More on the Politics of Trauma: Hartmann Writes an Essay for the History Books -- If We the People Win

A Tacoma Clinic Defense volunteer displays her standard response – facial expression included – to harassment from male misogynists. However the vast majority of passers-by indicate their support of TCD workers. Clinic defense is one of the many ways we socialists serve the people, bypassing the oppressive power of the capitalist plutocracy. Click on image to view it full size. (Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2016)

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THE QUESTION ASKED by Thom Hartmann in  “What Happens When Neither Political Party Answers to the Bottom 90%” is answered with almost eerie synchronicity by how a Democratic official seems to be vengefully withholding vital information from a small local newsletter called Community Chronicle that serves at least 50 elderly and disabled women and men in Tacoma, Washington.

Apparently the malicious withholding is in retaliation for publishing – though not in the newsletter – a number of pointed observations about the worsening failure of the USian experiment in representative democracy. As I have often stated here in OAN, the lies purposefully told by today's Democrats are clearly part of a greater strategy of disguised malevolence that enables them to collaborate with the Republicans in fulfilling Ruling Class orders to deliberately inflict genocidal harm on low-income people.

Such an analysis, precisely because it is an (obvious) interpretation of recent USian political history rather than document-supported fact, has never appeared in the Chronicle, the publication for which I sought the information that is now being withheld. Nor will it ever appear in the Chronicle as long as the analysis (1)-has no relevance to local events and (2)-lacks the irrefutable proof that would be provided by, say, exposure of a strategic document defining the genocidal destruction of government services as clandestine compliance with the elitist demands for population-reduction  that have been part of the USian political dialogue at least since the 1960s.

More to the point, the people victimized by the Democratic official's withholding of information are not the politically motivated readers of OAN. They are instead the politically disempowered residents of the senior housing complex where I have dwelt for the past 13 years.

In other words, the elderly and disabled folk of a notably impoverished community are being punished for the activism associated with a sociologically different and geographically far-removed community. The Democratic official is thus apparently employing the same theory of misplaced vengeance we have tragically witnessed elsewhere, often with far more devastating consequences. It is noteworthy especially for how it suggests yet another dimension – a potentially malignant one – to the answer of Hartmann's oh-so-pointed question.

One of the functions of the Chronicle, as illustrated by the November 2015 cover shown below, is warning readers of impending cuts in government stipends and services. While this is a function that was formerly performed by so-called “mainstream media,” its publication of news specifically relevant to low-income people has been abandoned in compliance with the demands of its advertisers, who insist on excluding from readership those who lack enough discretionary income to buy the advertised products. Hence “news” – once defined as any information of

relevance to the public – has been  redefined by advertisers as that which is of interest only to the advertisers' specific demographic targets. Hence too the Chronicle, which I started four years ago. A big part of my intent was – and is – helping my neighbors cope with the politics of deliberately inflicted trauma by closing the information gap that results from mainstream media's increasingly discriminatory definition of news.

(Though it is something of an aside, one of the more obvious reasons for the steeply declining readership of U.S. newspapers is the rapidly deteriorating standard of living that afflicts the entire USian proletariat – those of us the Occupy Movement named “the 99 Percent” and Hartmann with greater economic precision more correctly labels “the 90 Percent.” Based on the most recently revised census data,  half the residents of the USian homeland are now officially “low income” – this as typified by a family of four living on $45,000 or less annually. [Note: fully two hours of Internet research could not unearth a comparably revised figure for one-person households.] Since low-income people no longer have the discretionary income that defines them as valuable to advertisers, and since much of the news that is specifically vital to low-income people is deliberately excluded from the newspapers, such an ignored [and thus effectively banished] population cancels its newspaper subscriptions and seeks information elsewhere, especially on the Internet.)

But only four of the Chronicle's 50 readers can afford the USian homeland's highest-on-the-planet costs of an Internet subscription, which means the other 46 persons are repeatedly denied vital information by the combination of their no-Internet poverty with mainstream media's redefinition of news. Worse, the information they are deprived includes facts that are essential for survival. That's because the ever-more-aggressive reductions in governmental stipends and services for low-income people – all such reductions due to the war against impoverished people  both parties have been waging since the 1976 election of President Jimmy Carter marked the end of the New Deal era – have potentially fatal consequences, especially for elderly and disabled folks. Which provides yet another detail in answer to the pivotal question Hartmann has dared ask.

Because I know the cuts' perpetrators cannot possibly be ignorant of their potentially fatal consequences, when I am writing in OAN or on various Internet websites I have no hesitation labeling the cuts as intentionally genocidal. The cuts are clearly designed to serve the same function, albeit in slow motion (and therefore with far less controversy), as the Nazis' Zyklon B. That is, the cuts are intended to exterminate those of us the politicians' capitalist masters have banished from the workplace as no surplus human beings longer exploitable for profit and thereby condemned as no longer worthy of life. Nor is this – at least to those of us who are its victims – especially big news; I am merely verbalizing what most of us already recognize and not infrequently – usually with extreme anger or bitterness – also say aloud.

Nevertheless, in the Chronicle – because I recognize my readers are already traumatized by constant, life-shortening economic anxiety and are therefore physically and emotionally fragile, I am careful to avoid expression of such hideous truths unless they are quotes, whether direct or indirect, and even then only when they are so essential to a given narrative they cannot be sidestepped. Otherwise there is nothing to be served by berating the powerless with the real-world purpose and consequences of the Ayn Rand/social-Darwinist savagery that is now the defining characteristic of U.S. economic policy – the maliciously imposed wretchedness we already know entirely too well.

Nor is the Democratic official likely to be unaware of the enormous editorial differences between OAN and the newsletter. One, as noted, is in the identity of readership itself. Another, already implied, is in content; the Chronicle is written only for local readers, while OAN is written for readers slightly more than half of whom are overseas, mostly in Europe, a few in Asia and Africa. Also, OAN is unabashedly opinionated. But in writing, photographing, editing and producing the Chronicle, I make a point of observing the traditional practices of so-called “objective” journalism. Lastly, OAN is strictly on-line, while the Chronicle serves a readership so impoverished – and therefore so computer-deprived – it is entirely an on-paper publication.

Moreover, though in the Chronicle I make no secret of my bias in favor of elderly and disabled persons (note again the edition illustrated here), I also go out of my way to be fair to all parties involved whenever the subject so requires, as in the ongoing coverage of the procedures by which the Republican and Democratic parties will indicate their respective choices of candidates in this year's presidential election.

In contrast, OAN claims neither fairness nor objectivity. It is – and always has been – the on-line equivalent of an editorial opinion column, the uncensored variant of an award-winning and often controversial editorial column I wrote for a local newspaper from 1977 to 1981, with all of the characteristic op-ed strengths and weaknesses.

But the Democratic official in this story – the identity of whom I am deliberately withholding – is either indifferent to the night-and-day distinction between OAN and the Chronicle or hopes the obviously punitive discrimination against the the latter's readership will silence the emphatically anti-capitalist resistance of the former.

The reason I am not now identifying this Democratic official nor even the office this Democrat holds is my hope the information embargo will soon voluntarily end – or better yet, that I misunderstood these circumstances and the embargo turns out to have been as unreal or unintentional as it was undeniably apparent.  If not – that is, if my pleas to end it are refused or ignored – then full details will be forthcoming, complete with all supportive correspondence.

Meanwhile my strongest suspicion is this particular Democratic official has never before dealt with a real journalist; that is, has never interacted with someone who – unlike the craven propagandists now hired to serve mainstream media (which after all is the for-profit propaganda machine owned by the same obscenely wealthy One Percenters who own most U.S. politicians and therefore all USian governments at every level) – will aggressively ask relevant questions and equally aggressively expose those who refuse to answer.

Which, finally, brings us to the money grafs of Hartmann's essay:

Both parties right now face a great crisis of ideology as well as a great opportunity for reinvention, and whichever party first reinvents itself successfully will begin winning elections the way the Democrats did in the 1932-1968 era.

If neither does, our nation faces a massive crisis provoked by the loss of democratic representation of the majority of the American electorate.

The root cause of this crisis is the fact is that neither party today does much of anything for the bottom 90% of Americans.

Here too is my comment-thread response, not italicized as I have revised it for publication here:

This the best, most informative, most compelling essay I have yet seen under Hartmann's byline.

It is most assuredly also – assuming We the People somehow triumph, and “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” – an essay truly for the history books.

Indeed I have only one contrary comment: it is not merely  the “emerging generation of Millennials” who have become what Hartmann labels “radical cynics.”

The same is true of many elderly people like myself, who have been painfully awakened to the deadly malevolence of the forces arrayed against us – especially as manifest in  the genocidal policies of the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals toward any of us old enough to remember how much better life was under the New Deal.

Awakening to the true magnitude of the Evil that threatens us, we are also awakening to the fact that only Marxism – and only Marxism in its Leninist/Maoist variant – offers the ideological discipline essential to overthrow those tyrants who would either reduce us all to slavery or exterminate us all by the slow-motion genocide of "austerity."

We realize that the One Percenters – and their wholly owned  Ruling Class of politicians, bureaucrats, academics, military officers and police commanders – now regard our memories of radically better times as definitively subversive. That is one of the reasons they are trying to kills us by slashing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and any other governmental stipends and services upon which capitalism forces us to depend for survival.

The other reason for their murderous intent – and it cannot be said too often or too harshly that is precisely what it is – is greed: they want for themselves the money and resources that now (barely) keep us alive.

Literally, our lives – and the lives of every member of the Working Class – are therefore at stake.

Moreover,  with the omnipotent secret police apparatus the One Percent has already built – total surveillance and federally militarized law enforcement – we need only look to our species' broader history to see, particularly in the example of Nazi Germany, the  irrefutable evidence that conventional USian politics are woefully inadequate. 

Given our dawning recognition that capitalism demands the embrace of limitless, mercilessly selfish, relentlessly greedy moral imbecility as its core principle,  we also question the effectiveness of any political ideology that does not as a first premise acknowledge capitalism as the most devastating, most potentially terminal affliction humanity has ever thrust upon itself.

Hence the “political revolution” Hartmann describes has indeed already begun. 

One hopes, as I surely do,  it will be accomplished via the ballot box. The alternative – our nation reduced to the ruin that now characterizes most of the Middle East – is too fearful to contemplate.

But knowing the murderous arrogance of the One Percent – demonstrated not just by such horrors as the Pinochet Regime in Chile but also by the emergence of death-squad police tactics here in our own homeland – it is tragically probable our smug and obscenely powerful overlords will reject a democratic solution here just as they rejected it in Iran in 1953 and in so many other places since then.

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Significantly, the secret-police/militarized-police apparatus already in place proves the Ruling Class intends in the near future to behave toward the rest of us exactly as it already behaves toward the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations population. That is proven by analysis of what in the military is called “enemy capabilities” (as demonstrated against Occupy and Black Lives Matter) and of “enemy intentions” (as demonstrated against Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and in killings at Ferguson, Baltimore, New York City etc.).

Those who question the appropriateness of my correct use of military terminology should note the U.S. military has already designated political protesters as “enemy forces.”

Thus the only question for those of us likely to be on the receiving end of the handgun rounds and rifle volleys is when the killing of innocents will become the national norm at any protest against capitalist or racist savagery.

My estimate, based on a lifetime of 76 years and a near-lifetime as both a journalist and a student of history, is that the obvious, no-longer-deniable death of U.S. representative democracy will be declared by the emergence of zero-tolerance, kill-all-resistance plutocracy soon after the 2016 elections, no matter whether the victor is Hillary Clinton nor the far more likely Donald Trump.

In this sense, there is no significant difference between Hillary and Trump: each is an unabashed fascist (although in deference to Trump it is worth noting he pledges to protect the very Social Security and Medicare programs Hillary wants to destroy) – and because each is an unabashed fascist, neither has any intention of preserving the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Hence the  difference between the United States and fascist nations of the past will soon become more a matter of euphemisms and the identity of human targets than anything else.

In this context, history shows only the most disciplined resistance has any chance of achieving liberation. History also shows that only Marxism embodies that discipline. Thus, for example, were the opponents of Diem's viciously anti-Buddhist Roman Catholic (Christofascist) theocracy in South Vietnam compelled to adopt (and adapt) Marxism: no other ideology possessed the requisite discipline.

Remember too that Marxism failed in Russia not because of Marxism but because of the dark undertow of Russian history – the fact Russia had no democratic or even libertarian traditions to sustain its people's quest for liberation  against opportunists like Stalin.  

Marxism in the  United States – with its virtually ageless background of First Nations democratic traditions,  British Common Law,  241 years of constitutional governance and its ideology of representative democracy (no matter how the inherent principles have been nullified since 22 November 1963 by capitalism and its economic mandates for domestic enslavement and global conquest) – would prove to be a very different story.

Indeed it may be our only possibility of salvation – whether as an oppressed people or a species on the brink of environmental extinction.

Curiously – again with the subtle hint of near-eerieness that so often characterizes synchronicity – the response Hartmann's essay evoked from me seems, in retrospect, almost an elaboration on the response he engendered by an especially damning exposé last week  entitled “Businesses Exploit The Poor For a Buck”:

This sort of exploitation, the human equivalent of Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon, is another example of why capitalism is the most malignant evil our species has ever inflicted on itself.

Indeed capitalism is so evil, its malevolence can only be described in religious terms. Capitalism is, in fact, the elevation of infinite greed to absolute virtue. In other words, just as religion exalts faith and piety above all other values, so does capitalism exalt selfishness and greed above other values.  As holiness is to religion, so greed is to capitalism.

What this means in practice is the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian value our species has ever articulated. Which, in turn, mandates the deliberate cultivation and imposition of moral imbecility – the psychological state that defines serial killers.

Thus capitalism is the mentality of a Ted Bundy or an Elizabeth Bathory deliberately and with malice aforethought applied not just to economics, but to governance and indeed to every other aspect of human experience.

No greater evil than capitalism has humanity ever knowingly inflicted on itself, and no greater evil has ever more relentlessly threatened human survival.

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TO FEND OFF the darkness that now ever more relentlessly encroaches upon all our lives, and therefore in keeping with my pledge to try to end these blog posts with some form of positive input, here is a nursery rhyme  – perhaps more suitable for adults than children – by the unabashedly pagan singer S. J. Tucker, whose voice in this performance is like a caress.

LB/22 March 2016

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Working on a Long Story: This Week's Essay Very Short

"Stop Corporate Abuse of Democracy; Tax the Rich": Yet another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma pictures, as relevant now as in November 2011. Pentax MX, 100 mm SMCP-M f/2.8, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

 

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MY BLOGGING TIME this week was taken up by old-fashioned reportorial work – chasing a story via the telephone and the Internet. On Wednesday I thought I had it pretty well in hand, so well I was beginning to write parts of it in my head. But then yesterday I discovered what I thought I knew was mostly wrong – that not only was I ignorant, but I had a helluva lot more to learn before the story would be ready to write. 

Meanwhile here are links to three pieces by other writers I strongly urge you to read:
The first is old news – how the Occupy Movement was suppressed by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security through its command and control of federally militarized local police departments. But the report is worth reading again in the context of the most recent disclosures  about the total surveillance that now defines us all – the entire 99 Percent – as enemies of the global USian empire and all its corporate states.

Link number three is to a vital and closely related report from Europe – Former President Carter's admission there is no longer any “functioning democracy” anywhere in the United States.  That Carter's remarks were available only in a major German newspaper (and not only carefully excluded from its English-language editions but suppressed by all USian mainstream media), is more proof of the informational iron curtain that is being drawn down around the U.S. as it moves ever closer to becoming the genuine Fourth Reich, thereby fulfilling the dreams of the Nazi war criminals the federal government and its capitalist overlords embraced in 1945. 

LB/20 July 2013

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Secret Police Operations Refute Big Lie of 'Free Society'

This photograph has no connection to the story below, which mentions President Obama's genocidal efforts against life-sustaining social services only in passing. The image is an accidental sandwich, an inadvertent double exposure with a camera so old it lacks automatic double-exposure prevention. As to whether it might have been a compensatory gift from the Muse, with poetic or subconscious relevance to the reason this posting is so tardy, I leave that for viewers to decide. Rolleicord III, Kodak Tmax 100 in D-76, each of the two exposures 1/100th at f/16; colorization – to intensify the ethereal mood – by Gimp software. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS precipitated by a medical crisis – discovery I am going blind due to cataracts but may be denied corrective surgery by another medical condition for which there is no cure – delayed this week's posting. It is also the reason I'm filling this space with a commentary I wrote six days ago: anything more recent would be too bitter for public consumption. Hence the following, my pre-threat-of-blindness response to a story in Crosscut, the Seattle on-line daily, in which a local journalist – apparently too afraid of the secret police to tell the truth about what the United States has become – cravenly described our subjugated nation as a “free society.” 

The journalist, Floyd McKay, is a former long-time member of the Pacific Northwest working press and a professor emeritus at Western Washington University. I do not know him personally, but we are nevertheless indirectly connected. WWU is the descendant of Western Washington State College, the last of my own several almae matres, which through its Fairhaven College granted me an interdisciplinary bachelor of arts degree in 1976 – and 34 years later made it unmistakably clear I am one alumnus its officialdom would surely strike from their roster of graduates if they could. Though McKay joined Western's faculty long after I left its student body, I am familiar with his work via Crosscut's coverage of the ongoing Puget Sound coal-port struggle. His reporting of that wrenching conflict seems not only fair but exceptionally well researched – the sort of in-depth writing that was routine on the New York, New Jersey, Michigan and East Tennessee papers for which I worked during my first two decades in journalism but which has since gone the way of Archaeopteryx. (Apropos the coal port, the usual suspects intend to build it just outside Bellingham, a blatant “fuck you” to what is probably the most environmentally conscious city in all USia. Moreover, the obvious vindictiveness of the coal-port scheme has a nasty parallel in the equally assaultive Roman Catholic campaign to abolish female reproductive freedom here in the nation's most officially pro-choice state by buying up all the local hospitals and clinics. Might these developments be part of a multi-pronged effort to turn the entire realm into a West Coast version of Appalachia? Asking such an allegedly “unthinkable” question is well within the purview of the investigative reporter, at least as I learned the craft, but it is the one element McKay has failed to explore. Perhaps he has forgotten – or never knew about – the testimony of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state is the One Percent's favorite proving ground for its strategies and tactics of oppression.) Be that as it may, I was appreciative enough of McKay's reports on the coal-port fight, I turned directly to his analysis of the recently exposed secret police investigations of journalists, part of the (still-unfolding) story of the Obama Administration's unprecedented efforts to nullify the entire First Amendment.  

But I was sorely disappointed; McKay's lead set the (cringing) tone of his entire text: 

“Technology changes, but the basic tenets of journalism and the codes that govern reporting in a free society remain remarkably the same.”

Finally, hours after McKay's essay appeared – I had been busy all day with regular first-of-the-month errands – I wrote a response on the associated comment thread: 

(Note: Crosscut does not allow embedded live-links in comment threads, hence the URLs  below appear as in the original, this to spare me the necessity of revision. My apology for the resultant awkwardness.) 

 

Seems to me there are three points of contention in this story. These are: the nature and motives of the Obama Administration; the nature and role of the nation's informational media; and – pivotally – whether the United States remains “a free society.” 

 

It also seems to me – this from behind my own 50-plus years doing journalism – McKay's understanding of these questions is...well, less than adequate. Indeed, based on the foregoing comments, the one poster with whom I come closest to agreement is dbreneman. Given our total disagreements on public transport – I like most New Yorkers believe it is a civil right, dbreneman seems to share the defining local conviction transit is a form of welfare – our near-consensus over what should be termed the “USian press crisis” is probably an irony of the first order. 

 

The biblical admonition “by their fruits shall we know them” is at least as applicable to politicians, governments and economic systems as it is to matters of metaphysics and morality. Viewed from this perspective, Democrat Barack Obama emerges as the most carefully camouflaged and willfully deceptive Republican tyrant ever elected to the presidency. That he is in fact a latter-day Richard Nixon has been posited by many pundits both Left and Right, but none more convincingly than Jonathan Turley. Here Turley shows us how Nixon – in the persona of Obama – has achieved every imposition of tyranny the Watergate-criminal president ever imagined: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/03/25/nixon-has-won-watergate/2019443/ .
 

“More than any figure in history,” says Turley, “Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality.”

At the same time, the nature of USian informational media has also been transformed. In the era McKay and I joined the working press, about 90 percent of the nation's newspapers were locally owned. Now, today, something like 95 percent of the (shrinking number of) print news outlets are owned by monopolies, with lockstep reportorial conformity enforced nearly as rigidly on today's USian papers as it was on Hitler's Voelkischer Beobachter or the Stalin-era Pravda. (Coincidentally, my newest blog post [http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/loren-bliss-outside-agitators-notebook/2013/05/notes-on-life-after-uselessness-the-old-man-with-an-old-rolleicord.html] describes the personnel-office methods the monopolies – which also own or control all the nation's broadcast media – use to ensure the political reliability of their employees.) The result is news coverage and opinion that is almost never more than the approved, quasi-official voice of what the Occupy Movement labeled “the One Percent” – the Big Business/Wall Street aristocracy that, by its financing of both the Democratic and Republican parties, has become a genuine Ruling Class in the ancient and most arrogantly despotic sense.

Meanwhile the cult of personality that now silences Democratic criticism of Obama has again, just as it did under presidents Carter and Clinton, forced the Democratic Party to abandon its own egalitarian New Deal principles. Therefore let us not forget it was cults of personality that enabled the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, the former in the name of a prototypical Ayn-Rand-type master race, the latter in the name of the very socialist humanitarianism he so wantonly betrayed. Perhaps the far-Right's odious characterization of Obama as a new Führer is eerily prescient.

In any case we see the United States is clearly no longer the “free society” McKay claims it to be. A growing number of citizens, myself among them, would argue the nation we formerly thought of as “ours” is now but a modern, globally imperial version of pre-Revolutionary France, with the former middle class now permanently reduced to the status of the sans culottes. The politicians no longer represent us – “we the people” – at all. In fact – note the impending cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare and food stamps – “our” elected officials now make no secret their only loyalties are to the bankers and chief executive officers who are their financial masters.

In this context any discussion of “the role of informational media” is a form of denial. USian mass media is, as an institution, no less compromised – that is, no less a wholly owned subsidiary of the One Percent – than the political system or the economy. Hence the only relevant question is not how the (hopelessly corrupt) judicial system might rule on reportorial and photographic rights, or whether the (irremediably compromised) politicians will enact an effective shield law; it is instead whether individual journalists will recognize today's United States gives them only two choices: submission or revolution. Hence too the new relevance of an old Appalachian song of resistance, “Which Side Are You On” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SB0fc9CobQ ).

The problem, of course, is that today's journalists are hired precisely for their conformity and obedience. 

But history shows us even the most hopelessly submissive serfs sometimes rise up angry. History also suggests the brazen, piss-on-our-constitutional-rights intrusions the USian secret police are now tyrannically inflicting on all of us – not just journalists but everyone in the 99 Percent – might finally awaken any number of hitherto suppressed revolutionary instincts. 

Too bad resistance is now futile, exactly as under the (fictional?) Borg. Whether nonviolent or otherwise, the result – as we have already glimpsed in the Obama Regime's suppression of the Occupy Movement and its expansion of Bush Regime surveillance into Orwellian monitoring of all 99 Percenters all the time – would be a bloodbath of Third Reich magnitude and Greasy Grass futility.

Thanks to the very technology that was supposed to save us not enslave us, the One Percent has finally achieved its ultimate divine-right fantasy: re-creation of itself in the merciless and sadistic image of Yahweh/Jesus/Allah, the vengeful and implacably misogynistic god of patriarchy. Now as a result the USian Fourth Reich is truly omnipotent and eternal – that is, until the Mother of All Gods blows the whistle on our entire species. 

LB/7 June 2013

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Did 'Limits to Growth' Incite Capitalist Tyranny, Greed?

(Thanks to Mary Plante for help with this story's Internet research.)

Was the One Percent's ongoing frenzy of tyranny and greed triggered by a hitherto-unsuspected and possibly accidental perpetrator?

It's a whodunit that begins in 1970 with a Club of Rome research project conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the results of which were revealed two years later in The Limits to Growth. 

Controversial even before its publication, Limits is a 205-page exposé of our species' imprisonment in the expanding bubble of capitalism's demand for ever-increasing profit. It defines the present mode of capitalist “growth” as not just unsustainable but deadly. It offers several environmentally centered alternatives – each within a capitalist context – by which to achieve healthy, relatively egalitarian and above all sustainable human societies. It's conclusion is grim: if the bubble continues to swell, when it bursts – as eventually it must – life as we've known it will end forever.

But this prediction violates one of our nation's most rigidly enforced taboos; it confirms, albeit in apolitical terminology, a core truth of Marxian economics: that capitalism will eventually self-destruct, killing untold millions as it implodes. Capitalists and their hirelings in Ruling Class Media and academia thus predictably denounced Limits as “doomsday” negativity. Despite widespread rebuttals by environmentalists, the unusually toxic clamor of rejection eventually succeeded: the book was marginalized as lunatic-fringe prophecy, and the fickle public soon forgot its urgent message.

Now though it appears the trashing of Limits may have been an especially clever Big Lie. The One Percent may have clandestinely adopted its projections as the basis for their own long-range planning, then publicly attacked it to hide their true purpose and intent – a classic example of disinformation and misdirection. Here's the evidence:

The year following the start of the Limits project, Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote for his colleagues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the (formerly) super-secret Powell Memo, the Mein Kampf of modern capitalism.But what prompted the memo? Had Powell been alerted that Limits – despite its carefully phrasing – would give capitalism's opponents statistical confirmation of their arguments?

Soon afterward, no doubt as a reward for writing the memo, Powell was appointed by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court. There Powell laid the groundwork for corporate personhood,  the legal doctrine that has annulled our constitution, destroyed our representative democracy and reduced most of us to embittered subjects of an increasingly despotic plutocracy.

Less than two years after the Powell appointment, the newly re-elected Nixon issued his then-astounding declaration of war on the 99 Percent, vilifying us as spoiled, pampered ingrates, proclaiming his second-term policies would be designed to inflict maximum hardship on us all. Even William Randolph Hearst Jr., the interviewer, friend and political ally to whom Nixon disclosed his intent, said in print he was shocked by the President's outspoken harshness.

Not surprisingly, the historically damning text of the interview – Page One in every Hearst newspaper of the day (early 1973) – has seemingly been suppressed. My own clipping of the original article was lost, with all my files and most of my life's work, in the 1983 fire. My many efforts to obtain a replacement copy of Hearst's report – efforts that included letters to librarians at two of his newspapers – have been unsuccessful.

(Memo to the Working Press: a diligent investigative reporter with sufficient resources could probably find many more connections between the Limits project, the Powell Memo and Nixon's anti-99 Percent proclamation. A good starting point would be the MIT Trustees roster. Scan it for anyone who was amongst Powell's friends and associates and thus might have informed him of Limits and its anti-capitalist implications.  Bear in mind the lesson of the well-documented friendship between the arch-conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater and the genuinely liberal President John Fitzgerald Kennedy: that within the One Percent, political labels are ultimately meaningless – that One Percenters are united by their common Ruling Class economic interests far more than they are divided by the charades of partisan politics.)

Meanwhile consider what has been done to us since 1973. Capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and murderous poverty for everyone else – is now the defining reality of life in the United States. At the same time a growing body of evidence suggests the conclusions of Limits are frighteningly accurate. The bubble concept is proven beyond dispute: note the ongoing atrocities inflicted by the collapse of the housing market. That's a mere prelude – if Limits is correct – to the global disaster that looms.

Such a debacle, said to be only about 18 years away, would inflict unprecedented starvation, sickness and death – particularly in combination with terminal climate change.

Nevertheless even the newer Limits data has remained obscure, suppressed – as the original work eventually was – by a relentless, Powell-type deluge of antagonism. A recent sequel (The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update; Earthscan: 2004), is scarcely known outside academia. But now, as Common Dreams tells us, the projections of both the original Limits and its Update are reaffirmed by yet another study, this reported in the current issue of Smithsonian magazine. Perhaps Limits will at long last attain its deserved place as one of the most pivotal works in human history.

In any case the fact such studies continue – impossible without Ruling Class approval and financing – is still more evidence in support of a connection linking Limits and the Powell Memo to capitalism's methodical destruction of our quality of life. Indeed the environmentalist focus of Limits may itself be camouflage. Perhaps from the very beginning (and surely unbeknownst to its researchers and authors), its core purpose was that of an in-depth intelligence estimate, a detailed analysis of long-term threats to the One Percent's dominance. The likelihood of such a disguised purpose – the closely guarded secret of few executives and trustees – is underscored by MIT's extensive involvement with the U.S. military-industrial complex and the Club of Rome's relationship with the global monopolies.

Whether the book's urgent plea for environmental sanity expressed its authors' heartfelt intent or was merely eyewash, present-day conditions make it clear the One Percent chose long ago to reject the Limits alternatives and instead embraced the Ayn Rand option: business as usual, the 99 Percent and the world in which we live be damned. Capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – has become the planetary version of terminal cancer. What the Ruling Class is doing to us – the slaying of our American Dream and the termination of our American Experiment in constitutional democracy – is obviously far worse than just a proverbial rough spot on our national highway.

Contrary to the Big Lies disseminated by politicians and Ruling Class Media, the losses of our liberty and livelihood are not the temporary consequences of “war on terror” or “recession.” The associated restrictions are intended to last forever – and they probably will. Such is the real “change we can believe in”: the scheming that began with the Powell Memo, its purpose to ensure Ruling Class wealth and power survive – invariably at our expense, no matter the cost in death and suffering, no matter the magnitude of the impending environmental and economic disasters.

That's why – despite the fact we outnumber the oppressor 99 to 1 – our feeble efforts at resistance are already being crushed: witness the unprovoked attacks on the Occupy Movement. Despite our protests, those of us who are not useful as slaves will soon be cast into fatal impoverishment; the abandonment has already begun. This is the malevolent purpose that unites the downsizing of the economy, the destruction of the social-safety net, the attacks on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the war against women, the methodical elimination of our constitutional rights. The horrors of post-earthquake Haiti and post-Katrina New Orleans are previews of the misery to which the One Percent is condemning us.

Nor is the obviously genocidal intent of present-day capitalist policy anything new. Its 19th Century equivalent – disabled, sick or otherwise unprofitable slaves flung overboard during the mid-Atlantic passage – created a sea of death so genetically memorable it's even now infamous for its people-hungry sharks.

When we view today's United States in the context of the Powell Memo and the Limits project, we see a long-range cause-and-effect sequence that cannot be denied. We see too how we woefully underestimated the determination and Machiavellian cunning of the One Percent. We realize there will be no restoration of our constitutional rights, no economic recovery, no relief from debt slavery unless We the People – we the 99 Percent – mobilize in sufficient numbers to compel the necessary changes.

But the One Percent has already adopted a policy of brute-force attacks against nonviolent protesters. These tactics combine with the invincible terror-weapons in the Ruling Class arsenal of oppression to nearly eliminate our likelihood for success. Never in our species' history has such absolute power been possessed by so few. Peaceful resistance – already an expression of great courage – is fast becoming our sole opportunity to experience freedom.

(Copyright Loren Bliss 13 April 2012. Permission to reproduce is granted, conditional upon crediting the author and linking to Outside Agitator's Notebook.)

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Thinking the Unthinkable, Speaking the Unspeakable

I POST, OFTEN DAILY, to individual story-threads on a number of Internet sites. But I never know whether republishing those stories and comments here serves any meaningful purpose.

Sure it fills the space and sometimes spares me the extended effort of writing weekly essays. And yes it's egotistical fun to reproduce my own work in the pseudo-profundity of italic type.

But is it useful? Does it call attention to news items your own chosen media somehow missed? Does it provide new information on familiar topics? I have no way of knowing...unless you (please) use the Outside Agitator's Notebook comment section to tell me.

Meanwhile here's a selection of web reports I regard as vital reading, their disclosures the source of this week's page header, the material combined into three essays. Each includes key parts of the remarks I posted on the original discussion threads, with full text available via the links.

U.S. Military's Response to Occupy: Death Rays for Crowd Control

Defying a news blackout imposed by Ruling Class Media, the Common Dreams staff has exposed a new terror weapon with which the U.S. military plans to suppress the ever-more-frequent protests by the increasingly angry 99 Percent.

It's called the “Active Denial System” – a heat ray that inflicts intense, unbearably painful heat.

As I said on the associated thread, this is the most depressing, most emotionally wrenching, most infuriating news report I have ever read. It left me intellectually paralyzed in a way no story has ever done. It was a bit more than 30 hours before I managed to verbalize a reaction. I had been silenced by astonishment and revulsion, not just by the story itself but by its implicit and infinitely damning revelations:

(1)-What the development of such a terrifying weapon tells us about the attitudes, values and unforgivable malevolence of the One Percent, the Ruling Class who financed its development. 

(2)-What the development of such a weapon tells us about the intentions of the One Percent toward those of us in the ever-more-disenfranchised, ever-more-enslaved and therefore ever more rebellious 99 Percent.

(3)-What the weapon's gleeful acceptance by the military tells us about our ever-more-obviously deluded belief the soldiers, sailors, Marines and air corps personnel might turn against their officers when they are ordered to kill and torture U.S. civilians just as they are now killing and torturing civilians in the overseas realms of the U.S. – or rather Wall Street – empire.

Obviously, despite claims to the contrary, the heat ray is a death ray, an electronic variant of the flamethrower, which means its core purpose is to inflict a modern version of burning at the stake, the most agonizing form of death there is.

Imagine the glee with which modern Christians will turn this weapon against rebellious women, no doubt chanting “burn witch burn” as they flip the switch.

Picture what happens when the ray is aimed at a typical Occupy demonstration, a peaceful crowd of women, children, men, people who are elderly and disabled including those who depend on service dogs.

Envision a blind girl, herself shrieking in agony, her seeing-eye dog howling in pain and panic, both trying desperately to escape the invisible fire. The girl loses her white cane; then she can no longer hold her dog's leash. The dog struggles to protect her, but girl and dog are trapped within the panic-striken mob, battered, knocked to the ground, trampled to a writhing, whimpering tangle of death, finally just two more anonymous forms in the scatter of twisted, smoking corpses that litter the broad plaza.

See the Ted Bundy smiles on the faces of the heat ray's crew, look into the wasteland of their morally imbecilic eyes, hear their sadistic laughter, remember the searing touch of their psychopathic fire, ever afterward flee in such fear as you never before imagined...

Combine this death ray with the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011 (which makes protest demonstrations a federal felony) and Barack the Betrayer's newest executive order (which gives the president the absolute power of a Hitler, a Roman emperor or – yes – a Tsar), and you'll understand why it took me 30 horrified hours to react. The national portrait that emerges bears little resemblance to the United States in which most of us were born and raised.

What we see instead is a slave-realm, a land in which our liberty has been stolen from us by a succession of measures intended to preserve and expand the greedy despotism of the One Percent. These laws and orders have abolished not just the Bill of Rights but the entire Constitution. The result is definitively capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

There's no doubt the One Percent now defines us – the 99 Percent – as the enemy. Why else high-tech surveillance so acute it can monitor our every breath? Why else militarized cops and Gestapo-ized military, both increasingly armed with weapons of hitherto-unthinkable terror? Why else the draconian measures to suppress dissent?

Thus our beloved U.S.A. is crushed beneath the combat-boots of capitalism, reduced to a nightmare nation far more oppressive than anything George Orwell might have imagined.

It is not just the de facto Fourth Reich we are becoming. We are confronted by the most horrific fantasies of science fiction come to life, as if the One Percent were now revealing itself to be the Borg, threatening us with even more unspeakable horrors to come and warning us to surrender before it is too late: “resistance is futile.”

As I said: this is not the United States I was born in.

Quoth the I Ching: “Darkening of the Light. In adversity it furthers one to be persevering.”

*****

At Last, Recognition We're Being Herded into Christian Theocracy

Finally after years of denial both the Left and the libertarian Right are awakening to the (formerly unspeakable) threat of the United States being converted to Christian theocracy, first by stealth, now by open betrayal of the Constitution, soon by brute force – every stage of the assault lavishly financed by the One Percent.

The opening volley of the theocrats' war against separation of church and state was addition of the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. From the beginning, the emphatically capitalized G was intended as a thunderbolt of prejudice and rejection, a specific invocation of the tyrannical and tyrannically male god singular to Christianity and the other two Abrahamic religions, “God” as in “the Lord thy God” or “no God but Allah.” Despite Big Lies to the contrary, all deities “not consistent with Judaeo-Christian tradition” were deliberately excluded, a ban the Supreme Court has since affirmed, including – of course – exclusion of the wondrously revolutionary goddess of neopaganism, of whom I wrote so extensively in “'Dancer' Resurrected.” 

 

But the U.S. Left, effectively purged of its intellectuals and thereby deprived both of Marxian analysis and semiotic understanding, mostly refused to acknowledge the horrid significance of adding God to the Pledge. Among the few exceptions were Paul Krassner and Frank Cieciorka, whose deliciously outrageous “one nation under God” cartoon enlivened the March 1964 issue of Krassner's magazine The Realist. 

Now – bolstered by such vital works as Chris Hedges' American Fascists, Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy and Jeff Sharlet's The Family – there are long-overdue beginnings of genuine alarm, as shown by the following news reports and/or the comment threads so generated.

But – as the anonymous comment on the last theocracy thread demonstrates – it's probably too late. The Christians are already clamoring for our deaths.

The topmost anti-theocracy piece, via Reader Supported News, was by the former New York Times reporter Timothy Egan. It decries Republican efforts to impose what Egan labels “the church lady state...what your freedom-hating Republican Party has been doing across the land to restrict individual liberty.”  

“They want the state to follow you into the bedroom, the bathroom and beyond. They think you're too stupid to know what to do with your own body, too ignorant to understand what your doctors tell you and too lazy to be trusted in a job without being subject to random drug testing. Your body is the government's business.”

Since Christianity is – like all Abrahamic religion – definitively anti-female, I should have challenged Egan on the misogyny implicit in the term “church lady.” Discouraged by RSN's 1500-character response limit, I didn't, which I now regret. Instead I replied as follows (scroll down the linked thread to view my entire commentary):

Three points: 

(1)-Mr. Egan is mainstream media, a former New York Times reporter who parlayed his elite employment into lucrative freelancing, a career move impossible for any of us with lesser resumes.

(2)-It is notable when someone so privileged dares publicly decry the One Percent/Republican campaign to make the United States a Christian theocracy. (Too bad he ignores the One Percent/Democrat role: for example Obama picking the JesuNazi Rick Warren to read the inaugural invocation, then radically expanding Bush's “faith-based initiatives.”) 

(3)-The “larger picture”... is to be found in the South, de facto Christian theocracy since Reconstruction, where “industrial psychology” discovered Christians make the best post-slavery slaves. Taught all authority is divine right, Christians view disobedience as sin. Terrified of eternal damnation, they are reliably anti-union. Taught women are the source of evil, Christians are reliably misogynistic, hence vehemently anti-sexual. Crazed by frustration, their sex drive sublimates into frantic productivity, frenzied materialism, envious hatred of nonconformists. Hence the Ku Klux Klan, a death squad, colloquially “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.”

Capitalism in action: infinite greed as ultimate virtue; the South now Everywhere U.S.A. (“one nation under God”); maximum profits for the One Percent. 

“Be afraid. Be very afraid...” 

Then when a reader missed the significance of my concluding sentence (“...the south now Everywhere U.S.A...”), I elaborated:

The savagely theocratic South is the test-model for the zero-tolerance Christian theocracy the One Percent is now imposing on the entire United States.

Why? Because, by every capitalist measure, Abrahamic theocracy (Christian, Muslim, Jewish), is the most profitable form of governance. It guarantees capitalism's ultimate purpose: unlimited profit and absolute power for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

Yes the threat is global. Note the identical movements – each lavishly financed by the One Percent – in all Abrahamic religions. 

“Be very afraid” because of what zero-tolerance Abrahamic theocracy means: witches and heretics burned at the stake; homosexuals and people caught in extra-marital or pre-marital sex stoned to death; women reduced to chattel – the Christians want all of these horrors in their Biblical Nation. The Dominionist Christians demand it, the rest of the Christians support it by their refusal to denounce the Dominionists. (Google: “Dominion Theology,” no quotes.)

Yes fear oppresses. But oppression prompts rebellion. And to name one's fear is to begin the process of liberation... 

***

A seemingly unrelated RSN item – a vital report by Katrina vanden Heuvel exposing “the most powerful federal employee you never heard of” as “the man blocking America's recovery,” also prompted me to speak of theocracy:

...(Y)ou and many others need to understand the two-party charade.

(1)-There is really only one party, the Ruling Class or One Percent party, of which the Democrats and Republicans are merely pseudo-factions.

(See Bill Moyers' disclosures of 10 July 2009. For working journalists, this was nothing new. It was the ultimate dirty secret of U.S. politics. But Moyers was the first of us to dare publicly expose it.) 

 

(2)-The GOPorker/DemocRat scam is nothing more than a variant of the good-cop/bad-cop con. One party screams and rants to provide a rationale for the other party's betrayals, as in the health-care debacle or the ongoing war against women. 

(3)-Innumerable studies in what used to be called "industrial psychology" prove capitalism's most profitable employees are those who are (A), terrified to unquestioning obedience, and (B), so sexually frustrated they sublimate their forbidden desires in frenzies of productivity and impulse buying. 

Hence the oppression in which both alleged "parties" are equally complicit: denial of health care (fear); the war against women (war against sexuality); and the imposition of zero-tolerance Christian theocracy (guaranteed obedience, as proven long ago in the post-Reconstruction South). 

***

Ending this week's theocracy alert is a Truthout report disclosing how Christians poisoned a critic's dog, which boiled my blood thrice, first the by incident itself, next by kindred atrocities in my own life, lastly by the poster who demanded my death:

I have no doubt Prof. Mullin's unforgivable act of heresy – the alleged sin for which his dog was made to suffer – was openly suing to combat the savage Christian theocracy that has long reigned at the Air Force Academy and is now being imposed on all of us, civilian or military, who lack the means to escape the United States. 

The poisoning of one's dog is a classic fundamentalist tactic, now routinely employed throughout the U.S. by Christian terrorists, made notorious by the Ku Klux Klan during the years of the Civil Rights Movement. In which context note carefully the colloquial name for the KKK throughout the South: "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class." 

Indeed the Christian penchant for dog-poisoning is an outrage to which I can twice testify.  

The Klan fatally poisoned my dog Brunhilda in 1964. She was an especially beloved German shepherd I raised from a pocket-sized pup, and she had in fact saved my own life the year before, attacking a KKK hitman as he was climbing in through my kitchen window.  

Then in 1988, bible-thump JesuNazis trying to drive me out of a rented farm-cottage in rural Washington state poisoned another dog – this time non-fatally – and also hung a dead cat on the driver's-side door handle of my automobile. 

Nice people, these godly Christians, exactly as proven by their long history of Inquisitions, witch-burnings and other such genocidal atrocities. 

Verily, they are made in the image of their infinitely sadistic god. 

(Disclosure: mostly an agnostic, I also identify strongly with Taoism, Zen, Gaian paganism and First Nations spiritualities.)

To which an anonymous commentator replied, demonstrating not just his hatred but the ignorance of grammar and punctuation that so often accompanies such emotions: 

 

You, are a complete idiot. It's really a shame that KKK hitman didn't get a chance to finish the job... 

Ah yes, Christian love...

(To see my remarks in context, you've got to scroll way down, clicking “Load More Comments” at least three times, until the header “Showing 100 of 159 comments” appears.

*****

Republican Hypocrisy: GOPorkers the Biggest Governmental Spenders

To conclude – and vital for its discussion of economic reality – is an analysis by the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan that shows, complete with illustrative graphics, how Republican presidents deliberately ran up the federal deficit, outspending Democrat presidents by substantial percentages. 

My commentary, which generated 80 clicks of approval, reminded us of our too-often-forgotten history:

Three points: 

(1)-One of the avowed purposes of Reaganomics, many times confirmed by the Reaganoid guru David Stockman, was to inflate the federal deficit to the point social services – not just welfare but Social Security and Medicare – would become unaffordable.

(2)-The purpose of destroying social services, a goal about which the Reaganoids were a bit less forthright, was creation of the sweatshop/debt-slave economy by which we are oppressed today. The operant equations go like this: maximum social services + maximum employment = maximum assertiveness amongst workers = maximum wages; zero social services + maximum UNemployment = maximum terror amongst the workers = lowest possible wages. 

(3)-The only accurate analysis of capitalism – the absolute evil of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – is provided by Marxism. But – not the least because the U.S. 99 Percent is the most anti-intellectual (or intellectually lazy) proletariat on the planet, we will continue our Moron Nation resistance to Marxian ideological discipline and thus remain forever imprisoned in the (ever expanding) slave pens of the Ruling Class. 

*****

No, CenturyLink has not lifted its embargo against this blog. 

Nevertheless – not the least as demonstrated by the foregoing endorsement, an unprecedented 80 thumbs-up on an unabashedly Marxian post – our quest for liberty expands in strength of numbers, solidarity and force of will.

 

Yes, even here amidst the ashes of the American dream and the ruins of the American experiment in constitutional democracy – even here in this wretchedly oppressed land of death rays, forcible Christianization and Moron Nation gullibles who dare not see past the politicians' Big Lies – our determination intensifies. 

Let us then find affirmation in lines from an old song of resistance:

“Far and away the road goes winding
– Look and see how merrily the road goes”

LB/24 March 2012 

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