Anti-Black Slander from the Democratic Party?

THE OLDEST QUARREL inside the Left is undoubtedly the fight between pacifists and those who believe humanitarian reforms can be wrest from the capitalist Ruling Class only by violence or credible threats thereof. 

Events in Ferguson  re-heated the dispute to a simmer, but Baltimore  brought it to a rolling boil, and last week it bubbled onto the pages of mainstream media. 

Yet that's only half the story. The other half is that one writer, Jonathan Chait of the aggressively upscale New York Magazine, is using the discussion to slyly blame U.S. African Americans  for the downfall of the Democratic Party.

Thus, in Chait's obliquely presented view, black rebelliousness is responsible for the party's reduction to the me-too fascism that has characterized Democratic foreign policy since the ascendance of Lyndon Baines Johnson to the presidency, and defined its domestic policy since President Jimmy Carter's theocratic signature  enshrined the Republican war against women as federal policy. 

Meanwhile the appearance of the violence-versus-nonviolence debate in mainstream publications is, I believe, of profound political and historical significance. It is unlike anything I have seen during the nearly 60 years I have been a professional writer, editor and/or photographer. Nor have I heard of its like occurring anytime during the 75 years I've been living this lifetime. 

Moreover – and let us not forget this all-important point – Chait and the writers he cites all represent the Ruling Class regardless of the political disguises assumed by their publishers. Thus it is arguable the widespread coverage suddenly being given this issue is the most accurate yardstick yet of Ruling Class fears that Working Class anger in the U.S. is approaching the ignition-point of revolution. 

That's why Chait's opening graf, which builds a pro-violence argument he soon demolishes with volleys of academic research, is worth quoting in totality, especially for its links: 

The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon . “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox's German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.” In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson  asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds to answer her own question in the negative.

But then three paragraphs later Chait not only refutes the writers he cited. He also reaches a conclusion I would expect to find – albeit stated in more obviously racist terms – only in an avowedly Rightist journal:

The 1960s saw two overlapping waves of protest: nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations, and urban rioting. The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson swept every region of the country except the South running a liberal, pro-civil-rights campaign; in 1968, Richard Nixon won a narrower victory on the basis of social backlash.

Because I (of course) do not read New York Magazine, I owe Margaret Flowers and her excellent on-line daily Popular Resistance a salute of thanks for making Chait's “Riots and Social Change” available to a proletarian such as I. PR routinely does a damn fine job of bringing to Working Class attention important stories we 99 Percenters would otherwise be denied by the nation's various mechanisms of de facto censorship, but this time Flowers outdid herself.

All of which is prefatory to what I said on the associated comment thread. But it is more than just another en passant response. It is important for two reasons: it addresses the revisionist history by which the Ruling Class increasingly beclouds what happened within the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It also – or so I hope – alerts a few significantly placed people to a new Democratic Big Lie as potentially malicious as the “welfare queen” Big Lie the Democrats borrowed from the Republicans to justify enactment of genocidal “welfare reforms” in 1995.

(My apology for the fact there are a few repetitions between the explanatory grafs above and those below. The repetitions are unavoidable because I have reprinted my original comment word-for-word.)

Let us not forget that as a writer for aggressively upscale New York Magazine, Mr. Chait's perspective is necessarily that of the Ruling Class.

Hence the subtle but nevertheless implicit race-bating and victim-blaming in his statement that "The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order."

The truth, however, is quite different. The New Deal coalition was not "crack(ed) open" by the Republican Party but rather by the Democrats themselves.

President Lyndon Johnson's 180-degree turn in foreign policy immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led directly to the Southeast Asian (aka "Vietnam") War.

In turn -- and exactly as the Ruling Class intended -- the war destroyed the Working Class solidarity that had created and sustained the New Deal. The war divided the U.S. Working Class -- what today we would call the 99 Percent -- into two venomously hostile camps: the sneeringly contemptuous draft-exempt elite and the equally embittered draft-bait, cannon-fodder majority of those of us who (because we lacked the money and influence to bribe our way out of the draft), had no choice but to serve.

Contrary to the implications of Mr. Chait's remark -- a clever falsehood that seems designed to protect white Ruling Class Democrats by blaming blacks for the party's troubles -- all the significant non-racial divisions in present-day U.S. politics date from that history-changing Vietnam-era divide.

As to racist hate-mongering by the Republicans, that indeed occurred, but again contrary to Mr. Chait's disingenuous claim, the class warfare implicit in the Vietnam draft had already destroyed the New Deal.

Vietnam had also -- because of the tacitly genocidal U.S. policy of sending a preponderance of African-American combat troops to fight its colonial wars -- radically inflamed the long-simmering racial injustices that underlay the riots.

The Republican Party, which since the 1920s has been the primary vessel of U.S. fascism, predictably pounced with malicious glee on the resultant white fear. Obviously -- at least in retrospect -- this too was precisely as the Ruling Class intended.

Subsequent U.S. history makes it equally obvious what happened next. The Ruling Class deftly expanded Vietnam's divisiveness by manipulating it into a plethora of profoundly emotional clashes over firearms, jobs, unions, welfare, immigration, education, abortion, sexuality, Christian supremacy and ultimately the prevalent definitions of patriotism and what it means to be a U.S. citizen.

Again exactly as the Ruling Class intends, the resultant hostilities -- perpetuated as they are by a media machine more psychologically effective than even Josef Goebbels might have imagined -- destroy any future possibility of ever again restoring 99 Percent solidarity.

(Disclosure: I am not a Vietnam veteran but am a Vietnam-era vet: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1965, three years active duty, overseas service in Korea 1961-1962, honorably discharged after completion of three-year reserve obligation).

LB/8-14 June 2015

-30-

An Apology, Then More Democratic Party Obituary

On a Bridge at Midnight. Photo by KD, OAN copyright 2014. (Click on image to view full size.)

SORRY, THERE'LL BE no separate blog essay this week. That's because production of a monthly newsletter – I am its (unpaid volunteer) founder, editor, writer, photographer, designer, production manager, typist and general roustabout – was so bedeviled by computer problems I am still suffering from post-production exhaustion. 

The publication, called Community Chronicle and typically containing at least six pages of text and photos, serves the senior housing complex in which I live. It has become one of many factors in the ongoing development of our sense of community and communal identity – a sense already so strong we are now planning to undertake collective gardening next year. 

Hence I approach the newsletter with the same dedication I approached my work as a professional journalist. Hence too when that insufferable prick Murphy shows up to enforce his law (anything that can go wrong surely will), I am just as upset as I would have been if one of my long-ago cub reporters had returned from a major society wedding to tell me “no story, sir; the church burned down.”

Or, worse, if the reporter had indeed written a Pulitzer-class report on the nuptials-turned-nightmare that would never see the light of day because the newspaper itself had burned to the ground. Yes, I am still that committed to my lifetime craft, even at the age of 74. But in a week as electronically disrupted this was, something had to be sacrificed to the Lords of Chaos, and in this instance it was OAN. Again my apology. 

But the superb Katelyn Driskill photography above – of which I hope we'll be seeing more – will surely help compensate for this week's lack of original OAN writing.

***

IN PLACE OF the usual essay there will at least be a another glimpse of the ongoing debate between those who believe the Democratic Party might yet be revitalized and those who, like myself, believe the party is truly dead – though as of now it seems I am the only writer who has yet dared write its obituary. 

Thus the following, my response to a rally-the-Democratic-troops piece written for Reader Supported News by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.  His is an essay that – whether coincidentally or not – almost seems as if it could be the party's reply to my assertion it has been corrupted beyond any rational hope of amelioration.

Beyond that, de Blasio is important for a couple of reasons.

Though I no longer have any sources inside the City's political apparatus and thus cannot say anything with any certainty about de Blasio's administration, it seems from what I read he may actually be trying to govern my home City as a place for everyone and not merely for the parasitic, obscenely wealthy Ruling Class who have governed it since the mid-1970s as if all five boroughs were their very own Winter Palace.  

If my understanding of de Blasio's intent is correct, his democratic resolve is profoundly heartening. The last mayor who outspokenly so governed the City was the late John V. Lindsay who, with his contemporaries John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Robert Francis Kennedy, were amongst the political heroes of my young adulthood.

The other reason de Blasio is important is he is trying – much as Sen Elizabeth Warren is trying – to put a new face on the Democratic Party. Hence the significance of his RSN text, an open letter to Democrats (and therefore to the nation) entitled “Don't Soul-Search. Stiffen Your Backbone.”

Its essence is contained in its second and third grafs:

“As a Democrat, I'm disappointed in last Tuesday's results. But as a progressive, I know my party need not search for its soul -- but rather, its backbone.”

“The truth is that the Democratic Party has core values that are very much in sync with most Americans.”

The apparent question is whether de Blasio and Warren are genuine would-be reformers or are merely trying to perpetrate another Obama-type Big Lie.

Vital as it may seem to many, I believe that question is irrelevant.

The bitter truth is the Democratic Party has always been a creature of the Ruling Class. It birthed the New Deal not in furtherance of humanitarianism and economic democracy but to protect capitalism from the consequences of its own savage greed.

Had there been no New Deal, a Communist revolution would have been inevitable. With the support of the Soviet Union and its Red Army, the revolutionaries would have won. They'd have established a soviet-type state in most (if not all) the U.S. beyond the old Confederacy. (The old Confederacy would have seceded again and – backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, established its own white-supremacist version of Hitler's Third Reich, with the Ku Klux Kross in place of the swastika.)

Yes, the New Deal was – while it lasted – an era of genuinely humanitarian, economically democratic reforms. But that which the master giveth, the master can just as easily taketh away. Hence – with the Soviet Union dead, Communist China hopelessly bought off and the socialist challenge to capitalism therefore nullified – the capitalists dropped all pretense of human kindness and again bared their true moral imbecility.

That's why, behind the Democrats' Big Lie smokescreen of “progressive” rhetoric, their policies are indistinguishable from those of the Republicans. The Republican opposition to the Democrats is nothing more than a clever charade – a means of enabling the Democrats to impose Ruling Class demands. Combined, the two parties are therefore the perfect, good-cop/bad-cop facilitator of capitalism's Ayn Rand malevolence.

Reform is therefore impossible. Neither party can be reformed, not now, not ever. Whether from misguided idealism or deliberate deviousness, de Blasio and Warren are both scamming us. As Audrey Lorde  so presciently observed, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” Why? Because the master – the Ruling Class – will not allow it.

Hence my reply to de Blasio's panegyric:

Sorry, Mr. de Blasio, you're beating a dead horse – or, rather, a dead donkey.

The issue is trustworthiness. Obama the Orator promised “change we can believe in” but quickly became Barack the Betrayer. That makes those of us who voted for him stupid, gullible suckers conned by the biggest Big Lie in U.S. presidential history.

And that's the real issue, Mr. de Blasio: the fact Democrats cannot be trusted. It's a lesson hammered into the electorate by every Democratic president after John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

Lyndon Baines Johnson – escalated Vietnam into a major war while Big-Lie campaigning as the "peace candidate";

Jimmy Carter – bible-thumped away the reproductive freedom of impoverished women, began the war against the New Deal;

Bill Clinton – outsourced our jobs, reduced us to permanent Third World poverty and, via “welfare reform,” made damn sure there will never again be a safety net to protect the millions of families capitalism hurls into permanent destitution;

Now Obama out-does them all: not just betrayals, but the methodical murder of the constitution too.

The lesson? Vote for a Democrat, get a Republican. (No wonder so many don't vote.)

As to the party's soul and backbone, it has neither. It lost both in the aftermath of 22 November 1963.

Face it, Mr. de Blasio: the Democratic Party is dead. Our only hope now is some new party – preferably one with enough Marxian discipline to shut down capitalism forever.

(But I ain't holding my breath.)

***

Then I answered a poster who said George Bush not Barack Obama deserved the “most lying president” award:

We – or at least I – always assume the Republicans will behave like the overt fascists and/or closet Nazis they truly are.

But we – or at least I – expected better from the Democrats, even after the betrayals by LBJ, Jimmy the Theocrat and Slick Willie.

Also, George the Second didn't maliciously resurrect the hopes of a nation – truly desperate hopes given our socioeconomic reality – then literally spit in all our faces by betraying us even before he took office.

But that's precisely what Obama did. He promised single-payer public-option health care, promised to sign the Employee Free Choice Act, and above all else promised to restore constitutional governance. And he had a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, too...

Worse – although exactly as he had secretly promised his Wall Street masters – Obama the Orator was becoming Barack the Betrayer even before he took office. Remember the secret meetings with the prescription drug lords and the health insurance barons?

We voted for a Democrat and got not just a Republican but a viciously conservative Republican at that.

Try as I might, I cannot find a comparable betrayal anywhere in U.S. history.

Obama's smirking treachery – I will call it what it is – has driven the final nail into the Democratic Party's coffin.

Given U.S. racism, his behavior has also discredited legitimate African-American aspirations for at least a century if not forever.

***

Lastly, for a poster who agreed with my original comment, I elaborated:

Reduced to its LCD (lowest common denominator), capitalism is quite simply infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

It is therefore the rejection and reversal of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. It is also moral imbecility, the ethos of the serial killer – literally the knowing embrace of evil.

That's why, when capitalism becomes capitalist governance, it means absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – exactly as we have in today's U.S., exactly as prevailed in Pinochet's Chile, Franco's Spain, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.

The only remedy – remember how quickly the New Deal was destroyed – is democratic socialism.

But now it is not just human liberty that's at stake. It's the very survival of our species.

Either we raise the Red Banner of international socialism or we become extinct.

Yes, it truly is that simple.

LB/16 November 2014

-30-

Exclusive: Obama Regime Declares War on Tenant Rights

(Note: occasionally I still get a chance to do some original reporting, which in days of yore was my most award-winning skill. The following is a genuine scoop. I offered its first refusal rights to Marc Ash at Reader Supported News, but his response was to ignore my query. Hence I'm breaking the story here. Perhaps other media will pick it up and give it the widespread dissemination it deserves.)

***

IN A STARTLING reversal of public policy, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has sided with a national landlord lobby that seeks to add the expense of bed-bug extermination – and possibly of all pest control – to tenants' already-soaring housing costs.

The move by HUD may be the first documented instance in which a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was able to reach directly into the Obama Administration to obtain a nearly immediate favor – a favor that is hugely beneficial to landlords and potentially so ruinous to clients it could result in a nationwide wave of evictions.

It may also be another blow against the Democrats' dwindling prospects for success  in the November congressional elections. That's because HUD's new anti-tenant stance is sure to further inflame President Obama's critics on the Left, who already accuse him of deliberately concealing Republican ideology beneath a Democratic disguise. 

HUD says its rental facilities shelter about 1.2 million households.  Based on the 2010, two-persons-per-apartment demographics of Manhattan,  where virtually everyone is an apartment dweller, the new HUD policy probably impacts at least 2.4 million people – approximately as many women, men and children as live in Chicago, Kiev or Rome. 

The agency's departure from its long-established pro-tenant policies was revealed during a recent Network for Public Health Law web-seminar entitled “Addressing Bed Bugs through Law: Challenges and Limitations.” The network's post-webinar report cites two official HUD documents that reveal the agency's new opposition to tenant rights – rights that, in many cases, have long been recognized by law. 

“In Notice H-2011-20,” says the Network report, “HUD provided guidance to owners, management agents, and tenants of HUD multifamily insured and assisted properties for bed bug infestations. HUD urged owners to develop an Integrated Pest Management Plan (IMP) and to actively engage residents in efforts to prevent bed bugs. The notice set out a timeframe for responding to a tenant’s bed bug complaint and prohibited the owner from charging a tenant to cover the cost of bed bug treatment. An owner was also prohibited from denying tenancy to a potential resident on the basis of the tenant having experienced a prior bed bug infestation.”

“Eight months later,” the report continues, “HUD issued Notice H-2012-5 to supersede H-2011-20, which eliminated the “tenants rights and responsibilities” section, including the timeframe for responding to a tenant’s complaint, the prohibition on charging tenants for bed bug treatment, and the prohibition on denying tenancy to a potential resident because of a prior bed bug problem. 

“The National Multi Housing Council (NMHC), which represents owners, claims that HUD made these revisions at its urging and Congressional pressure, because the original guidance created confusion about best management practices, hamstrung the efforts of owners and property managers to prevent infestations and failed to meaningfully address the financial issues to the owner and resident related to repeat infestations. In contrast, the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) says the change eliminates important tenant protections and allows landlords to shift the cost of bed bug treatment to tenants.” 

Such costs, the public health law network estimates, can run as high as $1,500 to each tenant or tenant family – a sum that for lower-income people is devastating if not impossible, a potential precursor to bankruptcy, eviction and homelessness. 

Meanwhile, landlord response to a bed-bug infestation near Seattle, where tenants are being forced to pay the costs of extermination, is validating NLIHC's concerns. 

Equally alarming to tenants is the fact an NMHC document states landlords can now “treat resident's possessions as part of an Integrated Pest Management Program (IPM).” This means – just as has reportedly occurred in the Seattle case – landlords can invoke pest-control rights to confiscate or force tenants to destroy cherished books, artwork, furniture, photo albums, collections of phonograph records and any number of other items that might be deemed bed-bug-infested or capable of harboring such an infestation.

Moreover, NLICH says the new notice allows owners of HUD housing to “take action to deny tenancy or remove residents for causes related to infestations” – in other words, to evict tenants at will, presumably bypassing any legal protections against unjust or retaliatory eviction. 

While HUD's new anti-tenant stance has not yet been publicly acknowledged as the beginning of a campaign to require tenants to pay all pest-control costs, some health and housing professionals say privately they believe it might be just that. At the very least, they say, it's part of the ongoing national effort to minimize or abolish tenant rights. 

That this is so is suggested by the implicit ALEC involvement. ALEC is an arch-conservative organization that seeks to rewrite U.S. laws at all levels – federal, state and local – to favor the ruling One Percent by imposing additional burdens and disadvantages on everyone else. And NMHC is listed as an ALEC member. 

In this context, HUD's favorable stance toward NMHC – proven by the fact the lobbying effort bore fruit within eight months – is a significant revelation of the Obama Administration's internal ideology. So is the boast on the NMHC document cited above: that it took only two letters from Tea Party-identified congressmen to prompt HUD to reverse its former pro-tenant-rights stance. The letters, to Obama-appointed HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, were written by Rep. Robert Dold (R-Ill) and Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio).

 

Though Dold was not reelected in 2012, he is running for the office again this year. His ideology and Tea-Party connections are described here and here. Stivers' Tea-Party politics are discussed here. 

The Tea Party itself, the controlling faction within the Republican Party, is sustained by lavish funding from rich industrialists and businessmen,  as well as the tobacco industry. But the Tea Party's constituency spans the entire hard-right spectrum, ranging from Wall Street and Big Business to Christian theocrats and white supremacists – and now apparently to the Obama Administration's inner circle as well. 

***

Additional Notes:

(1)-HUD's policy-reversal is likely to (further) devastate Democratic Party chances in the November elections. Firstly, the afflicted people, mostly lower-income and/or minority urbanites who are a substantial demographic in progressive politics, are now (again) told – this time with unmistakable ferocity – the Democrats have turned against them and no longer want their votes. Secondly, local Democratic Party politicians who have remained faithful to the humanitarian principles of the New Deal are now (again) besmirched by association with by a national party that is increasingly right-wing and thus increasingly indistinguishable from its Republican counterpart. Voter turnout will suffer, and the flight of alienated voters to third parties will (again) be accelerated. Indeed, it seems Obama and his national Democratic apparatus is determined to facilitate Republican victory in the U.S. Senate, reinforce Republican domination of the House and foster Republican triumph at state and local levels as well. 

(2)-A HUD policy-reversal of this magnitude – particularly given its dire implications for the fall congressional elections – would have required upper-echelon White House staff approval, if not approval by the president himself. Therefore it is not unfair to regard it as yet another example of the t the president's obviously premeditated shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, and his historically unprecedented Big Lie of “change we can believe in.” 

(3)-The new HUD policy and its context – landlords seizing upon the bed-bug plague to nullify tenants' rights – is a classic example of shock-doctrine capitalism in action. Quoth Naomi Klein: “That is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster...puts the entire population into a state of collective shock...Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.” (The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company: 2007; pg. 17.) It's precisely how Shock-Doctrine Obama,  HUD and the landlords are using the shock of the bed-bug plague to force tenants to give up their right to landlord-provided pest control. Which of course makes the HUD properties with their disempowered tenants all the more attractive for sale to real estate profiteers. 

******

Outside Agitation Outside the Notebook: three contributions to discussion threads on timely stories published by other websites:

“Crimea River, Obama's Ukrainian Blunder” Mike Whitney of CounterPunch exposes an USian Empire effort to destabilize the Crimea by insertion of Turkish-based Jihadists to inflame tensions between the secular and/or Christian majority and Tatar Muslims. Predictable denunciations by Russophobes – yes, even on Reader Supported News – prompt me to defend Whitney's work in some detail:

Firstly, non-propagandized information about the Ukrainian Crisis is available from three English-language sources besides RSN. These are Socialist Alternative; Socialist World.Net, the publication of SA's parent organization the Committee for a Workers International; and the older World Socialist Website, any or all of which Google.

 

Secondly, Mr. Whitney's analysis has to be evaluated as probably true because it applies Occam's Razor to the reported data, cleaving its tangles and assembling its diverse strands into a coherent whole that makes sense both in terms of traditional Russian foreign policy and the One Percent's plan for global enslavement that is now the core of US foreign policy.

 

Thirdly, the notion of flying squads of US-backed Jihadist mercenaries operating out of the ever-more-viciously theocratic US client-state Turkey makes sense in that it explains how the democratic impulses of the Arab Spring were so quickly perverted into zero-tolerance Islamic theocracy. (The One Percent deems Abrahamic theocracy vital to sustain capitalist tyranny.)

 

Lastly, the pending imposition of austerity on Ukraine – see the publications cited above – is sure to trigger revolution. Given Western Ukrainian history, this will likely be violent, fascist and genocidally anti-Russian. Putin is moving accordingly, much as US presidents always move to smash any socialist revolution south of the US border.

 

*****

“Republicans Seize Edge in the Fight for the Senate Majority” Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post reports on the election result most of us now recognize as unavoidable and all of us fear. (Yeah, I linked to this same piece in OAN's lead story.) When the Obamanoids continue their vehement defense of the indefensible, and one poster attacks my stance as “moral bankruptcy,” the Muse hands me the perfect response, slightly edited for republication here:

You conveniently forget that when I vote my conscience, I condemn myself to the same "damnation" you claim I would inflict on "millions of Americans."

 

As to “enabling the far-right,” the history of the Democratic Party since 22 November 1963 – Vietnam; welfare “reform”; deregulation; “free” trade; total surveillance; other nullifications of the constitution; the forever deaths of the Employee Free Choice Act and of public-option health insurance; etc. ad nauseam – speaks for itself...

 

By your “logic,” to resist oppression is to be guilty of "moral bankruptcy” if and when said resistance results in hurt or inconvenience to others.

 

Thus by the same "logic," one must suppose you would accuse the World War II anti-Nazi resistance of “moral bankruptcy,” since defiance by these inconceivably heroic men and women provoked unspeakable retaliatory atrocities by the Nazis: Google Oradour-sur-Glane, or Lidice, or Zina Portnova.

 

What a wonderfully “moral” rationale you have established for collaboration with an enemy.

 

***

Earlier on the same thread I had explained the real reason for the impending Republican landslide, Democratic acts of betrayal further underscored by the HUD policy-change on which I reported above: 

What is fueling the Republican triumph is not the popularity of their unabashedly fascist policies but rather the electorate's anger...The voters are profoundly bitter...the Democrats are now identified as the party of the Big Lie.

 

I hear it repeatedly: “At least the Republicans are honest about what they stand for.”

 

“Yeah,” I reply. “They stand for killing all of us who are poor and disabled. They stand for slashing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They stand for ending food stamps and cutting off unemployment compensation.”

 

“The Democrats wanna do the same thing,” comes the inevitable rejoinder. “Only difference is the Democrats hide their intentions with lies.”

 

***

 

I had also pointed out the ugliest truth about Obamacare: 

If you knew anything about the Affordable Care Act, you would understand what a monumental betrayal it is.

 

What it does is create the illusion of access to health care.

 

In truth it is structured so that actual care remains unaffordable for most of the (ever-more-poorly paid) 99 Percent.

 

The function ACA thus serves is truly diabolical.

 

When a person is forced to choose between food and shelter or health care, chooses the former and dies as a result, it enables the Ruling Class to blame the victim: "s/he chose to eat and avoid homelessness rather than to get treatment; hence s/he chose to die."

 

ACA's huge unpopularity is not just because of Republican propaganda -- it's because so many of us are now forced to pay our insurance-company slavemasters thousands of dollars a year for policies the staggering deductibles and co-pays prohibit us from ever using.

 

Such is life and death in the United States – the only industrialized nation on earth wherein health care remains a privilege of wealth rather than a civil right.

 

***

 

But what really inflamed the Obamanoids was my (painfully accurate) description of USian political reality: 

With USian elections already a sham – with fascism triumphing no matter which half of the One Party of Two Names wins – the question of "getting enough votes to win" is a false question.

 

We the People have already lost. We lost our freedom when we surrendered to the coup of 22 November 1963. We lost any chance of ever regaining our freedom when we allowed the assassins to murder every other leader who might have saved us from ourselves.

 

Since then it's never been more than a choice between two fascist evils – the honestly evil Republicans and the dishonestly evil Democrats.

 

In this wretched context, the only non-evil choice is to vote my conscience – and for however many years I have left, that's exactly what I am going to do.

 

If more of us would do just that, democratic socialism – the only form of governance that's implicitly humanitarian – might yet have a chance.

 

*** 

Thus my recognition of the live-free-or-die necessity of a viable alternative:

In this dread context, the only thing that can save us is the emergence of a overwhelmingly powerful third party – for example, Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant's Socialist Alternative, albeit on steroids.

 

If that doesn't happen, we're doomed to live the remainder of our lives under fascist tyranny.

 

And it won't be just fascism. It will be fascism combined with fanatical Christian theocracy, enforced by the most formidable surveillance, military and secret-police apparatus our species has ever known.

 

That's why I'm damn thankful I'm old.

 

*****

“Robert Reich: Elizabeth Warren or I Could Run for President in 2016” Aaron Blake of The Washington Post gave me a unique opportunity to describe what has emerged as the key difference between Democrats and Republicans: 

The Republicans openly declare their fascism and govern accordingly.

 

By contrast, the Democrats lie. They get elected by pretending to be progressives, then govern like fascists, thereby rendering our votes meaningless.

 

LB/23 March 2014 

-30-