Open Letter to Goddess-Centered Pagans; Important Funding Drive; Long-Overdue Eulogy for My Dead Son

HOMELESS HUMANS have become the new exemplars of capitalist reality, particularly in the United States. (I made these portraits with my digital Canon SLR while on unpaid/volunteer assignment last week, then processed the pictures as if I were once again working with my beloved M Leicas and Tri-X at 800 ASA developed in D-76 and printing the results on DuPont Varilure, which had photographic paper's highest silver content and was therefore the best paper in the world but was discontinued in 1973 due to capitalist manipulations that triggered skyrocketing silver prices.) Photographs by Loren Bliss © 2016. Click on images to view them full size.

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PLEASE CONSIDER THE following as an open letter to the pagan community, the first of the essays on the relevance of socialism to paganism and of paganism to socialism I promised on 18 July I would soon write. Please also forgive the delay; the 18th was the last time my circumstances actually allowed me the time and energy essential to prepare anything genuinely contemplative for this space; my neighbors and I here in the geezer ghetto are still plagued by our heartless landlord's innumerable and invariably disruptive intrusions as he renovates his for-profit properties to comply with federal low-interest loan requirements.

As I wrote in that most recent OAN essay, how “do I resolve the apparent conflict between being a Marxian (and therefore a dialectical materialist) and... also being a Gaian Pagan (and a Pagan not by fad or adaptation or mere inclination but as a direct consequence of two undeniable, inexplicable and unquestionably demanding encounters with its Source)?”

“Preview: in the ultimate sense, I see no conflict at all. In fact I am convinced each is essential to sustain the other.”

But of course I was describing a feeling, emotional reality rather than intellectual reality, right brain rather than left brain, and I as soon as I began applying logic to the question, I initially feared I had stepped into a miasma of contradictions I might never be able to resolve.

Then – as so often occurs in my habitually agnostic/skeptical (if not downright cynical) relationship to all forms of spirituality including my own – synchronicity intervened. As it happens, I am working, again as an unpaid volunteer, on another editorial project which brought me into contact with the mostly unacknowledged truth all philosophies – even our own informal assumptions about life – embody the bias imposed by our socioeconomic class: whether we are part of the 99 Percent or part of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassalage.  Philosophically speaking, our overlords in the One Percent and its Ruling Class view the world as their rightful “god-given” possession, an exploitable commodity – we the people included – to subjugate as greed, sadistic whim and capitalism's mandatory quest for maximum profit dictate. Meanwhile we of the 99 Percent – all of us capitalism's victims – either (further) shackle ourselves by adopting the philosophies dictated by our oppressors or we (somehow) wake up and evolve our own philosophical view.

Socialism is, of course, one of the (self-protective) results of our awakening; Marxism is merely socialism's purest and most disciplined form. Paganism – especially in its Wiccan or Gaian forms – is another such awakening. The functional twinship of socialism and paganism begins with their common purpose: the preservation of our species from extinction by capitalist depredation, either as World War III or environmental apocalypse.

Indeed I would go so far as to argue that while one may be a socialist without being pagan, one cannot be a pagan without also being a socialist.

Capitalism, remember, is a direct derivative of Protestant Christianity (for which see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). The ultimate form of Protestantism is the Prosperity Gospel,  which reasserts the divine right of kings in its modern form as the divine right of corporate executives and of the One Percent in general. It defines wealth as an expression of divine blessing and attributes poverty to sin. (Backtracking for a moment, Christianity is one of the three Abrahamic religions. It and the others, Judaism and Islam, define the universe as the asexual creation of a male deity and thereby reduce female reproductive power to virtual irrelevance. From this reduction results the contempt for Nature, the misogynistic hatred, the clitoris envy and the implicitly violent insistence on hierarchy that define all patriarchal belief systems.) Predictably, the associated malignancy is intensified to its most extreme, ecocidal and genocidal form in capitalism, which is Abrahamic religion's ultimate distillate. (The historical dynamics of patriarchal religion's distillation into an ever-more-murderous philosophy of exploitation is eloquently documented in The Great Cosmic Mother, Barbara Mor's invaluable work in post-Abrahamic, post-capitalist anthropology, a book that should be twinned with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in terms of significant revelations of our methodically suppressed past.) A basic pagan library should include a well-read copy of each volume.

Remember too the relationship between capitalism and its Abrahamic-religion father is symbiotic: one reinforces the other – hence Marx's condemnation of religion as the opiate of the masses. Hence too the liberation of scientific inquiry resulting from the Soviet suppression of Abrahamic religion – specifically the widespread Soviet investigation of subjects damned as “Satanic”  in the Christian-dominated U.S. Moreover the Soviet suppression of Abrahamic religion encouraged not only the U.S.S.R.'s indigenous tribal religions but the resurrection of European paganism by Soviet and post-Soviet youth.

Given that the official, dominant and often violently sustained philosophy of our pre-revolutionary, pre-apocalyptic era is capitalism cum Christianity (or vice-versa), what then are socialism and paganism but efforts by ourselves, the 99 Percent, to liberate ourselves from enslavement by capitalism and Christianity? (I presume I need not add our enslavement is indisputably proven by how capitalism – its depredations countenanced if not encouraged by the Prosperity Gospel -- has already reduced half the U.S. population  to low-income destitution  during the past 43 years. As to how this has come about, see Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Harper: 2008].)

Just as socialism is our instrument of economic revolution, so then is paganism our instrument of spiritual revolution – though the class-based nature of modern paganism (another expression of the socialist/pagan twinhood) – has yet to be commonly recognized by either group.

While the revolutionary origins and history of socialism are thoroughly documented,  the modern history of paganism (or neo-paganism as it is sometimes called), is virtually unknown – even to many present-day pagans. Though such a history is beyond the scope of this essay, it can nevertheless be summarized in three sentences. The modern pagan renaissance – and in particular the resurrection of the Great Goddess as its primary deity – began with the 1948 publication of The White Goddess, Robert Graves' definitively revolutionary “Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 1966). Its initial collective expression occurred within the Beat Movement of the 1950s. (See for example Diane DiPrima's epic Loba (Penguin Books, London: 1973-1998), which, probably more than any other associated work, exemplifies the spiritual revolution implicit in the Beat ethos.) The resurrection process was accelerated by the the Folk Renaissance of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which popularized traditional British and European balladry, much of it the disguised yet still-psychically potent remnants of pagan liturgy, a connection explored in detail by the late Holger Olaf Nygard, Duke University's resident folklore scholar. (Alas, Nygard's cutting-edge work, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad [Duke University Press: 1963], is long out of print – and my copy, probably one of the last in existence, was destroyed by the 1983 fire.) In any case, the point here is that paganism acquired its present global momentum  as an extension of the Counterculture of Rebellion that reached its apex during the 1960s and 1970s – an expression of the same save-the-world-from-capitalist-depredation instinct that birthed the Gaia Hypothesis,  Second Wave Feminism, Environmentalism and the Back-to-the-Land Movement. And I think it no coincidence paganism is, with feminism and environmentalism, among the only Countercultural remnants surviving today.

But from the socialist perspective is spirituality  – any spirituality – not inevitably yet another “opiate of the masses”? And thus, again from the socialist perspective, should not all spirituality therefore be discarded as expeditiously as possible?

Firstly, history shows spirituality is a characteristic human activity impossible to suppress. It is ultimately an expression of our species' quest for individual and collective meaning, as instinctive as other forms of creative expression, as definitively human as sexuality, though – alas (precisely as Abrahamic religion demonstrates) – equally subject to perversion. Secondly the emergence of Liberation Theology,  a radical variant of Catholicism that presents Jesus as a martyred revolutionary and attempts to sidestep Christianity's inherent Abrahamic misogyny, contempt for Nature and hierarchical despotism, proves even a classic, trickle-down opiate might be made to (deceptively) serve the cause of socialist revolution. Thirdly, while Liberation Theology was ultimately an effort by the Ruling Class (as personified by the church) to retain Ruling Class religious dominance (i.e. philosophical supremacy) in an era of rising revolutionary anger, paganism by contrast is an instinctively revolutionary response by those of us increasingly alienated by the roles of organized religion and capitalist governance in spawning, fostering and intensifying capitalism's threat to human survival.

As if to further confirm paganism's revolutionary nature, there is compelling evidence the One Percent and its Ruling Class consider the resurrection of paganism (and particularly its Great Goddess) to be at least as subversive as socialism. (This evidence includes several premature deaths and the mysterious fire that destroyed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” my meticulously researched collection of the evidence that would have redefined the Counterculture as the first wave of a revolution against patriarchy.) Paganism's danger to the One Percent and its Ruling Class thus lies in its accelerating rebuttal of Abrahamic despotism, which remember is the root of capitalism. The contrast between the Abrahamic god and the modern pagan goddess is literally a clash of diametrical opposites. Whether one accepts the Abrahamic god as real or symbolic, he is in fact the personification of oppression – the limitation, destruction and/or perversion of our quintessential humanity. Just as, whether one accepts the goddess as real or symbolic, she is the personification of nurturing – the recognition, encouragement and fulfillment of our individual and collective potential.

In this context paganism offers genuine liberation – not just from the Abrahamic religions' patriarchy-sustaining misogynistic anti-sex, anti-sensual and anti-Nature taboos, but from the innate Abrahamic hostility to science as well. While the Abrahamic myth of creation by a male deity is a genuinely unnatural act, contradicting physics, astronomy and biology, the Gaia Hypothesis restates in scientific terms paganism's core principle – that our planet (and by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating. Moreover, paganism – unlike so-called Liberation Theology – is not dictated from above; the Ruling Class, which sneeringly denounces paganism as childish superstition or damns it as “Devil worship,” wants nothing to do with it and suppresses it at every opportunity.  Modern paganism is thus born entirely of rebellious intent – a 99 Percent philosophy intended, as I wrote in a long-lost essay, “to fault the (patriarchal) bedrock of (what passes for) civilization” and thereby free us from the psychological component of patriarchal/Abrahamic/capitalist shackles.

Thus too modern paganism is the spiritual and emotional counterpart of what socialism is for economics and politics. If one is truly a dialectical materialist – that is, genuinely committed to understanding “the real conditions of materialist existence” (which include the material of human consciousness) – one must recognize that sociological and psychological realities are equal to economic and political realities in the symbiosis that shapes our circumstances. Moreover, if one is genuinely committed to the pagan ethos of rescuing our human selfhood from beneath the jackboots of patriarchal religion and capitalism  – thereby reconnecting ourselves with Nature and (perhaps) saving ourselves from extinction – the socialist ethos of “from each according to ability; to each according to need” is the only way to expand the pagan principle of “as above, so below” to encompass all human society.

Here ends my open letter, which I hope will achieve the widest possible circulation within the pagan community.

*****

DONATIONS FOR WARBRIDES of Japan, a documentary, are desperately needed and are 100 percent tax deductible. While I do not normally use OAN for fund-raising, this is an especially worthy cause, as detailed in an e-mail Director Yayoi Winfrey recently sent me:

“Our production team has scheduled interviews with 11 Japanese war brides and/or their adult children in eight cities and three states. However, donations to our crowdfunding campaign, which began two weeks ago, has slowed down considerably, leaving us short on production funds. We desperately need your tax-deductible dollars for two airline tickets, car rental and gas plus hotel accommodations and meals for two weeks while we shoot. Won't you please help us get this documentary onto the screen? we would appreciate your participation no matter what size your donation.  Again, every dollar is tax-deductible if you donate at this site.  And please don't hesitate to ask questions you might have about where your donation dollars will go.”

*****

I HAVE COME to regard it as a kind of cheating to re-post comments I wrote on threads at other websites, but the following is the first time I have ever been able to bring myself to write publicly of the tragedy that – because it occurred during our society's pre-feminist refusal to acknowledge reproductive trauma – shattered the marriage shared by my second wife and me.

The writing was itself a surprise, my entirely unpremeditated response to an emotionally wrenching report  detailing the birth of a dead child and the creditor-intensified emotional devastation it inflicted on both parents.

What follows is slightly expanded from the original, which was condensed to fit Reader Supported News' 1500-character space restriction:

Albeit without the crushing debt that afflicted the author of the RSN essay after the death of her daughter, my second wife and I were similarly wounded by the death of our son. Hence we share Ms. Blossom's sorrow.

Ironically, we lived in Manhattan, the psychiatric capitol of the world, but it was 1967, and the feminist movement had yet to raise USian emotional consciousness enough for the shrinks to recognize the trauma associated with a still-born child.

We had made our baby deliberately and knowingly, gazing into one another's eyes amidst the exquisite pleasure and infinite joy of love, and like the Blossoms, we were anticipating, with all the characteristic happiness and apprehension, our transformation from a couple into a family. Adrienne, in that singularly female bio-emotional way of knowing  – a mode of perception we men can never truly comprehend  – had decided as a child age seven or eight she wanted a son named Loren, and now she was collecting the requisite baby clothes and related items ancillary to the fulfillment of her desire and intention. I on my part had already decided to give up the uncertain life of an editorial freelancer, take a staff job on one of the many New Jersey dailies that surrounded the City and thus aim for an eventual slot on one of the Manhattan papers, most likely The New York Post, which then before Rupert Murdoch bought it and destroyed it was the most proudly Left-leaning daily in the United States.

But at the end of our sixth month of pregnancy a moral imbecile for whom there are not vile enough pejoratives in any language ran for a train, and in his vicious haste – cursed may he be – he knocked Adrienne down the long flight of iron stairs to the lower level of the Union Square subway station. It was a Sunday; she had gone to visit friends on the Upper East Side, returned home that evening massively bruised and limping from the fall, and three days later our son was born dead.

My wife saw him briefly in the emergency room, an experience she cannot talk about even now, 49 years later. I viewed him for a moment as a nurse carried him in a glass jar through the Beth Israel Hospital emergency waiting room.

“Is that the Bliss baby,” I asked.

“Who are you,” she asked in reply.

“I'm the father,” I said. “May I see?”

Except for his purple color, he seemed perfectly formed, almost a twin of the infant I knew from pictures of myself as a babe-in-arms, his hair as near-black as my own was then.

I cannot yet describe my feelings as the nurse bore him away; even now no words suffice.

In keeping with that era's accepted practice, we stifled our grief. A year later it seemed we despised one another, and by 1974 we were divorced – though now in the final years of our lives we are again emotionally close though we live on opposite coasts.

Thanks to feminist consciousness-raising, trauma such as ours and the Blossoms is at last acknowledged, even unto the fact it is a wound from which full healing is rarely if ever achieved. But its hurt can indeed be ameliorated by therapy – save when capitalist greed prices such relief out of our reach, an atrocity the only cure for which is the abolition of capitalism – another of the many reasons my politics are what they are.

Meanwhile, if reincarnation is real, may that which animated our son live again as someone else's child – and this time thrive.

And yes, we would have named him Loren.

LB/8 August 2016.

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Hillary Will Kill Me No Matter What – Either by More Cuts to Social Security and Medicare or Starting World War III

Lest We Forget: Memorial Day in Tompkins Square Park, New York City, 1967. Click on image to view it full size.
Photo © Loren Bliss 1967, 2011.

*

NO, I'M NOT dead, not yet, though sometimes the aches, pains and political betrayals of old age – arthritis in shoulders, wrists, knees and every vertebra plus the constant foreboding generated by the Democrats' ongoing collaboration with the Republicans in the slow-motion genocide of “austerity” – almost make me wish I were dead.

Especially now, burdened as I am with the physical preparations for temporary eviction from my apartment – an atrocity encouraged by anti-tenant Washington state law that allows the landlords to renovate their buildings without any loss of rental income – it is easy to imagine the grave as a better alternative than the relentlessly increasing wretchedness inflicted on us by capitalism.  

But that is precisely what our One Percent overlords and their Ruling Class vassals want us to think.

The more of us die, whether by our own hands or by the policies of murderous neglect that are the quintessence of capitalist governance, the more money there is for the One Percenters to gamble in their Wall Street casino and buy mink coats, diamond necklaces and Parisian penthouses for their mistresses.

Hence an ultimate truth – one I hope will dissuade anyone genuinely contemplating suicide: in such times as these, with the capitalists intent on eliminating everyone who is not immediately exploitable for profit, survival is an act of revolutionary defiance.

It is also an act of revolutionary defiance to protest what the landlord is doing to all of us who live in this 50-unit senior housing facility. He is compelling old and broken women and men to pack all our possessions, then forcing us out of our apartments for the one day (or possibly more) it takes to replace the flooring therein. And he is coldly, arrogantly indifferent to the weeks of wrenching disruption this inflicts on all of us – in my case, packing before and unpacking after the temporary evictions, a total theft of at least two months from whatever remains of my life. Nor does the landlord give a flying rodent's rectum about the gnawing anxiety inflicted by the fact this sword of Damocles has been hanging over our heads since October 2014.

My understanding, from the Tacoma city officials to whom I fruitlessly complained early last year, is this sort of outrage is illegal everywhere save Washington state, where decades of behind-the-scenes collaboration between the Democrats and Republicans ensure we tenants remain perpetually powerless.

While the landlord's minimum-wage, mostly immigrant workers will physically move our boxes and furniture out of and back into our apartments, we geriatrically afflicted tenants must do all our own packing and stacking, and all our unstacking and unpacking too. Fortunately for the people whose mobility is limited to wheelchairs and walkers, some of our more physically capable fellow residents have volunteered to help those who are physically disabled. Otherwise we'd all be fucked.

For me, a physically disabled 76-year-old, the worst part of the ordeal is over. That was packing my personal library of 1,026 volumes, nearly all hardbacks. These books filled 25 boxes, each box 16 inches by 12 inches by 12 inches; each box weighing approximately 75 pounds when full. In other words, the 25-box total weighs about 1500 pounds – three-quarters of a ton.

The boxes and the requisite packing tape, which contrary to the landlord's promises were NOT provided, cost me $135.92 out of pocket. And there will be no refund from the landlord. In other words, my rent – $470 per month – is effectively raised to $492.65 for the remainder of 2016.

That $22.65 difference may not seem like much, but to me it is a is a ruinous blow. Thanks mostly to Washington state Governor Jay Inslee's Democratic administration, my 2016 income has been slashed $155 per month. That's right – as I have said before and will surely say again – this year I already had $155 per month LESS than I had in 2015.

Hence, even before the landlord-imposed expenses associated with the temporary eviction, I had absolutely NO discretionary income – all of it stolen from me by the same politicians who granted Boeing an $8.5 billion state tax exemption and are always scheming to find additional ways to bolster the bank accounts of the already obscenely wealthy capitalists who own USian governments at every level.

I repeatedly write about my own economic circumstances because they exemplify the fact that, from the perspective of the impoverished peoples who now make up the USian majority population,  there is no economic difference between the openly fascist Republicans and the more closeted but at least equally fascist Democrats. That's why so many of us no longer bother to vote.

Gov. Inslee's Democrats shut down WTAP, the Washington Telephone Assistance Program, by abolishing its tax base in 2013. That particular vulture came home to roost last August, costing me $17 per month. The same Democrats slashed my food food stamps 88 percent, cut my Medicare Extra Help 82 percent and hiked my Medicare-subsidized prescription-drug prices 16 percent. Add in the 33 percent transit-fare increase imposed on the local transit system by a RepublicRat coalition, and the loss to me is at least $155 per month. Atop that, there were the (allegedly “Democratic”) Obama Administration's manipulations to avoid a 2016 Social Security cost-of-living increase. Then add the $22.65 per month I had to shell out to pay for my own temporary eviction, and now I have $177.65 a month less than I had last year.

That's why I now have – I'll say it again – NO discretionary income. And, given political and economic reality, it is obvious I will never again have any discretionary income as long as this lifetime continues.

Moreover, stacking those 75-pound boxes of books extracted its own special price. After stacking 24 of the boxes I went to bed short of breath, panting, heart racing but nevertheless so exhausted I immediately fell asleep. When I awoke the next morning still short of breath, heart still racing, I realized I was in trouble, instantly contacted my doctor and on his orders spent the rest of the day in the excellent Tacoma urgent care facility of Group Health Cooperative. Tentative diagnosis: congestive heart failure, to be confirmed or denied by a two-hour echo-cardiogram (ultrasound) exam administered 19 May, the results of which I should have by the end of this week.

Am I upset, frightened, anxious about the results? Absolutely not. Why? As I said recently on a Reader Supported News comment thread:

Remember I am 76 years old: that means Hillary will kill me no matter what – either by slashing Social Security and further slashing Medicare (the Democrats have already cut my Medicare Extra Help 82 percent and my food stamps 88 percent) – or by starting World War III.

While it is true Trump promises to preserve Social Security and Medicare – and many Sanders-supporting seniors say that absent Sanders, that's why they'll vote for Trump – I know history, which includes the lesson implicit in how Trump's idols Hitler and Mussolini promised world peace.

Spawned by a piece about Former President Jimmy Carter, it was one of those rare RSN threads  on which I was resoundingly down-thumbed. My alleged offense was pointing out that Carter, by his gleefully self-righteous signature on the Hyde Amendment, did more damage to USian women's sexual freedom than all subsequent presidents combined. But today's hard-line Democrats are so desperate for heroes, they will embrace even an outspoken, Jesus-brandishing theocrat who – just as I (so vexingly) pointed out – was the first in the now-seemingly endless line of presidents from the One Party of Two Names.

Apropos Trump, I cannot, unlike too many of my peers, overlook the fact he is a Republican – not just a clandestine enemy of the 99 Percent, as the Big Lie Democrats are, but (his populist rhetoric not withstanding), the presidential candidate of the party that openly despises the 99 Percent. Hence I regard his promises as no more trustworthy than the Big Lies encompassed by the biggest Big Lie in USian presidential history: Obama's “change we can believe in.”

I should note here my reference to the RepublicRats and DemoPublicans as separate parties is not intended to contradict the fact we are ruled by One Party of Two Names. The fact is I have not yet figured out a way to encapsulate that hideous truth in abbreviated language. “Half-party” is incomprehensible, “pseudo-party” is incorrect and RepublicRats or DemoPublicans, though emotionally appealing, lose the point in the acrimony of their implicit jeers. Stay tuned; my subconscious is working on it.

As to the election itself, I am ever more alienated from the entire extravaganza. Of course I support Sanders, though I doubt he has the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell. But at least he has broken through 71 years of Big Lies and malicious censorship to (maybe) reawaken the USian proletariat to the fact socialism is our species' only path to liberation. Thus I find Robert Reich's most recent demand, that we all back Hillary if she wins the nomination,  to be particularly offensive.

“(M)y morsels of advice,” Reich wrote, “may be hard to swallow. Many Hillary supporters don’t want Bernie to keep campaigning, and many Bernie supporters don’t want to root for Hillary if she gets the nomination. But swallow it you must – not just for the good of the Democratic Party, but for the good of the nation.”

My initial comment-thread reply followed Reich's oral imagery, reductio ad absurdum, to its inevitable climax, an ejaculation RSN's censors later (understandably) suppressed:

Quoth Mr. Reich: “...swallow it you must...”

Quoth the 99 Percent: “but, but, but – they promised not to come in our mouths.”

Then I got serious:

I have said it before and I will say it again: a vote for Hillary Clinton – for the closeted “nuke Hanoi” Goldwater Girl who now shows her inner Ilsa Koch by cackling at the torture death of Qaddafi – is a vote for World War III and therefore a vote for human extinction.

Nor is Trump a rational alternative. A vote for Trump is a vote to unleash all the racist malevolence, ChristoFascist misogyny and JesuNazi intolerance that has always festered at the core of USian society.

Who with right mind and informed conscience can make such a choice?

Later in the same thread I elaborated:

She is, or so her relentless self-centeredness makes it seem, a genuine clone of Ayn Rand, who (in what amount to fictionalizations of Mein Kampf), proclaimed selfishness and greed to be not, as we were always taught, the deadliest of sins, but rather the ultimate of human virtues instead.

Surely this explains Hillary's attitude toward capitalism, within which selfishness and greed – and the moral imbecility essential to their embrace – have always been defined as the heights of virtue.

But then, what else might one expect of a closeted Goldwater Girl, who (or so it seems), has in her thinking merely replaced the long-ago slogan “Nuke Hanoi” with a truly suicidal and therefore infinitely more frightful modern variant, “Nuke Moscow.”

Speaking of closeted, might Trump be Hillary's clandestine assault weapon? Perhaps the most damning conjecture yet of the reasons behind Trump's candidacy  was dragged out of my subconscious by an RSN poster's comments about the fear Trump is inflicting on Hispanics, African-Americans and First nations people:

(Y)ou have laid bare a highly probable and very disturbing truth: that Trump's function (and therefore probably his clandestine purpose) is to terrorize people of color into ignoring Sanders and voting for Clinton.

In which context reflect on the documented friendship between Trump and the Clintons.

Shame on me, as – knowing the realities of class-war and therefore the malevolent strategy and tactics of the One Percenters and their One Party of Two Names as I do – I surely should have recognized this probability.

Good catch...for which kudos: what you suggest is no doubt part of the One Percent's strategy for ensuring the ultimate victory of fascism – which is, after all, the only way capitalism can survive – whether under Hillary or Trump.

Near the end of the same thread was my defense of Marxism, in context perhaps my best such effort yet:

Fascism...needs to be recognized as the inevitable consequence of capitalism. While the New Deal and its antecedents sought to ameliorate capitalism's pro-fascist momentum, they failed because capitalism cannot be reformed. With its ethos of infinite greed as maximum virtue – the rejection of all human morality and its replacement with consummate moral imbecility – capitalism is literally too evil to reform. Thus to prevent capitalism from morphing into fascism, it can only be overthrown and abolished. Hence the relevance of Marxism, not only as the one truly effective antidote to capitalism, but – increasingly (as capitalism becomes indistinguishable from governance itself and thus grows ever more tyrannical) – the only life-preserver we humans have left if indeed we are to save ourselves, our species and our planet.

Meanwhile, back in the sweat-shop warehouse my apartment has become, I have yet to disassemble my bookshelves – at least a day's work,  and even with the power screwdriver thoughtfully lent me by a friend, lots of arthritis pain – every twinge an object lesson in the evils of capitalism. 

LB/31 May 2016

-30-

OAN, Windows 10, an On-Paper Newsletter for Seniors, Susan's Questions/My Answers, Presidential Mania 2016

 

A lighthearted moment among Tacoma Clinic Defense volunteers on guard against Fundamentalist Christian fanatics who want to abolish women's sexual freedom. I recently joined TCD and will give it as much time on its defense lines and with my media skills as I am able.  Click to view image full size. (Photo by Loren Bliss © 2016)

*

ONCE AGAIN, OAN is in a state of transition. I have lost nearly all my readers due to the posting-hiatus inflicted by the worst creativity-killer I have ever encountered – an ongoing, emotionally exhausting fight with Microsoft's (notoriously buggy)  Windows 10 software. Nor can I abandon the struggle. It is necessitated by my ongoing commitment to produce a professional-quality monthly newsletter for the senior-housing community in which I live. But the hours, days and weeks the battle with Windows 10 steals from my life leave me neither the time nor the energy to publish new material here on OAN – though perhaps I am at last finding a detour around the Windows 10 barrier.

As nearly as I could figure, at its height my OAN readership was approaching 1,000 page-views per week, with more than half those readers in Europe. But as of last week the number had declined to less than 40 per week here on Typepad and to about 16 a week on Blogger, where I also post because – for whatever reason – it is much more accessible to European readers. Hence my deepest gratitude to those few who have remained aboard.

The newsletter that now because of Windows 10 claims such a huge part of my life is a publication I founded in 2013 and of which I am deservedly proud. It is is called Community Chronicle. It began its fourth year last November. Three months before that, when the struggle with Windows 10 ended my ability to update OAN at weekly intervals, I decided Chronicle must take precedence because its entirely-local, only-on-paper contents include information essential to lower-income seniors and disabled people in our ever-worsening struggles for survival in the face of capitalism's implicitly genocidal “austerity” policies.

Nearly all this vital information used to be available in local newspapers and often in broadcast media as well. But it is now maliciously suppressed by the for-profit propaganda ministry colloquially known as “mainstream media,” which is owned by the same One Percenters who own all USian governments and politicians at every level, and who therefore limit “news” to that which is of interest only to the economically upscale readers sought by advertisers. For example, “mainstream media” now covers welfare only when it can be misrepresented as “wasteful” spending squandered on those of us the Ruling Class ever-more-openly denounces as “lazy parasites.” But stories describing the horrors wrought by welfare cutbacks and what cutback victims might do to cope with the resultant hardships – the sorts of news we routinely covered during my years as a reporter and editor – are emphatically forbidden.

Thus the Community Chronicle attempts to fill the information gap. It focuses on material relevant to those of us who are elderly and/or disabled, and above all else impoverished enough to live in a 50-apartment/50-resident complex that is one of fewer than a half-dozen independent-living housing projects for low-income seniors and disabled people in Tacoma, Washington, a seaport city of 200,000 persons. The Chronicle has a a core readership of 50 persons every month, and all of us understand our circumstances – that we are targets of the government's relentless reductions of everything upon which our survival depends, mass transit included. Most of us are acutely aware of the government's genocidal intent: “obviously,” as many of us say aloud, “the politicians want us dead, but they don't want the embarrassment of death camps.”

Obviously too the Chronicle's contents are relevant to an audience much larger than the 50 residents of the facility it serves. But it is an audience rendered unreachable by the exclusionary savageries of capitalist politics and economics. Most of the Chronicle's potential readers are denied Internet access by the obscenely prohibitive rates charged by U.S. Internet service providers – rates typically ten times higher than those charged anywhere else on this planet. The costs of the requisite hardware – at least $400 for an even mediocre-quality new computer and printer – are equally prohibitive. Thus only eight of my 50 fellow residents own computers, and only five are actually on-line.

That 90-percent-off-line figure for low-income seniors in the 65-and-above age group – by far the worst digital divide in the industrial world – seems constant throughout the U.S. (I say “seems” because the relevant statistics, readily available when I wrote about this for a senior periodical in 2007, have since become much more difficult to find and interpret. A credible 2014 report that the digital divide is slowly but steadily worsening as capitalism continues to contract economic opportunities for the 99 Percent has apparently vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Meanwhile, access to life-sustaining government social services is ever more (maliciously) limited to those who can afford the horrendous costs of buying and maintaining computers and subscribing to an ISP – in other words, to those who don't need government stipends and services at all. As a result, those who are most needy are the very people who are most often denied access. Nor is this coincidental; it is yet another (lethally effective) tactic of the slow-motion genocide concealed within the euphemism “austerity.” The resultant struggle – no-computer elders versus computer-access-only agencies – is precisely what makes the Chronicle so necessary to its readers. But the fact these readers are (now and forever) denied computers and Internet access also makes giving Chronicle a domain name and putting it on the Internet a waste of money.

***

It is something of an aside, but I should note here that low-income senior housing is one of the more clever tactics by which the One Percent and its Ruling Class brain-trust perpetuate the societal divisions that ensure the 99 Percent remains forever disunited. Thus we elderly folk are warehoused separately from those USian Empire subjects the One Percent deems still exploitable for profit. Obviously, our overlords fear our (definitively subversive) memories of the New Deal's far better times – especially how those better times were won and sustained by the solidarity of organized workers. Such recollections, the Ruling Class fears, might give today's hopelessly disempowered debt-slaves dangerously disruptive notions of resistance.

Though most of these housing-facilities are reasonably comfortable, as is the apartment complex in which I live, their apartness nevertheless defines them as ghettos. And like all ghettos, they serve a specific capitalist purpose. Methodically isolated as we are, ever-more-encapsulated by the same damning aura of alienness the empire imposes on women, blacks, Hispanics, First Nations folk and any others it fears as potential enemies, we will be that much easier to subjugate and exterminate once capitalism completes its inevitable transition into fascism and/or the uniquely USian form of Nazism Donald Trump is now fomenting.

***

Given the time-and-energy conflict between OAN and the Chronicle, I naturally felt my obligation to my neighbors – that is, to people I know and see almost daily – took precedence over my obligation to a group of readers who were for the most part anonymous. For a long while, indeed for most of the Chronicle's three-plus years of publication, I had managed with only minor difficulties to serve both groups. But then my desk-top computer died, which forced me to switch to a laptop computer irremediably dedicated to Microshaft operating systems – this after seven years of running an Ubuntu-equipped machine that had been built specifically for me.

Learning to use the laptop's Windows 8 and 8.1 operating systems was difficult enough. But Windows 10 is the most nightmarishly difficult operating system I have yet encountered. (Nor is there any hyperbole here; the experience is indeed giving me nightmares.) From August onward, fighting Windows 10 typically left me so emotionally drained, the best I could do was get out one or two editions of OAN each month. This is because Windows 10 has turned the seven-day job of writing, photographing, editing, typesetting and laying out the Chronicle into a 14-to-20-day ordeal of infinite frustration, wrenching fury and – not infrequently – total defeat.

One set of Windows 10 problems was caused by Microshaft's Rube Goldberg programming,  which made computer operation suddenly far more bewilderingly difficult than anything I have encountered in my 16 years of overcoming the computer's many intrusions on my ability to process photographs and/or write acceptably coherent text. In fact, with Windows 10 it was as if I had never run a computer before, the as-if substantially complicated by Windows 10's built-in incompatibility with the open-source software that is my (impoverished person's) mainstay.

Trying to describe this problem to a friend who has minimal familiarity with computers, I used the analogy of a familiar journey. Normally we go from Tacoma to Portland, Oregon by driving south on Interstate 5. Imagine, I said, if the only way to get to Portland was by driving 2800 miles east to New York City and then driving another 2900 miles west and south to make a journey that used to be only only 142 miles. That's what using Windows 10 is like – driving 5700 miles to get to a destination that's 142 miles away.

An additional class of problems – far less frequent but far more disabling – was inflicted by Microshaft's nasty penchant for occasionally ramming in emergency Windows 10 updates without first asking permission. In one instance, Microshaft jammed an update into my machine while it was maxed out doing graphics, and the result was an epic crash that not only obliterated about 6,000 words of Chronicle text (nine stories, all of which had to be rewritten from scratch), but rendered the computer non-operational for nearly three days, making the Chronicle a week late.

No computer or software manufacturer has ever done anything even remotely like this to me before, and the resultant stress was of such devastating intensity, it took yet another week of mostly sleeping 10 or 12 hours at a stretch for me to recover. When one is my age – I'll be 76 at the end of this month – the theft of two entire weeks of one's increasingly precious time is not something one easily forgives or forgets.

Though I have always despised computers – firstly, because they are electronic scabs that eliminated six of every seven jobs in newspaper journalism; secondly, because they are inhuman tyrants that force me to labor as a typesetter while simultaneously playing a much-despised game of electronic Simon Says; thirdly, because their frightfully prohibitive cost now repeatedly threatens to terminate forever my ability to write and photograph – I had nevertheless surrendered to them and achieved a sort of working peace. But all that has been swept away by Windows 10, and I can now say with absolute truthfulness there is nothing in this world I hate so much as computers, and nothing I fear so much as the uncontrollable extent to which they can destroy my work. After last month's ruinous crash, every minute I am at my keyboard, it is as if I am hunched beneath a Damocles sword that threatens the total destruction of whatever I happen to be doing.

And no, I cannot afford – will never again be able to afford – the approximately $250 it costs for a back-up hard-drive. Nor – since it is nearly as big as a second computer – is there any place in my tiny apartment I could put it.

Obviously the stress of being Microshaft-dependent will continue to spike my blood pressure and thereby shorten my life. A Nurd friend has promised – if indeed he can ever find the time – to take the day or so it will require to determine if this machine can actually be stripped clean of Microshaft contamination, and if so, he will reload it with a Linux operating system – a project that will take at least another day and maybe two or three. Hence what I am really asking for is a week out of his work-life. While some people I know, the friend included, maintains this can be done, others warn that Microshaft and Samsung collaborated so effectively, any attempt to purge the computer will destroy it. Hence my friend's effort may prove to be fool's errand. Whatever, producing the Chronicle with Microshaft Windows 10 software will meanwhile continue to steal a disproportionate amount of my time and inflict a truly horrendous toll in stress. But I will continue to do it simply because my neighbors depend on it for information they can get nowhere else. Such are the (not always pleasant) obligations of being a (real) journalist, even in (alleged) retirement.

What then of OAN? Because of the far more universal scope of its ideas, I regard it as the far more important work – indeed the only work of any real significance to whatever postmortem legacy might be mine. But how can I restore OAN to its once-per-week frequency when one week (and effectively at least two weeks) are consumed each month by the huge struggle to produce the Chronicle with Windows 10? And what then when I am done with the Chronicle I am so exhausted, all I can do for the next week is recover via generous does of sleep and trash novels?

Part of the answer seems to be to return to my former practice of including in OAN the comments and information I post on other websites. Most of these contributions to Internet dialogues are short and to the point, and during the second and third weeks of each month, they are further abbreviated because the only time I have to write them is when I am taking a break from the constant war with Windows 10 that turns production of the Chronicle into an ordeal I now anticipate with naught but dread. My comment-thread work on Reader Supported News – by far my favorite Internet news and discussion site (and therefore my primary posting-place) – is pared down still more by RSN's 1500-character limit on individual posts, which imposes on me the same (welcome) discipline that writing for daily newspapers did.

Though I always felt it was somehow cheating to include comment-thread material in OAN, I often did, albeit usually for the purpose of providing additional relevant details, and as of last week I have returned to that practice. That should guarantee weekly appearances of new OAN material – or as close to weekly as the ongoing fight with Windows 10 will allow. And should the commentary evoked by breaking news deserve it, I will also publish the OAN equivalent of the old-time daily-newspaper Extra: a special edition rushed out to report pivotal events, for example an assassination, a coup or a declaration of war.

I also continue to ponder what else might be properly published under the OAN flag. I think there's a goodly chance it will become the final destination of the memoir I have been writing during the past two decades, albeit never more than in seemingly disconnected bits and pieces. I have already published a few such pieces in OAN, notably here,  here,  here and here.  And of course there will always be photographs on these pages, because in truth (and despite the painful limitations imposed by arthritis and deteriorating spinal injuries), I still think of myself far more as a photographer than writer or editor. As I have confessed before, I am dyslexic, quite severely so in fact, and this eternally bitter truth – never mind I have won more awards and certainly made more money from writing and editing than from photography – relentlessly tells me that to label myself a “writer” is at best a self-deception and at worst a fraudulent act.

Yes, my intellect knows this notion of being a fraud is nonsense – not just nonsense but nonsensical self-hatred – but even after at least 55 years of proof, my emotions (as if in some longstanding parallel to Windows 10 perversity) always default back to to the fraud setting. The source of the problem is obvious: despite decades of government proclamations to the contrary, we the disabled are still taught, often from birth, to despise ourselves. Such is disability in a realm so instinctively Christian Fundamentalist, the disabled person is invariably treated as someone accursed by the divine sadist the Christians worship as their god.

The absurdity here lurks in the fact these same Christians claim our species is “made in the image” of their god. What then of a disabled person? I can think of no better example of a contradiction in terms than the notion of a “dyslexic writer” – a concept that as an image of a god becomes genuinely laughable. Perhaps “god” is a dyslexic reversal of “dog” (as in the truism “dog is love”), and that all of the atrocities committed in god's name are the result of mistakenly looking beyond the canine example for the wisdom essential to human survival. Having been blessed by the company of dogs for most of my life, I long ago recognized their value as teachers. 

Meanwhile the fraud meme resists even efforts to laugh it away. One of the great ironies of my life is that while my photographs have generated enough acclaim to appear in significant journals – Paris Match for one, Newsweek for another – most of my writing never made it beyond journalism's minor leagues, and it was in those notably limited environments it won the lion's share of my awards. The limits imposed by dyslexia? Not entirely; some of my earliest editors thought me destined for The New York Times, and the late Cicely Nichols thought my “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which revealed the old Counterculture as the first wave of a rebellion against patriarchy, would become one of the more important works of the 20th Century. But my civil-rights arrest in 1963 seems to have ended forever my major-media potential, and that 1983 fire killed “Dancer.” Now, less than four weeks away from my 76th birthday and with the best of my work reduced to ash, the whole question of competitive quality is moot. That which has been destroyed can never be re-created. As I have learned from (invariably bitter) experience, whenever one attempts to do so, the result is always failure.

Perhaps that's why, even after the indescribable (and never-to-be-relieved) pain of the loss of all the work destroyed by fire, photography remains my passion. Seen through a camera, life is always new, often a Zen experience, and at its very best an encounter with Pagan ecstasy – that exquisite suspension of distinctions between self and other that no doubt prompted the original Taliesin to exclaim, “there is nothing in which I have not been.”

But writing, though a part of me loves it as much as I love photographing, is always befouled by the terrible down-pressing burden of the fearful o-please-don't-let-me-choose-the-wrong-word self-consciousness that is such an inescapably oppressive part of dyslexia. Yes I sometimes write reasonably well, but that does not alter the fact writing is for me (and always will be) as much an unnatural act as singing is for someone born without the power of speech. Thus it seldom rises above the level of dutiful intellectual exercise, as if I were required to move colored blocks about on a chessboard-like grid to prove how many different combinations I am capable of achieving. Which, no doubt, is why (especially when I am tired), my writing sometimes chokes on its own verbosity. And no, half-brother Donald, I never imagined myself a better writer than you, no matter the contrary opinion voiced by our father.

*** *** ***

I AWOKE FROM a nap yesterday with the inexplicable urge to answer questions asked of me several years ago by a woman who has a truly unique place in my memory. I know little of her present life and have no idea if she reads OAN. But I long ago learned to heed the promptings of journalistic intuition, which tells me to admit here and now I knew long before I turned 25 my financial prospects were so limited I would never have the material wealth capitalism demands of a “good husband,” and therefore I could never be a “good father.” Which is why, my dearest Susan H. N., I never tried to conceive another child with my second wife after her oh-so-devastating miscarriage, why I never dared seek to marry again after she and I divorced, and why our relationship dwindled as it did in 1963. But I think about you often even now, and as always I hope you are well and thriving.

*** *** ***

THANKS BE TO POLITICS for blessed relief from geezerly introspection:
An abysmally ignorant poster on the comment-thread of “Black Lives Matter, Just Not to Hillary Clinton” – an excellent William Boardman piece that is well worth reading – implicitly hailed Democrat Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton as a revolutionary,  an utterly baseless sentiment so widespread throughout USian identity-politics it is ever-more-disturbingly obvious large segments of the electorate have been blinded to who and what she really is. Here is my response:

Given Hillary's ties to Wall Street, she is scarcely more revolutionary than Marie Antoinette. Which means that, like Antoinette, she will do everything in her power to crush the revolution.

Moreover, the revolution-crushing implications of her hitherto-secret collaboration with the forces of ChristoFascism are every bit as dire – especially for women and minorities – as the implications of Trump's refusal to repudiate his Nazi and Ku Klux Klan supporters.

Hillary's incipient betrayals are revealed by Jeff Sharlet on pages 272-277 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). Page 275 is especially damning: “Hillary fights side-by-side with (Sam) Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it.”

As both a civil rights activist (Knox County Jail, 1963) and a journalist, I know too well the fundamentalist theocracy of the South and its stranglehold on both races – especially how Bible-thumping preachers control the vote. Hence I cannot but wonder if that explains the paradox of Hillary's popularity among blacks.

*** *** ***

TWO NEWS ANALYSES analyses in the same Sunday night Reader Supported News download present such antithetical views of the presidential election campaign I am posting links to each of them despite the fact I have (at least as of now) commented on neither of their threads. Their heads are self-explanatory. “Majority U.S. Public Opinion Is Mocked by the Ongoing Presidential Election” is here,  and “Why Bernie Sanders Won Super Tuesday” is here.  My present opinion on the campaign – the adjective indicating the content of the noun is by no means final – is included in the second passage below.

*** *** ***

ANOTHER DISCUSSION ABOUT Hillary – this on “Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump,” a Matt Taibbl/Rolling Stone essay that examines the terrifying reality of Moron Nation  – prompted me to focus on additional details of how Hillary's Inner Goldwater Girl has always served the One Percent at the expense of all the rest of us. Again I cited Sharlet:

Hillary's ongoing support for Free Trade is as implicitly anti-abortion as her clandestine collaboration with the forces of Christian fundamentalism is explicitly anti-abortion.

Free Trade – as U.S. feminists are at long last beginning to realize – throws millions of U.S. workers either into permanent joblessness or into sweatshop labor with radically diminished fringe benefits, or more likely no benefits at all.

In either case, the victims – male and female alike -- lose their health insurance. And for women -- especially with the devastating success of the JesuNazis' war against Planned Parenthood and all other birth-control providers – this means loss of the gynecological care essential to female sexual freedom.

To imagine the Machiavellian-minded Hillary is unaware of this deadly Free Trade side-effect is like imagining Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust.

And there is also, on pages 272-277 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet, Harper: 2008), a strong suggestion Free Trade's role in the war on women is part her collaboration with the JesuNazi Sam Brownback. Quoth Sharlet (page 275): “Hillary fights side-by-side with Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it.”

In other words, exactly as Free Trade does.

***

I ALSO EXPRESSED my agreement with Taibbi, albeit by pointing out he was a bit late to the fair:

H.L. Mencken wrote the epitaph for the United States in 1920:

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Now, with the Dunce-ocrats having ended the Sanders fantasy and ensured the candidacy of a woman who snickered at and applauded the agonizing death of a man anally impaled on bayonets, and the Republ-idiots sure to Trump the election with a man who channels Il Duce if not der Führer himself, there will soon be no place here for those of us who are old and/or poor and/or disabled or simply, by some accident of birth – geography, race, whatever – deemed no longer exploitable for profit.

This means we have but two choices: we can try to find another country – probably impossible for most of us older than about 55 (though I have some faint hope my analytical skills might prove useful elsewhere) – or we can remain here and wait to be exterminated, either by the slow-motion genocide of the social-safety-net cuts that will be inflicted no matter whether the president is Trump or Hillary, or by the death camps Trump is bound to establish to rid the nation not only of the minorities he openly despises but all of his critics as well.

Globally speaking, the American Dream has just become the Humanity Nightmare. The “sweet land of liberty” is dead. The only question is whether its successor nation will render our entire species extinct.

***

I also added a couple of comments about capitalism – the sort of remarks to which discussion-group participants seem increasingly reluctant to respond, no doubt because we all know the secret police, obviously in anticipation of the mass arrests to follow November's election, never relax their vigilance:

The problem with a “mixed economy” is that capitalism is like cancer: it will always metastasize into fascism or Nazism.

It has already done so in the U.S., killing forever the Keynesian ideology of the New Deal, and (both as “austerity” and as the resultant rebirth of the Hard Right), it is rapidly doing so in Europe.

This is because the core mandate of capitalism is the rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated and – as the replacement for those moral precepts – the elevation of infinite greed into ultimate virtue.

In other words, capitalism is institutionalized moral imbecility – the utter amorality of the serial killer focused on the accumulation of victims not by outright murder but by profit – which of course includes murder, as at Bangladesh or Bhopal or Triangle Shirtwaist or the Mingo County War or, for that matter, both World Wars, Vietnam, the re-colonization of the Middle East and Africa, etc. ad nauseam.

Footnote: Probably the only good thing that can be said about the Roman Catholic Church – apart from the work done in secret by a handful of subversive Irish and German monks to preserve what few remnants we have of the 35,000 years of pagan culture that preceded the forcible Christianization of Europe – is that its medieval clergy typically (albeit too-often ineffectually) insisted profiteering was a mortal sin. (See for example “Morality in Medieval Economics,” here.)

*

Yes, the Soviets failed to evolve the economic democracy they sought – the oppressive undertow of Russian history is relentless – but the fact the effort was made at all is far beyond glorious. Too bad it is probably also the only such chance our species will ever be allowed – that capitalism, now triumphant, will go on to eradicate all sentient life from this planet.

But let us not forget that all the socioeconomic gains we wrested from capitalism were in fact gifts the U.S.S.R. gave to the rest of the world, gifts extracted from capitalism by the sheer terror the reality of the Red Army inflicted on the One Percent: “better give those workers something or there'll be a revolution here.” That was the fear that prompted the New Deal and every other concession to economic democracy whether in the U.S. or anywhere else in the capitalist world.

Which is precisely why – now that the Soviet Union is history – the capitalists are methodically abolishing all those concessions and returning to the serial-killer moral imbecility of “business as usual.”

Hence capitalism will continue reverting to its original Elizabeth Bathory mode no matter whether Moron Nation is zieg heiling der Trumper or chanting “USA USA USA” for Hitlery Clin...er, excuse me, Hillary Clinton.

LB/6 March 2016

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