The Postmortem Continues: Some Genuine Leftists Awaken; the Identity-Politics Pseudo-Left Remains as Arrogant and Vindictively Counter-Revolutionary as Ever

WE THE PEOPLE can no longer doubt Donald Trump is the new Hitler. Last week – particularly given the conciliatory tone of his victory speech,  I said we should wait and see what sort of a president Trump would be – but his appointment of the notorious white supremacist Steve Bannon as his chief advisor tells us all we need to know.

Thus before the last few remnants of our Bill of Rights  are forever abolished, we who survived the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama prelude to Trump's Fourth Reich and now find ourselves among this not-so-New Order's publicly declared targets should at least try to understand the psychological cunning by which the capitalists manipulated Moron Nation into crowning their Donald as Führer of our species' deadliest and most relentlessly tyrannical empire.

For only by studying what has been done to us – and indeed what we have thus done to ourselves – might we begin to comprehend the unbearable truth that capitalism is naught but pure Evil, the most relentlessly powerful Evil in our maliciously abused Mother Earth's history, Evil so infinitely huge and overwhelming it has burst the doctrinal bounds of theological conceptualization and become instead the now-probably irreversible mechanism of ecocidal apocalypse, whether by thermonuclear war (as was intended by fascist Hillary), or by patriarchal hatred of Woman and her macrocosm Nature soon to be enshrined as federal policy by Trump and his JesuNazi Vice-President Mike Pence.

Nor should we overlook the increasing probability the election of Trump was the product of the ultimate, climactic (and almost certainly terminal) charade of USian “democracy” – the breathtakingly Evil consequence of an utterly Evil deception in which the One Percenters, the maliciously Evil capitalist overlords of both the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties, suppressed the Sanders candidacy to inflame our disgust with the Hillary candidacy, which they had already mandated to ensure the election of Trump and Pence – the shortest most direct route to the Nazi tyranny the capitalists have been seeking for the past 85 years.

Acknowledging these unbearably bitter truths and probabilities, armed with such excruciatingly painful recognitions, we might then fulfill Sun Tzu's prerequisite, “Know the enemy and know yourself, and in one hundred battles you will never be in peril.” In other words – if our species somehow survives the forthcoming debacle and we the people of the USian Homeland somehow at last banish our obstructive optimism – we might thus begin the long process of helping our species evolve a global path to humanitarian victory.

Such is the reasoning that underlies my belief in Marxism. Despite Marxism's obvious failures – the drowning of the Soviet Union in the dark undertow of Russian history  and the more notorious collapse of the People's Republic of China into zero-tolerance state capitalism – it remains the only ideology on earth with sufficient discipline to successfully resist (and perhaps even topple and permanently eliminate) the bottomless horror of Nazism – the terminal form of capitalism – that once again openly assaults us. But now, thanks to Trump's White House predecessors, it possesses incalculably more powers of subjugation than its Third Reich forefathers might ever have imagined. And there is no longer a Red Army nor anything like it to ensure our victory.

(Note: I have added a few links – indicated as “added link” – to the following reports to exemplify the points they make.)

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It Was the Rise of the Davos Class That Sealed America's Fate (Naomi Klein, Guardian UK): They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates (added link). They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry. But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate...Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present...For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

The only point on which I would quibble with Ms. Klein is her either/or assertion about the Democratic (sic) Party.

Given its long history of betraying the 99 Percent – which started the instant a Missouri political hack named Harry S. Truman became president (but which dates to the era in which it was the party of slavery and slave-owners) – it should be obvious to anyone of Ms. Klein's foresighted intelligence the only fate suitable for the Democratic (sic) Party is not just abandonment but methodical destruction.

Otherwise the Democrats' history of wanton betrayals will merely repeat itself again.

But where to start? Moron Nation, proven so by its election of Trump, most assuredly lacks the ability, the will and most importantly the courage to provide the requisite revolutionary leadership.

Asked without a scintilla of facetiousness: where is Vladimir Lenin now that we so desperately need him? Where is the old ComIntern? Where, finally, is the Soviet Union? (Never forget it was the USSR that during the 1930s provided us with a leadership built from our own people so effectively we nearly overthrew capitalism here in its global headquarters.)

Alas, there is nothing like that – no source of the requisite training and discipline -- in the world today. Which means Moron Nation is truly on its own – and when in history did a despotism of dunces ever give birth to anything save chaos, destruction and death?

Truly, only a miracle can save us now.

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My (very strong) suspicion is – apart from an even greater escalation of Democratic (sic) and Republican “austerity” – i.e., genocidal war on elderly, disabled and otherwise chronically impoverished people – there will be very little change in the status quo. (But given the 180-degree difference between Hillary's “public” and “private” policies, no doubt we'd have gotten that anyway, assuredly in a far more euphemistic form.) To make real change, we need a genuine revolution, and that will never happen here in Moron Nation, at least not in the lifetimes of anyone now living, because too much of the citizenry has been moronated into maliciously selfish submission.

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Never forget “the party of evil” is in fact one capitalist party of two deceptive names, Democratic (sic) and Republican.

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Trouble is, identity politics – the capitalist antidote to class consciousness – will abort (anti-capitalist) solidarity before it is even in the embryonic stage. The clitoris-envy misogyny of the anti-abortion Christian jihadist right; the forcible disarmament fanaticism of the pseudo-Left – people who truly believe every firearms owner is “a Nazi” and the mere ownership of a firearm is “an act of violence”; the Ku-Klux minded racists and Nazi-minded ableists of the Right; the tree-spiking environmentalists of the bourgeois Left, whose hatred of corporate depredations is exceed only by their demonstrably murderous hatred of Working Class people who have no other livelihood than logging – these differences and their corollaries, envenomed ad nauseam by hatreds of the same bottomless magnitude that tore apart the Weimar Republic and thus enabled Hitler, make any such (solidarity) hopeless under present circumstances.

The question then is how do we educate people on both sides of the political spectrum – people whose closed-minded zealotry proves them to be utterly ineducable.

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You (addressed to a hostile fellow RSN comment-thread poster) err grievously in equating Stalin with the Koch brothers. Read some history: Stalin was building an industrial nation from the ruins of a feudal nation. The Koch cabal is building a feudal nation from the ruins of an industrial nation.

But the implication of your “expect to learn Russian soon” – unintentionally to be sure (though maybe your subconscious is telling you something you should heed) – is that given present-day politics, Russia could well emerge from the global miasma as the savior of human liberty.

That savior most assuredly won't be Moron Nation, i.e., the United States of America.

Вы говорите по-русски?

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Before we damn Stalin as “a monster,” let us acknowledge the monstrous behavior of the United States, which for the most part went unchallenged by its citizenry until capitalism brought USian sadism home and the white population began to suffer the same depredations as indigenous populations abroad and minority or First Nations populations in the imperial homeland.

Then of course the white population, methodically moronated to self-destructive stupidity, did precisely as it was conditioned to do: note for example the required high school reading of Ayn Rand, a fictionalizer of Hitler's Mein Kampf whose work should never have been published, much less given, like gasoline thrown on a fire, to people capitalism had already raised from birth to be moral imbeciles. Thus in its ignorance-aborted quest for relief, Moron Nation voted in fascism. (Paragraph revised slightly to comply with format differences.)

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Think of the Electoral College as the national equivalent of the Democratic (sic) National Committee's “superdelegates.” Both serve the same class-war function – that is, making sure the will of the One Percent and the Ruling Class prevail over the will of the 99 Percent.

Just as the Democratic (sic) superdelegates parlayed an enormity of election fraud into ousting Sanders and nominating Hillary, so did the Electoral College parlay the candidacy of Hillary into the presidency of Donald Trump.

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Health Care in the Age of Trump (Adam Gaffney): The implications of the election  are widespread and multifaceted, ranging from the catastrophic impact a Trump presidency will have on climate change — and the attendant global health consequences — to the squeeze on reproductive health care access that will likely follow the rise of the Right. At the state level, important health care–related ballot initiatives went down in defeat, including a universal health care referendum in Colorado and an initiative in California...to mildly loosen Big Pharma’s tentacle-like grip on the state’s finances...Big Pharma and the insurance industry (spent) huge sums...Republicans now...(can) remold the nation’s health care system into something both uglier and more lucrative...Pharma stocks soared the day after the election).

Mr. Gaffney – still in denial of Tuesday's results – asks, “And how can we keep the dream for single-payer alive?”

The answer, of course, is that any hope of single-payer is dead, as dead as the so-called “American Dream,” in other words, dead forever with no hope of resurrection.

Apropos the Ayn Rand influence cited by (a fellow-comment-thread contributor), the significant fact about Rand is that she is the fictionalizer of Hitler's Mein Kampf: just as der Führer did, she demands extermination of all untermenschen, which by USian definition – now made policy by the Trumpite electorate – includes racial, ethnic and sexual minorities; those of us who are chronically impoverished, elderly and/or disabled; and most of all anyone who is chronically ill.

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Trump Voters Will Not Like What Happens Next (Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post): ...Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out,  and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president...The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up”...The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple of six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls...(but)...The uneducated white males who elected him, they will not like what happens next.

I should thank Keillor for his malevolent arrogance, firstly because it demonstrates exactly why Trump won; secondly because it proves the truth that earned me my all-time RSN down-thumb high, 62 at last count.

What I wrote is that “Prairie Home Companion...was a malicious satire...on those flyover folk...'Wobegon' was pronounced 'Woe-begone,' as in woe-begone peasants...The program was also a devastating parody...on 1950s rural-U.S. midday radio...For that reason, I never cared much for... Keillor nor for his perpetuation of USian class snobbery... I thought it wrong to make a mockery of people who could no more help being what they were than a polio victim in an iron lung could help being deathly ill.”

Obviously – note again the 62 red thumbs – revealing the now Keillor-proven truth about his vindictive elitism was the Hillaryite equivalent of owning a firearm, which the forcible disarmament cult damns as an “act of violence” that irrevocably defines one as “a Nazi.”

Indeed my only criticism of (another of Keillor's comment-thread critics) is the writerly observation that “hissy fit” is redundant. In the South, from whence the term originates, it was merely “hissy”: the ultimate hold-your-breath-until-purple, fall-to-the-floor, kick-shriek-and-shit-your-pants tantrum of a raging two-year-old boy, precisely as demonstrated above by Keillor's hateful invective.

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(To another RSN poster): I up-thumbed both your remarks, but must differ with you on one point. You wrote, “Bernie's revolution needs to find new legs – it'll be a winner in four years time.”

Sorry to disillusion you, but with Trump about to bring back the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (added link), Bernie's so-called “Revolution” and any other public expressions of Left-leaning thought, including this and any kindred websites, are living on borrowed time and will be dead in the foreseeable future.

What happened during the 1960s was our 1905; it is merely that the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals took much longer to crush us than the Tsar's Okhrana, police, Cossacks and soldiers took to crush the brave revolutionaries of '05.

Our 1917 – if it ever comes – will most assuredly not be led by Bernie Sanders, who betrayed the entire USian Left by his surrender to Hillary.

Indeed, I suspect this (Fourth) Reich, which pre-dates Trump by 53 years, will prove to be the Thousand-Year Reich Hitler imagined and with dreams of which his legions of Nazi war criminals further toxified the already-fascist USian Ruling Class when they were welcomed here after Germany's defeat. There is no power on earth that can beat it – not without destroying the planet – nor will the greedy submissiveness of Moron Nation ever dwindle, not until Mother Earth herself rises in apocalyptic rebellion against capitalist depredation. And by the time that happens, all of us alive today will be well and truly dead. Only a miracle can save us. 

By the one red thumb I've already gotten for this comment, it's clear some of you – probably in fact most of you – have no idea of the terrorism inflicted on this nation by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

It literally destroyed, literally forever, the lives of millions of USians – not only those it summoned to public degradation and financial lynching, but the millions more whose careers were destroyed and who were thus forever damned to inescapable poverty by the ripple effect of its indescribably vicious accusations. My father was one of this latter group; as in fact was I, my journalism career forever limited by the lynch-mob-like frenzy into which HUAC's accusations goaded the USian public. Ultimately, it is because of HUAC I will die in ever-more-wretched poverty, in all probability murdered by the poverty itself.

The primary legacy of HUAC's accusations was, firstly, the death, forever, of any ideologically disciplined (and therefore effective) opposition to capitalism, and, secondly, the fascist taint, “austerity” included, that poisons USian politics, culminating in the election of Trump and HUAC's vindictive return – its unprecedented tyranny now made truly omnipotent by all-seeing surveillance technology from which there is no possible escape.

Wake up, idiots. Unless you're my age (76) or older, you cannot begin to imagine the ruinous magnitude of the horrors soon to be unleashed on us.

Such is the ultimate malevolence (added link) of Moron Nation.

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Trans People Are Terrified of What Lies Ahead. We Must Look Out for One Another (Hannah Simpson, Guardian UK): The announcement that Donald Trump won the election was devastating for many people, but transgender people like me were especially frightened...The election of Donald Trump and Mike Pence to our nation’s highest office gives the social conservatives who championed them free reign to overturn decades of progress...A right-shifted supreme court could void all same-sex unions, and perhaps even challenge the fitness of transgender persons to be parents...any chance of the climate improving vanished this week.

I'd say Ms. Simpson is being optimistic: “could void” should be replaced with “will void” and “may well continue” be replaced with “will escalate.”

Here, of course, in the persecution of sexual nonconformists – which, mark my word – will be expanded to include heterosexual couples living together without marriage and communal households in which polyandry and/or bisexuality is common – is the ultimate and absolute proof of the infinitely murderous, infinitely sadistic viciousness of the Abrahamic god and therefore the defining core not just of Christianity, but of Judaism and Islam as well.

(With 60-something percent of the USian population believing the Bible as the literal word of god and therefore definitively fundamentalist whether they admit it or not, no wonder Trump won. And Pence is a theocratic, prosperity-gospel ogre [link added].)

The real winner, of course, is Moron Nation – a constituency now enabled to be as fanatically savage as their Jewish and Muslim counterparts in the Middle East.

Everyone in the targeted communities should waste no time in contacting Pink Pistols and learning the rudiments of effective self-defense.

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Does Trump Have a Mandate? (Marc Ash, Reader Supported News): For the second time in the fledgling 21st century, we are set upon by a right wing radical assuming the power of the US presidency without having won the popular vote.

Sorry, but (the) “50 years of progressive gains” (cited by a fellow comment-thread-contributor) is a Big Lie, an effective weapon in the One Percent's paralysis of USian political consciousness.

The era of “progressive gains” ended when President Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945. The era of revenge fascism now culminating in Trump, Pence and the resurrection of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee began immediately thereafter. The maliciously anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act became law on 23 June 1947. Any hope the U.S. might achieve economic democracy thus died forever, leading to the despair that, as in Weimar Germany, prompted the hopelessly oppressed 99 Percent to embrace fascism.

President Kennedy tried to revive the New Deal but was murdered on 22 November 1963 – the day future historians (if indeed there is a future) will cite as the date USian liberty died forever.

“Peace President” Johnson's so-called Great Society was ultimately nothing more than massive bribery to suppress resistance to his murderous Vietnam War. President Nixon, a fascist felon, began his second term by dropping all pretense of support for the 99 Percent's well-being, and our standard of living has declined steadily ever since.

True, there have been a few identity-politics gains since then, but these are mere Ruling Class giveaways. They have no impact on the increasing savagery of capitalism and capitalist governance, do nothing to alleviate our ever-worsening economic suffering and are therefore not “progressive” at all.

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It's Time for Progressives to Seize Control of the Democratic Party (Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News):  Donald Trump’s victory has left the Democratic Party open to redefining itself.

As I look back, defying Mr. Galindez's repetition of the Obama-ism by which the Betrayer justified his de facto pardon of the Bush Regime war criminals, what I see bolsters the suspicion I voiced on this site several weeks ago – that the One Percenters had concluded Trump was the more direct path to the Nazi Nation they've sought since the Bankers' Plot of 1934 (link added).

Indeed the mysterious failure of the Democratic (sic) Party's election-fraud apparatus seems to eliminate any other conclusion.

Moreover, Trump's appointees, apart from obvious Teabagger consolation prizes like Sarah Palin, are ideological twins of the neo-libs and neo-cons Hillary would have appointed to ensure our neo-subjugation.

Alas, the RSN posts in which I suggested the One Percent was secretly abandoning Hillary have seemingly been disappeared, though (the contributor screen-named) Radscal cited my suspicion:

“But Loren Bliss has gotten me thinking that the One Percent...may actually hope they could install Drumpf...for a more conventional fascist regime.”

Meanwhile let us not forget the support given Hillary by Messrs. Galindez, Ashe, Reich and Krugman fails the “which-side-are-you-on”  (link added) test so vital in times of intensified class-struggle and identifies them all as willing members of the One Percent's Ruling Class vassalage – a fact we dare not forget, particularly now that with the impending resurrection of HUAC we have to be McCarthy-era careful what we say or write in public.

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I frankly don't believe the Democratic (sic) Party CAN be reformed. Not now, not ever. Like the Republican Party, the Democratic (sic) Party is in fact the party of capitalism and capitalist governance, i.e., fascism.

Nor, given the realities of late-stage capitalism, can either party EVER be anything but a betrayer of the 99 Percent. Indeed, if we have not learned that lesson from the 2016 presidential campaign, we are clearly incapable of learning anything at all.

What we need is a genuine Democratic Socialist Labor Party, sworn from the moment of its formation to fight the class war on behalf the entire 99 Percent.

Won't happen, of course – the Moron Nation pseudo-Left is too invested in its self-destructive identity politics, too moronated-stupid to ever give them up, too bourgeois-hateful of blue-collar workers and too damn cowardly to ever embrace the hard and sometimes deadly work of revolution.

But it is nice to think about...

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Think logically. What are we told by the fact the Democratic (sic) Party is submissively silent on the Republicans' genocidal plans to destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security?

What we are told by their silence is that the Democrats' private position is the same as the Republicans' public position.

In other words, had Hillary been elected, the same thing would now be happening.

Which vividly illustrates why the Democratic (sic) Party is infinitely worse than the Republican Party. Both are parties of capitalist governance – i.e., fascism. The Republicans admit it – even boast about it. By contrast, the Democrats hide their fascism behind a smokescreen of Big Lies – again Hillary's “public” versus “private” positions.

Moreover, these deliberately malicious lies totally nullify the principle of free elections. How can the voters make a knowledgeable choice if one of the parties always lies about what it is?

All of which has two points: one is the overwhelming probability that with Trump we are neither worse off nor better off than with Hillary; two is that our ONLY hope is the creation of an independent, truthfully informed, ideologically disciplined Democratic Socialist Labor Party.

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Don't Call Clinton a Weak Candidate: It Took Decades of Scheming to Beat Her (Rebecca Solnit, Guardian UK): Sometimes I think I have never seen anything as strong as Hillary Clinton.  That doesn’t mean that I like and admire everything about her. I’m not here to argue about who she is, just to note what she did. I watched her plow through opposition and attacks the like of which no other candidate has ever faced and still win the popular vote...Or, as my brilliant friend Aruna d’Souza put it Wednesday: “At some point soon we need to discuss whether Sanders would have been able to win, but helpful hint: today, it just sounds like you’re saying: ‘The Democrats should have cut into Trump’s lead in the misogynist vote and the whitelash vote by running a white man.’ Let’s come to terms with the racism and the misogyny first, before analyzing the what-ifs – because otherwise we’re just going to replicate it forever. And if you think that the angry anti-establishment vote won (hence Sanders would have fared better), let me remind you that patriarchy and white supremacy are the cornerstones of the Establishment.”

Rebecca Solnit, a writer for whom I had enormous respect, is correct about Hillary's strength.

Hillary's strength is so great she handed the One Percent the Nazi victory they have sought since 1934, when Russian (Soviet) intelligence operatives helped Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC ret., save President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal from the Bankers' Plot, whereby the One Percenters' great-grandfathers sought to make the United States the economically dominant partner in the Third Reich and its later Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

What Hillary has accomplished is the most powerful act of political subversion in the past several centuries – maybe in our species' entire history. Indeed, she deserves a hearty Zieg Heil for putting our neo-Führer in the White House, thereby fulfilling the Aryan promise of the imperial domicile's name. USA! USA! USA!

As to Ms. Solnit, the spiteful gender-identity invective with which she has gifted us tonight permanently reduces her from significant essayist to to maudlin propagandist. The implicit hatred of and contempt for the viciously downtrodden USian 99 Percent evidenced in Ms. Solnit's newest text also casts profound doubt on the (alleged) humanitarianism from which she wrote. It thus reduces all her previous works to “schtick” – merely another extended program of histrionics, a chic and lucrative Big Lie wrapped in pseudo-empathy, one more dismal manifestation of the ultimately deadly charade of USian “democracy.”

Considering the role of the Soviet Union aka Russia in saving us from the pro-Hitler, pro-Mussolini capitalists in 1934, when these banksters plotted to make the U.S. a Nazi nation and turn the American Legion into an USian SS – I cannot but wonder if that's the real reason Goldwater Girl Hillary so despises Russia and all Russians including their unborn children.

Or maybe she just envies the Russians their oh-so-beautiful, oh-so-nuanced language, capable of so much more than the malignantly leering cackle that is Hillary at the apex of her expressiveness, as when she was celebrating the hideously agonizing death of Qaddafi by anal impalement.

How ironic too how Hillary – even as she was enthroning the real neo-Hitler (neo-Duce too) – was damning Vladimir Putin as the new Hitler. It was the most effective sleight-of-hand political action I've ever witnessed – obviously (Ms. Solnit take note), another proof of Hillary's great strength.

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Learning to Walk (Michelle Alexander, Michelle Alexander's Facebook Page):  (W)hat happened  can't be explained simply as a failure of the political establishment...Nor is it simply a problem of racism or sexism — though both are alive and well and flourishing in this moment. Nor is this election simply a matter of economics, though global capitalism and neoliberalism have created a world in which people of all colors are suffering greatly as factories close, work disappears, wages stagnate, and human beings are treated as disposable — like plastic bottles tossed in a landfill — as political and media elites (not just Trump) spew propaganda that encourages us to view “the others” as the enemy...What many of us have been attempting to do...(is) build a thriving multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, egalitarian democracy out of the rubble of slavery and genocide...

It is truly astounding – but simultaneously no surprise – to witness the lengths to which the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassalage will go to preserve Identity Politics, the inherent divisiveness our capitalist overlords chose long ago as their primary antidote to class consciousness and the Marxian epiphany it inevitably evokes.

Now of course in the USian election of a genuinely Nazi regime, we see the ultimate fruition of Identity Politics, now proven even more effective at building a malevolently militant Aryan Right than at ensuring the hopeless division of the Left.

In other words, by its vindictive embrace of Identity Politics, the USian Left first reduced itself to a pseudo-Left and now has slain itself entirely, witness the USian replay of how the Germans discarded their own Weimar-guaranteed liberty in 1933.

But – Identity-Politics propagandists like Garrison Keillor, Rebecca Solnit and the far more subtle Michelle Alexander not withstanding – from beyond the pseudo-Left's remains another Left is arising. It is potentially a Red Banner Left,  acutely aware of the capitalists' seductive cunning and the bottomless evil it maliciously fosters. Thus it freely acknowledges the need for the ideological discipline inherent in Marxism.

The question then is not whether the One Percent will respond to the failure of its Identity Politics deceptions, but rather just how violent it will be in its effort to suppress our awakening.

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No, Everything Is Not Going to Be Alright (Ted Rall):  Given that I’ve been saying The Donald had an excellent chance of winning for many months, maybe you should be scared when I tell you what I think there’s really a 15% chance of: another presidential election in four years...forget impeachment...the chances of Republicans impeaching a Republican president are pretty much zero...forget constitutional checks and balances. Weimar Germany had a lovely constitution, in many ways better than ours, but constitutions are mere paper unless they’re enforced...Guantánamo, immigration prisons, drone assassinations and secret black site CIA prisons are all brazenly unconstitutional. If Trump and his henchmen want to trash legal and political precedent, nothing institutional will stop them...Trumpism is here to stay, for at least four years.

The “right wing smear machine” of which you speak – “you” was not Mr. Rall but a comment-thread-contributor to whom I was replying – was in fact Hillary Clinton's Democratic (sic) Party, and its malevolent effectiveness is proven by the fact that while we were previously oppressed by closet fascists, we are now tyrannized by ever-more-brazenly outspoken Nazis. Thus after 82 years of clandestine efforts the great grandsons of the original 1934 Bankers' Plot conspirators have at last achieved their goal: conversion of the USian Empire into the Fourth Reich.

If I were to be in any way critical of Mr. Rall – which I most assuredly will not – it would only be to suggest he is still extricating himself from the cult of self-deluded optimism that is the opiate that anesthetizes the present-day, identity-politics USian Left to stupefied ineffectiveness.

But at least Mr. Rall – unlike the vast Moronic Majority of his peers – is beginning to awaken to the infinite horror we are facing, which includes not only another Holocaust, but a Holocaust facilitated by technologies of surveillance and genocide the original Nazis could only imagine – literally, all the murderous sadism of the Abrahamic god, the morally imbecilic deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – now fully materialized in the tools of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their ever-more-openly Nazi vassalage; total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Indeed that – total subjugation – is precisely what we are facing. But until we acknowledge how utterly alone and powerless we are – until we start reading Marx and Sun Tzu and Che Guevara rather than identity-politics invective, triumphalist jock biographies and Ayn Randish self-help manuals – the only question is not whether we are destined for concentration camps, but how soon we will end up there. In fact I think Mr. Rall's notion there is a 15 percent chance 2016 will not be the last USian election ever is dangerously optimistic.

Nor would Hillary have been any better: the the only difference between the Democratic (sic) Party and the Republican Party is the former lies about the magnitude of their Nazification while the latter boasts about it.

Moreover, now that we are being rationally pessimistic, note the choice our overlords offered us: between two Hitlers, Hillary Hitler (who wanted to be the first-ever conqueror of Russia and was willing to impose biblical Apocalypse – the extinction of our species and the death of our planet – to achieve her goal); versus Donald Hitler, neo-Führer of the neo-Holocaust, who won election by promising white USia to ensure its bigoted hegemony forever. Indeed it was the classic rat-experiment, performed in the rat lab of capitalism with us, we the rat-people of the rat-race, as subjects.

No Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. There is only the Slavic myth of Saint Nicholas, a good-hearted priest – originally pagan, later Russian Orthodox – who ministered to those flung down by misfortune. It was a fine midwinter bedtime story, a parable for the instruction of children in the necessities of sharing and generosity, an excellent prelude to the most profound slogan of our age: “from us according to our ability, to us according to our need.” But it was stolen by the capitalists and twisted into an orgy of obscene profiteering and we of Moron Nation laughed and applauded and let ourselves be Trumped. Hence our Christmas stockings will now and forever contain naught but thorns and cinders.

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I have no doubt the (basic strategic and tactical doctrine that enabled Trump's triumph) was planned long ago, probably during the first meetings between the legion of high-ranking Nazi war criminals to whom the Empire gave sanctuary and their sponsors the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today's One Percent, i.e the Bankers' Plot perpetraitors (note spelling) who wanted to make the U.S. part of Hitler's Greater Reich. Interesting too the skillful sleight-of-hand by which Hillary distracted us by damning Putin as the “new Hitler” even as she was helping put the real neo-Hitler in the White House.

LB/17 November 2016

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Tiny Food-Stamp Cut Reveals Bureaucrats' Big Lies

THE FALSIFIED-INFORMATION tactic employed by many (if not all) the USian state welfare bureaucracies to justify cuts in stipends and services – in this instance to deprive me of food stamps – is exemplified by the official notice I received recently from the always-adversarial Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.

As shown in the main paragraph of the copy reproduced above, the DSHS bureaucrats are falsely claiming my rent-and-utilities expenditures have “chang(ed)” – in other words, decreased. And while the $1 food-stamp reduction shown above is seemingly insignificant, the rationale upon which it is based is an obviously malicious bureaucratic lie. More to the point, it is indicative of the methodology of malicious lies by which DSHS slashed my food-stamp allocation from $103 per month to $17 per month – an 83 percent cut – effective 1 January 2016.

Nor is “malicious” an inappropriate choice of adjectives. DSHS's malice is proven not merely by its well-deserved reputation for hateful treatment of the subsidy-dependent poor, but by the indisputable fact my rent, which includes most of my utility costs – specifically electricity, water, sewerage, garbage collection and recycling fees – has risen steadily (albeit minimally) throughout the 12 years I have lived at my present address. The seven years I have been a food-stamp recipient are no different. Since May 2009, when losses inflicted by the so-called “recession” – the plutocracy's murderous theft of income from all the rest of us – hurled me into bankruptcy and forced me onto the dole, my rental payments have gone up 1.3 percent.

Meanwhile my telephone costs, constant from May 2009 until August 2015, skyrocketed 293 percent thanks to the Washington State Democratic (sic) Party's 2013 decision to abolish forever the Washington Telephone Assistance Program subsidy that guaranteed those of us who are officially impoverished our telephone bills would never exceed $8 per month. Thus my monthly phone bill leapt from $8 to $31.44 immediately after the subsidy was terminated last August. It has since – largely due to tax increases – inched upward to $35 as of my September 2016 bill.

Where then is the alleged decrease in rent-and-utility expenditures that caused my already minimal food-stamp allocation to be docked yet another dollar?

While DSHS (predictably) refuses to answer – more about that in a moment – the following National Public Radio report provides a powerfully indicative clue  as to what really obtains:

“In a recent federal court hearing, nine employees of New Mexico's Income Support Division — which oversees food stamps — took the stand to testify about fake assets being added to food stamps applications...When higher-ups were questioned in court, they pleaded the Fifth repeatedly. The state launched an internal investigation, but the results are sealed, and officials have refused to grant interviews about the allegations.”

Such defiance of the public's right to know has become a signature tactic of welfare bureaucrats, who have manipulated confidentiality regulations originally intended to protect welfare recipients into bureaucrat-shielding obstacles that now block even legislative oversight. The fact food stamps are now known by several names bolsters the welfare-bureaucracy's opacity even as it ensure the non-foodstamp-dependent public remains ignorant or at least confused about the associated issues. The feds call the program “SNAP,” a happy-faced, Madison-Avenue-contrived acronym for “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” the name also used by the New Mexico food-stamp program. DSHS calls it “Basic Food Assistance.” Other states have their own names for it: California's is “CalFresh,” while Wisconsin – where the unapologetically fascist (and possibly criminal)  regime of Gov. Scott Walker has made war against the poor a doctrinal centerpiece – ironically labels it “FoodShare,” never mind the sharing of food (or anything else) with lower-income folks violates Walker's Ayn Rand credo.

NPR report's on-line text is headlined, “New Mexico Defrauds The Poor Out Of Food Stamps, Whistleblowers Say.” The head aptly summarizes the entire story, which was first broadcast on 5 July 2016 and focuses on Kimberly Jones, an impoverished woman whom state welfare bureaucrats deliberately victimized by fraudulently inflating her income to deny her emergency eligibility for food stamps. The denial forced her to wait two months before she began receiving assistance.

By contrast, the theoretically permanent cuts inflicted on me by DSHS bureaucrats included not only January's $86 food-stamp cut (now 87 percent counting the $1 cut detailed above), but an 82 percent reduction in my Medicare Extra Help stipend, from $22 per month to $4. This plus associated Medicare Part D prescription-drug price increases of 11 percent and the Democrats' cancellation of the $23.44 telephone subsidy cost me approximately $155 per month.

In other words, in a year in which the anti-food-stamp Obama Administration denied Social Security recipients any cost-of-living increase, from 1 January onward I have been struggling to survive on approximately $155 per month less income than I had in 2015.

The immediate result of these cuts was to trap me in the most miserly of my Medicare Advantage provider's programs – low premiums and minimal levels of (nevertheless skillful) care with maximal, often-prohibitive co-payments. The longer term result was to hurl me into an abyss of such poverty as I had never before experienced – an ultimately deadly realm in which I am literally forced to choose between eating properly or obtaining the health care I need for survival.

For example, in the wake of last May's diagnosis of congestive heart failure, I am technically required to regularly consult a cardiologist. But the co-pay is $50 per appointment with this or any other specialist, which is nearly twice the program's monthly premium. Thus – thanks to the cutbacks inflicted on me by DSHS – it is a co-pay I cannot possibly afford.

Indeed, as I said to the visibly unsympathetic DSHS bureaucrat who last December handed me the paperwork announcing the $86 reduction in my food stamps, “this is a death sentence.”

Months later, while trying determine how the cutbacks were rationalized, I learned from credible inside sources whose anonymity I am sworn to protect that DSHS bureaucrats had done to me exactly what New Mexico's welfare bureaucrats did to Kimberly Jones, albeit by a more plausibly deniable method.

While the welfare bureaucrats always claim such cuts are mandated by regulations, the New Mexico and Washington state cases prove they falsely manipulate supplicants' income to create the desired illusion of regulatory compliance. The bureaucrats are also trained to discourage appeals by telling supplicants their food-stamp allocations are calculated by computers in unerring electronic obedience to state and federal law, another lie. Hence a typical bureaucrat's veiled-threat response to a cutback victim – a person often in shock (as I surely was last December): “You can appeal, but you're sure to lose, and then you'll have to pay back whatever we determine you owe us.”

Though DSHS is known to employ the New Mexico tactic of falsely inflating a supplicant's income, particularly against persons less able to defend themselves, the falsification method its bureaucrats used against me was radical understatement – by nearly $300 – of my monthly living expenses. My sources tell me this is the agency's most common approach – probably because when challenged, it can be more easily excused by a deluge of carefully pre-scripted lies claiming accidental omissions and/or miscalculations.

As to the Medicare Extra Help cuts, I am still in the proverbial dark about the regulations upon which they were based. Were they state or federal? Not only did DSHS bureaucrats refuse to answer my questions, their sullenly uncooperative silence forced me to get the information from my Medicare provider, whose employees proved infinitely more helpful: yes, DSHS had indeed inflicted the cut, but it was transmitted by the briefest of written orders, with no additional explanation forthcoming.

Could I then get a copy of the order? No, I was told, because the calculations are done by DSHS and transmitted to the provider in bulk, so that giving me access to the documentation would would violate the privacy of other Medicare patients: a perfect example of how welfare bureaucrats protect themselves from accountability.

Apparently – as best I can glean from inquiries amongst my neighbors in the lower-income senior housing complex wherein we all reside (and which I continue to serve as the volunteer editor/producer of its monthly newsletter) – the Medicare Extra Help cut inflicted on me last January is another result of DSHS's deliberate falsification of my living expenses. Those with less income than I said their Medicare subsidies were not reduced.

Thus on 23 September 2016 I filed a written, registered-mail demand for an appeal hearing before an administrative judge. Since then, the bureaucracy has orally informed me the hearing has been granted, but its snail-paced clerks have yet to officially notify me of the hearing's locale, date and time.

Needless to say – knowing as I do the favorite DSHS tactic of deliberately mailing such a notice so late the appellant learns of the assigned date only after it has passed and the appeal is thus summarily dismissed – I'm more than a little anxious. Stay tuned: assuming I am still alive, a follow-up report will most assuredly follow.

***

ALAS, MY FIGHT with DSHS is not my only ongoing struggle with government bureaucracies that are unapologetically tyrannical.

Because of the spinal injuries inflicted on me in 1978 by one of Washington state's innumerable defiantly habitual drunken drivers – the man had been arrested 19 times for drunken driving before he clobbered me – I have since the late '90s been prescribed a generic muscle relaxer called methocarbamol. My episodal use of this drug has increased as my spine deteriorates, the 1978 injuries now painfully inflamed by what one consulting MD said – this after I underwent a long and thorough spinal exam by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) – is “the worst case of spinal arthritis (she had) ever seen.” Hence there is no question about the source of the muscle spasms that, ever more often, render me temporarily immobile. Nor is there any question about my need for the drug.

Moreover, methocarbamol has proven itself particularly appropriate for me. It is non-addictive. But most importantly – especially since journalism is like organized crime in that it is an occupation from which one is never really allowed to retire – it is the one muscle relaxant that does not anesthetize me into a slumberous, depression-like state that makes it impossible for me to write or edit. It also – at least in me – generates no other prohibitive side-effects.

Five years ago (in 2010), Medicare bureaucrats, claiming methocarbamol is dangerous to those of us age 65 and older, arbitrarily canceled my prescription and ordered my pharmacist to replace it with baclofen. Initially I submitted to the bureaucracy's orders because I was told I had no alternative. But soon I discovered the baclofen not only gave me severe headaches but made it nearly impossible to stay awake even after a full night's sleep. Hence I complained, rather vehemently, to my doctor. He promptly overruled the Medicare officials, restored my methocarbamol prescription – and thereby also restored my ability to undertake occasional writing, editing and photographic assignments, among them the extensive pictures-and-text coverage of Occupy Tacoma I provided as an unpaid volunteer to the website Reader Supported News c. 2011-2012.

Then all was well until this April, when the Medicare bureaucrats intervened again, this time much more forcibly. Not only did they deny me methocarbamol, they specifically ordered the pharmacy to provide a drug called tizanidine as its replacement. Again I submitted. But within a few days, as I was attempting to write a rather complex historical essay for a class in which I participate, I discovered the tizanidine anesthetized me so thoroughly I was literally falling asleep at my computer keyboard. I complained, was told to reduce the dosage, and complied as instructed. But then I began experiencing repeat episodes in which I was severely short of breath. While a very minor breathlessness had been a known symptom of my congestive heart failure, in these new instances – triggered even by every-day walks to bus stops and local stores – I felt as if I was suffocating. I literally could not get enough air. Apparently – or so I supposed – my CHF had suddenly worsened, and I was therefore at death's door.

Wondering what I should do – I have no remaining fear of death but am admittedly fearful of dying in hospitals, which psychic research has convinced me are soul-traps – I realized my shortness of breath dwindled rapidly any time I was off tizanidine for more than a day or too. Hence I researched the drug, learned it is known to cause just such respiratory problems as I had experienced and so complained again to my doctor, with whom I have an excellent relationship. He responded by appealing to Medicare as he had done in 2010.

But this time its bureaucrats essentially told him he had no choice but to obey their edicts. At the same time they told the pharmacist that if my doctor wrote me a prescription enabling me to buy methocarbamol as a non-Medicare purchase, everyone involved – doctor, pharmacist, possibly even the pharmacy clerk – would be subject to Medicare fraud charges. My further use of methocarbamol, the bureaucrats decreed, was forbidden, and no doctor's appeal would change that prohibition.

Since then, my doctor, a former military MD who saw combat in Iraq and has the chain-of-command experience typical of most of us who are veterans, has been appealing the bureaucrats' decision ever-further up the hierarchical ladder– so far to no avail.

Thus whenever I am pained by back spasms, I am still compelled to depend on the tizanidine, which I now take only in the smallest possible doses: a four-milligram tablet quartered into one-milligram segments, and those segments cut again with my Xacto knife into half-milligram doses. But even that tiny amount leaves me noticeably short of breath. Worse, it submerges into such lethargy, I have had resume drinking real coffee, which is forbidden me by my heart condition, in order to do any serious writing or editing. Otherwise – as I said before – no matter how engrossing the work, I literally fall asleep at my keyboard.

Again, stay tuned: if I'm still around – that is, if the Medicare bureaucrats don't kill me with their damn tizanidine – I'll have a follow-up story on this matter as well.

*****

GIVEN PRESIDENT OBAMA'S history of brazenly pandering to the plutocrats  while waging undeclared economic warfare against the USian 99 Percent,  it is surely legitimate to question the striking similarity of the atrocities committed by the Washington state and New Mexico welfare bureaucracies. Are they are independent acts that are only coincidentally alike? Or are they – as inside sources have privately suggested to me – part of a clandestine, federally scripted national campaign to go far beyond the savagery of the food-stamp cuts already mandated by Democratic (sic) President Bill Clinton's so-called “welfare reform”  and further intensify, perhaps fatally, the suffering of the nation's poor? And could such a scheme be why the New Mexico welfare bureaucrats are hiding behind the Fifth Amendment's protection of self-incrimination?

The damning information contained in the three reports linked in the above paragraph – material doubly relevant because its disclosures about Obama's lies and treachery and the Democratic (sic) Party's now-routine employment of bait-and-switch tactics are powerfully indicative of how former Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton  would govern – suggests such a secretly scripted national targeting of the poor is well within the realm of possibility. Indeed, Obama's penchant for unprecedented tyranny  cloaked by dictatorial secrecy  provides an environment in which egregiousness of any sort – with or without presidential complicity – might easily thrive. It has already spawned an epidemic of outrages – for example Obama's blatanly unconstitutional program of total surveillance –  the uppermost of a long list of U.S. government crimes so effectively concealed only the courageous efforts of whistle-blowers and the tireless work of pro-democracy hackers could reveal them. And we already know the poor (and the 99 Percent in general) are among Obama's favorite targets. As Black Agenda Report Managing Editor Bruce Dixon said recently,  “In eight years Democrat Barack Obama has gone further to protect criminal banksters and their investors than any Republican dared go before him...It’s simply not punishable...as long as you steal from the poor or from the public.”

In the same linked text, Dixon accurately laments that crimes against the poor are no longer even investigated, a legitimate grievance for which USia's so-called “mainstream media” is as answerable as government itself. Such media was once, as in the Pentagon Papers episode,  an effective guardian against despotic politicians, criminal capitalists and all their greedy and/or subversive scheming. But now it is owned by the same One Percenters who effectively own and therefore control all USian governments at every level.

Thus censored, “mainstream media” has become nothing more than a privatized, for-profit (and therefore uniquely self-supporting) version of the Third Reich's Ministry of Propaganda. Thus too the editors and reporters of “mainstream media” follow the example of the late Josef Goebbels in dutifully echoing whatever Big Lie the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals want peddled as truth. And even the most dedicated of the USian whistle-blowers and hackers are likely to have been steeped from birth in the Ayn Rand, capitalism-über-alles dogma that now defines the United States, which means – particularly given the nearly inconceivable wealth required to equip and operate successful hacking operations – these alleged enemies of the state are nearly as likely as their fascism-minded adversaries to dismiss the poor as subhuman.

The overwhelming probability is therefore that any secret, federally organized effort to fatally afflict those of us who are impoverished will never be revealed.

However – at least in the New Mexico  and Washington state  cases – there are motives for crimes against the poor that are far older than the Obama regime. As noted in the NPR report that exposed the malfeasance of New Mexico's welfare bureaucrats, that state has “been under legal pressure for more than 20 years about how it doles out public assistance.” And Washington became somewhat similarly notorious – though all the relevant information has since been disappeared from the Internet – after Seattle's late Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman testified the state was the national plutocracy's favorite rat-lab for testing new techniques of oppression. The two states are also similar in their political ambiguity – that is, they are governed sometimes by Democrats, sometimes by Republicans, with both parties strong enough in each state to ensure that behind the typical charade of USian “democracy,” the One Percent retains absolute control.

While I know nothing more about New Mexico than what can be gleaned from standard public sources, I covered Washington state for nearly a dozen years as a card-carrying member of the working press and for another six years as a freelancer. After my official retirement in 2005, I became openly involved in local politics, most notably as an early activist in Occupy Tacoma (2011-2012). Since then have been at the core of other progressive efforts. Though geriatric physical disabilities increasingly curtail my ability to photograph, I continue to write for OAN and to post regularly on Internet discussion threads as well as to edit and produce a monthly newsletter for the 90-unit housing complex in which I dwell; the housing complex provides so-called “independent living” for elderly and disabled persons, and via its newsletter I cover such political topics – for example public transport – as are relevant to my fellow residents' needs and interests.

Thus I have a long and extensive familiarity with Washington state politics, enough to state unequivocally that beneath its deliberately deceptive “progressive” camouflage, it is in many ways – especially socioeconomically – more reactionary than any other state in the imperial union. For example, a Tacoma city official tells me it is the only state in which tenants have no legal rights whatsoever, a statement confirmed daily by the seemingly endless intrusions and disruptions  inflicted on my neighbors and me by a facilities-renovation that was supposed to be completed months ago but – thanks to the landlord's greedy indifference to our well-being – will probably continue to plague us at least until November. But the clearest demonstration of the state's longstanding hatefulness toward lower-income people is its tax structure, which is by far the most regressive in the nation  – and therefore probably the most regressive in the world.

The anti-Working-Class viciousness of the state's tax structure is vividly underscored by its contrast to the politicians' breathtakingly obscene generosity toward their corporate masters. Washington's corporate tax giveways, by far the largest in the nation, include the perpetually controversial $8.5 billion exemption granted Boeing.  The resultant need to slash stipends and services thus provides motives aplenty for welfare bureaucrats to go far beyond legal limits in minimizing public-assistance costs. And I know from conversations with former DSHS employees they are evaluated not on the number of impoverished people they serve, but rather on how many of us they deny stipends and services.

But the fact remains food stamps are a federal program...

Which brings us back to the likelihood the state bureaucracies are under federal orders to cut food- stamp approvals by any means possible – including unquestionably criminal manipulations of supplicant's eligibility data.

As already noted, the Obama Regime is notorious for perpetuating the anti-Working-Class bias that has effectively unified the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties since President Clinton's abject surrender on welfare policy. Thus the probability a cut-food-stamp-use-by-any-means order has been clandestinely issued by Obama is implicit in the overt hostility – not just indifference – he exhibited in his response to the recession and his pro-austerity appointments.

Thus too it was no surprise when Obama's Deficit Commission Co-chairman Alan Simpson publicly denounced Social Security recipients – never mind their average income two years previous (the most recent year for which data was available) had been a definitively-impoverished $1,115-per-month  – as “greedy geezers.”

Though the angry reaction Simpson's bigotry provoked was soon suppressed by the “mainstream media” propaganda ministry, the remark itself remains significant proof of the attitudes of the Obama Regime and the present-day Democratic (sic) Party toward poverty and those of us afflicted by it. Thus since Obama is known to demand ideological conformity throughout his regime, and since Democratic (sic) Presidential Hillary Clinton was a key part of his cabinet, it is arguable Simpson's malice toward those of us who are poor is probably, behind its rhetorical camouflage, little different from her own: another indication of how Hillary would govern if elected.

Meanwhile, whether or not Hillary remains the incipiently fascist Goldwater Girl she was in her youth, what is (deliberately?) overlooked in all the USian Empire's present-day “mainstream” political controversies is that now fully half the USian homeland population is definitively low-income.  Nor, short of (extremely improbable) economic revolution, is there any likelihood our lot will improve in the foreseeable future – most certainly not in my remaining lifetime. Not only has the homeland's so-called  “surplus population” thus become an issue. The near-certainty of additional job-stealing  “free trade” agreements – the irony quotes because the only “freedom” in “free trade” is that of the One Percent to further subjugate us – means the socioeconomic destitution into which we the people are being thrust will soon become the nation's majority condition. That's why it is increasingly evident, particularly to the millennial generation, the only hope for restoration of the so-called “American Dream” is to redefine it in socialist terms – “from each according to ability; to each according to need” – and then impose it by whatever means prove necessary.

The fact this pre-revolutionary attitude has been to varying extents apparent in the USian homeland since the advent of the Civil Rights Movement  in the 1950s no doubt explains the underlying purpose of Obama's total surveillance program. Just as Kate Epstein notes in the report linked in the preceding sentence, “What very few people are acknowledging, amidst all the discussion about the Snowden leak and what it reveals, is that a very real purpose of the surveillance programs—and perhaps the entire war on terror—is to target and repress political dissent. 'Terrorism' is the new 'Communism,' and the war on terror and all its shiny new surveillance technology is the new Cold War and McCarthyism.”

It is in this context we should consider not only the potentially deadly impacts of food-stamp cuts – extra-legal or not – but also Washington state's even more potentially murderous elimination of its telephone subsidies, which deny 911 emergency services to an unknown number of people who were already desperately poor. The Obama Regime's change in Medicare regulations to give medically ignorant bureaucrats absolute veto power over trained and licensed physicians is also potentially death-dealing and should therefore be viewed in the same light – that is, as an intensification of government authority in response to an increasingly rebellious population. Finally – and here is the culmination of my argument – there is the Empire's now-undeniable war against African-Americans,  who were the first post-First-Nations people to launch a culture-wide rebellion against USian capitalism and are therefore, by the deadly logic of violent subjugation, now the first targets of the local police who have been federalized and militarized into a de facto national police force – a merciless army of occupation that ever more often performs the genocidal function of a new Gestapo. 

While a growing number of USians recognize the Empire's foreign wars as genocidal, there remains widespread reluctance to apply that term to what obtains here in the USian Homeland. That is because of our failure, typically the result of obstructive optimism, to acknowledge that since the Decade of Political Murders – President John Fitzgerald Kennedy slain in 1963, Malcolm X slain in 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy slain in 1968 – the Empire now increasingly employs the same oppressive policies at home it has always used abroad.

Identifying these policies as genocidal is further hampered by the slow-motion process of death inflicted by the thousand cuts of stipend-and-service reductions. Those of us who are its victims – we who are elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed (and thus no longer exploitable for capitalist profit) – cannot doubt the genocidal intent of what is being done to us. But with the USian majority cleverly trained to see genocide only when it is manifest as death camps and gas chambers, it is difficult to to make our case save to others who are similarly victimized.

True, the more obvious genocide inflicted on African Americans, Hispanics and First Nations people by federally trained and equipped local police – which by its endlessly increasing death toll is obviously in response to a national shoot-first order – is finally being (minimally) acknowledged outside the targeted communities. Even so, the white population's closed-minded, 77-percent resistance to recognizing the racial (and therefore implicitly genocidal) motive behind the abandonment of the black population of New Orleans to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 suggests any sort of broader ideological awakening remains decades distant – as does the lynch-mob malevolence typified by the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump and his pledge of an anti-minority domestic Holocaust to “Make America Great Again.”

Such is capitalist governance in accordance with Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation and deadly poverty for all the rest of us. So goes the Empire in the early 21st Century, its ever-more-evident ethos that of a uniquely USian form of Nazism, its Caucasian masses united by the mesmerizing chants of “USA! USA! USA!” – our species' newest equivalent of “Zieg Heil.”

LB/29 September – 3 October 2016.

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