Ferguson Is Everywhere, and We Are All Michael Brown

THE WHITE RULING CLASS in Ferguson, Missouri is obviously terrified by the anger of the town's African-American majority population – hence the rush toward reforms  reported in useful detail by The New York Times two days ago.

The PollyAnna liberals, of course, will soon be hailing the reforms as a great triumph, the silver lining in the storm-dark clouds of Michael Brown's death and the still darker portends of the local police fulfilling the purpose for which they have been federalized and militarized – to serve as capitalism's army of occupation in the USian Empire's domestic colonies. But nothing will change save the gradual banishment of that conquered-territory image,  which must be suppressed because it (correctly) tells us our overlords think Iraq, Afghanistan and the imperial homeland are tactically and strategically interchangeable.  That's why, within weeks if not days, a team of obscenely salaried Josef Goebbels wanna-bees will be revising our recollections of what really happened so that eventually Ferguson fits the official Horatio Alger version  of U.S. history. And do not doubt they will succeed. The USian Ruling Class manages the most diabolically sophisticated tyranny in all human time, and its propagandists are the most effective truth-benders ever: note how they have already revised the story of Martin Luther King Jr. to remove the “r” from his call to revolution.

No doubt the propagandists will do with Ferguson as they have done with the life and death of Rev. King – they'll afix a smiley face to it. Picture a smiley face replacing the Roman execution order atop a medically accurate representation of Jesus' crucifixion agonies, or (like the Arbeit Macht Frei above the main gate at Auschwitz), hung at the entrance to Guantanamo: in either instance, complete with its slogan – “have a happy day” – and you'll understand the ultimate grotesquerie of this approach. Its historical context is especially telling: the smiley face emerged at the height of the Vietnam War, as if it were an admonition to capitalism's victims: “have a happy day” (or else).

Yes that is the precisely sort of predator nation in which we now live, as the dismantling of the New Deal,  the nullification of the Civil Rights Movement,  the defeat of feminism  and the terrifying triumphs of the lavishly funded theocratic counter-revolution  prove beyond all argument. “Reform” in this context is fraud – its sole purpose is deception, an illusion of “change” that does nothing more than temporarily cloak the savagery of capitalism, which is so malevolent it can no more be “reformed” than cancer.

But this time the marks know the score. The Ferguson residents who dismiss the reform effort as a scam  are undoubtedly correct. The black community, like all other USian minority communities, has learned from bitter experience that anything the Ruling Class gives, the Ruling Class can just as quickly take back – and no doubt will. Blacks know what too many of the rest of us still refuse to learn: the federalized, militarized police and their conversion into capitalism's army of occupation in the homeland colonies means Ferguson is Everywhere U.S.A. just as Michael Brown is all of us – every 99 Percenter regardless of race or gender or age.

Sometimes, rather than offer bogus reforms, the Ruling Class merely lies, a response at which the president is an obvious master. Hence Obama the Orator's 2008 campaign slogan, “change we can believe in” – possibly the most glaring Big Lie in U.S. political history – and his post-electoral transformation to Barack the Betrayer. Now in the latter persona he is again showing his true Republican selfhood by helping Pennsylvania privatize Medicaid, which – exactly as intended – will significantly worsen the plight of the state's poor, no doubt in some cases fatally, all the while enabling the One Percent to turn a handsome profit on the resultant misery.

Since Obama's absolute fealty to the Ayn Rand principles of capitalism is so obvious, I would also question the promises by the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Ferguson and an even more obvious atrocity in Louisiana, where a black man who'd been arrested, searched and shackled with his hands behind his back and locked into a police car then supposedly produced a concealed handgun and fatally shot himself.

The president has also called for a “review” of his own police federalization-and-militarization policies. (Yes, the process of turning the police into storm troopers was begun under Bush II, but like the nullification of the Bill of Rights, Obama has continued it with a vengeance.) Probably all the “review” means is the imposition of new measures to cover up the ongoing conversion of the police into a new Schutzstaffel.  We the People are becoming more rebellious, and the One Percenters, who worry the imperial war machine might not reliably kill U.S. citizens, are becoming terrified. Hence here in the United States the aristocracy turns to the police, exactly as the aristocrats did in Tsarist Russia, which gives “serve and protect” a new and decidedly more Ayn Randish meaning.

Hence too what I would anticipate from these investigations is nothing more than dramatic pronouncements in the characteristic Obama style: compelling rhetorical flourishes that when carefully analyzed say exactly nothing and change even less. Bear in mind too it's an election year: that means Obama's required to (seemingly) pander to the Democratic base. Never mind all the sensible Democrats (of which, long ago, I was one) have already figured out the party labels are meaningless – that we're governed by one Ruling Class party of two names, and that the only meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the former are fascists and brag about it while the latter are every bit as fascist but try to hide it behind a smokescreen of lies.

As many of you know I was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 was jailed on related charges in Knoxville, Tennessee. Reasoning from the eye-opening lessons I learned then and during the subsequent 18 months I remained in the South, I have selected a three more follow-up stories that seem to me to capture the essence of Ferguson's importance – and more importantly stress the fact Ferguson is (as I said above, and as cannot be said too many times) Everywhere U.S.A. One of these texts is a Popular Resistance.org piece that makes the point the killing of Michael Brown and other young black men is part of the nationwide class war,  “massive disinvestment in urban neighborhoods and unconscionable levels of joblessness and economic underdevelopment.” Another is an Associated Press dispatch Reader Supported News rescued from the Orwell hole: it says the Ferguson resistance is inspiring a nationwide resistance movement –  which is precisely what the Ruling Class doesn't want us to know. Lastly, also from the previous week – I now feel I should apologize for having been so caught up in the personal angst of viewing newsprint copies of my fire-destroyed photography – a Truthout exclusive examines the clash between “peacekeepers” and activists that is a vital part of the Ferguson backstory.  It is actually a new twist to an old conflict: in my day, the “peacekeepers” were called Uncle Toms.

Finally here are three more stories that fall into the “as-if-there-were-any-remaining-doubts” category.

The first reveals the extent to which the so-called Main Stream Media (MSM) has become the government's propaganda apparatus,  a perfectly logical evolution given the fact government at all USian levels is now a de facto subsidiary of Wall Street. In other words, government and business have merged, producing the ever-more-obvious reality of “capitalist governance” – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – what earlier generations knew as fascism.

Next, in the second report, we have another revelation of the forceable imposition of Christian theocracy on the military.  Undoubtedly (though the text doesn't say it), this is a desperate effort by the Ruling Class to use the Prosperity Gospel  in an attempt to bolster the political reliability of the troops. Will the theocrats succeed? Will biblical law replace remnants of our constitution? Margaret Atwood  surely thinks so – and having lived in the South, which is already a functional theocracy, I tend to agree.

Lastly, an anti-Michael Brown website provides a new yardstick by which to measure the magnitude of USian racism  – one of the many reasons I believe we are not far from the emergence of an USian Nazism that will target racial, sexual, political and spiritual minorities here in the bourgeoning Fourth Reich much as they were targeted in the Third Reich. But here it will no doubt be under the aegis of a smiley face, perhaps even with clowns to comfort the children before they are gassed: “have a happy day.”

LB/14 September 2014

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Censorship on the USian Left: Is Truthout Now in Pre-Election, Anything-to-Protect-the-Democrats Mode?

UNTIL LAST WEEK I had – past tense – a long and pleasant relationship with the website Truthout. As a former member of the American Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO, I applauded its decision to grant its employees guild representation, and as a former news editor and editor-in-chief, I am both impressed and moved by the unique facts-with-feelings reportorial style of Maya Schenwar, who is Truthout's executive director and probably its best writer as well. I had posted on the site's comment threads for many years, and only one of my comments had ever been suppressed – that by Truthout's comment-server Discus, which does not allow posters to link to their own blogs unless the blogs themselves have achieved the status of mainstream journalism. And Discus did let me repost the material as soon as I had removed the link.

But last week Truthout – not Discus (as the message that suddenly appeared on my post maybe five minutes after I had uploaded it made clear) – deleted the following:

The huge flaw in Obamacare is that it creates the illusion of insurance – precisely what it was intended to do – while imposing a structure of co-payments  and deductibles that are prohibitively expensive. Daily Kos provides a good basic explanation of how it works. 

If you're a member of the One Percent or the petit bourgeoisie, those co-pays and deductibles are of no concern even if you choose the least expensive plan. But if you're unemployed, or chronically impoverished, or disabled, you may well be worse off than before: forced by law to buy insurance from the for-profit insurance barons, but prohibited by co-pays and deductibles from ever actually getting health care. Indeed I know several younger people who are so afflicted – not surprising since by any reasonable standard, half the U.S. population is now impoverished.

 

Here, of course, is the truly obscene windfall profit Obama handed his insurance-barony benefactors: not just the all the new policy-holders, but all the policy-holders who will never be able to afford to use their insurance: pure profit for the profiteers, exactly as our closet-Republican president obviously promised them.

Medicare is a similar scam. If one is well off, Medicare is wonderful. The co-pays are 20 percent, the deductible is $1,000 per year. But if one is destitute, as I have been since 2009, Medicare is a nightmare of deprivation unless one (A) supplements it with what used to be called Medicare Plus (an LBJ idea made real by the Clinton Administration, then seized by Bush, restructured and renamed Medicare Advantage, with the advantage going to the for-profit insurors at the expense of non-profits); and (B) is willing to endure the loss of freedom and dignity attendant on becoming an oppressed subject of the welfare system  in return for Medicaid supplements.

(Yes, contrary to one of the bigger of the many Affordable Care Act Big Lies, Medicaid IS welfare, with all the restrictions and humiliations attendant thereupon.  And for those of us us who are elderly, it is not even a grant. It is instead a loan that will be repaid by the seizure of our meager estates – including all our personal property [books, tools, etc.] – after we're dead.) 

The common policy-thread through all this is retention of the Ayn-Rand/healthcare-as-a-privilege-of-wealth savagery that is the defining characteristic of the U.S. system. Go to a civilized country, there are no co-pays or deductibles.  But – note again the example of Medicare – we'll never see anything that humanitarian here even under a public-option plan, which we'll never be allowed anyway: not as long as the Citizens United decision remains in force – and the only way that will be overturned is by revolution.

The censored comment was my response to another poster, who asked me to clarify my stance on the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. The question's context was a discussion prompted by a Thom Hartmann exposé entitled “Is Rick Scott Guilty of Murder?” In it, Hartmann revealed how the Florida governor's refusal to allow a federally funded expansion of Medicaid had seemingly killed a young woman by denying her the care that might have sustained her life.

My original remarks had focused neither on Scott nor the dead woman but on the austerity policies that are being inflicted on us by both halves of the One Party of Two Names:

The purpose of austerity – no matter whether blatantly imposed by Republicans or stealthily imposed by Democrats – is genocide: specifically the extermination of those of us who are poor, chronically unemployed, disabled, elderly or otherwise unexploitable for maximum capitalist profit.

Yes, it is an outrage Charlene Dill was murdered by denial of health care. But she was slain not just by Republican policies in Florida. She was also killed by the endlessly more damning fact that – thanks to Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer and Democrat treachery in general – the United States remains the only industrialized nation on this planet in which health care is a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.

Nor is that too harsh a judgment. Obama and the Democrats promised us public-option health insurance. But they were lying. Once their deceptions had won them the White House and control of both houses of Congress, their (premeditated) treachery insured the savagery of health care as a privilege of wealth is now eternally locked into place. It is – and will be for as long as the USian Empire survives – now sustained by Obama's permanent elimination of all public-option alternatives, which has indentured us forever to the for-profit insurance barons. So much for "change we can believe in" – the biggest Big Lie of USian presidential history.

In this context, the most bitter truth of Charlotte Dill's death is that it is merely (another) deadly example of capitalism in action. It is a microcosm of Bhopal, of Bangladesh, of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 123 woman and 23 men on this very day 103 years ago.

The lesson taught us by Charlotte Dill – if we but had the courage to heed it – is the same lesson we should have been taught by the unspeakable sound of human bodies hitting the pavement of Washington Place below the Asch Building in Manhattan on the afternoon of 25 March 1911. Until we eliminate capitalism – which is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue (literally the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever set forth) – such atrocities will continue unabated.

As Neil Young so memorably said to honor Allison Krause,  who was yet another of capitalism's victims, "what if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?"

Later, when my accurate summary of Obamacare's most damning truths was deleted, I again addressed the poster who had asked me to clarify my position:

I responded to your question politely, truthfully and in some detail, but Truthout suppressed it. (No, not Discus; the notice specifically said Truthout.) Apparently – with the Republicans heading for a landslide victory in November (not that it will make life in the USian Imperial Homeland that much worse) – Truthout is now in do-anything-to-protect-the-Democrats mode, even unto suppressing unpleasant truths about the Affordable Care Act. Obviously I have become persona non grata here, so this will be my last post on this website. Indeed I'm not even sure you'll be allowed to see this. But if you are, and you're curious about what was censored, Google my name, then after next Monday you can read it in my blog. 

Yes, Truthout allowed that post to live – as if its censors were quite proud of how they had helped the Democratic Party in its ongoing campaign to suppress the ugly truths about the unprecedented rip-off sarcastically known as Obamacare.

******

Outside Agitation Outside the Notebook: Because today is my 74th birthday and the sun is shining – a rare phenomenon in the coastal Pacific Northwest at this time of year – I am not going to spend my usual 10 or 15 hours assembling this week's column. Instead I am going to merely post the headlines of and links to the reports on which I commented, plus of course the main comments themselves. These, with the notable exception of the next item, all focus on a common theme: Obama the Orator's ongoing shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, the results of which include the Ukrainian Crisis and its threat of World War III, the government's self-imposed disadvantage in Hobby-Lobby case (which greatly bolsters the probability it will further abolish women's reproductive rights), and the regime of unprecedented censorship and secrecy by which We the People are now afflicted.

Indeed it seems Obama intends to spend his second term giving us all the finger. His fuck-you, break-all-promises policies ever-more-defiantly serve his Ruling Class masters. His treachery is wrecking the Democratic Party and inflaming white racism into an unprecedented barrier against minority aspirations. He's ensuring not just Republican dominance for years to come, but the irreversible transmogrification of the United States into a fascist (and almost certainly neo-Nazi) empire, the de facto Fourth Reich. In other words, he's doing exactly what the One Percenters hired him to do.

***

“Kent State Truth Tribunal Addresses the United Nations Human Rights Committee”  Laurel Krause, sister of the murdered Allison Krause, reports on ongoing efforts to expose government secrets about the Kent State Massacre, which occurred on 4 May 1970. Via the comment thread, I give Ms. Krause what may be new and useful data:

There is one Kent State mystery that suggests the shooting was planned in advance.

I know of this because The Jersey Journal (Jersey City, N.J.), for which I was then the investigative reporter, published nine editions a day in that era. The last of these rolled a few minutes after Wall Street closed at 4 p.m. EDT. 

But all we had out of Ohio in that Monday afternoon's Market Final was a page-one bulletin the National Guard had fired on and wounded several students.

Across the river in Manhattan, where I lived, the final of The New York Post, the City's last remaining p.m., had no more than we at the JJ did.

The next day, because the shootings had occurred at 12:24 p.m. EDT, I asked why we missed the story. Our telegraph editor said the wire services – AP, UPI – hadn't moved anything more detailed than what we ran.

More curious than ever, I queried a UPI friend, who told me, “Ma Bell pulled the plug on everything in Ohio at about five minutes after 12.”

(I should explain here, for those unfamiliar with 1970s technology, that wire-service dispatches were transmitted over lines leased from AT&T and managed by the regional Bell systems.)

If it is true the Ohio wire-service connections were shut down just before the shootings – and I have no reason to doubt what my friend told me – this would suggest a conspiracy already in place, perhaps a scheme to terrorize the anti-war movement with an example of dead and wounded students.

*****

“It's Time to Put America First” Thom Hartmann decries the obscenity of lightning-fast, no-debate enactment of $1 billion in loans and $100 million in direct aid to Ukraine by the same Congress that killed unemployment compensation for 2 million USians and slashed food stamps for 1.7 million more. Vexed as always by Hartmann's refusal to acknowledge such savagery as nothing more than capitalism in action, I focus on economic reality:

Actually, the difference between the Ukrainian and USian Working Classes – why Ukrainia gets money and USia gets more austerity – should be obvious to anyone who is not a die-hard supporter of capitalism.

The Ukrainians – all but their oligarchs desperately impoverished – are therefore easily exploitable for maximum profit.

Not only that, Ukraine's industrial potential is enormous. It is the breadbasket of Europe – the most vast, most productive agricultural land on the entire continent – and it now effectively belongs to USian imperial agrobusiness. It will thus be farmed by minimum-wage laborers. And since the new Ukrainian government includes declared fascists, its agriculture will no doubt use slave labor too. The profits to the oligarchs and their new USian overlords will be near-infinite. 

Ukrainia also contains significant natural resources, including major fossil fuel deposits. And because of its post-coup chaos, there are no environmental regulations to stop or even slow the rape of the land – which again means maximum profit for the One Percent,  total subjugation of the Ukrainian Working Class.

Contrast this to the USian Imperial Homeland: it is but a husk of its former self. Its natural resources have been been bled dry by the One Percent, its industry has all been outsourced, its Working Class has been methodically disempowered by union-busting. We the People have mostly been reduced to hopeless poverty and are now being slowly exterminated by deliberately genocidal cutbacks in social services.  In short, the USian homeland no longer has any of the ingredients of a functioning economy. This means the so-called American Dream is dead; it also means there will never, ever be an USian economic rebirth. 

But the USian Homeland still has a charade of constitutional democracy, and – in a few places – still has some semblance of genuinely representative local government. Thus the One Percenters' hands remain much more tied here than in Ukrainia. 

By contrast, Ukrainia is now ruled by a cabal that includes many declared neo-Nazis in significant positions of power. This means – exactly as happened in Germany during the 1930s – Ukrainia will soon be ruled by an exclusively neo-Nazi government. In its inevitable imposition of a torture-state, it will soon be indistinguishable from Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile. It will thus become a major element in the USian Empire's 21st Century plan of global conquest – another slave-state in the USian Empire's de facto Fourth Reich. 

That summarizes the main reasons the USian Empire instantly invests money in Ukrainia even as it continues to inflict ever-worsening genocidal poverty on its own people.

We the People are being  cast away, discarded as if we were worn-out machinery. We are literally a surplus workforce, deemed useless and abandoned because we are no longer exploitable for significant profit.  Such are the consequences of capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever espoused.

As more and more of us recognize what is happening and awaken to the core truth our deepening misery is the quintessence of capitalism –  the fulfillment of all Marxist predictions about capitalism (and therefore the ultimate validation of the entire Marxist analysis) – we by our numbers and our intensifying anger will become ever more dangerous to the One Percenters.

What then will be their response? Will it be the same as that of tyrants throughout history? If so, they  will start a major war – a war big enough to exterminate the surplus Working Class population and  ruinous enough to enable the Ruling Class to abolish, forever, any last remnants of constitutional democracy. And by their continued provocation of Putin, it seems they are trying to start just such a war.

At the very least, it seems the One Percenters have convinced themselves the bloody lessons taught Darius, the Mongols, Bonaparte and Hitler no longer apply. At the very worst, their obscene, live-it-up-now-and-fuck-tomorrow arrogance – a subset of the same capitalist greed that fosters their morally imbecilic indifference to the impending environmental apocalypse – has rendered them equally indifferent to the fact such a war would be the death of our species.

Russia – with a long history of having some of the most astute and farsighted intelligence analysts on the planet – is obviously aware of all these factors. (Note that one should never underestimate Russian intelligence capabilities: One example of Russian skill is the Sepoy Mutiny of 1858, engineered by Tsarist agents, which forever stopped British Empire aggression into the underbelly of the Russian Empire. Another example is the devastatingly effective spy-saboteur-and-resistance network the Nazis eternally cursed as "the Red Orchestra," which GRU established during the late 1920s and early 1930s in anticipation of the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. [See The Red Orchestra, V.E. Tarrant, John Wiley & Sons Inc.: 1995])

With those sorts of analytical capabilities backing him up, it becomes obvious why Putin is responding as he is.

That's why I'm terrified the Ukrainian Crisis is the beginning of World War III – a war in which the  USian Empire suicidally underestimates the indomitable Russian will to “fight to the death.”

***

What many people don't know is in 510 BCE, Darius disastrously invaded Scythia, which the ancient Greeks defined as roughly equivalent to modern Black-Sea Russia, the Crimea and the Ukraine. Nevertheless the true Scythia was probably much larger, perhaps as large as the old Russian Empire, since archaeology suggests a significant Scythian presence nearly as far west as modern-day Germany and as far east as China.  DNA evidence meanwhile substantiates certain folk tales that claim Scythian origins for the Celts. Like the Celts, the Scythians were an equestrian people, and their horse-archers, at least 20 percent of whom were women – were with their long-range recurve bows considered the most formidable light cavalry of their time.

But Darius was deterred neither by the vastness of the Steppe nor by the Scythians' fierce reputation, and he marched his massive army – the era's largest and best equipped – deep into Scythia. To make a long story short, the Scythians did as the Russians have so successfully done: they retreated and retreated and retreated – then closed the door behind Darius and savaged the Persians until they fled in ever-increasing panic. (For those interested in the details, see Herodotus, The Histories, in any complete translation.) 

Nor have the Russians – many of whom themselves bear Scythian genes – forgotten this chapter of their Motherland's history: the Budenovka, for which Google, the pointed hat worn by the Red Cavalry during the Russian Civil War, was consciously patterned after the pointed hats of the Scythian horse archers, thereby implicitly linking the revolutionaries with ancient Russia. 

 

Presumably we all know what happened to the Mongols -- the mounds of their skulls the medieval Russians made as monuments at the sites of Mongol defeats – as we know the fates of Bonaparte and Hitler.

As to “Svyashchennaya Voyna” (“Sacred War”), do not be misled by the Soviet flag motif of the YouTube video I posted above. I chose that specifically for its English translation of the lyrics. The song remains popular in Russia today, and often highlights the widely attended performances of the Russian Army Chorus and Dance Troupe, the successor to the world-famous Red Army Chorus and Dance Troupe. 

       

*****

“Obama's Preposterous Defense of the Iraq War” Reliably caustic Charles Pierce of Esquire describes with appropriate venom how Obama, in his efforts to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin, has reversed his “wrong-war-in-the-wrong-place” stance against the unprovoked U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now – in another classic example of his Orator-to-Betrayer shape-shift, Obama has a become a staunch defender of the entire operation. This – no surprise to me – means he's now implicitly siding with the entire band of Bush League perpetrators, that gang of war criminals he has carefully protected since the first minute of his presidency. My response was surely predictable, but I think it's worth reprinting nonetheless:

Obviously the world has learned to recognize Obama the Orator as not just Barack the Betrayer but Barack the Belligerent – and Barack the Big Liar as well.

The dire question is whether – now the president's true persona is known – he will try in some way to do to the world what he is already doing to the United States, savaging the 99 Percent with ever-more-brazenly fascist policies.

(Note his proposals of more cuts to Medicare and new obstructions to disability insurance. Note too how he is tacitly backing Hobby Lobby in its war against women's reproductive rights, or how – like the devotee of shock-doctrine capitalism he is – he is using the shock of the bed-bug plague to repeal tenant rights in public housing, thereby making the housing easier to sell to profiteers.)

Yup: vote for a Democrat, get a sneaky, maliciously dishonest hard-right Republican – such is life under the One Party of Two Names.

What Obama is doing stateside is bad enough.

As to what he might do to Russia, be afraid; be very afraid.

*****

“The Danger of False Narrative” Robert Perry continues his superb Ukraine-Crisis reporting and analysis by noting how the USian propaganda machine deluged us with Big Lies to justify the war against Iraq and is now fabricating the same sort of Josef Goebbels narrative to gin up fear and loathing against Putin and Russia. I seize the opportunity to describe a couple of seemingly-revalidated suspicions:

Apropos observed reality, the appearance of Nazi, Confederate and Ku Klux Klan flags in conjunction with the Ukrainian coup (for which see the “Confederate battle flag” link within Mr. Parry's text), tends to confirm two suppositions many old-time Leftists accepted as ugly truths:

(1)- The existence of a secret organization – originally part of the Nazi German government, but since World War II either within the US government or facilitated by it – that aids and coordinates the imposition of fascism everywhere. (Its long-term purpose is the subjugation of all the world's peoples into a single, global fascist empire.)

(2)- Clandestine but pivotal support within the US government for the Klan and other such fascist, racist, misogynist and/or neo-Nazi organizations. (Given how the US government crushed the Communist Party, the various socialist parties and the Occupy Movement, the fact the Klan and its kindred are still functional is indisputable proof they are tacitly supported by the U.S. government and its capitalist masters.)

Why does the US foster and support fascism? Because fascism is the mature form of capitalism – that is, capitalism expanded into capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else.

In this context, the Obama Administration is not just a false-flag operation; it is false-faced as well.

*****

“Women Justices Rock the Hobby Lobby Argument”  Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker applauds how the Supreme Court's three female justices obviously support women's reproductive rights – of course they do – but then buries his lead: “Notably, the Obama Administration chose not to contest Hobby Lobby’s assertion that use of an I.U.D. was tantamount to abortion.”

My rim-rat reflexes as good as they were 44 years ago, when I was a news editor or sat a telegraph desk, I put the most important element of Toobin's story up where it belongs:

In other words, the president tacitly supports Hobby Lobby, and has hamstrung his solicitor general accordingly.

Then I elaborate:

Apparently the president is not only a closet Republican but a closet Christian theocrat as well. Note his dramatic expansion of Bush's Faith Based Initiatives, which trumps the Constitution by using federal funding to punish non-believers. (Google “faith based initiatives obama,” no quotation marks.)

This means the president is also a closet misogynist – a tacit supporter of the effort by Christian fanatics to force women back into Biblical subjugation. Once again we see Obama the Orator shape-shifting into his true persona: Barack the Betrayer.

As if that were not dismaying enough, there is also the fact the advocates of theocracy are malevolently powerful and obscenely well funded. The One Percenters lavish money on Abrahamic theocracy whether Christian, Islamic or Judaic.

Why? Because the Abrahamic dogmas of divine-right management and prosperity as divine reward ensure the perpetuity of capitalism.

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are thus hugely courageous to defy such might. Let us hope the Supreme Court includes two equally brave male justices.

 

Important development in a related story: Hobby Lobby's anti-birth-control lawsuit is part of the vast and irresistibly well-funded Christian effort to impose theocracy and Biblical Law – the Christian equivalent of Sharia – on the United States. Another part of the same well-coordinated campaign is the Vatican's sneaky effort to abolish women's reproductive rights by leveraged buyouts of formerly secular regional hospitals, after which the ecclesiastical authorities ban birth control, abortions, assisted suicide and even termination of life support in cases of medically hopeless disease or injury. The result – exactly as the Christians intend – is tantamount to the imposition of theocracy on entire hospital service areas. Hence the relevance of “Washington State Case Study: A Difficult Miscarriage Made Worse by Hospital's Religious Restrictions on Care,” a newly published Huffington Post reprint of a profoundly disturbing academic report  that describes the medical horrors – torture, actually – inflicted on a woman by the Roman Catholic hospital that is the only care provider in the region where the victim lives. I did not comment on the report – HuffPo banished me years ago for my uncontrite socialism – but I nevertheless link it via OAN because it is a vital and revealing microcosm of the broader Hobby Lobby issues.

*****

“Barack Obama: The Least Transparent President in History”  Amy Goodman's report is perfectly summarized by its head, on which I could not possibly improve. My response perfectly summarizes the last six years of our political history:

 

As Obama the Orator, the president preached "hope" and "change we can believe in" and shamelessly exploited the African-American progressive tradition to leverage himself into office.

Meanwhile the Republicans ensured his victories by terrifying us with their McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan assault guns.

Yes, that's how the system works: the good-cop/bad-cop routine – with all of us as the prisoners.

Bill Moyers tells us it's all a charade, and the evidence ever-more-powerfully confirms it.

If Moyers is correct – and I'm sure he is – our so-called “free elections” are merely dramas carefully scripted by the One Percent and played out by actors chosen from One Party of Two Names. USian politics is as false as professional wrestling, the political sound and fury meaningless save as yardsticks of deception and preludes to (ever-intensified) oppression. 

 

Such is the context of Obama the Orator's (obviously premeditated) shift into Barack the Betrayer.

His presidency is not only the least transparent; it is also founded on the biggest Big Lies in presidential history. He has probably discredited the Democratic Party beyond repair. Given USian racism, he has undoubtedly obstructed equality for people of color. He is probably fostering more “why-bother” non-voters than any politician in US history.

And when he leaves office, his Ruling Class masters will lavish him with obscene wealth and prestige to reward him for all the damage he's done.

LB/30 March 2014

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Why the 1% Wants Seniors and Older Workers Dead

HATRED OF ELDERLY people, especially those of us who are also poor, has long been amongst the defining sociological characteristics of Occidental culture and of the United States in particular: Google negative attitudes toward the elderly, you get 577,000 hits of instant confirmation. And if that's not enough, there's the tacitly genocidal campaign to slash and eventually terminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food-assistance programs, which would condemn millions of elderly and disabled persons to death by starvation and sickness – getting rid of us and our subversive memories of better times all without the international embarrassment of geriatric death camps.

 

No surprise to those of us who recognize capitalism for the moral imbecility it is – its elevation of infinite greed to maximum virtue is the absolute rejection of humanitarianism – the same murderous trend is now showing up in the USian workplace. Its ugly, ageist truth is exposed by AlterNet's Lynn Parramore in a Truthout-reprinted piece entitled “Fifty Is the New 65: Older Americans Are Getting Booted from Their Jobs – and Denied New Opportunities.”

I recommend we all read it from beginning to end. Its revelations are so important my comment-thread response morphed into this week's blog essay. But Parramore's work nevertheless has one huge flaw: despite being a superb and necessarily diligent investigative reporter, she omits from her otherwise-informative catalogue of capitalism's atrocities against older workers the pivotal fact our memories of infinitely better times make us definitively subversive. The mere fact we recall those halcyon days before the Christian Prosperity Gospel granted all bosses the divine right of medieval tyrants is enough to make us persona non grata – even if, terrified of losing our jobs, we are trying desperately hard not to rock the our place-of-employment boat.

It's perplexing a reporter of Parramore's skills has missed this crucial point. Perhaps she is simply too young to understand how radically different the USian Empire of today is from the United States of the years before the Decade of Assassinations. Thus she would not understand the absolute truth of a statement often whispered by those of us who have lived through the awful transformation from our former American Dream constitutional democracy to the relentlessly oppessive total-surveillance plutocracy that rules us today. “This is no longer the country I was born in,” we say. “It's as if the fascists won World War II.” 

Indeed the difference between that globally admired, seemingly blessed nation we knew as children and young adults and the internationally accursed nation wherein we dwell today is as nearly as great as the difference between Nazi Germany and the postwar German Federal Republic. Here it often feels as if time is marching backward – that the United States is not only becoming the de facto Fourth Reich, but is doing so deliberately, methodically, in malevolent fulfillment of the long-range intentions first revealed by the Bankers Plot of 1934. 

According to some of the old Communists I met years ago – all of them now dead – it was far worse than just a bunch of greedy One Percenters trying to boost their profits by imposing fascism. These old Reds said the plotters had secretly met with Hitler and Mussolini and intended to make the United States the bank, granary and manufacturing center of what was to be the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo-Washington D.C. Axis. Thus did the fathers and grandfathers of today's One Percent reveal what Karl Marx had understood long before the terms “fascism” and “Nazism” entered our vocabulary of horrors – that given the opportunity, capitalism will inevitably morph into pure Evil. 

The disposal of surplus workers and of workplace elders in particular is thus merely another of the cruel measures capitalism employs to ensure the subjugation of its workforce. In the case of all surplus workers, we are deemed no longer exploitable for maximum profit and therefore no longer worth the costs of the social safety net that formerly helped us stay alive between jobs. 

In the case of elderly workers, our individual and collective memories of a time when obscenely greedy capitalists were compelled to reward white males for hard work and diligence -- and were forced to at least render lip service to such rewards for women and minorities -- are viewed as dangerous incitements to rebellion. Thus considered the living equivalents of radical literature if not potential Outside Agitators, we are being disappeared down the Orwell-hole along with every other USian vestige of humanitarianism.

It cannot be repeated often enough the same murderous purpose motivates the "austerity" campaigns against Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation and any other safety-net program. Though no politician or Ruling Class pundit dare say it, the true objective of all these campaigns is genocide: the elimination of surplus workers and especially anyone who might remember what life was like before the aristocrats robbed us of the good times forever. 

We elderly are especially fragile; slash our Social Security stipends and deny us medical care and we're dead -- exactly as the One Percent intends. The associated fear alone – the daily stress of never knowing what the Ruling Class will do to us next – is often itself deadly. None of this is accidental. The sooner there are no longer any of us who remember the humanitarianism that was forced on the United States and on capitalism in general by the Soviet Union's formidable endorsement of global Marxism, the sooner the One Percent can get on with its intention of turning all workers into throw-away slaves and reducing Planet Earth to an electronically policed concentration camp.

Such is capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue -- the methodical rejection of all humanitarian principles, therefore the closest approximation of Absolute Evil our species has yet spawned. Next comes unabashed capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us -- what earlier generations knew as fascism or Nazism.

Though the Soviet Union was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be, its agitation for economic democracy at least forced capitalism to assume a humanitarian disguise. But now, with the U.S.S.R. dead and the People's Republic of China eternally co-opted by Wall Street, there is little or no hope of escaping or even ameliorating the Ayn Rand savagery by which the One Percenters are determined to guarantee their own luxurious survival.

Notwithstanding the superior investigative reporting skill Parramore demonstrated in “Fifty Is the New 65,” she is obviously afraid to confront the hideous malignancy capitalism now reveals itself to be. Nor can we really blame her; she would be instantly blacklisted were she to do otherwise. At least she implies -- but dares not say outright -- that capitalism's war against those of us who are older is bolstered by subtle  brainwashing that encourages younger generations to think of us as parasites and obstructionists. But she fails to note how similar techniques were used by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to engender the murderous hatefulness of an entire nation against the Nazis' racial, ethnic and demographic targets.  

Parramore thus avoids the undeniable truth of capitalism's deadly nature. She remains silent about what should be the main and most terrifying point of her disclosures: that by similar atrocities against specific groups did the Nazis prepare the German public for the Holocaust. No matter there are no geriatric death camps in the United States -- at least not yet. Whether we are herded into gas chambers or thrown out to starve, we are equally dead. Meanwhile, as prophets and rebels as far removed from one another as Lao Tzu and Boudicca and Jesus and Marx have said of oppressors, by their deeds do we know them -- and through our responses to that knowledge do we come to know ourselves. 

*****

More Relevant Remarks on the Comment Threads of Other Websites

“Cheerios Drops Genetically Modified Ingredients”  Reader Supported News posts a USA Todayreport, and I respond with a wise-ass remark: “Yeah, good for General Mills. But remember that covering up product danger by lying about is standard capitalist practice.”

 ***

“Capitalism, Ecology and the Official Invisibility of Women”  I posted a link to this Chris Williams piece last week, but the associated comment thread, already lengthy, has since turned into a thought-provoking dialogue between me and two other posters, one a fellow socialist, the other a person difficult to afix to any pin, whether of the T.S. Eliot sort or otherwise. 

LB/5 January 2014 

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Concern and Community in a Time of Growing Despair

IF YOU'RE OLD or disabled and no longer exploitable for profit and you are trying to survive in the industrial world's most deliberately cruel nation,  you are daily forced to endure the kind of constant anxiety that may eventually kill you or drive you to suicide. The government is now every bit as much your enemy as the fat-cat bosses were before you were tossed off the job, and that's because those same greedy bastards who were always trying to make you work more hours for less pay have bought off all the politicians and most of the upper-level bureaucrats as well. As a result the constitution you once trusted (and if you are male probably swore to defend with your life) has been nullified and subverted to the point it has become nothing more than the proverbial toilet paper upon which the One Percent routinely wipes its metaphorical ass. And it no longer matters whether their wholly-owned politicians are openly sadistic Republicans like Alan Simpson, who sneeringly described Social Security-dependent elders as “greedy geezers,” or serpent-tongued Democrats like this president who so often shape-shifts from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer and then back again whenever his (always) Machiavellian agenda demands some new deception.
 

As I have said before and will continue saying until I die, it is obvious the Betrayer's intent and for that matter the intent of all today's elected (i.e. bought-and-paid-for) politicians is to reduce younger people to slavery and exterminate those of us who are now dangerous subversives merely because we have lived long enough to remember the better times Ayn Rand capitalism has now stolen from us forever.

 

Meanwhile the Betrayer's purpose has become obvious enough we can now name it with certainty: he intends to go into history as Wall Street's most faithful and reliably obedient servant ever and thereby ensure he and his descendants live the same pampered lives as the wealthiest aristocrats – never mind the color line will never allow the president and his family entry into the vindictively racist, adamantly all-white aristocracy itself. He knows – and you have to give him a kind of sleazoid credit for the morally imbecilic cunning with which he acts upon this knowledge – exactly who rules the global plantation into which our ever-more-enslaved and desperate planet is being transformed, and he will do anything in his imperial power to serve the Ruling Class. He is the perfect butler, the perfect overseer, the perfect factotum. He does not give so much as a Marie Antoinette damn if We the People are at last awakening to the fact he's the most dishonest U.S. president ever. If we dare resist, he will crush us at home as surely as he now crushes his enemies abroad.

 

That context – the ugly truth the genocidal war against Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid is now being led by the man so many of us hoped would protect us – was deliberately submerged by the Josef Goebbels clones who manage Ruling Class Media, and with the One Percent cleverly pointing its Romney-Ryan assault weapon at our heads, our fears thus enabled the Betrayer to lie his way into a second term. (I admit I voted for him twice, first time by choice, because I believed his “change we can believe in” Big Lies – that he supported single-payer/public-option health care, would enact Employee Free Choice and restore our constitutional rights – second time because Romney/Ryan terrified me into not voting my default preference, the Socialist Workers Party.) But whether it was acknowledged or not, the threat was always there Obama would do again what he had done in his first term and prove himself to be, behind his his Afro-Democrat disguise and his mastery of rhetoric, another Richard Milhous Nixon, at last fulfilling the Nixonian dream of being the man who struck the final blow against the constitutional democracy the One Percent has despised since the days of the Banker's Plot, when the Wall Street aristocrats collaborated with Nazi Germany in a (failed) attempt to topple President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But Barack the Betrayer has in fact done much worse: were there a medal entitled “Most Obedient Servant of Wall Street,” Obama would have already won it.

 

Yet amidst all this misery and anxiety and wretchedness and sense of impending doom in a realm so transformed by capitalism into fascism it now bears only the most superficial resemblance to the nation in which I was born, the human spirit yet prevails in myriad ways. It reminds me of Lao Tzu's description of Tao as translated by Richard Wilhelm – “you look for it and you see nothing special; you act according to it and you find no end” – and that is what the above photographs are really about. I am blessed to live in a senior housing project that has evolved into a genuine community, thereby of course disproving all the Ruling Class lies claiming subsidized housing breeds alienation and irresponsibility, and when I limped outside today to hobble to a bus stop on a first-of-the-month errand, about 15 of my neighbors were gathered in the paved courtyard. They were seated on outdoor chairs and at outdoor tables, a jolly circle in the afternoon sun, and I was greeted by their smiles and friendly salutations and reminded again of how last summer maybe a dozen of us – even some who are severely disabled – had volunteered to paint the rusting steel bars of the courtyard fence. I spent hours grinding off the rust spots with an electric sander, then near the end of the workday grabbed a Pentax MX and a pair of SMCP-M lenses (a 28mm and a 100mm, each an f/2.8) and photographed a few of the painters as they finished the job. If our species is to survive what is to come – what indeed is already upon us – it will only be by such small local but definitively human efforts. The film is Fujicolor 400. All photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

 

LB/2 May 2013

 

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