USian Ukraine's Nazi-Jihadi Pact Ups World War III Risk

BECAUSE THE CONSEQUENCES of U.S. aggression in Ukraine may well determine whether our species lives or dies, its most disturbing chapter thus far – the USian vassal-government's back-to-the-future renewal of Adolf Hitler's Nazi-Jihadi alliance  – leads this week's OAN though the story was broken on 7 July by Robert Parry via his Consortiumnews.com.

Astute readers will also note I added its link to last week's blog, replacing the earlier Ukraine report I had initially referenced. But I did not comment at any length on the U.S. puppet regime's resurrection of the Nazi-Jihadi alliance until Parry's newest disclosure was republished by Reader Supported News the next day:

Both the Wehrmacht and the SS had specifically Muslim units.

Moreover, the Mufti of Jerusalem – the Muslim equivalent of an archbishop or cardinal – was the prime recruiter for these units. The present-day politics of the Middle East cannot be understood without inclusion of this historical fact.

By forbidding the practice of Abrahamic religion (though not paganism or shamanism), Communist governments whether in Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union effectively outlawed the defining hatefulness of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Centuries of religious violence were thereby ended.

But the U.S., a de facto Christian Crusader-state (see Sharlett, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power), has always relied on religious hatreds to advance its schemes of global conquest.

Thus, in addition to capitalism's abject fear of economic democracy, U.S. hatred of Communism, socialism and intellectualism has always included primary religious motives. To be Christian, for example, is not just to "love your (Christian) neighbors," but to murderously hate everyone else.

Had the Soviet and Yugoslav governments lasted longer – say for perhaps another century – the religious warfare that now again characterizes Eastern Europe would have no doubt ended forever.

But the U.S., like Nazi Germany before it, could never abide such peacefulness.

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Greece as a Proving Ground for Militarization of U.S. Local Police

WRITING ABOUT THE recent, often tragic history of Greece, RSN's Steve Weissman touched, perhaps inadvertently, on an obscure but obvious connection  between the U.S.-organized military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 through 1974 and the federally militarized local police who are killing and terrorizing U.S. residents today.

Back in the closing days of World War II, wrote Weissman, the British government of Winston Churchill moved brutally against the Greek Communists, who had led the resistance to German and Italian occupation. To oppose them, the Brits created Greek special forces...which pointedly recruited fascists who had dominated the Greek military and police ever since the 1930s...When the US declared its Truman Doctrine in 1947, Washington took on London’s imperial role in Greece and gave military backing to these same fascists...

In other words, the USian Empire – now that its capitalist overlords have reduced the U.S. Working Class to slave wages, perpetual unemployment and ever-worsening poverty – is now employing the same deliberately sadistic methods of control here in the homeland as it has hitherto employed in its overseas satrapies and vassal-states. Hence the skyrocketing incidence of killings by cops.  which, already at an all-time high, is beginning to disturb even the nominally pro-cop Right.  (Scroll down to “The Post report seems to suggest...”).

Nevertheless, the white-black divide on attitudes toward police brutality remain one of the best indices to the magnitude of U.S. white racism, however carefully closeted it might be.

An earlier but equally accurate index is the refusal by fully four-fifths of the white population to acknowledge the blatant racism  that characterized government policies toward the victims of Hurricane Katrina. (Scroll down to “As to the breadth and depth of white racism...”)

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Republicans Fear Trump's Outspoken Racism Is Too Revealing

WHEN RSN REPUBLISHED a Washington Post story reporting the Republican Party inner circle is worried Donald Trump's outspokenness is tarnishing their reputation, I could not resist the opportunity to point out that Trump was merely revealing the ideological truth the party usually hides behind a screen of code-words:

What is really embarrassing the Republican Party is that Trump is appealing to the same hatefully racist element in U.S. politics as Hitler appealed to in German politics.

This element in today's United States is huge and bottomlessly venomous – much larger and more malevolent than the Ruling Class dares publicly admit.

But if Trump wins the Republican nomination – and if the Teabagger grassroots retains control of the party apparatus, he surely will – the GOP will no longer be able to deny the fact it became the primary U.S. vessel of fascism during the 1920s and has remained so ever since.

Moreover, if Sanders manages to win the Democratic nomination, there is little question he will also take the presidency.

Candidate Trump's Teabaggers – the modern equivalent of Hitler's stormtroopers – would then almost certainly plunge the U.S. into a second civil war.

It is this – the (again) growing threat from the militant Right – that is finally awakening parts of the U.S. Left to the deadly danger implicit in forcible civilian disarmament – the same lesson that mobilized the Deacons for Defense at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

*** *** ***

Charleston Sparks (Some) Acknowledgment of U.S. Racism

IF THE CHARLESTON atrocity prompts even a small segment of the white majority population in the United States to acknowledge its often-instinctive, culturally inbred racism, the deaths of the nine Charleston victims  will not be squandered, as so many other such deaths have been, by the nation's subsequent history.

Let us then say the names of the Charleston dead – Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson – for it is by such roll-calls of the slain that we the living who did not personally know them when they themselves were alive might now sense our kinship with them, our late brotherhood and sisterhood implicit in the fact they like each of us each had their own experience of self and world that is now lost forever. Quoth John Donne: ...therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Meanwhile, the reality of U.S. racism remains painfully evident not just in the South, the region that is conveniently scapegoated for what in truth is a national phenomenon, but throughout the imperial homeland.

To those of us who regardless of our color know how to recognize it, it is especially obvious in the Pacific Northwest. For example, I cannot readily count the number of times during the past 33 years I have written of the white racism that underlies the maliciously inflicted and deliberately maintained wretchedness of mass transit in Pugetopolis, the colloquial name for the 5,872 square-mile (15,209 square kilometer) metropolitan area of nearly 4 million persons that's centered on the seaport cities of Seattle and Tacoma.

But I do know that – until the post-Charleston now – any such disclosure by any writer however accomplished was either suppressed or (if it somehow managed to get into print) was immediately and harshly denounced as untrue, never mind the obvious racism that repeatedly surfaced  during public debates over (usually unsuccessful) efforts to improve mass transit. (Scroll down to “In the Seattle Area, Racism Means Wretched Mass Transit.”)

Proportionally speaking – that is, in comparison to comparable metropolitan areas – Pugetopolis has the worst, most deliberately inadequate mass transit in the United States. Because the U.S. has the worst mass transit in the industrial world, this makes Pugetopolis mass transit the worst of the worst. Likewise, because the U.S. is the most outspokenly anti-mass-transit nation in the world, Pugetopolis is therefore the most anti-mass-transit (and anti-transit-user) realm on the entire planet. Only in Pugetopolis is mass transit openly defined as “welfare,”  a code-word that in the white racist vocabulary is merely a politically correct way of saying “used by niggers.”

But on 22 June, Knute Berger, a columnist for the Seattle on-line daily Crosscut, finally began chipping away at the taboo of silence that has prevented the region's mainstream media from acknowledging the 800-pound gorilla – or, more appropriately, the Ku Klux Klan klavern – that's right there in the Pugetopolis living room.

On 6 July, Crosscut Guest Columnist Christopher Eide took the process of acknowledgment a lot further  by asking, “What about NW's shortcomings on race.”

Then on 7 June, Politico swooped in from Washington D.C. to scoop the world on a blistering exposé of regional racism  the mainstream Pugetpolis press has deliberately suppressed for years – “Want to Meet America's Worst Racists? Come to the Pacific Northwest.”

Now reduced to playing catch-up, the next day Crosscut published Berger's much more detailed report on Northwest Front and its call for forcible racial cleansing of the entire Pacific Northwest: not just Washington state and Oregon, but also Montana (and maybe Alaska and Idaho as well).

Berger's 8 July piece was so thorough it prompted me to applaud via its comment thread:

Well done, Mr. Berger, with kudos to you, Christoper Eide (6 July) and Crosscut in general for at long last discarding the taboo against admission of Pacific Northwest racism. Now let's hope (1)-someone (besides me) has the journalistic courage to expose its direct connection to the wretched state of Pugetopolis mass transit, and (2)-that such journalistic bravery doesn't trigger an advertising boycott to kill Crosscut just as The Seattle Sun (1974-1982) and the original Seattle Magazine (1963-1970) were slain...

Given how the (hitherto-denied) racism of Pugetopolis has produced the transit crisis  that reveals the region's signature claim of environmental enlightenment to be nothing more than a particularly breathtaking brand of political hypocrisy, I cannot but wonder whether and to what extent unacknowledged racism is the hidden determinant of all U.S. environmental policy.

Meanwhile even Hillary Clinton now admits USian racism is a helluva lot more widespread than just “kooks and Klansmen.” 

*** *** ***

 

Some Long Overdue Truth about Racism's Economic Origins
 

BRYAN STEVENSON HAS described during an interview with The Marshall Project  an historically accurate how-and-why narrative of racism's economic origins, linking it to both religion and class-struggle while simultaneously explaining its malevolent persistence.

Here from an on-line text of the interview are some of the highlights of Stevenson's analysis:

The whole narrative of white supremacy was created during the era of slavery. It was a necessary theory to make white Christian people feel comfortable with their ownership of other human beings. And we created a narrative of racial difference in this country to sustain slavery, and even people who didn’t own slaves bought into that narrative, including people in the North...

Lots of countries had slaves, but they were mostly societies with slaves. We became something different, we became a slave society. We created a narrative of racial difference to maintain slavery...so I don’t believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved. It turned into decades of racial hierarchy that was violently enforced...

And so we are very confused when we start talking about race in this country because we think that things are “of the past” because we don’t understand what these things really are, that narrative of racial difference that was created during slavery that resulted in terrorism and lynching, that humiliated, belittled and burdened African Americans throughout most of the 20th century. The same narrative of racial difference that got Michael Brown killed, got Eric Garner killed and got Tamir Rice killed. That got these thousands of others — of African Americans — wrongly accused, convicted and condemned. It is the same narrative that has denied opportunities and fair treatment to millions of people of color, and it is the same narrative that supported and led to the executions in Charleston...

Stevenson has also launched an initiative to mark where lynchings took place in the U.S.,  which is explained by another of his statements in the Marshall interview:

“You can’t go to Germany, to Berlin, and walk 100 meters without seeing a marker or a stone or a monument to mark the places where Jewish families were abducted from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” said Stevenson in an. “Four thousand African Americans were lynched between 1870 and WWII and none of us know anything about it. We don’t mark these places where these lynchings took place. Most of them took place on courthouse lawns that are now adorned with monuments to the Confederacy.”

Perhaps I am being overly optimistic, but I believe Stevenson has given us the core ingredients for a desperately needed antidote to the racist toxins with which we whites are so relentlessly poisoned – particularly by constant repetition of propaganda that deliberately omits from our official national histories any discussion of racism's Machiavellian, pre-Nazi, pre-Orwellian and most definitively capitalist origins.

***   ***   ***

Surprise -- Supremes Rule against Economic Segregation

NOTING TODAY'S U.S. is ever more segregated by income, Robert Reich says a Supreme Court decision – its impact unfortunately obscured by the mainstream media's focus on the marriage equality and health care rulings – has substantially bolstered our protections against discrimination. 

In a 5-4 ruling, Reich reported, the Court found that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 requires plaintiffs to show only that the effect of a policy is discriminatory, not that defendants intended to discriminate....The decision is likely to affect everything from bank lending practices whose effect is to harm low-income non-white borrowers, to zoning laws that favor higher-income white homebuyers.

This from the court that with its Citizens United  judgment knowingly destroyed the last vestiges of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is perplexing indeed.

My immediate reaction is the justices are merely throwing us a bone, perhaps modeled after the Affordable Care Act –  which cleverly – and obviously for international propaganda purposes – creates the illusion of near-universal health insurance. But it simultaneously imposes such exorbitant co-payments and fees, only the rich can afford to use it, thereby fulfilling ACA's ultimate purpose – that of perpetuating the USian policy, unique in the industrial world, of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.

*** *** ***

Good News for LGBT Seniors in Court's Marriage Decision

THE SUPREME COURT'S legalization of same-sex marriage means that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual couples can now access the legal benefits of marriage no matter where in the United States they live, says the Alliance for Retired Americans “Friday Alert”  issued 10 July.

Elderly LGBT couples living in states where marriage equality was formerly outlawed now have the same rights granted heterosexual couples including Social Security spousal survival payments and state and federal tax benefits, the ARA reports. 

*** *** ***

Have the USian Secret Police Marked Snowden for Death?

A FORMER OFFICIAL of the Carter Administration wondered during an interview if one or more of the federal secret police agencies will try to kill Edward Snowden,  a courageous speculation that proves again the malevolent, Fourth Reich nature of the USian Empire.

*** *** ***

A Link to the Best New Writing I've Read Since the 1960s


HIGH POETRY DISGUISED as prose – that's Ta-Nehisi Coates' “Letter to My Son,”  a piece as poignantly angry as Ginsberg's “Howl” but infinitely more lyrical, as eloquently defiant as the concluding lines of Yeats' “Wanderings of Oisin” yet appropriately, even forcefully secular; as emotionally compelling as Kavi's “Black Marigolds.” Originally published by The Atlantic and republished by RSN, it is unquestionably the most powerful new writing I have seen in maybe the past 45 years. To read it is to relish it...and to want to read it again.


LB/6-13 July 2015

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“Seattle Process”: a Tool for Savaging the Working Class

TO UNDERSTAND HOW Seattle's campaign for a $15 minimum wage was stabbed in the back – how “15 Now” became “15 Maybe Someday” – it is essential to first understand a perversion of democracy called “the Seattle Process” which, for brevity's sake, we'll hereinafter call “TSP.”

TSP is occasionally lauded as representative democracy at its best, but it is more often damned  as endless debate that results in permanent “indecision” or – on the rare occasions it actually achieves consensus – an approach that succeeds only by inflicting “exhaustion” on the participating groups and individuals.

Probably the most glaring example of TSP legacy is the wretched state of public transport  in Seattle and the metropolitan area on the eastern shore of Puget Sound, the so-called Pugetopolis, which includes Tacoma and Olympia to the south and Everett and Bellingham to the north.

In terms of mass transit, the entire region is nearly a half-century behind Portland, Oregon, which is its southern just-across-the-Columbia-River neighbor. And – not only in transit but in terms of all public services and humanitarianism in general – Pugetopolis is at least a century behind its nearby northern neighbor, European-minded Vancouver in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

While Pugetopolis seemingly dithered – “seemingly” because behind the dithering was a carefully scripted Ruling Class campaign to torpedo mass transit – Portland applied for and received federal funding that, by today's miserly standards, seems astonishingly generous. 

The money was available to U.S. municipalities through the Urban Mass Transit Administration, part of President John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Such were the halcyon years before UMTA – and indeed nearly all federal support for local transit – was killed forever by President Ronald Reagan and his Ayn-Rand-minded successors, all of them, whether Republican or Democrat, the obedient servants of Big Oil and Big Automotive.

On its surface, TSP appears to be nothing more than a local example of self-destructive indecisiveness, and indeed that is how it is invariably portrayed by its mainstream critics, who point to the seemingly endless debates and neighborhood-versus-neighborhood/whites-versus-minorities squabbling that – once Seattle-area light-rail construction was finally approved by voters in 1996 – delayed it another 10 years.

But if you look at these results using the tools of objective analysis – that is, if you analyze the results in terms of class struggle (or in parlance of old-time investigative reporters, “who got rewarded and who got fucked”) – then it becomes obvious TSP is yet another of the deceptive weapons the One Percenters use to perpetuate their power and ensure the rest of us remain forever below the salt.

Again taking the example of mass transit, the (mostly-unacknowledged) fact is the Pugetopolis Ruling Class has vehemently opposed it since it became an issue – mainly because adequate mass transit (think of New York City, Chicago or Boston), is one of the major factors that determine whether an area is attractive to lower-income people. Washington state has long been deliberately gentrified by any number of policies – the nation's most viciously regressive tax structure is one; the closure of wilderness access roads to all but equestrians and bicyclists is another – and the aristocracy clearly intends to keep it that way.

Not surprisingly, Seattle Ruling Class opposition to adequate mass transit became most obvious when the availability of the requisite public funding was at an all-time high – that is, during the late 1960s. Emerging via the the editorial pages and news columns of The Seattle Times, the opposition was soon mainstreamed by a nasty grassroots whisper campaign that played on xenophobic fears the subway and light-rail system proposed by Forward Thrust would destroy forever the region's cherished but cleverly undefined “Pacific Northwest lifestyle.”

These whispers inflamed the bigotry characteristic of the city's Northern European majority, claiming subways would turn Seattle into “another Jew York” and attract “criminal” minorities to prey on the (white) citizenry. The outcome, which included a de facto 26-year moratorium on rail transit, is a particularly telling example of how the USian Working Class is convinced to vote against its own interests.

It is also significant for the likelihood – raised by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's testimony Washington state is often used as a proving-ground by the Ruling Class to test and refine methods of oppression – the anti-transit campaign was a rat-lab experiment in voter manipulation. (My apology for the fact I cannot link to this testimony; all published references to it have seemingly vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Meanwhile, assuming Ehrlichman's admission was truthful, the strategy and tactics remain devastatingly effective. (See again the “wretched state” link above.) Note how the implicitly racist meme “transit is welfare” convinced voters in the Pierce Transit service area to viciously downsize their own barely adequate system – never mind most of Pierce Transit's ridership comes from the seaport city of Tacoma, where half the population is definitively lower income and nearly half of the approximately 36,000 daily bus riders have no other means of transportation.  (In its new policy of pandering to relatively wealthy suburbanites – mostly rabid Republicans who despise all lower-income people as “parasites” – Pierce Transit has purged from its website anything its newly favored riders might denounce as “sob-story” data. Thus the link is to OAN and ridership numbers PT released in 2012.)

But the point is not the Pugetopolis transit crisis per se. The point is acknowledging what the Seattle Process really is: a pseudo-democratic mechanism of negation and disempowerment that serves the One Percent and – exactly as intended – savages the rest of us.

Which is precisely what happened to Seattle's fight for a $15 minimum wage – how it was transmogrified from “15 Now” to “15 Maybe Someday.”

Before I continue, I need to stress two important facts. One is I am speaking here only for myself. Yes I am a member of the 15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee, but the views expressed here are my own, only my own, and most assuredly not those of the group. Two – the second fact – is I have no inside knowledge of what obtained behind the scenes in Seattle. My one reliable inside-Seattle source is long dead. My divorcement from all things Seattle is permanent and so poisoned by its native-born residents' notorious hostility to outlanders,  it is unlikely I would visit there even if invited. Therefore the information I have comes only from the same sources available to us all.

That said, why I view the fate of 15 Now Seattle as a loss rather than a win – indeed a devastating loss – is my application of Marxian principles of objective analysis: specifically that any loss for the Working Class is a victory for the Ruling Class, and, by extension, that any victory for the Working Class is a defeat for the Ruling Class.

“Working Class” as used here is an accurately descriptive synonym for the 99 Percent – those of us who, whether our jobs are mental or physical, must work if we are to survive. “Ruling Class” in this context includes not only the One Percent – the aristocrats who own the United States and regard all the rest of us as real or potential slaves – but the cadre of military officers, police commanders, politicians and bureaucrats who serve the One Percenters by obedience to their orders in compliance with the Führerprinzip   that rules USian capitalism and capitalist governance just as it ruled German Nazism and Nazi Germany.

***

In the early days of Seattle's fight for a minimum wage, the 15 Now Seattle organization was, whether intentionally or not, virtually indistinguishable from Socialist Kshama Sawant's astoundingly successful campaign for a city council seat. Sawant is an outspoken member of Socialist Alternative, and she campaigned as such.

For those unfamiliar with present-day USian politics, Socialist Alternative is a Marxian party that like the Socialist Workers Party acknowledges Marxism's enormous debt to Leon Trotsky. But unlike SWP, which publishes the informative and often provocative Socialist Worker but otherwise functions as little more than a debating society, SA embodies the “think globally/act locally” strategy that emerged from the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Its 15 Now campaign, which is spreading throughout the U.S. and is embraced by growing numbers of workers employed by U.S. Big Business abroad, is a textbook example of the global/local approach.

The Ruling Class response to Sawant's victory has been the co-optation effort she anticipated in her city council victory speech  (relevant videotape begins at 11:35 minutes). But it was first evidenced, as I noted last January, “by subtle changes in Obamanoid rhetoric” that indicated the electoral triumph of a revolutionary socialist was already frightening the capitalist Ruling Class back into aspects of its former, Soviet-era pretense of humanitarianism.

Seven months later the Seattle City Council unanimously approved a $15 minimum wage ordnance that transformed “15 Now” into what some 15 Now supporters elsewhere have sarcastically dubbed “15 Eventually.” A caustic statement on the Portland, Oregon 15 Now website, edited here only for brevity, tells the whole story: 

Even while we should acknowledge and celebrate this accomplishment there are so many problems with the deal in Seattle that declarations of victory seem somewhat premature and have left many people feeling justifiably deflated.

• Corporations that make billions of dollars in annual profits don’t need years to phase in. While it is true that under this deal the minimum wage for many of Seattle’s low wage workers will rise to $11 per hour in less than one year, the fact is that large corporations can afford to pay $15 now, but they are not paying $15 for a few years.
• Tip credits and health care credits actually reduce workers’ real wages that can be used to buy food and pay rent. Even if eventually phased out, these credits mean that at first there are likely to be some workers who actually see a decrease in their monthly net pay.
• Lower “training wages” could encourage companies to move to a model of short-term temporary labor in order to take advantage of the lower short-term rate of pay, especially among large, low- wage-paying corporations that already have high employee turnover.
• The sub-minimum wage for teenagers fails to help the many teens in Seattle who work not for extra spending money, but because their family needs the income extra income to help pay the rent and the bills.
• Categorizing businesses with up to 500 employees as “small” for the purpose of the phase in schedule is ludicrous.

So while those of us within the $15 Now movement who have worked hard justifiably want to celebrate the accomplishment of getting a large city like Seattle to pass a bill for $15, we also need to be open and honest about the fact that the workers of Seattle themselves are not getting $15 Now, they are getting $15 Eventually, in about a decade. While we allow ourselves a moment to celebrate what we have accomplished so far, we also need to make certain we recognize the fact that even in Seattle, and certainly in the rest of the country, the Fight for $15 is far from over.

Predictably, Seattle's mainstream media – which is really Ruling Class Media (i.e., capitalist propaganda) – celebrated the reduction of 15 Now to 15 Eventually – or as I prefer to call it, (because Big Business is already moving to reverse the city council's decision), “15 Maybe Someday.”

Meanwhile Crosscut columnist Knute Berger proclaimed the nullification of 15 Now a significant victory for “incrementalism,” noting how the associated maneuvers “put out the potential fire of a populist rebellion.”

“As left-wingnutty as Seattle is sometimes caricatured,” wrote Berger, “it's still a town of business, big and small...Our capitalistic roots are strong and deep; radical activism has occasionally surged, but rarely gained power. Labor may score an occasional strategic victory, but workers never really run the show (ask Boeing's machinists).”

And since Berger proved the point with which this essay began – that Seattle Process is merely an especially devious method to ensure the Working Class remains disempowered – I'll also give him the last word. Applauding how 15 Now became 15 Pie-in-the-Sky, Berger called it “an example of Seattle process...”

I rest my case.

******

In Case You Missed It/Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because this was the first week of the month with all its snail-paced bus-errands and those vexations multiplied to the Nth power by a couple of emotionally wrenching household disasters – the sorts of undeserved misery that prompt me to sing my own personal variant of the Doxology (“Curse god from whom all misery flows/ curse him ye victims here below”) – I had little time for reading my daily deluge of email, much less for posting comments on other websites. Nevertheless I did manage a few forays into Internet Land.

Hence when The Guardian reported on the burgeoning Department of Veterans Affairs scandal,  “White House Fights to Restore Veterans' Trust: 'It's Not Going to Be Quick or Easy',” I was quick to point out the easy back-story the Ruling Class Media dare not report:

The veterans' health-care scandal is a microcosm of the national health-care scandal, which can be explained in five words: the One Percent's genocidal greed. The One Percenters and the politicians and bureaucrats who serve them don't give a damn for the wellbeing of anyone outside the obscenely pampered Ruling Class. The result for ailing veterans is there is never enough money to give them the care they need. The result for the rest of us is health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. Both are functions of Ruling Class miserliness. “Why bother to treat the poor,” the aristocrats sneer. “The poor are always sick, and they die accordingly. Besides, their lives are worthless...”

This is not hyperbole. A prominent Ayn Rander – a Marie Antoinette political theorist whose fortunes are rising as the United States becomes ever more like pre-guillotine France – publicly made such statements a couple of months ago. (Sorry I don't have time to ferret out her identity.)

And though the politicians and bureaucrats are doing everything in their power to cover it up, and though the veterans' organizations are too compromised to ever acknowledge these sorts of atrocities are intrinsic to capitalism, it is the Ruling Class hatred and contempt for the Working Class – that and nothing else – that is measured in the resultant deaths.

My only other contribution this miserable week was on the comment thread of a disturbing report on the rise of neo-Nazism in Greece,  “SS Songs and Antisemitism: The Week Golden Dawn Turned Openly Nazi”:

Three points:

(1)-Note that Golden Dawn attracts "ever-growing numbers of the middle class." That's because, in times of economic crisis, modern history proves the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie), will ALWAYS turn to fascism. (It's only members of the proletariat and peasantry who turn Left.)

(2)-That's why, when the One Percent decides its time to impose capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the workers (in other words unabashed fascism) – it's the middle class that's targeted for discomfiture and the poor who are scapegoated and targeted for extermination.

(3)-Greece did NOT “give birth” to democracy. It coined the word that describes the mode of governance that had been characteristic of all human society until the advent of patriarchy. (A state of being is not named when it is the norm; it is named only after it has become rare enough to require description.) Moreover, if Robert Graves' hypotheses are correct, the real Greek contribution was imposing democratic process on patriarchy – which may (though I'm increasingly doubtful), yet rescue our species not only from patriarchy but from patriarchy's direct descendants, capitalism, fascism and Nazism.

***

And this in response to another poster on the same thread:

You are, jsluka, partially correct. But what you describe as "mass support from 'workers'" was typically induced by terror: unabashed extermination of Marxians and indeed all representatives of any Left alternatives in Germany, Italy and Spain; the less violent but more permanently psychologically damaging purge of Leftists and intellectuals in the postwar United States; Pinochet's extermination of class-conscious workers in Chile, etc. ad nauseum.

In terms of innate tendencies – and I erred in my failure to make this clear, for which I apologize – I believe what I said obtains: the petit bourgeoisie turn right, the peasantry and proletariat turn Left. 

Again as a generalization, this is because for the petit bourgeoisie, who have no identity beyond their possessions, the destruction of the status quo is the loss of everything. But for proletarians and peasants, who have far more flexible identities, the destruction of the status quo may actually mean relief from oppression.

And yes, the USian Homeland does indeed have peasants and proletarians. The former are mostly agricultural workers – near-slaves, actually – while the latter are mostly the legions of minimum-wage workers employed by Big Business.

LB/8 June 2014

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