Moron Nation Rules (with Robert Reich's Help); Millennials Suffer Worsening Poverty; Revolutionary Fervor of Staffers Aids Sanders Campaign

Men of Tacoma Clinic Defense on guard. Another image is here. Photo by Loren Bliss © 2016. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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THERE ARE THREE separate stories in this week's edition of OAN – four if you count the all-man Tacoma Clinic Defense photo I'm publishing as a clarification to whatever misleading impressions might have resulted from last week's TCD picture that showed only one man and four women. These facts alone are scarcely preface-worthy, but one of the other stories – the lead story in fact – has proven so damnably difficult to write, it demands an introduction.

Though I hate to begin an essay by recitation of all the reasons it is badly written, in this instance its disclosures are important enough I am willing to endure the mortification of yet another public confrontation with the utter (and utterly contradictory) absurdity implicit in the term “dyslexic writer.” 

Years ago, probably in 1969, when I began the first draft of what became the epic but doomed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” the 24-year odyssey of photography, research and writing that in 1983 was disseminated not via libraries and bookstores but rather as a cloud of windblown ash emanating from a smoldering ruin near the rural Washington state town of Alger, I encountered for the first time the challenge of textually addressing several new ideas at once.

The new ideas in “Dancer” – remember this was 1969, before feminist researchers had rescued the now somewhat more widely recognized evidence of our species' matrifocal (if not definitively matriarchal) past – were its hypothesis (that the Counterculture was the first wave of a spontaneous revolution against patriarchy), plus all the long-suppressed (and thus hopelessly obscure) material from folklore and mythology upon which that hypothesis was based.

Hence, if my conclusion was to make any sense, I had to first educate my readers. How, then – given that no paragraph should ever contain more than one new idea – would I write the book's opening?

It was, in fact, a problem to which I never found a satisfactory solution. It is also among the reasons I was so overjoyed when, in 1983, the late Cicely Nichols volunteered to edit the manuscript. Surely Cicely, a long-time friend whose credits included the editorship of Grove Press, would be able to cleave through the dyslexic frenzy of verbal convulsions – imagine, if you will, the conceptual equivalent of trying to wrestle hands-full of wet spaghetti into a stable rectilinear form – that always, always, always was the exasperating culmination of my efforts to write a satisfactory beginning to “Dancer.”

After the destruction of “Dancer” in Washington state – by a blaze that was started on the same day (1 September 1983) and indeed at the exact moment Cicely and I were meeting in Manhattan (7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time; 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time [which we know from the partially melted electric clock at the fire's point of origin] ) – I had assumed all such tasks were forever behind me.

But now, with this piece revealing Robert Reich's malicious and perhaps even gleeful participation in the making of Moron Nation, I am confronted with exactly the same editorial dynamic. The real story is Reich's breathtaking dishonesty. But to show its significance, I must first demonstrate the existence of Moron Nation, a condition our One Percent masters do their best to conceal. Yet if my initial focus is on Moron Nation, Reich's treachery is reduced to a kind of sequel – buried so deeply in the prefatory text it can readily be ignored. And if I focus first on Reich's professorial malfeasance, the reaction is likely to be “so what”? That's why writing this essay has already generated three top-to-bottom rewrites and consumed more than 36 hours.

Because I have decided that first exemplifying Moron Nation and only then describing Reich's role in it is the best way to approach this story – actually the better of two unsatisfactory choices – I beseech your patience. Thank you.

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“OBVIOUSLY – AND TRAGICALLY for our homeland and the world beyond – Moron Nation extends as deeply into the Left as it does into the Right”: so I wrote on the comment thread of a Politico report as republished by Reader Supported News.

Headlined “Would Sri Srinivasan Be Exxon-Mobile's Justice?,” the report discloses the plutocratic bias of the man who is emerging as President Obama's most likely choice to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of the notoriously reactionary Justice Antonin Scalia.

To put the associated debate in its proper context, here is the rest of my contribution to the “Srinivasan/ Exxon-Mobile” thread:

Given Obama's Barack-the-Betrayer record, the one certainty in this matter is that he will appoint a supporter of Citizens United. 

Indeed, the perpetuation of Citizens United is no doubt now the primary mandate of his One Percent masters.

Hence a defender of the petroleum cartel – who by his defense has proven himself an advocate of what might be termed “divine right capitalism” – is not an unlikely choice.

As I have said before, this appointment will reveal the real Obama – the Goldwater conservative who hid himself behind a Big Lie of fake “progressive” promises – which means whomever he picks will be acceptable to the Republicans with whom he clandestinely collaborates.

A while later, after my comment was repeatedly down-thumbed via RSN's equivalent of readership voting, I added the following:

Once again I am appalled by the fanatical closed-mindedness of those who remain in denial about who and what Obama is and how he conned us by his unprecedented use of the Big Lie.

Indeed it is worse than denial. It is, in fact, as clinically delusional as any of the absurd beliefs that characterize Abrahamic fundamentalism whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim...

Moreover, note that Obama's behavior apropos the Supreme Court vacancy is exactly as, on 14-15 February, I predicted it would be.

See here  (scroll down), also here.

For reasons their content will make obvious, my remarks accessed via the first of these two links deserves reprinting here in full:

Several hours ago I discovered my main comment, which pointed out that based on Obama's neo-liberal, anti-New-Deal record he is likely to appoint a Scalia clone, had been removed from this thread. Likewise the accompanying remarks by several supportive posters.

At first this was, of course, profoundly disturbing. The main reason I cherish RSN is its editorial freedom, which literally has no equal at any other Leftist website in the United States. Hence I have been a regular participant in RSN discussions since its founding. I also covered Occupy Tacoma for RSN, relying on the skills acquired during a journalism career that spans nearly seven decades (1956 to the present) to provide RSN with relevant photographs and text.

Initially I was hurt, disappointed and outraged. But after an extensive exchange of e-mails with Editor/Founder Marc Ash, I am convinced the disappearance of my posts – from here and from the thread of an expose' revealing the gross dishonesty of the Clinton campaign – was the result of unfortunate circumstances that are not likely to recur. Indeed, I have Mr. Ash's assurance the posts will be restored later today.

Hence my gratitude, both for Mr. Ash's responsiveness and for the reassurance RSN remains what it has always been – an exemplar, perhaps our very best, of that most precious freedom (allegedly) assured us by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Next is what I posted after the circumstances were somewhat more clarified:

Unfortunately not just the post in question (see my "Several hours ago," above) but the entire related (and mostly supportive) dialogue it engendered was irremediably deleted.

Though Editor Marc Ash and I differ on the source of the deletion – he says he regards it as accidental, while I regard the attendant manipulations of time signatures and the simultaneous deletion of a related post on another thread as incontrovertible proof the perpetrator is a Hilleryite infiltrator acting with maximum malice – Mr. Ash has nevertheless asked me to reconstruct and summarize the entire dialogue.

This requires two separate posts, as the suppressed material included at least a half dozen posts.

My comment was prompted by speculation on what sort of Supreme Court nominee Obama might submit given the mandates of his Ruling Class masters, his legacy quest, his neo-liberal ideology and his need for senatorial approval. I pointed out the only path to an accurate answer is analysis of his record, which in bitter truth defines Obama as a Goldwater Republican who won election under two false flags: that of the Democratic Party, and that of the progressive consciousness gullible voters – myself included – foolishly assumed to be universal amongst the USian Empire's oppressed minorities.

Hence I summarized how Obama the Orator mobilized voter support with the Big Lie of “change we can believe in” but promptly shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer.

Then as Barack the Betrayer he cut food stamps $90 per family/per month, asserting – like some latter-day Josef Goebbels – the resultant starvation budgets will protect children from hunger; he dealt the final death blow to organized labor by sandbagging the Employee Free Choice Act; he permanently betrayed health care reform to forever define U.S. health care as a privilege of wealth rather than the human right it is in the civilized world; he openly collaborated with implicitly genocidal efforts to cut and/or privatize Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all other elements of the already inadequate socioeconomic safety net; and he not only broke his pledge to restore our constitutional rights but by his unprecedented whistle-blower persecutions and other brazen depredations has defined himself more of a tyrant than even Nixon.

Moreover, if one examines the nature of the present-day U.S., it becomes obvious that – just as its ideological founding fathers are the Nazi war criminals the Ruling Class embraced after World War II – so is the Citizens United decision the judicial cornerstone of the resultant (implicitly fascist) plutocracy.

Ergo, it is obvious Obama's One Percent masters will demand he give them a Supreme Court that does not even obliquely jeopardize Citizens United.

In other words, Obama's most likely course of action is to appoint a Scalia clone.

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MORE DISMAYING EVIDENCE of Moron Nation's disabled political consciousness lies in how few people seem able to grasp the simple, obvious-as-sunrise fact the Mainstream Media is owned by the same One Percenters who own most U.S. politicians and therefore own all U.S. governments at every level.

That explains why these governments whether local, state or federal, most politicians and the Mainstream Media itself all speak with the same voices, as for example in the national pep rallies that preceded the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Syria. It also explains the lavish coverage of Trump or Hillary, the methodical suppression of news about Sanders and the malicious slanders of the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter.

But how many times must this be stated before it soaks in? Has the U.S. citizenry been utterly purged of the ability to reason? As I have said so many times before, and said again on the comment thread of John Nichols' thought-provoking analysis of “How We Got Trumped by the Media” after it was republished by RSN from The Nation:

...Mainstream Media is the first for-profit, totally and forever privatized, all-government ministry of propaganda.

That means its endorsements, whether outright or obliquely (as by its apportionment of coverage), always reflect our overlords' intentions.

Ergo, it is obvious the One Percent has chosen Trump as its primary figurehead and Hillary as the alternate should Trump lose.

Nor should this surprise anyone who knows the history of USian fascism. It began with the failed Bankers Plot of 1934; bolstered itself by the post-World-War-II embrace of Nazi war criminals; eliminated its enemies via the purges and/or assassinations of all leading Leftists and liberals (Communists, socialists, Keynesians, intellectuals) during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s; became the creeping, slowly boiled-frog fascism that began with Carter; and has now erupted into the rampaging fascism of today.

Then, to underscore my point:

Also, here's a Josef Goebbels speech, complete with English translation, for those who dismiss Trump's violent hostility to reporters and photographers as “just politics.” Watch and listen – if you dare – and note the ways in which Goebbels' 1933 oratory is similar to Trump's today.

Coincidence? Not if Trump, in preparation for becoming the first USian Fuehrer, has been studying the speeches of Goebbels, Hitler and Mussolini.

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ANOTHER TRUTH SEEMINGLY lost to moronation is how Obama's tactics typify how the Democrats use the Big Lie to obscure their role as the enablers of whatever the One Percent demands through its Republican mouthpieces.

Which explains Obama the Orator's obviously pre-planned shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer.

Just as the Betrayer's One Percent masters intended, “change we can believe in” was the most outrageous, most politically destructive Big Lie in U.S. presidential history. Moreover, given both the USian Empire's Nazi-enhanced skill at psychological warfare and Madison Avenue's predatory skill at long-range psychological manipulation, it is obvious the deception and the devastating disappointment it fostered has (deliberately) alienated more U.S. voters than any political act in the nation's post-Civil-War history.

The message is undeniable: why bother to vote if even when the candidate encourages “hope” and promises “change” the result is instead a (defiantly imposed) worsening of our circumstances.

And now, once again, in “Documents Show Obama Lobbied Strongly Against Transparency Reform,” we are confronted with Obama's penchant for lying – undeniable proof of his bottomless contempt for us, we the people, and his relentless hostility to the very constitutional rights he pledged to restore:

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IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to discuss Moron Nation without considering the state of the nation's schools.

Though I was never an education writer per se, my interest in the policies and theoretical issues of USian public education began during my senior year at Holston High School in Knox County, Tennessee, 1957-1958. It was an interest that became professionally relevant during the middle third of my journalism career, which included the years I was a part-time college instructor (1975 through 1982), and it remains a compelling interest even now.

During my teaching years I noted amongst my younger students the worsening civic ignorance that resulted from the radical downsizing of public-school curricula – specifically the methodical elimination of any courses that might teach students their constitutional rights. Imposition of this Moron-Nation-type of induced ignorance was the One Percent's response to anti-Vietnam War protests and the Countercultural Rebellion in general. The Ruling Class seemed to believe that people who were not allowed to learn their rights would never be able to assert them. As a result, the needs of younger students for remedial education began disrupting my classes, which were about photography and journalism. Whenever the Bill of Rights (particularly the First Amendment) was relevant to our discussions, I found myself teaching civics and U.S. history as well as camera work and news writing. Thus I have some real-world familiarity with how the creation of Moron Nation became one of the undisclosed purposes of USian public education. But now I am getting ahead of myself; hence let us return to the 1957-1958 academic year,

In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the world's first space satellite, which triggered throughout the USian homeland an intense, often passionate, sometimes hateful conflict between proponents of two diametrically opposed pedagogies. One group would have sustained the USian pre-Moron-Nation compliance with capitalism's insistence the public schools produce “well-adjusted” (that is, ignorant but conformist and therefore reliably obedient) graduates as demanded by corporate personnel experts. The other group would have adopted the Soviet (actually European) mandate that graduates acquire the foundation of a classical education – including the various exercises in logical thinking provided by in-depth studies of literature, science, mathematics and humanities.

For some reason – I no longer remember why (though probably because I was the managing editor of the school paper and a top student in speech and drama classes) – I was asked to participate in a public debate matching one pedagogy against the other. As I recall, I was free to choose either side, but of course – because that's where my heart was even at age 17 – I chose to advocate the Soviet pedagogy, and in preparation for the actual event, I steeped myself in everything I could find regarding educational theory. Again if memory serves, the debate – conducted at night in the high-school auditorium before a standing-room-only audience of parents, teachers and fellow students – was declared a draw. Years afterward I was told the eloquence of my presentation – never mind support for anything “Commie” in that era would have otherwise provoked immediate ostracism – was among the reasons I was voted “Boy Most Likely to Succeed.” (Holston, named after the nearby river, has since been absorbed by expansion of Knoxville's city limits and downgraded to a middle school.)

Decades later, my interest in pedagogy would again serve me well when I was a reporter assigned to investigations or the coverage of public affairs.

The stories I wrote as an investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal (Jersey City, N.J.) included an award-winning series in 1970 that revealed the magnitude of the local school-funding crisis. The Jersey City school board later used my reports as supportive evidence in its successful lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of school levies. (The court upheld Jersey City's argument that local school levies, which are based on local property values and therefore on the presumptive ability of local citizens to pay, are unconstitutionally discriminatory against lower-income school districts.)

Stories in the public affairs category (1976-1981) included dozens of reports on education policy, most of them focused on the Legislature's struggle to define “basic education” in Washington state, a fight that rages unabated even now,  35 years later. One such story, a 1978 Sigma Delta Chi winner, documented the tribulations and triumphs of an academically superior high school caught between ChristoFascist fanatics and secular rationalists in a bitterly and sometimes violently contested war over over course content and teaching methods.

The continued expansion of Moron Nation – chiefly by the denial of adequate public-school funding – remains among the most devastating consequences of such infighting. But the ruination caused by reduced funding – which (though few dare say it) is a direct expression of hostility to public education itself – is nationwide.  The hostility seems to have two primary sources: the grassroots rejection of non-biblical learning that's symptomatic of the frightening expansion of Christian Fundamentalist power in the USian homeland, and the Ayn Rand economic doctrine imposed by our One Percent overlords, which condemns as wasted money any government expenditure that presumably benefits the 99 Percent.

For those who wish to pursue the subject in greater depth, Henry A. Giroux, whose  website is here, has documented – probably more thoroughly than any scholar on earth – the destruction of USian public education. He writes in provocative detail about the downsizing of school districts and the conversion of their few remaining schools to zero-tolerance training camps, the purpose of which is to provide capitalism with legions of mindlessly obedient workers and to eliminate, via the school-to-prison pipeline and the prison-industrial system, anyone who dares resist.

Moronation has thus reduced the USian citizenry to the most frighteningly ignorant population  in the industrial world. Its ignorance is so huge, so bottomless, so malignant, many fear it is the inevitable precursor to extinction-class disaster, whether by nuclear war, environmental apocalypse or both. Thus too it seems the damning statement H. L. Mencken made in 1920 – “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron” – is already the epitaph for the United States – and may become the epitaph for the rest of humanity.

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BUT THE COLLEGES and universities – surely their scholars will save us before Moron Nation goes terminal. Right?

That is precisely what I believed until last week, when I read the essay by Robert Reich entitled “The American Fascist.”

Reich, the former secretary of labor who at the end of Bill Clinton's first term resigned to protest the president's vicious anti-labor policies and thereby earned my presumably undying respect, is a professor at the University of California/Berkeley and a scholar with impeccable credentials.  He nevertheless knowingly – that is, with what U.S. Courts call “malice aforethought” – penned and published the following mostly-true statement that includes one breathtakingly deceptive lie:

“But Trump has finally reached a point where parallels between his presidential campaign and the fascists of the first half of the 20th century – lurid figures such as Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, and Francisco Franco – are too evident to overlook.”

The lie is Reich's inclusion of Stalin in the list of fascists. Indeed it was Stalin and his Red Army that saved the world – at the inconceivable cost of as many as 43.3 million Soviet soldiers and civilians – from Hitler's Nazism and Mussolini's fascism.

That Reich's lie is obviously a purposeful Big Lie – one cunningly intended to serve the mind-paralyzing function identified by George Orwell as “doublethink”  – is underscored by the fact most USians regardless of age or education are so ill-informed, they have no idea that without Soviet assistance, the United States and its allies would not have been able to defeat Hitler's Wehrmacht – the best trained, best equipped war machine of its time.

Nor do USians understand that socialism and fascism are antitheticals. Both, we are taught, are “unAmerican,” therefore “bad,” and from the viewpoint of Christian zealotry, so unforgivably sinful they damn their proponents to the fires of hell forever. The resultant combination of ignorance and fear – which Reich's Big Lie intentionally perpetuates – locks USian minds closed as tightly as any miser's safe and thereby (exactly as intended) makes political consciousness-raising impossible.

Never in my life did I imagine I would encounter such a deliberate falsehood in a manuscript by a Harvard-educated professor, an alleged liberal who teaches at one of the nation's leading universities. But I did – and frankly I am still in shock. Hence here is the full text of my comment-thread response, which unavoidably includes earlier versions of the points I made above:

Mr. Reich's historically and academically dishonest inclusion of Joseph Stalin in his list of fascists is far worse than an error. Mr. Reich obviously knows better – that while Stalin was indeed a tyrant, he was most assuredly no fascist.

Thus it is obvious Mr. Reich maliciously chose to use his professorship to not only deliberately disseminate a falsehood but to contribute to the further dumbing down of the USian population – specifically by fabricating yet another variant of the already hopelessly illiterate, breathtakingly wrong notion, omnipresent throughout Moron Nation, that there is no difference between socialism and fascism.

By so doing – by literally nurturing the worst-in-the-industrial-world USian national ignorance – Mr. Reich has in all probability laid the groundwork for the real fascists to slander Mr. Sanders' democratic socialism as both “Stalinism” and “fascism” simultaneously.

I am frankly appalled by Mr. Reich's arrogant deception – so much so, all the (considerable) respect I had for him is gone forever. Indeed, with “friends” like Mr. Reich, Mr. Sanders scarcely needs enemies.

Later, in response to the down-thumbed jeers of other RSN posters, I added the following:

The number of otherwise intelligent, well-educated USian people who have been rendered politically brain-dead by the relentless deluge of anti-socialist, pro-capitalist propaganda is beyond appalling.

As best I can do in one sentence, the difference between socialism and fascism is that the former advocates economic democracy, while the latter advocates zero-tolerance economic hierarchy.

The core purpose of socialism, achievable only when we the people own the major means of production, is facilitating life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by the abolition of economic differences of class, race, ethnicity and gender. “From each according to ability; to each according to need.” Thus socialism seeks to end the One-Percent-versus-99-Percent paradigm that forms the inherently oppressive, inherently exploitative basis of capitalism.

Fascism is literally socialism's diametrical opposite. Its core principle is “der Fuehrerprinzip,” a secular version of the divine rights formerly claimed by emperors and kings. Its economic tyranny is implicit in the quote attributed to Mussolini: “Fascism should be more properly called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

(There was more to my comment, but it was in response to other posters on the thread and is therefore not relevant here.)

What is relevant is how Professor Reich's participation in the process of moronation tells me Moron Nation is far more egregiously triumphant – and thus far more carefully scripted and far more vastly conspiratorial – than ever I imagined.

Indeed the willful participation of a high-ranking scholar in the malicious dumbing-down of the United States is tantamount to the knowing participation of high-ranking German scholars in the Nazification of the Weimar Republic. (No wonder a fascist is dominating the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.)

Reich's role in moronation also tells me we must recognize the damning statement H. L. Mencken made 96 years ago is just another part of the elaborate camouflage behind the One Percenters and their servants in academia, media and government hide while they engineer our subjugation.

I have no idea how we might defend ourselves against such malevolence. But I do know if we recognize it for what it is and name it and stop blaming ourselves for what it is doing to us, we will have taken the first step toward evolving adequate countermeasures.

Meanwhile, if Bernie Sanders is the person he claims to be, he will surely purge his campaign of Robert Reich the Smirking Professor of the Big Lie.

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THE COMMENT ABOUT Hillary mentioned in “suppressed material” (far) above documents her clandestine collaboration with the Christofascist opponents of women's sexual freedom. Its reconstructed version is here. Alas, it was written, as all writers know is true of any such reconstruction, with the sure (and surely depressing) knowledge the second effort will not ever be as well-stated as the original.

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“YOUNG AMERICANS ARE now poorer than retired people,” the newscaster/blogger Thom Hartmann reported recently.

“That's the stunning take away  from a new study by The Guardian,” he said.

Furthermore, the paper says the problem of abject poverty, though most obvious amongst Millennials who live in the United States, has become a defining characteristic of their generational peers throughout Europe as well.

Hartmann elaborated on these dismal facts at some length (click the above link to access his work), though unfortunately he failed to give us a link to the original story, which I provide here and which contains much more information than Hartmann had space to provide.

When he asked, “What do you think? Tell us here,” I responded accordingly:

Fact: The Ruling Class aka the One Percent has been ranting about the necessity for forcibly reducing the global population (i.e. genocide) at least since the late 1950s.

Fact: Death camps, ethnic “cleansing” and other obvious forms of genocide are no longer fashionable (save perhaps amongst Donald Trump's supporters and others of the fascist/Nazi persuasion).

Fact: Hence the most effective method of genocide – especially since under capitalism, the victims themselves can be blamed for their own deaths – is economic downsizing.

Need I say more?

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NORMALLY I DO not post more than a few words from an article on which I am commenting, but “Bernie and the Groundswell on Which He Stands” is perhaps the most inspiring dispatch I have yet seen emerge from the hurly-burly of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Besides that, “Groundswell” stands in brightly positive counterpoint to the gloomy negativity of “Moron Nation” and “Millennial Poverty” stories, which means it fulfills a promise I made to myself a couple of weeks ago – that given the descending darkness in which we now seem fated to abide, I will try as best I can to find an uplifting report with which to conclude what is all too often a passage through disquieting realities.

Hopefully that antidote to depression will be, as it is today, a significant report. But it may be something as mundane as a joyful or triumphant dog story, the very sort of anecdote I as an unapologetic dog lover always appreciate – especially now that thanks to young friends I am blessed by a few joyful big-dog hours every week.

Here, then, are the lead grafs of “Groundswell,” a vitally informative piece  republished by RSN in which The Guardian's veteran journalist Paul Hilder describes the revolution-minded origins of the Sanders campaign and the internal dynamics that have sustained its unprecedented victories:

The Bernie campaign is working toward a political revolution, and they’re playing to win.

Over the last few weeks, I worked my way inside the belly of the Bernie campaign. I saw the virtual chat rooms where thousands of super-volunteers are coordinating, and mapped their digital infrastructure, fast growing into something more powerful even than the Obama campaign.

I traveled through five battleground states and spoke with hundreds of his supporters, as well as analysts and insiders. What I found was the story of a political start-up growing exponentially in a cauldron of American discontent.

Yes, I think Hilder's text really is worth reading. There's even, near the bottom of the comment thread, a good-humored exchange between another poster and I.

LB/15 March 2016

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Looming Blindness and the Slow-Motion Genocide of Social-Service Cuts Make 2016 My Most MiserableYear

TO MY HORROR, I have learned the cataract surgery I had in late 2014 has failed. I am again going blind, this time from a post-operative condition called posterior capsule opacity – essentially the failure of a production-line surgeon to remove enough of the cataract cells to prevent them from growing back in a new inner-eye locale.

But now the slow-motion genocide of cuts to social services has left me without any means to pay the out-of-pocket cost of corrective surgery, which is $608 plus an additional sum in co-payments of approximately $200 – a total of $808.  

It might as well be $800,800.  Either sum is impossibly beyond my reach. 

Thus – barring a miracle – I will end my life a helpless, hopeless blind man, unless of course I am fortunate enough to die before declining vision forces me into the nightmare of assisted living in some miserably neglectful, piss-reeking nursing home.

In other words, 2016 – though it has hardly begun – has become the most miserable year of my entire life.

Before learning on 6 January of my encroaching blindness, I was already in extended shock at the magnitude of the cutbacks imposed on my 2016 income. It had been the worst yet of the now-inevitable Dismal Decembers – the annual political-becomes-personal nadir-of-reckoning in what is the cruelest month of all for U.S. lower income people. This year – a year in which the Big Lie Democrats claim to have “restored” social services – my monthly Medicare Extra Help stipend was cut from $22.90 to $4. My monthly food stamp allotment was slashed from $103 to $17. And, as noted in November, my telephone subsidy, approximately $17 per month, was abolished entirely.

In 2016, a year in which we seniors and disabled people are notoriously denied a Social Security cost-of-living increase – my barely livable monthly income of $1263 has been chopped by at least $121.90 – “at least” because I can only estimate the impact of an immediate 16 percent increase in Medicare Part D prescription drug co-payments and a pending 33.3 percent increase in local transit fares.

(Yes, I realize $121.90 is mere pocket change for a sneering One Percenter or any of the super-fortunate USian suck-asses whose abject obedience to capitalist tyranny enables them to cling to living-wage jobs. But for someone on a fixed income of scarcely more than $15,000 per year, the loss of $121.90 per month is total, irremediable ruin. What it does to me is eliminate every last penny of my discretionary income – this in a year in which I already [before the doctors discovered my impending blindness] – needed denture adjustment [approximately $100] and three pairs of new shoes [another $150 at least] – money I no longer have no matter the state of my eyesight.)

But the point here is not the hopelessness of my own circumstances – the fact I too like so many others in this ever-more-openly malignant nation must now choose carefully whether to spend my meager income on shelter, food, medicine or clothing – all of which civilized nations regard as human rights. Nor is it the fact my encroaching blindness makes all those choices ultimately meaningless.

The point is the documents I quoted here on 25 November 2015 only hint at the savage magnitude of the social-service cuts inflicted by the Republicans and their Democrat collaborators in the Washington State Legislature – cuts signed into law without so much as a whisper of protest by Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee.

As previously reported, one of the documents I cited was a slickly art-directed, expensively printed Democratic Party mailer boastfully claiming its legislators had “restored” social services. The other was a grimly unsigned notice from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services announcing the state would no longer subsidize telephone service for lower-income people. Together, the two documents clearly demonstrate the ugly truth the Democrats are (again) operating as the party of the Big Lie.

Since then, it has (again) become obvious the Democrats are – perhaps even more than the Republicans – the enablers of austerity, a clever euphemism for slow-motion genocide: the methodical extermination of those of us who, whether because of age or disability, are no longer exploitable for capitalist profit. For now our already-bloodied noses are rubbed in the fact the legislators – the bought-and-paid-for strumpets of the One Percent who are always trying to bullshit us into believing U.S. “democracy” is anything but cruel deception – also slashed Medicare premium subsidies and hacked away still more dollars from food-stamp allowances.

But an apparent gag order – unprecedented in my years of covering state and local politics – has made it thus far impossible to determine the actual magnitude of the cuts. The Democrat legislators appear to have adopted a policy of ignoring any constituent who dares complain about the cuts, even those who send letters. Normally vocal advocacy groups – organizations necessarily aligned with the Democratic Party and therefore undoubtedly silenced by the Democrats' pre-election bullying – have yet to utter a single word of protest. Welfare bureaucrats, when pressed for information, reluctantly mutter “the legislature did it” but refuse to disclose further details.

All I want to know is who to blame – what perpetrators to name in public print. But even my own sources – the remnants of a handful of insiders whose veracity and reliability were established by years of providing accurate information – are refusing to answer my questions about the cuts. I am not an accountant, and without expert assistance, the closed-door secrecy of the budget process and the opacity of the budget itself nullifies my investigative reporting skills. As always, the operant principle of capitalist governance is “fuck the 99 Percent.”

Meanwhile, the local “mainstream media” – that is, the local branches of the plutocracy's de facto ministry of propaganda – continue to ignore the story, which any even halfway competent reporter of my generation would have pounced on. This in turn strongly suggests the media silence about the cutbacks is deliberate – truth-suppression in obedience to the plutocratic cabal that owns all U.S. major media and all Democrat and Republican politicians as well. Such is what passes for “journalism” here in the de facto Fourth Reich – where our capitalist overlords have by their diabolical cunning given themselves not only a Josef Goebbels-type propaganda apparatus but one that earns them obscene profits by its lies and disinformation. 

Not that I'm surprised. What is being employed to hide these newest social-service cuts is merely the logical extension of the Big Lie tactic the Democrats first employed in President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, most notably in the slogan “change we can believe in” – which “change” turned out to be Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. 

Now, just as the Betrayer tried to cover up his 2014 food-stamp cuts with a truly Orwellian lie – claiming the cuts “make sure America's children don't go hungry” – so are his state-level minions doing likewise.
 
The strategic advantage in this sort of Big Lie is found in the fact the Moron Nation electorate accepts it without question. This is partly due to conditioned ignorance, partly due to the ever-more-obnoxious, ever-more-implicitly reactionary cult of “positive thinking” by which the white USian 99 percenters who still have jobs deliberately blind themselves to what is going on around them. Thus they are psychologically distanced from capitalism's socioeconomic and political atrocities in exactly the same way the citizens of Nazi Germany were shielded from the more obvious atrocities of their own nation. Thus too when we the victims complain or protest, we are confronted with hostile disbelief and denounced as welfare queens or “greedy geezers.” 

Fortunately there are still a few websites, among them Reader Supported News, that remain willing to report just how truly wretched life in the USian homeland has become, not just for elderly and disabled people, but especially for women, particularly women of color, whose likelihood of suffering death in childbirth is nearly four times that of white women.

Because I am an old man, my time is obviously ending, and though it surely hurts when the capitalists and their factotum bureaucrats and politicians kick me in the balls, my pain has little affect on what is to come. But when you kill the mothers, you murder the very source of life. And this nation's deliberately deadly, methodically sustained misogyny exemplifies more vividly than any of capitalism's other atrocities its unconscionable threat to our species' survival.

LB/11 January 2016

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Memoir: How We the People Gave Birth to Moron Nation

MANY PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY the younger folks I've come to know through recent political activism, tell me I'm being grossly unfair when I denounce the United States as Moron Nation.

But most of these critics weren't alive in 1957 and 1958, when We the People responded to the breathtaking Soviet triumph of Sputnik I.

Misleadingly, a new, post-Sputnik order seemed manifest in U.S. government policy. We would now focus on becoming genuinely educated. The result, the Ruling Class assured us, would be an era of capitalist technological brilliance in which the U.S. would perpetuate its world domination.

The government thus enacted the National Defense Education Act with loans and grants to encourage studies in mathematics, science and engineering. The high-school guidance-counselors – this was in those halcyon days before students were routinely drugged into submission – began dutifully pushing their charges in the requisite academic and military directions.

But at the grass-roots levels, the citizens were consciously choosing to become the nyekulturiny subjects of a realm now deservedly notorious for its savage anti-intellectuality and pridefully brandished ignorance.

Nor – despite the decades of disinformation that have (deliberately?) obscured what obtained – was this mandate for ignorance imposed from above.

It was instead truly the people's choice, a spontaneous choice made at the grassroots level by millions of citizens and expressed by thousands of local school boards.

That's why it is not a choice you will ever read about in the history books. But I was there, a part of the process by which the choice was made, which is why now when challenged I can report what truly happened.

***

From the perspective of U.S. high-school students, the Soviet Union's orbiting of Sputnik I on 4 October 1957 provided two unique opportunities.

One was for planned disruptions in study halls, a “beep, beep, beep” sound that mimicked the satellite's radio transmissions. In study-hall mode, it started with a single “beep” by one person at one side of the room, continued through its width via a human chain of beepers and ended at the other side, as if the little orbiter were passing overhead. Sometimes – depending on the size and configuration of the particular study hall (most were in auditoriums) – the disruptive sounds of bogus passage were uttered down the room's long access or even on a diagonal, typically the hypotenuse of the space as divided into two right triangles. But usually it was via linear progression across the study hall's width. And however it was perpetrated, it was invariably accompanied by exclamations of outrage from the teachers who were serving as proctors and giggles from the students – especially from the girls impressed by outlaw-minded boys' abilities to mouth the satellite sound without being caught and punished.

The other, more enduring opportunity Sputnik provided was participation in a serious national debate about pedagogy – specifically the U.S. versus the Soviet Union in their approaches to education.

As defined by school officials, the U. S. approach was to use school as a socialization facility to produce “well-adjusted” (that is, obediently conformist) graduates who would function profitably in capitalist society.

The contrasting Soviet approach – which is really the European approach (though few dared defy the omnipresent anti-Communist censors to say so) – was to immerse all students in grade-appropriate summations of the intellectual legacy of human experience and allow each student to pursue those inputs to the appropriate level of intensity and competence.

Again as claimed by school officials, the U.S. approach was “democratic” in that it (allegedly) treated everyone as equals through 12th grade. Regardless of one's interests or abilities, everyone was exposed to the same (deliberately mediocre) curricula. Thus in the public schools of Tennessee and Michigan, which I attended from fall 1954 through Spring 1958, the future carpenter, iron-worker or precision machinist had to pass the same two years of mathematics, three years of history and four years of English literature as the college-bound future scientist, professor, lawyer or journalist.

The end result was a one-size-fits-all diploma that, even when I was a teenager, seemed profoundly unfair. Why should a future machinist be required to labor away at studies of literature (save from genuine interest and therefore as an elective)? And why should a future academic be alienated to despair by mandatory study of literature so expurgated, diluted and Reader's Digest-ed to chaste respectability, the “Classic Comics” versions were certainly more entertaining and probably more informative as well?

One-size-fits-all high-school diploma requirements similar to those in Tennessee and Michigan – albeit with minor variations in electives and access to preliminary military training programs via the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) – were standard throughout the United States.

The so-called “Soviet” system, however – never mind it was producing 10th graders whose knowledge and understanding of the world was equal to that of many U.S. college graduates – was damned by my local public-school officials as “dictatorial” and “elitist.” Your life in such a regimen, or so the officials argued, was not your own; it was irremediably shaped and controlled by someone else. Your fate was not determined by your own free will but by a series of aptitude tests that defined the courses you studied and thus in turn determined whether you went to college or vocational school.

Yet selecting one's proper studies by aptitude testing – or so it seemed to my 17-year-old self (exactly as it does to my 74-year-old self today) – was infinitely more fair (and therefore infinitely more productive) than oppressing all students with low-grade materials that would be frustratingly irrelevant to some and infuriatingly alienating to others.

But the purpose of U.S. public education – forcible production of “well-adjusted” (i.e., submissive and malleable) citizens for the corporate state – was surely fulfilled by the adjustments its mediocrity necessitated. The future machinist went away disgruntled, feeling vaguely inferior and thereby already conditioned for exploitation by future bosses. The “normal” student did the required (mediocre) work without question and was typically rewarded with high grades, the dynamic of mediocrity so acquired thence to be duplicated throughout life, particularly in relationships with imperious bosses whether matrimonial or industrial. Meanwhile the brightest of us – kids like myself – became beatniks by default. We turned away in utter boredom, found solace in defiant sex and illegal booze and secret rowdiness and reluctantly set aside 15 cents from our cherished cigarette money for the relevant Classic Comic whenever we needed to pass a high-school English test.

A passage in a book entitled The Struggle for Control of Public Education and subtitled Market Ideology vs. Democratic Values (Michael Engel, Temple University Press: 2000) states the grass-roots pedagogic conflict very well on page 23: “While American school children were learning how to get along with their peers or bake a cherry pie, so the explanation went, Soviet children were being steeped in the hard sciences and mathematics needed to win the technological race that had become the centerpiece of the Cold War.” The quote, which Engel properly attributes, is from another work on education that's well worth reading, Herbert M. Kliebard's The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (Psychology Press: 2004).

Unfortunately neither of these books was ever allowed into the USian cultural mainstream. Each is (deliberately) censored by price – as high as $74 per volume. 

My teen-age involvement in this pedagogy fight was as a member of the first graduating class (1958) at Knox County, Tennessee's Holston High School. It began when Assistant Principal Edith J. Fewell asked me to participate in a Parent-Teacher Association-sponsored study, its title something like, “Which Is Better: U.S. Or Soviet Education.”

I was invited to join the discussion because, much to my own astonishment, I had become something of a Holston notable. A paid stringer for The Knoxville Journal and a photographer, mostly unpaid, for the school yearbook, my quest for news had quickly earned me the nickname “Scoop.” But the biggest exclamation-point of recognition came from my role as founder, managing editor and photographer of the new school's student newspaper.

Though I founded and organized the publication single-handedly, I had (significantly) understood the southern caste system well enough to recognize that I – the “Yankee” son of a “Yankee carpetbagger” (and therefore a subspecies of “white trash”) – would never be accepted as the paper's editor-in-chief. Thus I assured the properly southern, properly aristocratic Brenda Clement she would never be plagued with any real responsibilities or other demands on her already busy schedule if she were editor-in-chief and so maneuvered her onto the masthead in that role. It was that self-effacing ploy – complete with its he-who-knows-his-place submissiveness – that earned me not just the respect of my peers (who later voted me “boy most likely to succeed”), but also the approval of the school authorities.

Hence I was on the stage as a key speaker when the pedagogy discussion culminated maybe six months later in a debate before a standing-room-only audience of students, teachers and PTA parents in the Holston High School auditorium. 

I remember little of the actual debate save that I spoke as I felt: that the European aka “Soviet” approach to public education was infinitely superior to the U.S. approach because the former was intended to produce an informed and thoughtful citizenry just as the latter was intended to produce reflexively submissive drones. But I dared not use such phrases as “reflexively submissive drones” lest I reveal that beneath my views on education was already a healthy hatred and contempt and – yes – fear of capitalism. So conditioned in reflexive “Americanism” was I (and so conditioned are we all), I could not fully verbalize such thoughts – never mind the Marxian teachings in my father's household – until I was in my 70s and began recognizing capitalism as “infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue”: the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth, and more to the point, the deliberate and knowing choice of moral imbecility as one's personal ethos. Therefore in 1957 I argued in euphemisms, terms I am vaguely thankful are lost to memory.

But I will never forget that Dorothy Merritt, my English, speech and drama teacher – the only one of my high school teachers I genuinely respected – told me I had spoken “very convincingly.”

Not that it mattered. To the thunderous applause of the audience, the U.S. approach to education with its “well adjusted” product was proclaimed the hands-down victor. And as I would read in Scholastic Magazine  or some other such publication soon afterward, the same debate – with the same disheartening results – was occurring throughout the nation.

I think that was when I began to grasp the full magnitude of just how truly homeless I am in my own homeland. Which, save for my years in Manhattan – a place that was for me precisely as James Baldwin described it, Another Country – has been and remains amongst the core truths of my life.

Fifty-six years later, the result of our collective embrace of stupidity is undoubtedly amongst the greatest tragedies of human history: the fact we the people of the United States of America, when faced with the most pivotal choice of our lives, decided c. 1957-1958 we preferred the alienated and/or apathetic and/or bigoted and/or frightened and always, always, always vindictively anti-intellectual, cravenly submissive ignorance of Moron Nation to the informed activism required by a functional constitutional democracy.

That – our decision to become Moron Nation – is what leaves us unable to grasp the genocidal magnitude of the death-dealing inequality capitalism is forcing on us. It is what enabled the murder of the American Dream and facilitated the nullification of our constitution. It has killed the Democratic Party beyond hope of resurrection, the story I broke first  now confirmed again by still another timidly expressed half-requiem – this one for the nation as well.  It is what keeps us too opiated by celebrity, Abrahamic fanaticism and prescription drugs to see how Barack the Betrayer has again fucked us all by including in his otherwise-welcome immigration-reform executive-order 400,000 visas for high-tech scabs – his union-busting, worker-impoverishing payback to Bill Gates and the silicon aristocracy for their obscenely huge campaign contributions. It is what keeps Moron Nation indifferent to what some of us know is coming next – that Gates and his cronies, the counts of computerdom and the earls of electronic gadgetry (and exactly as AFL/CIO Chief Richard Trumka fears), will unleash these scabs to further reduce U.S. high-tech wages, now to the same ruinous graveyard-filling rock-bottom poverty that already defines life for the vast USian Working Class majority.

It is the nightmare reality perfectly expressed by an old black man in a wheelchair on the Pierce Transit Number 1 bus last week: “they got them young people so plugged in, they cain't even see what goin' on around 'em.” Such is Moron Nation, now and forever – that is, until the extinction of our species, which thanks to our national stupidity is looming ever closer by the day, perhaps even by the hour.

 

LB/16-23 November 2014

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