“Everywhere There's Rain, My Love, Everywhere There's Fear”

(Headline quote from Tim Buckley's "Phantasmagoria in Two," linked below.)    

THE CRUSHING DEFEATS We the People suffered in the past year leave us with only two alternatives: submission or resistance, either of which portend a descent into darkness of such unprecedented magnitude, its intensity and probable duration should refute forever our comforting but utterly deluded notion  “the arc of the universe...bends toward justice.”

What has obtained in 2016 should also force us to acknowledge the bitter truth we symbolize as darkness – tyranny, subjugation, slavery and genocide – is in fact proven by history to be our species' default condition. Our ancestors, most of them serfs or slaves and therefore utterly powerless, rarely knew anything better than the birth-to-death, always-beneath-the-overseer's-whip wretchedness Thomas Hobbes' so memorably described as “nasty, brutish and short”– the one true human eternity in its most absolute and irremediable sense.

Thus instead of revolution, which we now know is doomed by the moral imbecility that invariably corrupts all our species' endeavors – witness revolution's colossal failures in the United States, France, the Soviet Union and China – our chronic powerlessness fosters either bottomless despair or addiction to the false opiates promised by religion: fake eternities of imaginary euphoria supposedly guaranteed by a nonexistent god in alleged compensation for the absolute reality of our eternal misery.

Resistance enters our equation not as the valiant expression of hope it was during previous eras but – in existential epiphanies akin to Jean Paul Sartre's realization during the World War II years Nazi Germany seemed invincible  – as a quest for the entirely internal personal meaningfulness that in such circumstances is the only possible antidote to despair. The underlying lesson of the past 53 years – actually, reckoning from 4 July 1776, the cumulative lesson of the past 241 years – is that hope is absurd. Despite how fascist sensationalism wildly inflates our numbers, we true progressives are the tiniest of minorities, too few in number to be more vexing to the One Percent and its Ruling Class than a single mosquito might be to an elephant. And even if our numbers were truly great, we now at the dawn of 2017 know our overlords have the capability to kill us by the flick of a switch or the press of a button and the intention to do so in as expeditious a manner as possible, no doubt even to the extent of neutron-bombing  an entire city to exterminate us but save all its material wealth.

Such is the shark-womb price  we pay for being the only mammalian predators whose primary prey is our own species, our children, ourselves. Capitalism is obviously the ultimate and most likely terminal fulfillment of our genetic defectiveness, the grotesque reality underlying the Abrahamic legend of original sin.  The inescapable destitution capitalism now relentlessly imposes on 99.9 percent of the global population is thus the latest (and probably last) self-generated affliction in our 200,000-year epic of suffering.

Donald Trump's looming transformation of the United States into Ku Klux Nation thus combines with the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton campaign of suicidally provoking war with Russia, which combination leaves no doubt we are at the beginning of yet another of our species' periodic descents into total darkness – this time most likely forever and unto our own extinction.

Note – especially in this context of the again-escalating  Obamanoid/Hillaryite threat of thermonuclear apocalypse – the revelations  by Washington's Blog historian Eric Zuesse:

“America’s aristocracy and its vassal-aristocracies controlling the U.S.-allied nations (billionaires, centi-millionaires, and their top agents in both the public and private sectors) are buying and building deep-underground nuclear shelters for themselves...(As for everybody else, those other people are not involved in geostrategic decisionmaking, and so are being ignored.) However...none of the West’s elite are condemning the path toward nuclear war that their governments are on. So: buying or building nuclear-war shelters is more acceptable to them than is stopping America’s planned conquest of Russia. The higher priority is to conquer Russia.”

What Zuesse correctly implies – but unfortunately does not state outright – is the nuclear winter that would result from the apocalypse intended by Hillary and Obama would almost immediately solve the problem of global warming. What Zuesse omits entirely is how such an apocalypse would fulfill the long-term Ruling Class goals of reducing the world population by as much as 99 percent while simultaneously ensuring the Caucasian-capitalist domination of wealth and technology that would also ensure eternal white-race tyranny over the planet and all its inhabitants. In other words, from the perspective of the One Percent and its vassals, World War III is the perfect solution to all global problems – the resurrection of radical socialism included.

We are, in a word, fucked.

If We the People of the 99 Percent are to evolve resistance powerful enough to defeat our enemies or at the very least hold them at bay as Vladimir Lenin and his successors did for 74 years with the Soviet Union or as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did for a mere 14 years with the New Deal (in truth ended by enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947), we must first acknowledge the hitherto unspeakable truth that in 2016 We the People of the United States lost not just a battle but a war. It was a war that – though never formally declared outside the esoterica of ecclesiastical creeds and political dogma – was in fact the most important conflict in all our history: a species-defining clash between benevolence and malevolence and therefore quintessentially between Good and Evil. All that remains is equivalent to the die-hard guerrilla fight that typically follows conquest by an ultimately irresistible power, much as occurred in the North America's so-called “Indian Wars” and now obtains in the Middle East. Because of the global omnipotence of the USian Empire, in which this final struggle is being fought, its outcome will determine the fate of every living creature on this planet. Our victory could lead to a world in which the true Golden Rule – from each according to ability; to each according to need – is th dominant ethos. But history proves – again the example of the Indian Wars – such an outcome is unlikely at best.

Meanwhile – woe to us all – Evil has won.

***

UNTIL THE LAST few years our defeat was inflicted so slowly it is hard to know just when We the People began losing. Evil's useful idiots whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim date it to the Garden of Eden and blame it on women. More rational folk date it to colonial times or the earliest days of the republic, blaming religious fanatics and slave-owners respectively. Though I cannot disagree with the culpability of zealots and slavers, I find it more useful to date our defeat to 1934, when President Roosevelt granted the Bankers' Plot  traitors immunity in return for their pledge to stop fighting the New Deal. 

What happened next is obvious: when World War II did not go as the One Percenters hoped – when their (by-then clandestine) champions Hitler and Mussolini were unable to defeat the Red Army and conquer the Soviet Union – the One Percenters imported legions of Nazi war criminals to tutor them in the postwar strategy and tactics of converting the U.S. into the Fourth Reich. Men who had given their monstrous intellects to the Evil personified by Hitler and the German Nazi Party now gave their repulsive talents to the less obvious but far greater Evil personified by the USian One Percenters. Soon reinforced by the sociopathic psychiatrists and psychologists who served Wall Street via Madison Avenue, this secret, diabolically Machiavellian cabal, now functioning as an informal end-human-liberty-forever think-tank of refugee Nazis and pro-capitalist psychological warfare experts, began as early as 1946 scheming how to Nazify the United States – not suddenly, as Hitler had done with a German population already predisposed to acceptance of tyranny, but rather by the stealth with which one slowly boils a living frog.

Recognizing the USian homeland population's hard-shelled egotism – its bigotry, anti-intellectualism, religious fanaticism, proudly self-sustained ignorance, anarchistic disdain of governmental authority and most of all its perverse obsession with sex – the One Percent's Ayn Rand-minded advisors weaponized all these negative characteristics into the most brilliantly conceived subversion campaign of all time. Thus our apparent victories in civil, reproductive, matrimonial and gender rights were in fact defeats in that their long-term results – goading our enemies into ever more tyrannosauric frenzies just as the One Percent intended – led inexorably to the inauguration of fascist governance sought by the Bankers' Plot conspirators. Facilitated by the murders of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy, then advocated by the Powell Memo  and personified by the betrayer Barack Obama,  the anti-democratic process was finally brought to terrifying fruition by the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Given the raw material with which the One Percent's consultants had to work – an intractably racist 77 percent  within the white majority, a total USian Homeland population that by definition is 64 percent Christian Fundamentalist – it is no wonder these “motivational research” experts were able to engineer an USian majority that is either Nazi-minded or submissively apolitical and in any case is as permanently reliable and therefore politically predictable as 70 years of the world's most relentlessly intense psychological conditioning can possibly make it. The uniquely USian brand of Nazism is now the dominant ethos of the once-vaunted “land of the free.” Most of us, We the People of 2016, are now in our submissiveness indistinguishable from the Good Germans of 1933. These are not attitudes that can be changed, certainly not overnight and probably not ever.

Even so, we also need to bear in mind this nauseatingly obscene parody of an election is not technically over until 6 January, when the House either votes its formal acceptance of the electoral college's legal coup or rejects it and sets in motion a process by which the House itself, ruled by the same Republican Party that nominated Donald Trump, imposes its own presidential choice on the nation. Though it is unlikely, Hillary, who out-polled Trump by 2.9 million popular votes,  could still be chosen president. For that matter, so could Sen. Sanders, though because he represents the progressive, anti-apocalyptic populism so feared by the One Percent such a compromise  would be an upset of the first magnitude and is thus even more improbable.

But no matter who is awarded the presidency, nothing changes but the timetable of our subjugation. Whether Hillary or the Donald or some other anointed surrogate for our capitalist overlords eventually ascends to the Imperial White House, the one undeniable declaration of the 2016 presidential campaign is that We the People are irrelevant – that we are factored in imperial affairs only to the extent we can be forced or seduced into providing our masters with cheap labor, readily available canon-fodder and above all else a profitable rationale for building ever-more-inescapable slave pens walled by ever-more-irresistible technologies of total surveillance and sadistically violent death.

If we dare read the fine print of 2016's oft-unspoken but nevertheless implicitly glaring declarations – a reading far too many of us will never find the courage to undertake – we will surely be smitten by the realization the year's paramount unwritten decree is that in the eyes of the now truly omnipotent One Percent, We the People are henceforth irrelevant. Our hopes and aspirations no longer matter.  All the ideals so eloquently expressed in our Declaration of Independence and in the Preamble to our constitution – “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”; “justice, domestic tranquility, general welfare” – are rendered obsolete by the moral imbecility that sustains the capitalists' ever-more omnicidal quest for profit.

Thanks to the framework of tyranny so carefully laid by Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II and most maliciously of all by Obama – thanks indeed to the decades of now-obvious preparation for just such a pivotal inauguration as is planned for 20 January 2017 – Hillary or the Donald or someone else – whomever so chosen is now more Führer than President. Thus he or she must as a prerequisite to their ascension pledge to uphold the core principle of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percenters and their vassals, zero-tolerance subjugation for all the rest of us. Thus too our well-being – or more correctly our ever-more-wrenching lack thereof – troubles our rulers only when our anger intrudes on their endlessly predatory orgies of profiteering.

In this regard, We the People , we of the 99 Percent – all of us now forever denied even a fraction of capitalism's falsely promised wealth – are like some battered wife who throughout her years of abuse strove diligently to regain the love and respect she believed her husband pledged her during their courtship and vowed so-help-him-god on her wedding day but revealed that night as the cruelest of lies when once inside the nuptial bedroom he beat her and raped her and sneered at her pain and bewilderment, just as he would do for the remainder of their matrimonial paring. In response she did the best she could just as we all do when faced with capitalism's parallel brutalities whether in the bedroom or the classroom or the workplace or the welfare line or the church or the mosque or the temple or the clinic or the hospital emergency room. She worked hard and she obeyed the rules and above all else she believed her efforts would eventually win her the respect and security and perhaps even the comforting love she so desperately sought to fill the aching hole in her heart. But now she is battered and bruised and bedraggled and she is cast off in the most heartless of divorce actions, just as we too are cast off and abandoned when we are no longer exploitable for profit. Capitalism, the archetype of domestic abuse, is moral imbecility – and moral imbeciles are incapable of loving anyone but themselves.

Thus 2016 was the year of the moral imbecile, the year the morally imbecilic One Percenters revealed the extent to which they despise us and view us with contempt. They did so by afflicting us with two moral imbeciles as presidential candidates who reduced our once-cherished voting rights to an obscene parody – “They want elections? Let them choose between tyrants” – hence the terminally insulting choice between Hillary who promised thermonuclear apocalypse versus Trump who promised a new Holocaust and now amongst the chaos of his contradictory tweets seems intent on keeping that one promise.

Now, as if by publication of divorce decrees, our masters are making certain we get the message the era of charade democracy and the Democratic (sic) Party Big Lie of progressive populism is over. From now on the Democratic (sic) brand of fascism – which at its core differs from its Republican counterpart only in the former's fanatical commitment to forcible civilian disarmament and lip service to minority rights – will be as unapologetically tyrannical as the Republicans have been since they ended Reconstruction in 1877 and then via the long purge that climaxed with the Goldwater candidacy in 1964 and triumphed with the election of Reagan in 1980 methodically suppressed all traces of their party's former Lincolnism. That's why the Democratic (sic) Party now openly spits in all our faces by its fight against progressive reform  even as Trump and the Republican Party batter us with appointments that say “ahha we gotcha again; this time we get to rape you forever” and tell us all their populist promises were Big Lies of nearly the same malicious magnitude as Obama's eternally infamous “change we can believe in.”

Divorced by the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, divorced in the name of capitalist governance and its core ethos of moral imbecility, divorced and cast off and abandoned and soon to be denied not only our remaining jobs but food stamps and Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security and WIC and any other conceivable means of sustenance – soon to be denied not just our rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness but (whether by austerity's slow-motion genocide or war-for-profit's mass murder), denied our very right to life – We the People are now the microcosm of our species' most unfortunate divorce victim ever, our Mother Earth, the cast-down goddess of whom the late Tim Buckley dared sing,  “If you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” Though once our species loved our Mother dearly, we forsook her long ago; though once we loved our country dearly, now we ourselves are as forsaken as orphans. Our anguish is as in an old lament: “Once I had a sweetheart, but now I have none.”

Of all possible metaphors for our present circumstances, there is probably none more apt than the abused wife who finally rises up angry, the woman beaten and full of despair and rage and perhaps fighting back only for the sake of her children – or so she now may be telling herself at the beginning of her odyssey of resistance. But next may come that odyssey's healing epic of self-discovered strength, and after that...

Think Lexington Common and Concord Bridge, 19 April 1775; think Paris 14 July 1789; think Petrograd on International Women's Day, 8 March 1917.  But all these victories have been swept away, betrayed more by human Evil than by military force. Therefore think also on the fate of First Nations peoples under USian Manifest Destiny and the similar fates of Jews and and other minorities under German Nazism .

In such times as these, survival itself becomes an act of revolutionary defiance.

***

ALL OF US who are politically conscious must now become Outside Agitators. The name, which we should embrace proudly and thus redeem, is how we are damned by our enemies, the Ku Klux Klan of yesteryear and the plutocrats and their killer cops today: “We din have no trouble with our niggers,” the old Jim Crow tyrants always said, “till them damn outside agitators come down hyar an stirred em up.” But now in the eyes of the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals, skin color no longer matters: I a white male am a nigger and you whatever your race or ethnicity are a nigger and we are all niggers, and like the “uppity” niggers of the Civil Rights era, we must now in solidarity keep one another “stirred up” if we are to even begin to effectively resist the genocidal brutality of USian governance and transcend its soul-destroying omnipotence.

To succeed we must acknowledge the fact that whether we personally identify as African-American or Hispanic or First Nations or White, whether we identify as heterosexual or LGBTQ, whether we identify as Left or Right – We the People are all cast off and abandoned and alone as never before in our species' history. Individually we are of no more consequence to the One Percent and its Ruling Class than a single cockroach is to an exterminator. Involuntarily united in our abandonment and oppression, we should voluntarily unite in rejection of submission to the One Percent. And now at last we must confront the hard truth that if we are to survive, we must build our solidarity not from race or gender or sexual preference but from our socioeconomic circumstances and its commonality of grievances. Only then can we muster adequate defenses against disempowerment by the disunity inherent in the identity politics our overlords shape and sustain solely for their own protection.

We 99 Percenters must also expand our reading and viewing tastes. Sun Tzu, Niccolo Machiavelli and Vladimir Lenin are far more relevant to our present-day circumstances than Deepak Chopra, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale or any other self-help huckster might ever have been. The camera work of Gene Smith and Dorothea Lange and Jacob Riis and Walker Evans tell us more about who we are than all the fashion photographs and idealized landscapes ever shot, even those by Ansel Adams and Richard Avedon and their ilk. The wrenching realism of the 2010 Russian film Brest Fortress aka Brestskya Krepost (Брестская крепость) tells us more about World War II than the 2001 USian film Pearl Harbor, which shows us only a Disneyland version of combat, complete with glaringly comedic technical errors. Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf – long among USia's most popular reading – are relevant only as prosecutorial evidence. The primary task for those of us who are courageous enough to acknowledge we are in fact part of the (potentially doomed) 99 Percent is spreading the word our economic afflictions define us as potential patriots and partisans of that true Golden Rule which given the infinite bleakness of our future – if indeed we have a future at all – cannot be repeated too often: from each according to capability, to each according to need.

Yet despite our despair and the boiling anger it provokes we should never forget we are so few in number we can only resist by nonviolence. We must therefore continue to embrace Rev. King.'s example, never forgetting war is at this point an exclusively Ruling Class methodology. Wars are started by the Ruling Class only because our overlords know as a certainty of their privileged births they can exempt themselves from the horrors of war and wage their warfare as if it were nothing more than a board game and dump all its bloody burdens – all its shattered faces and blown-off penises and spilled-intestines – on us, we the workers and peasants who are too disempowered to prevent ourselves from being conscripted as canon fodder. As our bodies pile up, the Ruling Class profits in every way imaginable.

Thus are We the People the targets of the final moping-up operations in the long war of our own subjugation by capitalism, the most malignant Evil our species has ever spawned and unleashed on itself..

***

GLEN FORD WARNS us in Black Agenda Report we are also collateral damage in an apocalyptic clash by which the USian Ruling Class “is undoing itself.”

If we recognize Trump as the figurehead of a dissident element within the One Percent – which is in fact exactly what he is – Ford's analysis is demonstrably true. Indeed it brings to mind a lengthy report, published during the late 1960s or early 1970s and probably in The New York Review of Books, that hypothesized a “Yankee and Cowboy War" as the key element in all the USian Empire's internal struggles over foreign and domestic policy. The article was written by the late Carl Olgesby, who subsequently expanded it into a book by the same name  that is now not only out of print but censored by price, with poor-condition paperback copies starting at about $50.

As I remember – and here I must apologize for the fact my inescapable poverty prohibits the confirmation of memory I would normally seek before writing – Olgesby's epicentral conclusion was the assassination of JFK had been a pivotal, probably permanent Cowboy victory that led directly to Vietnam and doomed the Empire to a future of endless wars.

The Yankees in Oglesby's formulation were the members of the so-called “Eastern Establishment," which included FDR, the Kennedys and Republicans of the Jacob Javits/Nelson Rockefeller/Dan Evans variety. To one degree or another, these were all liberals in the New Deal/Progressive traditions that had sprung from the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties respectively. The Cowboys were equally bipartisan. Their Machiavellian archetype was the Democratic (sic) President Lyndon Banes Johnson; whose bogus peace candidacy, conducted as he and his henchmen schemed to expand the USian military presence in Southeast Asia into a major war, is second only to Obama's “change we can believe in” in Big Lie brazenness. But Cowboy ranks included Republicans Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the (venomously racist) Southern Democrats. Meanwhile Cowboy LBJ savvily governed by bribing the Left with long-sought civil rights legislation and dramatically expanded social services, thus silencing all but the most relentless opponents of his Southeast Asian wars of imperial expansion. (Two of these opponents were MLK and RFK, who were instead silenced by assassins' bullets.)

Socioeconomically the Yankees were Keynesian, while the Cowboys – secretly in the case of LBJ and Nixon – were fanatical Ayn Randers. The Yankees favored diplomacy; the Cowboys favored war. Regardless of their factional identity, each group favored capitalist tyranny – the Yankees of the stealthy Brave New World variety, the Cowboys of the openly brutal 1984 sort. But neither the Yankees nor the Cowboys were as unabashedly genocidal as the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton/Mitch McConnell imperialists of today, who until very recently hid their Nazi-like intentions of global conquest behind false flags of traditional “American” rhetoric. But now it seems they have concluded such deception – which was enabled by an ever-more-ignorant public and its ongoing mental deterioration inflicted by mainstream media (which let us not forget is the world's first privately owned, for-profit, Josef-Goebbels-type ministry of propaganda) – is no longer necessary to the advancement of their schemes.

Hillary, a political nobody when Oglesby was writing, might have been labeled a Cowboy merely by her associations Goldwater and Arkansas Democrat Bill Clinton. Trump would probably have been labeled a Cowboy too, simply because he is (apparently) so despised by the Democratic (sic) and Republican establishment. But Hillary and Trump differ radically on how best to sustain the empire. As we know, Hillary favors war – especially thermonuclear war that risks human extinction – which given her obvious hatred of Russia and all persons and things Russian, makes me wonder if someone close to her, perhaps in her family or among her ideological tutors, was one of the many German Nazi war-criminals for whom the One Percent arranged USian sanctuary.

Trump – apart from his violent intentions toward Islam and USian minorities – seems to favor economic competition rather than war: hence his apparent rapprochement with Vladimir Putin, which despite how it grants us welcome relief from the prospect of World War III nevertheless also prompts serious reflection on the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.

But given the apocalyptic intent evident in the Obama/Clinton/McConnell schemes, I am no longer certain the Yankee/Cowboy formulation – or for that matter even our present-day labels of neo-liberal and neo-conservative – are adequately descriptive. For what we are talking about – note again the Zuesse report linked above – is ultimately a clash between proponents of our species' survival and advocates of its deliberate near-extinction. And I confess my efforts to conjure up memorably simple but nevertheless properly descriptive titles – an ongoing quest that began when I started working on this piece a month ago – have thus far all failed.

Meanwhile I am beginning to wonder if the clandestine truth of the Hillary-Trump campaign is not the opposite of what was initially rumored: that instead of Trump being the One Percent's stalking horse to ensure the election of Hillary, the reverse is true: that it was Hillary who was used to ensure Trump's victory – and that she herself was not informed of her function until after the election – hence the sullen silence that so loudly suggests she is overwhelmed by post-election bitterness.

In this context note how, in Trump, the One Percenters may believe they have indeed won the shortest most direct route to the unabashedly Nazified nation  they and their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers have sought since the failure of the Bankers' Plot. Note too the undeniable liberty's-end message of Trump's appointments, discussed here on the always-informative website Popular Resistance, with a comment thread that includes my own detailed estimate of the horrors – based on the common Hard-Right ideological denominator of Trump's appointments whether rumored or confirmed – that will probably confront us after 20 January.

Nevertheless, though I am painfully aware of the implicit irony, I wish you all a Happy New Year.

Quoth the 17th Century samurai Miyamoto Musashi: “To win any battle, you must fight as if you are already dead.”

LB/1-31 December 2016.

-30-

Dispatches from Tyranosauric Petroleum's Global Empire

AGAIN I DID no writing specifically for OAN this week, and again – this time due to voluntary albeit unavoidable interruptions – I missed my self-assigned deadline. But the comments I posted elsewhere on the Internet are nevertheless perhaps worth reading.

***

“DAPL Mississippi Stand Update: Protesters Arrested on False Pretenses and Illegally Searched”: The head, like the organization's name, is written with the customary millennial contempt for precise language and is confusing enough it fooled a Reader Supported News editor into captioning the accompanying photograph as having been made in Mississippi when in fact it was taken far to the north in Illinois. The “Mississippi” in question is the river, not the state. Nor is the acronym DAPL – Dakota Access Pipeline – defined anywhere in the text, an omission corrected in the picture caption by the same RSN editor who got the locale wrong. But the story itself  and the accompanying video are much clearer – and far more troubling than sloppy syntax and geographical confusion:

“...Two of our comrades, Cameron Kennedy and James McBride, were arrested on false pretenses on the East bank of the Mississippi River yesterday afternoon near the drill pad in Illinois that bores underneath the river...DAPL private security spotted (Cameron Kennedy) and James (McBriide) on a public road near the linchpin drilling operation and within three minutes they were surrounded and blocked by multiple Hancock county squad cars as well multiple DAPL security cars...Cameron denied consent to a vehicular search by Police, but... Private DAPL security guards began conducting the search (as)...Hancock Sheriff Scott Bentzinger...said, "They are going to do what they want." These are the first known DAPL related arrests in Illinois...The money of big oil has seeped into small towns and counties across the United States and has effectively hired the police as enforcers of the Dakota Access agenda.”

HERE, I NOTED, THE EMPIRE IS OMINOUSLY HONEST: More than any confrontation in my lifetime (1940-201?), the Dakota Pipeline struggle reveals the true, unabashedly racist/fascist (actually neo-Nazi) nature of today's United States.

Thus we learn the valiant efforts of our kinfolk who died or were wounded or otherwise suffered to save humanity from the original Nazi threat were all in vain.

It also demonstrates the utter futility of peaceful protest – as if, as in Harry Turtledove's alternative-history short story, the German Nazis won World War II, conquered the world, and when Gandhi attempted peaceful protest against their brutality, they killed him and all his followers – just as in the real world the Nazis exterminated all of the German pacifist White Rose Society.

All we can do now is recall the words of another man murdered by USian fascists, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who in a comment increasingly applicable to the USian Empire and its own unique brand of Nazism, warned that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

It will not happen in my lifetime, and probably not in the lifetime of any person now living. The plutocracy – made genuinely omnipotent by its technology – is infinitely more powerful than the feudal order that tyrannized Europe for 1,441 years, from the fall of Rome until the Russian Revolution.

But eventually – if our species survives capitalism – we may evolve a revolutionary ideology with enough discipline to triumph.

WHAT I DID NOT SAY, because I was approaching the 1500-character limit that governs RSN posts, is the DAPL authorities' use of so-called “private security” as goon-squads parallels the often-deadly practice of 19th and 20th century capitalists and thus presages the same sorts of capitalism-in-action vigilante violence exemplified by the lynching of Frank Little,  by the Ludlow Massacre  and by the Battle of Blair Mountain,  known locally as the Logan County War.

A partial listing of the men and women murdered in the USian Empire for daring to challenge our capitalist overlords is here.  And let us not forget to add the name of Karen Silkwood to this roll-call of the heroic proletarian dead.

There is also the fact, relevant to any such discussion as this, that history shows successful revolutions whether peaceful (Gandhi) or violent (Marx, Lenin et al) have four prerequisites (scroll down),  none of which are present in today's USian Empire.

OTHER SIGNIFICANT ELEMENTS I did not have the space to include (1)-that Hillary's silence on the DAPL struggle is yet another indication of her typically-capitalist contempt and hatred for all of us in the 99 Percent; (2)-that Obama's refusal to halt the obvious violations of First Nations' treaty rights and protesters' constitutional rights is yet another confirmation of the tyrannical capitalist agenda evident in his federalization and militarization of local police into a de facto national police force; (3)-that the apparent equipping of the pipeline goons with automatic weapons, toxic gas and other military equipment prohibited civilians is – if indeed it is occurring as alleged – a flagrant violation of federal gun laws that exemplifies the Nazi-like realities of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its vassals; total subjugation for all the rest of us); (4)- that governmental use of private security forces as goon squads parallels Germany's use of the freikorps and later the Nazi SA   to enforce its tyrannies; and (5)-that an identical maximizing of the 99 Percent's defenselessness – indeed our reduction to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is, like Hitler's forcible disarmament of Germany's Jews, socialists and Communists, the sole purpose behind Hillary's promised campaign of forcible civilian disarmament.

*********

“Bernie Sanders: I'm Going to Make Sure Hillary Clinton Implements Progressive Policies: Sen. Bernie Sanders, a loyal soldier for Hillary Clinton  since he conceded the Democratic presidential nomination in July, plans to push liberal legislation with like-minded senators with or without Clinton’s support if she is elected — and to aggressively oppose appointments that do not pass muster with the party’s left wing.”

NOT SO, SAID I: Sanders' belief he can wrest “progressive” concessions from the war-mongering Goldwater Girl Hillary – whose fanatically fundamentalist Christian “Angel of Death” persona is revealed via her intent to start World War III – is the pre-doomsday equivalent of the rich German Jews' fatally deluded belief their wealth would reduce Hitler's antisemitism to mere posturing...

Hillary with her Goldwater Girl arrogance has the same morally imbecilic “USA uber alles” mentality as the generals (President) Kennedy defied.

Remember it was Goldwater, an Air Force reserve major general and thus one of Curtis LeMay's proteges, who wanted to nuke North Vietnam, which would have triggered instant war with the Soviet Union.

Clearly, Hillary has some twisted sense of loyalty to her original ideological role model and is bent on fulfilling his apocalyptic fantasies of global conquest, never mind the USSR is long gone and there is no alleged provocation by today's Russia that even remotely approaches that of the Soviet thermonuclear missiles in Cuba. (Which, by the way, were emplaced in retaliation for US emplacement of anti-Soviet thermonuclear missiles in Turkey.)

Apropos LeMay, without whose patronage Goldwater would never have been made a general, he “argued that the United States should launch 5,000 missiles on the Soviet Union...During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba.” 

Obviously, like LeMay and Goldwater, Hillary believes the US can conquer not only Russia but China as well, never mind the millions who would die as a result. Another belief undoubtedly driving Hillary is that most of humanity is 'surplus' – i.e., not exploitable for profit – and should thus be exterminated.

Such are the genocidal inputs that form the core of Hillary's apocalyptic ideology.

*********

“Letter From El Salvador: 'I Was Jailed for a Miscarriage': nside the women’s prison in El Salvador, set on the outskirts of the capital in a dangerous neighborhood called Ilopango, at least 21 women are serving sentences for abortions they say they never had. All of these women claim they are jailed for miscarrying their babies. 

ALAS I WOULD EXPECT NO BETTER: Abrahamic religion – in this instance Christianity – and its misogynistic, sadistic god in action: not just the opiate of the masses, but the electric cattle prod that subjugates the masses as well.

*********

“JILL STEIN: Many of our readers are strongly advocating the candidacy of Jill Stein. The problem is that, polling at 2% nationally, she has no chance whatsoever of being elected. In fact, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, running under the Libertarian banner, has triple the supporters Stein has, and he doesn’t even appear to be totally coherent. So it isn’t really a candidacy  at all that Stein’s supporters are promoting, it’s more of an ideal or a lecture on political responsibility. The candidacy provides the platform for the ideology.”

MY RESPONSE: Quoth Mr. Ashe: “Painting the Democratic candidate as the devil to achieve those ends is ludicrous.”

Alas, based on her oft-declared intent to start World War III (and thereby not only exterminate our species but reduce the entire planet to a radioactive death-sphere inhabitable only by cockroaches), Hillary truly IS “the devil.”

Worse, actually, because in the Abrahamic theologies (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it's not the devil who inflicts the Apocalypse; its their sadistic god. With whom we know Hillary identifies because of her long association with the Family.

(Again the damning relevance of Jeff Sharlet's work, The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Harper: 2008]. Read it, acknowledge the endless nightmare Hillary and her fanatical fundamentalist co-conspirators intend to inflict on us all and be very, very, very afraid.)

*********

“As Election Day Nears, Military Hawks Circle To Promote New Wave Of War: Though the hawkish stance of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been too often ignored  this election season, new reporting on Thursday highlights how her presumed win in November will likely usher in a more aggressive, bipartisan foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond.”

HAD I SPOKEN ALOUD, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A SNARL: how many times must it be said before Moron Nation awakens to the apocalyptic truth? A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for World War III, the thermonuclear extinction of our species and the reduction of Planet Earth to a radioactive death-sphere habitable only by cockroaches.

*********

“How Power Works: Heather Ann Thompson’s book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy is a detailed study of the inner workings of America. The blueprint for social control employed before and after the crushing of the Attica revolt is the same blueprint used today to keep tens of millions of poor people, especially poor people of color, caged or living in miniature police states. Thompson meticulously documents the innumerable ways the state oppresses the poor by discrediting their voices, turning the press into a megaphone for government propaganda and lies, stoking the negative stereotypes of black people, exalting white supremacy, ruining the lives of people who speak the truth, manipulating the courts and law enforcement, and pressuring state witnesses to lie to obstruct justice. Her book elucidates not only the past but also the present, which, she concedes, is worse...Poor people of color have been robbed of the most elemental forms of justice and basic constitutional rights. But the state, in the age of deindustrialization, has no intention of stopping there. These forms of social control, so familiar to poor people of color, will bear upon all of us.”

TO MY APPLAUSE: Thus Mr. Hedges and Heather Ann Thompson confirm what has hitherto been denounced by ignorant or deluded pseudo-Leftists as a 'racist' notion: that the purpose of the Obama Administration's federalization and militarization of the local police and his mostly unreported but nevertheless devastating cuts in food stamps, Medicare. Medicaid and other elements of the socioeconomic safety net is the methodical reduction of impoverished or rebellious whites to the statutory wretchedness already imposed on the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations communities.

Meanwhile – now under obvious (and obviously clandestine) kill-orders – the federalized local police continue their campaign of murder against those minority communities – again blacks, Hispanics and First Nations – whose histories show they are most likely to rise up against the Empire's ever-intensifying savagery.

Such is capitalist governance in action: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us – and death to any of us who dare resist.

(Thank you, Mr. Hedges and Ms. Thompson for daring to expose these hideous truths about what the United States has become, and thank you Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese for having the 24-karat chutzpah to publish their work. A clenched-fist salute to each of you.)

*********

“US Soldiers Told to Repay Thousands in Signing Bonuses From Height of War Effort: In most cases, when an employer pays a signing bonus to attract new workers, that payment is understood to be essentially unrecoverable. But the Pentagon has a different understanding — and it's ordering the California National Guard to claw back thousands of dollars  paid to soldiers who re-enlisted to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

HENCE MY SUGGESTION: The One Percenters and their Pentagon vassals who are behind this outrage need to remember what happened when Tsar Nicholas II pissed off most of the soldiers in the Russian Army and most of the sailors in the Russian Navy as well...

Veterans are NOT people to screw over.

Indeed the primary reason the military draft was ended was the huge fear by the One Percent and its Ruling Class the draft was training the revolution.

And now the pompous plutocrats are alienating the very soldiers they hired to keep themselves and their obscene wealth secure?

Astounding!

Maybe the Empire truly is teetering on the brink of collapse.

LB/27 October 2016


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Politicians' Lies: Diabolical Way to Kill Elections without the Bad Publicity of a No-More-Civil-Liberties Decree

THE UTTER FUTILITY of trying to restore our stolen liberty here in the United States – the now-undeniable fact We the People are the disempowered subjects of a predator state ruled by gangster capitalists and their wholly-owned vassals in government, academia and mass media – is made undeniably clear by the damning revelations about Democratic (sic) Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican opponent Donald Trump.

That's because after last Friday's disclosures we now know as absolute certainty what many of us have long suspected: that the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals, in what is probably human history's most profound gesture of aristocratic contempt, are offering us a pseudo-choice that reduces our once-internationally esteemed democratic process to meaningless ritual. As if in grotesque mimicry of the (questionable) tale of Marie Antoinette's response to starving Parisians – “The people want bread? Let them eat cake” – it seems our rulers are sneering, “The people want elections? Let them choose between tyrants.”

Voting is thus reduced to an obscene satire on its former function – a diabolical feat that in its cunningly despotic destructiveness exceeds even the darkest estimates of our capitalist overlords' capabilities and intentions.

The result – as significant psychologically and ideologically as it is historically and politically – is nullification of the democratic process. It is exactly as if we the people have been officially disenfranchised by the sort of decree we associate with Hitler or Mussolini or Third-World despots. But – and here again we see the One Percent's demonic genius – our disenfranchisement is accomplished not by decree (which would leave no doubt the USian Empire is now the Fourth Reich), but by breathtakingly clever perversion of the very process that formerly ensured our liberty.

How then can we ever hope to regain our freedom?

***

As I have written repeatedly during the past few months, what we are offered is tantamount to a choice between two Hitlers: Donald Hitler versus Hillary Hitler – the murders and lesser hate-crimes of a domestic holocaust versus World War III and our species' extinction.

Donald Hitler intends to resurrect the white-supremacy policies of the German Third Reich and impose them on all the unpopular minorities of the Fourth Reich United States, thus to “restore America's greatness.” He would wage war on any of us who are African-American, Hispanic, First Nations, Muslim, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual-queer, Communist, socialist or even slightly Left-leaning.

Hillary Hitler intends – just as the late Führer did – to be the first-ever conqueror of Russia. But Thermonuclear Hillary Hitler is infinitely more dangerous than Pre-nuclear Adolf Hitler. Hillary Hitler is willing to gamble our entire species' survival in her fanatical desire to reduce at least 146,600,000 Russian women, men and children either to radioactive ash or to the ultimately deadly sweatshop slavery that is increasingly the inescapable lot of the USian Empire's 99 Percent.

Depressing as it is, the One Percent's limitation of our plausible options to Clinton or Trump is not, by itself, the ultimate proof our liberty is abolished beyond any hope of recovery. That proof is in the methodical lying rationalized by what should henceforth be labeled the Hillary Axiom: in politics, “you need both a private and a public position.”

Thus the politicians privately speak the truth to their plutocratic owners, and use Big Lies – of which Obama's “change we can believe in” is the ultimate example to-date – to publicly dupe the rest of us.

While that is surely the lesson taught us by Obama the Orator's now-infamous shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, the impact of its verbalization by a personage of Hillary's stature turns it from submissive shrug-of-the-shoulders suspicion to infuriating clenched-fist fact.

And the broader implication of Hillary's Axiom – that the entire public face of USian politics is naught but scam – is as vital to understanding today's global politics as the German Nazis' conceptualization and use of the Big Lie was to understanding the politics that led to World War II.

With Hillary's inadvertent but eternally damning admission  that deceiving the public is now the core dynamic of Usian politics, we are in essence told that under capitalist governance, all politicians are of necessity liars and that no USian politician's promises can ever again be trusted – a disclosure that will surprise only those who fail to recognize the necessity of lies to capitalism itself.

Here we encounter the ultimate discouragement to any sort of conventional political activism: why bother if the relevant truths are forever hidden behind a cacophony of lies?

Voters have no defense against clandestinely pro-plutocracy politicians who – precisely as Obama did – lie themselves into office as “reformers,” then in service to their One Percent masters break the very promises by which they energized their support.

Thus capitalist governance, like capitalism itself, is by its intrinsic dishonesty placed forever beyond the reach of reform.

Thus too we must now immediately dismiss as Big Lies any and all of Hillary's claims she favors progressive demands – particularly given that Friday's revelations prove her (true) private positions are the diametrical opposites of her public assertions. For example Hillary says in private that “Simpson-Bowles” – Obama's Deficit Commission, which would have sentenced innumerable seniors and disabled people to premature deaths by slashing Social Security and Medicare – “put forth the right framework” for the most productive capitalist governance. She also notes she “did all (she) could to make sure (Wall Street) continued to prosper.”

Obviously, Hillary's private politics are those of the Goldwater Girl she was in her youth. Just as obviously, she regards the 99 Percent and all of us therein with a 21st Century version of the vindictive scorn the haughty aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France reserved for the Third Estate. Indeed it now appears she is the ultimate false-flag candidate: beneath her Democratic (sic) disguise, a fanatically conservative, nuke-em-till-they-glow Barry Goldwater disciple cunningly trained as an infiltrator – one cannot but wonder by whom – and oh-so-carefully self-closeted until she could pounce to certain victory.

In other words, the public Hillary is pure fraud.

The broader relevance of the “eternally damning admission” report linked above, jointly authored by Kevin Zeese and Dr. Margaret Flowers of the superbly informative Occupy-offspring website Popular Resistance, is that it is one of the most telling summations I have yet seen on the extent to which such fraud has become the One Percent's primary methodology for governing the Usian imperial homeland.

Its disclosures supported by a bibliography of authoritative links, it goes far beyond the immediate issue of Hillary's perpetual dishonesty and includes, for example, a forthright discussion of the Big Lie tactics that accompanied imposition of the Affordable Care Act, “the biggest insurance scam in history.”

Unfortunately Zeese and Flowers conclude by reiterating their oft-repeated claim that “when people organize they have power.” They add that “the people need to let the government know they will not be silent against systemic corruption. We will... make sure (Hillary's) is a presidency of protest; where the people will be relentless in demanding that the government represent our interests.”

Thus Zeese and Flowers – like the vast majority of USians – remain blinded by the obstructive optimism that prevents them from recognizing the zero-tolerance reality of total surveillance: that thanks to the One Percent's ownership and mastery of surveillance technology, we live in a realm wherein nothing can ever again be hidden from the omnipresent gaze of the secret police. Yet so brainwashed are we – our minds so saturated from birth with USian propaganda – we glibly dismiss the tyrannical intent of such surveillance by clinging to the Big Lie we live in the “sweet land of liberty,”

As under the fictional Borg, effective resistance – much less any possibility of evolving even one of the four prerequisites of revolution (for which scroll down)  – is therefore genuinely futile.  Lesser resistance, as in the recent Bernie Sanders campaign, will be neutralized by lies; greater resistance, as in Occupy, will be crushed by infiltration and violence.

Rescue by invasion from without – as in the Union Army's liberation of the Confederacy, the Red Army's liberation of Leningrad, the Allied Forces' liberation of Paris or the liberation of Saigon by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army– is rendered eternally impossible by the USian threat of thermonuclear weapons and the fact “better dead than Red” has been elevated from a Goldwater Girl slogan into an irrevocable principle of imperial policy. Have no doubt: our overlords would rather blow up the planet than relinquish their power – unquestionably why, with the flaring of pre-revolutionary anger in the USian Homeland (never mind the anger is hopelessly undisciplined) – the One Percenters and their Hillaryite surrogates are now openly trying to provoke World War III.

We are thus permanently subjugated. But until we recognize that rightfully terrifying fact – until we set aside our obstructive “all-will-be-well” optimism; until we stop our senseless employment of tactics rendered useless (if not suicidal) by total surveillance; until we abandon hopes long ago proven idiotic by the oft-demonstrated submissiveness of the USian Caucasian majority, (who as part of their legacy of white supremacy believe revolutionary change is theirs merely for the asking) – we have no chance of evolving an adequate resistance.

Instead we must unflinchingly examine the bitter truths of our powerlessness and the omnipotence of our masters – the fact we are already prisoners in an electronic slave-pen wherein even our most private thoughts are laid bare by computers that psychoanalyze us by the books we read, the foods we buy and even our chosen brands of tooth paste, toilet paper, menstrual supplies and condoms. Only when we acknowledge the unmitigated horror of our circumstances – a horror more devastatingly oppressive than anything in our species' history – will we be able to evolve strategies and tactics adequate to the task of self-liberation. Just as Sun Tzu asserted 2600 years ago, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.”

But even if sometime in the future we are at last possessed of the requisite knowledge and discipline to permanently overthrow capitalism, it may yet be that our only hope for victory – our only chance to make economic democracy a reality (and therefore restore both human dignity and human liberty) – will arise from the opportunity sure to handed us by Mother Nature.

Though too few of us deign to recognize her for what she is – our planet's one undeniably real deity (the selfsame Goddess the patriarchy and its direct offspring capitalism truly cannot abide) – when at last the depredations of the capitalists provoke her to apocalyptic vengeance, the technologies of surveillance and mass murder will be among the first technologies to fail. No electricity means no computers, which means our overlords will no longer have the powers they appropriated from their sadistic and misogynistic conception of divinity. And in their defenselessness – the defenselessness of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals – will be the 99 Percent's opportunity to prevail – though only if we are ideologically and organizationally prepared. I will not live to see it; probably not even the Millennial generation will live to see it, but it is bound to happen – unless of course Hillary and her masters exterminate our species first.

**********

As noted in A Government Is Seizing Control of Our Election Process, and It Is Not the Russians, (t)here is an attempt underway for a government to take control of our election process and throw the election to Hillary Clinton. It is not the Russian government. Mark this day it is when we came to understand that the American government decided to elect a president.

The report goes on to document in disturbing detail how the so-called “deep state” – that is, the imperial security apparatus – is now functioning as a key part of the Clinton campaign machine.

In comment-thread response, here with an informational link added and the text slightly enlarged, I wrote what turned out to be my longest off-OAN Internet post of the week:

I have to quibble with (any) distinction between “government” and “deep state.”

What subjugates us is capitalist governance: in other words, fascism (actually – with its claim of “exceptionalism” and its chants of “USA! USA! USA!” as variants of the traditional “Zieg Heil” – a uniquely USian form of Nazism). It is government wholly owned by, and therefore utterly obedient to, a cabal of mostly anonymous plutocrats rather than to a Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or Pinochet.

The “deep state” – the USian security apparatus – is merely the first part of government the cabal took over after the failure of the 1934 Bankers' Plot.

This was in compliance with Hitler's Mein Kampf dictum the path to power is infiltration of the most powerful organs of the state.

As soon as “the deep state” was under capitalist control, the rest was relatively easy: the postwar purge of progressives; the decade of murders; the 2000 Bush Coup; the Reichstag Fire of 9/11; Obama elected by “change we can believe in” (the most malicious Big Lie in our presidential history); and we the people thus reduced to irremediable hopelessness. All else – including the subjugation implicit in our 2016 major-party choices – follows “as the night the day.”

And anyone who is surprised what obtains has been asleep, a la Rip Van Winkle, at least since 22 November 1963.

Such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals (the so-called “deep state” included); total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Thus too the future intended by the USian Empire (should humanity survive Hillary's intended depredations): the planet transformed by neo-conservative colonialism and neo-liberal economics into one vast neo-plantation, with all of us in the 99 Percent reduced to neo-slavery.

*****

Yahoo Secretly Scanned Customer Emails for US Intelligence – Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails  for specific information (demanded) by U.S. intelligence officials...scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

As I remarked on the associated comment thread, “And how do we know the companies that claim they didn't aren't lying? (Especially since deliberate deception – the sole reason for the gazillion-dollar Big Lie Business of Madison Avenue – is the quintessential core of capitalism.)”

I also added three additional comments to this thread, these in response to other thread-contributors' posts rather than to the news report itself.

*****

US Ranks Lower Than Kazakhstan and Algeria on Gender Equality – The US, the world’s biggest economy, ranks below Kazakhstan and Algeria for gender equality, according to...the Girls’ Opportunity Index, compiled by Save the Children to mark International Day of the Girl...The US came 32nd in the index due to its low representation of women in parliament, high teenage pregnancy rates and and its record on maternal deaths. Fourteen women died per 100,000 live births in the US in 2015, a similar number to Uruguay and Lebanon. Save the Children’s head of inclusive development, Lisa Wise, one of the report’s authors, said that the low ranking of the US was surprising. “It’s one of those cases where it should be performing better.”

Indeed, hence my comment-thread editorial:

“I'm surprised Ms. Wise is surprised at the USian Imperial Homeland's relatively low ranking. She must get her "news" from the Ministry of Propaganda (aka "mainstream media") rather than from less censored sources.”

“Otherwise she'd recognize the signature destitution imposed by capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

“And now that hackers have shown us the real Hillary -- the Goldwater Girl who closeted her ideological malevolence until she had the opportunity to spring it on us -- we know with absolute certainty it will get much much much worse: deadly cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; probable elimination of food stamps; the nullification of what little remains of our constitutional rights, millions more jobs stolen by free trade, who knows how many young men and women killed in ever-expanding foreign aggression...

“(Were I a betting man, which I'm not, I'd wager Big Time the USian position on the Girls' Opportunity Index is declining [just like every other indicator of USian quality of life], and that next year it will be worse.)

“As I said: capitalist governance in action.”

*****

Tim Kaine, John Negroponte and the Priest Who Was Thrown From a Helicopter...published this week by the Daily Beast...is a cheap exercise in red-baiting: “Tim Kaine’s Time with a Marxist Priest.” That priest, Fr. James Carney, was indeed a revolutionary and, as a practitioner of liberation theology in Latin America during a period marked by populist movements fighting against death squads and murderous regimes backed by the U.S., an avid student of Marxist theory. After years spent among the poor and oppressed in Latin America, Carney renounced his U.S. citizenship and joined the armed guerrilla struggle against U.S.-backed death squads and governments. He also left the Jesuits because, he explained, the order would not condone his involvement in an armed struggle...He was thrown from a helicopter in 1983...”executed by order of... Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, who...had received training in counterintelligence from U.S. forces at the School of the Americas”...The year Carney was murdered, Negroponte praised Gen. Álvarez Martínez’s “dedication to democracy.”

As I wrote in response, “One of the many reasons I can no longer call myself 'Christian' is because of the extent to which Christianity has become a tool of capitalism, hence precisely what Marx eternally damned as 'the opiate of the masses.' But if I could, for what you said here I would give you 10, 100, even 1000 thumbs up. Thank you for reminding me of a poignant truth I too often ignore.”

*****

Bernie Sanders: Focus Wells Fargo Criminal Probe on Senior Execs – Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and their colleagues urged Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a new letter to “thoroughly investigate the culpability of senior executives” at Wells Fargo (WFC) in the fake account scandal that shocked America...The 14 U.S. Senators warned Lynch on Monday that Wells Fargo is a “critical test” of the DOJ's recent push to pursue bad behavior of individual executives, rather than just impose fines on the corporations they represent. The lawmaker said they hope the DOJ “brings all the resources it has to bear” on investigating possible wrongdoing by “senior executives.”

As I sneered on the story's comment thread, “really, good people, be rational. Expecting anyone in the business of capitalist governance to seriously prosecute their owners is like expecting Hitler's Third Reich to prosecute the SS for war crimes. As Audrey Lorde put it, 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.'”

*****

Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean (And It’s Going To Get Worse) – The nuclear disaster has contaminated the world’s largest ocean in only five years and it’s still leaking 300 tons of radioactive waste every day.

I did not comment on the above report. It is from a website of which I was unaware but to which I will subscribe if possible. However there are claims in its comment-thread the report is not accurate, claims I have neither the knowledge nor the sources to resolve. Hence I re-post it here because (1), I suspect the report is probably true, to such an extent I no longer eat any salt-water fish; because (2), even if the report's summary of Fukushima's consequences is inaccurate, the cloak of lies, disinformation and silence imposed on this ongoing disaster by USian “mainstream media” demands we be reminded of its environment-destroying continuation, which itself reflects the fact (3), that so-called “mainstream media” is owned by the same plutocrats who own all “successful” USian politicians and all USian government at every level – which means “mainstream media” is nothing more than a private, for-profit version of the Ministry of Propaganda Josef Goebbels ran for Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich.

*****

Though I commented on neither of the two following reports, I posted them on OAN because of their relevance to the Fukushima debacle and our species' suicidal penchant for poisoning the environment. These – their headlines self-explanatory, are: Monsanto's Toxic PCBs Lurking in 26,000 US Public Schools, Report Says, here, and  Industrial chemicals linked to attention problems in Massachusetts children, here.  The latter, though published in 2012, nevertheless elaborates on the present-day Monsanto story.

*****

Six Million Adults Who Won't Influence This Presidential Race – It's hard to overstate the absurdity of the divide between corporate offenders and everyone else,  when it comes to the limits on democratic influence...executives from companies that are caught for serious offenses are almost never charged criminally, meaning that they seldom lose their voting rights...these same companies almost all become major campaign contributors...whether or not you lose the right to vote for committing a crime mostly depends on who you are, not what you did...

As I have said so many times on so many other comment threads, “such is life – and death – here in the Fourth Reich, where African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations peoples and progressives are the equivalents of the Third Reich's Jews, Roma, Slavs and Communists.” 

*********

SINCE I BEGAN Outside Agitator's Notebook in October 2009 I have wrestled with the problem of how – in the midst off an alleged “retirement” that because of volunteer work often demands more of my time than my journalism career did even at its peak – to post to this blog with enough regularity to retain faithful readership.

The obvious solution was to post my contributions to other websites even when I wrote nothing specifically for OAN. But that always seemed like cheating – until I realized, quite recently, the value to readers (including the secret police) of having all my comments gathered in one locale.

Hence – again with apologies for my long but unavoidable hiatus (see below) – a new approach: a collection of links to my weekly Internet posts even when none of the comments were originally intended for publication here. Though today is a Monday – still celebrated as the Columbus Day holiday in a few places but more rightfully recognized as Genocide Day by First Nations people and their supporters (of whom I, with my tiny fraction of Mohawk blood, am surely one) – this and future such postings will (health and other circumstances permitting), most likely be on Wednesdays or Thursdays.

Meanwhile thank you for your continuing readership.

***

As regular readers already know, since October 2014 my life has been plagued by an onslaught of ongoing disruptions – many of them health-endangering, all of them gravely depressing – inflicted by my landlord. This includes the extreme physical labor, last May, of having to pack all my possessions, including a 1,026-volume personal library, for temporary eviction – the effort that literally left me breathless even a full day after the work was finished and so brought about the diagnosis I am (very slowly) dying from congestive heart failure.

The mechanism of this landlord's malevolence, which is unquestionably the most physically damaging oppression I have suffered in this lifetime, is the obviously disorganized and thus seemingly endless renovation of the apartment complex in which 89 others and I are forced by economic circumstances to dwell. It is, of course, a facility for low-income seniors and disabled people – in other words a place where those of us rendered surplus by the fact we are no longer exploitable for profit (save as victims in circumstances identical to these) are housed to await death.

Therefore, in accordance with the core principles of capitalism – which contrary to its infinity of Big Lies allocates rights and privileges only on the basis of one's financial worth and thus functions in morally imbecilic defiance of all humanitarian considerations – we the tenants are treated by our landlord as if we are sub-humans with hardly more rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” than are accorded factory-farm animals, never mind the proclamations of the USian Declaration of Independence. Nor – particularly as proven by our unprotected exposure to the lung-befouling dust-storm generated when safety-masked workers sanded all the stucco off the exteriors of the facility's two four-storey buildings – is there even one scintilla of hyperbole in the factory-farm metaphor. While the workers were at least issued protective masks, we were given no protection at all – merely the recommendation we close our windows.

Moreover, as I am repeatedly told by various government officials, we have no recourse. Our abject powerlessness is mandated by the fact Washington is the only state in the USian Empire in which the backroom legislative collaboration of the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties ensures that tenants have absolutely no legal rights at all.

Thus the landlord can compel us to pay rent no matter how long his renovation continues – never mind it is a helter-skelter operation ever-more-obviously planned to generate maximum profit at minimal cost – with minimal prior planning and therefore maximum disruption of our lives.

For example: interior, individual-apartment renovation – flooring replacement that imposed the temporary evictions I mentioned above (which in turn inflicted the physically demanding and emotionally stressful chores of packing as for a permanent move) – was unthinkingly scheduled to precede the removal of the stucco. As a result the new carpets are now begrimed by a thick layer of stucco dust and will soon have to be cleaned at tenant expense – approximately $150 per apartment. The windows are also filthy – and there on the glass the rain has turned the dust back into cement – but again we the tenants are to be billed for cleaning up the landlord's mess. That sort of thing – the fact the landlord can legally continue the extraction of rent no matter how intolerable he renders our existence – is the quintessence of “absolutely no rights at all.” Indeed it is a landlordly outrage that for me personally was far beyond imagination – that is, until I became one of the landlord's 90 victims.

Meanwhile – despite the filth and disorder the renovation continues to inflict – the landlord has resumed quarterly apartment inspections – intrusions to check for bedbug infestations and to spot early evidence (like used diapers stored in one's refrigerator) of geriatric dementia.

In my case, because of the (astonishing) quantity of stucco dust that seeped into my apartment despite the intolerable, 100-degrees-Fahrenheit discomfort of windows tightly closed in the midst of last summer's hottest days, the resumption of inspections has cursed me with the worst, most difficult, most extended and (thanks to arthritis inflamed by the onset of the rainy season), most physically painful housecleaning drudgery I have ever suffered. Ever. Again, no hyperbole: while preparation for the quarterly inspection normally takes me no more than two eight-hour days, I began this most-miserable of post-stucco-removal inspection-preparation chores six days ago, have worked at it anywhere from six to 14 hours each day since, and I still have two more days of work before this apartment – which under pre-renovation circumstances was a reasonably pleasant place – is sufficiently dust-free to pass inspection. And now I cannot but fearfully wonder what horrors all this dust might have fertilized into malignant growth in my throat and lungs – for now I am perpetually hoarse and afflicted by a chronic cough as well.

LB/13 October 2016

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