Anti-Black Slander from the Democratic Party?

THE OLDEST QUARREL inside the Left is undoubtedly the fight between pacifists and those who believe humanitarian reforms can be wrest from the capitalist Ruling Class only by violence or credible threats thereof. 

Events in Ferguson  re-heated the dispute to a simmer, but Baltimore  brought it to a rolling boil, and last week it bubbled onto the pages of mainstream media. 

Yet that's only half the story. The other half is that one writer, Jonathan Chait of the aggressively upscale New York Magazine, is using the discussion to slyly blame U.S. African Americans  for the downfall of the Democratic Party.

Thus, in Chait's obliquely presented view, black rebelliousness is responsible for the party's reduction to the me-too fascism that has characterized Democratic foreign policy since the ascendance of Lyndon Baines Johnson to the presidency, and defined its domestic policy since President Jimmy Carter's theocratic signature  enshrined the Republican war against women as federal policy. 

Meanwhile the appearance of the violence-versus-nonviolence debate in mainstream publications is, I believe, of profound political and historical significance. It is unlike anything I have seen during the nearly 60 years I have been a professional writer, editor and/or photographer. Nor have I heard of its like occurring anytime during the 75 years I've been living this lifetime. 

Moreover – and let us not forget this all-important point – Chait and the writers he cites all represent the Ruling Class regardless of the political disguises assumed by their publishers. Thus it is arguable the widespread coverage suddenly being given this issue is the most accurate yardstick yet of Ruling Class fears that Working Class anger in the U.S. is approaching the ignition-point of revolution. 

That's why Chait's opening graf, which builds a pro-violence argument he soon demolishes with volleys of academic research, is worth quoting in totality, especially for its links: 

The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon . “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox's German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.” In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson  asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds to answer her own question in the negative.

But then three paragraphs later Chait not only refutes the writers he cited. He also reaches a conclusion I would expect to find – albeit stated in more obviously racist terms – only in an avowedly Rightist journal:

The 1960s saw two overlapping waves of protest: nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations, and urban rioting. The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson swept every region of the country except the South running a liberal, pro-civil-rights campaign; in 1968, Richard Nixon won a narrower victory on the basis of social backlash.

Because I (of course) do not read New York Magazine, I owe Margaret Flowers and her excellent on-line daily Popular Resistance a salute of thanks for making Chait's “Riots and Social Change” available to a proletarian such as I. PR routinely does a damn fine job of bringing to Working Class attention important stories we 99 Percenters would otherwise be denied by the nation's various mechanisms of de facto censorship, but this time Flowers outdid herself.

All of which is prefatory to what I said on the associated comment thread. But it is more than just another en passant response. It is important for two reasons: it addresses the revisionist history by which the Ruling Class increasingly beclouds what happened within the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It also – or so I hope – alerts a few significantly placed people to a new Democratic Big Lie as potentially malicious as the “welfare queen” Big Lie the Democrats borrowed from the Republicans to justify enactment of genocidal “welfare reforms” in 1995.

(My apology for the fact there are a few repetitions between the explanatory grafs above and those below. The repetitions are unavoidable because I have reprinted my original comment word-for-word.)

Let us not forget that as a writer for aggressively upscale New York Magazine, Mr. Chait's perspective is necessarily that of the Ruling Class.

Hence the subtle but nevertheless implicit race-bating and victim-blaming in his statement that "The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order."

The truth, however, is quite different. The New Deal coalition was not "crack(ed) open" by the Republican Party but rather by the Democrats themselves.

President Lyndon Johnson's 180-degree turn in foreign policy immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led directly to the Southeast Asian (aka "Vietnam") War.

In turn -- and exactly as the Ruling Class intended -- the war destroyed the Working Class solidarity that had created and sustained the New Deal. The war divided the U.S. Working Class -- what today we would call the 99 Percent -- into two venomously hostile camps: the sneeringly contemptuous draft-exempt elite and the equally embittered draft-bait, cannon-fodder majority of those of us who (because we lacked the money and influence to bribe our way out of the draft), had no choice but to serve.

Contrary to the implications of Mr. Chait's remark -- a clever falsehood that seems designed to protect white Ruling Class Democrats by blaming blacks for the party's troubles -- all the significant non-racial divisions in present-day U.S. politics date from that history-changing Vietnam-era divide.

As to racist hate-mongering by the Republicans, that indeed occurred, but again contrary to Mr. Chait's disingenuous claim, the class warfare implicit in the Vietnam draft had already destroyed the New Deal.

Vietnam had also -- because of the tacitly genocidal U.S. policy of sending a preponderance of African-American combat troops to fight its colonial wars -- radically inflamed the long-simmering racial injustices that underlay the riots.

The Republican Party, which since the 1920s has been the primary vessel of U.S. fascism, predictably pounced with malicious glee on the resultant white fear. Obviously -- at least in retrospect -- this too was precisely as the Ruling Class intended.

Subsequent U.S. history makes it equally obvious what happened next. The Ruling Class deftly expanded Vietnam's divisiveness by manipulating it into a plethora of profoundly emotional clashes over firearms, jobs, unions, welfare, immigration, education, abortion, sexuality, Christian supremacy and ultimately the prevalent definitions of patriotism and what it means to be a U.S. citizen.

Again exactly as the Ruling Class intends, the resultant hostilities -- perpetuated as they are by a media machine more psychologically effective than even Josef Goebbels might have imagined -- destroy any future possibility of ever again restoring 99 Percent solidarity.

(Disclosure: I am not a Vietnam veteran but am a Vietnam-era vet: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1965, three years active duty, overseas service in Korea 1961-1962, honorably discharged after completion of three-year reserve obligation).

LB/8-14 June 2015

-30-

An Apology, Then More Democratic Party Obituary

On a Bridge at Midnight. Photo by KD, OAN copyright 2014. (Click on image to view full size.)

SORRY, THERE'LL BE no separate blog essay this week. That's because production of a monthly newsletter – I am its (unpaid volunteer) founder, editor, writer, photographer, designer, production manager, typist and general roustabout – was so bedeviled by computer problems I am still suffering from post-production exhaustion. 

The publication, called Community Chronicle and typically containing at least six pages of text and photos, serves the senior housing complex in which I live. It has become one of many factors in the ongoing development of our sense of community and communal identity – a sense already so strong we are now planning to undertake collective gardening next year. 

Hence I approach the newsletter with the same dedication I approached my work as a professional journalist. Hence too when that insufferable prick Murphy shows up to enforce his law (anything that can go wrong surely will), I am just as upset as I would have been if one of my long-ago cub reporters had returned from a major society wedding to tell me “no story, sir; the church burned down.”

Or, worse, if the reporter had indeed written a Pulitzer-class report on the nuptials-turned-nightmare that would never see the light of day because the newspaper itself had burned to the ground. Yes, I am still that committed to my lifetime craft, even at the age of 74. But in a week as electronically disrupted this was, something had to be sacrificed to the Lords of Chaos, and in this instance it was OAN. Again my apology. 

But the superb Katelyn Driskill photography above – of which I hope we'll be seeing more – will surely help compensate for this week's lack of original OAN writing.

***

IN PLACE OF the usual essay there will at least be a another glimpse of the ongoing debate between those who believe the Democratic Party might yet be revitalized and those who, like myself, believe the party is truly dead – though as of now it seems I am the only writer who has yet dared write its obituary. 

Thus the following, my response to a rally-the-Democratic-troops piece written for Reader Supported News by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.  His is an essay that – whether coincidentally or not – almost seems as if it could be the party's reply to my assertion it has been corrupted beyond any rational hope of amelioration.

Beyond that, de Blasio is important for a couple of reasons.

Though I no longer have any sources inside the City's political apparatus and thus cannot say anything with any certainty about de Blasio's administration, it seems from what I read he may actually be trying to govern my home City as a place for everyone and not merely for the parasitic, obscenely wealthy Ruling Class who have governed it since the mid-1970s as if all five boroughs were their very own Winter Palace.  

If my understanding of de Blasio's intent is correct, his democratic resolve is profoundly heartening. The last mayor who outspokenly so governed the City was the late John V. Lindsay who, with his contemporaries John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Robert Francis Kennedy, were amongst the political heroes of my young adulthood.

The other reason de Blasio is important is he is trying – much as Sen Elizabeth Warren is trying – to put a new face on the Democratic Party. Hence the significance of his RSN text, an open letter to Democrats (and therefore to the nation) entitled “Don't Soul-Search. Stiffen Your Backbone.”

Its essence is contained in its second and third grafs:

“As a Democrat, I'm disappointed in last Tuesday's results. But as a progressive, I know my party need not search for its soul -- but rather, its backbone.”

“The truth is that the Democratic Party has core values that are very much in sync with most Americans.”

The apparent question is whether de Blasio and Warren are genuine would-be reformers or are merely trying to perpetrate another Obama-type Big Lie.

Vital as it may seem to many, I believe that question is irrelevant.

The bitter truth is the Democratic Party has always been a creature of the Ruling Class. It birthed the New Deal not in furtherance of humanitarianism and economic democracy but to protect capitalism from the consequences of its own savage greed.

Had there been no New Deal, a Communist revolution would have been inevitable. With the support of the Soviet Union and its Red Army, the revolutionaries would have won. They'd have established a soviet-type state in most (if not all) the U.S. beyond the old Confederacy. (The old Confederacy would have seceded again and – backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, established its own white-supremacist version of Hitler's Third Reich, with the Ku Klux Kross in place of the swastika.)

Yes, the New Deal was – while it lasted – an era of genuinely humanitarian, economically democratic reforms. But that which the master giveth, the master can just as easily taketh away. Hence – with the Soviet Union dead, Communist China hopelessly bought off and the socialist challenge to capitalism therefore nullified – the capitalists dropped all pretense of human kindness and again bared their true moral imbecility.

That's why, behind the Democrats' Big Lie smokescreen of “progressive” rhetoric, their policies are indistinguishable from those of the Republicans. The Republican opposition to the Democrats is nothing more than a clever charade – a means of enabling the Democrats to impose Ruling Class demands. Combined, the two parties are therefore the perfect, good-cop/bad-cop facilitator of capitalism's Ayn Rand malevolence.

Reform is therefore impossible. Neither party can be reformed, not now, not ever. Whether from misguided idealism or deliberate deviousness, de Blasio and Warren are both scamming us. As Audrey Lorde  so presciently observed, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” Why? Because the master – the Ruling Class – will not allow it.

Hence my reply to de Blasio's panegyric:

Sorry, Mr. de Blasio, you're beating a dead horse – or, rather, a dead donkey.

The issue is trustworthiness. Obama the Orator promised “change we can believe in” but quickly became Barack the Betrayer. That makes those of us who voted for him stupid, gullible suckers conned by the biggest Big Lie in U.S. presidential history.

And that's the real issue, Mr. de Blasio: the fact Democrats cannot be trusted. It's a lesson hammered into the electorate by every Democratic president after John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

Lyndon Baines Johnson – escalated Vietnam into a major war while Big-Lie campaigning as the "peace candidate";

Jimmy Carter – bible-thumped away the reproductive freedom of impoverished women, began the war against the New Deal;

Bill Clinton – outsourced our jobs, reduced us to permanent Third World poverty and, via “welfare reform,” made damn sure there will never again be a safety net to protect the millions of families capitalism hurls into permanent destitution;

Now Obama out-does them all: not just betrayals, but the methodical murder of the constitution too.

The lesson? Vote for a Democrat, get a Republican. (No wonder so many don't vote.)

As to the party's soul and backbone, it has neither. It lost both in the aftermath of 22 November 1963.

Face it, Mr. de Blasio: the Democratic Party is dead. Our only hope now is some new party – preferably one with enough Marxian discipline to shut down capitalism forever.

(But I ain't holding my breath.)

***

Then I answered a poster who said George Bush not Barack Obama deserved the “most lying president” award:

We – or at least I – always assume the Republicans will behave like the overt fascists and/or closet Nazis they truly are.

But we – or at least I – expected better from the Democrats, even after the betrayals by LBJ, Jimmy the Theocrat and Slick Willie.

Also, George the Second didn't maliciously resurrect the hopes of a nation – truly desperate hopes given our socioeconomic reality – then literally spit in all our faces by betraying us even before he took office.

But that's precisely what Obama did. He promised single-payer public-option health care, promised to sign the Employee Free Choice Act, and above all else promised to restore constitutional governance. And he had a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, too...

Worse – although exactly as he had secretly promised his Wall Street masters – Obama the Orator was becoming Barack the Betrayer even before he took office. Remember the secret meetings with the prescription drug lords and the health insurance barons?

We voted for a Democrat and got not just a Republican but a viciously conservative Republican at that.

Try as I might, I cannot find a comparable betrayal anywhere in U.S. history.

Obama's smirking treachery – I will call it what it is – has driven the final nail into the Democratic Party's coffin.

Given U.S. racism, his behavior has also discredited legitimate African-American aspirations for at least a century if not forever.

***

Lastly, for a poster who agreed with my original comment, I elaborated:

Reduced to its LCD (lowest common denominator), capitalism is quite simply infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

It is therefore the rejection and reversal of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. It is also moral imbecility, the ethos of the serial killer – literally the knowing embrace of evil.

That's why, when capitalism becomes capitalist governance, it means absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – exactly as we have in today's U.S., exactly as prevailed in Pinochet's Chile, Franco's Spain, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.

The only remedy – remember how quickly the New Deal was destroyed – is democratic socialism.

But now it is not just human liberty that's at stake. It's the very survival of our species.

Either we raise the Red Banner of international socialism or we become extinct.

Yes, it truly is that simple.

LB/16 November 2014

-30-

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Democrats, of course, remain in vindictive denial.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there are degrees of one-party rule.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

***

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

But I called it eight months ago on 23 March:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/3-9 November 2014

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