A Not-So-Fond Farwell to Reader Supported News

Occupy Tacoma's last demonstration, May Day 2012. Click image to view it full size. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2012.

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WHAT FOLLOWS IS one of those stories I never imagined I would write – a report about an event I never imagined could happen.

When I first encountered Reader Supported News, probably sometime in 2010, it seemed a welcoming haven of uncensored reportage and vital, intelligently expressed dialogue. Hence I soon became something of a regular contributor to its comment threads, and in October 2011, after e-correspondence with owner Marc Ash, I volunteered to cover Occupy Tacoma for the site. I provided both text and pictures – the latter at considerable personal expense because in those days I was still shooting film (mostly in a beloved pair of Leica M4s) – but I no longer had my own darkroom and was therefore dependent on commercial processing.

An Occupy Tacoma activist from the local group's beginning, I stayed with its story until the entire Occupy Movement was crushed the following spring.

I made the picture above, one of my final Occupy Tacoma frames, on May Day 2012. It was as telling an end-shot as any photo-essay-concluding image I've ever made, but it was my one Occupy submission RSN owner Marc Ash declined to run. And in light of subsequent events I cannot but wonder if that was my first taste of his own peculiar brand of censorship, for in the accompanying text, as in many subsequent comment-thread posts, I violated the politically correct taboo against telling Occupy's most embittering core truth – that the movement was as much a victim of its own pseudo-anarchistic anti-intellectualism as it was prey to brutal oppression by the new Gestapo of the Empire's federalized, militarized local police. Apparently Ash considered this alleged heresy to be allowable in a comment thread, but verboten in the more formal medium of a photographically illustrated news report.

Though it is perhaps an aside, I should disclose here that since my teenage years I have been aware, sometimes rather painfully, of the deadly danger of USian anti-intellectualism – the methodically conditioned, socioeconomically fatal mental paralysis first inflicted by capitalism's postwar purge  of Communists, socialists and New Deal Democrats, later by its relentless escalation  to marginalize or silence any politician, journalist or academic who dared show even minimal humanitarian tendencies. But I was shocked to discover, via Occupy, just how thoroughly much of the younger USian population – particularly those who, despite their self-proclaimed  anarchism,  have never heard of Bakunin  or Kropotkin  – has been so irremediably conditioned.

While people who have never before been allowed the opportunity to think and learn often become superior students – that is one of the more obvious lessons of the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions – those who have been taught to despise knowledge and to fear thinking are definitively unteachable. Such is the dreadful rationale behind Moron Nation and the process of dumbing down – of “moronation” – that has reduced the citizenry of the United States to the most notoriously ignorant population in the developed world. Induced ignorance policed by anti-intellectualism is capitalism's ultimate – and ultimately impregnable – defense.

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IN EARLY 2013, when 15 Now Tacoma emerged from Occupy Tacoma's ashes to rally for a $15-per-hour minimum wage inside Tacoma, which is Washington state's second largest seaport and the third busiest seaport on the West Coast, I volunteered to cover that story for RSN too. But Ash never replied to my inquiries. At the time, early 2013, I assumed Ash dismissed the Tacoma campaign as too local to be nationally relevant and that in any case he was too busy to respond. As for me, I remained a 15 Now activist through the fall of 2014, when health problems – the geriatric afflictions of old age – forced me to drop out.

Eventually the Tacoma electorate, perhaps 65 percent of which has been reduced to official low-income status, was terrorized into semi-submission by Ruling Class threats of retaliatory job losses and thus in November 2015 voted against itself and $15 Now but approved “$12 Later” – a minimum-wage hike begrudgingly proposed by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, added to the ballot by the chamber's Tacoma City Council vassals, and now to be staged in over four years. Again Ash seemed uninterested in the story, and again I assumed it was merely the situation I myself had experienced countless times as a member of the working press, particularly as the news editor (1968-1969) of The Daily Record in Morristown, N.J. – too many stories, not enough news hole i.e. editorial space.

But then last summer, Ash threw all his weight behind the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Of necessity given Hillary's arrogance, lies, corruption and most especially her Goldwater Girl ambition to be the first-ever conquer of Russia and therefore the personification of thermonuclear apocalypse, Ash began noticeably shifting the content of his website. Not only did he deliberately exclude reports critical of Hillary and her Democratic (sic) Party. He also began relying more and more on the material disseminated by the so-called “mainstream media.”

Owned as it is by the same One Percenters who own USian government at all levels, this “mainstream media” is in fact the world's first privately owned, for-profit, Josef-Goebbels-type ministry of propaganda.

Not surprisingly I began to wonder if Ash's rejections of my final Occupy story and all my post-Occupy story suggestions are more than mere journalistic coincidence – if indeed they are perhaps reflective of the same “neo-liberal” (aka fascist) anti-99-Percent bias that in the past year has become one of the ideological cornerstones not just of of present-day Democratic (sic) Party but of RSN as well.

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THE CHINESE WARMASTER Sun Tzu observed 2,500 years ago that “all warfare is based on deception.” This is never more true than in class warfare which – because it is ultimately a fight to the death to determine who will be the predators and who will be their victims – is the most mercilessly vicious warfare of all time. Both sides employ tactics derived from strategies of deception. One such tactic, used by a tyrannical ruling class to identify, concentrate and neutralize its opponents, is to organize those opponents into false opposition movements.

Perhaps its ultimate example, pioneered by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, is Father Gapon's  Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of St. Petersburg. As Lev Bronstein aka Leon Trotsky famously remarked, “in every gathering of three or more revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.” Likewise, the post-World-War-II Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was rumored to contain more agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the main USian secret police agency, than actual Communists. Since then, the creation of fake revolutionary cells and the subsequent arrest of their members has become a primary USian secret police tactic. 

The practice of today's Democratic (sic) Party – spouting humanitarian rhetoric like “change we can believe in” while imposing genocidal cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and other socioeconomic services – is another tactic formulated from the same strategy of deception.

To be absolutely clear, I am not – say again NOT – accusing Ash of being a latter-day Father Gapon. But I am saying there's enough of a parallel between Gapon's betrayal of the Petrograd proletariat and RSN's abandonment of and increasing hostility toward the 99 Percent and their (our) hard-Left, invariably socialist, often Marxian advocates to prompt three pointed questions: (1)- When did RSN's now-undeniable alliance with the Hillaryite Democratic (sic) Party begin; (2)-What financial benefits, if any, has RSN received as a result; and (3)-Has RSN offering its services to, or has it been hired by, one or more of the USian secret police agencies as a Left-magnet – that is, a Gaponishka mechanism for identifying, cataloging and perhaps eventually disappearing those us who are genuinely committed to resisting capitalist savagery.

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RSN PUBLISHED SCOTT Galindez's “Our Opportunity in 2017” on 11 January.  Another of Galindez's fanatically anti-Trump, implicitly pro-Hillary diatribes, the following quotes are taken directly from its text:

“The political revolution must be ready to... transform the Democratic Party...we have to defend progressive gains we’ve made over several decades...I don't believe all Trump supporters are racist, sexist bigots...Trump did convince working-class voters in the Rust Belt that he would bring back the factory jobs that bad trade deals drove out of the country. We have to win those voters back...We have to offer them an alternative that benefits their families. Every time Trump makes a move that threatens the quality of life of working people and the poor, we need to fight hard to stop him. Those fights are opportunities for us to reach new communities...we also must continue to fight for people of color, the LGBTQ community, and women. We don't want Donald Trump's America. We have come too far to let fearmongering take us backward.”

Like all effective wartime propaganda, Galindez's text is a seductive mixture of truth and falsehoods. The latter, designated above and below by bold italic, are glaring Big Lies. Given how the so-called “Reagan Democrats” embraced code-word Republicanism as an expression of their bigotry – the same hatefulness demonstrated by the 77 percent of white USians who refused to acknowledge the murderous racism in the Bush Regime's abandonment  of post-Katrina New Orleans – there is no possible way to win those voters back, not even by an alternative that benefits their families. Among the irrefutable lessons of my nearly 77 years, 56 of which have been in journalism of one form or another, is that white racism and/or homophobia trumps all other considerations – no pun intended.

Because the Democratic (sic) Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street, the notion any political revolution can transform the Democratic Party is not only a lie but a contradiction in terms – like arguing Nazism could have cured Germany of Antisemitism or the Ku Klux Klan could end USian racism.

Apart from a few identity-politics victories – pseudo-triumphs allowed only because they destroy the class solidarity essential to the struggle for economic democracy and therefore clandestinely serve our capitalist overlords – there have been absolutely no progressive gains...made over several decades. Galindez's claim is thus a picture-perfect example of the verbal sleight-of-hand by which he tries to conceal the Democratic (sic) Party's post-JFK history as the nation's chief betrayer of the 99 Percent. The last “progressive gain” was the U.S. Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973. Since then there have been naught but defeats. Many of these debacles are deadly, as in the ruinously impoverishing (and therefore life-shortening) destruction of labor unions or the huge loss of reproductive health care. (The latter is the result of JesuNazi violence, murder included, that is tolerated by Democrats and encouraged by Republicans. As of last year it has left approximately 90 percent of the nation's counties – homes to about 40 percent of the nation's reproductive-age women – without abortion facilities.)

United in the tyranny of ever-more-obviously Nazified capitalist governance, the two parties are in fact a single Ruling Class entity that functions as a good-cop/bad-cop enforcement team. Thus Galindez's claim we (presumably the Democratic [sic] Party) also must continue to fight for people of color, the LGBTQ community, and women is deception of the first order; see for example The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Governance (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008), particularly pages 272-277. A vital companion-book – especially now that Trump's victory has given the JesuNazis absolute power, is American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges; Simon & Schuster: 2006); see also The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Naomi Klein; Henry Holt and Company: 2007), most notably chapters 14 and 15. In truth the Democrats have been openly waging genocidal war on minority communities since President Bill Clinton's welfare-cutoff and mass-arrest laws were enacted during the 1990s. The Democratic (sic) Party's begrudging support for gay marriage climaxed years of outspoken opposition, and women – supposedly a favored Democratic (sic) constituency – were shafted both by Obama's sneaky gift to the anti-birth-control Christian fanatics and by his massive cuts in food stamps,  its victims including millions of single-mother families.

Moreover there is the now-obvious impermanence of the identity-politics wins – especially since the Trump Regime intends to wage war against gay rights and to re-impose nationwide zero-tolerance marijuana prohibition by mass internments, first in the states where marijuana is legalized or decriminalized, with fatally long federal prison sentences for anyone who survives arrest and is so convicted. Thus Galindez's we have come too far is an especially egregious Big Lie, an attempt to hide the hideous truth we have been – and indeed are being – thrust so far backward, no recovery may be possible.

There is no question we have been in a Dark Age for many years – I would say at least since the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963, maybe since the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. There is now no question it is about to get infinitely darker under Trump, just as it would have, albeit in different and perhaps more universally fatal ways, under Hillary. And history tells us such dark ages typically last 500 years or more – eternity for those who are born and die amidst the darkness.

***

IT WAS IN response to the shameless lies and deceptions asserted by “Our Opportunity in 2017” I fired off a comment-thread post in which I respectfully addressed Galindez as “Mr. Galindez” – a courtesy I always observe in such circumstances whether my reaction is positive or negative – and took him to task for his dishonesty.

I opened with the statement that transformation of the Democratic (sic) Party into a revolutionary organization was no more possible than the transformation of black widow spiders into household pets. I probably noted, much as I did above, that Galindez's ever-more-obvious support for identity politics was not only collaboration  with the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals, but perpetuated the capitalist governance that had reduced the future of the Empire (and therefore the future of humanity and the planet) to a choice between two Hitlers: Hillary Hitler, who intended to try to conquer Russia via World War III, and Donald Hitler, who intended a new Holocaust as his Final Solution to the Empire's problems with minorities, women and poverty. I ended by pointing out that in such revolutionary times as these, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution, and Mr. Galindez's ideology clearly identified him as belonging to the former category.

Unfortunately my exact wording is lost because I did not save the comment as a word document. I had no reason to believe Ash would suppress it. But suppress it he did. And when I asked that my text be returned, he first ignored my request, than said returning it was impossible. Here is the resultant e-correspondence:

On 12-Jan-17 08:31, Marc Ash wrote:

Loren, Sorry man but we are tired of the personal attacks on our authors. Did not approve you comment condemning Scott. Sorry.

m

On 12-Jan -17 09:11 Loren Bliss wrote:

Mr. Ashe:

Firstly, please do me the courtesy of returning to me the text of what will be my last-ever attempt to comment via Reader Supported News. That comment was not a “personal attack"; it was legitimate criticism that has obviously been suppressed for its (bluntly truthful) response to Mr. Galindez's efforts as a Democratic (sic) Party identity-politics ideologue and therefore his (seemingly) inadvertent role as one of the facilitators of Trump's no-doubt-permanent transformation of the United States into a Nazi nation.

Actually the censored post was relatively restrained as I did not point out that Mr. Galindez's claim "we have to defend progressive gains we’ve made over several decades" is nearly as slick a Democratic (sic) Party Big Lie as "change we can believe in." Apart from one economically meaningless identity-politics victory, there have been no "progressive gains" in this country since the Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973. Indeed the reverse is true: since 1973 there have been naught but skyrocketing progressive losses. Thus Mr. Galindez's claim is but another example of the Democrats' wantonly dishonest rewriting of history to sustain the especially egregious Big Lie the Democrats represent and/or defend progressive values.

In this context, that you would suppress any rebuttal of Mr. Galindez's falsehoods thus unmistakably redefines RSN's purpose, from its hitherto-professed function of speaking truth to power to its now painfully obvious goal of serving the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals by dissemination of the lies and maintenance of the charades -- including those of Gapon-type pseudo-opposition -- deemed essential to the expansion of capitalist governance, i.e., the uniquely USian brand of Nazism now emergent.

Secondly, and very regretfully, your imposition of censorship makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion you and RSN have become a Democratic (sic) Party asset and therefore too an asset of one or more of the nation's 17 secret police agencies. Thus RSN demonstrates an ever-more-obvious similarity to the functions of Father Gapon and his movement on behalf the Okhrana in Tsarist Russia. Thus too, the only valid question is no longer whether RSN so serves but for how long it has been so serving. As I said in the post you suppressed, in revolutionary times such as these, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution; though the extent of your cooperation with the secret police remains unknown, by your defense of the fascism-facilitating Democratic (sic) Party, you and RSN obviously fall into the former category.

Thirdly, given these givens – particularly your decision to escalate your pseudo-progressive facilitation of fascism – I can no longer in good conscience attempt to contribute to your website, particularly now it is obvious you will suppress any genuine dissent.

Please in this context and for future reference be advised I own the copyrights to the Occupy Tacoma photography I contributed to RSN c. 2011-2012 and will, through my ongoing membership in the National Writers Union, promptly take action against any violations thereof.

I am sorry this ends as it does. Though I am not surprised. I have yet to meet a bourgeois self-proclaimed "progressive" who is not invariably more faithful to the bourgeois ethos and is therefore ultimately a (typical) betrayer of genuinely progressive values.

Loren Bliss

On 12-Jan-17 09:45, Marc Ash wrote:

Mr. Bliss,

With all due respect, I’ve known Scott Galindez for 17 years. He is one of the most dedicated grass-roots organizers I have ever met. He has been arrested for going over the White House fence in a peace demonstration. He always defends the weak and the poor and he’s is not afraid to pay the price for doing it. Scott was at Vandenberg in 2002, NY in 2004, Crawford Texas in 2006. And a host of other places most so called activists will never go.

Enough is enough.

Marc Ash,
Founder Reader Supported News

On 12-Jan-17 12:19, Loren Bliss wrote:

Mr. Ashe:

As I requested in my last, please return to me the text of the suppressed post.

Thank you,
Loren Bliss

On 12-Jan-17 12:34, Marc Ash wrote:

My last name is spelled “Ash.”

The post was deleted by one of our admins. So we don’t have a copy.

Marc Ash,
Founder Reader Supported News

On 12-Jan-17 13:20, Loren Bliss wrote:

My apology for the misspelling. My fault entirely, particularly since
your name is spelled correctly in my address book. Had no intention of making an Ashe of you, nor for that matter of myself.

Obviously I did not bother to note that no matter how many nationwide demonstrations Galindez might have participated in, it excused neither his identity politics nor the divisiveness so evoked. Nor did I note the obvious wealth – including the equally obvious question about its origins – that granted Galindez seemingly far greater mobility then the late, genuinely saintly Father William J. Bichsel S.J.,  a fellow alumnus of the Knox County Jail.

In this context I find it extremely interesting that Galindez seemingly shares not just Hillary's Democratic (sic) Party ideology; like Hillary, he also has Goldwater roots. Quoth RSN: “Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice...”

And then there is what the hatefully Hillaryite RSN poster screen-named Robbee said at 22:06 on 13 January 2017 in response to librarian 1984, one of the site's most knowledgeably articulate posters:

Quoth librarian:

I request that RSN put a picture of a soothing landscape or mischievous kittens at the head of a Hayden article or, better yet, don't run any more. I have a visceral urge to regurgitate on seeing this repulsive individual.

Quoth Robbee:

we'll look into it!
while you're at it? any more requests?

Apparently Robbee – continuously red-thumbed as perhaps the most obnoxiously unreadable Hillaryite troll ever to invade RSN – is now one of Ash's censors. Robbee's emergence as a site authority plus Ash's viciously McCarthyite attack  on investigative reporters Glenn Greenwald, Robert Parry and Ray McGovern, all of whom Ash attempts to smear as “Trump's enablers,” makes it obvious I'm well out of there. I'll miss the former RSN dialogue – especially with Radscal, economagic and librarian 1984 – but just as Ash said so dismissively to me, “enough is enough.”

LB/15 January 2016

-30-

Atrocities and Accomplishments That Tell Us Who We Are

THE WANTON TORTURING of an innocent young white woman by two Department of Homeland Security border guards may have at long last awakened the nation's major media to the dangerous extent the United States of America has degenerated into a de facto Fourth Reich.

First reported by The Watertown Daily Times, then covered in depth by Reason and The Atlantic, the atrocity in question has momentarily united three diverse elements of the mainstream media in a national outpouring of journalistic outrage. The Watertown paper, the flagship of an Upstate New York conglomerate of dailies and weeklies, is the trio's closest approximation of old-time independent media. But the two magazines make no pretense of being anything other than mouthpieces of the One Percent. Reason is the voice of the Ayn Rand Right,  though in this instance its libertarian opposition to government has trumped its Randite moral imbecility to produce the most informative of the three cited reports. The Atlantic is an instrument of the Bill Gates mentality, a carefully closeted form of fascism that seems to (correctly) recognize Randism as a new expression of Nazism and therefore – no doubt to avoid the associated odium – tacitly encourages Randites to self-identify as “New Democrats” or anti-union “progressives.”

Apart from the atrocity itself, the pivotal issue from the OAN perspective is the extensive coverage these three publications have given the incident. Their detailed reportage – particularly the excellent legal analysis provided by Reason – stands in stark contrast to how the mainstream media covers the ongoing war of attrition waged by the feds and federally militarized local police against blacks and Hispanics. Had the victim been a black or Hispanic woman, the incident would have almost certainly gone unreported. Such a story is deliberately suppressed unless it provokes a neighborhood rebellion, which is then denounced as an uprising of “welfare recipients” or “gangbangers” or “thugs.”

Given the geographic and sociopolitical exclusivities of its publishers, I probably would not have seen this story had Reader Supported News Editor-in-Chief Marc Ash not selected it for republication on his website.  I do not know what motivated his choice. I suspect part of his intent was to call attention, as the story surely does, to the racial discrepancies that define mainstream media's coverage of the skyrocketing incidence of police brutality.

No doubt Ash also recognizes the savaging of an unarmed and therefore defenseless white woman who dared assert her legal rights as yet another escalation in the policies that are methodically reducing U.S. citizens to captive people in a conquered land. Similar escalations occurred in post-Katrina New Orleans  and post-bombing Boston. 

But this newest incident is unique in that it was rationalized neither by disaster nor terrorism. In fact the video makes it clear the border guards' sole motive for victimizing Jessica Cooke was their obvious glee at inflicting suffering on a defenseless person.

Hence my remarks on the associated RSN comment thread:

And yet there are many idiots here amongst us who do not believe we live in the de facto Fourth Reich...

(This woman will of course be convicted and imprisoned and her life thereby ruined merely because she dared assert her rights in protest to the new Gestapo...who now claim jurisdiction over a “border” that in some places is 150 or 200 miles deep. Which means atrocities like this – albeit mostly suppressed by our Josef Goebbels media – are probably commonplace. Frankly I am astounded the video has not already been disappeared.)

(Note too the sadistic malice obvious in the border guard's voice – here as in Nazi Germany, sadism is now part of the job description for such thugs.)

Responding to another poster, I said:

Psychologically speaking, she WAS raped, a reality underscored by the obviously gloating response of the male Border Patrol thug.

(I'd bet he treats his wife or girlfriend and any children with exactly the same smirking brutality.)

And as I later added:

Alas, here in the Fourth Reich, there is no more “law.” There is only the malevolence of the authorities,which in turn is the malevolence of capitalism underscored by the Supreme Court. Now and forever the ultimate instrument of the One Percent, the court has already proven it will uphold all the brutality of capitalist governance no matter how savage or (previously) unlawful.

(Definitions: capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth; capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.)

***

MEANWHILE PROTEST DEMONSTRATIONS – and counter-demonstrations by neo-Nazis whom credible witnesses describe as “disturbingly cozy with the local police” – continue in Olympia, Washington state, where cops shot two unarmed black men on 21 May. 

The two, Andre Thompson, 24, and Bryson Chaplin, 21, are stepbrothers. Both are hospitalized. One is in critical condition with chest wounds.

They were initially accused of shoplifting beer from a Safeway supermarket. But two Olympia sources say the cops shot innocent men – that video tapes from store security cameras prove the two shooting victims were not the shoplifters – though this had seemingly not been confirmed by mainstream media as of this writing (31 May).

Because coverage of the incident has been typically spotty – once again we see that in the newsrooms of U.S. mainstream media, black lives do not matter – I am including this link  to an electronic bulletin board that attempts to provide up-to-date information on the shooting and its aftermath.

The reports and photographs thereon are posted by people who are outraged by the shootings. As is often true of the alternative press, these dispatches are typically more detailed and accurate than the trickle-down (piss-on-the-99-Percent) coverage begrudgingly provided by the media monopolies.

My own sources tell me the apparent alliance of the neo-Nazis with the police is profoundly disturbing. Such alliances were commonplace in the U.S. South during the Civil Rights Movement era, where police and sheriff's deputies were often also members of the Ku Klux Klan. But no such arrangements had hitherto been suspected in modern-day Washington state.

However, the ongoing refusal of the federal government to prosecute the armed militiamen who resisted its officials in the Bundy Ranch incident  suggests the encouragement of alliances between police and armed reactionaries may already be an un-publicized (and probably top secret) federal policy (scroll down).

***

THE EPIDEMIC OF young, often (understandably) defiant but invariably unarmed black youths murdered or severely injured by local cops has become a defining characteristic of the United States in the second decade of the 21st Century.

But few (if any) commentators have dared speculate on why – apart from racism – these atrocities are occurring so frequently.

Like soldiers, cops are trained to follow orders. Like their military counterparts, these orders allow individual officers almost no initiative.

Thus the frequency and geographic distribution of the killings suggests they are not coincidental – that they are in obedience to some (top secret) extermination order that has been handed down through police chains-of-command.

Given the federalization of local police by the Department of Homeland Security and the concurrent militarization of local police by joint DHS/Department of Defense agreements, the probable source of such an order is obvious.

The harshest critics of DHS whether on the Left or the Right say it is literally a U.S. recreation of the Third Reich's dread SS/Reichssicherheitshauptamt. 

Though three solid hours of Internet research failed to turn up a credible source for that particular claim, it revealed a somewhat more subtle bit of supportive evidence that is surely equally disturbing. The Nazi German acronym for its security department was RSHA. The originally proposed name for DHS was National Homeland Security Agency; its acronym was therefore to have been NHSA.

Coincidence? Or is there really a phantom chorus of “zieg heils” in the background? Scroll down to page viii of “Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change.” 

Note also this federal document's date: 15 February 2001. In other words, what many critics have damned as the Nazification of the United States  was underway eight months before the 9/11 attacks provided the government with an enabling equivalent of the Reichstag Fire.

Other vitally informative reads on DHS and its role in turning the U.S. into the Fourth Reich are here,  here,  here,  here and here.

(Yes, it is true many of the above links are to Libertarian [conservative] websites. That's because, when the issue is tyrannical governance, the [alleged] U.S. Left – obligated as it so frequently is to government-employee unions – is too often submissively silent.)

*** *** ***

DESPITE THE WIDELY publicized reports of a slight decline in the number of U.S. Christians, there is surely no decline in their ability to inflict their tyrannies on the U.S. population.

Among the most relentless of these theocratic despots are the Catholic bishops. They are trying to impose their misogynistic dogmas and deliberately cruel end-of-life “redemptive-suffering” doctrines on all of us via their expanding control of Catholic hospitals and medical systems. Because these institutions are heavily financed by taxpayer dollars, the bishops have access to vast sums of federal, state and local revenues with which to fund seemingly endless maneuvering through constitutional loopholes. The result is community after community inflicted by the anti-sexual and pro-agony strictures of de facto theocracy.

In Washington state, the situation is especially dire. The following is from Catholic Watch,  an on-line organization that tracks the church's methodical conquest of the nation's health care facilities:

“Almost half of the acute care hospital beds (a proxy for the health care system more broadly) are now subject to the 'moral authority' of three Catholic bishops. These bishops oversee medical policy and employment practices for all Catholic 'health care ministries,' which now include hospitals, labs, physician practices, hospices, and even insurance companies.”

The Catholic takeover of health-care facilities is fueled by missionary zeal – specifically the church's fanatical opposition to same-sex marriage, birth control, fertility treatments, abortion (even to save the life of the mother) and Death with Dignity.  By imposing the church's zero-tolerance dogmas via the marketplace – where capitalist doctrines of “economic freedom” are routinely cited to justify even the most egregious acts of oppression – the bishops are cleverly sidestepping the constitutional prohibitions that hitherto protected the U.S. from theocracy.

Predictably, the Republican Party – which with its anti-sex hatemongering often appears to be the bishops' executive-action agency – is reacting with panic  to the tiny decline in Christian membership.

***

BUT CHRISTIAN BIGOTRY is not only a defining characteristic of the U.S. Right. It was the closeted homophobia of Democrats, many of them self-proclaimed “progressives,” that terminated the 19-year career of David Olio, who just recently had been honored as one of the best high school English teachers in the nation. 

Olio's alleged sin? He dared read an outspokenly gay Allen Ginsberg poem in an advanced class for college-bound seniors.

As I said on the comment thread:

This appalling destruction of a teacher's life shows us all that is wrong with the United States.

It reveals the hypocrisy that underlies the self-proclaimed "progressive" label. It shows us that beneath the self-righteous rhetoric, a “progressive” is as anti-union, anti-First Amendment, racist, homophobic, misogynistic and reflexively fascist as any conservative, especially in the fear and loathing of sexuality.

I do not remember who it was – maybe Anais Nin or her lover Henry Miller – who noted the U.S. was the only nation on Earth to have made the Christian hatred of sexuality into a definitive national trait.

But that – though it alone explains how the U.S. population was reduced to Moron Nation, and how Moron Nation has been shaped into the Fourth Reich – is only half the tyrannical dynamic evidenced here.

The other half – "Olio refused to be interviewed for this story" – is exemplified by the teacher himself.

Thus it seems the final lesson he would teach us is in the slavish submission that has quashed forever the U.S. experiment in liberty. Why else would one whose life is irremediably ruined and who therefore has nothing left to lose refuse to fight back?

I hope of course I am wrong – that Olio is silent not because he is a coward but because he is preparing an epic lawsuit that will destroy the South Windsor School District.

Though hope, as Barack Obama has already so memorably taught us, expresses not audacity but futility.

***

Footnote: In these times, the only rational definition of our politics is provided by our socioeconomic class. We are thus either Working Class (the 99 Percent) or Ruling Class, the One Percent and its vassals.

Marx and Engels make it even clearer. We are either proletarians and peasants or we are part of the bourgeoisie.

It is the latter that includes the Ayn-Randimated status seekers that make up today's petit bourgeoisie – those who so often hide their greed and selfishness behind the self-proclaimed label of “progressive.”

How do I see this so clearly? As in Connecticut, so in “progressive” Washington state – where the fascists (in the form of the Republican Senate) already control the state government.

Next year the voters will again ride the rising wave of bourgeois hatred for the poor and shift yet further right, no doubt making Washington the newest Wisconsin – after which there will be many more cases like Olio's.

***

As a journalist – blogger, former editor-in-chief , news editor, city editor, investigative reporter etc. – I am frustrated by the many elements missing from this story.

For example:

It was reportedly a student who ratted out Olio and so began the process that destroyed his life.

From the ninth graf of the story linked above: “...the controversy began when one student in the class begged off a test in a different class the next day, claiming he (or she) couldn’t concentrate due the reading of the poem.”

The identity of this student should be published. Teens are routinely tried as adults when they they murder someone, and since this teen has maliciously murdered Olio professionally, he or she should by exposed accordingly. (I'd bet the rat is either a practicing Christian, a disciple of Ayn Rand or both.)

There is also the matter of a newspaper campaigning against the First Amendment. (Seventh graf: “The local newspaper denounced him in editorials.”)

As there at least two newspapers that serve South Windsor, the anti-Olio publication should be identified by name.

One of these papers is The Hartford Courant, which is owned by Tribune Publishing, the nation's third largest media corporation. If this is indeed the anti-Olio journal – its pay-wall prohibits the requisite archive search – hat in itself is a major news story.

Why? Because it would show us yet another dimension of mainstream media's shift toward Josef Goebbels propagandization.

*** *** ***

THE GOOD NEWS the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has tossed out an entire coda of Idaho anti-abortion laws  is also bad news as the decision will surely be appealed to the Supreme Court. And just as surely SCOTUS will toss out Roe v. Wade and affirm Christianity's hatred of women and sexuality by making abortion illegal again.

*** *** ***

THOM HARTMANN HAS written a breakthrough piece entitled “Capitalism Could Kill All Life on Earth,” for which he is to be commended. 

I responded accordingly:

Clearly Mr. Hartmann has at last realized that capitalism is literally the enemy of all life on earth – that if we are to survive, capitalism must be recognized as the cancer it is and removed accordingly.

Many of us already know this as the ultimate, pivotal truth of this the darkest most hopeless era in all the 200,000 years of our species' experience.

Verily then we are challenged by three questions:  (1)- how are the capitalists to be overthrown?  (2)- how is capitalist governance to be eliminated?  (3)-what eradication measures will ensure capitalism is never again able to threaten our rights to life and liberty? 

However, if we are to find effective answers to these terminal questions. we must first recognize the absolute evil at the core of capitalism. Stripped of its seductive rhetoric, capitalism is in fact the ultimate malevolence of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – literally  the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth. 

Once we have acknowledged that fact and its terrifying corollary – that our Earth is now ruled by moral imbeciles whose sole purpose is fulfillment of their own serial-killer fantasies of limitless wealth and power – then at last  we will have positioned ourselves  to rationally evolve the answers to the above questions.

And these answers – or rather their effectiveness – will then determine whether our species lives or dies. 

Later, I addressed a slyly pro-capitalist poster:

Chuckle8: Argue as you will, nothing changes the ugly truth that all our previous efforts to liberate ourselves from capitalism have failed. Period. End of sentence.

In this context, suggesting the New Deal could again become a vehicle of liberation makes about as much sense as suggesting a horsewhip could be used to re-start a stalled automobile.

“The best tools available” – including the electoral process that enabled the New Deal – are all nullified by hopeless corruption. The fact of the matter – I say again FACT – is the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is dead. Its fatal weakness was its failure to recognize that without  economic democracy, political democracy is meaningless. 

Thus we are imprisoned by circumstances from which there is no apparent exit. 

That's why, if we are to liberate ourselves from capitalism, we must first acknowledge the bitter truth of our abject powerlessness. 

Only then – when we have at last set aside our selfish, self-pampering  Norman Vincent Peal conformity and its attendant opiate of PollyAnna optimism – will we be sufficiently grounded in reality to (perhaps) begin to evolve an effective response to the present crisis.   

I had believed that would end our exchange. Alas, it did not. So I wrote one more rejoinder:

Wake up, chuckle8: forget all the deceptive definitions you learned elsewhere. Capitalism reduced to its essence is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. Capitalism is therefore manifest moral imbecility – the mindset of the serial killer expressed in economic terms. That is why it cannot be reformed. As to the distribution of our (increasingly scarce) resources, nothing says it better than this: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” 

*** *** ***

KATE DAVIES OF Tikkun  has written a thought-provoking essay on “hope”  that prompted me to write a respectfully contradictory response:

Ms. Davies makes valid, useful points.

Too bad the term “hope” has been so severely besmirched by Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. Too bad “hope” was reduced to a cynical joke by the most malicious liar in U.S. presidential history, the man who conned us by asserting “the audacity of hope” and then by his wanton agenda of betrayals and deceptions schooled us instead in the utter futility of hope – the most bitter truth of our species' existence.

Thus “hope” stands revealed as the ultimate expression of powerlessness, the last desperate emotion of the slave and the slave's mandatory passivity – “all I can do is hope Massa won't whip me again today.” Such is the “hope” that – exactly as the Betrayer and his One Percent masters so obviously intend – proclaims our helplessness and thereby perpetuates our hopelessness.

(Yes, the punishing contrast between “audacity” and “futility” is surely a deliberately imposed trauma – as if the true purpose of the Obama Administration is to put us all in our [disempowered] place and teach us to never again dare aspire to rise above it. And yes, do not doubt for an instant Madison Avenue is possessed of the requisite skill. It is the most diabolically skilled psychological warfare agency on this planet.)

Is there, then, an antidote to the hopelessness manifest in ideologies of hope?

There is indeed such an antidote, and its name is “defiance.”

Defiance is the fuel that fires resistance movements even when there is no hope, even when all reasons for hopefulness have been exterminated. Though itself formless, defiance is expressed in an infinity of forms. Yesteryear's defiance is what prompted my Celtic ancestors to fight their Roman and Christian oppressors when there was no possibility of victory. Today's defiance is the (now) revolutionary assertion of our species' right to survival and liberty. It is recognition that in this time of unprecedented Evil, ruled as we are by serial-killer-minded overlords, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance – the core defiance within which all lesser acts of revolutionary defiance are mothered into being.

By contrast, hope is at best a pacifier, an unguent for dreamers, a noun that even as a verb (“I hope”) reveals its crippling taint of passivity. But defiance as a verb (“I defy”) is implicitly a summons to action, to resistance, to rebellion...and perhaps even to triumphs we cannot yet recognize or envision.

*** *** ***

SOME OF THE best analytical reporting I have thus far seen on the Ukraine crisis focuses on the propaganda war with which the United States and its vassals continue to obscure who killed 298 people by shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17 last year.

One of the story's most important revelations is additional proof of the extent to which U.S. and allied mainstream media function as a uniquely privatized governmental propaganda apparatus (scroll down to “Glenn Greenwald's Exposé”). Thus we are given yet another reason Josef Goebbels would be proud to claim the MSM as his own:

“If nothing else (and with this story there is plenty 'else'), the MH-17 fallout was emblematic of the MSM’s long, well (if not fully) documented, and not so illustrious history of venal complicity in blindly validating Western governments’ approved narratives, along with sanctioning their official agendas and, whether through sins of omission or commission, suppressing their secret ones.”

*** *** ***

WASHINGTON STATE BUREAUCRATS have always pandered to the rich. But now they are granting the moneyed aristocrats exclusive rights to formerly public Washington state wilderness lands – this to facilitate Marie-Antoinette-style “glamor camping”  in $220-per-night luxury tents.

Actually it's the newest development in an old and embittering story. Ask the hunters and fishers who were forever locked out of the state's wilderness areas by the pro-equestrian road closures imposed during the early 1990s.

Precisely as they were intended to do, these closures severely restrict back-country access. They exclude everybody but those rich enough to afford extended weekends with horses and wranglers or those in good enough physical condition to mountain-bike 15 or 20 miles to reach the hunting grounds or fishing waters that are now rendered inaccessible to everybody else.

The immediate result was a staggering decrease in sales of hunting and fishing licenses – a drop so huge and sudden, officials of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife still refuse to disclose its magnitude.

To compensate for the revenue loss, the bureaucrats jacked up resident license fees to the highest in the nation,  now $117.50 plus sales tax for a hunting license and $54.25 for a combination freshwater/saltwater fishing license. Resident license fees in many states including Alaska are less than half what Washington charges,  and the lucky license-holders typically have access to vastly larger tracts of unrestricted land and water.

By the end of the '90s, the road closures had made inaccessible every place in Washington state I had ever fished or hunted. (That is one of the main reasons I so dislike this state. I had intended to spend a reasonable portion of my retirement years fishing its trout streams. But the economic and physical discrimination implicit in the closures made that impossible.) Given the democratically accessible trout waters of Upstate New York and rural New Jersey, I would literally be better off had I remained in Manhattan.

Hence it would not be stretching the point to say that the Evergreen State's embrace of glamor-camping is merely another expansion of its long-established policies of brazenly catering to the One Percent while maliciously brutalizing lower-income people with the most savagely regressive tax structure  in the entire United States.

***

THAT THESE INEQUALITIES are now as evident in the back country as they are in the cities probably explains why the graffiti vandals have suddenly begun spray-painting their fuck-you rage on convenient surfaces in state and national parks and forests. 

Whether graffiti is high art – and some of it most assuredly is – should not distract us from its semiotic message, which is “I am denied any stake in this property or place, so I will trash it.” In the wilderness as everywhere else, graffiti is thus embittered protest, the human equivalent of the animal habit of marking territory with splurts of urine, often a last desperate attempt to reclaim formerly public domains that are increasingly pay-walled or privatized into prohibitive exclusiveness.

As the advent of increasingly unaffordable fares provoked the graffiti attacks on the New York City subway system, so now does increasing exclusivity provoke graffiti and other forms of vandalism in the (formerly public) realms of rural recreation land. Illegal dumpers in these realms are merely vandals who are too stupid to employ other means of protest.

(Disclosure: I was 18 years into a photographic study of urban and rural graffiti when it was destroyed by the 1983 fire. Like everything else photographic in the wake of that life-changing disaster, I have never been able to put my heart enough back into it to resume the work.)

*** *** ***

LET US NOT FORGET that the malevolent malcontents who deface, vandalize and otherwise trash the wilderness are also expressing the Abrahamic hatred and contempt for nature that is the cornerstone of capitalism. Let us also remember that same Judaic, Christian or Islamic arrogance is what motivates the climate-change deniers whose obstructionism is jeopardizing our species' survival and threatening to kill our entire planet.

It is to those of us who battle these fanatical morons I dedicate this concluding dispatch:

“Following an abnormally warm winter, spring temperatures exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit across a broad swath of interior Alaska in May, breaking records for the earliest day with temperatures that high.”

Read the rest of it here  – and in our grief for our wounded Mother Earth, let us find the defiance we need to persevere.

LB/25-31 May 2015

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