Looming Blindness and the Slow-Motion Genocide of Social-Service Cuts Make 2016 My Most MiserableYear

TO MY HORROR, I have learned the cataract surgery I had in late 2014 has failed. I am again going blind, this time from a post-operative condition called posterior capsule opacity – essentially the failure of a production-line surgeon to remove enough of the cataract cells to prevent them from growing back in a new inner-eye locale.

But now the slow-motion genocide of cuts to social services has left me without any means to pay the out-of-pocket cost of corrective surgery, which is $608 plus an additional sum in co-payments of approximately $200 – a total of $808.  

It might as well be $800,800.  Either sum is impossibly beyond my reach. 

Thus – barring a miracle – I will end my life a helpless, hopeless blind man, unless of course I am fortunate enough to die before declining vision forces me into the nightmare of assisted living in some miserably neglectful, piss-reeking nursing home.

In other words, 2016 – though it has hardly begun – has become the most miserable year of my entire life.

Before learning on 6 January of my encroaching blindness, I was already in extended shock at the magnitude of the cutbacks imposed on my 2016 income. It had been the worst yet of the now-inevitable Dismal Decembers – the annual political-becomes-personal nadir-of-reckoning in what is the cruelest month of all for U.S. lower income people. This year – a year in which the Big Lie Democrats claim to have “restored” social services – my monthly Medicare Extra Help stipend was cut from $22.90 to $4. My monthly food stamp allotment was slashed from $103 to $17. And, as noted in November, my telephone subsidy, approximately $17 per month, was abolished entirely.

In 2016, a year in which we seniors and disabled people are notoriously denied a Social Security cost-of-living increase – my barely livable monthly income of $1263 has been chopped by at least $121.90 – “at least” because I can only estimate the impact of an immediate 16 percent increase in Medicare Part D prescription drug co-payments and a pending 33.3 percent increase in local transit fares.

(Yes, I realize $121.90 is mere pocket change for a sneering One Percenter or any of the super-fortunate USian suck-asses whose abject obedience to capitalist tyranny enables them to cling to living-wage jobs. But for someone on a fixed income of scarcely more than $15,000 per year, the loss of $121.90 per month is total, irremediable ruin. What it does to me is eliminate every last penny of my discretionary income – this in a year in which I already [before the doctors discovered my impending blindness] – needed denture adjustment [approximately $100] and three pairs of new shoes [another $150 at least] – money I no longer have no matter the state of my eyesight.)

But the point here is not the hopelessness of my own circumstances – the fact I too like so many others in this ever-more-openly malignant nation must now choose carefully whether to spend my meager income on shelter, food, medicine or clothing – all of which civilized nations regard as human rights. Nor is it the fact my encroaching blindness makes all those choices ultimately meaningless.

The point is the documents I quoted here on 25 November 2015 only hint at the savage magnitude of the social-service cuts inflicted by the Republicans and their Democrat collaborators in the Washington State Legislature – cuts signed into law without so much as a whisper of protest by Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee.

As previously reported, one of the documents I cited was a slickly art-directed, expensively printed Democratic Party mailer boastfully claiming its legislators had “restored” social services. The other was a grimly unsigned notice from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services announcing the state would no longer subsidize telephone service for lower-income people. Together, the two documents clearly demonstrate the ugly truth the Democrats are (again) operating as the party of the Big Lie.

Since then, it has (again) become obvious the Democrats are – perhaps even more than the Republicans – the enablers of austerity, a clever euphemism for slow-motion genocide: the methodical extermination of those of us who, whether because of age or disability, are no longer exploitable for capitalist profit. For now our already-bloodied noses are rubbed in the fact the legislators – the bought-and-paid-for strumpets of the One Percent who are always trying to bullshit us into believing U.S. “democracy” is anything but cruel deception – also slashed Medicare premium subsidies and hacked away still more dollars from food-stamp allowances.

But an apparent gag order – unprecedented in my years of covering state and local politics – has made it thus far impossible to determine the actual magnitude of the cuts. The Democrat legislators appear to have adopted a policy of ignoring any constituent who dares complain about the cuts, even those who send letters. Normally vocal advocacy groups – organizations necessarily aligned with the Democratic Party and therefore undoubtedly silenced by the Democrats' pre-election bullying – have yet to utter a single word of protest. Welfare bureaucrats, when pressed for information, reluctantly mutter “the legislature did it” but refuse to disclose further details.

All I want to know is who to blame – what perpetrators to name in public print. But even my own sources – the remnants of a handful of insiders whose veracity and reliability were established by years of providing accurate information – are refusing to answer my questions about the cuts. I am not an accountant, and without expert assistance, the closed-door secrecy of the budget process and the opacity of the budget itself nullifies my investigative reporting skills. As always, the operant principle of capitalist governance is “fuck the 99 Percent.”

Meanwhile, the local “mainstream media” – that is, the local branches of the plutocracy's de facto ministry of propaganda – continue to ignore the story, which any even halfway competent reporter of my generation would have pounced on. This in turn strongly suggests the media silence about the cutbacks is deliberate – truth-suppression in obedience to the plutocratic cabal that owns all U.S. major media and all Democrat and Republican politicians as well. Such is what passes for “journalism” here in the de facto Fourth Reich – where our capitalist overlords have by their diabolical cunning given themselves not only a Josef Goebbels-type propaganda apparatus but one that earns them obscene profits by its lies and disinformation. 

Not that I'm surprised. What is being employed to hide these newest social-service cuts is merely the logical extension of the Big Lie tactic the Democrats first employed in President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, most notably in the slogan “change we can believe in” – which “change” turned out to be Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. 

Now, just as the Betrayer tried to cover up his 2014 food-stamp cuts with a truly Orwellian lie – claiming the cuts “make sure America's children don't go hungry” – so are his state-level minions doing likewise.
 
The strategic advantage in this sort of Big Lie is found in the fact the Moron Nation electorate accepts it without question. This is partly due to conditioned ignorance, partly due to the ever-more-obnoxious, ever-more-implicitly reactionary cult of “positive thinking” by which the white USian 99 percenters who still have jobs deliberately blind themselves to what is going on around them. Thus they are psychologically distanced from capitalism's socioeconomic and political atrocities in exactly the same way the citizens of Nazi Germany were shielded from the more obvious atrocities of their own nation. Thus too when we the victims complain or protest, we are confronted with hostile disbelief and denounced as welfare queens or “greedy geezers.” 

Fortunately there are still a few websites, among them Reader Supported News, that remain willing to report just how truly wretched life in the USian homeland has become, not just for elderly and disabled people, but especially for women, particularly women of color, whose likelihood of suffering death in childbirth is nearly four times that of white women.

Because I am an old man, my time is obviously ending, and though it surely hurts when the capitalists and their factotum bureaucrats and politicians kick me in the balls, my pain has little affect on what is to come. But when you kill the mothers, you murder the very source of life. And this nation's deliberately deadly, methodically sustained misogyny exemplifies more vividly than any of capitalism's other atrocities its unconscionable threat to our species' survival.

LB/11 January 2016

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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.) 

******

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.

***

“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. 

***

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.

******

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.

******

“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.

******

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.

******

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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Kerry's Contradictions – Peace-Candidate Big Lie versus Warhawk Reality – Exemplify How the Two Parties Collaborate to Dupe Voters, Sustain Sham 'Democracy'

(Note: TypePad, the primary publisher of Outside Agitator's Notebook, has been shut down by an ongoing denial of service attack and has been offline since Friday 18 April. Thus until further notice this will be OAN's only edition.)

* 

(Updated 14:56 Monday 21 April with a new Robert Parry dispatch on the Ukrainian Crisis, for which see "Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Imperative," below.)

 

MOST OF US have already noted the apparent paradox of how U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the former antiwar-activist and Democratic presidential (peace) candidate, has become a frighteningly aggressive, propaganda-spouting war-monger. 

But even the most Leftward-leaning of the big-time pundits has not dared point out the bitter lesson – another irrefutable proof USian “democracy” is a naught but a cunning charade – implicit in Kerry's (apparent) transformation.

Stupefied as we are by the so-called “mainstream media” and its dire fulfillment of Josef Goebbels' plan to create the most hypnotically effective propaganda machine in human history, the majority of us have not heard of Kerry's murderous record in Vietnam.  We do not know his riverine operations reveal a penchant for inflicting death on civilians that would have earned him a hearty, Zieg Heil welcome into the most kill-hardened units of the Schutzstaffel, the Nazis' dread SS. 

Jeffrey St. Clair, the author of the above-linked Counterpunch report, says the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. revealed that Kerry's murderousness created a great many problems for Vietnam commanders. Zumwalt, himself a warrior of international renown, is quoted in the 2013 exposé as saying, “we had virtually to straitjacket (Kerry) to keep him under control.”

Thus in the context provided by St. Clair's disclosures last year and Kerry's conduct today, the 2004 election becomes a perfect, textbook example of how the One Percent defrauds the USian public with the Big Lie of “free elections.” The Democrats ran “peace candidate” Kerry as the antithesis of “war-criminal” George Bush, but also emphasized Kerry's Vietnam combat record, thereby appealing to Democratic warhawks. The Republicans then reinforced Kerry's “peace candidate” image  by attacking him for his anti-Vietnam War activities, by questioning the validity of his medals – three Purple Hearts for wounds plus the Bronze Star and Silver Star for bravery under fire – finally labeling him “unfit for command” and implicitly suggesting he was a coward.

It's a classic example of how the two halves of the One Party of Two Names perfectly fulfill the functions assigned them by the One Percent.

The same pattern, obvious once we have learned to recognize it, is apparent in the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. In the former, the One Percent allowed the Democrats a victory to preserve the deception of a functional representative democracy. Obama raised the electorates' hopes by promising “change we can believe in,” and the Republicans ensured the outcome, first by selecting a terrifyingly ignorant candidate for vice president, then by rabidly denouncing the proposed “change” as “socialist” conspiracy, thereby convincing desperate voters Obama's promises were surely more than rhetoric. In 2012, after Obama the Orator was clearly revealed as Barack the Betrayer, the Republicans again served the Democrats with the “accidental” revelation of Romney's contempt for 47 percent of the U.S. population. 
 
Meanwhile Warmaster Kerry, whose belligerence on behalf the violently greedy One Percent may well trigger World War III, is merely fulfilling the role for which he, like Obama himself, was obviously trained and scripted long ago.
 

****** 

In Case You Missed It (and apropos the fulfillment of assigned roles), “The Plot to Overthrow FDR: How the New Deal Sent Conservatives Into a Rage,” implicitly defines the imposition of fascism on the United States  as a multi-generational project. But as I said on the comment thread, Moyers and Company narrator Joshua Holland tells the story wrong – or very differently from how I heard it as a child and a young man.

Firstly, the coup was known as "the Bankers' Plot," under which search-engine entry you will find the most complete information.

Secondly, it was organized by Hitler and Mussolini. Its goal was to make the American Legion an SS equivalent; the objective was to make the U.S. part of the Axis. (The U.S. One Percent was already the prime financier of world fascism; now the U.S. would also be the primary source of food, natural resources and materiel for global conquest.)

Thirdly, the plot was exposed by Soviet agents. Despite Gen. Butler's efforts, it first became public knowledge only via the Communist and Communist-influenced alternative press.

What indicates these assertions are probably true is how they solve at least three riddles of history. They explain why FDR trusted Stalin (his agents literally saved FDR's presidency and USian democracy too); why the postwar U.S. harbored Nazi war criminals (back-door fulfillment of the plotters' intent); and why the postwar U.S. so savagely purged Communists, socialists and intellectuals (fear these elements would obstruct further efforts to impose fascism).

Obviously the plotters and their descendants have won. The results – the death of the “American Dream,” the imposition of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us) – are obvious.

******

In Case You Missed It, Robert Parry of Consortium News is continuing to slay the Big Lies spewed by the USian propaganda machine and courageously filter out the truth about the Ukraine Crisis. I did not comment on “The Dangerous Neocon Role in Ukraine,” linked here. But I said a few words about its sequel, “Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Imperative,” where I pointed out U.S. aggression is forcing the Russians to see themselves as the modern-day equivalent of the Spartans at Thermopylae or their own grandfathers at Fortress Brest. I also had a bit to say about the media issues raised by “Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass,” in which Parry describes the current coverage of the crisis as “utterly Orwellian...including accusing others of 'propaganda' when their accounts – though surely not perfect – are much more honest and more accurate than what the U.S. press corps has been producing.”

Parry reiterates the warning that – had we USians not been numbed by lies and disinformation – should rightfully terrify us all: “There’s also the added risk that this latest failure by the U.S. press corps is occurring on the border of Russia, a nuclear-armed state that – along with the United States – could exterminate all life on the planet. The biased U.S. news coverage is now feeding into political demands to send U.S. military aid to Ukraine’s coup regime.”

As another poster on this thread said in very different words, our submissive response does indeed demonstrate the terrifying reality of Moron Nation – we the people imprisoned in ignorance by decades of deliberate moronation, so dumbed-down we like the most abjectly broken slaves instantly believe everything our masters tell us – even when it is filled with obvious contradictions.

But what to me as a long-ago-blacklisted professional journalist is far worse is the relentless, never-challenged deluge of false information that proves how the One Percent – by subsuming the nation's formerly independent media into a half-dozen monopolies – have created a one-voice propaganda machine far more formidable than the ground-breaking model for all such apparatuses Joseph Goebbels built for Nazi Germany.

As a result the USian Empire has the most hypnotically effective propaganda in our species' history. And because the machine that produces it is disguised as a civilian business rather than a government bureaucracy, its tyranny and the diabolical cleverness by which we are brainwashed into submission remains forever unrecognized.

Once again we see capitalist governance in action: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Thus does capitalism fulfill its moral imbecility: not just as fascism, but as fascism sustained by modern technology and therefore more inescapably evil than anything our species has ever before encountered.

******

In Case You Missed It, Thom Hartmann has decided “American Democracy No Longer Works,” in support of which he cites a newly released study  that shows We the People are We the Powerless when it comes to influencing public policy. (Unfortunately, Hartmann does not provide us a link to a more detailed summary of the study's findings, an omission I correct here.) 
 
Meanwhile the fact it took a formal academic project and its 20-year collection of data to prove what our ancestors recognized at least a century ago – that the United States is an oligarchy in which the rich are omnipotent and the rest of us are impotent – prompts me to lapse into parody on the Hartmann comment thread: 

Five axioms concerning capitalist governance:
   
Definitions: The One Percent is the hereditary capitalist aristocracy that owns the nation's wealth. The Ruling Class consists of the politicians, bureaucrats, police commanders, military officers and business executives who serve the One Percent. The purpose of capitalist governance is absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else.

Hence: 
    
(1)-The non-responsiveness of the Ruling Class to the popular will is directly proportionate to the extent the Ruling Class is indebted to – and therefore effectively owned by – the One Percent.
   
(2)-The probability of revolution is directly proportionate to the non-responsiveness of the Ruling Class.

(3)-The probability of successful revolution is based on the presence of four historically proven prerequisites. These are (A)-a unifying ideology; (B)-effective leadership and disciplined organization; (C)-mastery of extant technologies; (D)-support by one or more foreign powers.

(4)-The probability of violent revolution is directly proportionate to the Ruling Class capability of violently suppressing non-violent revolution.

(5)-The negative consequences of violent revolution – death, famine, disease, destruction – are directly proportionate to the refusal of the One Percent and its Ruling Class to yield to the popular will.

(In other words, no matter who wins, life in a post-revolutionary United States would be no more or less wretched than life in a land that combines the violent anarchy of Somalia, the toxicity of Fukushima and the poverty of post-earthquake Haiti. Which is why I am so very glad I'm old – so old I probably won't be alive when the revolution happens.)

***

My next entry on the thread, in response to another poster, dropped the academic affectations: 

The unified ideology described by axiom (3)-(A) is already taking shape amidst the grassroots. It is beyond the domain of the two Ruling Class parties (actually one Ruling Class party with two names), and even beyond the Tea Party and its various overtly fascist subsets, (i.e., the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the other such groups whose banners are part of the international fascist solidarity demonstrations now taking place in Kiev). It is also beyond the domain of any specific organization of the Left, which is why this new unified ideology has yet to acquire a name and formal structure.

Nevertheless it is a hybrid of democratic socialism (cooperative and/or public ownership of vital services and the means of production); Marxism (recognition of the historical truth of class struggle and the necessity of disciplined Working Class solidarity); traditional anarchism (healthy distrust of hierarchal organizations) and classical Jeffersonian populist democracy (one person/one vote, fostered by the Internet). 

It has already made itself apparent in innumerable small ways, particularly as the (failed) Occupy movement and its  more localized successes, including the relief efforts of Occupy Sandy in and around New York City, the rapidly growing popularity of the Socialist Alternative Party in Seattle and Minneapolis, and the brushfire-fast nationwide spread of SA's $15 Now! campaign to raise the minimum wage to livable-income levels.
 
When and if this incipient movement coalesces and comes to power, it would be absolutely compatible with the U.S. Constitution and would in fact be its fulfillment. 

The vital questions are therefore how and when its self-recognition will progress to the point of formalization, and whether it will have the solidarity (strength) and courage to withstand the inconceivably violent reaction by which the One Percent and the Ruling Class will try to suppress it, the forces for which are already in place. 

Apropos a civil war, I too see that, but probably not as you do. Assuming a successful revolution – note again its four prerequisites – a situation would probably evolve similar to what obtained in the old Russian Empire after 1917, with the One Percent trying (with the support of various overseas allies) to regain power, and the revolutionaries equally determined to hang on to the "liberated" parts of the U.S. 

The One Percent, in keeping with the lavish funding it is pouring into establishment of theocratic governance, would no doubt declare its territories ruled by Biblical Law, thereby ensuring the fealty of the South and the Midwestern interior, but both coasts and no doubt Alaska too would side with the revolution. The nation as we know it would cease to exist (as it nearly has anyway), and the land would be sundered in such ways that, combined with terminal climate change, would probably take at least a thousand years for recovery. Hence my vision of "the violent anarchy of Somalia, the toxicity of Fukushima (as the One Percent would not hesitate to nuke rebellious cities), the poverty of post-earthquake Haiti."
 
As a result, the global power center would of course shift far eastward: China unquestionably, Russia more than likely. As to what remained of the former United States, part of it would be absorbed by expansions of Mexico and Canada and probable Russian reclamation of its former Pacific Northwest possessions; the remainder would either be uninhabitable due to the lingering toxicity inflicted by CBR (chemical, biological, radiological) warfare or so impoverished by isolation its habitable lands would be realms of famine and disease. 

Were the One Percent to win – and I believe the odds are 50-50 – most if not all of the same conditions would apply save that the residents of lands under One Percent control would have it far worse: they would be de facto slaves...which is of course what the One Percent already intends for all of us in the Working Class anyway.

As I said, I'm damn glad I'm old.

***

Then when another poster seemed to romanticize revolution, I added this:

Make no mistake: there is nothing desirable about violent revolution – which would leave the lands wherein it is fought looking, at best, like Europe in 1945 and, at worst, like Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the Bomb. 

Yet given how quickly the One Percent now resorts to violence – note again the example of the brutal suppression of Occupy, also the Gestapo-like disregard of neighborhood civil rights that characterized the search for the Boston Marathon bomber –   I fear an eventual violent reaction by the citizenry is inevitable. 

(Indeed, provoking a rebellion may be the clandestine purpose behind such tactics – the creation of an incident that will give the Ruling Class an excuse for exterminating large segments of the U.S. population, the Final Solution to the problems of unemployment,  poverty and homelessness.) 

And the mercilessness of the Ruling Class response has already been made clear: it was demonstrated in Vietnam: “we had to destroy the village to save it.” 

Remember too that morally there is not one scintilla of difference between the USian policy of exterminating an entire village for harboring alleged "terrorists" and the Nazi German policy of imposing exactly the same reprisals for harboring partisans. That the USian (Fourth) Reich does the extermination from afar with drones, while the German (Third) Reich did it up-close-and-personal with machine guns, rifles, bayonets and pistols, does not alter the moral depravity or karmic malignancy of the event itself.  In fact it is at least arguable the drone-exterminations are more reprehensible merely by how they protect the drone operators from being splattered with blood and gore – and how that bloodlessness is then diabolically used to assure the drone operators they are without sin.
  
As to your notion of a coordinated revolutionary effort by socialist countries – Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam etc. – that capability perished with the Soviet Union, and it is already clear the USian Empire will do anything it can to prevent its resurrection.  China, meanwhile, has been totally co-opted (and totally corrupted) by capitalism; the USian Empire has achieved with money precisely what its British Empire antecedent sought in the 19th Century to accomplish with opium. The one remaining wild-card is Russia, where the Communist Party remains the second largest (and by far the best organized) political party in the nation – so much so it is at least arguable it was only by Putin's New Deal-like repeal of the most viciously capitalist Ayn Rand “reforms” imposed under Yeltsin the country was steered away from another Communist revolution.

(This is no doubt one of the reasons why the USian Imperial One Percent – the oberfuehrers of fascism's Global New Order – are now trying to provoke a war with Russia: they are terrified by what might happen should that vast nation again go Communist.)

LB/20 April 2014

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Food Stamps: Dems, Repubs Vote to Kill Poor People

Obama Says Cuts Ensure 'America's Children Don't Go Hungry'

THE FINAL VOTE against food-stamp recipients was a revealing 68-32, with only nine Senate Democrats opposing the cuts; that plus the president's enthusiastic approval of a decade of downsizing the government now admits will total at least $8.7 billion is tantamount to official notice from the Democratic Party it too wants the nation's poor people dead – that the only difference between the Democrats and Republicans is over the forcefulness with which this genocide is to be accomplished. The Republicans wanted to slash the program by $40 billion,  which would have begun killing off lower-income people almost immediately. But the Democrats apparently feared the GOP's proposal would be too obviously murderous – almost as embarrassing as public endorsement of death camps – which is no doubt why the One Party of Two Names finally opted for the less dramatic, easier-to-obfuscate reduction that will short 850,000 food-stamp-dependent households a starvation-inflicting average of $90 per month.  

Meanwhile, with the Democrats ever more worried by the growing popularity of revolutionary socialism, they've intensified their efforts to hide their Ayn Rand malevolence behind classic, Josef Goebbels-type Big Lies, most recently President Obama's astonishing claim the food-stamp cutbacks will “make sure America's children don't go hungry.”  Though the “public integrity” Barack the Betrayer promised us in 2008 was long ago recognized as no less a deception than “change we can believe in,” portrayal of the deliberate imposition of hunger as a humanitarian act is a new low, a falsehood in comparison to which most of the president's other lies dwindle to insignificance. It is also in the mind-wrenching mode of “freedom is slavery,” a proclamation that characterized the (formerly) fictional tyranny described in George Orwell's prophetic 1984. Now we are implicitly shown its entirely non-fictional equivalent: “hunger is nourishment.” 

And for the 47.2 million USians who now depend on food stamps  to keep themselves and their children fed, the associated pangs will only intensify: as a prescient headline writer at Seattle's excellent on-line daily Crosscut has already implied, this is undoubtedly the beginning of the end  of the entire food stamp program, the formal name of which is S.N.A.P., the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Perhaps now the acronym will become a sardonic joke: Starvation Neutralizing America's Poor, as in “with a SNAP of its fingers, the Ruling Class has fucked us again.”

Hunger as nourishment? Verily, such is the quintessence of absolute evil.

*****

 

Outside Agitation on the Comment Threads of Other Relevant Reports

“50 Reasons We Should Fear the Worst From Fukushima” Harvey Wasserman of EcoWatch exposes the apocalyptic reality of the Fukushima debacle. I quote a Cheyenne Ghost-Dance chant: “The white man's god/ has forsaken him/ Let us go and/ look for our Mother...” Then I add a nightmare notion that should especially bug the UFOs-have-landed folks: what if “the alleged 'divine revelations' that spawned patriarchy – Moses' Burning Bush, Ezekiel's fiery wheel, etc. ad nauseam -- were intergalactic equivalents of the smallpox-infested blankets by which Europeans exterminated First Nations peoples. Thus the ultimate purpose of patriarchy and its maturation over the centuries into capitalism and now finally into ecocidal fascism is to make Earth too toxic for life as we know it – precisely as is happening. Our final, dying clue as to who the Global Ruling Class serves by its relentless moral imbecility (and who – or rather what – will inherit the planet as a result), is found in the fact that of all earthly species, only the cockroach is totally immune to radiation and can within a single generation evolve immunity to any other toxin.”

***

“The New Snowden Revelation Is Dangerous for Anonymous - And for All of Us” Gabriella Coleman of Wired reports on the government's zero-tolerance, maximum-sentence prosecution of on-line civil disobedience, but then inexplicably claims such draconian measures are applied only to cyber-activists – that “physical tactics such as trespass or vandalism of property rarely result in serious criminal consequences for participants and tend to be minor civil infractions instead of federal crimes.” I imply she's either ignorant or in denial: obviously, “the new USian Empire norm – note the felonies for which the Oak Ridge 3 were convicted – is going to be maximum charges and maximum sentences in retaliation for ANY act of civil disobedience.” 

***

“Helping homeless students stay in school”  Joseph Sutton-Holcomb describes the valiant efforts of the specialists employed by local school districts to ensure the Seattle area's many homeless students are able to remain in school. A major challenge, he writes, is arranging the students' transportation to and from classes. I use the story as a teachable moment to point out the only way to end homelessness is to end capitalism.

Only now – too late for the comment thread – did I focus on the fact Sutton-Holcomb failed to report the specialists' tasks are made profoundly more difficult by the region's notorious hostility to mass transit,  with a growing number of local voters rejecting buses, trolleys and even commuter rail service as welfare that encourages laziness by pampering minorities and lower-income people in general. (Note: my OAN piece on the anti-transit-user hatefulness that defines Washington state politics was written nearly four years ago, but the bigotry it describes intensifies each time there is a transit vote,  as in Tacoma during the 2012 general election. Though the local transit authority was not forced to shut down, all that saved it was a small, unanticipated, post-2012 increase in sales tax revenues. Its service remains minimal, the nation's worst amongst comparable cities, with its 37 bus routes so radically downsized, their operations end as early as 5:20 p.m. daily. Meanwhile its minimized schedules inflict extreme hardship on anyone who does not have an automobile, while the refusal of even self-proclaimed “progressive” politicians to take ameliorative action again demonstrates the malice toward lower-income people that increasingly characterizes USian governance at every level.) 

***

“What does Al Jazeera America see in the Northwest?” Olivia Weitz reports on Al Jazeera's new Pacific Northwest bureau but notes that despite the news agency's reputation for accurate reporting, its U.S. viewership remains tiny. I point out it's no doubt “the (very rational) fear of being placed on one or more secret-police watch lists that keeps the Al Jazeera America audience so small. Thus the USian Empire's total surveillance regime fulfills another of its definitive purposes: ensuring that we the people remain imprisoned in ignorance.” 

***

“Whose Radical Jesus? The Story of a Literary Success” Truthout's Paul Buhle reviews Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House: 2013).  I point out that regardless of the truth or falsehood of Aslan's hypothesis, its ultimate function is to serve the Ruling Class by re-legitimizing the murderous and ecocidal religion of a god that failed. A far more genuinely revolutionary interpretation of the Jesus story, I add, “was written nearly 70 years ago by Robert Graves in King Jesus, which argues that while Jesus was indeed a rebel zealot, his primary purpose was to extinguish the last lingering remnants of the old goddess-centered religions. The 'money quote' -- morbid pun intended -- in Graves' telling of the story sums up the entire history of patriarchy, from its origins in Moses' burning bush and Ezekiel's fiery wheel to its final manifestations today as capitalism fulfills itself by morphing into terminal fascism. 'I am released from the jurisdiction of the Female,' says Jesus, 'I have come to destroy Her works' (King Jesus; Minerva Press, London: 1946, p. 256). The 'Female' of whom Jesus spoke was the goddess who is the variously titled Mother of All Being, Gaea, the Mother Nature whose act of creation was to give birth to the entire cosmos. Especially if we consider the Gaia Hypothesis -- that Earth (and perhaps by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating -- what Jesus said two thousand years ago is precisely what the capitalists are saying today: that they are released from Nature's jurisdiction; that they have come to destroy all her works.” 

LB/9 February 2014 

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