Tacoma: Microcosm of Capitalism and Class Struggle

Foggy night in Tacoma. Photo by KD, OAN copyright

2014. Click on image to view it full size.

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(Note: in the interest of clarity, some of the links below are used more than once in the text.)

 

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WHENEVER I FOCUS a critical eye on the operations of local government in my adopted home city of Tacoma, it seems I discover a new dimension of class warfare. 

Verily, I should not be surprised. A former investigative reporter, I witnessed the same dynamics in New York City, Seattle, Bellingham and various places in Michigan, Tennessee and New Jersey – literally every place I ever worked and even when I was a teenager covering sports not news. (I lasted 30 years in mainstream media, 1956-1986, only because I was able to hide my ever-more-emphatically confirmed recognition U.S. “democracy” is our species' ultimate Big Lie.) I had understood capitalism as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth – long before Ayn Rand  gave me the vocabulary to express its true malice.

And, yes, capitalism is everywhere malicious. While the lessons of Bhopal,  Exxon Valdez,  Deepwater Horizon and Bangladesh are infinitely more grotesque than the back-room banalities of local betrayals by bureaucrats, legislators and municipal officials in lockstep service to the Ruling Class, capitalism's bloody history proves it has always, even in its most innocuous forms, been an economic system run by killers.  The photographs from Madhya Predesh  or Dhaka are themselves sufficient to define capitalism as serial murder. 

As if this damning evidence were yet inadequate – as if Nature in one last act of maternal mercy had decided her human children are such slow learners we yet need further proof of capitalism's innate maliciousness – there is the now-indisputable fact capitalism is fatally poisoning our planet.  Our world is dying, and its death wounds are inflicted by capitalism's relentless avarice, of which the local impact alone should be a constant goad to raise the red banner of resistance.

In the context of these present circumstances – the context of terminal climate change, of the atrocities of Bangladesh and Bhopal and of all the other too-awful-to-conceal demonstrations of capitalist truth – we scarcely notice many of the daily depredations of capitalism we typically encounter here in the USian homeland. That's because we have been conditioned to accept them as everyday realities, as irremediable as weather and therefore as moot as settled matters of law. 

But we should also recognize how capitalism's defining disasters – including all its greed-spawned horrors that will assail us in the years ahead – typically begin as lesser evils, the quashed traffic tickets and all the other apparently harmless examples of minor malfeasance that arise from the invariably chummy relationships between the local business executives and the politicians themselves. The wealthier the capitalist, the more deeply the politicians bow to his demands. That's why the case against the rich kid caught dealing cocaine to his private-school classmates vanishes before it gets to court, and the case against the impoverished black kid who got busted with a single marijuana cigarette results in a 10-year prison sentence.

And there's no relief. Eventually even the reformist politicians become capitalist puppets, a process that most often starts with a single act of petty graft, the capitalist buying a politician or a bureaucrat or maybe even a journalist an elaborately catered private-club dinner or giving him an expensive watch or guaranteeing the admission of his children to an exclusive private college. Sooner or later the capitalist con-man's newest mark is entrapped by outright bribes or perhaps – in the most extreme forms – a video-taped night amongst the Stepford courtesans,  female or male, of some unimaginably compliant executive whorehouse. The eventual result is total malfeasance – a government that is theoretically elected to represent the people but in fact represents only the capitalists – the realpolitik behind all the atrocities cited above. 

Ultimately – exactly as is said of USian politics – all corruption is local. Capitalism's ways and means are thus always the same, whether at Bhopal or in our own back yards. The capitalists' sole purpose is always identical: more for themselves, no matter the cost to us and our children and our Mother Earth. 

But even Ayn Rand, capitalism's most outspoken evangelist, dared not admit what capitalism truly is: that it is self-induced moral imbecility, the deliberate embrace of evil, the ethos of the serial killer shaped into global strategies and tactics that – once we discover how to look – are as obvious in the banalities of local governance as they are in the bodies of capitalism's victims. 

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BECAUSE I HAVE adopted the Pacific Northwest as my homeland, I tend to think of it as a place that is better than anywhere else. And though I have long been convinced neither our species nor our planet will survive the depredations of capitalism, it still disturbs me when I discover some new capitalist toxin poisoning my own back yard. Perhaps a tiny, eternally foolish part of me retains a vestige of hopefulness. 

But regardless of our perspective, and no matter how seemingly trivial the issue, once we have learned to recognize capitalism for what it is, we cannot escape the fact we are confronting absolute, absolutely intransigent evil. Even in the smallest examples of malfeasance we see the same ugly truth proven by the atrocities itemized above – that capitalists are sociopaths intent on victimizing all the rest of us. Thus the moral imbecility that defines capitalism is as evident in the everyday politics of the U.S. state of Washington  as it is in Bangladesh.

Note how, as a matter of official policy, Washington robs its taxpayers and gives the loot to the capitalists – sneering aristocrats  who are already so obscenely rich their wealth is inconceivable to those of us condemned to live our lives below the salt. Note how Washington politicians knowingly perpetuate the most deliberately regressive tax structure  in the nation. Note how they sadistically punish Washington's poorest peoples with the nation's highest state tax burden and simultaneously pamper its One Percenters with the nation's third lowest taxes. 

More to the point, note how Washington gives Boeing an $8.5 billion tax exemption – the largest such gift in U.S. history – even as it refuses to properly serve its citizens.  It is in (openly defiant) contempt of court for its refusal to provide its children with their educational needs. It cannot even maintain its physical infrastructure.  Yet in no other U.S. state are the politicians more generous to their capitalist puppet-masters. 

Though the gloating sadism of Washington state's capitalist overlords is not as brazenly obvious as that of the capitalist masters of Detroit,  we can be sure the only reason for the difference is racial. Washington state's population is 77 percent Caucasian, the USian homeland's favored majority. This means its politicians and bureaucrats have to be a bit more subtle about their primary job – extorting money from the people and giving it to the capitalists. By contrast, Detroit's population is 82 percent black, its majority the one USian people on whom it is always open season. Whether due to the greed of the board room, the carefully closeted but Ku-Klux-caustic bigotry of about 75 percent of the white majority or the conditioned murderousness of the (mostly white) federally militarized state and local police, blacks and their neighborhoods are always the prime targets.

But if we truly open our eyes, we see that in every domain against every race on every continent, capitalism's intent is always the same. Capitalist Bangladesh allows construction so shoddy it kills at least 1,129 people. Capitalist Detroit cuts off the drinking water to 27,000 households, inflicting the horrors of Third World poverty on entire neighborhoods. Capitalist Washington state commits the same atrocities, albeit more incrementally, with greater deviousness and more certain concealment beneath the Josef Goebbels cloak of near-total news blackout. The state denies health insurance  to 70,000 lower-income workers. It damns children to eternal ignorance by refusing to properly fund its public schools. It hikes tuition and slashes state support to ensure college is a privilege only the wealthiest families can afford. It guarantees its continued impoverishment by giving Boeing – a corporation that is unapologetically vicious in its treatment of its employees  – the biggest tax break in all U.S. history. And its politicians dutifully genuflect as Boeing moves another 2,000 jobs to the anti-union, low-wage, low-skill South.

All of this – families hurled into permanent destitution by downsizing and outsourcing, workers slain by production facilities so poorly built they become death traps, local environments poisoned beyond recovery, transit, schools and other vital services slashed or eliminated – is looting. And its obvious purpose wherever it obtains – Tacoma or Detroit or Bhopal or Dhaka or any other locale made infamous by capitalist atrocities – is pandering to the insatiable, unspeakably malevolent greed of the capitalists.

Such is class warfare, the quintessence of capitalism in action. 

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IN THE SEAPORT city of Tacoma, the most vivid example of class warfare is the white suburbanites' ongoing attack on mass transit. 

It is most often cleverly disguised as a spontaneous expression of racism.

But an obscure, state-funded think-tank report entitled “Identifying Redevelopable Lands” and revealingly subtitled “Application of a Land Value Potential (LVP) Approach in Urban Centers,” suggests the war against Tacoma transit-users is a clandestine form of the socioeconomic cleansing that's being openly imposed on Detroit. The Tacoma document,  completed in 2009 for city officials and their colleagues in adjacent local governments, is a deliberately confusing, carefully euphemistic textbook on the Ayn Rand economics of gentrification. As always under capitalism, its motivating principle is greed. Beyond a smokescreen of obfuscatory jargon, it shows how the demolition of lower-income housing could clear the way for luxury apartment complexes generating rentals as high as $2,170 per month and minimum profits of 10 percent (“Exhibit 9,” page 17). Given that rent control is illegal everywhere in Washington state – the politicians' response to a 1980 attempt by Seattleites to protect themselves against greedy landlords – the actual profits in a post-urban-renewal Tacoma would no doubt be much higher. 

In both cities – brazenly in Detroit, surreptitiously in Tacoma – the politicians and bureaucrats are undoubtedly fulfilling back-room promises to make land-use more profitablefor their capitalist benefactors. The war against Tacoma's transit users has already been denounced by some of its more savvy victims as the first phase of a campaign of socioeconomic cleansing or gentrification. That it began with an eight-percent service cutback in 2010 – the year following the “Land Value Potential” report – is thus unlikely to be coincidental.

 

Moreover – though it never quite states it in any quotable form –“Land Value Potential” obviously outlines the Ruling Class response to the fact (socioeconomically “undesirable”) lower-income people are the majority demographic in Tacoma  (see “Community Profile”). Though Tacoma officials are loathe to openly admit the city's poverty, it is proven by several statistics. The city's median annual household income, $47,862 per year, is nearly $10,000 a year less than the state median, The city's poverty rate – the percentage of the population the federal government officially defines as impoverished – is 17 percent; the state's is 12. This is underscored by the fact 45 percent percent of the local transit system's 36,000 daily riders have no other means of transportation. Perhaps the most telling fact of all is that 60 percent of Tacoma's school children come from families so poor they qualify for the federal free or reduced-price school lunches. And nearly 25 percent of Tacoma's population is black or Hispanic  – the perennially favorite targets of the gentrifiers. 

Detroit is much worse off.  Its median annual income is only $26,955, and its poverty rate is 38 percent. 

That Tacoma's ongoing transit crisis is the Ruling Class response to the barriers to gentrification posed by the city's lower-income majority is proven by two developments. One is the steadfast refusal of the allegedly “progressive” Tacoma City Council – which has both the requisite legal framework and taxing authority  – to come to the aid of mass-transit users. The other is the new, crisis-perpetuating policy adopted by Pierce Transit, the local transit authority, which denies long-promised service restorations to the (impoverished) city but radically increases service to the (far wealthier) suburbs. Thus it rewards the anti-transit suburbanites while punishing pro-transit city dwellers  (scroll down). It also serves notice the cutbacks in Tacoma bus service, which now total about 73 percent, are permanent. And it expresses the Marie Antoinette indifference of local politicians and bureaucrats – yes, even the so-called “progressives” – to the fact the radically reduced bus service has already denied an unknown number of families access to their jobs and forced them to move elsewhere. 

The downsizing, of course, was cleverly done, carefully structured – as it always is – to muffle public expressions of pain and anger. Even in Tacoma the politicians are superbly schooled in manipulation and deception. Public outcry was effectively stifled by the fact the cuts and the resultant life-ruining circumstances were rationalized by the so-called Great Recession. 

Meanwhile the use of the economic crisis by politicians everywhere as a cover for granting the Ruling Class long-demanded austerity measures lends further confirmation to the probability the entire economic contraction was engineered specifically to facilitate such devastating cutbacks. 

But gentrification is only one of the many weapons by which the Ruling Class assaults us. As always in capitalist governance – which is rule in accordance with the genocidal principles laid out by Ayn Rand – anything that helps sustain lower-income people is under attack. That's why there's a war against public education nationwide,  against potable water in Detroit, against public transport in Tacoma. That's why in the real (never publicized) state budget,  the capitalists rake off $50 billion even as the state's 1,045,453 million k-12 kids are deprived of adequate schools. That's why the Tacoma City Council won't salvage local bus service, makes a viciously dishonest pretense of considering mandatory paid sick leave  and is ignoring demands for a $15 minimum wage. In every case, it is targeted socioeconomic bigotry  intended to vindictively inflict maximum hardship on anyone of lesser means. Thus, by the imposition of ignorance and hopelessness, do the capitalists' wholly owned political servants repay their Wall Street masters. 

The underlying principle is simple. The more hardship the capitalists inflict on us, the more we are afraid – and the more we are likely to surrender to socioeconomic wretchedness. Note the 15,513 “under-votes”  – ballots in which the voter refused to indicate a choice – that killed the 2012 Pierce Transit service restoration measure.  Astoundingly, 4,443 of these under-votes came from inside the Tacoma city limits (the precincts prefixed by the number 27), where the proposal was nevertheless approved by nearly 56 percent. But the anti-transit-user majority in the suburbs nevertheless won by a final official tally of 704 votes. (The linked OAN piece was written before the results were finalized.) 

What the under-votes show depends on the locale. In the anti-transit areas they are undoubtedly gestures of contempt for those of us who are dependent on buses. But in pro-transit Tacoma they can only measure the extent to which the Working Class electorate is so psychologically demoralized, it will not even muster in support of its own obvious interest. Based on the city's demographics, at least half those 4,443 persons who wouldn't specify a choice were lower-income people for whom the transit issue was surely vital and probably personally decisive. In other words, the Working Class electorate inside the city cut its own metaphorical throat by refusing to vote. As a local Occupy activist said prophetically in 2011, “the 99 Percent is broken.”

USian “representative democracy” has thus obviously failed. And the voters' increasing disdain for elections is an index of the extent of their growing recognition the system is corrupted beyond any possibility of reform. Deceptions of the Elizabeth Warren sort  not withstanding, only the capitalists' most reliable puppets are allowed into U.S. political office. This is the gatekeeper-function function of the alleged “two-party” system, which is actually a single Ruling Class party, its monolithic nature disguised by carefully scripted public rivalries. It ensures the only interests represented in USian governance whether local, state or federal are exclusively those of the Ruling Class. A few exceptions, like socialist Kshama Sawant in Seattle,  are sometimes allowed locally, but only when the Ruling Class deems it necessary to bolster the greater Big Lie of USian “democracy.” 

Politicians who truly threaten the USian Empire's financial overlords are invariably removed from office.  Some are slain outright. Not even the officials of traditionally allied nations are safe from capitalist reprisals.  are safe from capitalist reprisals. 

As for Warren, her public disclosure file seems at first glance to suggest a substantial degree of independence from our capitalist overlords. But like all other Democrats, she is the political equivalent of the Trojan Horse. Her most generous funding source is Emily's List, which despite its feminist facade is fiercely committed to Ayn Rand economics.  And Warren is one of the group's most vocal supporters,  which tells us that behind her deceptive campaign rhetoric, she is as ruthlessly fanatical a capitalist  as Ayn Rand's disciple Alan Greenspan.  This tells us were Warren to win the White House, she would undoubtedly follow the example set by Barack Obama, the all-time champion Trojan Horse of U.S. political history, who ran for the presidency in 2008 as the candidate of “change we can believe in.” 

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AS MANY OF you know, I have several metaphorical dogs – personal and political alike – in the local fights for mass transit and a $15 minimum wage. 

A socialist with strong Marxian leanings, I also find it appalling (but infuriatingly typical of capitalist governance) the United States is the only developed nation that does not mandate paid sick leave for all workers. Therefore I volunteered my editorial skills to the local campaign for a paid-sick-leave ordinance. But my offer has been ignored, probably because the campaigners, who include the Tacoma City Councilman Anders Ibsen, are loathe to be associated with an outspoken socialist. 

There are no such fears amongst the local campaigners for a $15 minimum wage, a struggle begun by Socialist Alternative  and the Harry Bridges Club,  both of which are outspokenly Marxian organizations. Thus I have been active in Tacoma 15 Now since last February, and despite a two-month hiatus (September and October) due to a potentially fatal kidney infection, I will remain as active as other personal obligations and worsening physical disabilities allow. 

I will never personally benefit from a $15 minimum wage – I am 74 years old, and the USian job-market prejudice that regards old age as tantamount to terminal disability ensures I would never again be allowed to work for pay even if I were not permanently locked out of the workplace by the odium of my long-ago post-fire clinical depression. What prompts my involvement with Tacoma 15 Now is that USians are now the most viciously oppressed workers in the industrial world. Hence – however insignificant it might be – I will do whatever I can to combat this ever-worsening wretchedness the capitalists are knowingly inflicting on my Working Class sisters and brothers. The same spirit keeps me committed to the cause of organized labor through ongoing membership in the National Writers Union. 

The transit fight, however, is obviously a lost cause. As noted above, the local transit authority has made it clear there will be no improvement in bus service inside the city of Tacoma: not now, not ever. We who would benefit by such improvements have been damned as undesirables and are clearly being being targeted for socioeconomic banishment. 

Nevertheless, no doubt because I am a New Yorker by birth and was a Manhattanite by preference for much of my adulthood, I have always believed nationwide access to NYC-magnitude mass transport is a human right. In my years in the working press I advocated accordingly, and whenever possible I have done so in retirement as well. I therefore also understand why bus service inside Tacoma is maliciously kept at a prohibitively wretched minimum. In typically sadistic capitalist spirit, the transit authority's obvious intent is to inflict a perpetual transportation crisis on as many of us as possible. This is especially true for those of us who are chronically impoverished or are lower-income elderly or disabled people, of which I am all three.

What makes the crisis even more difficult for me personally is the financial atrocities of 2009 left me without a car. My meticulously maintained 1992 Ford Tempo V6 died in mid-2009 at 422,210.7 kilometers (262,349 miles), and I could not afford to repair or replace it. I was thus flung into permanent (and permanently embarrassing) dependency on vehicle-owning friends for any errands that cannot be accomplished via the vengefully downsized local bus service. 

The death of my automobile is also a kind of psychic death: it ended forever my ability to access alone the deep country solitude so essential to my spiritual wellbeing. 

Yet despite all this – despite the fact Tacoma now has by far the worst public transport of any comparable U.S. city – I am stranded here for the remainder of my life, with no possibility of ever moving to a less hatefully restricted environment. (Where does one go – and how does one get there – when one is 74 years old, physically disabled and damned by circumstance to an annual income of less than $15,000 per year?) 

The same questions afflict all of Tacoma's transit-dependent poor regardless of our age or physical condition. And in truth, there is no place we can go. Despite demographic trends elsewhere, the local suburbs remain prohibitively expensive bastions of white privilege. 

We are thus backed into the proverbial corner, our circumstances analogous to that of a wounded, once proud elk trapped in box canyon. We can either surrender or fight the predator who has entrapped us. If we surrender, we will surely lose. If we resist, our chances of winning are negligible, though at least we preserve our human dignity. 

But those 4,443 transit under-votes tell me the Tacoma Working Class has already surrendered. This puts the local $15 minimum wage effort gravely in doubt as well. If Tacoma's 99 Percenters wouldn't vote in 2012 for the transit restoration they themselves acknowledged they needed to get to work, why would they vote next year – or in any other year – to give themselves a raise? Locally at least, the revolution the aristocrats now openly fear  is undoubtedly more a creation of their guilt and paranoia than the result of any actual threat. 

LB/20 October-2 November 2014 

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Did Obama Throw Women under the Hobby Lobby Bus?

WAS OBAMACARE SECRETLY INTENDED to betray women? When you consider the utterly predictable outcome of the United States Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision and its de facto endorsement by President Barack Obama's refusal to employ his executive powers against its sweeping ban on birth control, the possibility becomes too evident to ignore. Indeed it clamors for investigation. Moreover, Obama's long and embittering record of making campaign promises he had no intention of keeping suggests the betrayal may have been part of the Affordable Care Act's hidden agenda from the moment the newly elected president began his closed-door scheming  with the health-insurance-industry executives who actually authored the legislation.

I said nearly as much in response to Abby Ohlheiser's brief and tautly reasoned “Ginsburg's Passionate 35-Page Dessent of Hobby Lobby Decision,” part of my daily email from Reader Supported News. Six days later,my suspicions intensified by many hours of research, what began as an embittered comment-thread remark had become the key passage of this column:

Assuming the correctness of Justice Ginsburg's dissent, the impact of the Hobby Lobby decision is far more devastating than we are being told by mainstream media.

The devastation is inherent in the fact at least 90 percent of U.S. business is “closely held.” 

Hobby Lobby thus allows the imposition of theocratic restrictions on most of the U.S. workplace. Not only does this abolish the reproductive freedom of most of the workforce; it is also a giant step toward replacing constitutional governance with Biblical law – a subversive goal lavishly funded by the One Percent as the ultimate means of subjugating the Working Class.

Meanwhile, imposition of theocracy via the private sector has become a standard Christian tactic. The takeover of the nation's health care facilities by the Roman Catholic Church is already, wherever it occurs, prohibiting access to all forms of contraception.

Financially, Hobby Lobby's main beneficiaries are the insurance barons. By making birth control unobtainable, the ruling further maximizes Affordable Care Act profits. Mandatory insurance generates obscene windfall profits even as prohibitively expensive co-pays and deductibles radically limit the public's ability to actually obtain care. Hobby Lobby furthers this process, minimizing cost by eliminating birth control from ACA coverage.

 

Given the lies and treachery by which we are now ruled, who can doubt this atrocity was carefully scripted in advance?

Though the president's sycophants will loudly denounce any such notion as unthinkable, U.S. history proves otherwise. Legislation at all levels – federal, state and local – is invariably peddled as an essential solution to some pressing crisis. But many such measures are sneakily written to perpetuate the very grievances they falsely claim to redress. By legalistic sleight-of-hand and other devious means – especially alleged “benefits” that on closer inspection turn out to be nonexistent – they defeat the democratic will of the people and impose instead the tyrannical goals and objectives of Ruling Class politicians and bureaucrats. Under the direction of their One Percent masters, these functionaries have honed the strategy and tactics of deliberate deception to sadistic perfection at every level of government – federal, state or local – inside the United States and its possessions.

The associated methodology is obviously a Machiavellian variant of the marketing practices by which the capitalists routinely dupe us into buying defective products. In the marketplace it is infuriating. In its political application – with all its heightened expectation of collective socioeconomic improvement and its subsequent plunge into defeat and disillusionment – it is perhaps the most injurious psychological warfare weapon in the Ruling Class arsenal. Not only does it foster alienation and despair; it subverts democracy and undermines even the hope of democracy by convincing us the entire democratic processes is a sham.

An ultimate example of this sort of deception is the New Deal. By ameliorating the morally imbecilic savagery of capitalism, it co-opted, demobilized and eventually dispersed a definitively revolutionary majority coalition of Communists, other socialists, Progressives and Left Democrats. But it (deliberately) preserved the irresistible power of the One Percent and thereby ensured its own eventual death. It also facilitated – chiefly by temporarily disguising the predatory nature of capitalism – the re-emergence of capitalism's unapologetic malevolence.

Another example is Medicare, which is funded by a combination of payroll taxes and mandatory premiums. It is touted as a European-style program that provides health care to all the nation's citizens age 65 and over and to recipients of Social Security Disability Insurance stipends as well. Though Medicare is widely believed to signal the government's endorsement of the principle that health care is a human right, in truth it does nothing of the kind. It covers only “about 48 percent” of an individual's authorized health-care costs  – far less if the non-reimbursed costs of vision, hearing and dental services are included in the calculations. The remainder, 52 percent of the approved expenses plus the full price of everything else that is not covered – eye glasses, hearing aids, dental care, many other services – comes out of the so-called beneficiary's pocket.

“No part of Medicare,” states the reference linked in the preceding paragraph, “pays for all of a beneficiary's covered medical costs, and many costs are not covered at all.” For the average recipient, the necessary co-payments and deductibles are too often prohibitive.  This means innumerable Medicare recipients, though saddled with the mandatory premiums deducted from their Social Security pensions, are chronically unable to obtain adequate health care. They are locked out of the system by its additional fees. And the little Medicare does cover is under constant attack by Republicans and Democrats alike – one of the many ways the two Ruling Class parties demonstrate their absolute fealty to the One Percenters, who now make no secret of the fact they regard humanitarian expenditures as wasted money. The only people genuinely served by Medicare are thus the wealthy, for whom it is merely another bonus on a seemingly endless list of taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Medicare's functions are therefore actually fourfold. (1)-Medicare rewards the wealthy. (2)-It punishes – and sometimes exterminates – the poor. (3)-It locks into place the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. (The definition's perpetuity is achieved by a system so impossibly complex, no group of citizens can change it without the intervention of politicians and bureaucrats – which means the citizens' efforts are invariably betrayed.) (4)-By its opacity, Medicare enables the U.S. to promulgate the Big Lie – within and without – that it offers some of its citizens a genuine universal health-care program.

Obamacare serves exactly the same functions in precisely the same ways. It is mandatory. The premiums it extracts are providing the health insurance cartel with the largest, most obscene windfall profits in its history – another of the president's innumerable gifts to his Wall Street masters. Yet Obamacare's deductibles and co-pays discourage and/or prohibit most of its alleged beneficiaries from fulfilling their medical needs. Like Medicare, its complexities make it incomprehensible save by politicians and bureaucrats, which further cements into permanence the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of wealth. And, again like Medicare, it enables U.S. propaganda to disseminate another Big Lie intended to disguise the deadly barbarism of its Ayn Rand economics.

Such are the ways of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else. Such too is the unmitigated deception that is the operational context of all U.S. health care.

It is in this same context Obamacare's triumphant claim “being female is no longer a pre-existing condition” emerges as yet another Big Lie. (Readers who are unfamiliar with the for-profit U.S. medical system should note that until the advent of the so-called Affordable Care Act, the health insurance barons charged radically higher premiums  for insuring reproductive-age females.) Obama the Orator repeatedly assured the voters such discrimination would soon be ended. But after he won the presidency, he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer. In that persona, he almost certainly guaranteed the insurance barons they would soon regain their ability to exploit female genitalia as a profit center. Even if he did not, it is beyond belief he and his insurance-cartel henchmen – armed as they were with all their market research and secret-police surveillance data – did not foresee the Hobby Lobby lawsuit or some other action that would yield the same result.

In any case, it is increasingly obvious the Hobby Lobby decision has now permanently rescinded what women regarded as the most compelling aspect of the ACA. As the Associated Press reported the day after the decision – “The Supreme Court has left in place lower court rulings in favor of businesses that object to covering all methods of government-approved contraception...not just the four pregnancy prevention methods and devices that the court considered in its ruling.” Since then, at least 82 more companies have indicated they intend to cancel their employees' birth-control coverage. 

Nor is there any recourse. The fund-raising claims of several women's organizations notwithstanding, Congressional remedies are impossible. The aggressively reactionary, vindictively theocratic Republican majority in the House has been gerrymandered into unbeatable permanence. And as reported above, the president – whose theocratic leanings  are so obvious they are provoking secularist protests – will not grant Hobby Lobby's growing roster of victims any other remedy.

Long term, the Hobby Lobby ruling will probably enable employers and insurers to force nearly all U.S. women to pay out of pocket for their birth control. But these expenses, like Medicare and ACA co-pays and deductibles, will be brutally prohibitive. Capitalism has downsized nearly half the population's paychecks to poverty or lower-income levels.  As Justice Ginsberg noted in her epic dissent, the cost of a single inter-uterine device or IUD “is nearly equivalent to a month's full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage." For women who cannot afford the aristocratic privilege of self-financed contraception, the only alternative is total surrender to misogyny: re-learning to despise their own bodies – to fear their own sensuality, sexuality and fertility – precisely as demanded by Christian doctrine and its regime of mandatory chastity. Theocrats everywhere are gloating. 

All of which again underscores the fact that in the United States, health care is a privilege of wealth and will remain so forever – that is, until the nation as we know it is no more.

The Hobby-Lobby case also demonstrates the ever-more-terrifying likelihood biblical-law Christian theocracy  will eventually replace Constitutional governance in the U.S homeland. Not only has the Supreme Court endorsed Jesus as the national deity; the forcible Christianization of the imperial military machine has already produced legions of troops trained in theocratic surveillance and oppression. The high command is now marching these latter-day Inquisitors and Crusaders into place.

Unfortunately, only a few Cassandra columnists,  of whom I am surely one, dare write constantly and at length about the inherent malevolence of the fanatical U.S. Christians and their schemes for imposing a Christian version of Middle Eastern theocracy (complete with public torture-executions for rebellious women, homosexuals and all other so-called “heretics”). And though we have been exposing these threats for years, our warnings are often belittled or suppressed. The above linked piece by Chris Hedges, for example, was suppressed by every major publication in the nation – never mind his stature as a mainstream writer.

Meanwhile, the ever-more-emboldened theocrats now openly denounce all women who use contraception  as “creatures...who cannot control their libido.” Such malicious slanders resurrect the bigoted dogmas of Abrahamic religion – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – that all women are like the biblical Eve, ruinously sinful, ready recruits for the Devil and therefore a seductive threat  to every devout male. But as Truthout's William Rivers Pitt aptly puts it, the U.S. seemingly remains the “land of the free” – unless you're a woman.

Though Pitt seems to carefully avoid such possibilities, it's impossible to overlook that someday in this increasingly downtrodden nation, women's cumulative anger might light the proverbial fuse. That's what happened in Paris on 14 July 1789, likewise in Petrograd on International Women's Day, 8 March 1917, 23 February by the old Tsarist calendar. The events in Paris – first the city's wives and mothers provoked to riotous rage by impossibly expensive bread, then the storming of the Bastille – are well known, but what obtained in Petrograd has been obscured by distance and anti-Russian propaganda, so I'll tell it once again: the flint-hearted bosses of the massive Lesnoy Textile Works sacked five women for trying to organize a union, and the women's 5,000 workplace sisters boiled into the streets in furious protest. Within just a few hours, their demonstration had exploded into the Russian Revolution.

LB/6 June 2014

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(Note: this week's OAN omited “Agitation Elsewhere” to better focus on the unfolding Hobby Lobby story.)

Challenging Russia in Ukraine Could Trigger World War III

I FEAR KIEV could become – like Sarajevo of the century past – an international flashpoint. Just as the Slavic minority in Sarajevo despised the city's Austro-Hungarian overlords, so is the Russian minority in Kiev afraid of the allegedly neo-Nazi rulers of the Ukraine.  And given the new regime's alleged USian sponsors, the jeopardy in which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry puts himself and world peace by his visit to Kiev  could therefore be extreme. Let us prayerfully hope 4 March 2014 does not acquire infamy comparable to – or possibly far worse than – 28 June 1914.

Even the politically moderate European press – though it flinches from calling the new Ukranian government neo-Nazi – is alarmed by the hard-Right Svoboda party. “(A)nti-Semitism,” says a der Spiegel report,  “is part of the extremist party's platform; until 2004, they called themselves the Social-National Party of Ukraine in an intentional reference to Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party. Just last summer, a prominent leader of party youth was distributing texts from (material) Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels translated into Ukrainian. Without the nationalists' tight organization, the revolt on Maidan Square would long since have collapsed.” The more Left-leaning Guardian now reports Svoboda appointees control the new government's most powerful ministries.  To those who are familiar with the combination of means by which Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party took over the Weimar Republic, Svoboda's swiftly rising power is justifiably frightening.

As I presciently said last Monday (24 February) on a Reader Supported News comment thread, Russia – especially given its experiences during World War II – will not tolerate  the presence of a fascist state, USian surrogate or not, on its western frontier. Hence I cited three reasons this could start World War III:

(1)-Nazism has an ugly history in the Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler's Wehrmacht, then gleefully aided the SS in rounding up, deporting and killing Jews. This history imposes huge obstacles to the present-day Ukrainian quest for national identity.

(2)-Russia's strategic interest is threefold. Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe – as vital to the Russian economy as the grain fields of the Middle West are to the U.S.; it is an invasion route to the Russian interior, hence vital to the defense strategies of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and today's Russian Federation. It controls access to the Black Sea, an objective of Russian and Soviet policy since the time of the earliest Tsars.

(3)-The USian Empire's apperent Ukranian strategy is a variant of Hitler's plans for eastward conquest. Its purpose seems to be imposition of a militarily friendly neo-Nazi state on Russia's frontier, for-profit seizure of Ukrainian agricultural and natural resources and obstruction of Russian Black Sea access.

To imagine Russia will tolerate this de facto invasion is to imagine the U.S. would tolerate foreign conquest of its Middle Western states. This time the neocons, with their dreams of a global Fourth Reich, may have made the same mistake their secret hero Hitler made: they have goaded the Bear in his own den.

In other words, the events in Ukraine embody what the Russians perceive as a direct threat to Rodina – their beloved Motherland. For a hypothetical parallel, imagine Mexico taken over by a coup organized by the People's Republic of China. How would the USian Empire react?

But that's only one reason this looming confrontation scares me more than the Cuban Missile Crisis did. There is also a glaring difference between the quality of U.S. leadership in 1962 and today, specifically in the caliber of the presidents. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was popular, respected and already assured of his role in history. Barack Hussein Obama is unpopular, scorned as vehemently by the Left as by the Right. A few days ago his disapproval-rate polled as high as 56 percent, an omen of sure defeat for his Democratic Party in the fall congressional elections. At the very least, Obama remains a president in search of a positive legacy. And his increasingly authoritarian demeanor – manifest in unrestricted drone warfare,  extra-judicial presidential death warrants  and ever more aggressive foreign policy  – suggests he intends that legacy to be akin to Octavian's, who declared himself the first Roman emperor.

Apropos the Cuban Missile Crisis, when its story broke in 1962, I was only days out of the Regular Army. I had served the three active-duty years of my six-year enlistment, more than half of that in Korea, but I was obligated for three more years in the reserves. The troop transport in which I returned stateside with some 3,500 other soldiers, the U.S.N.S. Sultan,  was shadowed from Hawaii nearly to San Francisco Bay by a Soviet submarine, no doubt as part of the Cuban preliminaries. Had the crisis led to war while we were at sea, we'd no doubt have been torpedoed and sunk. And had the war begun after I was a civilian, I'd have been yanked back into uniform minutes after the first shot was fired. I knew that, and as a 22-year-old man with a 19-year-old wife and my first full-time job in journalism, a sportswriter for The Knoxville Journal, I was understandably worried. Given the grotesque realities of nuclear warfare, I was also gravely concerned for the wellbeing of my wife and other family members, especially those in and around Knoxville, Tennessee – a critical target due to its proximity to Oak Ridge. 

But I trusted President Kennedy. I thought of him as “our” president, even “my” president despite the fact I had not been old enough to vote in the 1960 election. He was a president who had campaigned honestly and whom We the People had rightfully elected to office.

Now though as I approach my 74^th birthday, I have no such trust in our leaders, least of all President Obama. He lied his way into office by promising “change we can believe in.” He shape-shifted from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer and immediately escalated George Bush's war against the Constitution. He betrayed his supporters in organized labor and in the movement for single-payer/public-option health care. He declared genocidal war on lower-income peoples of all ages by slashing food stamps, downsizing Medicare and attempting to cut Social Security. He is not my president, he is not “our” president (unless you are part of the One Percent or its corps of factotums), and it is most assuredly not We the People whose interests he serves.

Indeed I cannot but wonder if he seeks to provoke a war merely to boost his popularity and silence his critics, either by herding us into concentration camps or by unleashing his death squads with the extra-judicial extermination warrants he claims the right to issue at will.

At the very least – or so says Robert Perry in “Neocons and the Ukranian Coup,” the piece on which I posted the comments boldfaced above – he's abdicated control of the government (or more likely knowingly granted it) to a neo-conservative (i.e., neo-fascist) cabal that has been the real power behind the Oval Office at least since the Reagan years. “American neocons,” says Perry, “helped destabilize Ukraine and engineer the overthrow of its elected government, a 'regime change'...(with) neo-Nazi militias at the forefront.” (The link to Perry's analysis, also in the lead-in to the boldfaced paragraphs, is repeated here for readers' convenience.)

***

My original intention this week was to post comment-thread contributions as I usually do – that is, by summarizing the article and my Outside Agitator's response. But now I think the threat of war makes my comments on two of these threads relevant in their entirety. Hence the following, which the sharp-eyed reader will note is ever-so-slightly edited from the original texts:

“The 'Deep State' - How Much Does It Explain?” Mike Lofgren of Moyers and Company writes at length on what he calls the “Deep State,” portraying it as “a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state...out of control and unconstrained... (the perpetrator of) deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war.” I reply that from a socialist perspective, the term “deep state” is nothing more than another deliberately anti-Marxist euphemism to avoid such terms as “Ruling Class,” “capitalist aristocracy,” “the bourgeoisie” or “the One Percent.”

The behavior of the “deep state” is therefore typical of all ruling classes.

But the power of the “deep state” has no counterpart in human history. It is literally omnipotent, made so by a combination of three factors. The first of these is technology, which gives it capabilities hitherto accorded only gods – and only the most sadistic gods at that. The second factor is the ethos by which it is driven: capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate, typically malicious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated. The third is the new Mein Kampf by which the One Percent rules, Ayn Rand's expansion of economic theory into a formal doctrine of statehood, governance and intention: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

(A fourth factor that previously constrained even the most tyrannical states – the need to placate the masses – has been rendered irrelevant by weaponry that makes resistance not only futile but suicidal. We the people, we the 99 Percent, we the peasants and proletarians who do all the work – we no longer matter save in terms of our exploitability for profit. We are already prisoners, inescapably trapped in electronic slave pens.)

For the first time in our collective experience, our species has been subdued by conquerors so evil – that is, so hostile to human liberty and planetary life – the only metaphors to adequately describe their vileness come from mythology, religion and science fiction. Indeed they are the quintessence of evil; their triumph is the equivalent of conquest by demons or demonic creatures from outer space. And only a very few of our best writers – Chris Hedges, for example – have awakened to the bottomless horror of their moral imbecility.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lofgren's plea for a leader – someone with the “serene self-confidence” to lead us in rebellion – is nothing less than a call for voluntary human sacrifice, for yet another victim to walk the fatal paths of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. All were potentially such leaders. Each was murdered – decades before the state followed the pattern set by Hitler's Third Reich and publicly claimed, as it does now, the right to slaughter at will. Today our only certainty is that any true defender of freedom who arises to genuine leadership will be slain by the ever-eager assassins commanded by the One Percent.

What then, as Vladimir Lenin asked so presciently in 1902, is to be done? I have no satisfactory answer. Nor, seemingly, does anyone else. Hedges suggests our only recourse is the turning to art and spirituality that has been the opiate of slaves since the advent of slavery. History – specifically the fact there is no earthly precedent for the obscene might and toxic darkness of that which oppresses us today – tells me he is probably right, that we have no other alternatives.

As I ponder this unspeakable dismal future I remember a chant of the Cheyenne Ghost Dance – “the white man's god has forsaken him, let us go and look for our Mother.” My genes -- Scythian, Celtic, Norse, Iroquoian, others of which I know not – urge me to embrace the life and consciousness reasserted by the Gaia Hypothesis, to prepare myself for her vengeance on those who would knowingly destroy her. I do not imagine many of us will survive her fury. I am thankful I am old.

*

Later a poster on the same thread questioned my understanding of Hedges' stance. I replied by citing the Hedges essay entitled “A Time for Sublime Madness.” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_time_for_sublime_madness_20130120 In it he says, “To endure what lies ahead we will have to harness the human imagination,” which he then defines as both art and religion, with strong emphasis on the latter. (“Art” as used here includes not just visual work but music, poetry, dance, etc.)

What makes this particular Hedges essay so significant – it appeared on 20 January 2013 – is it is to my knowledge the first time he has acknowledged the true totality of our powerlessness. In so doing, he cites how other powerless groups sustained themselves. “It was the human imagination,” he wrote, “that permitted African-Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow era to transcend their physical condition. It was the human imagination that sustained Sitting Bull and Black Elk as their land was seized and their cultures were broken. And it was the human imagination that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to retain the power of the sacred. It is the imagination that makes possible transcendence.”

Unfortunately – as we see in the de facto Christofascist theocracy of the USian South (and in the increasingly theocratic midlands as well) – religious imagination typically functions as opiate rather than agitation. This is true even in the case of non-Abrahamic religions. Note for example the stridently apolitical, even anti-political stance taken by so many Wiccans, who in every other sense are acutely aware of what is happening both politically and environmentally, yet cling to the New Age nonsense that collective transformation is impossible unless it is preceded by personal transformation.

To further clarify, while I believe Hedges is correct – that  “imagination” is our only recourse (simply because the genocidal technological superiority of the Ruling Class will not be defeated until it is overthrown by Gaian apocalypse) – I also regard it as a dreadful admission of defeat. Apart from the truly savage USian compulsion to religious conformity (which afflicts neo-Pagans as much as the Christofascists and the JesuNazis), our imagination has been withered to nonexistence by the slave mentality methodically imposed by the nation's public schools. One cannot make – or even comprehend – truly meaningful art when one's creative instincts have been deliberately starved to death by aesthetic ignorance. Thus we are robbed – perhaps permanently (because the only culture that can arise from ignorance is a culture of ignorance) – of even the one sanctuary Hedges suggested we might have left. Such is the totality of Evil by which we are now ruled. 

       

***

“Our Military: Fighting to Keep Its Culture of Abuse” Sarah L. Blum of Truthout reports on how the sexual and psychological abuse of women within the U.S. military not only continues unabated but – based on new statistics – is intensifying every year. I point out what I consider a major failure by mass media, the fact no widely published writer dares reveal the intimate connection between rape and the Christian fanaticism that now dominates the U.S. officer corps.

In the fanatical Christian worldview, which incidentally is shared by all Abrahamic fundamentalists, women are the (innately evil) daughters of Eve. As punishment for their alleged sinfulness, they are not only to be subservient to men, they are to be imprisoned in the homes of their fathers and husbands, their duties limited to housekeeping and child-rearing. Rape – the atrocity itself and the chain-of-command's diligent protection of the rapists -- is therefore part of “god's divine plan” to re-subjugate the entire female gender: that is, to drive women out of the military and out of the workforce in general and eventually “put woman back in her divinely ordained place.”

The troubling fact this horror-story is not being covered despite the abundant topical evidence -- the persecution of non-believers at the Air Force Academy, less-well-publicized reports of similar outrages at the other service academies, theocratic pronouncements by various general officers, major publications of at least four books discussing the theocratic threat to constitutional governance etc. ad nauseam – suggests even alternative mainstream media is now subject to theocratic censorship.

If this is not so -- if the Christian theocrats are not already so powerful they are muffling even allegedly alternative media -- then why is this story being suppressed?

(I ask not merely as a regular reader but as formerly award-winning print journalist, mostly a newspaper reporter, retired after a career spanning a half-century. Given only the publicly available sources, I could put together a basic report -- “Rape and the Christianization of the U.S. Military” -- in no more than a week. With time to cultivate inside sources and otherwise properly investigate the matter, a competent reporter could easily produce a Pulitzer-class story in two or three months.)

That this story has not already been broken is the most damning indictment yet of our allegedly "free" press.

*

In response to another poster on the “Culture of Abuse” thread, I point out I have written many times of rape and the Christianization of the military: access the TypePad edition of OAN, go to archives, then type in "theocracy" (no quotation marks).

For the record, the four books cited above are: The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet, Harper: 2008); American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges, Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.: 2006); American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Kevin Phillips, Viking: 2006); The Age of American Unreason, especially Chapter 8 (Susan Jacoby, Pantheon Books: 2008).

The best of these is Sharlet's work. Phillips' text is interesting because he is a conservative but nevertheless is appalled by the theocratic threat, while Jacoby's work is a general exposé on the Moron Nation (as I sometimes call it) that has resulted from capitalism's methodical “moronation” (my term for “dumbing down”) of the national mentality. 

Other reliable sources on the theocratic threat include Americans United for Separation of Church and State; Theocracy Watch; Catholic Watch and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. AU's role is explained by its name. Theocracy Watch is an encyclopaedic source on the effort to impose Biblical Law on the United States, but in its fealty to the Democratic Party is blind to the Democrats' pro-theocracy efforts, for example Hillary Clinton's secret, pro-Biblical-Law  collaboration with Sam Brownback as exposed on pages 272-277 of Sharlet's book. Catholic Watch monitors the efforts by the Roman Catholic Church to buy up all U.S. health-care facilities and thereby impose total bans on contraception and legally assisted suicide, while the Military Religious Freedom Foundation fights the forcible Christianization of the armed forces. 

I think there are two reasons the predatory nature of Christianity is suppressed by publications on the USian Left. The first is elitist arrogance, which since the 1960s has been the Left's downfall, in this instance the assumption religion is irrelevant (never mind the fact the U.S. is the most fanatically religious nation in the industrial world). The second reason is political correctness: to acknowledge Christian fanaticism is to acknowledge the fanaticism of Abrahamic religion in general, which of necessity would include acknowledgement of Islamic fanaticism – which political correctness forbids – and acknowledgement of Jewish fanaticism as well.  

That said, the last and best word of this week's column comes from a dear friend's reaction to the Ukraine crisis (and Goddess grant her foresight is better than mine): “I don't think we'll get into a land war with Russia over some peninsula in the the Black Sea – strategic to others, but not to us – and I'm very sick of our continuing to clean up the messes created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the imperial ambitions of Europe!”

LB/2 March 2014

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