“Seattle Process”: a Tool for Savaging the Working Class

TO UNDERSTAND HOW Seattle's campaign for a $15 minimum wage was stabbed in the back – how “15 Now” became “15 Maybe Someday” – it is essential to first understand a perversion of democracy called “the Seattle Process” which, for brevity's sake, we'll hereinafter call “TSP.”

TSP is occasionally lauded as representative democracy at its best, but it is more often damned  as endless debate that results in permanent “indecision” or – on the rare occasions it actually achieves consensus – an approach that succeeds only by inflicting “exhaustion” on the participating groups and individuals.

Probably the most glaring example of TSP legacy is the wretched state of public transport  in Seattle and the metropolitan area on the eastern shore of Puget Sound, the so-called Pugetopolis, which includes Tacoma and Olympia to the south and Everett and Bellingham to the north.

In terms of mass transit, the entire region is nearly a half-century behind Portland, Oregon, which is its southern just-across-the-Columbia-River neighbor. And – not only in transit but in terms of all public services and humanitarianism in general – Pugetopolis is at least a century behind its nearby northern neighbor, European-minded Vancouver in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

While Pugetopolis seemingly dithered – “seemingly” because behind the dithering was a carefully scripted Ruling Class campaign to torpedo mass transit – Portland applied for and received federal funding that, by today's miserly standards, seems astonishingly generous. 

The money was available to U.S. municipalities through the Urban Mass Transit Administration, part of President John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Such were the halcyon years before UMTA – and indeed nearly all federal support for local transit – was killed forever by President Ronald Reagan and his Ayn-Rand-minded successors, all of them, whether Republican or Democrat, the obedient servants of Big Oil and Big Automotive.

On its surface, TSP appears to be nothing more than a local example of self-destructive indecisiveness, and indeed that is how it is invariably portrayed by its mainstream critics, who point to the seemingly endless debates and neighborhood-versus-neighborhood/whites-versus-minorities squabbling that – once Seattle-area light-rail construction was finally approved by voters in 1996 – delayed it another 10 years.

But if you look at these results using the tools of objective analysis – that is, if you analyze the results in terms of class struggle (or in parlance of old-time investigative reporters, “who got rewarded and who got fucked”) – then it becomes obvious TSP is yet another of the deceptive weapons the One Percenters use to perpetuate their power and ensure the rest of us remain forever below the salt.

Again taking the example of mass transit, the (mostly-unacknowledged) fact is the Pugetopolis Ruling Class has vehemently opposed it since it became an issue – mainly because adequate mass transit (think of New York City, Chicago or Boston), is one of the major factors that determine whether an area is attractive to lower-income people. Washington state has long been deliberately gentrified by any number of policies – the nation's most viciously regressive tax structure is one; the closure of wilderness access roads to all but equestrians and bicyclists is another – and the aristocracy clearly intends to keep it that way.

Not surprisingly, Seattle Ruling Class opposition to adequate mass transit became most obvious when the availability of the requisite public funding was at an all-time high – that is, during the late 1960s. Emerging via the the editorial pages and news columns of The Seattle Times, the opposition was soon mainstreamed by a nasty grassroots whisper campaign that played on xenophobic fears the subway and light-rail system proposed by Forward Thrust would destroy forever the region's cherished but cleverly undefined “Pacific Northwest lifestyle.”

These whispers inflamed the bigotry characteristic of the city's Northern European majority, claiming subways would turn Seattle into “another Jew York” and attract “criminal” minorities to prey on the (white) citizenry. The outcome, which included a de facto 26-year moratorium on rail transit, is a particularly telling example of how the USian Working Class is convinced to vote against its own interests.

It is also significant for the likelihood – raised by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's testimony Washington state is often used as a proving-ground by the Ruling Class to test and refine methods of oppression – the anti-transit campaign was a rat-lab experiment in voter manipulation. (My apology for the fact I cannot link to this testimony; all published references to it have seemingly vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Meanwhile, assuming Ehrlichman's admission was truthful, the strategy and tactics remain devastatingly effective. (See again the “wretched state” link above.) Note how the implicitly racist meme “transit is welfare” convinced voters in the Pierce Transit service area to viciously downsize their own barely adequate system – never mind most of Pierce Transit's ridership comes from the seaport city of Tacoma, where half the population is definitively lower income and nearly half of the approximately 36,000 daily bus riders have no other means of transportation.  (In its new policy of pandering to relatively wealthy suburbanites – mostly rabid Republicans who despise all lower-income people as “parasites” – Pierce Transit has purged from its website anything its newly favored riders might denounce as “sob-story” data. Thus the link is to OAN and ridership numbers PT released in 2012.)

But the point is not the Pugetopolis transit crisis per se. The point is acknowledging what the Seattle Process really is: a pseudo-democratic mechanism of negation and disempowerment that serves the One Percent and – exactly as intended – savages the rest of us.

Which is precisely what happened to Seattle's fight for a $15 minimum wage – how it was transmogrified from “15 Now” to “15 Maybe Someday.”

Before I continue, I need to stress two important facts. One is I am speaking here only for myself. Yes I am a member of the 15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee, but the views expressed here are my own, only my own, and most assuredly not those of the group. Two – the second fact – is I have no inside knowledge of what obtained behind the scenes in Seattle. My one reliable inside-Seattle source is long dead. My divorcement from all things Seattle is permanent and so poisoned by its native-born residents' notorious hostility to outlanders,  it is unlikely I would visit there even if invited. Therefore the information I have comes only from the same sources available to us all.

That said, why I view the fate of 15 Now Seattle as a loss rather than a win – indeed a devastating loss – is my application of Marxian principles of objective analysis: specifically that any loss for the Working Class is a victory for the Ruling Class, and, by extension, that any victory for the Working Class is a defeat for the Ruling Class.

“Working Class” as used here is an accurately descriptive synonym for the 99 Percent – those of us who, whether our jobs are mental or physical, must work if we are to survive. “Ruling Class” in this context includes not only the One Percent – the aristocrats who own the United States and regard all the rest of us as real or potential slaves – but the cadre of military officers, police commanders, politicians and bureaucrats who serve the One Percenters by obedience to their orders in compliance with the Führerprinzip   that rules USian capitalism and capitalist governance just as it ruled German Nazism and Nazi Germany.

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In the early days of Seattle's fight for a minimum wage, the 15 Now Seattle organization was, whether intentionally or not, virtually indistinguishable from Socialist Kshama Sawant's astoundingly successful campaign for a city council seat. Sawant is an outspoken member of Socialist Alternative, and she campaigned as such.

For those unfamiliar with present-day USian politics, Socialist Alternative is a Marxian party that like the Socialist Workers Party acknowledges Marxism's enormous debt to Leon Trotsky. But unlike SWP, which publishes the informative and often provocative Socialist Worker but otherwise functions as little more than a debating society, SA embodies the “think globally/act locally” strategy that emerged from the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Its 15 Now campaign, which is spreading throughout the U.S. and is embraced by growing numbers of workers employed by U.S. Big Business abroad, is a textbook example of the global/local approach.

The Ruling Class response to Sawant's victory has been the co-optation effort she anticipated in her city council victory speech  (relevant videotape begins at 11:35 minutes). But it was first evidenced, as I noted last January, “by subtle changes in Obamanoid rhetoric” that indicated the electoral triumph of a revolutionary socialist was already frightening the capitalist Ruling Class back into aspects of its former, Soviet-era pretense of humanitarianism.

Seven months later the Seattle City Council unanimously approved a $15 minimum wage ordnance that transformed “15 Now” into what some 15 Now supporters elsewhere have sarcastically dubbed “15 Eventually.” A caustic statement on the Portland, Oregon 15 Now website, edited here only for brevity, tells the whole story: 

Even while we should acknowledge and celebrate this accomplishment there are so many problems with the deal in Seattle that declarations of victory seem somewhat premature and have left many people feeling justifiably deflated.

• Corporations that make billions of dollars in annual profits don’t need years to phase in. While it is true that under this deal the minimum wage for many of Seattle’s low wage workers will rise to $11 per hour in less than one year, the fact is that large corporations can afford to pay $15 now, but they are not paying $15 for a few years.
• Tip credits and health care credits actually reduce workers’ real wages that can be used to buy food and pay rent. Even if eventually phased out, these credits mean that at first there are likely to be some workers who actually see a decrease in their monthly net pay.
• Lower “training wages” could encourage companies to move to a model of short-term temporary labor in order to take advantage of the lower short-term rate of pay, especially among large, low- wage-paying corporations that already have high employee turnover.
• The sub-minimum wage for teenagers fails to help the many teens in Seattle who work not for extra spending money, but because their family needs the income extra income to help pay the rent and the bills.
• Categorizing businesses with up to 500 employees as “small” for the purpose of the phase in schedule is ludicrous.

So while those of us within the $15 Now movement who have worked hard justifiably want to celebrate the accomplishment of getting a large city like Seattle to pass a bill for $15, we also need to be open and honest about the fact that the workers of Seattle themselves are not getting $15 Now, they are getting $15 Eventually, in about a decade. While we allow ourselves a moment to celebrate what we have accomplished so far, we also need to make certain we recognize the fact that even in Seattle, and certainly in the rest of the country, the Fight for $15 is far from over.

Predictably, Seattle's mainstream media – which is really Ruling Class Media (i.e., capitalist propaganda) – celebrated the reduction of 15 Now to 15 Eventually – or as I prefer to call it, (because Big Business is already moving to reverse the city council's decision), “15 Maybe Someday.”

Meanwhile Crosscut columnist Knute Berger proclaimed the nullification of 15 Now a significant victory for “incrementalism,” noting how the associated maneuvers “put out the potential fire of a populist rebellion.”

“As left-wingnutty as Seattle is sometimes caricatured,” wrote Berger, “it's still a town of business, big and small...Our capitalistic roots are strong and deep; radical activism has occasionally surged, but rarely gained power. Labor may score an occasional strategic victory, but workers never really run the show (ask Boeing's machinists).”

And since Berger proved the point with which this essay began – that Seattle Process is merely an especially devious method to ensure the Working Class remains disempowered – I'll also give him the last word. Applauding how 15 Now became 15 Pie-in-the-Sky, Berger called it “an example of Seattle process...”

I rest my case.

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In Case You Missed It/Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because this was the first week of the month with all its snail-paced bus-errands and those vexations multiplied to the Nth power by a couple of emotionally wrenching household disasters – the sorts of undeserved misery that prompt me to sing my own personal variant of the Doxology (“Curse god from whom all misery flows/ curse him ye victims here below”) – I had little time for reading my daily deluge of email, much less for posting comments on other websites. Nevertheless I did manage a few forays into Internet Land.

Hence when The Guardian reported on the burgeoning Department of Veterans Affairs scandal,  “White House Fights to Restore Veterans' Trust: 'It's Not Going to Be Quick or Easy',” I was quick to point out the easy back-story the Ruling Class Media dare not report:

The veterans' health-care scandal is a microcosm of the national health-care scandal, which can be explained in five words: the One Percent's genocidal greed. The One Percenters and the politicians and bureaucrats who serve them don't give a damn for the wellbeing of anyone outside the obscenely pampered Ruling Class. The result for ailing veterans is there is never enough money to give them the care they need. The result for the rest of us is health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. Both are functions of Ruling Class miserliness. “Why bother to treat the poor,” the aristocrats sneer. “The poor are always sick, and they die accordingly. Besides, their lives are worthless...”

This is not hyperbole. A prominent Ayn Rander – a Marie Antoinette political theorist whose fortunes are rising as the United States becomes ever more like pre-guillotine France – publicly made such statements a couple of months ago. (Sorry I don't have time to ferret out her identity.)

And though the politicians and bureaucrats are doing everything in their power to cover it up, and though the veterans' organizations are too compromised to ever acknowledge these sorts of atrocities are intrinsic to capitalism, it is the Ruling Class hatred and contempt for the Working Class – that and nothing else – that is measured in the resultant deaths.

My only other contribution this miserable week was on the comment thread of a disturbing report on the rise of neo-Nazism in Greece,  “SS Songs and Antisemitism: The Week Golden Dawn Turned Openly Nazi”:

Three points:

(1)-Note that Golden Dawn attracts "ever-growing numbers of the middle class." That's because, in times of economic crisis, modern history proves the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie), will ALWAYS turn to fascism. (It's only members of the proletariat and peasantry who turn Left.)

(2)-That's why, when the One Percent decides its time to impose capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the workers (in other words unabashed fascism) – it's the middle class that's targeted for discomfiture and the poor who are scapegoated and targeted for extermination.

(3)-Greece did NOT “give birth” to democracy. It coined the word that describes the mode of governance that had been characteristic of all human society until the advent of patriarchy. (A state of being is not named when it is the norm; it is named only after it has become rare enough to require description.) Moreover, if Robert Graves' hypotheses are correct, the real Greek contribution was imposing democratic process on patriarchy – which may (though I'm increasingly doubtful), yet rescue our species not only from patriarchy but from patriarchy's direct descendants, capitalism, fascism and Nazism.

***

And this in response to another poster on the same thread:

You are, jsluka, partially correct. But what you describe as "mass support from 'workers'" was typically induced by terror: unabashed extermination of Marxians and indeed all representatives of any Left alternatives in Germany, Italy and Spain; the less violent but more permanently psychologically damaging purge of Leftists and intellectuals in the postwar United States; Pinochet's extermination of class-conscious workers in Chile, etc. ad nauseum.

In terms of innate tendencies – and I erred in my failure to make this clear, for which I apologize – I believe what I said obtains: the petit bourgeoisie turn right, the peasantry and proletariat turn Left. 

Again as a generalization, this is because for the petit bourgeoisie, who have no identity beyond their possessions, the destruction of the status quo is the loss of everything. But for proletarians and peasants, who have far more flexible identities, the destruction of the status quo may actually mean relief from oppression.

And yes, the USian Homeland does indeed have peasants and proletarians. The former are mostly agricultural workers – near-slaves, actually – while the latter are mostly the legions of minimum-wage workers employed by Big Business.

LB/8 June 2014

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How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies Global Class War

THOUGH THE UKRAINE EMERGENCY continues to intensify – see below for recommended reading and a list of the web sources I've found to be reliable – our justifiable fear USian aggression could trigger World War III should not distract us from the One Percent's atrocities that obtain elsewhere on our grievously sickened planet. There is always the possibility sanity will once more prevail as it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which case our earthly lives will continue toward some other denouement, and additional outrages – events perhaps now seemingly rendered moot by the prospect of thermonuclear extinction – will again become important, if nothing else as textbook examples of capitalism in action. That's the good news.

The bad news is the USian One Percenters – having nearly completed the total subjugation of their imperial homeland – will continue their efforts to hasten capitalism's inevitable transition to fascism and thus impose on the rest of humanity the zero-tolerance ideology they have adopted from Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf and Triumph of the Will.

This means the increasingly vicious class warfare that's being waged over mass transit in the Puget Sound area could become as relevant in London or Moscow or Kiev as it is in Seattle and Tacoma. The latter two cities, Washington state's largest and busiest seaports, are the economic pillars of the Puget Sound metropolis, a region of 3.5 million people who self-righteously claim to be exemplars of environmental enlightenment but repeatedly prove themselves to be the most reliably anti-mass-transit voters in the most notoriously anti-mass-transit nation on Earth. They sustain Pugetopolis as the global epicenter of anti-mass-transit activism and the racial and socioeconomic anti-transit-user hatefulness such activism invariably expresses. The associated hypocrisy is breathtaking, all the more so given the region's supposedly “progressive” mindset.

But the 46-year success of the strategy and tactics that underlie the transit crisis – how the Ruling Class fires up normally closeted bigotry to goad majorities of white, allegedly “environmentalist,” purportedly “progressive” 99 Percenters into voting against their own interests – tells the true Pugetopolis story: that apart from its ecotopian rhetoric, the region's only significant difference from more urbanized parts of the Ku Klux South is its lack of a southern drawl. As an elderly African-American gentleman told me one afternoon while we were sharing a ride on a Pierce Transit bus, “This state be named after a slave-owner; that's why the whole damn place be cursed.” (Pierce and King Counties share the antebellum odium; they are named, respectively, after the pro-slavery President Franklin Pierce  and the slaveholder William Rufus deVane King.)  The regional transit crisis is thus at least partly an eerily lingering 21st Century reminder of the pro-slavery invaders who drove out the First Nations occupants and seized their lands in the name of 19th Century Manifest Destiny.

 

The class-war dynamics of the transit crisis – the essence of which is the malicious denial of public transportation to the growing numbers of people who desperately need it because they can no longer afford the staggering and ever-increasing cost of an automobile – provide a teachable example of why progressive economic change is truly and forever impossible in the USian homeland. The stark contrast between the Ruling Class refusal to solve the transit crisis, which is definitively an economic issue, and Ruling Class flexibility on so-called social issues, is profoundly revealing. It tells us that marriage equality, legal marijuana and legal firearms ownership (albeit to a steadily diminishing degree) are tolerated only because the Ruling Class regards them as modern manifestations of panem et circenses, all supportive of – or at least non-threatening to – the increasing tyranny of capitalist governance. The key to understanding their function is that such breads and circuses cost the One Percent nothing in terms of increased taxes, higher wages or restoration of workers' rights. But they keep us 99 Percenters reliably distracted if not smugly sedated. And above all else, they preserve, for maybe a few more years, the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

While the recent vote to downsize Seattle/King County Metro Transit was easily predictable – even a tiny sales-tax increase of one-tenth of one percent (one penny on a $10 purchase) is too much for the vindictively auto-centric, ever-more-openly bigoted suburban voters – the radically pro-suburban policy-shift at Tacoma's Pierce Transit is appalling even to cynics like myself. Its efforts to maintain vital bus service twice defeated at the polls, the transit authority's board of directors is now openly pandering to the dominantly white, economically privileged, rabidly anti-transit, hatefully anti-transit-user suburbanites who brought the agency to its proverbial knees via a special election in 2011 and the general election the following year. To date, the doling out of rewards at the center of this previously untold story includes at least three new suburban bus routes, all financed by increases in sales-tax revenue generated by up-ticks in the local economy – this as the board punishes the impoverished, racially diverse but notably pro-transit voters in Tacoma proper  by ongoing denial of service inside the city limits. While the same suburbs-versus-city antagonism is evident in Seattle, only in Tacoma has the transit board openly sided with the suburbanites, in essence telling us city-dwellers the revenue-increases we were formerly assured would gradually restore intra-city bus service are now earmarked for the suburbs instead.

Despite the region's history of anti-transit populism, the trigger of the present crisis was Washington state's notorious tax code, which is the nation's most regressive  and therefore the most favorable to the state's preponderance of billionaires and millionaires, whose wealth and power ensure both the permanence of the state's uniquely anti-transit financial structure and its tax-the-poor/exempt-the rich fiscal policies in general. Dependent as the state's transit systems are on sales tax, their fortunes are thus shackled to the ups and downs of capitalism, which means they are forced to reduce services whenever the periodic panics and recessions deprive the 99 Percent of the money to buy, maintain and operate automobiles and thereby send transit ridership soaring. Thus Washington state's transit operations reliably function as a picture-perfect example of the savagery implicit in “austerity” – the practice of victimizing (and sometimes genocidally reducing) the Working Class by slashing social services whenever they are most necessary for working families' survival.

In the past, the legislature sometimes ameliorated such crises by granting municipalities special funding powers. Even so, on transit policy there is little meaningful difference between the Democratic and Republican parties – as per usual, the latter are blatant fascists, while the former still try to hide their fascism behind deceptively “progressive” rhetoric. But now, with the legislature deadlocked by a permanent Republican majority in the state senate and the entire state government therefore under a de facto Republican dictatorship – there is no possibility of even temporary reforms: not now, not in the foreseeable future.

There are also, as I suspected in 2012 and have since traced to the suburban Pierce Transit operating area, disturbingly credible rumors of privatization schemes, including alleged offers from a shadowy French multinational to provide for-profit bus service should anti-transit voters succeed abolishing Pierce Transit entirely. These measures would please the white Republican suburbanites and their representatives on the Pierce Transit Board not just because of compliance with Ayn Rand doctrines but because the Republicans and their constituents make no secret of the fact they despise the democracy of mass transit. They recognize privatization would create a country-club transit system lower-income people could not afford to use. It would also be a step toward re-gentrification of those sections of the suburbs that are becoming sanctuaries for lower-income urbanites who are being forcibly gentrified from the cities.  The privileged riders of Pierce County's hypothetical Country Club Transit would thereby exempt themselves from any need for contact with “undesirables” – those of us who are elderly, homeless, disabled, unemployed or members of castes and ethnicities other than executive, professional and mostly lily-white.

Here again we see how USian government at every level – federal, state, local – serves only the interests of the One Percent.  We see too how the death of the Soviet Union – never mind it was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be – has allowed the capitalists to shed their velvet gloves and again don their characteristic jackboots. But this is still the United States of America, where capitalism's Ayn Rand (fascist) malevolence is yet (somewhat) disguised by euphemisms such as “austerity” and hidden by denial (“no matter how it looks, it's not really genocide”). In all the six decades I pounded a keyboard for pay, I don't recall anything in local governance anywhere – not even in Ku Klux Tennessee – quite so fuck-you brazen as Pierce Transit's decision to back-stab its friends and pamper its enemies. More bus service for the privileged people who don't need or want it, less bus service for those of us who can't survive without it – such is Pierce Transit's “future strategic direction.” As always in the USian homeland, Ayn Rand rules. 

For the record, the three new Pierce Transit routes – and there may be more I don't know about as the agency seems to have adopted a new policy of minimal public disclosure – are numbered 503, 504 and 425. The municipalities these buses serve – Puyallup, Fife, Milton and Edgewood – are small incorporated towns just beyond the eastern city limits of Tacoma. As noted in “How Republican Hatemongering Wrecked an Urban Transit System” (linked above), the official 2012 election results archived at the Pierce County Auditor's Office  show the mostly Democratic voters in Tacoma's electoral precincts voted by about 55 percent to maintain Pierce Transit service. But the overwhelmingly Republican voters in the four suburban municipalities that are getting the new bus service voted by as much as 64 percent to shut Pierce Transit down.

While the transit authority board is theoretically non-partisan, a recent, seemingly inexplicable reorganization somehow took control away from Democratic Tacoma and gave it to the Republican hinterlands. The process by which this was accomplished remains mysterious: I'm told I may not be able to access the relevant minutes without the hassle and indefinite delay of a formal freedom-of-information request. But there's no doubt the Republicans are using their newfound power to impose a classic Ayn Rand solution: rob the afflicted and give to the comfortable. Obviously these Republicans aren't “anti-transit” after all; they're merely opposed to transit that serves folks who are needy. It's another variant of standard Republican dogma: they love welfare for the rich, they hate it when it helps the poor. (As previously noted, the Democrats are scarcely different. They merely closet their Republican-ness behind a curtain of Big Lies. Such is the One Party of Two Names that rules USia on behalf the One Percent.)

Meanwhile The News Tribune, the local outpost of the McClatchy media monopoly – for which “news” is defined not by its old-time definition of majority significance but instead by its relevance to the upscale consumers – has suppressed this entire story as not worth covering. That's because in the Ayn Rand economy of the USian Homeland, buying power is now the only officially recognized measure of citizenship. Just as the Supreme Court has again ruled, money trumps votes. The extent to which we are actually citizens is determined not by the Constitution, as it was in days of yore, but only by our net worth. And the net worth of the typical Tacoman – fully half of us definitively lower-income – is so negligible, TNT routinely omits news that to us is vitally important. Just as we're denied bus service, so too are we denied essential information. Here in this little enclave of the Ayn Rand New World Order, those of us who are transit-dependent obviously no longer matter. Which means what you're reading today is (another) OAN exclusive, a genuine scoop.

(Other relevant articles on the Puget Sound transit crisis are here, here and here.) 

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Apropos the Ukraine Crisis, I spent so much time this week ferreting out and reasoning together the transit story, I had little time to comment on developments in Ukraine – and in any case I feel I have already said pretty much anything I might add to the Ukraine comment-thread dialogues. Nevertheless I raised an intriguing question on the thread of “Rebels Down Ukraine Helicopters,” here, in which I noted the irony of how USian aggression seems to be forcing the Putin Administration substantially further to the Left:

Obama/Kerry warmongering is compelling Putin to resurrect socialist traditions (for example the May Day labor celebration) in the interest of Russian national unity...What will be especially interesting is whether Putin will now expand the popular anti-capitalist reforms he began after Yeltsin's Ayn Rand economic policies, which were forced on post-Soviet Russia by the U.S., nearly provoked a second revolution. Yeltsin/Rand economics was fast reducing the entire Russian 99 Percent to the hopeless poverty that now defines the USian Homeland's 99 Percent. But Putin ameliorated these savage policies with a kind of Russian New Deal, which is the primary reason for his huge popularity. In this context, the relevance of the renewed May Day celebration is that it suggests Putin's economic reforms might now go beyond anti-capitalist amelioration to an actual resurrection of Russian socialism...The additional irony is how these events parallel the way Castro's Cuba was driven into the Soviet bloc by U.S. aggressiveness, with the U.S. government, then as now, acting as the storm troopers of the global One Percent.

***

Leading my In-Case-You-Missed-It list of recommended reading is an especially thoughtful der Spiegel staff report entitled “War in Europe? Ukraine and the Threat of Wildfire.” It is the first mainstream media acknowledgement I've seen anywhere of the frighteningly real threat of World War III implicit in the U.S. decision to militarily confront Russia literally at its own borders.

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“Ukraine's Government Has Lost Control of East, Says Acting President” is a Guardian UK dispatch that details the developments summarized in its headline. What is unique is its on-the-scene portrait of the determination of the pro-Russian rebels, including the woman who said of herself and her companions, “We'll fight to our last breath.” Given the astounding courage displayed by Soviet partizanska during World War II, such assertions should not be taken lightly; as proven by what happened to the Persians, the Mongols, the Teutonic Knights and the armies of Bonaparte and Hitler, to attack Mother Russia is to fight all her children, female or male, youth, adult or senior. 

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Another of Robert Parry's superb Consortium News reports, republished by Reader Supported News, is “Prepping for a Ukrainian Massacre,” which says we USians are being psychologically prepared to accept “and perhaps even cheer” anti-Russian genocide in eastern Ukraine. Despite being nearly two weeks old – I accidentally omitted it from last week's Ukrainian anthology – unfolding events tell us it remains hair-raisingly relevant.

***

Sources on the Ukraine Crisis I find especially useful are: The Moscow Times,  which despite its pro-western editorial stance seems to do a fair and thorough job of reporting; The Guardian;  the aforementioned Consortium News  and Reader Supported News  plus of course RT,  the U.S.-based, English-language service of the Russian state television network. I've been a regular viewer of RT since the eloquently sarcastic and gorgeously appealing Alyona Minkovski was its main evening news anchor. (Yeah, I admit it: old as I am, my appreciation of womanhood has not diminished – and Goddess forbid it ever does.) Moreover I will assure newcomers to RT's broadcasts it is not the Soviet-type propaganda outlet it is sometimes alleged to be. In fact, RT has broken many stories the so-called “mainstream media” (that is, U.S. Ruling Class media) dares not report. And I have not found anything in RT's Ukraine reporting that was not fully confirmed by other sources.

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When Guardian UK revealed that  “Germany, Under US Pressure Blocks Edward Snowden From Testifying,” I commented accordingly:

Utterly predictable: with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank functioning as the USian Empire's equivalent of a 19th Century colonial ministry, the USian colonies – which include all the nations of Western Europe – have no alternative but obedience. Just as the European nations bow to USian austerity – the will of their peoples be damned – so now do these de facto colonies also bow to the Empire's other, ever-more-oppressive demands. (Could it be that here we are glimpsing the true core of Obama's legacy-quest – to be the first U.S. president hailed as “imperator”?) In any case, Snowden is undoubtedly the beneficiary of this banishment, for once in Germany – even with political asylum – he would have been within easy reach of the USian death squads.

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“Barbarians in Oklahoma,”Charles Pierce's account of an agonizingly botched execution, engendered a discussion thread that asked why the Christian fanatics who dominate that state and so many other domains in the USian interior are not denounced for their bloodlust by the broader Christian community, which supposedly favors pacifism and forgiveness. I replied accordingly:

In English and USian law there is a concept called "countenancing." To "countenance" something is to allow it to happen without interference or objection. "Countenancing" is what the non-fanatical USian Christians are doing in response to the Bible-thump, Biblical Law fanatics who rule the Land of Bumpkins – Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Dakota, Texas and all the other USian backwaters of barbarism. The acts of countenancing are of course carefully rationalized, as are all such hypocrisies. In the instance of Christianity, countenancing is said to be "ecumenical” – that is, essential to Christian unity. Hence even a JesuNazi like Rick Warren – the notorious misogynist and homophobe of Barack the Betrayer's inaugural invocation – remains above Christian criticism.

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Adam Lee's Alternet piece entitled “10 Things I Learned About the World From Ayn Rand's Insane Atlas Shrugged” prompted an unusually longed comment thread when it was republished  by Reader Supported News, which gave me an opportunity to repeat my view of Ayn Rand's books and the close kinship between capitalism, fascism and Nazism:

Actually the best way to understand Ayn Rand is to acknowledge that her work is the capitalist equivalent of Mein Kampf – written in prose so bad it is effectively unreadable, nevertheless guiding a nation's morally imbecilic embrace of evil. We of course know what Hitler did, but how many of us recognize that as Mein Kampf blueprinted the Holocaust, so do Rand's texts blueprint capitalism's inevitable transformation into fascism and thence to a distinctly USian form of Nazism – with all of us who are poor, disabled, elderly and/or chronically unemployed destined for same sort of terminal scapegoating Hitler imposed on the Jews.

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Joshua Holland of Moyers and Company asked the ultimate question of our time: “Can America's Descent Into Plutocracy Be Reversed?” I expressed my gravest doubts:

The fact there is controversy over the value of the voter franchise (rather than over our corrupted elections) proves that battle too is lost. Such is Moron Nation – by which the Ruling Class suppressed the rebelliousness of the 1960s. Meanwhile (the) notion capitalism can be used to defeat capitalism – that members of the One Percent will work against Ruling Class interests – is not just pathetically naïve; it is literally beyond absurd. It is the best proof I've yet seen of the Audre Lorde axiom: “the Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house.” What we fail to recognize is the magnitude of those tools. Moron Nation is not just the byproduct of moronated classrooms and prison-industrial pedagogy. It is the fulfillment of an irresistible methodology of oppression derived from Nazi psychological experiments. Its primary instruments are a deliberately punitive economy and mass media in every conceivable form, advertising and entertainment included. Its consequences include the destruction of community and even of our ability to form communities. It has obliterated our collective and individual connections to the environment; it has eradicated every other quality that fosters solidarity. Contrast the birth and death of the New Deal with the birth and death of Occupy. It is not that We the People have willfully surrendered. It is instead that we have been methodically stripped of any and all capabilities for effective resistance.

LB/4 May 2014

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