Beyond the Newest Squabbles of the Two Evils, a Faint Possibility Sanders Might Be the Perfect Compromise

JILL STEIN'S EFFORT TO nullify the 2016 presidential election by last-minute recounts reeks of Green Party naivety, typically dishonest Democratic (sic) Party sleight-of-hand and the sinister guile for which Hillary Clinton is rightfully infamous. In all probability, Stein is Hillary's figurehead, positioned to be the perfect scapegoat for the debacle that will inevitably follow if this newest campaign to monkeywrench Donald Trump's victory is even half as effective as Hillary's felonious suppression of Sen. Bernie Sanders' candidacy.

Properly cynical analysis of the Stein campaign – Stein's relative innocence and limited finances as opposed to Hillary's bottomless corruption and obscenely unlimited wealth – indicates it can hardly be anything but another Clinton operation. In any case it has turned a long-cliched Madison Avenue hyperbole into new reality. Advertisers often boast their product “changes everything,” but this is precisely the outcome the breathtakingly Machiavellian recount-ploy will have if it triumphs, which several sources say is highly probable. For this “everything” truly is everything – not just the hitherto-certain, now unnervingly dubious outcome of the election, but the now equally dubious longevity of our nation, our species and our planet.

As I have said for months, the actual choice allowed us by our capitalist overlords – minor parties, write-ins, incomplete ballots and hell-no-I-won't-vote abstentions aside – was between two latter-day Hitlers and the horrific agenda each represents: the new Holocaust as promised by Donald Trump; the attack on Russia and the resultant thermonuclear apocalypse as sought by Hillary Clinton. In other words, we were forced to choose between possibly survivable horrors versus absolutely certain extinction.

Obviously exploiting Stein as her puppet – and obviously both as Stein's financier and puppet-master (diabolical, yes, especially in its multiple betrayals, but nevertheless the only conclusion allowed by logic) – Hillary is timing the recount to invalidate enough electoral votes to deny Trump the presidency and possibly – depending on whether the Democratic (sic) election-fixing apparatus can alter recount results as efficiently as it killed Sen. Sanders' primary victory – give it to herself.

Here's how it might work:

As The Hill reports, failure to complete an official recount by the federal 13 December deadline probably nullifies the state's electoral votes. Rightist websites – in this instance to be believed – are already saying Stein's belated filing of the recount demands is intended to ensure the three states' miss the 13 December deadline, thereby subtracting their electoral votes from Trump's total and throwing the presidential election into the House of Representatives.  (Apologetic note: this link to Inquisitr.com,, which summarizes the associated arithmetic, is obnoxiously clogged by advertisement monitoring and takes at least five minutes to stabilize to readability.)

What would happen were the presidency to be decided by the Republican-ruled House remains to be seen. There are at least three possibilities: that it confirms Trump's election; that it finds another Republican whose domestic Nazism is perhaps more closeted than Trump's but who will obey with absolute reliability the One Percent's global-conquest mandates Trump seems to opposes; or that it will find a compromise candidate acceptable to both parties – a possibility no less remote than Alpha Centauri, but one that nevertheless could put the hugely popular Sen. Sanders in the White House. (You read it first here.)

But let us not forget the recounts could also reverse enough votes to give Hillary the presidency. Thus she would seize the White House after having positioned Stein and the Green Party as the immediate scapegoat for the civil war that is certain to result. Meanwhile who can doubt the recount is yet another product of Hillary's limitless vindictiveness? As I said before, Stein not only lacks the requisite malice, but – without Hillary's clandestine intervention – it's gravely doubtful she'd have been able to access the requisite wealth. Cynicism – which sometimes is the most revealing Muse of all – suggests only two possibilities: that Hillary has blackmailed Stein into becoming her figurehead, or that Stein's ambitions have reduced her to Hillary's sacrificial lamb and turned her into another of Clintons' useful idiots. (Wikileaks: please tell all!)

As to the danger of civil war, the KuKlux/Christian/Nazi militias have already threatened to rise in armed rebellion if Trump is denied the presidency. They would be even more enraged were Trump's ouster – seemingly accomplished by the same typical Democratic (sic) deviousness that invariably spares the Clintons from prosecution despite their brazen criminality – to succeed in putting Hillary in the White House.

Unfortunately, and just as I have written elsewhere,  the violence of a second civil war would kill forever the nonviolent revolution now brewing at Standing Rock, which is fast evolving the potential of mobilizing sufficient overseas support  to succeed much as Gandhi's revolution did against the British Empire in India. But with the nonviolent revolution aborted by unrelated violence, the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals could rest in absolute certainty the nonviolent threat to capitalist governance was permanently terminated even as the government's technological superiority was ensuring the defeat of the Rightist militias.

Moreover, a second civil war (perhaps labeled by future historians “the War of Presidential Succession”), would – under the unlimited powers Obama has bequeathed the presidency – allow declaration of a permanent state of emergency, thereby nullifying what little remains of the Constitution and ensuring the eternal omnipotence of capitalist tyranny.

Were Hillary the president, it would also facilitate her most cherished domestic ambition: zero-tolerance forcible disarmament – confiscation without compensation of every civilian-owned firearm in the United States.

Hillary would ultimately blame Russia for the millions of deaths and millions of dollars of damage so inflicted, whether by civil war, forcible disarmament or both. She would no doubt claim it was all the result of some alleged Kremlin conspiracy involving Trump, Stein, the Greens and Vladimir Putin – thereby giving herself a “nothing-to-lose” rationale for nuking Moscow and triggering thermonuclear apocalypse.

As to why Hillary would do anything so obviously suicidal, there are only two possible answers.

One is that her decades  of fanatical Christian brainwashing  by The Family  have driven her beyond what should be labeled JesuNazism to clinical insanity, perhaps even turning her into a believer in biblical End Times and the Apocalypse  as the only sure route for the Christian god's devotees  to depart this world of sin and get to Heaven.

(I apologize for the above paragraph's link-heavy text. But now with the growing likelihood  Hillary Clinton will be the next USian president – remember how she stole the primary  from Sen. Sanders – I think it vital for us to recognize what a JesuNazi she truly is, and that once she is in the White House, she is likely to attack the remnants of the First Amendment at least as vindictively as we know she will attack the Second Amendment.)

The other possible explanation for Hillary's obvious intent to start World War III – an explanation that does not negate the first possibility (and could in fact be the expression of its Noah's Ark intent) – is that the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals have secretly built and stocked a vast subterranean network of bunkers to allow themselves and a few carefully chosen and meticulously bred slaves to survive a 25-year nuclear winter. Rumors of such refuges have persisted for years, and knowing our overlords' genocidal contempt for all the rest of us, we the people of the 99 Percent, I cannot doubt the rumors are founded on truth. Thus the plutocrats, their children and their slaves – the slaves no doubt dark-pigmented for easy identification – would emerge from these latter-day Noah's Arks as unchallenged rulers of a planet “cleansed” of all “sinful” humans and, not coincidentally, also healed of global warming.

In this context, let us further examine what might be the hidden agenda of the recount.

As I said above, on 8 November 2016 we were forced to choose between two Hitlers: Donald Hitler of the Renewed Holocaust versus Hillary Hitler of the Thermonuclear Apocalypse. But ultimately our choice was between (possibly survivable) horror or (certain) extinction. And our decisions revealed to the One Percent's psychological warfare experts the magnitude of our national courage.

The courageous – those of us who dared vote against Hillary (whether by voting for Trump or one of the lesser alternative-party candidates – voted to gamble on the likelihood of survival and thus to fight on.

But those who voted for Hillary chose thermonuclear suicide. Some chose suicide because their fanatical Christianity convinced them they were better dead than Red – “Red” in this instance encompassing not only the uncertainties of socialist revolution (as by the nonviolence of Standing Rock), or at the very least the long-overdue rejection of Prosperity Gospel Christianity,  the consequence implicit in Senator Sanders's efforts to resurrect the New Deal. Others chose suicide because they are terrified by the prospect of life on a planet undergoing terminal climate change or in a nation in which people – especially Working Class people – are allowed to own firearms. Still others – perhaps the moronic majority of Hillary's voters – chose suicide out of Moron Nation ignorance – ignoring all the damning evidence of Hillary's closet fascism and attachment to theocracy, and remaining in clinical denial of Hillary's ever-escalating threats, whether against any remnants of USian civil liberties or against Russia and ultimately against human survival.

In any case, the fact Hillary is winning the popular vote – overwhelmingly so, if the latest figures are to be believed – also tells the psychological warfare experts Moron Nation is already significantly subjugated, too cowardly to alter the status quo save by imposing forcible disarmament – that is, mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – on all civilian firearms owners.

Even so, what might the One Percent and its Ruling Class hope to accomplish by forcing a recount and at the very least nullifying the election? Is the One Percent perhaps still indecisive about which Hitler will serve it best as Führer? Or is something else afoot – say deliberate provocation of a Rightist uprising, with civil war its inevitable result.

To reiterate: civil war would kill forever the potentially successful nonviolent revolution taking shape at Standing Rock. And – again reiterating – the resultant “state of emergency” would enable the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals to terminate – also forever – any rational hope of ever restoring USian liberty. Plus – last reiteration – a civil war's destruction, its magnitude akin to that of Germany in 1945, would give the Hillary the perfect “nothing-to-lose” rationale for starting World War III.

Think, people. We are tyrannized by Evil, our species' most diabolical plotters ever.

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THE FOLLOWING ARE the titles and links that were part of the blog post I had written for OAN before the news of the recount literally changed everything. The material – most of it about the transition to overt Nazism that would have occurred under Trump – is still relevant. But it is way too lengthy to add to the above, so I am reducing it to a recommended reading list, with the briefest possible notes about content and whether I commented on the associated discussion thread.

Fascism in Donald Trump's United States (Henry A. Giroux):  Trump's comments form a discourse of hate, bigotry and exclusion...resonating deeply in a landscape of U.S. culture and politics crafted by 40 years of conservative counterrevolution...We heard this same hatred in the words of Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet and other demagogic orators who have ranted against Jews, communists and other alleged “infidels.” (No comment by LB.)

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Honor Roll Student Shares Fruit With Classmate, Gets Suspended for Violating Weapons Policy: An honor roll student...shared part of her lunch with a classmate. The school suspended her for six days...after she cut a peach in half with a child’s butter knife...The Pembroke Pines Police Department said it has turned over their investigation to the State Attorney’s Office. (No comment by LB.)

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His horror show hides Clinton's rotten agenda (Elizabeth Schulte and Alan Maass):  Donald Trump is so despicable that no one is paying attention to what Hillary Clinton actually stands for.  (No comment by LB.)

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Goodbye, American Neoliberalism. A New Neo-Fascist Era Is Here (Cornel West):  (T)he abysmal failure of the Democratic party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of US democracy. And since the most explosive fault lines in present-day America are first and foremost racial, then gender, homophobic, ethnic and religious, we gird ourselves for a frightening future. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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President Obama's Last Stand (Matt Taibbi):  As Taibbi often does, he buried his lead, probably in embarrassment: ...There are a lot of people these days wondering if the election of the race-baiting Donald Trump will end up staining or outright repudiating the legacy of Barack Obama. I think it will be the other way around. Trump's presidency is almost sure to throw the best qualities of this unique and powerful historical figure into relief. (Brief comment by LB.)

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Obama Refuses to Pardon Edward Snowden. Trump's New CIA Pick Wants Him Dead (Alex Emmons and Naomi LaChance):  President Obama indicated on Friday that he won’t pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even as President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to run the CIA: Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who has called for “the traitor Edward Snowden” to be executed. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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7 Big Areas Where Jeff Sessions Could Change Policy at DOJ (Danny Vinik):  Sen. Jeff Sessions was an instantly divisive figure when President-elect Donald Trump named him as his next attorney general: conservatives and immigration hardliners welcomed the choice, while civil-rights groups and Democrats spent the day attacking the pick...the critics’ focus was on controversial past comments by Sessions, such as accusations that he said the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union were “un-American,” and joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK, until I learned they smoked pot.” But much of the concern is what he’d actually do as AG: that he’d undermine civil rights protections, prosecute more undocumented immigrants and allow companies to go wild with mergers...Here are seven areas where Sessions could most dramatically change public policy. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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Life Under Trump (Rebecca Gordon): Can we hold back the rising seas that are already closing over island nations on a planet where Donald Trump promises to abandon the fight against climate change and walk away from the historic Paris climate accord? And...(j)ust how vulnerable are we, two middle class white lesbians in our sixties, during a Trump presidency? (Brief comment by LB.)

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Here's What We Do Now - a Personal Note (Greg Palast):  Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction.  Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed—and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and a howling anti-Semite as White House Senior Counselor. But the horror we face is countered by this one hard and hopeful fact: Donald Trump did NOT win this election. (Brief comment by LB.)

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Medics Describe How Police Sprayed Standing Rock Demonstrators With Tear Gas and Water Cannons (Alleen Brown):  (T)he Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council...estimated that 300 people were treated for injuries, including 26 who were taken to area hospitals. (Brief comment by LB.)

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War Has Broken Out in North Dakota (Marc Ash):  The situation in North Dakota at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline has degenerated into what can now only fairly be described as a war zone. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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IN SUCH TERRIBLE times as these I am occasionally asked what weird insight or sickness of imagination enables me to (accurately) portray our capitalist overlords as they truly are – that is, as boundlessly more cunning (and therefore infinitely more Evil) – than any diabolical creature ever conceived by the authors of the Torah, the Bible, the Qur'an or even the far more ancient and dreadful Chaldean catalogue of demons.

Usually I merely shrug my shoulders – a nonverbal “I dunno” – and leave the question unanswered.

But if I am asked this same how-do-you-do-it question by someone with whom I am already psychologically comfortable, I might, if there is time, explain it as the hidden blessing of my childhood, which was all the more miserable for the absence of physical evidence that hid its unhealable gashes of psychological trauma. So wounded was I that even now on adult word-association tests I equate “family” with “betrayal” and “deception” and “scapegoating” and “rejection” and “despair.” Thus the microcosm of family brutality prepared me – quite thoroughly in fact – to cope with our species-wide macrocosm of bottomless Evil.

Evil is in fact humanity's default reality. (I capitalize it not for theological reasons – I am an ever-more-devoutly skeptical agnostic – but to provide the proper literary emphasis due what is undeniably our sole defining quality, intellect and soul alike, if indeed the latter is more than hallucination.) Nor will I debate my admittedly misanthropic conclusion; it has been confirmed more times than I can count, proven far more conclusively by what I've witnessed done to others than by what was ever done to me, whether during my first 18 years, or my award-winning but grievously underpaid and overworked decades as a journalist and social-documentary photographer, or now finally in my final seasons as a crippled old man with a failing heart, no longer exploitable for capitalist profit and thus like everyone else in such circumstances knowingly, deliberately, maliciously sentenced to death by the slow but methodically certain genocide of ever-deeper cuts to Medicare and food-stamps and Social Security and any other programs on which we depend for survival. Such is the quintessential Evil of Homo sapiens sapiens: Evil as it was in the beginning, Evil as it is now and Evil as it ever shall be, Evil without end amen.

Thus the one truly vital lesson to be gleaned from life is to learn to beware our species' penchant for perverting our most hypothetically exalted principles into real-time rationales for mass murder as at Wounded Knee and Mai Lai, mayhem as in Birmingham or at Standing Rock, and the sort of sadism the invading Germans sometimes inflicted on Russian children: bloating their bowels with gasoline enemas, lighting matches to their petrol-leaking anuses, then – much as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cackled at Qaddafi's execution by anal impalement – chortling with glee at the children's shrieking, running, sometimes exploding and always indescribably agonized deaths. Thus do the ubermenschen – our “brightest and best” – behave toward those of us they damn as untermenschen. Such is the Evil that defines our species.

Merry Christmas, Happy Easter, and here's a thermonuclear egg to brighten your basket. Our Evil demonstrably exceeded our ability at self-control when we nuked Japan to terrify our then-ally Josef Stalin and serve him notice that henceforth we'd be his deadliest enemy, far deadlier than the Germans his Red Army had just defeated.  Now – thanks to this election and its aftermath – no matter its outcome our Evil will almost certainly overwhelm any possibility we might have escaped it.

LB/28 November 2016

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How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies Global Class War

THOUGH THE UKRAINE EMERGENCY continues to intensify – see below for recommended reading and a list of the web sources I've found to be reliable – our justifiable fear USian aggression could trigger World War III should not distract us from the One Percent's atrocities that obtain elsewhere on our grievously sickened planet. There is always the possibility sanity will once more prevail as it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which case our earthly lives will continue toward some other denouement, and additional outrages – events perhaps now seemingly rendered moot by the prospect of thermonuclear extinction – will again become important, if nothing else as textbook examples of capitalism in action. That's the good news.

The bad news is the USian One Percenters – having nearly completed the total subjugation of their imperial homeland – will continue their efforts to hasten capitalism's inevitable transition to fascism and thus impose on the rest of humanity the zero-tolerance ideology they have adopted from Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf and Triumph of the Will.

This means the increasingly vicious class warfare that's being waged over mass transit in the Puget Sound area could become as relevant in London or Moscow or Kiev as it is in Seattle and Tacoma. The latter two cities, Washington state's largest and busiest seaports, are the economic pillars of the Puget Sound metropolis, a region of 3.5 million people who self-righteously claim to be exemplars of environmental enlightenment but repeatedly prove themselves to be the most reliably anti-mass-transit voters in the most notoriously anti-mass-transit nation on Earth. They sustain Pugetopolis as the global epicenter of anti-mass-transit activism and the racial and socioeconomic anti-transit-user hatefulness such activism invariably expresses. The associated hypocrisy is breathtaking, all the more so given the region's supposedly “progressive” mindset.

But the 46-year success of the strategy and tactics that underlie the transit crisis – how the Ruling Class fires up normally closeted bigotry to goad majorities of white, allegedly “environmentalist,” purportedly “progressive” 99 Percenters into voting against their own interests – tells the true Pugetopolis story: that apart from its ecotopian rhetoric, the region's only significant difference from more urbanized parts of the Ku Klux South is its lack of a southern drawl. As an elderly African-American gentleman told me one afternoon while we were sharing a ride on a Pierce Transit bus, “This state be named after a slave-owner; that's why the whole damn place be cursed.” (Pierce and King Counties share the antebellum odium; they are named, respectively, after the pro-slavery President Franklin Pierce  and the slaveholder William Rufus deVane King.)  The regional transit crisis is thus at least partly an eerily lingering 21st Century reminder of the pro-slavery invaders who drove out the First Nations occupants and seized their lands in the name of 19th Century Manifest Destiny.

 

The class-war dynamics of the transit crisis – the essence of which is the malicious denial of public transportation to the growing numbers of people who desperately need it because they can no longer afford the staggering and ever-increasing cost of an automobile – provide a teachable example of why progressive economic change is truly and forever impossible in the USian homeland. The stark contrast between the Ruling Class refusal to solve the transit crisis, which is definitively an economic issue, and Ruling Class flexibility on so-called social issues, is profoundly revealing. It tells us that marriage equality, legal marijuana and legal firearms ownership (albeit to a steadily diminishing degree) are tolerated only because the Ruling Class regards them as modern manifestations of panem et circenses, all supportive of – or at least non-threatening to – the increasing tyranny of capitalist governance. The key to understanding their function is that such breads and circuses cost the One Percent nothing in terms of increased taxes, higher wages or restoration of workers' rights. But they keep us 99 Percenters reliably distracted if not smugly sedated. And above all else, they preserve, for maybe a few more years, the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

While the recent vote to downsize Seattle/King County Metro Transit was easily predictable – even a tiny sales-tax increase of one-tenth of one percent (one penny on a $10 purchase) is too much for the vindictively auto-centric, ever-more-openly bigoted suburban voters – the radically pro-suburban policy-shift at Tacoma's Pierce Transit is appalling even to cynics like myself. Its efforts to maintain vital bus service twice defeated at the polls, the transit authority's board of directors is now openly pandering to the dominantly white, economically privileged, rabidly anti-transit, hatefully anti-transit-user suburbanites who brought the agency to its proverbial knees via a special election in 2011 and the general election the following year. To date, the doling out of rewards at the center of this previously untold story includes at least three new suburban bus routes, all financed by increases in sales-tax revenue generated by up-ticks in the local economy – this as the board punishes the impoverished, racially diverse but notably pro-transit voters in Tacoma proper  by ongoing denial of service inside the city limits. While the same suburbs-versus-city antagonism is evident in Seattle, only in Tacoma has the transit board openly sided with the suburbanites, in essence telling us city-dwellers the revenue-increases we were formerly assured would gradually restore intra-city bus service are now earmarked for the suburbs instead.

Despite the region's history of anti-transit populism, the trigger of the present crisis was Washington state's notorious tax code, which is the nation's most regressive  and therefore the most favorable to the state's preponderance of billionaires and millionaires, whose wealth and power ensure both the permanence of the state's uniquely anti-transit financial structure and its tax-the-poor/exempt-the rich fiscal policies in general. Dependent as the state's transit systems are on sales tax, their fortunes are thus shackled to the ups and downs of capitalism, which means they are forced to reduce services whenever the periodic panics and recessions deprive the 99 Percent of the money to buy, maintain and operate automobiles and thereby send transit ridership soaring. Thus Washington state's transit operations reliably function as a picture-perfect example of the savagery implicit in “austerity” – the practice of victimizing (and sometimes genocidally reducing) the Working Class by slashing social services whenever they are most necessary for working families' survival.

In the past, the legislature sometimes ameliorated such crises by granting municipalities special funding powers. Even so, on transit policy there is little meaningful difference between the Democratic and Republican parties – as per usual, the latter are blatant fascists, while the former still try to hide their fascism behind deceptively “progressive” rhetoric. But now, with the legislature deadlocked by a permanent Republican majority in the state senate and the entire state government therefore under a de facto Republican dictatorship – there is no possibility of even temporary reforms: not now, not in the foreseeable future.

There are also, as I suspected in 2012 and have since traced to the suburban Pierce Transit operating area, disturbingly credible rumors of privatization schemes, including alleged offers from a shadowy French multinational to provide for-profit bus service should anti-transit voters succeed abolishing Pierce Transit entirely. These measures would please the white Republican suburbanites and their representatives on the Pierce Transit Board not just because of compliance with Ayn Rand doctrines but because the Republicans and their constituents make no secret of the fact they despise the democracy of mass transit. They recognize privatization would create a country-club transit system lower-income people could not afford to use. It would also be a step toward re-gentrification of those sections of the suburbs that are becoming sanctuaries for lower-income urbanites who are being forcibly gentrified from the cities.  The privileged riders of Pierce County's hypothetical Country Club Transit would thereby exempt themselves from any need for contact with “undesirables” – those of us who are elderly, homeless, disabled, unemployed or members of castes and ethnicities other than executive, professional and mostly lily-white.

Here again we see how USian government at every level – federal, state, local – serves only the interests of the One Percent.  We see too how the death of the Soviet Union – never mind it was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be – has allowed the capitalists to shed their velvet gloves and again don their characteristic jackboots. But this is still the United States of America, where capitalism's Ayn Rand (fascist) malevolence is yet (somewhat) disguised by euphemisms such as “austerity” and hidden by denial (“no matter how it looks, it's not really genocide”). In all the six decades I pounded a keyboard for pay, I don't recall anything in local governance anywhere – not even in Ku Klux Tennessee – quite so fuck-you brazen as Pierce Transit's decision to back-stab its friends and pamper its enemies. More bus service for the privileged people who don't need or want it, less bus service for those of us who can't survive without it – such is Pierce Transit's “future strategic direction.” As always in the USian homeland, Ayn Rand rules. 

For the record, the three new Pierce Transit routes – and there may be more I don't know about as the agency seems to have adopted a new policy of minimal public disclosure – are numbered 503, 504 and 425. The municipalities these buses serve – Puyallup, Fife, Milton and Edgewood – are small incorporated towns just beyond the eastern city limits of Tacoma. As noted in “How Republican Hatemongering Wrecked an Urban Transit System” (linked above), the official 2012 election results archived at the Pierce County Auditor's Office  show the mostly Democratic voters in Tacoma's electoral precincts voted by about 55 percent to maintain Pierce Transit service. But the overwhelmingly Republican voters in the four suburban municipalities that are getting the new bus service voted by as much as 64 percent to shut Pierce Transit down.

While the transit authority board is theoretically non-partisan, a recent, seemingly inexplicable reorganization somehow took control away from Democratic Tacoma and gave it to the Republican hinterlands. The process by which this was accomplished remains mysterious: I'm told I may not be able to access the relevant minutes without the hassle and indefinite delay of a formal freedom-of-information request. But there's no doubt the Republicans are using their newfound power to impose a classic Ayn Rand solution: rob the afflicted and give to the comfortable. Obviously these Republicans aren't “anti-transit” after all; they're merely opposed to transit that serves folks who are needy. It's another variant of standard Republican dogma: they love welfare for the rich, they hate it when it helps the poor. (As previously noted, the Democrats are scarcely different. They merely closet their Republican-ness behind a curtain of Big Lies. Such is the One Party of Two Names that rules USia on behalf the One Percent.)

Meanwhile The News Tribune, the local outpost of the McClatchy media monopoly – for which “news” is defined not by its old-time definition of majority significance but instead by its relevance to the upscale consumers – has suppressed this entire story as not worth covering. That's because in the Ayn Rand economy of the USian Homeland, buying power is now the only officially recognized measure of citizenship. Just as the Supreme Court has again ruled, money trumps votes. The extent to which we are actually citizens is determined not by the Constitution, as it was in days of yore, but only by our net worth. And the net worth of the typical Tacoman – fully half of us definitively lower-income – is so negligible, TNT routinely omits news that to us is vitally important. Just as we're denied bus service, so too are we denied essential information. Here in this little enclave of the Ayn Rand New World Order, those of us who are transit-dependent obviously no longer matter. Which means what you're reading today is (another) OAN exclusive, a genuine scoop.

(Other relevant articles on the Puget Sound transit crisis are here, here and here.) 

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Apropos the Ukraine Crisis, I spent so much time this week ferreting out and reasoning together the transit story, I had little time to comment on developments in Ukraine – and in any case I feel I have already said pretty much anything I might add to the Ukraine comment-thread dialogues. Nevertheless I raised an intriguing question on the thread of “Rebels Down Ukraine Helicopters,” here, in which I noted the irony of how USian aggression seems to be forcing the Putin Administration substantially further to the Left:

Obama/Kerry warmongering is compelling Putin to resurrect socialist traditions (for example the May Day labor celebration) in the interest of Russian national unity...What will be especially interesting is whether Putin will now expand the popular anti-capitalist reforms he began after Yeltsin's Ayn Rand economic policies, which were forced on post-Soviet Russia by the U.S., nearly provoked a second revolution. Yeltsin/Rand economics was fast reducing the entire Russian 99 Percent to the hopeless poverty that now defines the USian Homeland's 99 Percent. But Putin ameliorated these savage policies with a kind of Russian New Deal, which is the primary reason for his huge popularity. In this context, the relevance of the renewed May Day celebration is that it suggests Putin's economic reforms might now go beyond anti-capitalist amelioration to an actual resurrection of Russian socialism...The additional irony is how these events parallel the way Castro's Cuba was driven into the Soviet bloc by U.S. aggressiveness, with the U.S. government, then as now, acting as the storm troopers of the global One Percent.

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Leading my In-Case-You-Missed-It list of recommended reading is an especially thoughtful der Spiegel staff report entitled “War in Europe? Ukraine and the Threat of Wildfire.” It is the first mainstream media acknowledgement I've seen anywhere of the frighteningly real threat of World War III implicit in the U.S. decision to militarily confront Russia literally at its own borders.

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“Ukraine's Government Has Lost Control of East, Says Acting President” is a Guardian UK dispatch that details the developments summarized in its headline. What is unique is its on-the-scene portrait of the determination of the pro-Russian rebels, including the woman who said of herself and her companions, “We'll fight to our last breath.” Given the astounding courage displayed by Soviet partizanska during World War II, such assertions should not be taken lightly; as proven by what happened to the Persians, the Mongols, the Teutonic Knights and the armies of Bonaparte and Hitler, to attack Mother Russia is to fight all her children, female or male, youth, adult or senior. 

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Another of Robert Parry's superb Consortium News reports, republished by Reader Supported News, is “Prepping for a Ukrainian Massacre,” which says we USians are being psychologically prepared to accept “and perhaps even cheer” anti-Russian genocide in eastern Ukraine. Despite being nearly two weeks old – I accidentally omitted it from last week's Ukrainian anthology – unfolding events tell us it remains hair-raisingly relevant.

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Sources on the Ukraine Crisis I find especially useful are: The Moscow Times,  which despite its pro-western editorial stance seems to do a fair and thorough job of reporting; The Guardian;  the aforementioned Consortium News  and Reader Supported News  plus of course RT,  the U.S.-based, English-language service of the Russian state television network. I've been a regular viewer of RT since the eloquently sarcastic and gorgeously appealing Alyona Minkovski was its main evening news anchor. (Yeah, I admit it: old as I am, my appreciation of womanhood has not diminished – and Goddess forbid it ever does.) Moreover I will assure newcomers to RT's broadcasts it is not the Soviet-type propaganda outlet it is sometimes alleged to be. In fact, RT has broken many stories the so-called “mainstream media” (that is, U.S. Ruling Class media) dares not report. And I have not found anything in RT's Ukraine reporting that was not fully confirmed by other sources.

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When Guardian UK revealed that  “Germany, Under US Pressure Blocks Edward Snowden From Testifying,” I commented accordingly:

Utterly predictable: with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank functioning as the USian Empire's equivalent of a 19th Century colonial ministry, the USian colonies – which include all the nations of Western Europe – have no alternative but obedience. Just as the European nations bow to USian austerity – the will of their peoples be damned – so now do these de facto colonies also bow to the Empire's other, ever-more-oppressive demands. (Could it be that here we are glimpsing the true core of Obama's legacy-quest – to be the first U.S. president hailed as “imperator”?) In any case, Snowden is undoubtedly the beneficiary of this banishment, for once in Germany – even with political asylum – he would have been within easy reach of the USian death squads.

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“Barbarians in Oklahoma,”Charles Pierce's account of an agonizingly botched execution, engendered a discussion thread that asked why the Christian fanatics who dominate that state and so many other domains in the USian interior are not denounced for their bloodlust by the broader Christian community, which supposedly favors pacifism and forgiveness. I replied accordingly:

In English and USian law there is a concept called "countenancing." To "countenance" something is to allow it to happen without interference or objection. "Countenancing" is what the non-fanatical USian Christians are doing in response to the Bible-thump, Biblical Law fanatics who rule the Land of Bumpkins – Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Dakota, Texas and all the other USian backwaters of barbarism. The acts of countenancing are of course carefully rationalized, as are all such hypocrisies. In the instance of Christianity, countenancing is said to be "ecumenical” – that is, essential to Christian unity. Hence even a JesuNazi like Rick Warren – the notorious misogynist and homophobe of Barack the Betrayer's inaugural invocation – remains above Christian criticism.

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Adam Lee's Alternet piece entitled “10 Things I Learned About the World From Ayn Rand's Insane Atlas Shrugged” prompted an unusually longed comment thread when it was republished  by Reader Supported News, which gave me an opportunity to repeat my view of Ayn Rand's books and the close kinship between capitalism, fascism and Nazism:

Actually the best way to understand Ayn Rand is to acknowledge that her work is the capitalist equivalent of Mein Kampf – written in prose so bad it is effectively unreadable, nevertheless guiding a nation's morally imbecilic embrace of evil. We of course know what Hitler did, but how many of us recognize that as Mein Kampf blueprinted the Holocaust, so do Rand's texts blueprint capitalism's inevitable transformation into fascism and thence to a distinctly USian form of Nazism – with all of us who are poor, disabled, elderly and/or chronically unemployed destined for same sort of terminal scapegoating Hitler imposed on the Jews.

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Joshua Holland of Moyers and Company asked the ultimate question of our time: “Can America's Descent Into Plutocracy Be Reversed?” I expressed my gravest doubts:

The fact there is controversy over the value of the voter franchise (rather than over our corrupted elections) proves that battle too is lost. Such is Moron Nation – by which the Ruling Class suppressed the rebelliousness of the 1960s. Meanwhile (the) notion capitalism can be used to defeat capitalism – that members of the One Percent will work against Ruling Class interests – is not just pathetically naïve; it is literally beyond absurd. It is the best proof I've yet seen of the Audre Lorde axiom: “the Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house.” What we fail to recognize is the magnitude of those tools. Moron Nation is not just the byproduct of moronated classrooms and prison-industrial pedagogy. It is the fulfillment of an irresistible methodology of oppression derived from Nazi psychological experiments. Its primary instruments are a deliberately punitive economy and mass media in every conceivable form, advertising and entertainment included. Its consequences include the destruction of community and even of our ability to form communities. It has obliterated our collective and individual connections to the environment; it has eradicated every other quality that fosters solidarity. Contrast the birth and death of the New Deal with the birth and death of Occupy. It is not that We the People have willfully surrendered. It is instead that we have been methodically stripped of any and all capabilities for effective resistance.

LB/4 May 2014

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