“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

-30-

Thoughts on Ukraine, Gentrification, White Racism

NO ORIGINAL ESSAY specifically for OAN this week because I'm working on what I hope will be next week's lead story.

Meanwhile I'm still groping toward a satisfactory format for links to material on other websites. So here are my “in-case-you-missed-it” picks from last week's work by other journalists, with my own Outside Agitation on the comment threads as indicated. 

First of course are dispatches about the ongoing USian attempts to inflame the Ukraine Crisis into World War III, again our lead story because the outcome of the crisis may determine whether we have any future at all.

“Clashes Spread Across Eastern Ukraine As Russia Begins Military Drills on Border”By William Booth and Michael Birnbaum of The Washington Post. This Ruling Class propagantorial piece provoked a discussion thread about why the USian Empire “always” supports Nazism. My contribution was a short summary of modern history:

When the U.S. One Percent welcomed all the Nazi war criminals after World War II, the Nazis made no secret of their intent – to use U.S. resources to spread Nazi ideology (hence "U.S. exceptionalism") and eventually to use U.S. wealth and military power to create a Fourth Reich.

That's what fostered Pinochet, what drove the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and what's fostering the Ukraine Crisis, where the neo-Nazi presence is NOT an accident. That's also why the Russians are so (rightfully) alarmed.

Most of all, it's why this crisis is far more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis...The One Percent clearly wants war...Furthermore, with the One Percenters believing they will be safe in their obscenely posh bunkers, they no doubt see war as the best way to suppress the rising anti-capitalist dissent and exterminate all us "takers" – We the People who are unemployed, elderly, disabled and/or members of ever-more-openly oppressed minorities.

***

“Beneath the Ukraine Crisis: Shale Gas” Nat Parry of Consortium News reveals how USian aggression is (again) motivated by the quest for fossil fuel.

Though I contributed a bit of Outside Agitation to the associated discussion thread, my remarks were more relevant to the thread than to the article itself, hence my decision not to repeat them here. That said, note the unusual spelling of Parry's family name; could Nat be kin to Robert Parry, also of Consortium News? The latter Parry's reporting on the Ukraine Crisis is without peer, but this piece too is filled with vital information.

******

In the fall of 1974 the jazz pianist and chanteuse Melinda Mohn told me of a dream that had deeply disturbed her. She had been hired to perform at a nightclub in Seattle, but first she had to obtain a “city pass” – an official document that instructed the armed guards to let her past the concertina wire and minefields and through the gates in the high stone medieval-fortress-like wall and finally into the city itself. Some sort of apocalypse had occurred, she said, and now in her dreamtime all cities were reserved for the Ruling Class of the neo-feudal realms that had replaced the United States. And Melinda, like any housemaid or nanny or secretary or janitor or scribe or teacher or other worker who served the aristocracy, now had to ensure her papers were in order before she was allowed into the main baronial compound of the Puget Sound region.

What made the dream a nightmare, she said, was its Catch-22 element: not only was she required to have a pass to enter the city so she could sing for the pay she needed to save herself from starvation; she also had to find some way to first enter the city without a pass in order to apply for the requisite pass, and she did not have enough money to bribe the guards...

I do not remember how the dream resolved itself; I remember only it had troubled Melinda to tears, and as I told her at the time, I strongly suspected it was prophetic. Now I know it was. “The Bleaching of San Francisco: Extreme Gentrification and Suburbanized Poverty in the Bay Area,” by Adam Hudson of Truthout, describes how the cities are becoming bastions of the One Percent and the Ruling Class in general:

“Taken together, what's going on in San Francisco is deeper than just a fight between well-to-do tech workers and longtime San Francisco residents. San Francisco is microcosm of what's going on in metropolitan areas around the world. From San Francisco to New York City to London, urban areas are being redesigned into playgrounds for the very rich. The poor, working and almost-nonexistent middle-class people who can't afford to live in these rich Elysiums are forced to live farther away, with few resources to support themselves. By pushing poor and working-class people to the suburbs, gentrification...reconfigures the geographic lines of racial and economic inequality, granting improvements to the lives of the moneyed classes, at the expense of the needs - and sometimes, even the survival - of everyone else.”

Myself a victim of gentrification – that's what forced me out of Manhattan – I too can attest to the miserable consequences of exile to wretched locales, likewise to the bumpkin viciousness one all too often encounters in such places.

One of the realms on my involuntary post-NYC itinerary was a rural area ruled by zero-tolerance Christian fanatics who believed my non-attendance at church, my organic gardening practices and my two very large black dogs identified me as a witch. These prosperity-gospel vigilantes harassed me mercilessly for nearly three years. They trampled my vegetables, flattened my tires, flung rocks onto my roof at midnight, wired newly-slain kittens to my car door and finally poisoned one of my dogs. After the dog recovered, I let it be known via the local grapevine I was not only armed, but a military veteran demonstrably skilled at marksmanship, after which the harassment stopped.

The last destination on my dismal itinerary of exile was the city of Tacoma, where it seems I will live out the remainder of my life. Like Seattle, Tacoma is a major seaport on Puget Sound, and according to the prevalent Big Lie, the regional mindset is “progressive” and “green.” But beneath that shallow facade is a bottomless miasma of reactionary hypocrisy. Though Tacoma and Seattle certainly contain pockets of genuinely enlightened voters – note the Seattle election of Kshama Sawant – the Puget Sound norm is increasingly set by suburbanites who are as maliciously xenophobic as any Ku Klux Southerner. The resultant trend toward ever-more-unabashed fascism has already paralyzed the state government, and the next election or two will no doubt put it solidly under Rightist control.

Meanwhile – the ultimate proof of the region's environmental hypocrisy – it has a 46-year record of nastily opposing mass transit, a scorecard of negativity that has no counterpart anywhere in the notoriously anti-transit United States.

Even in the region's cities, the voters cling to their automobiles with a stubborn vindictiveness that routinely spawns hate-campaigns against the growing numbers of us – all victims of capitalism – for whom mass transit is the only affordable mode of travel.

The local One Percenters want us gone. They say we lower their property values and stink up their neighborhoods. Their newest and most successful gentrification tactic is now to denounce publicly-subsidized transit as “welfare,” an angry buzzword that prompts the reliably racist, reliably Ayn-Rand-minded electorate to react accordingly: to demand the privatization of transit (thereby making it unaffordable to “undesirables”), and to vote at every opportunity to dismantle public transit systems throughout the region, exactly as occurred last week in and around Seattle.

(Despite my obviously-strong feelings on this topic, I added no Outside Agitation to the associated thread because – having been outrageously censored under Truthout's anything-to-protect-Obama election-year policy – I no longer dare post there.)

******

At last the small but increasingly effective USian Real Left is beginning to recognize the harsh truth reportedly asserted in KGB analyses of the rebelliousness that characterized the U.S. in the 1960s: that while the nation's minorities possessed genuine revolutionary potential, the mostly white New Left was scarcely more than a fad.

According to Canadian media reports during the early 1990s – at least one of these appeared in MacLean's Magazine, but I can find no links to it today – KGB analysts concluded the New Left of the '60s was too anti-intellectual to accept the need for disciplined ideological study, too bourgeois comfortable and Ayn-Rand selfish to repudiate capitalism, and above all else, too racist to accept leadership from its only genuinely revolutionary sources, which were within the African-American, Hispanic, Asiatic and First Nations communities.

Moreover, the New Left's individual members were deemed too ageist to accept input from the remnants of the Traditional Left and too arrogantly self-obsessed to build any solidarity with others apart from their own socioeconomic kindred.

Thus the Soviet spooks predicted the New Left would eventually abandon or betray its minority comrades, stop its lip-service assertions of humanitarian values and become a New Right as soon as the military draft was ended – a prediction confirmed to the letter by the post-Vietnam emergence of the so-called “me generation,”  the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the outcomes of all elections thereafter.

But now the collapse of the U.S.S.R. has freed the capitalists to disclose their infinite greed and innate savagery without fear of revolutionary reprisal. They have discarded their velvet gloves and donned their original jackboots. This has fostered the evolution – actually re-evolution – of a Real Left in the USian Homeland, which in turn has prompted renewed examination of USian racism, starting with acknowledgment we Caucasians are subtly but methodically inoculated from birth with racism's toxins, the ultimate barrier against 99 Percent solidarity.

Hence “The Unbearable Whiteness of the American Left,” a Nation essay by Gary Younge that was picked up by Reader Supported News and – like a pry-bar wielded in a long-abandoned house – brought the termites out in force.  Hence too my comment-thread response:

Mr. Younge is – if I may lapse into the parlance of my radical youth – right on. The problem is that we USian whites have been conditioned from birth to think of ourselves as the personification of “American exceptionalism” – that is, of the global master race.

Not only that; we've been conditioned so thoroughly and effectively, our USian-supremacist/white-supremacist (and therefore incipiently Nazi) attitudes have been planted so deeply in our subconscious minds, they are exceedingly difficult to uproot.

Such is the psychological reality of the Fourth Reich.

But the effort to transcend that conditioning – painful as it invariably is – must nevertheless be made. Otherwise, exactly as KGB studies reportedly said of U.S. revolutionary prospects during the 1960s, racism will always nullify our efforts toward solidarity.

***

It needs be said there are two pseudo-Lefts in the U.S., also a much smaller Real Left:

The fad pseudo-Left is dominantly white and idiotically useful; it helps maintain the Big Lie of USian democracy. Its chief characteristics are the rowdiness, conformity and anti-intellectuality one finds in fraternity and sorority houses. Its members are pampered college and university students enjoying the political variant of Spring Break self-indulgence. Its exemplar is Jerry Rubin, who climaxed his “radical” activism by a career as a millionaire stock broker.

The bourgeois pseudo-Left is mostly wealthy, dominantly white and also idiotically useful. Its defining traits are its indifference to 99 Percent concerns, its “progressive” anti-unionism and its opposition to socialism and Marxism. It endorses “New Capitalism” – capitalism with its evils camouflaged by human-potentialist rhetoric. Its members include New Agers, Ayn Rand feminists (consumeroid consumption as women's liberation), most USian environmentalists (“green capitalism”), etc. ad nauseam. Its exemplars include Gloria Steinem and the One Percenter Bill Gates.

The Real Left, small but growing, acknowledges the struggles for equality, economic democracy and environmental protection as part of the historical truth of class war. It recognizes the relevance of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. It strives toward maximum solidarity by embracing maximum diversity. Its exemplars include Kshama Sawant and Angela Davis.

******

My final recommendation for the week, “Racism and Criminalization in the Media,” is a scathing exposé of “the hiding-in-plain-sight but never-discussed racism that characterizes the United States and the ways US media subtly sustain that racism.” By Truthout's Bethania Palma Markus, it is surely the most enlightening such reportage I have yet encountered – and I with a journalism career spanning a bit more than half a century. Again I added nothing to the associated thread, but in this instance there was nothing I could say – save kudos to Maya Schenwar for having the courage to publish Markus' work.

LB/27 April 2014

-30-

Terribly Sick, I Can Only Link to Outside Agitation Off-Site

WOKE UP THIS morning sick as the proverbial dog: fever of 102F, entire body an uncooperative mass of aches, brain too fuzzy to focus  on anything but the most mundane tasks, no other symptoms yet. Hence, with my apologies,  this collection of my earlier posts on the comment threads of other sites: 

*

“Pentagon & NSA Officials: Assassinate Edward Snowden”  David Sirota of PandoDaily exposes the murderousness at the core of the USian Empire. I link Sirota's courageous work to a report on the extent to which the empire is ruled by white racism  and argue its combination of racism and murder proves it's the de facto Fourth Reich. As Sirota's disclosures imply, “the only relevant question now is when will the government – which is disguising its broader genocidal intentions as cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment compensation – begin openly murdering not just dissidents but all of us it and its One Percent masters want dead.”

*****

“Why is Washington paying Catholic hospitals to take away healthcare?”Monica Harrington of Catholic Watch reports on how the eternally misogynistic Catholic Church is using taxpayer dollars to buy up Washington state's healthcare system and prohibit end-of-life, contraception and maternity care. The usual cadre of Christian zealots denounce her reporting as “hatred,” but I – late to the fair – post a bibliography of texts and links that support her work by documenting even more of the hideous truth about the USian Empire's rush toward theocracy.

*****

“Westlake businesses hold the city's bike plan hostage” Eric Scigliano exposes another example of the Ayn Rand selfishness and political cowardice that lurks beneath the Big Lie of “progressive” Seattle. I point out the associated thread is a perfect example of the reactionary, malevolently auto-centric hatefulness that -- in Seattle as in Tacoma -- invariably rises to the surface of Pugetopolis political cesspool to obstruct any and all improvements in public transport.

*****

“Steubenville Rapist Released After 10 Months, While Activist Who Exposed Him Faces 10 Year Sentence”  Jodie Gummow of AlterNet updates the atrocity story. I point out it is the One Party of Two Names -- the fact the president and all the other Democrats and Republicans are, in reality, members of a single party representing only the One Percent -- that makes our nation the fascist despotism it is. The FBI – part of the massive secret police apparatus that protects the Ruling Class and sustains its fascist tyranny – is merely following orders.

*****

Divide between Governor, Republicans Paralyzes Washington State. This was not the title of John Stang's informative report on state government, but it should have been. As I said last year, the Republican coup in the Senate kills any remaining hope of humanitarian policy-making in Washington state. It also – cunningly (and exactly as intended) – gives the Democrats the ability to muddy the political waters by spouting humanitarian rhetoric. The Ruling Class allows it because there's not the slightest chance any of it will ever be enacted. Moreover, the Democrats' Big Lie re-emergence as a (bogus) party of the people serves the Ruling Class by weakening the voter-appeal of genuine humanitarians -- that is, Kshama Sawant and other socialists. Thus, by discrediting government, the One Percent prevails.

LB/19 January 2014 

-30-

Kshama Sawant Personifies Our Most Vital Yearnings

FOLLOWING KSHAMA SAWANT from the distance of 37 miles I find myself repeatedly moved, sometimes literally to tears, by her breathtaking courage and eloquence.

I desperately wish I could be there to see her and hear her and applaud her in person. I wish too I were able to contribute my knowledge and skill to her causes, not just the fight for a $15-per-hour minimum wage but the struggle for world socialism we must win if our species is to survive.

But I am old, I live in a realm of vindictively downsized public transport, and – as will be true for the remainder of this lifetime – I am denied an automobile by the inescapable poverty that has afflicted me since 2009.

Thus Councilwoman Sawant's Seattle is, for me, as impossibly distant from Tacoma as Paris or Mumbai.

Even so, her words are more elating than I can describe. I never imagined I would live long enough to hear any candidate for office anywhere in the USian Empire – much less any elected official – declare herself a Marxist and urge displaced workers to take over the abandoned factories.

But that is what she does:  She says we need to “organize a revolt,” that “the laws of the rich are unenforceable if the Working Class refuses to obey.” (The linked tape, new material here in OAN, is from 2012, after she was defeated in a battle for a seat in the Legislature – which makes her defiance all the more energizing.)

Thus human beings like us – we proletarians and peasants who are being flung onto the socioeconomic garbage heap or herded into slave pens by the capitalists – are at last (again) blessed by a leader who truly speaks for us alone.

(See also the link to Sawant's inaugural address, “I Wear the Badge of Socialist with Honor,” below.)

*****

Outside Agitation Elsewhere: Relevant Remarks on Other Threads

“What Congress Does When We're Not Watching” Thom Hartmann, the perennial defender of President Obama, disingenuously tries to blame Congress for fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, never mind it's one of Barack the Betrayer's pet schemes for further enslaving the USian Empire's already subjugated proletariat. I contribute my usual anti-capitalist skepticism to the resultant discussion thread and also post vital links to the fast-track legislation itself. But the occasional Outside Agitator award for a truly exceptional comment goes to the poster screen-named Aliceinwonderland: “Thom, maybe I oughta try calling you sometime while you're on the air.  I would love to ask why you're still so Obama-friendly, knowing he's behind the TPP... even to the point of wanting to fast-track it!  Between that and his hit lists with murder-by-drone, I've had my fill of President Obama.  I am ashamed of myself for having squandered my vote on this smooth-talking fascist.  'Change we can believe in' has turned out to be little more than a clever sales pitch...” As is often the case on this excellent blog, the associated thread is still running, and – depending on time and energy (mostly the latter) – I may post additional commentary before it closes. Meanwhile, kudos to Alice for speaking out. 

***

“I Wear the Badge of Socialist with Honor” Newly elected Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant again dares name our true enemy: “Shamefully, in this, the richest country in human history, fifty million of our people - one in six - live in poverty. Around the world, billions do not have access to clean water and basic sanitation and children die every day from malnutrition. This is the reality of international capitalism.” I salute her by noting the subtle changes in Obamanoid rhetoric that indicate her victory is already terrifying the Ruling Class. Later I applaud another poster's definition of capitalism as “slavery or serfdom for the 99 Percent” and (again) point out the moral imbecility at capitalism's core: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle – therefore the closest our species has yet come to embracing Absolute Evil.

***

“A New Low in Health Care Rhetoric” Matt Taibbi of the thoroughly mainstreamed Rolling Stone predictably criticizes a publicly malevolent disciple of Ayn Rand for her expressed belief health care for poor people is a waste of money – that they should be denied health care and abandoned to die. I chide Taibbi for his (obedient?) bourgeois blindness to the obvious fact inadequate and/or prohibitively expensive health care is part of the elaborately euphemistic program of genocide imposed on us by the USian Imperial Ruling Class – its final solution to the “problem” of surplus workers. “The only difference between the Nazi German One Percent and the Capitalist USian One Percent is the latter is troubled by the public relations problems arising from death camps,” I say. “Thus in their infinitely evil cunning, the USian One Percenters now hide mass murder behind Ayn Rand ideology and thereby shift the blame onto the victims.”

***

“Capitalism in Crisis: Who Are the Real Takers?” Ruling Class Propagandist Bernard Weiner uses the classic ploy of an obvious truth (“Capitalism is in crisis around the globe”) to pontificate a Big Lie, claiming the Democratic Party is the only rational hope of the USian Working Class. I respond that we who are socialists should be heartened by the escalating efforts of our opponents: “the One Percent aristocracy Mr. Weiner so obediently serves is clearly frightened. The pivotal question is whether its legions of soldiers and federalized cops will follow orders or stand down in 99 Percent solidarity, as their Petrograd counterparts did at the Neva River bridges on 8 March 1917.”  (Disclosure: I knew Weiner in Bellingham c. 1970-1972, where we were not friends. Weiner organized and led the clique of anarchists and useful idiots who pablumized, neutralized and eventually destroyed Northwest Passage, which had begun life as a fearless, credible, generally well-written alternative journal with a keen but uniquely accessible focus on local environmental issues. At the time there were rumors Weiner was a spook, though these were never substantiated.)

LB/12 January 2014

-30-

After Occupy, a Newly Evolving Eco-Socialist Spirituality?

THE APPARENT CONFLICT between our desperate need for the economic democracy promised by socialism and our equally desperate need for spiritual sustenance has traditionally been a major barrier to building a revolutionary socialist movement in the United States. But the conflict is an illusion – the result of a colossal misunderstanding on one side and a diabolical campaign of misrepresentation on the other. Theoretically, it could therefore be resolved by socialist declarations of tolerance guaranteeing the spiritual freedom of all persons – believers and unbelievers alike – within the revolutionary community. Implicit in the declarations would be socialist recognition of the need for spiritual anarchy: that one's spiritual quest – assuming one is so inclined – is ultimately (exactly as First Nations peoples understood), an individual and therefore intensely private matter.

But that re-assertion of our First Amendment right would be only half the battle. The vast majority of Abrahamic ecclesiastical authorities would denounce such guarantees as devilish lies. This is because most ecclesiastics whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim are as much a part of the Ruling Class as the Wall Street barons and their corps of wholly owned politicians and bureaucrats. The Ruling Class priests, ministers, rabbis and mullahs are therefore bound to serve the earthly One Percent at least as devoutly as they serve their god – which means any socialist attempt at defending our constitutional guarantee of religious and spiritual freedom is bound to trigger new frenzies of slander and oppression from church, mosque and temple – particularly now as the United States deliberately morphs ever closer to unabashed fascism reinforced by Christian theocracy.

Barbara Mor succinctly summarizes the problem in the opening pages of The Great Cosmic Mother (Harper & Row: 1987), an epic work that is (or should be) indispensable in the formulation of the new socialism toward which so much of the post-Occupy Left seems to be instinctively moving. “Marx and Engels,” wrote Mor, “confused spirit with established religion – as their doctrinaire followers continue to do – because, as Western white males, they could not see the total paradigm of ancient women's original communism.” Their error, she stated, “has given fuel to the propaganda engines of the reactionary systems in all countries, so that the world is ripped apart in a false dichotomy between 'Godless communism' and 'divine capitalism.' For if communism is atheistic, its opponents can claim to be mandated by God, however phony this claim might be...Both systems – Western capitalism and Soviet communism – are based on the denial of communal celebration...Neither the God of the Dollar nor the God of the State – nor any of the alienating patriarchal gods from which they descent – allow for this participation.” (Quotes are from Mor's second edition, pgs. 15-17). 

Mor's text of 26 years ago is relevant today for many reasons, but its significance here is as an inadvertent prelude to the Occupy Movement. This is because the quest for a new politics of community and celebration that satisfies hungers both physical and emotional was perhaps Occupy's deepest yet most unarticulated yearning. Indeed it is at least arguable the movement's refusal to state explicit goals was tacit recognition, no matter how subconscious, of the limitations imposed by (patriarchal) language on our ability to express our most profound needs. In this context, what might be termed the “old socialism” – that is, the Stalinist pseudo-socialism Mor so rightfully deplored – was (correctly) viewed as merely another rationale for (patriarchal) tyranny and was thus rejected as no more liberating than capitalism. But at the same time there was within Occupy a passionate interest in the potential of combining socialist principles with the communal, environmental and spiritual values implicit in recognition of the sacredness of Earth. Two years later, similarly minded Seattle voters elected Kshama Sawant,  a declared Marxist, to the City Council. 

Recognizably part of this same accelerated process of political evolution is Truthout's posting of a Chris Williams piece  entitled “Capitalism, Ecology and the Official Invisibility of Women,” which notes how capitalism “has fueled a world in which women are rendered invisible and saddled with the majority of labor.” The subsequent discussion enlarged upon Williams' theme. As I said in response, “Williams seems to be drawing ever closer to the consciousness-changing recognition that capitalism is in fact a logical outgrowth of patriarchy...This lineage is clearly traceable through the advent and maturity of capitalism during the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and it concludes with capitalism's final-stage, apocalyptic imposition of fascism on the world today. Thus our ultimate challenge is whether capitalism's inevitable maturity into fascism will be the end of our species. Will the One Percenters obliterate our world in fascist wars of conquest, or we will manage to mobilize sufficient resistance to replace fascism with an egalitarian, cooperative, sustaining and therefore necessarily socialist society?” 

*****

More Relevant Remarks on the Comment Threads of Other Websites

 

“Homeless Couple Gets a Home on Christmas Eve, Thanks to 'Occupy' Group”  A homeless couple in Madison, Wisconsin gets a tiny, 96-foot square house, a poster on the comment thread wonders what has gone wrong and fears we will all soon be living in such shrunken quarters. I explain how capitalism applauds such wretchedness precisely because it means even bigger profits. 

“Q&A: Libyan Women Were Handed Over as Spoils of War”  Karlos Zurutuza reports from Tripoli on Libya's post-Gaddafy oppression of women. I note that “whenever and wherever the USian Empire intervenes in an alleged Middle Eastern 'revolution,' the victors are invariably the most misogynistic of the religious fundamentalists. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya -- in fact anywhere women have managed to gain some rights -- their gains are quickly and totally undone. Does the USian Empire -- despite all the lip service it gives to female equality -- actually support the re-imposition of official misogyny? As the old intelligence adage puts it, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” 

LB/30 December 2013 

-30-

Capitalism's Deeds Reveal Its Intrinsic Evil; Identity Politics Exemplify the Cunning by Which We Are Kept in Slavery

CAPITALISM DEFTLY CAMOUFLAGES its evil behind innumerable Big Lies and a facade of constitutional democracy. But we see its hideous truth in the atrocities the U.S. Empire commits abroad.  Here at home we see the same capitalist savagery manifest in the eviction of that older woman I wrote about  four  weeks ago. 

 

We also see it in ever more glaring evidence of the desperate poverty that now oppresses fully half the USian population: young workers missing teeth due to the definitively capitalist combination of sweatshop wages and prohibitive dental costs; formerly middle-class parents whose jobs were outsourced, whose mortgages were foreclosed, who were evicted into homelessness and whose children now live as street urchins; formerly secure elders now dependent on soup kitchens as their only defense against starvation. 

All these atrocities and innumerable more – think Bhopal or Deepwater Horizon  or Bangladesh – are the essence of capitalism in action. Capitalism's defining premise is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species ever asserted, the ultimate example of the biblical exhortation, “by their deeds shall ye know them.” Though I am not a Christian – though I can never be a Christian – these words attributed to Jesus surely apply to recognizing the evil capitalism inflicts on all but the obscenely privileged few. 

*** 

 

Witnessing that eviction four weeks ago was wrenching for many reasons, but the most painful was the extent to which the woman's frantic scurrying about the ruins of her life reminded me of my own helpless behavior after the times my identity was violently obliterated.

I write this statement knowing it will be challenged by anyone who stubbornly clings to identity politics. How could I, a so-called “privileged white male,” presume to imagine suffering a loss such as that Tacoma woman suffered. (Yes, despite the socioeconomic lessons of the past several decades, there is still a legion of useful identity-politics idiots who serve the Ruling Class by fostering the hostility of one Working Class identity group toward all other Working Class groups.) 

The hypothetical identity-politics question – and I have no doubt it will be asked in real time – reminds of an incident in Manhattan c. 1983, when a white female personnel executive rejected my employment application because it had taken me until I was 36 years old to earn my bachelor of arts degree. According to this personnel officer, the duration of my educational effort combined with the fact I “had all the advantages of being a white male” to prove I was “obviously not serious about doing college-level work.” Therefore – or so she reasoned from her (genuinely) privileged Ivy League background as she looked down upon me from her managerial throne – I was unsuitable for editorial employment.

By the diplomas and certificates on her office wall, this young woman had undoubtedly lived a sheltered, pampered life – a prerequisite of graduation from any of the prohibitively expensive Ivy League schools that train the sons and daughters of the One Percenters and their most valued Ruling Class servants. Moreover, her reference to white male advantage made it clear she was blinded by identity-politics resentments. She could not imagine any seemingly successful, apparently middle-class white male encountering genuinely insurmountable obstacles. Hers was the same Ayn Rand/New Age hybrid of presumptuousness that believes unemployability is merely a state of mind: “change your thinking and you change your reality,” no revolution required. From her perspective, there was nothing in the world so daunting it could delay a white male's baccalaureate degree by 14 years, unless of course the male in question was “not serious” – that is, too lazy. 

Thus does identity politics eliminate empathy, which in turn eliminates class solidarity, blinding huge segments of the 99 Percent to the fact all USian Empire subjects whether proletarians or peasants and regardless of our gender or race or ethnicity are sisters and brothers of the Working Class. 

***

The bitter truth of my own life is that I was never middle-class enough, much less successful enough, to be financially secure. Even at the height of my journalism career, whether as a daily-newspaper news-editor in Northern New Jersey or as the editor-in-chief of an international trade-journal in Manhattan, I was never more than a paycheck or two away from financial ruin. 

Though I have never been thrown into the street with all my possessions, I was ousted by family treachery from a place where I had lived for 11 years and assumed I would spend the remainder of my life. The ouster, which occurred in 2004, is a perfect example of why to me the term “family” is a synonym for all sorts of unpleasantness including rejection and betrayal, which were the everyday norms of my childhood, and genuine risks of bodily harm or death, which thank Goddess occurred only rarely. 

But you can only lose your home once, and I lost mine – and my family as well – on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945, when my mother sought to kill me. Based on independent evidence I gathered as a middle-aged adult, my death was to have climaxed a sequence of events my mother had been scheming since before my conception. I was not a love-child; in fact I was its opposite, a hate-child deliberately conceived to entrap my father into marriage. Though my father saved my life – a canceled meeting brought him home early on that pivotal Solstice Eve – now that I know the larger circumstances, I can understand and almost forgive what he did next. As if he were overwhelmed by the parental equivalent of buyer's remorse, a few weeks later he sought closed-door judicial permission to dump me in a state orphanage, but the judge forbade it. From then until I turned 18, I was never more than an albatross around the necks of my father and my new stepmother, his former executive secretary.

Meanwhile, to escape the looming public scandal of judicial actions in open court, my mother's wealthy parents paid for her confinement in a posh private insane asylum. She remained there until 1947, after which she obtained a court order decreeing I would spend the summers with her and spend the school years with my father and his wife. But from the moment my mother tried to celebrate the 1945 Solstice by her intended sacrificial act of post-partum abortion, all but one of her kin regarded me as an unwelcome reminder of bad times and scandalous events. The one exception was the blessed aunt whose later intervention saved me from dyslexia. In the eyes of my other maternal relatives, I was never more than a worm in the shining apple of the hypocritical bourgeois respectability they so carefully cultivated and so diligently maintained. 

Albatross and worm – so I remained until I moved out of my father's house and was freed from the judicial indenture of obligatory summertime visits to the domain of my mother. Thanks to my aunt, who in the summer of 1948 got me the tutoring that laid the foundation for all I later became; thanks to my father's books, which filled a wall 22 feet long and 10 feet high from floor to ceiling and overflowed into several glass-front bookcases; thanks even to my father himself, a master of Socratic method despite his rejection of me as a son and his failure as a parent; and thanks most of all to an inner strength I often cursed in please-let-me-die adolescent despair – I had managed to survive. Eventually I even thrived, though only for a bit. 

But then at age 43, just as it seemed I was approaching a peak of journalistic achievement, I was robbed of my life's work, stripped of all my identity and denied any further potential for anything humanly recognizable as success. The mechanism of my ruin was a fire I do not doubt but cannot prove was government arson – the event of 1 September 1983 that obliterated all my life's work and has ever since defined who I am, what I am and all that I will never be. 

In other words, I am no stranger to losses of the magnitude suffered by that shockingly unfortunate woman who was evicted from her home in Tacoma on what should have been called not an “anniversary” but rather our 50th annual day of mourning. There is not one scintilla of hyperbole in my assertion of empathy with her. But at least I have thus far survived all that has been done to me, and with all my heart I wish the same for the woman who was evicted. 

That is why, in the face of all that is being done to all of us, I long ago recognized survival as an act of revolutionary defiance – the very point at which the personal becomes political. 

It is a realization now made all the more poignant by a “happy holidays” convergence of complex medical problems that promise to reduce my 2014 to a year of unrelenting misery even before its arrival: Merry Christmas to me from a relentlessly hostile Jesus. 

*****

Relevant Remarks on the Comment Threads of Other Websites 

“NSA Surveillance Program: It's Going to Get Worse”  Dave Eggers of The Guardian notes how the National Security Agency and its kindred secret-police agencies have effectively nullified all U.S. constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure. Moreover, he warns, history – specifically the post-World-War-II purge – proves that anything the government can employ to oppress us, it will eventually use without mercy. I agree, noting that a government does not collect such material without malevolent purpose. I also note it is increasingly obvious an enemy of the USian state is anyone who objects to capitalist savagery, whether they seek to abolish capitalism or merely reform it. “(F)rom the perspective of the One Percenters who own the government and the politicians, bureaucrats, cops, soldiers and religious authorities who make up the Ruling Class -- the enemy is anyone who dares challenge the present socioeconomic order.” 

“Barack Obama Is Not George Bush”  Jonathan Chait of the Ruling Class journal New York Magazine pens a clever piece of Democratic Party propaganda, and I refute it as another of the party's pre-Congressional-election efforts to make us forget how Obama the Orator became Barack the Betrayer and thus revealed the party's new strategy for serving the One Percent: campaign as Democrats, rule as Republicans. Challenged to provide an alternative to capitalist governance by the One Party of Two Names – to posit a means of relief from the policies of absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the rest of us – I answer that the winning methods of Councilwoman Sawant in Seattle teach us everything we need to build an effective 

resistance.

*****

Winter Solstice Greetings and happy holidays to all, even amidst this time of political strife and personal wretchedness.

LB/22 December 2013 

-30-