thence to the destruction of the labor
movement imposed by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948; thence to the apex
purges of the McCarthy Era; thence to the political murders of the 1960s
and 1970s; thence to the war on the 99 Percent that began under Nixon
in 1973; thence to the increasingly authoritarian regimes of Ford,
Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton; finally to the unabashed tyranny
imposed by Bush II and intensified by Obama – jackboot imperialism
complete with Nazi-type atrocities abroad, police-state fascism and
ChristoFascist theocracy at home, the elimination of undesirables either
via enslavement in for-profit prisons or death imposed by elimination
of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment compensation.
Creation
of a “Fourth Reich” is also – by the way – a chillingly accurate
description of the intent most of the Nazi war criminals brought to
their new homeland.
Hence
“the Fourth Reich,” though metaphorical, is nevertheless a brutally
accurate description of the nightmare reality in which We the People are
imprisoned – the most internally oppressed realm in the industrial
world, the most savagely aggressive empire on the planet.
I
would clarify only one point, that the steadily escalating capitalist
brutality described in items (1) and (2) was equally characteristic of
the Third Reich, especially in terms of its huge reliance on slave labor
to boost and sustain corporate profits. Indeed German Nazism was merely
capitalism taken to its logical 1930s extreme – exactly what our Ayn
Rand-minded One Percent is inflicting on us in 21st Century form today.
And
I would add one point more. The Republican landslide of 2010 and its
subsequent war against women and minorities is already demonstrating how
Citizens United facilitates the imposition of Christian
theocracy, fascism and racism of an intensity that edges ever closer to
outright Nazism. To imagine the 2012 presidential race will not bear
similarly toxic fruit is to imagine Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and
the Tooth Fairy are all real. The pattern is now obvious, established by
2010's results. That 2012 is the first presidential vote conducted in
the Nazified climate of CU is thus reduced in significance to little more than a footnote.
What
is most revealing about the 2012 election is the precedent set by the
fact it's a contest between two undeniable enemies of the U.S.
Constitution. Never before in our national history have we been limited
to an alleged “choice” between two unabashed tyrants: Barack the
Betrayer versus Mitt the Malevolent. Obama has proven relentlessly
hostile to the Bill of Rights, concealing his despotic agenda behind
oratorical deception and a few gestures toward women and homosexuals,
while Romney is already notorious not only for his enthusiastic embrace
of the Republican brand of fascism in general but for his specific
antagonisms toward women, homosexuals and dogs.
And this year's shift toward de facto Nazism is not over yet. Now there's a growing possibility we'll witness the emergence of Scott Walker as the true Führer the Republicans and their Ku Klux Christian kinsmen have always sought. If Scotty the Sadist and his endless supply of Citizens United
money wins Wisconsin as anticipated, he'll be uniquely positioned to
oust Malevolent Mitt as insufficiently brutal, then win the Republican
National Hate Rally and emerge as the Betrayer's opponent.
Whatever, there's no doubt the fascists will win.
LB/20 May 2012
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