Another Inspection Again Wrenches My Life

I CAN'T OBJECT to the idea behind the federally mandated quarterly inspections of the individual dwelling units in any lower-income senior housing complex that was built with even a tiny percentage of public funds. Officially the purpose is to make certain the facilities are fully functional – that the plumbing, exhaust fans, alarm systems and electric ranges are all operational.

(I should note here we seniors are forbidden gas cooking, which means that 10 years after encountering my first electric range, I still can't successfully cook even the most simple meals. Indeed I despise electric ranges, which as far as I am concerned are worthless for anything save boiling water or heating soup. With a gas flame, you can see what you're doing; with electricity, you can only guess, which in my case means everything has to be burned on the outside to make sure it is not raw in the middle. But that is another issue for another time.)

Unofficially, the purpose of the quarterly inspections is to monitor the mental health of the occupants: detection of an unkempt or dirty apartment that might indicate the onset of Alzheimer's, hoarding that might endanger an occupant or create fire hazards for an entire complex, that sort of thing.

 

Nevertheless and in reality I resent these intrusions more than anything that fate and bureaucratic tyranny has ever dealt me. This is not just because of the violation of my privacy; the medical truth is that each inspection literally steals six or seven days from my life. Four of these days are taken by the preparatory cleanup, which for me – because of my arthritic spine, shoulders, left wrist and right knee – is an excruciatingly painful ordeal of dusting, vacuuming, mopping and, finally, on the morning of the inspection, neatening my bed into semi-military, Suzi-homemaker presentableness. This is in fact the most agonizing chore of all, which due to its hurtful extremes of bending and reaching takes me at least 30 minutes and sometimes half again that, the very reason I do it as seldom as possible. The remainder of the stolen time – the post-inspection hours of inspection day plus one or two days afterward – is required for recovery, most of it in my newly made bed.

But I have not verbalized these objections – at least not emphatically – until now, when the combination of the surprise state inspection inflicted on us at the end of last month and the upcoming regular inspection Tuesday is stealing 12 whole days from my life. (The interval between the first inspection and the second was just long enough all the cleaning had to be repeated.) The result – because the time-theft occurs at a peak of volunteer obligations (this blog; the monthly newsletter I produce for my fellow tenants; work for the organizing committee of 15 Now Tacoma; public relations for a friend who is a playwrite and musician) – is I am more frantically jammed up and therefore more jaggedly stressed than I have been at any time in memory, including the many years I worked at two and sometimes three jobs.

Another very big part of the problem is the wrenching time-theft imposed by my dependence on Pierce Transit. PT's bus service was only marginally adequate in 2009, the year my car died, and now after five years of anti-transit-user downsizing, it has been shrunken by least 70 percent. The transit authority bureaucracy will no longer disclose the actual size of the cuts, but the result is unquestionably the worst bus service I have ever seen anywhere in the urban U.S. Indeed there was more frequent bus service – far more frequent – provided by Knoxville Transit Lines in Knoxville, Tennessee during the 1950s. (For example, KTL buses ran until 1 a.m.; most PT buses cease operations at 9 p.m., some as early as 5 p.m. – and Knoxville in 1954 had half the population of Tacoma in 2014.) Bottom line, because of the bus service here – or rather the abysmal lack thereof – an errand that took me maybe 45 minutes when I had an automobile can now take up to an entire day.

 

I was of course prepared for the interruption inflicted by this month's quarterly inspection, but the additional seven days stolen by the surprise state inspection was the proverbial straw that broke the metaphorical camel's back. Such are the punishments capitalism maliciously inflicts on those of us it exploited into inescapable poverty.

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In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because so much time during these past few weeks has been stolen by inspections, OAN again gets shortchanged; again no real essay, and only five Internet posts during the past seven days:

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote about the mix of theocratic Christianity and Hard Right populism that enabled a Teabagger to beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor last week. But “David Brat: Free-Market Purist, Ayn Rand Devotee” said nothing about the campaign's historical precedent, and I responded accordingly:

What we are witnessing in David Brat – and mark my word (because you read it here first) – is the combination of strategy, tactics and rhetoric that will leverage the USian Homeland's final transition to unabashed neo-Nazism.

Doubt me? Read William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Simon and Schuster: 1959, 1960, 1987, 1988, 1990).

It's by studying Shirer we see what we might aptly dub the "Bratley Method" is precisely how the Nazis sold themselves and their programs to the seemingly ultra-civilized German people as Germany suffered from the devastation inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression.

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Yes (Rise and Fall) is long, but it's vividly written, and its well worth the effort. For me it was the perfect sea-cruise book, and I had lots of time to read it – on the troopship returning from Korea, the U.S.N.S. Sultan, which in 1962 made the passage from Inchon to Oakland Army Terminal in about three weeks. For me, that was the blessed passage of return to civilian life after the three-year, Regular-Army active-duty portion of a six-year enlistment. (The remainder was in the reserves, but – luck of the draw or blessing of the Goddess – I was not recalled for Vietnam.) And of course I've reviewed Rise and Fall many times, as it's been part of my library ever since.

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Alan Pyke exposed another atrocity of USian governance  in “Impoverished Mother Dies in Jail Cell Over Unpaid Fines for Her Kids Missing School.” I noted how it exemplifies capitalism in action:

What this Dickensian tragedy tells us is that in the merciless new world of the former United States – a realm transmogrified into the de facto Fourth Reich – any one of us who is not part of the Ruling Class could suffer the fate of Eileen DeNino

Indeed the death of Eileen DeNino – and the deaths of so many others like her, always from the denial of basic human needs that now under the savagery of Ayn Rand economics have become privileges of wealth – makes me think perhaps the Hans Christian Anderson story of the “Little Match Girl” is replacing the Horatio Alger tales as the epic that properly symbolizes our present and future. (Indeed, recast in a 21st Century setting by cinematographer Filip Matevski's 12-minute film, it becomes just that.)

Apropos which, perhaps (an anti DeNino poster) would say the Match Girl too "refused to help herself" when, as in Matevski's work, the child chose to spend the night in the freezing cold rather than submit to sexual abuse, or – as in the older versions of the story – refused to go home to be beaten by her father.

Meanwhile let us all mourn Eileen DeNino, a mother dead in debtor's prison, another victim of capitalism's New World Order.

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Trevor Timm of Guardian UK revealed another of the dark and menacing secrets of Obamanoid tyranny in “The US Government Doesn't Want You to Know How the Cops Are Tracking You.” I pointed out an even darker truth:

It is a great irony the wanna-be Nazis of the Confederate-Flag/Swastika-Banner Hard Right – the Christians who claim the U.S. Constitution gives them the right to persecute non-believers; the white racists who believe their god gives them dominion over non-whites; the misogynists who think all women are sluts at heart – were the first to caricature Obama as another Hitler.

Perhaps it was just one of those oddball examples of accidental prophecy from a wildly incongruous source.

More likely it was a case of psychological projection, the mechanism of recognition embodied in a taunt once commonplace on Southern schoolyards: “it takes one to know one.”

However it came about, its terrifying truth becomes more evident every day. Barack Obama is worse than Bush, even worse than Nixon. He is the first genuine tyrant to hold the office of President of the United States, and by his embrace of the modalities of tyranny, he is methodically transforming this nation and its empire into the de facto Fourth Reich.

But the greatest irony of all is how it is his own race – more than any other group of us who, because we are lower-income people, are being scapegoated into equivalents of Nazi Germany's Jews – that is already bearing the brunt of this looming new holocaust in which federalized local police are trained and equipped to function as the new Gestapo.

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Charles E. Cobb Jr. discussed his forthcoming book, which boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis.” Reader Supported News titled Cobb's important essay “Guns Made Civil Rights Possible: Breaking Down the Myth of Nonviolent Change,” but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted the actual title of the book, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). Then my comment-thread response got right to the point:

A similar volume, Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense (University of North Carolina Press: 2004), was marginalized by the same zero-tolerance codas of political correctness with which the U.S. Left fanatically suppresses all positive references to firearms.

Meanwhile, with the Working Class more in jeopardy than ever, the USian Left's signature effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – i.e., mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is surely amongst the greatest ironies of human history.

Contrary to its claims, pacifism cannot succeed without the threat of violence. The British surrendered to Gandhi's pacifism only because it was backed by the potential of armed revolution organized by the Soviet Union. The same is true of Rev. King's nonviolence.

Indeed all the humanitarian gains of the 20th Century – unions, labor rights, civil rights, safety-net programs – were wrested from the capitalists only by the Soviet threat. That's why, now the U.S.S.R. is dead, capitalism is methodically abolishing all those concessions.

But with the USian Left embracing pacifism and thus functioning as the chief spokesperson for the One Percent's effort to disarm the 99 Percent, these bitter truths are now also tabooed.

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It was the armed Anglo-Saxon and Cymru yeomanry with their deadly longbows – the massed repetitive firepower of which was not equaled until the invention of the machine gun – that eventually brought the invading Norman kings (of England) to heel. Nevertheless it took what amounted to 300 years of intermittent civil war, some of which is immortalized in the epic of Robin Hood.

Though it is another truth suppressed by political correctness, the most important historical difference between Britain and the continental nations originated from Roman forcible disarmament of conquered peoples. Universal throughout the imperial mainland, it was for a number of reasons never successful in the province of Britannia. Hence even before the Anglo-Saxon conquest, the British peasantry was always at least minimally armed, which is why the remnants of what we know today as "democracy" were never totally exterminated there, seeds that began thriving in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

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Juan Cole wrote a piece on the criminality of the Iraq War,  but “Blair-Bush & Iraq: It’s Not Just the Quagmire But the Lawbreaking & Deception” ignored what may be the most important aspects of the story:

(1)-That it was the perfect distraction from the questions about 9/11 that were then gathering momentum;

(2)-That, apart from Turkey (which is now hopelessly lapsing back into Islamic theocracy), Iran was the only genuinely secular society Islamic culture has ever produced. Thus its destruction brought about the immediate re-imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy, whether Sunni or Shiite, with all its misogynistic savagery. This is an obvious victory for the One Percenters whose intent is to make capitalism safe by imposing Abrahamic theocracy – Jewish in Israel, Christian or Islamic everywhere else – on the entire world.

I keep hoping maybe next week won't be so grim, but then I remember we're all residents of a dying planet – a world we ourselves are killing. 

LB/15 June 2014

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Unabated Climate Change:1%'s Final Solution for 99%?

(Note to readers on Blogger: a much more graphically sophisticated version of this blog -- identical text, slightly different headline due to format spacing -- is available at http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/. The TypePad version also includes several portfolios of my photography, much of it previously published, some of it dating back to the 1960s.)

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(Editorial note: I've omitted the usual “Outside Agitation Elsewhere” feature because I think the following disclosures, which are even more damning than I anticipated, should be presented without distraction.)

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IS CLIMATE CHANGE to be the One Percent's doomsday weapon – the Final Solution by which it hopes to exterminate most of the 99 Percent and thereby win, forever, the class-war that now rages with intensifying fury everywhere on this planet?

Consider the evidence. The global aristocracy's continuing refusal to ameliorate the apocalyptic impact of climate change – were that refusal a singular phenomenon – could be dismissed (as it often is) as nothing more than unfortunate coincidence. It could be, as so many people assume, an ultimate (and ultimately deadly) example of what happens when political ineptitude interacts with man-over-Nature arrogance and general human folly. But when you add the murderous consequences of deliberate policies and policy-decisions – austerity; the proliferation of genetically modified and therefore toxic foods; unprovoked wars of aggression as in Vietnam and the Middle East; the abandonment of disaster-stricken populations as in post-earthquake Haiti, post-tsunami Southeast Asia, post-Katrina New Orleans and post-Sandy New York City – what emerges is a far more ominous likelihood.

Is there, then, behind the locked oaken doors of some palatial Ruling Class mansion – or more likely intimately connected via an invisible network of indecipherable electronic signals – a secret cabal of global oligarchs who dictate such policies? Is it their homicidal purpose to methodically worsen the human condition until the entire global Working Class is starved, sickened, shot and otherwise terrorized to eternal submission? Is it their intent to emerge as all-powerful übermenschen from their climate-controlled, nuclear-bomb-proof bunkers, thence to reorder the world in accordance with the morally imbecilic principles set out by Ayn Rand in her fictional diatribes on the themes of Mein Kampf?

Evaluate the damning evidence for yourself:

Most of us recognize U.S. Ruling-Class academics Paul and Anne Ehrlich  as the popularizers of the present-day arguments for forcible population control. But too few of us recognize how closely some of the Ehrlichs' proposals duplicate the policies of Adolf Hitler and his colleagues.  Nor is it common knowledge Der Führer modeled his genocidal seizures of lebensraum  on the U.S. doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”  and its methodical extermination of First Nations peoples.  Most of us flinch at the admission such atrocities remain as “American” (that is, USian), as the proverbial apple pie. Yet the formerly top-secret U.S. “National Security Study Memorandum 200”  implicitly endorses population control by whatever means are necessary to ensure the prosperity of the USian imperial future:

“The U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries...Whether through government action, labor conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbance, the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized. Although population pressure is obviously not the only factor involved, these types of frustrations are much less likely under conditions of slow or zero population growth...In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.” (Emphasis added.)

Youth in particular are targeted by this 1974 document: “The young people, who are in much higher proportions in many LDCs (less developed countries), are likely to be more volatile, unstable, prone to extremes, alienation and violence than an older population. These young people can more readily be persuaded to attack the legal institutions of the government or real property of the 'establishment,' 'imperialists,' multinational corporations, or other-often foreign-influences blamed for their troubles...” (Emphasis added.)

Beneath all such theorizing are the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian doctrines that claim most of us in the 99 Percent are genetically programmed to mindlessly over-breed until we exceed our environment's capability to keep us fed. Barring the intervention of humanitarian aid – which Malthus and his present-day disciples vehemently oppose – we will then in our frenzies exterminate ourselves by self-inflicted famine, disease and violence.

Unfortunately, the only sustainable counter-arguments to Malthusianism are based on Marxism, which – given the realities of capitalist governance – means they are deliberately marginalized, often censored and generally unavailable to the global masses.

Though I was already aware of anti-Malthusian reasoning – chiefly that Malthusian doctrines are so mean-spirited in their support of the capitalist status quo, they ignore the ameliorative potentials of science, industry and mass movements – it took me several hours of research to ferret out sources appropriate for citation on OAN.

Early in the quest I found John Bellamy Foster's “Malthus' Essay on Population at Age 200: a Marxian View,” an informative, historically detailed and refreshingly thought-provoking study available here, albeit with a caution it is hardly material for quick-and-casual reading over lunch or coffee.

But eventually I discovered “The Population Issue: Marx vs. Malthus,” by Martha E. Gimenez, which is both brief and compellingly well-written. Its essence is a quietly dire warning:  “as long as population control remains the main or only concern of the various international and national organizations which in one way or another are trying to foster economic development in underdeveloped societies, their action will only consolidate the economic backwardness they are avowedly aiming to solve.”

But what if perpetuating that economic backwardness in the developing world – not to mention re-imposing it on the industrialized world via austerity – is precisely the Ruling Class intent?

What if the One Percent's long-range plan is to destroy all allegedly “surplus humans” – especially those of us who are elderly or disabled or chronically unemployed or otherwise unexploitable for maximum profit – in order to clear the way for imposition of a new, Ayn Rand World Order?

Far-fetched? Not at all; that is precisely what Rand advocates in Atlas Shrugged.

Nor it is coincidence the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian credo closely parallels the Ayn Rand dogma by which the global economy is ever-more-openly ruled. The latter – the assumption our species is divided into a few innovators whose lives should be preserved at all cost and legions of parasites who should be abandoned to die if not actively exterminated – is indeed the logical extension of the former. Hitler's concepts of übermenschen and lebensraum, derivatives of the Nazi concept of geopolitik, were merely German-nationalist variants  of the same basic ideology. Its modern-day version is the U.S. geopolitical policy of global domination, complete with all its genocidal consequences.

To quote an axiom that supposedly originated from the intense and thorough training given Soviet intelligence operatives but is probably as old as espionage itself, “once is accident, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” “Accident” might be the paralysis that blocks, now obviously forever, any ameliorative action on what should properly be labeled terminal climate change. “Coincidence” might be the climate-change failures combined with the abandonment of disaster-stricken populations. But when you factor in all the rest – austerity, the mass poisoning inflicted by genetically modified foods, the now-permanent regime of unprovoked wars – the conclusion of “Enemy Action” becomes ever-more undeniable.

As I have said so many times before, such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

LB/6 April 2014

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U.S. Reinforces Black Sea Naval Squadron: Coincidence, or Another Deliberate Escalation in the Ukrainian Crisis?

WAR FEARS ARE again intensifying as the United States puts additional pressure on Russia by reinforcing a U.S. naval squadron in the Black Sea. The squadron, now reportedly of three vessels, is said to include a Marine expeditionary unit, a newly added guided missile destroyer (USS Truxton), a guided missile frigate (USS Taylor) and an amphibious-operations command ship (USS Mount Whitney). An accompanying submarine escort, if any, would typically be unannounced, its existence most likely classified Top Secret.

While U.S. Navy sources claim the frigate and the command ship were dispatched to render aid if terrorists attacked the Winter Olympics at Siochi,  Robert Parry's ongoing disclosures of USian sponsorship and funding of the Ukrainan neo-Nazi coup  suggests the squadron was more likely pre-positioned in the Black Sea to provide support for the new regime in Kiev.

Though I respect Parry's work, I reject his (perhaps obligatory) suggestion Obama has lost control of his government to a neocon cabal. As I said on the associated comment thread, “the pre-inaugural immediacy of (the president's) transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer tells us he was the neocons' Manchurian Candidate (actually the Neoconian Candidate) from day one – that his 2008 “change we can believe in” campaign was the biggest Big Lie ever fed the U.S. electorate. Now it seems to me just as likely Obama is again demonstrating his signature deviousness, painting himself as the good guy, no doubt in hope of salvaging the 2014 elections, which as of now are a looming Republican landslide – not because of GOP popularity, but because of the bottomless, throw-the-bastards-out unpopularity of the treacherous Democrats. Meanwhile the “my advisors did it” excuse is as old as politics itself...” 

Whether ordered by the president or by his ever-more-openly aggressive cabinet and general staff, the naval squadron's reinforced presence undoubtedly intensifies the perceived magnitude of the Ukrainian coup's challenge to Russia's centuries-old policy of maintaining a warm-water seaport – that is, one not closed by winter ice – with year-round access to the Mediterranean and the world's oceans. The port in question (see map accessible via the link in the first paragraph) is Sevastopol,  in the now-contested Crimea. Despite Russia's huge land mass – she is by far the largest country in the world – Sevastopol is her only warm-water port. Not only is it headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet; it is of growing commercial importance and a favorite summer resort for Eastern Europeans.

Because the United States has so many warm-water ports, there is no possibility of a directly analogous threat – nothing as legitimately alarming to the U.S. as the Ukrainian coup is legitimately alarming to Russia. But a coup installing a hostile government in Mexico, perhaps backed by the People's Republic of China and threatening reconquista of California, would surely be regarded as equally provocative, particularly given the naval and port facilities at San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Such a hypothetical scenario should thus help clarify why Russia is so troubled by the Ukrainian situation. (My apologies to overseas readers for these brief lessons in third-grade geography and sixth-grade world history, but we USian Empire subjects are so oppressed by deliberately imposed ignorance, I felt the review was essential.) 

Meanwhile, USian mass media remains notably silent on the geopolitics of the Ukrainian Crisis – so much so the apparent censorship, by which Josef Goebbels would be delighted, seems not only methodical but maliciously warmongering. That's why we should be profoundly thankful to Parry on the Left and Patrick Buchanan on the Right. Parry's work has provided most of the source material for my commentaries, and Buchanan's debunking of Hillary Clinton's outrageous denunciation of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a latter-day “Hitler”  is compelling in its own right, particularly for its wealth of historical information. 

As to Hillary herself, I have long assumed she is a female George Bush in Democratic disguise – far more intelligent than Bush of course, probably even brighter than his ideological successor Obama, but with the same I-wanna-be-Emperor-of-the-World complex that now seems to be the defining quality of presidents and presidential candidates from both the Democrat and Republican factions of the one Ruling Class Party. Hence my (slightly edited) comment on Parry's alarming report of the “'we-hate-Putin' hysteria”  being ginned up throughout the USian Homeland:

The ugly truth about Hillary, who is not only a neocon but a Christian theocrat, is revealed by Jeff Sharlet on pgs. 272-277 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). Sharlet reports Hillary secretly collaborates with the notorious Sam Brownback and his fanatical ilk to impose Biblical Law by “tunneling beneath” the constitutional wall between church and state.

That said, Hillary's Hitler analogy is clinically interesting because it is a classic psychological projection of the USian Empire's “American Century” agenda of global conquest. In this context, the so-called military “withdrawal” cited by a poster below is a Big Lie because it never voluntarily occurs until conquest has ensured the triumph of capitalism and its enslavement of the indigenous population.

Thus, just as Putin notes, the USian Empire has assumed the role of international aggressor that characterized the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. Indeed, had the Bankers Plot of 1934 succeeded in ousting President Roosevelt, the U.S. would have been the fourth Axis partner.

Thus too the genocidal (and therefore definitively neo-fascist) social-service cuts now sponsored by both ruling parties – actually one party of two names. Cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation etc. are undoubtedly intended to kill those of us who no longer exploitable for profit. Killing by neglect rather than in death camps merely avoids the odium of the latter.

 

Could this – the fact a major war would exterminate vast numbers of workers rendered permanently jobless by the for-profit downsizing of the USian Homeland economy – be another reason the empire has so radically escalated its warmongering? Before you answer, remember the One Percenters, who include Hillary and her ilk, all assume they will be protected by their own posh, heavily fortified bunkers – that their obscene wealth will thus keep them safe from bombs, radioactive fallout, disease, famine and all the other horrors of thermonuclear war. We on the other hand will be abandoned – just as the African-American residents of New Orleans were abandoned after Katrina – to live or die as fate and happenstance decree.

 

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Insurance-Company Atrocities in Obamacare: an Anthology of Horrors

Truthout's William Rivers Pitt – a man I often scorn for his refusal to admit that disciplined socialism is the only adequate response to capitalism's ever-intensifying savagery – has written a Pulitzer-class exposé of what Barack the Betrayer enabled when he killed public-option health care and thus indentured the entire U.S. population to the vampires of the for-profit insurance mafia. Entitled “Worse than the Mob: the Insurance Industry Is Organized Crime,” his detailed and heart-wrenching report of the devastating injuries Obamacare inflicted on his wife will of course win no USian journalism award nor ever be published in any mainstream USian journal. Hence – though I did not comment on its associated thread because there was nothing I could say beyond an emphatic “please read this” that in context would have been redundant – I am linking it here.  It is well done, a work of which Pitt and his publishers should damn well be proud, as fine a piece of truth-telling as I have witnessed in this lifetime. 

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Outside Agitation on Other Websites: a busy week – the usual first-of-the-month chores drawn out by the fact I am too poor to own an automobile but reside amongst voters who despise mass-transit users in a region that officially disdains mass transit – with my time squandered accordingly on herky-jerky buses. Nevertheless...

 

“Lets Make Capitalism a Dirty Word”  Carl Gibson of Reader Supported News details the hardships capitalism maliciously inflicts on the 99 Percent and triggers an interesting discussion-thread to which I contribute three posts. The first repeats statements I've made many times: “All defenders of capitalism are either deluded or dishonest. Precisely as defined by its messiah Ayn Rand, capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the rejection, with malice aforethought, of every humanitarian precept our species has ever articulated. It is therefore, as proven by its anti-humanitarian and anti-environmental depredations, the closest approximation to absolute evil yet manifest on Earth...(that's why) capitalism's momentum is always toward ever-more-vicious tyranny.” The second refutes a poster who seemed to idolize Hitler and Nazism. The third, refuting a capitalist disciple, poster notes an increasingly obvious truth about all such discussion threads: “Interesting how class war manifests even here on this website: the obvious division between those (few) who have profited via capitalism and therefore defend it, versus the masses, we the now-permanently impoverished proletarians and peasants who are capitalism's victims and angrily seek its replacement.” 

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“Four Ways to Evolve Beyond Capitalism”  Alas, Gibson's sequel to the above piece carefully avoids any mention of socialism, a failure that, to my mind, discredits him. In fact it suggests he is yet another apologist for the status quo and possibly a clandestine operative for the (increasingly desperate) Democratic Party. I respond accordingly (the comment slightly revised for posting here): “A growing third party already exists, and precisely as Mr. Gibson suggests, it is 'building power first at the local and county level.' It is called Socialist Alternative. It has defeated huge odds to elect Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council, and it is increasingly active in many other U.S. cities. Its website is here. By its cutting-edge leadership in the campaign for a $15-per-hour minimum wage, SA is already a huge factor at the national level. It has scared Obama into trying to restore the Democratic Party's humanitarian image and has even frightened a few Democrats into joining its '$15 Now' campaign.” 

LB/9 March 2014 

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