Obamacare as a Microcosm of What Is Killing Us

THE BIG LIE of the so-called “Affordable Care Act” – an Orwellian name if ever there was one – is already obvious in its prohibitive co-pays.

Moreover – as if there were any remaining doubts – the death of any rational hope  for achieving single-payer/public option health insurance in Vermont underscores what was obviously one of the key purposes behind Obama the Orator's shape-shift to Barack the Betrayer. ACA – “Obamacare” as it is ironically labeled – cares only for ensuring insurance-company profiteering.

Yes, as Vermonters have learned to their embitterment, ACA methodically perpetuates the deliberately genocidal U.S. policy of health care as a privilege of wealth.

And it does so with typical Madison Avenue cunning. In the eyes of those fortunate folks who are neither Obamacare's victims nor its supplicants, it creates the illusion of an actual national health care system. It thereby silences that global chorus of humanitarian critics who were rightfully damning the United States as the only industrial nation on earth which refuses to accept that health care is a basic human right.

Said one U.S. physician in a 2012 protest-letter  to The Wall Street Journal:  “(ACA) will not achieve universal coverage, as it leaves at least 26 million individuals uninsured. It will not make health care affordable to Americans with insurance because of high co-pays and gaps in coverage that leave patients vulnerable to financial ruin in the event of serious illness, and it will not control costs...It denies care in order to increase insurers' bottom line, and it obstructs any serious effort to control costs.”

The law – or rather the absence of humanitarian reform the law locks into place – is also driving an unknown number of U.S. doctors to seek professional asylum elsewhere.

A physician recruiter  quoted by The Star, the newspaper of Windsor, Ont., says that over the past decade at least 105 U.S. doctors have relocated to that city alone.

One of these soon-to-be exiles is Dr. Emily Queenan MD, a family physician in upstate New York. She is moving to Canada  because, as she put it in an Evidence Network piece republished by Truthout, “I'm tired of doing daily battle with the same adversary that my patients face – the private health insurance industry, with its frequent errors in processing claims (the American Medical Association reports that one of every 14 claims submitted to commercial insurers are paid incorrectly); outright denials of payment (about one to five percent); and costly paperwork that consumes about 16 percent of physicians' working time, according to a recent journal study.”

“I've also witnessed the painful and continual shifting of medical costs onto my patients' shoulders through rising co-payments, deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses,” wrote Dr. Queenan. “According to a survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, 66 million – 36 percent of Americans — reported delaying or forgoing needed medical care in 2014 due to cost.”

As I cannot say too often, such is life – and death – under capitalism. For what is capitalism but infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue? What is capitalism but the malicious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth? Just ask the late Ayn Rand, whose fictionalization of Hitler's Mein Kampf polls as second only to The Bible as the most influential book  in the United States.

Given that background – given my horror at the Moron Nation to which my homeland has been reduced – I suppose my response to the Truthout piece was in a sense predictable. But several others made supportive comments. Hence I reproduce it here in totality: 

I commend Dr. Queenan for her courageous decision to embrace civilization by moving to a nation not ruled by Ayn Rand savagery. May she, her family and her future patients all thrive.

That said, her naive belief "the U.S. will get there some day" is a classic example of the futility of hope.

The ultimate fate of any and all efforts to achieve single-payer/public-option health insurance in the U.S. is proven beyond dispute by the (Democrat) gubernatorial treachery that killed – forever – the apparently successful grassroots effort to create such a system in Vermont.

Indeed the lesson of the Vermont debacle sends a terminal message to health insurance reformers everywhere in the U.S.: don't bother trying for single-payer/public-option because even your best most diligent efforts will be defeated in the end by political betrayal.

And so it shall remain until the oligarchy is overthrown or our species renders itself extinct, whichever comes first.

Another poster noted that “Vermont activists haven't given up on seeking Single-Payer.”

True – but only in that some people will never acknowledge the U.S. experiment in representative democracy has failed (or, rather, has been murdered), and that these same people will always continue banging their heads against the proverbial stone wall.

As long as the One Percent owns and rules the U.S. political system – that is, for how ever much longer the United States exists – a public-option/single-payer system will never be allowed.

To imagine otherwise is to ignore the primary purpose of Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer: to prohibit socialism (especially including socialized medicine), and thereby ensure the neo-Nazi savagery of Ayn Rand capitalism is forever. All this, of course, with the additional cover provided by the Republicans accusing the president of being a "socialist."

Such is the diabolical methodology of de facto one-party rule.

In which context note that Obamacare cunningly prohibits the states from initiating public-option/single payer insurance – which would have killed it in Vermont even without the (Democrat) governor's service to his One Percent masters.

The tragic failure of the U.S. Left to understand realpolitik – specifically to acknowledge the extent to which we have already been subjugated and enslaved – defines this Left as being as much a part of Moron Nation as the Right.

Until we admit the magnitude of our powerlessness, we will remain unable to evolve an effective response to it. Which – particularly given the extinction of our species made inevitable by the combination of terminal climate change and the looming thermonuclear war with Russia -- relegates such hope to the realm of nonsense.

Sorry, but that's just the way it is. The hydrogen bomb trumps everything, and even without that, if you understood the true magnitude of the climate-change disaster (even now at its alleged "beginning"), you'd recognize Nature has clearly decided our species is unworthy of survival.

Later, in response to multiple posts, I wrote:

I had not meant to trigger an extended discussion, but it appears I have done just that. Hence this reply is to Ted, PGreen and whomever else might choose to to join in.

Admittedly I write and speak from the cynical perspective of one who has been an activist/journalist (or a journalist/activist) since my late teens in the 1950s. 

During the subsequent 58 years, I have witnessed the defeat of every cause to which I committed time, energy, a brief stay in jail, some bloodshed and a helluva lot of suffering and deprivation. These causes include organized labor (the American Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO); post-Sputnik education reform; the Civil Rights Movement (Knox County Jail, 1963); the anti-Vietnam War Movement; the Back-to-the-Land Movement; the alternative press; the creation of an anti-capitalist Counterculture, and of course the associated defenses of the Bill of Rights.

Every one of these causes has failed. Given the time-span involved – I say again 58 years – these failures cannot be dismissed as short-term or temporary phenomena.

Each failure is in fact symptomatic of the relentless destruction of U.S. liberty begun by the One Percent in response to the close proximity of Communist revolution that evolved during the 1930s. The retaliatory purge – and that is precisely what it is – began literally the day World War II ended and continues even now.

Ideologically speaking, the abject failure of the U.S. Left to combat this aggression is rooted in its rejection of the historical truth of class warfare. Thus it has blinded itself to the nature and lineage of capitalism.

But what marks the U.S. Left as part of Moron Nation is actually a triple failure.

The first failure is failure to understand that capitalism is literally infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – precisely as Ayn Rand states in her fictionalizations of Mein Kampf. the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

Failure number two is refusal to recognize that capitalism is the direct descendant both of patriarchy and patriarchal religion. It is therefore the immediate, innately misogynistic ancestor of both fascism and Nazism. In other words, Nazism (whether in its misogynistic anti-Jewish German form or in its misogynistic Christian/exceptionalist U.S. form), is the ultimate form of capitalism. Its savagery is therefore as inevitable as the death of a corn crop after a hard freeze.

In the past, the ostensibly Marxian domains of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Peoples' Republic of China offered enough competition to capitalism, the U.S. One Percent was forced to ameliorate capitalism's most obvious savageries. Now, with the Soviet Union dead and China co-opted by Wall Street, there is no such strategic or even tactical need. Hence capitalism now openly displays its tyrannosauric nature.

Failure number three is the U.S. Left's refusal to recognize the ONLY reason the One Percent yielded to the humanitarian demands of labor, the Republican Progressives and finally the Democrats' New Deal was the One Percenters' abject terror of Communist revolution. (Note that The Communist Manifesto, which from the perspective of the capitalists is the most dangerous document in our species' history, dates from 1848.)

What all this means in terms of any present-day prospects for humanitarian change is that there are none.

History shows us such change has four prerequisites. These are (1)-ideological solidarity; (2)-leadership and organization; (3)-mastery of extant technologies military and civilian; and (4)-the aid, overt, clandestine or both, of a major foreign power.

None of the first three prerequisites exist in the United States today. Our society has been deliberately dumbed down or "moronated" into Moron Nation precisely to rob us, forever, of the requisite intellectual skills and psychological reflexes. Meanwhile the moronation of other realms (which includes the radical Islamization of the Middle East), continues apace.

And with the death of the U.S.S.R. and the co-optation of China, there is no longer any source of revolutionary outside agitation or support or even any effective antidote to capitalist depredation.

Nor will there ever be again. The U.S. will literally destroy the world before it allows any rival nation – with or without a rival ideology – to emerge.

Couple that with the already ruinous apocalypse inflicted by what should properly be labeled "terminal climate change" – for that is exactly what it is – and you have then begun to arrive at a realistic assessment of our present circumstances: literally the darkest, most hopeless epoch in our species' 200,000-year history.

However, this does not mean we should give up. It merely means we should recognize that surely the notion of revolution by a dying species on a dying planet is the ultimate cosmic joke. We should therefore give up the grandiose in exchange for doing the best we can, locally, to better peoples' lives.

(Even at a physically disabled age 75, I still manage to serve my community by producing an informationally vital monthly newsletter and, as its editor, sometimes functioning as an unofficial ombudsman.)

But to attempt anything on any greater scale is merely to court despair.

Though I cling, perhaps foolishly, to the belief that if we can strip off the Norman Vincent Peale blinders with which the One Percent has shackled us – that is, if we can acknowledge the extent to which we have been defeated and conquered – we might yet evolve an effective response.

However, until then we are at best doing nothing more than dancing a 21st Century version of the Ghost Dance.

Meanwhile the same administration that promised us "change we can believe in" now assures us U.S. aggression in Ukraine will not require nuclear weapons. 

LB/17-24 May 2015

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We Are Slowly Boiled Frogs, Yet No Leftist Dares Admit it

THE BOILED FROG analogy of politics – the notion we the people are being gradually but deliberately subjugated, so that like a frog in water warmed ever-so-slowly to a boil, we will not be aware of the danger until it is too late to escape – is seemingly anathema to the U.S. Left.

Not once in all the years I have written about politics, roughly from late 1963 until the present, have I heard even one Leftist spokesperson use the boiled-frog comparison to explain the tactical and strategic significance of the ever-increasing restrictions imposed on our political and economic freedom – especially the latter.

Nor is there any widespread recognition the recent culture-war victories – marriage equality and legalized marijuana – are entirely illusory. Neither costs the One Percent a penny. Hence neither does a thing to alter the wage-slavery dynamic that defines capitalism.

Though I support marriage equality, I am equally aware the freedom to marry is meaningless if you can aspire to nothing better than a grueling minimum-wage job, a miserable lifetime of debt slavery and an early death imposed by the lack of adequate health care – the sure fate, regardless of their sexual preferences, that already awaits at least half the families in the United States.

Legalized marijuana in this context becomes merely another opiate by which to numb ourselves against our abject wretchedness, thereby ensuring our masters we are that less likely to rebel.

And yes, the One Percent is indeed that cunning.

But rejection of the boiled-frog analogy leaves the Left without any effective means to describe the gradual imposition of tyranny that has followed, “as the night the day,” the now-undeniable coup of 22 November 1963.

As of now, the most blatant of these tyrannies is the Hobby Lobby decision, which already was becoming the women's equivalent of the Dred Scott decision, as I argued last week.  (Scroll down to “Outside Agitation Elsewhere.”)

But now it looks as if Hobby Lobby may be the Dred Scott equivalent for the entire 99 Percent.

“By declaring that “closely held” corporations may hold religious beliefs, the court may have provided businesses with a new tool for crushing workplace unionization drives,” an MSNBC analyst wrote on 15 July.  “In addition to declaring themselves exempt from contraception mandates and non-discrimination laws, religious employers may soon be able to argue for an exemption from collective bargaining laws.” 

If so, any boss will be able to make such a claim. Not only will it be a giant step toward the One Percent's goal of reducing the U.S. to an officially Christian theocracy.  It will also be a huge stride toward fulfillment of what seems to President Barack Obama's primary domestic goal: reducing the entire U.S. Working Class to the inescapable socioeconomic wretchedness that formerly defined only the nation's racial and/or geographic minorities.

What the frog analogy would show us is how these restrictions on our freedom are parts of a relentless, multi-generational, multi-faceted war of subjugation waged against us by the One Percent.

Though traceable to the 19th Century, the war's present form took shape at least as early as 1934 with the so-called Bankers Plot.  (Scroll down for my addition of historical facts to the comment thread.)  According to the era's Communist Party sources, this was a joint Wall-Street/Nazi-German effort to impose fascism on the United States and make it part of the greater fascist New Order proposed by Hitler. 

Had the plotters succeeded, this nation with its vast natural and industrial resources would have become the chief financier and primary supply source for what would have been the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo/Washington D.C. Axis and der Führer's plan for global conquest.

The U.S. plotters, placed above the law by their status as members of the uppermost ranks of the (unacknowledged) capitalist aristocracy, were never punished.

And their descendents are to this day continuing the One Percent effort to impose fascism. This is manifest in the violent suppression of dissent (as in the crushing of the Occupy Movement) and in the wars against organized labor and against the rights of women and minorities. The power of the One Percent – now defined as the right of corporate “personhood” – is used to abolish the rights of all the rest of us. That's why the struggle has now (predictably) morphed into a war against every civil right we the people ever imagined we might have.

But the Left seemingly dare not use the one English phrase that would make all those connections obvious.

The same lack of language – or, more accurately, avoidance of language – illustrates vividly how the One Percent uses wedge issues to perpetuate the powerlessness of the 99 Percent. It also demonstrates how the U.S. Left, weakened by its signature rejection of formal ideology and thus by its lack of analytical ability, often unwittingly serves the very oppressor it seeks to topple.

What then actually prompts the Left to reject the boiled-frog analogy?

I strongly suspect it is misguided political correctness. In my lifetime, the frog likeness was first applied to U.S. politics by the Second Amendment community. That happened at least 38 years ago, even before the membership of the National Rifle Association – in furious and embittered response to the de facto national gun registration imposed by the Gun Control Act of 1968 – elected a revolution-minded board of directors who radically transformed the organization into what it is today.

Founded in 1871, the NRA had been, until the enactment of GCA '68, an avowedly apolitical group of target shooters and firearms experts with close connections to the War Department and its successor the Department of Defense. The academic credibility of its journal, The American Rifleman, had elevated it to the world standard as the definitive source for historical and technical material about firearms.

NRA's primary purpose in those pre-GCA-'68 years was the promotion of rifle marksmanship – a realm in which, until the previously widespread familiarization of youth with firearms was abolished by the ongoing escalation of cleverly fostered anti-gun hysteria – the U.S. led the entire world. But now, in response to the often subtle but nevertheless undeniable Ruling Class effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – that is, to reduce the 99 Percent to mandatory defenselessness and compulsory pacifism – the NRA has become one of the most powerful advocacy groups in the nation.

It has also, of necessity, become one of the nation's most outspokenly anti-government organizations, in the course of which it has (unfortunately) allowed itself to not only be captured by the Hard Right, but to become a front organization for the Republican Party, also known as the “Grand Old Party” or simply the GOP.

Though the GOP is one of the two U.S. Ruling Class parties, it is the only one that dares speak openly for the racist, sexist, imperialist (and thus definitively fascist) One Percent.

The NRA – though it actively courts women and minorities as members and participants in marksmanship training and shooting sports – has nevertheless by its association with the most reactionary elements in the Republican Party become the favorite hate-object of a huge majority within the U.S. Left. 

But this so-called “Left” is actually a pseudo-Left. It is proven so by its anti-intellectuality and rejection of ideology (and the resultant lack of ideological discipline) that fosters its reflexive identification with the oppressor – its petit-bourgeois arrogance and its carefully closeted Ayn-Rand-conditioned selfishness.

Thus it fears an armed Working Class far more than it fears the ever-escalating depredations of the One Percent.

Never mind how the One Percent's coterie of politicians, judges, generals, academics, executives, bureaucrats and police commanders have destroyed the American Dream and are now methodically nullifying the last remnants of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy. The U.S. Left will not use the best phrase in the English language to describe what is being done to us all merely because those words were first uttered in a political context by the people it most despises.

Moreover – and uniquely – the present-day U.S. Left has little or nothing to do with Working-Class consciousness.

Therefore its most intense hatred is not directed at the One Percenters, nor at their obscenely well-recompensed servants in the upper echelons of government and industry, but rather at the (mostly blue-collar) men and women of the 99 Percent who yet own firearms and hold to the right of personal self-defense.

This particularly vicious twist in the class war is amongst the lingering legacies of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In its immediate aftermath, newly inaugurated President Lyndon Baines Johnson – as faithful a servant of the One Percent in 1964 as President Barack Hussein Obama is today – reversed the policies of the murdered President Kennedy and so ballooned a shrinking U.S. involvement in a Vietnamese civil war into a World-War-Two-sized windfall to military-industrial profiteers.

But that wasn't all LBJ gave his masters. The war's biggest bonus to the One Percent was its destruction, forever, of the New Deal coalition, a united front of white-collar and blue-collar interests – revolutionaries and reformists alike – brought together by their demands for socioeconomic relief from the malevolence of capitalism.

The New Deal coalition had (sort of) kept the more obvious forms of institutional fascism out of (most of) the U.S. homeland since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic reforms saved U.S. capitalism from the revolution its savagery had nearly provoked. Not only did the New Deal co-opt a looming Communist rebellion – an uprising that, given the aid of the Soviet Union, would undoubtedly have succeeded. It also prevented the civil war – including a second secession by the South – that would have inevitably followed such a revolution.

But only three decades later, the domestic conflict inherent in the Vietnam War – the schism within the 99 Percent between the white-collar and blue-collar classes (and the breathtaking hatred and contempt with which the draft-exempt children of the white-collar elite viewed those of us whose poverty and lack of influence left us no choice but prison or service in the imperial war machine) – killed the New Deal coalition just as surely as the assassins' bullets slew President Kennedy.

Soon afterward, the smirkingly draft-exempt white-collar elite became the snarlingly anti-gun elite, which redefined us no-choice-but-to-soldier blue-collar folk accordingly. We who had been “baby killers” and “war criminals” were now “gun-crazed thugs” instead.

Thus, by the diabolical cunning of the One Percent, was any sort of 99 Percent solidarity rendered forever impossible.

From then on, the Boiled Frog Protocol was the One Percenters' primary method.

It would take the One Percenters a few more decades – and even then they could not be sure of victory until the Soviet Union was destroyed – but the end result would be a USian Empire as thoroughly fascist, inside and out, at home and abroad, as anything the aristocrats' Bankers Plot ancestors might have imagined.

Yet the alleged Left – robbed of appropriate language by its fanatical hatred of firearms owners and all the craven fears and intimations of inadequacy that fuel its loathing – never dares speak of the Boiled Frog.

Meanwhile, as the One Percent slowly turns up the heat, we flounder about ever deeper in ever-hotter water.

* * * * * * 

Outside Agitation Elsewhere (In Case You Missed It) 

When the Bill Gates division of the New World Order hurled an unprecedented number of workers under the unemployment bus,  it seemed a perfect example of capitalism in action, complete with a vicious lesson for those 99 Percenters who reject the historical truth of class warfare and mistakenly assume they and the One Percenters have common interests. Hence my less-than-sympathetic remarks on the comment thread of “Microsoft Announces Largest Layoffs in History, Stocks Rise”:

Nurds and techies are amongst the most fanatical fans of Ayn Rand, whose fictionalizations of Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") formalized capitalism's philosophy of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the emphatic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. 

But now so many of these women and men and have been flung out of work – at least 18,000 human beings cast off by Microshaft as if they were nothing more than obsolete software.

Given the relentless savagery of the economy so many of these newly jobless persons hitherto celebrated and served, most likely they will soon discover they have been permanently condemned to minimum-wage slavery.

I wonder if they will then finally begin to recognize the true nature of capitalism – that it is not just moral imbecility, but moral imbecility run amok – and that they who were previously its prideful facilitators are now its abject victims, utterly defenseless against the smirking malevolence of their creditors.

The only sure beneficiaries of these layoffs are the secret police. There is no person on this planet more dangerous than an angry Nurd turned revolutionary – which means the government agents assigned to spy on these newcomers to the Golden Arches slave-pens will soon be collecting unprecedented hours of overtime pay.

* * * * * * 

Reader Supported News, which along with Consortium News are my favorite sources for uncensored reporting, uncharacteristically posted a curiously anti-Russian story on the latest Ukraine crisis,  a dispatch all the more perplexing for its usually reliable Guardian UK origin. My addition to the comment thread of “Recording Strongly Suggests Russian Separatist Shot Down Malaysian Jet” was therefore notably skeptical:

With the CIA and its neo-Nazi militias running the Ukraine government, this tragedy could have been scripted well in advance, much as the Gulf of Tonkin incident was scripted by President Johnson to justify massive U.S. intervention to support the fascists in Vietnam's civil war.

Therefore what we should fear most is capitalist media turning the shooting down of the airliner into an episode equivalent to the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and/or the sinking of the Lusitania – that is, a pretext for escalating the Ukrainian Civil War into an all-out war against Russia – with the U.S. commanding the action exactly as in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the truly pivotal question – why was a civilian airliner flying in the midst of a war zone – remains not just unanswered, but shamefully unasked.

Such is capitalist media, of which Josef Goebbels would be justifiably proud.

* * * * * * 

Late last night, in one of those geriatric moments of brutally honest self-evaluation, I was thinking about why I persist in political activism despite the fact my knowledge of human history tells me it is almost certainly pointless – that barring a genuine miracle (an event in which I cannot believe) – conditions in the United States will continue to worsen until this nation is no more.

Not only have the capitalists made themselves as powerful as the sadistic Abrahamic god they so obviously emulate; they have perpetuated their omnipotence by mastery of the most malevolent technologies of oppression. And now they are deliberately herding us into a new Dark Age from which – because their depredations are also killing our planet – our species will most likely never emerge.

That's why, when I discovered the dreadful detail that dooms Vermont's brave effort to declare health care a human right  (and thereby overturn Obamacare's deliberate reinforcement of the capitalist mandate that health care is to remain forever a privilege of wealth), I became quite angry at Tara Culp-Ressler for burying this pivotal fact and otherwise writing as if the Vermont plan were fait accompli. Hence my antagonistic words on the comment thread of her well-written but nevertheless deceptively optimistic “Beyond Obamacare: Health Care as a Human Right”:

I am sick unto death of these “there's a better tomorrow” stories, which are secular versions of the Santa Claus or Jesus myths and are thus actually nothing more than propaganda cunningly designed to stave off rebellion by perpetuating false hopes.

The key sentence in this report, which contains the fact that should have been its lead, is “Vermont plans to apply for a waiver to sidestep the Affordable Care Act beginning in 2017 so it can implement its own single-payer system.”

What this means is Vermont's plan is doomed without federal approval, which in turn means it is nothing more than pie-in-the-sky. Indeed to hope for such approval under present conditions is as absurd as hoping for Congressional relief from the Hobby Lobby decision.

Neither recognition of health insurance as a human right nor restoration of female sexual freedom will ever be allowed under the present system. The U.S. experiment in representative democracy, like the so-called “American Dream,” is dead beyond any hope of resurrection.

The hideous truth is that government at every level in this savagely oppressed nation has been reduced to a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. Until we the people recognize that without economic democracy there is no democracy at all, we will continue to suffer beneath the truncheons of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Why then do I persist in humanitarian activism, as for example my ongoing involvement with 15 Now Tacoma and its quest for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour? Why, for that matter, do I even bother to write this blog?

Because when I was a child age 11 or so and a Boy Scout on my first camping trip, I rather joyfully embraced the notion of leaving the campsite in better condition than I found it. Later, as a young adult, I realized that precept was amongst the rules by which I governed my life – that in fact it was an apt metaphor for one of the instincts that led me into journalism. And though I now know such improvement is no longer possible – that our campsite, which is our planet, is trashed beyond repair – I cannot live with myself unless I keep trying, in my own small way, to clean up the mess.

LB/20 July 2014

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Did Obama Throw Women under the Hobby Lobby Bus?

WAS OBAMACARE SECRETLY INTENDED to betray women? When you consider the utterly predictable outcome of the United States Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision and its de facto endorsement by President Barack Obama's refusal to employ his executive powers against its sweeping ban on birth control, the possibility becomes too evident to ignore. Indeed it clamors for investigation. Moreover, Obama's long and embittering record of making campaign promises he had no intention of keeping suggests the betrayal may have been part of the Affordable Care Act's hidden agenda from the moment the newly elected president began his closed-door scheming  with the health-insurance-industry executives who actually authored the legislation.

I said nearly as much in response to Abby Ohlheiser's brief and tautly reasoned “Ginsburg's Passionate 35-Page Dessent of Hobby Lobby Decision,” part of my daily email from Reader Supported News. Six days later,my suspicions intensified by many hours of research, what began as an embittered comment-thread remark had become the key passage of this column:

Assuming the correctness of Justice Ginsburg's dissent, the impact of the Hobby Lobby decision is far more devastating than we are being told by mainstream media.

The devastation is inherent in the fact at least 90 percent of U.S. business is “closely held.” 

Hobby Lobby thus allows the imposition of theocratic restrictions on most of the U.S. workplace. Not only does this abolish the reproductive freedom of most of the workforce; it is also a giant step toward replacing constitutional governance with Biblical law – a subversive goal lavishly funded by the One Percent as the ultimate means of subjugating the Working Class.

Meanwhile, imposition of theocracy via the private sector has become a standard Christian tactic. The takeover of the nation's health care facilities by the Roman Catholic Church is already, wherever it occurs, prohibiting access to all forms of contraception.

Financially, Hobby Lobby's main beneficiaries are the insurance barons. By making birth control unobtainable, the ruling further maximizes Affordable Care Act profits. Mandatory insurance generates obscene windfall profits even as prohibitively expensive co-pays and deductibles radically limit the public's ability to actually obtain care. Hobby Lobby furthers this process, minimizing cost by eliminating birth control from ACA coverage.

 

Given the lies and treachery by which we are now ruled, who can doubt this atrocity was carefully scripted in advance?

Though the president's sycophants will loudly denounce any such notion as unthinkable, U.S. history proves otherwise. Legislation at all levels – federal, state and local – is invariably peddled as an essential solution to some pressing crisis. But many such measures are sneakily written to perpetuate the very grievances they falsely claim to redress. By legalistic sleight-of-hand and other devious means – especially alleged “benefits” that on closer inspection turn out to be nonexistent – they defeat the democratic will of the people and impose instead the tyrannical goals and objectives of Ruling Class politicians and bureaucrats. Under the direction of their One Percent masters, these functionaries have honed the strategy and tactics of deliberate deception to sadistic perfection at every level of government – federal, state or local – inside the United States and its possessions.

The associated methodology is obviously a Machiavellian variant of the marketing practices by which the capitalists routinely dupe us into buying defective products. In the marketplace it is infuriating. In its political application – with all its heightened expectation of collective socioeconomic improvement and its subsequent plunge into defeat and disillusionment – it is perhaps the most injurious psychological warfare weapon in the Ruling Class arsenal. Not only does it foster alienation and despair; it subverts democracy and undermines even the hope of democracy by convincing us the entire democratic processes is a sham.

An ultimate example of this sort of deception is the New Deal. By ameliorating the morally imbecilic savagery of capitalism, it co-opted, demobilized and eventually dispersed a definitively revolutionary majority coalition of Communists, other socialists, Progressives and Left Democrats. But it (deliberately) preserved the irresistible power of the One Percent and thereby ensured its own eventual death. It also facilitated – chiefly by temporarily disguising the predatory nature of capitalism – the re-emergence of capitalism's unapologetic malevolence.

Another example is Medicare, which is funded by a combination of payroll taxes and mandatory premiums. It is touted as a European-style program that provides health care to all the nation's citizens age 65 and over and to recipients of Social Security Disability Insurance stipends as well. Though Medicare is widely believed to signal the government's endorsement of the principle that health care is a human right, in truth it does nothing of the kind. It covers only “about 48 percent” of an individual's authorized health-care costs  – far less if the non-reimbursed costs of vision, hearing and dental services are included in the calculations. The remainder, 52 percent of the approved expenses plus the full price of everything else that is not covered – eye glasses, hearing aids, dental care, many other services – comes out of the so-called beneficiary's pocket.

“No part of Medicare,” states the reference linked in the preceding paragraph, “pays for all of a beneficiary's covered medical costs, and many costs are not covered at all.” For the average recipient, the necessary co-payments and deductibles are too often prohibitive.  This means innumerable Medicare recipients, though saddled with the mandatory premiums deducted from their Social Security pensions, are chronically unable to obtain adequate health care. They are locked out of the system by its additional fees. And the little Medicare does cover is under constant attack by Republicans and Democrats alike – one of the many ways the two Ruling Class parties demonstrate their absolute fealty to the One Percenters, who now make no secret of the fact they regard humanitarian expenditures as wasted money. The only people genuinely served by Medicare are thus the wealthy, for whom it is merely another bonus on a seemingly endless list of taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Medicare's functions are therefore actually fourfold. (1)-Medicare rewards the wealthy. (2)-It punishes – and sometimes exterminates – the poor. (3)-It locks into place the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. (The definition's perpetuity is achieved by a system so impossibly complex, no group of citizens can change it without the intervention of politicians and bureaucrats – which means the citizens' efforts are invariably betrayed.) (4)-By its opacity, Medicare enables the U.S. to promulgate the Big Lie – within and without – that it offers some of its citizens a genuine universal health-care program.

Obamacare serves exactly the same functions in precisely the same ways. It is mandatory. The premiums it extracts are providing the health insurance cartel with the largest, most obscene windfall profits in its history – another of the president's innumerable gifts to his Wall Street masters. Yet Obamacare's deductibles and co-pays discourage and/or prohibit most of its alleged beneficiaries from fulfilling their medical needs. Like Medicare, its complexities make it incomprehensible save by politicians and bureaucrats, which further cements into permanence the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of wealth. And, again like Medicare, it enables U.S. propaganda to disseminate another Big Lie intended to disguise the deadly barbarism of its Ayn Rand economics.

Such are the ways of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else. Such too is the unmitigated deception that is the operational context of all U.S. health care.

It is in this same context Obamacare's triumphant claim “being female is no longer a pre-existing condition” emerges as yet another Big Lie. (Readers who are unfamiliar with the for-profit U.S. medical system should note that until the advent of the so-called Affordable Care Act, the health insurance barons charged radically higher premiums  for insuring reproductive-age females.) Obama the Orator repeatedly assured the voters such discrimination would soon be ended. But after he won the presidency, he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer. In that persona, he almost certainly guaranteed the insurance barons they would soon regain their ability to exploit female genitalia as a profit center. Even if he did not, it is beyond belief he and his insurance-cartel henchmen – armed as they were with all their market research and secret-police surveillance data – did not foresee the Hobby Lobby lawsuit or some other action that would yield the same result.

In any case, it is increasingly obvious the Hobby Lobby decision has now permanently rescinded what women regarded as the most compelling aspect of the ACA. As the Associated Press reported the day after the decision – “The Supreme Court has left in place lower court rulings in favor of businesses that object to covering all methods of government-approved contraception...not just the four pregnancy prevention methods and devices that the court considered in its ruling.” Since then, at least 82 more companies have indicated they intend to cancel their employees' birth-control coverage. 

Nor is there any recourse. The fund-raising claims of several women's organizations notwithstanding, Congressional remedies are impossible. The aggressively reactionary, vindictively theocratic Republican majority in the House has been gerrymandered into unbeatable permanence. And as reported above, the president – whose theocratic leanings  are so obvious they are provoking secularist protests – will not grant Hobby Lobby's growing roster of victims any other remedy.

Long term, the Hobby Lobby ruling will probably enable employers and insurers to force nearly all U.S. women to pay out of pocket for their birth control. But these expenses, like Medicare and ACA co-pays and deductibles, will be brutally prohibitive. Capitalism has downsized nearly half the population's paychecks to poverty or lower-income levels.  As Justice Ginsberg noted in her epic dissent, the cost of a single inter-uterine device or IUD “is nearly equivalent to a month's full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage." For women who cannot afford the aristocratic privilege of self-financed contraception, the only alternative is total surrender to misogyny: re-learning to despise their own bodies – to fear their own sensuality, sexuality and fertility – precisely as demanded by Christian doctrine and its regime of mandatory chastity. Theocrats everywhere are gloating. 

All of which again underscores the fact that in the United States, health care is a privilege of wealth and will remain so forever – that is, until the nation as we know it is no more.

The Hobby-Lobby case also demonstrates the ever-more-terrifying likelihood biblical-law Christian theocracy  will eventually replace Constitutional governance in the U.S homeland. Not only has the Supreme Court endorsed Jesus as the national deity; the forcible Christianization of the imperial military machine has already produced legions of troops trained in theocratic surveillance and oppression. The high command is now marching these latter-day Inquisitors and Crusaders into place.

Unfortunately, only a few Cassandra columnists,  of whom I am surely one, dare write constantly and at length about the inherent malevolence of the fanatical U.S. Christians and their schemes for imposing a Christian version of Middle Eastern theocracy (complete with public torture-executions for rebellious women, homosexuals and all other so-called “heretics”). And though we have been exposing these threats for years, our warnings are often belittled or suppressed. The above linked piece by Chris Hedges, for example, was suppressed by every major publication in the nation – never mind his stature as a mainstream writer.

Meanwhile, the ever-more-emboldened theocrats now openly denounce all women who use contraception  as “creatures...who cannot control their libido.” Such malicious slanders resurrect the bigoted dogmas of Abrahamic religion – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – that all women are like the biblical Eve, ruinously sinful, ready recruits for the Devil and therefore a seductive threat  to every devout male. But as Truthout's William Rivers Pitt aptly puts it, the U.S. seemingly remains the “land of the free” – unless you're a woman.

Though Pitt seems to carefully avoid such possibilities, it's impossible to overlook that someday in this increasingly downtrodden nation, women's cumulative anger might light the proverbial fuse. That's what happened in Paris on 14 July 1789, likewise in Petrograd on International Women's Day, 8 March 1917, 23 February by the old Tsarist calendar. The events in Paris – first the city's wives and mothers provoked to riotous rage by impossibly expensive bread, then the storming of the Bastille – are well known, but what obtained in Petrograd has been obscured by distance and anti-Russian propaganda, so I'll tell it once again: the flint-hearted bosses of the massive Lesnoy Textile Works sacked five women for trying to organize a union, and the women's 5,000 workplace sisters boiled into the streets in furious protest. Within just a few hours, their demonstration had exploded into the Russian Revolution.

LB/6 June 2014

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(Note: this week's OAN omited “Agitation Elsewhere” to better focus on the unfolding Hobby Lobby story.)

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

 

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

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

       

*****

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

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

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

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

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

What Obama is doing stateside is bad enough.

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

Then I elaborate:

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

*****

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

LB/30 March 2014

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