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-

Why I Was Gone So Long; Apology to Readers; U.S. Escalation in Ukraine; Protesters as 'Enemy Forces'

A NUMBER OF people have asked me why I withdrew so suddenly from the blogosphere last December and why I have been mostly absent since then, not only posting nothing significant in this space but making only minimal contributions to websites I formerly frequented daily.

As with so many things human, the answer is complicated. It has at least three parts.

The first of these, the fulcrum upon which fate leveraged everything that followed, was as I said at the time “a conjunction of obligations and disasters.” 

My obligations were to write, photograph, edit and produce the monthly newsletter that serves the community of elderly and disabled people in which I reside, and – at the same time –to help a friend with a suddenly essential project that had to be completed by 31 December.

The initial disaster was the death of my computer's printer, chiefly because I cannot edit my own writing effectively on a monitor. I'm not sure what the problem is that causes me to miss so many errors when I try to edit on-screen, but I am certain it has to do with only seeing a small part of the text at one time and also with being dyslexic.

Hence I if I am to write for OAN (or for any other medium in which it is imperative I not look like an illiterate idiot, a muddle-headed moron or a geezer doddering into dotage), I need the printer to provide me text I can edit in the traditional copy-desk manner, green visor, pica stick and all. I mark the corrections on the paper. Then – like an old-time Linotype operator (one of the many categories of highly skilled workers who were flung into permanent joblessness by that electronic scab known as the computer) – I type the changes into the virtual text.

As I do so I hope desperately I do not make other errors – for example the dyslexic but comically literal “fucendate” (from “fecundate”), or the arthritic-fingered blunder that turns “working press” into “wormking press.”

(I leave it to you readers to decide the Freudian appropriateness of “wormking press” as it applies to the so-called “mainstream media” of the United States. Suffice it to say that in historical truth it is our species' first wholly privatized Ruling Class propaganda machine, a microcosm of the larger socioeconomic triumphs achieved in the U.S. by Ayn Rand, Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels.

Remember too – especially in the context of the warning to never eat yellow snow – how this “main stream” functions to facilitate the trickle-down economics in which we are all...well, er, drowning.)

Returning to the circumstances of my departure, I had intended, as noted in December, to resume blogging after the first of the year.

By then, thanks to the continuing generosity of Adrienne, who was my second wife and is now amongst my dearest friends, I had a new printer – the highly rated Hewlett-Packard Envy 5530.

But the new printer crashed my old computer, forcing me to undertake a project I had long dreaded: replacing my old familiar machine with the new, substantially more powerful but totally alien Samsung NP355E5C Adrienne had given me the previous Christmas.

I had not started using the new computer – in fact I had not even unpacked it – because I knew from past experience the process of changing computers would probably keep me off-line for at least a month. And I wanted to re-start OAN before my absence cost me too many more readers.

Fate, however, had other plans. The old computer could not be resurrected without the expenditure of far more money than I had. Nurds here in Bill Gates land charge as much as $265 per hour, and what the old computer needed – a near-doubling of its random access memory plus upgrading from an Ubuntu 10.10 operating system to the present Ubuntu 12-whatever – would take many many many more hours than one.

That was the bad news. The worse news was the crash had obliterated my e-mail address book, which I have since been able to only partially reconstruct.

The most devastating news of all was that Samsung and Microshaft had cut a maliciously monopolistic deal that made it impossible to reconfigure the new laptop to run Ubuntu, which I had come to love for its clarity, simplicity, intuitive protocols and a friendly discussion board to help compu-ignoramuses like myself navigate its Nurdly esoterica.

Thus I had to learn Microshaft Windows 8.1, which after running anything Ubuntu was like being told the only allowable route to Portland, Oregon was via New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago and Hungry Horse, Montana rather than by the direct route 143 miles (230 kilometers) south from Tacoma on Interstate 5.

Finally, near the end of March and with the help of two computer-savvy friends and an auxiliary keyboard, I was able to run the Microshafted Samsung without having to call for help every 15 minutes.

But on my 75th birthday – literally just as I was writing the preceding paragraph – yet another crisis arose.

For the past six months, the faceless, mostly nameless executives who lord it over the apartment complex in which I'm a tenant have been harassing us with threats of a one-or-two-day temporary eviction, ostensibly so the entire building can be renovated in the shortest time possible.

The temporary evictions, we are told, are non-negotiable.

But the executives refuse to tell us when these evictions will occur – only that we will have 48 hours notice to prepare, which of course means we should box up our belongings now and then live as denizens of storage lockers until management deigns to act.

Needless to say, the dislocations we are suffering as a result are in some respects worse than the life-disruptions of a full-fledged move to a new address. At least with an address-change, there's a known schedule, presumably with reasonable time for planning, packing and unpacking.

What in landlord-speak is dismissed as a minor inconvenience is for us a debacle. Add in that we're all either old and/or disabled, many of us both, some genuinely fragile, and the stress and anxiety inflicted by the temporary-eviction threats ramps up into the stroke-and-heart-attack zone.

Moreover the fact the need for such haste has never been explained combines with the fact the neighborhood is a known gentrification target to evoke strong suspicions we are being not-so-subtly encouraged to move elsewhere.

Then on my birthday – happy birthday from Jesus – we were hit with the written threat of a $75-per-month rent increase and its unexpressed but implicit and abjectly terrifying threat of instant homelessness.

Hence, acting both as the volunteer founder and editor of the apartment-complex newsletter and in my own defense, I consulted with a local lawyer. On his advice, I wrote, assembled and filed a 51-page formal complaint complete with 11 pages of narrative and 40 pages of documentation.

Though there is no effective tenant-protection apparatus in Washington state – tenants here have probably fewer rights under state and local law than anywhere else in the U.S. – the fact this particular apartment complex was at least partly financed with federal funds means we may have some rights under federal law.

Or so the lawyer said. Hence the complaint – which took me 16 gruelingly long 14-hour days to prepare – was mailed to U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer (Democrat/Washington state) on 13 April.

Truly I have not worked so hard since I was a full-time investigative reporter. Worse, it was the first time I had written about anything so damnably complex since I quit tobacco, 20 years ago this coming 23 September. I was not even one day into the project when I began to fear I could not finish the work without starting smoking again. Indeed I became so fearful of yielding to nicotine seduction I enrolled in a quit-smoking program offered by Group Health Cooperative, which is my Medicare (health care) provider and in which I am a voting member.

My problem, as regular readers of OAN know, is that I am dyslexic.  In days of yore, when I was a member of the working press, my two-and-one-half-pack-per-day cigarette addiction was a key part of my compensatory mechanism.

The nicotine one imbibes by smoking is a potent neurotransmitter, and one of its deadly benefits – the oxymoron is deliberate – is that it temporarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction. It thereby evokes an instantaneous clarity of expression that now without nicotine often takes me hours – and sometimes literally days – to achieve.

In the instance of the complaint to Congressman Kilmer, it took me a total of 224 hours – the equivalent of 6.4 35-hour workweeks compressed into 16 days – to write a seven-sentence summary and a 5,000-word, 10-part report and then to assemble the supportive documents. In the old days, as a smoker, I'd have done the writing in maybe three days max and – working no more than my usual seven-hour days – had the entire project finished within a week.

But at last the complaint is now done and mailed.

Will our Democratic Congressman defend us? Or will he act upon his de facto Republican, military-industrial-complex ideology and throw us under the proverbial bus?

Surely we shall soon know the answer.

The question is legitimate. Not only are we lower-income people. Because we are elderly and/or disabled, we are truly surplus – no longer supportable for profit.

And now finally – for the first time since last December – I actually have the time and energy and inclination to again start doing this blog right.

***

IT OCCURRED TO me last night because of an “I-hope-you-keep-writing” note sent by a reader with the seemingly Eastern European name of Marija (as in the late Marija Gimbutas), that perhaps the explanation for OAN's readership in Ukraine and Russia was its regular linkage to the accurate Consortium News reports of events therein.

Consortium News and Reader Supported News,  a separate website that often republishes the Consortium reports, are the only indigenous U.S. sources that dare reveal how the USian Empire has imposed and is now defending its newest Nazi puppet state.

These websites also report how ethnic Russians are resisting the U.S./Nazi onslaught with the same breathtaking courage as defined the Soviet partizanska during World War II, which for the peoples of the U.S.S.R. was indeed what it is called in Russia even now: “the Great Patriotic War against Fascism.”

Could it be that due to electronic censorship by the U.S./Nazi regime in Kiev, OAN was one of the few reliably available sources of those Consortium and RSN reports? 

Obviously I don't know. But the suspicion alone is enough to fill me with guilt for my nearly four-month absence.

Hence my profuse apology if my personal problems made it more difficult for 

Ukrainians and Russians to get those reports. Providing the relevant links is a purpose – indeed an obligation – I will damn well take seriously in the future.

***

YET ANOTHER REASON I withdrew – maybe the most important reason of all – I confess in a letter to a colleague here in Tacoma:

During our recent telephone conversation my explanation of why I so suddenly dropped out of sight was less than articulate. Like most men I find it extremely difficult to talk about my own emotions, but unlike many men I do possess some small skill at writing about such things. Hence this hopefully more informative (and therefore more honest) explanation:

As you no doubt know from your work, as we approach our personal graveyards we often become brutally honest with ourselves. Though I have been in that general mode for several years, my brush with death via kidney infection and incipient septicemia last fall radically intensified the attendant process of self-evaluation.

When I was maybe 12 or 13, and without really giving it much thought,  I adopted a Boy Scout rule  – "always leave the campsite in better condition than you found it" – as the  motivating principle of my life. For many years my choice was scarcely conscious, and I am only now realizing the extent to which it nevertheless ruled my most important decisions: how, for example, it prompted me to choose journalism and journalistic activism as my primary career. 

But sitting one day last fall in Group Health hooked up to intravenous Cipro I had the darkest, most wrenching epiphany of my life: I realized that every cause to which I had committed time, energy and passion – including causes for which I sometimes willingly risked my life – has either failed or was later defeated.  

Organized Labor is dead beyond any hope of resurrection. Today's U.S. is every bit as racist as it was in the Jim Crow era. Women's reproductive rights are being reduced to pre-Roe-v-Wade levels (and in most states have already been abolished entirely). Vietnam taught us nothing. The alternative press is no more (its electronic ghost is but a flash-in-the-pan), and the mainstream press has been corrupted into the most diabolically effective Josef Goebbels propaganda apparatus our species has ever known. Meanwhile the Environmental Movement  is so impotent in the face of Christo-capitalist ecocide, it can do nothing to protect us from becoming a doomed species on a dying planet.

 

The mental list continued,  etc. ad nauseam for the entire two hours I was in the clinic that day and continues to haunt me – with the additional weight of shame for yielding to despair – to this very minute.  

In other words, though I participated in probably 60 years of efforts to leave the campsite of this nation and this planet in better shape than it was, every one of those efforts failed abysmally.

Why then, I asked myself, should I squander the final years of my life fighting for causes that either have no possibility of ever winning or that – even if they might seem to achieve small victories – are certain to be undone by the now-unavoidable extinction of our species? (The newest projections of terminal climate change say we will have rendered our planet uninhabitable by mammalian life – and ourselves extinct – within a hundred years.)

Obviously I am still debating this most vexing of all personal questions, which is why I remain unable to commit to anything much beyond the demands of living day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute. Factor in the growing probability of a thermonuclear apocalypse resulting from U.S. provocations of Russia in the Ukraine and I often feel as if I am living, albeit in slow motion, the script of Nevil Shute's On the Beach.  I therefore hope – because your friendship means a lot to me – you will forgive my angst-ridden retreat.

 

(It is so foolishly easy, even thrust ever deeper as we are into the de facto concentration camp Ayn Rand economics and total surveillance is making of the USian homeland, to forget that others have it infinitely worse, that for beleaguered people elsewhere, as in the eastern Ukraine, yielding to despair is possible only if one is willing to submit to immediate extermination. I understand this, not the least because of the violently dangerous wretchedness of my childhood. Hence my oft repeated statement that in times such as these, survival is itself an act of revolutionary defiance. Hence too my hope I have sufficient strength I do not falter again.)

***

  
BUT THE WEIGHT of despair is nevertheless undeniable. We are facing a magnitude of oppression that is unique in our species' experience. And if we are to survive it – which grows less likely every day – it will require evolution of an entirely new set of strategies and tactics.

This was the main point of my response to “Three Reasons Why the United States Is Broken, Bloated and Bleeding,” a Truthout piece in which Pierce Nahigyan posits the astonishingly arrogant, absurdly pompous argument all we need do to cure the nation's ills is “have a serious conversation about the big idea: What we want the United States to be”  – as if that alone would save our species from itself.

Needless to say, my retort was blistering. 

Here is an excerpt, edited and condensed from four separate posts:

Alas, it is far too late to have “a serious conversation about the Big Idea."

Indeed it has been too late since the Eleven Years of Political Murders (22 November 1963 to 13 November 1974), and the slayings of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Sen. Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, Phillip Gibbs, James Green and Karen Silkwood.

Everything that has happened since then, the Patriot Act and the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act included, has been nothing more than what the military calls a "mopping-up operation," the consolidation of victory, albeit performed in slow motion lest Moron Nation awaken to what obtains.

Though the Occupy Movement was in fact an awakening, it was predictably crushed. (For those of literary inclinations, our situation is identical to that described in the Harry Turtledove short story called "The Last Article," for which Google.

As a result there are now only two sorts of people in the United States.

There are those like Mr. Nahigyan, who believe we are still allowed significantly effective remnants of our former freedom and political power, but who thus by their breathtaking ignorance prove themselves to be utter fools if not victims of clinical delusion.

Then there are those like Chris Hedges or myself who know enough history to understand the USian Empire's technological supremacy means its de facto Fourth Reich is forever – that is, until capitalist savagery and/or the resultant nuclear war and/or environmental ruin reduces our species to extinction.

Nor will the oft-promised “technological solutions” ever save us. Murphy's Law is absolute reality. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And scientists with their breathtakingly selfish arrogance are Murphy's most devastating facilitators, witness Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island etc.

Though it is considered heresy to say so, Rev. King's statement that the arc of the universe moves toward justice is meanwhile proven to be the biggest Big Lie of all time. In fact the reverse is true. The few interludes of "justice" in human history are but fleeting sparks in an infinity of darkness -- and the frequency and duration of those sparks are in inverse proportion to technological development.

The more advanced the technology, the less it tolerates individual liberty.

Technology's ultimate function is thus proven by its consequences: it is to grant our overlords ever-more-godlike powers and simultaneously reduce ourselves to ever-more-abject powerlessness.

Besides which there is the fact the notion of revolution is rendered meaningless when it arises amongst a dying species on a dying planet.

Most of us also fail to understand how revolutions succeed. The Germanic risings against Rome succeeded because they were part of a continent-wide onslaught that denied Rome any possibility of assistance from without. Likewise Islam, again part of a continent-wide onslaught that denied large parts of post-Roman Europe and finally Byzantium -- Constantinople -- any possibility of outside reinforcement. But in the modern world -- as the Marxians themselves concluded -- such widespread risings are impossible. Hence all revolutions have four requirements. These are: (1)-ideological solidarity; (2)-leadership and organizational discipline; (3)-access to, and know-how to use, extant military technology; (4)-the intervention (or at least the clandestine assistance) of a major power. In today's world, no revolution can succeed without all four of these prerequisites in place.

The movements that in the 20th Century dismantled the British Empire would not have succeeded without Soviet and/or Chinese assistance. Gandhi's pacifism was backed by the Red Army and its threat of violent revolution. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1858 would never have occurred without the agitation of Tsarist intelligence operatives. The American Revolution of 1776 could not have succeeded without French assistance and intervention. Nor would the Russian Revolution of 1917 have succeeded without the clandestine help of Imperial Germany.

But evolution of the requisite pre-revolutionary conditions is impossible today and will remain so for as long as present-day surveillance technology and weaponry exist. Thanks to that technology, the USian Empire's total control of the world's economy is also total control of the world's peoples.

Domestically, the truly savage anti-intellectuality in which we have all been conditioned since World War II means that no ideological solidarity is possible beyond that organized by the Ruling Class: note the emergence of the Tea Party and then of Occupy (of which I was part). Contrast the two, and note why one has gone on to become an incipient Nazi Party, while the other is dead beyond resurrection, torn apart as much by forces within as it was crushed from without.

Conditions abroad are even more hopeless: the instant the global surveillance apparatus detects effective resistance, the Central Intelligence Agency sends in its death squads (for the newest example of which see the Ukraine reports below). Or take Venezuela: without the Soviet Union to back it up, its progressive government is no more sustainable than the proverbial snowball in hell. And there, of course, you have it: with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the co-optation of China, any realistic hope for humanitarian revolution or even humanitarian reform anywhere on this planet died forever.

Those who doubt this should remember the New Deal happened only after the U.S. Ruling Class was terrified into concessions by the prospect of a U.S. Communist revolution backed by the Red Army.

Any Ruling Class responds only to force, and this is more true of the Capitalist Ruling Class than of any of its historical counterparts – for what is capitalism but infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue?

Thus without the sort of leverage the USSR provided – even if there were not the nullifying issue of a dying species on a dying planet – humanitarian change is impossible. Thus too the unspeakable reality of the present: the darkest, most hopeless epoch in all human experience.

But our individual and collective powerlessness does not prohibit (and may in fact encourage), small-scale community efforts to improve the immediate circumstances of our lives. For example, an environmentalist friend and comrade in Maine has reduced her mass-movement involvements and refocused her efforts into teaching organic gardening methods to individuals and grassroots organizations.. As she puts it, We the People are so totally disempowered, all we activists can do now is work to help our neighbors transcend the present and looming adversities and thus live better lives.

The essence of such efforts is embodied the Zen/Taoist phrase "nothing special." Anything beyond that is grandiose if not delusional. But ironically it is from reconfiguring the ordinary – the "nothing special" – that true community is born, thereby transcending (and at least potentially nullifying) the divisions hitherto inflicted by ideological, ethnic, racial or sexual differences. Thus – when you think about it -- there is no greater, more effective antidote to capitalism than true community.

(My apology to the family of Allison Krause for misspelling her name in the on-line version of this commentary, which is corrected above.)

***

EMPHATICALLY RECOMMENDED READING: “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust”: on the 70th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the U.S. puppet neo-Nazi government in Kiev honored the Ukrainian fascists  who helped the German invaders exterminate the region's Jews.

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports, the text also documents the (predictable) emergence in Ukraine of neo-Nazi death squads. They are (unsurprisingly) similar to the death squads the Central Intelligence Agency trained and operated elsewhere  throughout capitalism's New World Order, the de facto Fourth Reich.

Also emphatically recommended is the Al Jazeera America/ Agence France-Presse report the U.S. has already sent at least 300 paratroopers  into Ukraine to help Kiev bolster its death-squad governance.

As I noted in the comment thread, “This invasion of Ukraine is from the Russian perspective as great a threat as Soviet missiles in Cuba were to the U.S. in 1962. Indeed it is arguable the U.S. has just made World War III inevitable.”

In that same comment thread – somewhat revised for publication here – is my speculation on why the U.S. Ruling Class so fanatically despises the Russians, it would rather blow up the world than coexist with them – never mind the Russians our are natural allies in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

I have long assumed this anti-Russian hostility is a response to the fact the Russian people, in the person of the Red Army, beat back the capitalist powers' attempt to reconquer Russia  immediately after the revolutions of 1917. Even now, 24 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party remains the second largest party in the Russian Federation. This means the Communists could again become Russia's ruling majority, the mere thought of which is sufficient to terrify our plutocratic overlords into the suicidal madness of thermonuclear war-mongering.

Another toxic spasm of the U.S. Ruling Class hatred for Russia is no doubt evoked by the fact that – more than any other country (and at a cost of about 45 million people killed) – it was Russia in the form of the Soviet Union that saved the world from German Nazism. As proven by the Bankers Plot of 1934,  the Ruling Class wanted the Nazis to win.  But for the plot's failure, the U.S. would have been the fourth and ultimately dominant Axis power.

But now – given the neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi taints metastasizing through the nation (most noticeably in how the federally militarized police are murdering African-Americans, but also in radically intensified misogyny, the growing popularity of genocide euphemized as “austerity” and of course in the 2010 and 2014 election results ) – maybe the real reason the Ruling Class hates Russia dates back to the U.S. Civil War.

Had it not been for Imperial Russia's support of the Union  – note the Russian fleets in New York  and San Francisco c. 1863 – Britain and France would have recognized the Confederacy, entered the war on its side and probably facilitated a Confederate victory. But not even the two empires together dared confront a fully mobilized Russia.

The resultant U.S.-Russian alliance was subsequently immortalized by Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Bleak are our shores with the blasts of December, Fettered and chill is the rivulet’s flow; Thrilling and warm are the hearts that remember Who was our friend when the world was our foe. Fires of the North in eternal communion, Blend your broad flashes with evening’s bright star; God bless the Empire that loves the Great Union Strength to her people! Long life to the Czar! [15]

As I know from firsthand experience, the Ruling Class aristocrats have long and vindictive memories. Could it be they're still enraged at the Russians for helping Lincoln end slavery?

*

GLENN GREENWALD'S EXPOSÉ on the deceptive propaganda peddled by NBC  via the Richard Engel kidnapping tells a story that is, just as its headline says, “More Troubling Than Brian Williams Scandal.” 

But it also gave me an opportunity to write a concise summary of how the USian Ruling Class has actually outdone Josef Goebbels. It has followed Goebbels' rules for propagandizing a people so effectively, they reflexively reject any unofficial narratives. It has done so by designing and imposing the world's first fully privatized governmental propaganda machine.

What follows is a slightly revised variant of the comment-thread original: 

The ugly truth behind NBC's behavior in the Engel case is found in the fact so-called "mainstream media" is owned by the same cabal of plutocrats who own and control government at every U.S. level.

This means "mainstream media" is nothing more than a fully privatized, obscenely profitable government propaganda apparatus: same owners, same bosses, same goals of world conquest as those who own and control the government. In other words, just as government has been reduced to the executive-action agency of the Ruling Class, so has mass media been reduced to its mouthpiece.

This is not only fascism as defined by Benito Mussolini; it is in fact the ultimate, most perfected form of fascism, in which governance itself is a profit center – not just in "mainstream media" as state propagandists, but as in the prison-industrial complex, for-profit schools, etc. ad nauseam.

Meanwhile the "mainstream media's" deceptions about Iran are identical in magnitude and purpose to the German deceptions about Poland, authored by Josef Goebbels, that started World War II.

What we have here in the U.S. is not just fascism, but when you add in the master-race implications of U.S. "exceptionalism ," is in fact a new form of Nazism.

And let us not forget that fascism and Nazism are direct derivatives of capitalism. In fact they are capitalism's final, mature forms -- the only destinations allowed by capitalism's core value, the Ayn Rand precept of infinite greed as ultimate virtue.

Whether the goal is lebensraum and slaves or maximum profit by other means of exploitation, capitalism's corpse-littered pathway is identical and identically evil.

*

FINALLY THERE IS this: National Guard troops called out to suppress anti-racism protests in Ferguson, Missouri considered the protesters “enemy forces,”  never mind the demonstrations were – as one discussion-thread contributor aptly put it, “American Citizens exercising their First Amendment right to 'petition the Government for redress of grievances.'”

To which I replied: “Ferguson or Ukraine, it's the same war: on one side, the capitalist New Order, the de facto Fourth Reich. On the other side, all the rest of us, We the People of the World.“

LB/12-19 April 2015 

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Exclusive: A Black Woman's Perspective on Ferguson

(Editor's note: The following – one of the most thought-provoking commentaries on Ferguson I have yet read – is excerpted by permission from an exchange of e-mails between myself and a fellow writer I met in 2010 during a National Writers Union non-fiction workshop. Besides being a dear friend and a respected colleague, she is what might be termed “a true American”: her ancestry includes African, First Nations and Caucasian peoples and exemplifies the genetic melting-pot the American continents have been for at least the past 25,000 years. She was born in a small southern town, and though she appears white, her birth certificate defines her as “Negro” – a reality that gives her a unique perspective on life in the United States. So does her personal history: she spent a summer driving across the southeast, worked and camped in every section of the nation, and lived in apartments and houses in the suburbs and the hearts of four U.S. metropolitan areas as well as on a farm. For professional reasons, she prefers to remain anonymous. [LB/30 November 2014])

***

THE ONE THING I haven't seen or heard in all the Ferguson coverage is a comparison of the present-day policing of U.S. minorities with the strategy and tactics used against the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – specifically from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 through the Haymarket Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.

Militarization of law enforcement (then via the National Guard and the Pinkerton Agency), the ever-present possibility of provocateurs and the law-enforcement organizations' protection of the rights of the establishment over those of the individual – all are similar to what is happening to folks of color now, whether in Ferguson or on our southern border.

Then as now, the conflicts are about labor – though the pivotal elements tend to be obscured by the fact labor rights no longer threaten our economic establishment. With the advent of containerization, just-in-time production and stocking, and very speedy transport, the unionized jobs have gone – either overseas or to the "right-to-work" states – the outsourcing helped by various tax breaks.

But something had to be done with the remaining workers. Oh, we can start a new industry! Besides the military-industrial (and Congressional) complex, we now have the prison-industrial-Congressional complex. Like the 19th Century practice of giving away land and tax benefits to railroads, we now have 21st Century giveaways to private, for-profit prisons, and we can even guarantee them a certain number of prisoners – or detainees in the case of Immigration Detention Centers.

The reason we haven't heard such comparisons being made is there is no longer a Labor Radio or a newspaper sponsored by labor. There aren't even any labor programs on air or columns in the press any more. And without constant publicity, labor unions, corrupt or clean, begin to fade.

During the civil rights era, reporters and editors, even for the top newspapers and networks, earned middle class incomes. Newspaper workers lived in the neighborhoods where the average Joe lived. Now they earn enough money not to have to live with the hoi polloi. This only increases their lack of understanding of the real story.

At the heart of the Ferguson conflict is economics and education. Typically due to the tax breaks granted corporations (see above), there isn't enough money to fully fund good schools with good teachers for all students. In addition, few state governments are empowered to do more than minimally contribute to public school (K-12) funding. In most states, the critical budget decisions are made by local school districts. That's because most of the money spent in a given district is generated – mostly from real estate taxes – within that district. Thus the impoverished districts stay poor and the rich ones get richer.  And yes, I agree that teachers' unions have fostered some of the malaise in our schools, but that really didn't start until desegregation – until white teachers felt they had to fend off what they regarded as encroachment by "new" (often African-American) teachers.

Once upon a time, our land-grant colleges were supposed to be for workers' families. Now they, and community colleges (which used to be free to students in their service area), are beyond the reach of today's lower income families: a year at Washington State University costs about $28,176 a year for tuition, books, fees, room and board, transportation, and miscellaneous expenses. Tacoma Community College charges $109.59 per credit hour, plus fees, books, etc.

But even if a college education were free, the good jobs have been leaving the nation at least since the Reagan years. I watched a factory that was making tools for the auto industry get shipped piecemeal to Korea in 1982-1984. It went from 50-plus people per shift, three shifts a day, seven days a week, shutting down only on Christmas, to zero people in two years. None of those middle-aged men were retained by the company. Likewise, Boeing is slowly moving its work from the Seattle area to non-union states from Kansas to South Carolina.

And even if we reform the education system, where are the jobs? As in Egypt, Tunisia, Italy, and Spain – where are the jobs that would give these kids a purpose?

To speak to the particulars of Darren Wilson versus Michael Brown, a one-inch differential in height should not have cowed Officer Wilson so much he immediately pulled his gun. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't kick his door open as Mike Brown got close enough. Anyone behind the steering wheel of a car is at a definite disadvantage when it comes to getting a nightstick or pepper spray as opposed to a firearm that's on his hip. For both men, the final 90 seconds probably ran on pure adrenalin. But the outcome was determined the moment Brown reached inside Wilson's car.

Yes, I do believe Wilson was terrified. Lots of people are afraid of large people, and large people depend on that fear to get their own way. Wilson probably had used his height to keep from having to pull his gun before. This time, his opponent was bigger than he was – certainly heavier though not much taller. And Wilson's testimony reflects that.

Should he have been terrified? I don't think so. I think his training and fitness level should have overcome that. Wilson might be in excellent shape for a Ferguson cop, but he spends his days in a squad car, not being a physically active teenager. He needs to up his fitness profile and his awareness quotient. People caught off-guard as he was are generally used to terrorizing other people by their mere presence.

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Capitalism as Death: Bald Tires, Ebola, Ferguson, Malicious Disenfranchisement of Minority Voters

CAPITALISM'S INNATE MURDEROUSNESS is manifest everywhere we look.

We see it in the Ebola epidemic and in how the Obama Administration's decision to permanently define health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right has already spread Ebola to two nurses here in the United States. We witness that same wanton lethality in the escalating atrocities committed by federalized, militarized police against blacks and other minority people. The same deadly dynamic t underlies the methodical disenfranchisement of college students and minorities and lower-income people in general. The fewer anti-capitalist voters, the more of us the capitalists can exploit, work to death or otherwise murder with impunity.

And last Wednesday, the furtively hidden poverty that is a consequence of capitalism's morally imbecilic restructuring of the USian domestic economy literally came within a telephone-pole's thickness of killing me.

I had been shopping for a few mid-month essentials and was walking along the sidewalk to the bus stop on the northeast corner of Tacoma's Pacific Avenue South at South 72nd Street. It was 5:15 p.m. on 15 October, unseasonably very warm, terminal-climate-change muggy and drizzling in what is already by far the most uncomfortably hot autumn ever recorded in the Pacific Northwest. I was traveling via this seaport town's vindictively downsized  public transport because I am loathe to inconvenience my vehicle-owning friends with unnecessary requests for rides; my own carefully maintained V6 Ford Tempo died at 260,000 miles in mid-2009, the same year capitalism's deliberate contraction to a wage-slave economy cost me nearly 70 percent of my annual income, which in turn decreed I will never again in this lifetime have enough money to own an automobile.

Hence the bus, and hence my near-death encounter with a newish bright-yellow Jeep Wrangler that was meticulously polished and cared-for in every superficial way but was nevertheless running on – and skidding wildly toward me on – four utterly bald tires. I heard it before I saw it – the terrifying sound of a speeding vehicle out of control on wet pavement. My reactions are said to be unusually quick for a person of my 74 years, but by the time I had turned my head toward the threat, the jeep had already slammed into the telephone pole that saved my life. The collision, no more than 10 feet away, was as startling as an unexpected artillery round. I hardly felt its shrapnel, a matching yellow “KC Daylighter” headlight cover flung by the impact as it brushed its sinister happy-face smile across the backs of my legs. My exclamation was not thankful but outraged: “Jesus fucking Christ!” 

An elderly, half-toothless woman ran from the entrance to an adjacent store to make sure I was ok; I suspect she feared that, given my obvious age, the momentary terror evoked by the accident might trigger a heart attack. I reassured her. She returned to her shopping.

But the driver of the jeep would not so much as acknowledge my presence. A dark-haired, slightly plump but attractive 30-something white woman in a baggy gray sweat-suit, she had turned the corner from 72nd Street onto Pacific, obviously in a hurry to get somewhere and going way too fast for conditions, and the combination of her defiantly bald tires and the pavement's slick emulsion of oil and drizzle turned her intended 90-degree turn into a 180 degree skid and transformed her jeep into a potentially deadly projectile that, but for the pole, would have bounced up over the curb and onto the sidewalk and into my body and over it no doubt either crushing me to death under its oversized and (say again) bald tires or smashing me into a vegetable or, infinitely worse, a hopeless cripple fully aware of my irremediable wretchedness yet physically unable to end my life. (This is not hyperbole; I have seen, as a newspaper reporter, how human flesh is ground to raw hamburger when a vehicle crushes a pedestrian against pavement.) Thus there is no question in my mind that, had I not been saved by the telephone pole, my death would have been the best possible outcome of our encounter.

Meanwhile the jeep's driver continued to behave as if I were invisible. Nor was I surprised. Her demeanor was the typically hostile reaction of a Puget Sound-area motorist to a pedestrian. It was also a commonplace local expression of class warfare. In this oppressively auto-centric society, pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users – people who by definition seem to lack motor vehicles – are assumed to be absolute failures, worthless bums, parasites, the ultimate dregs of society (note again the material linked under “vindictively downsized”). Especially when mass transit is a subject of public debate, those of us who ride the buses are often the targets of insults shouted by passing drivers: if you're elderly, it's “hurry up and die, you fucking bum,” or if you're younger, it's the more commonplace “get a job – and get a car.” And there at the bus stop on Wednesday 15 October not only was I obviously a pedestrian and a bus-rider; I was also obviously old, obviously burdened with my purchases – and therefore, given the no-doubt bigoted, probably suburbanite perspective of Ms. Bald Tires, I was likely a homeless bum and undoubtedly a non-person, someone to whom a respectable citizen would never speak, someone to be ignored at all times and in every circumstance, one of those Others the Ayn Randers would happily exterminate.

Now, because Ms. Baldies and her smashed-nose jeep were blocking rush hour traffic, I figured the cops would be there within minutes, particularly since a passing motorist shouted out he had called 911 to get the woman help. But instead of the cops, an elderly male Good Samaritan in a pickup truck pulled up behind her, climbed out and helped her tie down the ruptured hood and otherwise get her damaged vehicle mobile again. Their interaction was perplexing. Sometimes they seemed to be strangers. At other times they seemed oddly comfortable with one another. But there is no doubt his assistance, which after maybe only 10 minutes enabled her to flee, saved her from a ticket. She'd have been charged with defective equipment at least, and probably reckless driving as well. Though it was not until she fled the scene of the accident I saw the condition of her tires and understood why and how she had lost control of the jeep that might have killed me. As for the cops, strangely enough they never showed. 

Riding a typically herky-jerky bus and halfway home, I suddenly understood what a telling lesson the jeep incident had taught me about USian capitalist reality. The woman or more likely her husband bought the jeep. Then one or both of them was thrown out of work by capitalism's downsizing and outsourcing of jobs to cheaper labor overseas. Rather than admit their circumstances – rather than acknowledge their victimhood to others and build a solidarity of resistance – they hid in shame, carefully washing and waxing their jeep and otherwise doing everything in their power to conceal the poverty proven by the bald tires, trusting the rugged treads on the sides of those flagrantly unsafe tires to hide the total absence of tread where the rubber meets the road. It is a genuine microcosm of capitalism in action: not just how capitalism victimizes all of us, but how most of the victims have been brainwashed to such fretfully conformist what-will-the-neighbors-think helplessness, they will never find within themselves the honesty – much less the courage – necessary to rise up against their masters.

A teachable moment indeed – that is, if it really was an accident...

******

Something to remember: as a student of history, I am of course aware that any ideology or system of government, however emphatically humanitarian its stated ideals, can be corrupted into an apparatus that serves its Ruling Class an the expense of everyone else. But only capitalism – its morally imbecilic credo spelled out by Ayn Rand – brazenly elevates infinite greed to maximum virtue, thereby publicly rejecting every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. And only capitalist governance openly declares, as in the Powell Memo,  that its sole purpose is providing absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class while totally subjugating all the rest of us.

******

 

I began this week's OAN by mentioning Ebola because that is mostly all I have written about for the past seven days.

Admittedly, the Ebola crisis had remained at the periphery of my consciousness until two detailed reports brought it into sharp focus as yet another capitalist atrocity. The first of these texts was “Assassination' of Public Health Systems Driving Ebola Crisis,” a cutting-edge exposé published by Common Dreams that documents how capitalist greed – chiefly the downsizing and privatization of public health facilities – has inflicted this out-of-control epidemic on all of us.  The second article, “Ebola In The US: Story Of A Broken Healthcare System,”is an anthology of damning revelations  collected by Dr. Margaret Flowers MD and published by the ever-more-informative website PopularResistance.org. Its most important disclosure is that Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas sent the now-dead Ebola victim home with minimal treatment – and thereby jeopardized us all – because “he was a man of color with no health insurance and no means to pay.”

Capitalism is thus threatening us with a disease for which there is no known cure – not because science cannot find a cure, but because there is no profit in developing cures for diseases that (hitherto) afflicted only woefully impoverished Third World peoples. Ebola is 70 percent fatal, and now as a direct consequence of capitalist greed, the deadly virus may be loose in the United States. Worse, an Obama-specific expression of that greed, the so-called Affordable Care Act – its title nearly as grotesque a Big Lie as “change we can believe in” – forever defines U.S. health care as a privilege of wealth. Meanwhile, capitalism has reduced fully half the nation  to lower-income status. This means the prohibitive fees required by ACA's no-treatment-without-advance-payment policy will force even some of the most desperately sick people to avoid care and spread disease. (Or if they seek care as paupers, they'll be rejected as unprofitable, precisely as the late Thomas Eric Duncan was by Dallas Presbyterian in its telling display of Christian charity.) And yes, that health-care-only-as-a-privilege-of-wealth definition truly is “forever” because the windfall profits from mandatory insurance are sufficient to fund the perpetual bribery of every politician in the nation, thereby ensuring the system imposed on us by the insurance barons and the prescription drug lords through Barack the Betrayer's treachery is eternally immunized against humanitarian reform.

While I did not comment on “Ebola in the US” – Popular Resistance threads do not encourage any sort of extended dialogue – I commented at length on “Assassination of Public Health Systems”:

Wake up, people. The Ebola epidemic is intensifying exactly what the neoliberal social model is intended to do: facilitate the genocidal extermination of all Third World peoples and all lower-income peoples everywhere else in the world. That's why the virus is being allowed to run amok – to eliminate all of us the One Percent regards as surplus workers.

Never forget: the entire planet is now ruled by capitalists – people for whom, by definition, infinite greed is maximum virtue – that is, the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. Our Ayn Rand-minded overlords are thus truly moral imbeciles by choice – literally the personification of incarnate evil. And their policies – such as the methodical destruction of public health facilities and social-services in general – are shaped accordingly.

In response to a poster who poignantly hoped my analysis was wrong, I wrote:

Unfortunately, no other analysis suffices to explain what is being done to us.

Obviously it is no coincidence that just as medical scientists started warning us of the inevitability of deadly disease spread worldwide by the global transport network, the One Percent – the capitalist Ruling Class – began methodically destroying the public health and social service facilities that would have enabled us to cope with any such outbreak.

In this context, once we recognize the true nature of capitalism – that it is literally the greatest evil ever unleashed on this planet – all the rest becomes obvious. Final-stage capitalism is behaving exactly as Marxian analysis predicted, maturing into fascism at home and world-conquest imperialism abroad.

Just as importantly, the capitalists themselves – in the ultimate expression of the Shock Doctrine – are seizing upon the looming environmental apocalypse to restructure global governance into an electronically policed, drone-enforced, zero-tolerance tyranny akin to that of Hitler's Third Reich but infinitely worsened by modern technology.

Doubt me? It's already happening. Look at the methodical killing of blacks in the United States, the drone-massacred wedding parties in Afghanistan and the U.S. military's gleeful machine gunning of civilians in Baghdad. The United States is already the de facto Fourth Reich.

The capitalists' ultimate motive is of course their own survival – maintaining their present-day, obscenely lavish lifestyle by stealing from all the rest of us, forcing us into a wretchedness that can scarcely be imagined. To accomplish this, they're restructuring global governance into a system that is half neo-feudalism (with the corporations in place of the medieval baronies), half Nazi-style terrorism to keep us – the 99 Percent – in total subjugation.

Part of that terrorism is the elimination of surplus workers. The Nazis did it in death camps, but those have become unfashionable. Hence – at least until now – the main Ruling Class methods have been less than obvious, chiefly low-intensity genocide by elimination or reduction of the social safety net. (In this context, the primary function of Obamacare is to perpetuate and enforce the U.S. modality of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. Those too poor to pay are abandoned to die. Again, it's already happening.)

But now the One Percent have the Ebola virus on their side, and their destruction of public health and social services are having exactly the effect they intended. The long-term result will be a world reshaped into the global equivalent of an antebellum plantation. The One Percent will be absolute masters and we – those of us who survive – will be their slaves.

Could anything alter this terrible prognosis? Yes: a global socialist revolution. But there is neither the uniform ideology nor the discipline – much less the solidarity of popular will – necessary for such an event. In which context remember that, since the advent of patriarchy about five thousand years ago, democracy has never been more than a very occasional, very brief, very faint spark in the timeline of our history. The norm has not just been tyranny – it is tyranny infinitely worsened by every technological advance. Thus the past shows us our real future – if indeed our species survives at all.

And in response to a skeptic I wrote:

Three points in rebuttal:

(1)-The malice you deny is overwhelmingly evident in the works of Ayn Rand, which show us the core doctrine of capitalism – infinite greed as ultimate virtue – and are in fact a fictionalization of the principles set out in Hitler's Mein Kampf. These principles include the glorification of the übermenschen (the One Percent), the condemnation of the üntermenschen (the 99 Percent), and the implicit demand we 99 Percenters be exterminated for our own good. The train wreck scene in Atlas Shrugged is in fact an endorsement of genocide.

(2)-Rand's murderous (and consciously, deliberately immoral) ideology is now openly declared the ideology both of capitalism and of the Republican Party. Though closeted, it is also the ideology of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by their collaboration with the Republicans in attacking the social safety net.

(3)-To label the One Percent “stupid” and to otherwise dismiss their conscious, deliberate, Ayn Randian espousal of moral imbecility is to make the strategically and tactically suicidal mistake of under-estimating the enemy. It also provides the official propagandists with a convenient “they didn't know any better” defense for the capitalists' deliberate embrace of policies and practices our species defines as evil. Were the capitalists motivated by “stupidity,” they would not own half the planet's wealth and possess the capability of tyrannizing all of us. Nor would the capitalists have developed the technologies of death and oppression that give them powers earlier generations deemed divine – powers that in the real world of today give our overlords true (and probably eternal) omnipotence.

Another skeptic cited past decades of humanitarian aid to Africa as an argument against neoliberal genocidal intent. I responded with a brief history lesson:

Government programs often have inertial momentum. Note for example how Great Society programs continued almost into the Reagan era despite the staunch anti-social-services positions of the Nixon, Ford and Carter regimes.

 

I do not know how to assign a date for the total conquest of the planet by Ayn Rand economists. But I do know that in 1955 (and well into the 1980s at least), the occidental governmental consensus toward Africa, though capitalist/imperialist, included a facade of humanitarian concessions to obstruct the professional revolutionaries of the Soviet Union and (then-genuinely-Communist) China.

Now, with the Soviet Union gone and China totally co-opted by Wall Street, there is no need for any such deception, which is why capitalism now openly displays its true savagery without fear of any consequences.

Further researching the Ebola crisis, I found several informative links on Global Research, the website of the Center for Research on Globalization, a Left-leaning international think tank headquartered in Montreal. These include:

“World Health Organization Says Ebola Cases Could Reach 10,000 Per Week,” here. 

 “U.S. is Responsible for the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Liberian Scientist,” here. 

“Instead of Appointing a Medical Expert, Obama Appoints a Lobbyist as Ebola Czar,” here. 

And a general primer on the Josef Goebbels/Big Lie factor, “US Propaganda: How Corporate America Manipulates the American Public Into Unwitting Support for Corporate Fascism,” here.

***

Meanwhile on an Ebola-related Reader Supported News thread, my denunciation of the pathetically unfunny “comedian” Andy Borowitz   garnered not just a record-number of 59 thumbs-down but a couple of nasty accusations of cowardice as well. This and the general tone of the thread suggests RSN's present-day readership is notably more Democratic Party-orthodox than it was even a few months ago – which perhaps explains why RSN in these pre-election weeks seems ever more desperate for sustaining donations. By contrast, my remarks on Common Dreams, where in the past I was often jeered by doctrinaire Democrats and obvious agent-provocateurs, brought me a record 67 clicks of approval and no disapproving clicks at all. (Could it be the Democrats are running a clandestine site-destroying operation, trying to oust genuine Leftists by deluging us with disheartening Democratic disdain, thereby discouraging the donors who would otherwise keep the site alive? Hmm...wonder if the same tactic was being employed, obviously unsuccessfully, against Common Dreams? Obviously too, the Lev Bronstein rule applies: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”) In any case, here is what I wrote on RSN that provoked so much ire:

I find Mr. Borowitz's “humor” sophomoric at best, buffoonish at worst, grotesquely “American” at all times. But to belittle our fears of this looming Ebola epidemic – which government has been deliberately rendered powerless to combat – is like jeering at our legitimate terror of ending up crippled (as one of my sisters did), or dying in an iron lung (as a neighbor child did) during the Polio epidemics of my boyhood years. 

Then I took on a poster who implied the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital nurses had infected themselves:

The two nurses who are now facing death in Dallas did not “slime (themselves) in an infected person's body fluids.” This fact tells us two things:

Either (A), the supposedly 100-percent-safe protective apparatus touted by for-profit medicine is as defective as most other capitalist products; or (B), the government is lying to us (what else is new?) about the communicability of the virus.

Then there's possibility (C): that both (A) and (B) are true.

The one absolute truth – given we know with 100 percent certainty the government routinely lies to us – is that we don't know what the truth is.

Worse, given that our major media is no more than a privatized government propaganda apparatus, its mode of operations guarantees we will never find out...until it's too late.

(Exactly, by the way, as in Iraq, Afghanistan and “change we can believe in.”)

Disclosure: At age 74, I am hardly subject to panic at the prospect of yet another mode of death, though I will admit I am not enchanted by the possibility of drowning in my own blood, which is how Ebola kills most of its victims.

But I do fear for all those who have not yet lived their lives – especially since I do not believe the U.S. government (run as it is by, for and of the One Percent) – has the capability of containing the epidemic. 

In which context note Obama's “czar”: a Josef Goebbels-type propagandist – which tells us all we need to know about government intent. 

Finally I realized the entire dialogue was not so much a defense of Borowitz as of the underlying capitalist ideology that defines USian health care:

What astounds me about this thread is the majority of posters who are implicitly defending for-profit doctors, for-profit health care and access to care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. 

As I have observed throughout my adult life, scratch a U.S. citizen – even a self-proclaimed "progressive" – and you'll most often find a fascist. 

No wonder real health-care reform – that is, single-payer public-option health care – was dead on arrival, never really part of the Big Lie of “change we can believe in.”

And that – another example of how capitalism kills – is the point of the entire Ebola story.

But, precisely as this thread demonstrates, any sort of genuinely humanitarian socialist consciousness is forever beyond the (sorely limited) capabilities of the (infinitely selfish) USian mind. 

And when one of the very few supportive posters gently chided me for not mentioning Cuban socialism and how its doctors and nurses are the primary effort against Ebola in Africa, I responded accordingly:

Consider those Cuban doctors now praised.

Cuban socialism has in fact done more for health care in Latin America and the Third World than all the capitalist intrusions combined. A good source on this subject is here.

Meanwhile the best the USian Empire can do is send troops (Why? To euthanize the victims?) and appoint a Josef Goebbels-type propagandist (instead of an MD) as its Ebola "czar."

With a propagandist as “czar,” it's obvious the USian anti-Ebola campaign will be a microcosm of capitalism itself – that is, a Big Lie to cover a miasma of deception, exploitation, (unnecessary) death and (obscene) profiteering.

******

What is carefully avoided by the Southern Poverty Law Center report entitled “How Cliven Bundy Defeated the US Government” is there is only one logical conclusion to be drawn from the government's apparent "inability" to prosecute the armed Right.  It is that our political overlords are so terrified of the revolutionary fervor now building on the Left – particularly the advent of various forms of eco-Marxism – they are making secret alliance with the armed Right to bolster the defenses of capitalism. Relentlessly logical though it is, it is also clearly too disturbing for the forcibly optimistic, perpetually happy-faced, “have a nice day” USian mentality.

Meanwhile, as I noted on the associated RSN comment thread, capitalism is in fact fulfilling all the predictions of Marxian analysis by (inevitably) maturing into fascism. That the USian Empire is thus becoming the de facto Fourth Reich is further indicated by the refusal of the so-called "Justice" Department to intervene in the burgeoning atrocities  committed by federally militarized police at Ferguson and elsewhere.

The national direction is obvious. As we the people awaken to the Big Lie of USian "democracy," the Ruling Class moves ever closer to unabashed fascism, perhaps even – in the escalating murder and imprisonment of minorities – to an USian variant of Nazism. Likely in anticipation of the eventual, no doubt inevitable USian de jure criminalization of already de facto criminalized minority status and/or lower income status, the Ukrainian Nazis are already rioting for official public recognition.  And how bitterly ironic the key Judas-goat in this entire process of subjugation and enslavement is himself an African-American.

LB/13-19 October 2014

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