Are Ruling-Class Feminists Out to Kill 99% Solidarity?

(Note to readers on Blogger: a much more graphically sophisticated version of this blog -- identical text, slightly different headline due to format spacing -- is available at http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/. The TypePad version also includes several portfolios of my photography, much of it previously published, some of it dating back to the 1960s.)

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NORMALLY I AM uncomfortable writing about feminism because, being male, I can never have an insider's appreciation of its dynamics. Moreover I believe the blessing (or curse) of a womb – and with it the implicit responsibility for mothering (or not) – creates in every female a perspective we males might approach intellectually but cannot possibly comprehend emotionally. Hence my usual response to feminism is akin to the respectfully inquisitive silence with which a hopelessly left-brained student might approach a Zen master. I know I will never achieve enlightenment – at least not in this lifetime – though I am unquestionably willing to learn whatever wisdom the master deigns to impart.

But twice this year already, the lily-white exponents of a uniquely USian brand of feminism – the “material girl” ideology so antagonistically antithetical to feminism's socialist roots I am compelled to label it “Ayn Rand Feminism” – have sunk their incipiently fascist fangs into progressive people and causes, first by public repudiation of reproductive-rights heroine Sandra Fluke  in retaliation for her progressive economic views, now more recently by denouncing the hacker-collective Anonymous and the women's-equality collective UltraViolet as “white-knight vigilantes” for their courageous defense of rape victims. Thus the Ayn Rand feminists have begun to brandish their fealty to the Ruling Class much as the Teabag Party asserts its lockstep adoration of the One Percent, which means these particular feminists are now – like any other organ of capitalist governance – a legitimate target of socialist criticism regardless of the critic's gender.

What therefore follows is a much-enlarged version of a commentary I posted two weeks ago on Reader Supported News in response to a startling piece of gender-war invective entitled “Brad Pitt's New Movie on the Steubenville Rape Case Has the Wrong Protagonist,” the text cited in the second of the above links. By Tara Culp-Ressler, it offers an updated version of the old gender-warrior doctrine that no man should ever be allowed to help the women's movement lest his good deeds reinforce not only his (despicable) male ego but strengthen the shackles of patriarchy as well – and that any woman who disagrees is a hopeless reactionary, part of the problem rather than the solution.

I ran afoul of that uniquely white-bourgeois dogma nearly 40 years ago, when I was an investigative reporter, and its resurrection renews a sense of shame that prompts me to reveal now a fact I should have disclosed then. Here is the whole story:

An assertively Christian hospital that served a large and populous suburb of a major city refused to treat rape victims lest the association with sex and violence taint its godly image. Despite the fact an executive of the local rape-relief organization was my lover, I got the story not from her but because in those days I had the best cop sources in the area, probably in the entire state, and the cops complained to me about the hospital after one of their fellow officers ran afoul of its atrocious policy while seeking emergency-room care for an especially distraught rape victim. The cops, who in that era still believed their job was to protect and serve the citizenry rather than to serve the One Percent as its army of occupation, were genuinely furious. Several officers correctly likened the hospital's coldly enforced anti-rape-victim policy to psychologically re-assaulting the victim. After my usual telephone-and-shoe-leather effort unearthed an extended pattern of such abuses, I confronted the perpetrators and wrote my report, a blistering story that ran atop Page One.

But to my lingering shame, I omitted from follow-up stories how the local rape-relief group had known of the problem for years but had deliberately kept it secret – apparently for two reasons: they hoped to get sole credit for negotiating a solution, and they feared some (male) “do-gooders” might discover the problem, forcefully solve it (exactly as the cops and I did), and thereby – or so these gender-warriors reasoned – perpetuate male supremacy. In other words, the white, petit bourgeois feminists who ran the rape-relief organization believed it was better for rape victims to be denied proper care at their local Christian hospital (and thus be forced to travel as much as 50 crow-miles to a secular hospital), than for anyone other than the feminist movement – and better yet this specific rape-relief organization – to get credit for solving the problem.

Again to my shame, I half-assedly rationalized my act of self-censorship by telling myself my inside knowledge of the group's operations and policies was off-the-record information. Now nearly five decades after the fact and with the unforgiving, pre-graveyard clarity of old age, I confess my rationalization was total bullshit. The truth is I suppressed that vital detail merely to sustain my relationship with the rape-relief executive; I was living with her in her own house, and the alternative would have been instant homelessness. In any other circumstances, such a deliberate cover-up of atrocities would have either been in my lead or in my second and third grafs. Given a time machine to go back to the where and when, here is how I would write the story now:

Rape victims in Gastropoda County are thrice victimized – first by the rapist, then by Gastropoda Christian Hospital, finally by the very rape-relief organization that claims to be the victims' advocate and protector.

These circumstances came to light after police sources described the chilling ouster of a distraught rape victim from the GCH emergency room two weeks ago. Subsequent investigation brought to light at least a half dozen other such incidents.

Now GCH executives reluctantly admit it bars rape victims from its emergency room and has forcibly ejected the few who have managed to get past its gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, Gastropoda County Rape Relief officials just-as-reluctantly admitted they've known about the problem for years but have kept it secret. They claim the secrecy was essential to what they describe as an “ongoing” effort to negotiate with hospital management to change its anti-rape-victim policy.

But no such negotiations, spokespersons for both organizations concede, have ever taken place.

Moreover, the hospital's executive director insists he and his managerial colleagues were never asked to undertake such talks.

The hospital's longstanding opposition to treating rape victims – which inside sources say grows out of its owners' fear any association with sex and violence will besmirch the institution's image of “Christian godliness” – is confirmed by records in...

(The anonymity with which I am now cloaking this report is in response to three facts: [1]-my clips of the original story, and therefore my ability to confirm its published details, were destroyed by the same fire that in 1983 obliterated all my life's work, and I cannot replace the clips as the newspaper's morgue of bound copies did not survive corporate bankruptcy in the mid-1980s, nor – for reasons I am unable to determine (especially since it was the local paper of record) – were its editions ever microfilmed by the local library; [2]-the hospital long ago changed hands and is now under secular ownership; [3]-the sources and perpetrators are either retired, dead or otherwise unable to defend themselves.)

Significantly, my lover had made it clear she was uncomfortable with the story from the moment I told her what I was working on. But we never had time to discuss the details of her discomfort. Hence I did not foresee her anger, much less its intensity. When I with my bottle of celebratory wine arrived at our dwelling the night after the story broke, I expected a joyful and exuberant welcome – at the very least a thank-you embrace and a “well done” in recognition of the quality of the work. Instead I was greeted with an unprecedented outpouring of anger and contempt. My reporting, she said, had damn near gotten her fired; some of the members of her board of directors accused her of using her relationship with me to foster publication of the story, thereby perpetuating the sex-for-favors dynamic of patriarchy; others condemned her for allowing a male to “invade” a realm of advocacy they believed should be exclusively female – never mind at least 10 percent of all rape victims are male; still others insisted she should have clandestinely pressured my editor and even my publisher to reassign the story to a woman. When the board voted on her proposed firing, she said, the termination motion failed by only one vote.

To say I was shocked is an understatement, but mostly I was enraged by the indifference to victims that to me had suddenly emerged as the common stance of everyone but the cops and had therefore become the core issue of the entire story. Finally I responded accordingly: “You of all people know how good a reporter I am; you know I'd have found out about it even if you and I had never met – and what I should do now, what I fucking-A-tweet would do right this minute if our circumstances were different, is write a new story revealing everything you told me tonight.” What I did not say, not only because it was too painfully embarrassing for me to verbalize but because both of us clearly knew it already, is that she could goddamn well thank her lucky stars I was living in her house, which meant there was no way I could write the rest of the story without condemning myself to instant eviction. Needless to say, the confrontation killed the relationship, though the process of breaking up would consume another month or two. It also tossed a huge bucket of cold water on my journalistic pride.

Nevertheless the story made a helluva big wave – big enough the hospital's management was forced to reverse their anti-rape-victim policy literally hours after the paper hit the street. They were also forced to pay for their emergency-room personnel to get the medical and psychological training necessary to provide proper care for rape victims of both genders. As ashamed as I am of my act of self-censorship, I remain fiercely proud of what my story accomplished.

(I should note here that journalism of that era – at least as it used to be practiced on a good many local newspapers here in the pre-global-economy United States – was mostly a Working-Class calling. It drew from blue-collar families the same sorts of aggressively bright kids who might otherwise have gone into the cops or the priesthood or maybe the military. Sometimes it even enabled a declassé proletarian like myself to actually better people's lives, which to me was always its biggest attraction.)

Apropos the malice directed at males accused of poaching in political or conceptual territory certain feminists believe should be theirs alone, that hospital story was not my first encounter with it. A few years earlier, when I was an undergraduate, it hamstrung a major research project of mine, part of the work that would become the forever-lost book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which was destroyed with all its research notes and most of its photography in the 1983 fire. “Dancer,” an investigative reporter's 24-year probe of the origins and significance of the '60s Countercultural Rebellion, concluded the rebels were resurrecting a modern variant of the ancient matriarchal or at least pre-patriarchal consciousness. My findings were based on the Counterculture's music, poetry, journalism, ritual, social structures, economics and the expression of its values in environmentalism, feminism, the back-to-the-land movement and the neo-pagan renaissance. (It is an aside, but the Jungian Edward Whitmont reached a similar conclusion from very different data. But Whitmont's work, unlike my own, was carefully apolitical and therefore achieved significant publication, for which see The Return of the Goddess, Crossroad: 1982.)

While working on “Dancer,” I had foolishly imagined, exactly as I had while putting together the hospital story, that feminists would applaud my disclosures. After all, the pioneers in the “Dancer”-relevant fields of folklore and myth were themselves males. But by the early '70s, the gender-war feminists believed they had appropriated these realms as their own, and they defended their conquests with the passive-aggressive nastiness and backstabbing that characterizes academic ferocity whether male or female. Meanwhile the males associated with my project, an undergraduate thesis, seemed to regard me as a traitor to my gender. Hence though I got enough credit for the research and writing to win my bachelor's degree, my thesis itself was rejected.

And now, decades later, Culp-Ressler has resurrected the same hateful doctrine of gender-exclusivity not just to belittle Anonymous and its breathtakingly courageous defiance of draconian prison terms, but to denounce UltraViolet, which unlike its (white bourgeois) sister organizations defends oppressed women without (ironically) discriminating on the basis of caste, ethnicity or the presence of male allies.

In this same context, the Emily's List endorsement of “fiscal conservatism” – a euphemism for the genocidal savagery of Ayn Rand economics – is typical of the feminism spawned by capitalist co-optation and redirection of the USian second-wave feminist movement. (See again the first of the above links.) Because Second Wave Feminism was a daughter of the New Left of the 1960s, its dominant vision was overwhelmingly petit bourgeois and often fiercely anti-intellectual; therefore, despite its “women's liberation” label and its use of socialist rhetoric, it was frequently hostile not just to the historical truth of class struggle,  but to any analysis based on the revolutionary traditions of socialism and Marxism. Stripped of socialist armor, it was therefore easy prey for infiltrators and agents provocateur. That's why the USian feminism of the so-called “mainstream” remains indifferent to the outsourcing of jobs and downsizing of paychecks characteristic of the capitalist (Ayn Rand) moral imbecility that subjugates the USian 99 Percent. It does not acknowledge the fact that for a Working-Class woman, the loss of health insurance inflicted by global-economy outsourcing is often the total loss of reproductive freedom, an ugly reality carefully suppressed by Emily's List and the (Free Trade) Democrats in general. Nor – despite Big Lies to the contrary – is there any guarantee of rescue from the theocratic Christian effort to prohibit Obamacare from providing any satisfactory alternative.  Meanwhile, Rand herself has become an USian feminist heroine,  which explains not just the Emily's List stance, but bourgeois white USian feminism's unabashed support of capitalism itself, particularly as exemplified by the all the women who define themselves as “anti-union progressives.”

Could it then be a coincidence such divisiveness reappears just as we in the USian Imperial Homeland seem to be making genuine progress toward proletarian solidarity? Surely not, as every available indication points to the Ruling Class mustering all its resources to suppress what it fears is looming revolution. This mustering includes not only the obvious efforts – for example the attempt by the Democratic Party to co-opt (and thereby betray) Socialist Alternative's demand for a $15-per-hour minimum wage – but the newly exposed program under which secret-police agents accompany the military into overseas combat (for which see “Outside Agitation Elsewhere” below). Obviously, such a program has only one objective: to ensure the agents are kill-hardened enough to reliably follow orders when they are commanded to exterminate suspected revolutionaries at home. In this oppressive context, I am not surprised by the anti-99 Percent treachery of the feminism discussed above. In truth it is an old story, so old we should expect nothing else from a movement that was in too-large measure co-opted by the One Percent  from about 1970 onward, with the result its exclusion of impoverished women and women of color has long been infamous.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere: The big news is the ongoing neo-Nazification of the United States, the result of capitalism maturing into fascism, thereby not only fulfilling the predictions of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin but validating Marxism itself. (Aside: what the founders of Marxism called “imperialism,” we today know as fascism or Nazism.) Here are two links, with brief expositions of outside agitation on each of the comment threads: “Now We Know What's Being Done in Our Name,” in which Esquire's Charles Pierce writes about the leaked torture-memo scandal,  and “FBI Agents Were Deployed in Hundreds of JSOC Raids Conducted in Iraq & Afghanistan,” which describes how the USian equivalent of the Okhrana (or maybe the Gestapo) is being trained to suppress  the inevitable uprising against capitalism that is bound to occur here in the post-American-Dream wastelands.

LB/13 April 2014

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Notes on Betrayals Personal and Political, Old and New

(Edited 18/2/2014 to clean up the debris of writing in haste to avoid the pangs of painful memories.)

I APOLOGIZE FOR the tardiness of this post. The activities of “retirement” that included two days of volunteer editorial work plus responding to a wealth of relevant material on other websites seemed to have left me no time for the weekly contemplation, research and writing that usually keynotes this space. Instead I planned to note in passing how my compulsion to outside agitate on other sites had generated a total of eight posts in four days, which is probably a personal record for Internet contributions. I would then write a few sentences on the common concerns – deliberate disinformation, co-optation and political betrayal (mostly the latter) – that bind these eight posts into a topical anthology and headline it accordingly.

But – such is the undeniable (white, gray and sometimes black) magick of writing – what I intended wasn't at all what happened.

After I boasted of my eight-post output, I sat smiling at the fact I was fairly sure it's a high-water mark I haven't approached since the good old days when I was often summoned to stand in as a rewrite-man on The Jersey Journal (1969-1970), where I was a reportorial top gun, a presumably up-and-coming young journalist who was not only appreciated and respected by my employers but also well-liked by most of my colleagues.

Now I fondly remembered the uniquely welcoming smell of paper, machine-oil, tobacco-smoke and ink that characterized all big-city newsrooms of that era. I remembered the staccato of typewriters and the faster more assertive riffs of wire-service teletypes punctuated in random counterpoint by bulletin bells and ringing telephones and the suck-bang of the pneumatic tubes that carried skillfully edited copy to the composing room where with equal skill it was set in type cast from molten lead. I remembered too the self-assured expression of my own editorial talents that always seemed bolstered by this atonal but profoundly energizing symphony as it rose to its crescendo at our main deadline, straight-up noon for the big makeover we called the North Lift. And now as I contemplated these memories, I realized they had been rendered poignant by the sepia-toning that characterizes history and the quietude imposed by distance – that they were shaping themselves into a spontaneous eulogy to a breed of journalist and a rewarding intensity of life and work and commitment that is no more, and I began to write how good I felt about having been part of all that.

Next much to my surprise it came to me I had set my all-time story-production record not during good times at The JJ, but during the bad old days I was a reporter and sometimes photographer for The Federal Way News, from the fall of 1976 through the first half of 1981.

Such is the blessing – and the curse – of writing. To write is to remember, and sometimes, even amidst pleasant memories, it is to suddenly and unexpectedly recall painful, hitherto-suppressed details: in this case all the reasons why I have no fond memories of the The Federal Way News, none whatsoever. It was there I was paid the lowest wages of my career and evaluated not for the quality of my work but for whether I met a weekly word-quota and whether my personality meshed with the personalities of the other (disgruntled) occupants of the editorial hive, which mostly it didn't, not the least because I cannot respect people who flee from their own intellectual potential or cringe in terror and/or rat you out to management if you so much as whisper the word “union.” At first – remembering all this wretchedness here and now 33 years after the fact – I was merely taken aback. But then the rest of the details rose to haunt me like vengeful ghosts, and I was overwhelmed by hurt and anger.

Unlike The JJ, where we were proud of what we did and for whom we did it and proud too we were represented by the Hudson County Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO, The FWN was a journalistic sweatshop and was infamous as such throughout Washington state and maybe the entire Pacific Northwest. You never knew whether you were meeting the word-quota because it was deliberately kept secret – a sadistic albeit diabolically effective means of ensuring the subjugation of the staff. But that wasn't its only deficiency. As I was warned over drinks one night by a friendly editor at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, FWN had such a bad reputation for suppressing stories to placate advertisers, even if you won a Pulitzer there, you probably wouldn't get any credit for it because of where you'd been working. “You wanna get back in the game,” he said, “you gotta get out of Federal Way and onto a real newspaper first.”

I wrote some significant and award-winning stories at FWN – exposés that changed local policies, won me a place on Gov. Dixy Lee Ray's enemies list and in one instance beat a sneaky Christian effort to close gay and singles bars – but all that really mattered to the bosses was whether the text was long enough to fill spaces between the advertisements. Not only did my writing suffer a ruinous lack of discipline resulting from FWN's operational shibboleth of longer is (always) better; my mental health was wounded too. Vicious, relentless bullying by the psychological thug who was FWN's glaringly talentless editor for most of my five years there was the most painfully wrenching workplace experience of my entire life.

Though I would not let myself admit it until now, his constant derision and belittlement had weakened me to the point I was unable to muster the emotional strength necessary to find a better job, much less return to the East Coast where I belonged. His undeserved but relentless antagonism was also, because of my own history, an especially wounding form of betrayal. Bullied and abused as a child, I had turned to journalism as a sanctuary, a realm wherein I could be myself and  demonstrate my true strengths without fear of ridicule or assault, and so it had been on every publication for which I had worked in New York City, New Jersey, Michigan and even during most of the years I worked in the South. But my experience at FWN soon became a nightmare, and a source of nightmares, and so it remained until the editor was fired.

Eventually, maybe a year later at the beginning of the downsizing that preceded the paper's bankruptcy, I got the boot too. At least I was laid off rather than fired, which meant I could collect unemployment compensation.

As for my alleged colleagues, they were obviously glad to see me leave. None attended my going-away party, a small gathering hosted by a few non-newspaper people, mostly cops who had come to know me as the one local reporter they could trust to get the facts right and never burn a clandestine source. Despite the nagging uncertainties of joblessness amidst the recession Reagan and his cronies imposed to begin the reduction of everybody's wages, I cashed my last FWN paycheck with feelings of joy I imagine are akin to those of a man newly freed from a hard-time prison. But by then it was too late for any rapid recovery; so damaged was I, it took a season as engineer/deckhand on the Caroline, a 96-foot salmon-seiner out of Bellingham's Squalicum Harbor, to even begin to rebuild my self-confidence, for which my eternal gratitude to Skipper Andy Zanchi.

Indeed this is the first time I have been able to write of my circumstances at The Federal Way News. In fact it is the first time I have even spoken of these circumstances save in denials voiced to my long-ago lover who (though she was two decades my junior), was nevertheless perceptive enough to recognize in me the symptoms of a victimization I could not bear to admit to myself. Perhaps my inability to confront the associated issues was one of the underlying reasons we broke apart. In any case she was a notably kind young woman who unintentionally took my heart with her when she left. But perhaps some good came out of those dismal FWN years too; perhaps that's why I'm yet so sensitive to the betrayals now routinely inflicted on us by politicians, bureaucrats and alleged advocates.

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(Note: The Federal Way News for which I worked from 1976 through 1981 no longer exists. Originally a weekly shopper, its management had intended to make it a daily newspaper – the promise that [foolishly] diverted me from a ticket-in-my-pocket return to New York City. Though the paper subsequently achieved thrice-weekly publication and at one point seemed sure to go daily – the pie-in-the-sky by which I rationalized enduring the editor's psychological brutality – FWN nevertheless went bankrupt during the 1980s. It was then bought by The Seattle Times and shut down. The present Federal Way News, a weekly, has no organizational connection to the former publication by the same name.)

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“Our Movement Must Desegregate, or We'll Lose”  Carl Gibson of Reader Supported News fumbles for euphemisms to enable his otherwise accurate reporting of how Ayn-Rand-minded Emily's List “feminists” betrayed Rush-Limbaugh-target Sandra Fluke and how her betrayal is a teachable moment. I sharply criticize the opacity of Gibson's language: “his chosen words are clearly intended to avoid the implicitly Marxist terms 'ideological solidarity' and 'ideological discipline' – both of which are necessities the USian Left self-destructively rejects.”  Then I commend his insight – and refute a comment-poster's absurd claim the Democratic Party might foster such solidarity and discipline. “The Democrats,” I explain, “who maliciously conceal their fascist zealotry beneath progressive slogans – are the primary deceiver in USian politics. By contrast, the Republicans have been a vessel of USian fascism since the 1920s and, now as then, make no secret of it. Thus the de facto one-party rule that defines USian governance...(Thus too) Emily's List's endorsement of 'fiscal conservatism' – another euphemism for economic savagery – is typical of the Ayn Rand feminism spawned by capitalist co-optation of the USian feminist movement. As the loss of jobs and income that subjugates the USian 99 Percent, women are denied reproductive freedom by the loss of health insurance, a fact deliberately ignored by Emily's List and the Democrats in general. Nor – despite Big Lies to the contrary – does Obamacare provide a satisfactory alternative. Meanwhile, Rand herself has become an USian feminist heroine, which explains not just the Emily's List stance, but bourgeois white USian feminism's tacit approval of capitalist malevolence.”

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“The Empowerment Elite Claims Feminism” Jessica Valenti, the founder of the compellingly radical website Feministing, exposes a new effort to neutralize feminism. I reply that TEDWomen, the target of Valenti's reporting,  is undoubtedly (yet another) effort by the One Percent – the diabolical cunning of which we underestimate at our own peril – to co-opt the one radical movement that, despite all the odds against it, has nevertheless forced (some) amelioration on the ever-more-openly savage Ayn Rand capitalism that governs the United States. In this context, the lily-white, bourgeois nature of TED and TEDWomen should surprise no one: it is merely a reflection of the ethnicity of the USian Ruling Class and the bigotry therein...“As to TED's taboo on discussing reproductive freedom, this is a strong indication the organization is a clandestine collaborator with the forces of Christian theocracy -- the most obscenely well-funded, relentlessly fanatical subversives in USian history. (Apropos which, note the secret collaboration between Hillary Clinton and Sam Brownback, exposed by Jeff Sharlet in The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, [Harper: 2008], pgs. 272-277.)”

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“Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-Lite?” Robert Parry of Consortium News lays bear some ugly truths that suggest the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is no more a “change we can believe in” than President Obama was. I point out she's “infinitely worse than 'neocon-light' or even neocon-heavy,” again citing Sharlet's report she's a clandestine theocrat, secretly collaborating with Brownback and others of his ilk to impose biblical law on the United States. Her specialty, says Sharlet, is deceptive legislation “dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunnelling beneath it.” The same strategy of stealthy oppression is enabling the Roman Catholic Church to ban birth control, abortion and end-of-life choices by buying up U.S. health care facilities,  already a crisis in Washington state.

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“Quit Talking About Equal Pay and Do Something”  Elizabeth Schulte of Socialist Worker explores how President Obama talks progressive change but then does nothing to make it happen and often actually sabotages the effort. She speculates the same presidential tactic will betray the struggle to close the wage gap that allows women only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. In the associated comment thread I note this sort of treachery is in fact the president's defining characteristic. Forever Janus-faced, he presents himself as Obama the Orator, pledging “change we can believe in.” But then he invariably shifts to Barack the Betrayer – “his true imperial self” – and he allows no changes save those that define, advance and perpetuate capitalist governance. A subsequent comment by another poster prompts me to list seven ways Obama has done more harm than any other president in my lifetime, which began in 1940. 

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“Reagan's 'Liberal' Son Takes on Ted Cruz” Elias Isquith of Salon discuses another debate over Republican obstructionism. I say the purpose of all such debates is to normalize austerity – “a genteel euphemism for genocidal cutbacks by which the One Percent intend to kill off all of us they consider 'surplus workers' – that is, any of us (elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed) who are no longer exploitable for profit...The Republicans, I add, “are capitalism's trail-breakers, as in their proposed $40 billion cut in food stamps. The Democrats are capitalism's facilitators, as in the 'compromise' food-stamp cutback of $8.7 billion. It's rule by One Party of Two Names – the Capitalist Party – and we the people are the victims.

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“House Democrats Call for Discharge Petitions!” Thom Hartmann reports the House Democrats are planning a new ploy to move legislation obstructed by the Republicans. I respond: “What is obvious here --what makes me grin with glee -- is how mere mention of 'revolutionary socialism' (as by Councilwoman Kshama Sawant in Seattle) has terrified the Democratic Party into a  pretense of returning to New Deal values. That – and the fact it proves beyond argument socialism is anything but 'dead' or 'irrelevant' – is the real story behind these discharge petitions, though you'll never read it in so-called 'mainstream' (i.e., Ruling Class) media.” 

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“Distorting Russia: How the American media misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine”   Stephen F. Cohen reports via The Nation on the disinformation and outright lies USian “mainstream” (Ruling Class) media is disseminating about Russia. I suggest the real reason U.S. media is spewing anti-Russian propaganda is the fact the second largest political organization in today's Russia is the Communist Party. My comment then triggers a long series of exchanges on the comment thread, for which it's necessary to scroll way, way down. 

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“Will US Civil Liberties Survive the Occupy Trial?”  Chase Madar of the Guardian questions whether the USian homeland's ever-more-restricted freedom to peaceably assemble will survive the trial of an Occupy activist who was savaged by New York City cops. The resultant comment thread is taken over and hogged by a Christian apologist for fascism, but I try to bring it back to one of Madar's most vital points: that the USian incarceration rate now exceeds even those of the former Soviet Union and East Germany. I point out the only valid incarceration-rate comparison is between the Third Reich of Nazi Germany and the de facto Fourth Reich of the United States – and even then, including the Nazi concentration camps – Internet data suggests the USian rate is worse. Though my let's-get-back-on-topic post wins ten reader thumbs-up, my effort is to no avail: the Christian continues to demonstrate Christian love by shouting down everyone else. 

LB/16 February 2014

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