Reflections on Despair and Hope; Ukraine Crisis Anthology; Hitler Lives: How U.S. Funds and Facilitates Re-Nazifaction; Obama's Choice of Bigot for Federal Judgeship Is Another of His Ever-More-Defiant Betrayals

DANCING IN THE RAIN – A child whose parents were attending the $15 Now rally on 3 May at People's Park in Tacoma celebrates her own private May Day festivities. She was joined immediately afterwards by two other kids who also danced in the rain, but by then I was out of film. The rally was part of an ongoing national campaign to raise the local, state and federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Click on image to view it full size. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2014.)

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TO ACKNOWLEDGE DESPAIR is not the same as surrendering to it. The above photograph is implicitly and explicitly hopeful. It refutes those obnoxious disciples of compulsory positive thinking who self-righteously nag me with their dogmatic diatribes – who falsely denounce acknowledgment of despair as aid and comfort to the subjugators of our nation and the rapists of our land. The mere fact I can make such a photograph proves the PollyAnnas of both genders are idiots or hypocrites or pathological deniers and are in every instance beneath contempt because they, like the propagandists of the One Percent, would blind us to our true circumstances. Yet until we understand just how hopeless those circumstances are, we will never evolve the means to transcend our hopelessness.

Despite how children such as the rain dancer bear witness to the necessity of hope, in this time and place I have every right and reason to despair. I watch the relentless imposition of fascism and fascist governance that characterizes modern U.S. history, definitively since 22 November 1963  and arguably since 12 April 1945.  I threw away the New York Times potential of my journalism career when I went to jail for the Civil Rights Movement in 1963. Yet now 51 years later I witness the widespread re-emergence of the same racial bigotry I had foolishly believed might be permanently exorcised from U.S. society. My willing sacrifice – which later denied me my life's most promising job with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and therefore an opportunity for Canadian citizenship as well – was utterly pointless. Bigots, I know now, are truly ineducable; they cannot be reformed; yet their bigotry must somehow be culled from our species' mentality lest it embroil us in ever-more-suicidal extremes.  

But the deepest most wrenching source of my despair is the U.S. emergence of a new, carefully manufactured, neo-Nazi-intense hatred of lower income people. It is literally as if we the elderly and disabled and chronically unemployed and yes too all our children and grandchildren are being pre-positioned to be, in this beastly Fourth Reich that now slouches toward its official birth, the methodically scapegoated victims the Jews were in the Third Reich. Ayn Rand, who gave capitalism its modern equivalent of Mein Kampf, called openly for our extermination, and because death camps are not yet again fashionable, her genocidal policies are everywhere imposed as “austerity” and already whole families go hungry as a result.

So of course I despair. No knowledgeable person, no sane person, could possibly do otherwise.

Yet, perhaps paradoxically, it is despair that denies me the ability to surrender. 

And it is my inability to surrender that prompts me to make photographs like the one above.

I have reached a point wherein I would rather write of almost anything but politics. Sometimes I think I would even go back to the stultifying boredom of covering sporting events as I did in my youth to earn my passage into real journalism. I would especially prefer to write of the startling and sometimes poignant humanity I so often witness while riding mass transit, or to share the many inspiring dog stories I learned in my years as a reporter and collect even now in the company of other dog lovers.

Most of all I would rather say fuck it and go fishing, spend the best hours of my final years losing my self in the back-country satori of clear and troutly water and the Zen of working the slow green depths of some wild river with a seven-foot ultra-light-action rod and a Number 1 Mepps spinner and that uniquely wordless anticipation that wells up like invisible mist from the recognizable habitats of big cutthroats and lunker-size native rainbows.

But even in the wilderness, despair invariably intervenes like a sudden invasion of a dozen cast-off beer cans borne into a supposedly pristine canyon by a swift and allegedly unspoiled current. Damnit, I love this nation for its former potential and I love this land for the exquisiteness that is being ripped and gouged away in the name of profit and – fool that I am – some small part of me believes both the nation and the land can yet be restored. My despair is therefore the despair of an exile or a refugee, and it compels me to fight on in the only ways I can: by writing about the very politics I have come to deplore; by occasionally making icons of hope such as the photograph above, by serving such causes – for example the quest for a $15 minimum wage – as my geriatric disabilities yet allow, and most of all by acknowledging that in such times as these, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance.

And if neither nation nor land can be restored, at least the future – if indeed our species has any future at all – may know a few of us in this o-so-stealthily inflicted miasma of Moron Nation remained conscious of what was being done and how we were being methodically disempowered and enslaved.

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In Case You Missed It, the fact there is no breaking news this week from Ukraine is good news, perhaps the best news of all. Recommended (the first report is from Reader Supported News, the others from Consortium News), are the following: “Secret Cable Reveals Russia Warned US in 2008 Meddling in Ukraine Could Split Country,” here; “How NATO Jabs Russia on Ukraine,” here;  “Cold Water on the Neo-Cold War Hysteria,” here; “Ethnic Russians Are People Too,” here. and “Ukraine's Dueling Elections,” here.

Vital backgrounders on how the U.S. finances global re-Nazification – as relevant to the Ukraine Crisis as it is to present-day Latin American politics – are “How Wall Street Bailed Out the Nazis,” here; “Hitler's Shadow Reaches toward Today,” here; and a der Spiegel exclusive, “Nazi Veterans Created Illegal Army,” here. 

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Again this month President Obama has shown his true (white/Republican/Christofascist) colors, this time by nominating Michael Boggs, a self-described “conservative Christian” who is notably anti-woman and anti-gay, for a lifetime federal judgeship.

The White House announcement immediately generated on-line opposition including a petition  by the usually staunchly pro-Obama People for the American Way. Then Ian Millhiser's ThinkProgress exposé, “Obama Judicial Nominee Ran Anti-Gay Political Campaign Touting His 'Conservative Christian Values,'” revealed additional details of Boggs' politics, provoking no reaction at all from the ever-more-defiantly Republican Obama but doubtlessly evoking cheers and klapping maybe even a celebratory kross-burning or two from Ku Kluxers throughout Georgia and elsewhere in the former Klanfederacy.

An outraged poster on the Millhiser comment-thread bitterly noted Senate Democrats now must either vote against a Democratic president's judicial choice  or approve a nominee “who might as well have been chosen by the Tea Party.”

“How,” the poster asked, “did we get to this pathetic point?”

I answered with a burst of Outside Agitation:

(1)-The U.S. experiment in representative democracy ended 22 November 1963. Ever afterward, the nation is increasingly ruled by One Party of Two Names.

(2)-The collapse of the Soviet Union and the permanent co-optation of China remove all global restraints to capitalist savagery. Capitalism accelerates its inevitable transformation to fascism and thence to economic neo-Nazism (genocide against all “non-profitable” elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished people in accordance with Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf).

(3)-The two pseudo-parties within the One (Ruling Class) Party of Two Names become distinguishable only by rhetoric. The Republicans are overtly fascist; the Democrats are equally fascist but hide their fascism behind Big Lies, e.g. “change we can believe in.”

(4)-Now, with the 99 percent ever more afflicted by capitalist predation and therefore ever more rebellious, the Ruling Class abandons bipartisanship and the slow-boiled-frog imposition of fascism and adopts ever-harsher measures, e.g., total surveillance, the National Defense Appropriations Act of 2012 and its nullification of the Bill of Rights.

(5)-Obama reveals his true (white/Republican/Christofascist) political identity: first the Rick Warren appointment, now Boggs, also killing net neutrality, single-payer/public option, Employee Free Choice, etc. ad nauseam.

In the context of all Barack the Betrayer's other about-faces and back-stabbings, the Boggs nomination should eliminate any lingering doubts the president was in fact a Manchurian candidate – the ultimate false-flag operative thoroughly trained in the arts of deception by his One Percent masters, then imposed on us via those Manchurias known as Wall Street and mainstream media.

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Photo data: The film is Kodak Professional BW400CN (black-and-white for development by C41 color processing machinery), its kill date 12/2010. This was the remnant of a much larger lot of film I used on a commissioned job c. 2006-2008, and I had kept the last two rolls in my refrigerator ever since. Kodak rated the film's SAE (ISO) at 400, which I found to be correct for indoor work, though its daylight speed is closer to 600. The camera was one of my ancient Pentax MXs, the lens an equally geriatric 70mm-210mm f/4 Tokina zoom at maximum (210mm) extension. Exposure was 1/250th of a second at f/5.6.

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Back to the beginning: do I really believe there is still any hope? Not so much. In fact what I believe is “the imbecility of hope,” which parodies the phrase coined by our false-flag president, who has intensified our hopelessness to infinity by proving himself to be the most brazen liar in U.S. political history. Hope seems imbecilic because I know the four historical prerequisites of change – none of which appear to be achievable in today's United States. Hope seems especially imbecilic when I think of someone like Cecily McMillan spending seven years in prison and know – because it is the dirty business of a journalist to know such things – it will destroy her no matter how strong and brave her resistance. But occasionally – as when I photographed that child dancing so joyfully in the rain – it seems to me we have no choice but to be hopeful...even if it's only the hope of learning to live well despite chronic hopelessness.

LB/18 May 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.

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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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