OAN, Windows 10, an On-Paper Newsletter for Seniors, Susan's Questions/My Answers, Presidential Mania 2016

 

A lighthearted moment among Tacoma Clinic Defense volunteers on guard against Fundamentalist Christian fanatics who want to abolish women's sexual freedom. I recently joined TCD and will give it as much time on its defense lines and with my media skills as I am able.  Click to view image full size. (Photo by Loren Bliss © 2016)

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ONCE AGAIN, OAN is in a state of transition. I have lost nearly all my readers due to the posting-hiatus inflicted by the worst creativity-killer I have ever encountered – an ongoing, emotionally exhausting fight with Microsoft's (notoriously buggy)  Windows 10 software. Nor can I abandon the struggle. It is necessitated by my ongoing commitment to produce a professional-quality monthly newsletter for the senior-housing community in which I live. But the hours, days and weeks the battle with Windows 10 steals from my life leave me neither the time nor the energy to publish new material here on OAN – though perhaps I am at last finding a detour around the Windows 10 barrier.

As nearly as I could figure, at its height my OAN readership was approaching 1,000 page-views per week, with more than half those readers in Europe. But as of last week the number had declined to less than 40 per week here on Typepad and to about 16 a week on Blogger, where I also post because – for whatever reason – it is much more accessible to European readers. Hence my deepest gratitude to those few who have remained aboard.

The newsletter that now because of Windows 10 claims such a huge part of my life is a publication I founded in 2013 and of which I am deservedly proud. It is is called Community Chronicle. It began its fourth year last November. Three months before that, when the struggle with Windows 10 ended my ability to update OAN at weekly intervals, I decided Chronicle must take precedence because its entirely-local, only-on-paper contents include information essential to lower-income seniors and disabled people in our ever-worsening struggles for survival in the face of capitalism's implicitly genocidal “austerity” policies.

Nearly all this vital information used to be available in local newspapers and often in broadcast media as well. But it is now maliciously suppressed by the for-profit propaganda ministry colloquially known as “mainstream media,” which is owned by the same One Percenters who own all USian governments and politicians at every level, and who therefore limit “news” to that which is of interest only to the economically upscale readers sought by advertisers. For example, “mainstream media” now covers welfare only when it can be misrepresented as “wasteful” spending squandered on those of us the Ruling Class ever-more-openly denounces as “lazy parasites.” But stories describing the horrors wrought by welfare cutbacks and what cutback victims might do to cope with the resultant hardships – the sorts of news we routinely covered during my years as a reporter and editor – are emphatically forbidden.

Thus the Community Chronicle attempts to fill the information gap. It focuses on material relevant to those of us who are elderly and/or disabled, and above all else impoverished enough to live in a 50-apartment/50-resident complex that is one of fewer than a half-dozen independent-living housing projects for low-income seniors and disabled people in Tacoma, Washington, a seaport city of 200,000 persons. The Chronicle has a a core readership of 50 persons every month, and all of us understand our circumstances – that we are targets of the government's relentless reductions of everything upon which our survival depends, mass transit included. Most of us are acutely aware of the government's genocidal intent: “obviously,” as many of us say aloud, “the politicians want us dead, but they don't want the embarrassment of death camps.”

Obviously too the Chronicle's contents are relevant to an audience much larger than the 50 residents of the facility it serves. But it is an audience rendered unreachable by the exclusionary savageries of capitalist politics and economics. Most of the Chronicle's potential readers are denied Internet access by the obscenely prohibitive rates charged by U.S. Internet service providers – rates typically ten times higher than those charged anywhere else on this planet. The costs of the requisite hardware – at least $400 for an even mediocre-quality new computer and printer – are equally prohibitive. Thus only eight of my 50 fellow residents own computers, and only five are actually on-line.

That 90-percent-off-line figure for low-income seniors in the 65-and-above age group – by far the worst digital divide in the industrial world – seems constant throughout the U.S. (I say “seems” because the relevant statistics, readily available when I wrote about this for a senior periodical in 2007, have since become much more difficult to find and interpret. A credible 2014 report that the digital divide is slowly but steadily worsening as capitalism continues to contract economic opportunities for the 99 Percent has apparently vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Meanwhile, access to life-sustaining government social services is ever more (maliciously) limited to those who can afford the horrendous costs of buying and maintaining computers and subscribing to an ISP – in other words, to those who don't need government stipends and services at all. As a result, those who are most needy are the very people who are most often denied access. Nor is this coincidental; it is yet another (lethally effective) tactic of the slow-motion genocide concealed within the euphemism “austerity.” The resultant struggle – no-computer elders versus computer-access-only agencies – is precisely what makes the Chronicle so necessary to its readers. But the fact these readers are (now and forever) denied computers and Internet access also makes giving Chronicle a domain name and putting it on the Internet a waste of money.

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It is something of an aside, but I should note here that low-income senior housing is one of the more clever tactics by which the One Percent and its Ruling Class brain-trust perpetuate the societal divisions that ensure the 99 Percent remains forever disunited. Thus we elderly folk are warehoused separately from those USian Empire subjects the One Percent deems still exploitable for profit. Obviously, our overlords fear our (definitively subversive) memories of the New Deal's far better times – especially how those better times were won and sustained by the solidarity of organized workers. Such recollections, the Ruling Class fears, might give today's hopelessly disempowered debt-slaves dangerously disruptive notions of resistance.

Though most of these housing-facilities are reasonably comfortable, as is the apartment complex in which I live, their apartness nevertheless defines them as ghettos. And like all ghettos, they serve a specific capitalist purpose. Methodically isolated as we are, ever-more-encapsulated by the same damning aura of alienness the empire imposes on women, blacks, Hispanics, First Nations folk and any others it fears as potential enemies, we will be that much easier to subjugate and exterminate once capitalism completes its inevitable transition into fascism and/or the uniquely USian form of Nazism Donald Trump is now fomenting.

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Given the time-and-energy conflict between OAN and the Chronicle, I naturally felt my obligation to my neighbors – that is, to people I know and see almost daily – took precedence over my obligation to a group of readers who were for the most part anonymous. For a long while, indeed for most of the Chronicle's three-plus years of publication, I had managed with only minor difficulties to serve both groups. But then my desk-top computer died, which forced me to switch to a laptop computer irremediably dedicated to Microshaft operating systems – this after seven years of running an Ubuntu-equipped machine that had been built specifically for me.

Learning to use the laptop's Windows 8 and 8.1 operating systems was difficult enough. But Windows 10 is the most nightmarishly difficult operating system I have yet encountered. (Nor is there any hyperbole here; the experience is indeed giving me nightmares.) From August onward, fighting Windows 10 typically left me so emotionally drained, the best I could do was get out one or two editions of OAN each month. This is because Windows 10 has turned the seven-day job of writing, photographing, editing, typesetting and laying out the Chronicle into a 14-to-20-day ordeal of infinite frustration, wrenching fury and – not infrequently – total defeat.

One set of Windows 10 problems was caused by Microshaft's Rube Goldberg programming,  which made computer operation suddenly far more bewilderingly difficult than anything I have encountered in my 16 years of overcoming the computer's many intrusions on my ability to process photographs and/or write acceptably coherent text. In fact, with Windows 10 it was as if I had never run a computer before, the as-if substantially complicated by Windows 10's built-in incompatibility with the open-source software that is my (impoverished person's) mainstay.

Trying to describe this problem to a friend who has minimal familiarity with computers, I used the analogy of a familiar journey. Normally we go from Tacoma to Portland, Oregon by driving south on Interstate 5. Imagine, I said, if the only way to get to Portland was by driving 2800 miles east to New York City and then driving another 2900 miles west and south to make a journey that used to be only only 142 miles. That's what using Windows 10 is like – driving 5700 miles to get to a destination that's 142 miles away.

An additional class of problems – far less frequent but far more disabling – was inflicted by Microshaft's nasty penchant for occasionally ramming in emergency Windows 10 updates without first asking permission. In one instance, Microshaft jammed an update into my machine while it was maxed out doing graphics, and the result was an epic crash that not only obliterated about 6,000 words of Chronicle text (nine stories, all of which had to be rewritten from scratch), but rendered the computer non-operational for nearly three days, making the Chronicle a week late.

No computer or software manufacturer has ever done anything even remotely like this to me before, and the resultant stress was of such devastating intensity, it took yet another week of mostly sleeping 10 or 12 hours at a stretch for me to recover. When one is my age – I'll be 76 at the end of this month – the theft of two entire weeks of one's increasingly precious time is not something one easily forgives or forgets.

Though I have always despised computers – firstly, because they are electronic scabs that eliminated six of every seven jobs in newspaper journalism; secondly, because they are inhuman tyrants that force me to labor as a typesetter while simultaneously playing a much-despised game of electronic Simon Says; thirdly, because their frightfully prohibitive cost now repeatedly threatens to terminate forever my ability to write and photograph – I had nevertheless surrendered to them and achieved a sort of working peace. But all that has been swept away by Windows 10, and I can now say with absolute truthfulness there is nothing in this world I hate so much as computers, and nothing I fear so much as the uncontrollable extent to which they can destroy my work. After last month's ruinous crash, every minute I am at my keyboard, it is as if I am hunched beneath a Damocles sword that threatens the total destruction of whatever I happen to be doing.

And no, I cannot afford – will never again be able to afford – the approximately $250 it costs for a back-up hard-drive. Nor – since it is nearly as big as a second computer – is there any place in my tiny apartment I could put it.

Obviously the stress of being Microshaft-dependent will continue to spike my blood pressure and thereby shorten my life. A Nurd friend has promised – if indeed he can ever find the time – to take the day or so it will require to determine if this machine can actually be stripped clean of Microshaft contamination, and if so, he will reload it with a Linux operating system – a project that will take at least another day and maybe two or three. Hence what I am really asking for is a week out of his work-life. While some people I know, the friend included, maintains this can be done, others warn that Microshaft and Samsung collaborated so effectively, any attempt to purge the computer will destroy it. Hence my friend's effort may prove to be fool's errand. Whatever, producing the Chronicle with Microshaft Windows 10 software will meanwhile continue to steal a disproportionate amount of my time and inflict a truly horrendous toll in stress. But I will continue to do it simply because my neighbors depend on it for information they can get nowhere else. Such are the (not always pleasant) obligations of being a (real) journalist, even in (alleged) retirement.

What then of OAN? Because of the far more universal scope of its ideas, I regard it as the far more important work – indeed the only work of any real significance to whatever postmortem legacy might be mine. But how can I restore OAN to its once-per-week frequency when one week (and effectively at least two weeks) are consumed each month by the huge struggle to produce the Chronicle with Windows 10? And what then when I am done with the Chronicle I am so exhausted, all I can do for the next week is recover via generous does of sleep and trash novels?

Part of the answer seems to be to return to my former practice of including in OAN the comments and information I post on other websites. Most of these contributions to Internet dialogues are short and to the point, and during the second and third weeks of each month, they are further abbreviated because the only time I have to write them is when I am taking a break from the constant war with Windows 10 that turns production of the Chronicle into an ordeal I now anticipate with naught but dread. My comment-thread work on Reader Supported News – by far my favorite Internet news and discussion site (and therefore my primary posting-place) – is pared down still more by RSN's 1500-character limit on individual posts, which imposes on me the same (welcome) discipline that writing for daily newspapers did.

Though I always felt it was somehow cheating to include comment-thread material in OAN, I often did, albeit usually for the purpose of providing additional relevant details, and as of last week I have returned to that practice. That should guarantee weekly appearances of new OAN material – or as close to weekly as the ongoing fight with Windows 10 will allow. And should the commentary evoked by breaking news deserve it, I will also publish the OAN equivalent of the old-time daily-newspaper Extra: a special edition rushed out to report pivotal events, for example an assassination, a coup or a declaration of war.

I also continue to ponder what else might be properly published under the OAN flag. I think there's a goodly chance it will become the final destination of the memoir I have been writing during the past two decades, albeit never more than in seemingly disconnected bits and pieces. I have already published a few such pieces in OAN, notably here,  here,  here and here.  And of course there will always be photographs on these pages, because in truth (and despite the painful limitations imposed by arthritis and deteriorating spinal injuries), I still think of myself far more as a photographer than writer or editor. As I have confessed before, I am dyslexic, quite severely so in fact, and this eternally bitter truth – never mind I have won more awards and certainly made more money from writing and editing than from photography – relentlessly tells me that to label myself a “writer” is at best a self-deception and at worst a fraudulent act.

Yes, my intellect knows this notion of being a fraud is nonsense – not just nonsense but nonsensical self-hatred – but even after at least 55 years of proof, my emotions (as if in some longstanding parallel to Windows 10 perversity) always default back to to the fraud setting. The source of the problem is obvious: despite decades of government proclamations to the contrary, we the disabled are still taught, often from birth, to despise ourselves. Such is disability in a realm so instinctively Christian Fundamentalist, the disabled person is invariably treated as someone accursed by the divine sadist the Christians worship as their god.

The absurdity here lurks in the fact these same Christians claim our species is “made in the image” of their god. What then of a disabled person? I can think of no better example of a contradiction in terms than the notion of a “dyslexic writer” – a concept that as an image of a god becomes genuinely laughable. Perhaps “god” is a dyslexic reversal of “dog” (as in the truism “dog is love”), and that all of the atrocities committed in god's name are the result of mistakenly looking beyond the canine example for the wisdom essential to human survival. Having been blessed by the company of dogs for most of my life, I long ago recognized their value as teachers. 

Meanwhile the fraud meme resists even efforts to laugh it away. One of the great ironies of my life is that while my photographs have generated enough acclaim to appear in significant journals – Paris Match for one, Newsweek for another – most of my writing never made it beyond journalism's minor leagues, and it was in those notably limited environments it won the lion's share of my awards. The limits imposed by dyslexia? Not entirely; some of my earliest editors thought me destined for The New York Times, and the late Cicely Nichols thought my “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which revealed the old Counterculture as the first wave of a rebellion against patriarchy, would become one of the more important works of the 20th Century. But my civil-rights arrest in 1963 seems to have ended forever my major-media potential, and that 1983 fire killed “Dancer.” Now, less than four weeks away from my 76th birthday and with the best of my work reduced to ash, the whole question of competitive quality is moot. That which has been destroyed can never be re-created. As I have learned from (invariably bitter) experience, whenever one attempts to do so, the result is always failure.

Perhaps that's why, even after the indescribable (and never-to-be-relieved) pain of the loss of all the work destroyed by fire, photography remains my passion. Seen through a camera, life is always new, often a Zen experience, and at its very best an encounter with Pagan ecstasy – that exquisite suspension of distinctions between self and other that no doubt prompted the original Taliesin to exclaim, “there is nothing in which I have not been.”

But writing, though a part of me loves it as much as I love photographing, is always befouled by the terrible down-pressing burden of the fearful o-please-don't-let-me-choose-the-wrong-word self-consciousness that is such an inescapably oppressive part of dyslexia. Yes I sometimes write reasonably well, but that does not alter the fact writing is for me (and always will be) as much an unnatural act as singing is for someone born without the power of speech. Thus it seldom rises above the level of dutiful intellectual exercise, as if I were required to move colored blocks about on a chessboard-like grid to prove how many different combinations I am capable of achieving. Which, no doubt, is why (especially when I am tired), my writing sometimes chokes on its own verbosity. And no, half-brother Donald, I never imagined myself a better writer than you, no matter the contrary opinion voiced by our father.

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I AWOKE FROM a nap yesterday with the inexplicable urge to answer questions asked of me several years ago by a woman who has a truly unique place in my memory. I know little of her present life and have no idea if she reads OAN. But I long ago learned to heed the promptings of journalistic intuition, which tells me to admit here and now I knew long before I turned 25 my financial prospects were so limited I would never have the material wealth capitalism demands of a “good husband,” and therefore I could never be a “good father.” Which is why, my dearest Susan H. N., I never tried to conceive another child with my second wife after her oh-so-devastating miscarriage, why I never dared seek to marry again after she and I divorced, and why our relationship dwindled as it did in 1963. But I think about you often even now, and as always I hope you are well and thriving.

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THANKS BE TO POLITICS for blessed relief from geezerly introspection:
An abysmally ignorant poster on the comment-thread of “Black Lives Matter, Just Not to Hillary Clinton” – an excellent William Boardman piece that is well worth reading – implicitly hailed Democrat Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton as a revolutionary,  an utterly baseless sentiment so widespread throughout USian identity-politics it is ever-more-disturbingly obvious large segments of the electorate have been blinded to who and what she really is. Here is my response:

Given Hillary's ties to Wall Street, she is scarcely more revolutionary than Marie Antoinette. Which means that, like Antoinette, she will do everything in her power to crush the revolution.

Moreover, the revolution-crushing implications of her hitherto-secret collaboration with the forces of ChristoFascism are every bit as dire – especially for women and minorities – as the implications of Trump's refusal to repudiate his Nazi and Ku Klux Klan supporters.

Hillary's incipient betrayals are revealed by Jeff Sharlet on pages 272-277 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). Page 275 is especially damning: “Hillary fights side-by-side with (Sam) Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it.”

As both a civil rights activist (Knox County Jail, 1963) and a journalist, I know too well the fundamentalist theocracy of the South and its stranglehold on both races – especially how Bible-thumping preachers control the vote. Hence I cannot but wonder if that explains the paradox of Hillary's popularity among blacks.

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TWO NEWS ANALYSES analyses in the same Sunday night Reader Supported News download present such antithetical views of the presidential election campaign I am posting links to each of them despite the fact I have (at least as of now) commented on neither of their threads. Their heads are self-explanatory. “Majority U.S. Public Opinion Is Mocked by the Ongoing Presidential Election” is here,  and “Why Bernie Sanders Won Super Tuesday” is here.  My present opinion on the campaign – the adjective indicating the content of the noun is by no means final – is included in the second passage below.

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ANOTHER DISCUSSION ABOUT Hillary – this on “Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump,” a Matt Taibbl/Rolling Stone essay that examines the terrifying reality of Moron Nation  – prompted me to focus on additional details of how Hillary's Inner Goldwater Girl has always served the One Percent at the expense of all the rest of us. Again I cited Sharlet:

Hillary's ongoing support for Free Trade is as implicitly anti-abortion as her clandestine collaboration with the forces of Christian fundamentalism is explicitly anti-abortion.

Free Trade – as U.S. feminists are at long last beginning to realize – throws millions of U.S. workers either into permanent joblessness or into sweatshop labor with radically diminished fringe benefits, or more likely no benefits at all.

In either case, the victims – male and female alike -- lose their health insurance. And for women -- especially with the devastating success of the JesuNazis' war against Planned Parenthood and all other birth-control providers – this means loss of the gynecological care essential to female sexual freedom.

To imagine the Machiavellian-minded Hillary is unaware of this deadly Free Trade side-effect is like imagining Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust.

And there is also, on pages 272-277 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet, Harper: 2008), a strong suggestion Free Trade's role in the war on women is part her collaboration with the JesuNazi Sam Brownback. Quoth Sharlet (page 275): “Hillary fights side-by-side with Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it.”

In other words, exactly as Free Trade does.

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I ALSO EXPRESSED my agreement with Taibbi, albeit by pointing out he was a bit late to the fair:

H.L. Mencken wrote the epitaph for the United States in 1920:

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Now, with the Dunce-ocrats having ended the Sanders fantasy and ensured the candidacy of a woman who snickered at and applauded the agonizing death of a man anally impaled on bayonets, and the Republ-idiots sure to Trump the election with a man who channels Il Duce if not der Führer himself, there will soon be no place here for those of us who are old and/or poor and/or disabled or simply, by some accident of birth – geography, race, whatever – deemed no longer exploitable for profit.

This means we have but two choices: we can try to find another country – probably impossible for most of us older than about 55 (though I have some faint hope my analytical skills might prove useful elsewhere) – or we can remain here and wait to be exterminated, either by the slow-motion genocide of the social-safety-net cuts that will be inflicted no matter whether the president is Trump or Hillary, or by the death camps Trump is bound to establish to rid the nation not only of the minorities he openly despises but all of his critics as well.

Globally speaking, the American Dream has just become the Humanity Nightmare. The “sweet land of liberty” is dead. The only question is whether its successor nation will render our entire species extinct.

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I also added a couple of comments about capitalism – the sort of remarks to which discussion-group participants seem increasingly reluctant to respond, no doubt because we all know the secret police, obviously in anticipation of the mass arrests to follow November's election, never relax their vigilance:

The problem with a “mixed economy” is that capitalism is like cancer: it will always metastasize into fascism or Nazism.

It has already done so in the U.S., killing forever the Keynesian ideology of the New Deal, and (both as “austerity” and as the resultant rebirth of the Hard Right), it is rapidly doing so in Europe.

This is because the core mandate of capitalism is the rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated and – as the replacement for those moral precepts – the elevation of infinite greed into ultimate virtue.

In other words, capitalism is institutionalized moral imbecility – the utter amorality of the serial killer focused on the accumulation of victims not by outright murder but by profit – which of course includes murder, as at Bangladesh or Bhopal or Triangle Shirtwaist or the Mingo County War or, for that matter, both World Wars, Vietnam, the re-colonization of the Middle East and Africa, etc. ad nauseam.

Footnote: Probably the only good thing that can be said about the Roman Catholic Church – apart from the work done in secret by a handful of subversive Irish and German monks to preserve what few remnants we have of the 35,000 years of pagan culture that preceded the forcible Christianization of Europe – is that its medieval clergy typically (albeit too-often ineffectually) insisted profiteering was a mortal sin. (See for example “Morality in Medieval Economics,” here.)

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Yes, the Soviets failed to evolve the economic democracy they sought – the oppressive undertow of Russian history is relentless – but the fact the effort was made at all is far beyond glorious. Too bad it is probably also the only such chance our species will ever be allowed – that capitalism, now triumphant, will go on to eradicate all sentient life from this planet.

But let us not forget that all the socioeconomic gains we wrested from capitalism were in fact gifts the U.S.S.R. gave to the rest of the world, gifts extracted from capitalism by the sheer terror the reality of the Red Army inflicted on the One Percent: “better give those workers something or there'll be a revolution here.” That was the fear that prompted the New Deal and every other concession to economic democracy whether in the U.S. or anywhere else in the capitalist world.

Which is precisely why – now that the Soviet Union is history – the capitalists are methodically abolishing all those concessions and returning to the serial-killer moral imbecility of “business as usual.”

Hence capitalism will continue reverting to its original Elizabeth Bathory mode no matter whether Moron Nation is zieg heiling der Trumper or chanting “USA USA USA” for Hitlery Clin...er, excuse me, Hillary Clinton.

LB/6 March 2016

-30-

President Obama's Victory Day Rudeness: I Apologize for My Country's Scorn of Living Russians and Soviet Dead

Mothers and daughters became Soviet warriors. (Click image to view it full size.)

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I AM ASHAMED of how those who rule the Imperial United States and its European satrapies dishonored the millions of Soviet men, women and children who were slain in the epic struggle to save the world from Nazism.

I am ashamed of how we who have never yet suffered comparable invasion  have been taught to belittle the breathtaking sacrifices of those who fought and died to defeat the most obviously sadistic invader our unspeakably savage era has thus far produced. I am ashamed of the politics of xenophobia and greed that demand we disdain fellow humans we should instead hail as heroes and heroines, not just of their own Motherland but of all humanity.

Behind my shame at our overlords' unconscionable bad manners on this particular Victory Day is my far greater shame at how we in the United States have allowed our once-exemplary representative democracy to be reduced to an oligarchy of global oppression and environmental ruination.

I am especially ashamed of how its tyrannies are perpetuated by a white electorate so blinded by racial, socioeconomic and religious hatreds,  it seems idiotic to imagine it will ever stop voting against its own well-being. 

But my country has become so much a police-state, I dare not continue without affirming my shame is the shame of a patriot – that if I did not love my country, I would not so grieve its betrayal. I would not denounce the capitalist One Percent and their political vassals for looting my country into poverty. I would not damn the One Percent's ballot-box disciples for voting my country into ruin merely to inflict suffering on those whose race or ethnicity or gender or sexuality they despise. If I did not love my country, I would not be so appalled by the electronic concentration camp  to which it has been reduced by these betrayers of liberty and their wanton perversions of democratic process.

Nor dare I rationally hope for liberation in what remains of my lifetime. The U.S. Ruling Class is protected by technologies of surveillance and retaliation we can scarcely imagine. Armed with powers earlier generations attributed only to god, it is combining the doctrines of Ayn Rand economics, U.S. exceptionalism and divine-right imperialism into a new and uniquely USian form of Nazism – a Nazism in which absolute power rests not with a single despot but with an infinitely despotic cabal of corporate executives.

The pivotal question of our time, brought into sharp focus by the events in Ukraine, is therefore whether this newest, U.S.-sponsored onslaught of the human penchant for moral imbecility can be brought to bay before its proponents literally nuke the world into a radioactive cinder. 

Yet even if we somehow succeed in building a successful resistance, it may already be too late for our species and this planet as we know it. Indeed it is entirely conceivable some sure but thus far secret knowledge of ourselves as denizens of a dying world is what is fueling the unrelenting greed of the One Percent – a greed so limitless it has no known precedent in human experience.

Is this what is happening? Have the One Percenters been reliably informed their deadly contempt for Nature commanded by the Abrahamic religions has already doomed us? Is the One Percent's intent now merely to see who can collect the most wealth before the too-long-ignored-and-despised Mother Earth sounds the final buzzer? 

Only the darkest and most hopeless of times could produce such otherwise-unthinkable thoughts. And that – the darkest most hopeless time in our species' history – is the time in which we are cursed to live and challenged to do whatever we can to resist the encroaching darkness.

Another dark time, nearly as dark and hopeless as the present, were the months immediately after Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on the Summer Solstice of 1941.

But the Red Army and the Soviet people fought back valiantly, eventually defeating what was then the best trained, most technologically advanced war machine on Earth. 

Let us therefore never forget their victory came at a terrible price – their combined military and civilian deaths now estimated to be as many as 43.3 million. (Yes, this is the same material linked in my second paragraph above. But the source for the 43.3 million figure is the researcher Boris Sokolov, for whom you must scroll far down the text.)

All such numbers are inconceivable unless we restate them in quantities we can envision. 

Picture a man or a woman or a child. Then picture that person dead. Picture a corpse.

If you accept Sokolov's estimate (which I do), picture that corpse multiplied 43.3 million times. Forty-three-point-three million is the present-day population of five cities the size of London. Or five the size of New York City. Or four the size of Moscow. Now try to envision these entire municipalities filled with naught but corpses – decomposing bodies that were once living men, women and children, folks with all the pleasures and pains and ambitions and desires and other emotions you or I or anyone has.

That's what it cost the Soviet Union to save us from the Nazis.

But the most important element in this recitation of grim facts is that the Soviet people prevailed – and that by prevailing they saved us all, every man woman and child now alive – from those earlier forms of fascism and Nazism personified by Mussolini and Hitler. (Yes, Fascist Italy did indeed aid Nazi Germany  in the invasion of the Soviet Union.)

The English-language service of the Russian state television network, RT, celebrates this 70th anniversary of the Soviet triumph with a Victory Day program  so thoughtfully scripted it should be preserved and issued as a DVD. It is a valuable historical document, and if it is available, I will add it to my own personal library. 

RT's coverage gives us the obligatory summaries of the fighting but also offers vital glimpses of social history – stories of the people and how they coped with the stresses of enemy invasion.

It includes a sampling of the often poignant poetry of Russian wartime popular music. It is a musical literature utterly unlike the self-consciously happy-faced, “Boogie-Woogie Bugle-Boy-of-Company-B” trivializations with which we in the wartime U.S. were sedated. But you'll have to wait a bit for all the RT material to load, and then you'll have to scroll down to its last pages.

The songs are each accompanied by translations into English, and two are especially moving. One is called “White Cranes”:  “Sometimes it seems to me each fallen soldier/ That never came back from fields of gore/ In fact did never perish as they told you/ But turned into a crane as white as snow.” The other is “Wait for Me”: “That in the midst of gunfire/ It was your waiting for me/ That saved my life.”

Also especially relevant on this occasion is the 2010 Russian film entitled Brestskaya Krepost – “Brest Fortress” in English – that tells the heartrending stories of some of the soldiers and civilians, among them three women, who fought in the battle that was the Soviet equivalent of our Pearl Harbor and Wake Island battles combined.

Available as a DVD with some versions subtitled in English, it is notably unlike most Hollywood war films in that it neither sanitizes the horrors of the battlefield nor belabors the audience with pro-war propaganda.

The ability of Russian cinematographers to depict horrendous violence without simultaneously glorifying it is a skill that has apparently been carefully denied their U.S. counterparts. But that should surprise no one who understands that in the new imperial U.S. oligarchy, government at every level and all its mainstream informational media (including film producers, textbook publishers and advertising agencies), are owned and controlled by the same self-serving inner circle of voraciously capitalist One Percenters.

Nor is there any doubting the diabolical, Josef-Goebbels-inspired efficacy of the uniquely privatized U.S. government propaganda apparatus that has been spawned by the One Percent's seizure of power. The greed and selfishness the propaganda so successfully evokes was undoubtedly a major if undocumented factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prepared in accordance with state-of-the-art psychological research, its influence is so irresistible, it has already convinced the nominally well-informed people of Western Europe to accept the Big Lie World War II was single-handedly won by the United States. 

This same process of de facto psychological warfare, the relentless dumbing-down I label “moronation,” is what sustains Moron Nation – that portion of the U.S. electorate which is ever more militantly white, theocratically Christian, aggressively reactionary and therefore ever more inclined to embrace a uniquely USian, Ayn Rand version of Nazism. Its emergent ideology is already apparent, not only in the use of “austerity” as a euphemism for calculatedly genocidal elimination of social services, but in a local war against public-transport users I wrote about extensively earlier in this decade.

Now of course the One Percent's (allegedly unofficial) propaganda machine – which in truth is as potent and functionally official as Goebbels' own Ministry of Propaganda – is turning not just its assault weapons but its heaviest Joe McCarthy siege guns on anyone of significance who dares dispute the empire's portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine.

Quoth the ever-reliable Robert Parry via a Consortium News exclusive:

U.S.-taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty has a checkered history that includes hiring Nazi sympathizers as Cold War commentators. Now, one of its current writers has used the platform to bash an American scholar who won’t join Official Washington’s “group think” on Ukraine.

That follows Parry's earlier report detailing how the group-thinkers insist on describing the deadly ramrodding of Ayn Rand capitalist savagery down post-Soviet Russian throats as nothing more than “growing pains” intended “to help (these people) attain a better life.”

Which suggests another presumably unthinkable thought:

Given its context of economic warfare with imperialistic intent, could it be the real reason Obama snubbed the Russian people and their Victory Day celebration is that he cannot agree with what it celebrates?

Remember it was the immediate ancestry of the present-day One Percent that tried via the Bankers Plot of 1934  to join the U.S. to the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

Perhaps then Obama is no different from so many other U.S. politicians in harboring a clandestine, beyond-top-secret commitment to the Nazi resurgence already evident in the Western Ukraine and unquestionably lurking in the Moron Nation shadows of the USian Homeland as well.

After all, what is Nazism – particularly with its profit-expanding policies of slave labor and the extermination of anyone no longer exploitable for profit – but the ultimate form of capitalism?

LB/3-10 May 2015

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Baltimore: the Capitalist Pressure Cooker Blows a Gasket

MAY DAY IN TACOMA – An estimated 200 persons celebrated International Worker's Day with a peaceful demonstration in this seaport city. Participants included the Communist Labor Party, Socialist Alternative, South Sound Jobs with Justice, 15 Now Tacoma, and members of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 120, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 367/21 and Service Employees International Union Local 6. The flag shown above is the banner of the CLP, a new and rapidly evolving group  dedicated to empowering the Working Class. (Photo by Diane M. Knowles; click on image to view it full size.)

 *

BALTIMORE'S MOST IMPORTANT lessons are being methodically obscured by mass media, which predictably portrays peaceful demonstrators as frenzied black thugs threatening to escape their ghettos, invade what the white bourgeois considers the only “Real America” and seduce its darling daughters, the linked illustration chosen because it mocks the secret fear of sexual inadequacy that dwells in the Ku Klux depths of every racist white male's alleged mind. 

But alternative media is meanwhile working overtime to provide us with antidotes to these daily doses of distraction and deception, and from this aged news-hound's admittedly cynical perspective, its small but dedicated cadre of rogue reporters is doing a damn fine job.

Here are three examples of their best work: 

At the top of today's kudos list is the revelation – confirmed by reliable sources and courageously reported by The Real News – that the overkill tactics employed by federally militarized police against blacks in Baltimore and Ferguson and against entire Working-Class neighborhoods in post-bombing Boston are practice-drills in the same sense the Spanish Civil War was the Wehrmacht's dress-rehearsal for World War II. (The relevant discussion begins 14 minutes into TRN's videotape.)

These drills are intended to prepare the cops and the military for efficient collaboration in what radicals of the 1960s used to call “the Big Bust,” the day the Ruling Class drops all pretense of “democracy,” declares the entire Bill of Rights null and void, and orders the Last Roundup of everybody even a hundred-thousandth of an inch Left of the middle as defined by the One Percent. 

And who might be the doctrinal exemplars of this alleged norm? 

The Founders are clearly not among them. But the list undoubtedly includes Ayn Rand, James Dobson, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale and an Adolph Hitler so cleverly disguised by euphemisms, his identity is (deliberately) hidden by the Clausewitzian fog of class warfare. 

Next on today's news-honors roster is (additional) confirmation that here in the de facto Fourth Reich, any humanitarian dissent is now automatically criminalized as “terrorism.” As was the massive imperial secret police apparatus mustered against Occupy, so is it now being mobilized against Black Lives Matter. 

Third on the list is a report that gives us (another) real-time glimpse of the tyrannical future as envisioned by our overlords,  the looming era in which “due process” will be no more than a fond memory. 

As I said on the associated comment thread: 

Mark my word: the suspension of Due Process – including the indefinite detainment in military concentration camps authorized by the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act – will soon be the norm as resistance to the de facto Fourth Reich continues.

Meanwhile, hoping to ensure a maximum number of white voters are provoked to lynch-mob anger just in time for next year's elections, the Republicans – the true voice of the Ruling Class – are already using Baltimore as the foundation for an obviously pre-scripted campaign of racial hate-mongering.

Thanks to Reader Supported News – which because of Editor-in-Chief Marc Ash's eclectic editorial judgment is probably my favorite alternative information source – we now have access to Frank Rich's exposé of a significant escalation in race-baiting. Prepared for the socioeconomically privileged readers of New York Magazine, the piece becomes vital intelligence when presented to more proletarian-minded audiences. 

Its unspoken suggestion is the possibility the nationwide, implicitly genocidal campaign of violence by federally militarized police against U.S. blacks may be part of a much broader One Percent effort to frighten the white majority into voting for unabashed fascism in 2016.

Could local disorders be woven into another national Reichstag-fire-like scare campaign, thus to finalize the systemic transformation from representative democracy to capitalist oligarchy begun by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and so dramatically accelerated by the events of 9/11?

The historically pivotal consequences of President's Kennedy's murder are carefully documented by James W. Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books: 2008). This should be considered required reading for anyone who hopes to understand what is occurring in the United States today. 

As for creation of a new scare-campaign of Reichstag Fire magnitude, the capability unquestionably exists.

 

Mainstream media is owned by the same One Percenters who effectively own U.S. governance at every level. The psychological manipulation skill originally assembled by the advertising agencies of Madison Avenue is part of the mainstream-media package by which we are governed. It is as readily available to the One Percent's military/industrial vassals as it is to the One Percent's politicians. 

Once again, as in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's classic definition of fascism  (scroll down the linked text), the distinction between the public and private sectors is reduced to meaninglessness. 

Moreover, the Pentagon's authority over local police departments provides a perfect mechanism by which to initiate and direct the violence essential to any fear-mongering campaign. The key question is therefore whether the cops are already sufficiently indoctrinated to give such an effort their unquestioning obedience, particularly to no-leak security regulations. 

Some cops – perhaps most in places like Baltimore and Ferguson – obviously are. 

And there is Obama's unprecedented war on leakers to prohibit disclosure. Given the federal-state-local pyramid of command, the requisite documents would all be federal, which means the threat of retribution would be fearsome – all the more so since the life-expectancy of an ex-cop in prison is measurable only in negative numbers. 

Is this what is happening? Are the outbreaks of violence in Baltimore and other such ghetto-realms and the upsurge in hate-mongering part of the One Percent's anticipated Final Solution both to the alleged “problems” posed by racial minorities and the few remnants of democratic process?

 

As an old Soviet intelligence axiom supposedly said, “once is coincidence, twice arouses suspicion, three times is enemy action.” 

Hence my (slightly revised) comments on the “race-baiting” thread: 

Let us not forget the white majority in the United States is indeed viciously racist, whether as demonstrated by Nixon's victory in 1968 or by its malevolent indifference to the abandonment of New Orleans blacks to Katrina. 

Factor that in with simmering anger over Obama the Orator's transformation to Barack the Betrayer – a transformation no doubt calculated by the Ruling Class to further reinforce white racism even on the Left – and the likelihood of a Republican landslide next year looms ever larger.

Given that the Republican Party is simultaneously the voice of the Ruling Class and the vessel of the uniquely USian, uniquely white/Christian brand of Nazism known as "exceptionalism ," the anticipated Republican triumph will no doubt obliterate any remaining pretense of democratic process and political or socioeconomic freedom. 

Indeed it is at least arguable that, from the perspective of the Ruling Class, the primary underlying function of the Obama Administration is clearing the way for the Republican triumph that formally ends, forever, the USian experiment in representative governance. 

Hence the relentless, Ruling-Class-decreed campaign of genocidal violence against blacks by federally militarized police: the "gasoline" intended to provoke riots and thereby ignite a (pivotal) inflammation of white racism... 

The point also needs to be made that an unknown but obviously substantial percentage of the whites who voted for Obama did so not because some cosmic creature had plunked its magic twanger and miraculously cured them of their racism, but rather out of socioeconomic desperation. 

This is particularly true of the legions of Caucasian blue-collar workers who voted for Obama in response to his (now obviously false) pledge to sign the Employee Free Choice Act into law. 

In each instance, 2008 or 2012, the choice was between Obama and candidates pledged to methodically worsen the 99 Percent's already dire straits. And despite the Moron Nation ignorance that prevails beyond the dwindling ranks of workers informed by union political-education programs, the electorate nevertheless (dimly) perceived the Republican threat and voted accordingly – never mind their votes were ultimately rendered meaningless by pre-planned betrayals.

What this boils down to is a cauldron of quietly seething anger that is rationally based on the Orator/Betrayer transformation but is irrationally intensified by the re-emergent racism expressed in the phrase "we gave him (them) a chance, and he (they) fucked us"  – just as this most diabolically Machiavellian of all Ruling Classes so obviously intended.

 

* * *

“DIABOLICALLY MACHIAVELLIAN” IS not hyperbole. Its ugly truth is underscored by yet another report, this one from The New York Times, that tells us the Ruling Class has co-opted nearly everything into its secret police apparatus – maybe even your own trusted shrink.  

The story's headline, “American Psychological Association Secretly Aided CIA Torture,” says it all. Hence on the comment-thread I put the event in its broader historical context:

A competent investigative reporter with an unflinching employer should investigate the extent to which APA is responsible for making Skinnerian psychology, with its innately fascist behavior-modification tyrannies, the overwhelmingly dominant USian psychological methodology.

Significantly, this began at the University of Washington psych department, which in the early 1970s was the only Skinnerian psych department in the entire U.S., but was also by far the most heavily federally funded.

Torture fits perfectly into the Skinnerian scheme as it is the ultimate behavior-modification technique, infinitely more terrifying than death.

If APA was indeed the vector by which Skinnerian psych became dominant, that in turn would indicate it had been co-opted, probably by the CIA, long before it became a collaborator in torture.

In this context, it is also significant that Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman testified that Washington state (the Puget Sound area in particular), is a favorite Ruling Class rat lab for the perfection of techniques and technologies of oppression.

Too bad there is no longer investigative reporting of the depth and quality essential to put all these pieces together, as the resultant scoop would no doubt reveal yet another dimension of how the One Percent has become the most diabolically omnipotent Ruling Class in human history.

 

* * *

WHY MARTIAL LAW might be demanded by the One Percenters and obediently imposed by their political vassals, whether in Baltimore or anywhere else in the United States, is made obvious by the 99 Percent's ever-intensifying grievances. 

As noted in The Real News telecast linked above, the same unending Working Class despair that boiled over in Baltimore may eventually do likewise throughout the nation. 

The sneering, morally imbecilic indifference of the capitalist Ruling Class is already provoking demonstrations, strikes and riots. Despite the violence with which even peaceful dissent is routinely suppressed, Working Class discontent may eventually explode into open rebellion. 

And now, as if to vocalize that same anger, Sen. Bernie Sanders has announced his presidential candidacy. More than any other contemporary politician, he dares speak the language of the oppressed. 

He damned the $7. 25 federal minimum wage  as a “starvation wage” that cannot sustain U.S. families. He denounced so-called “free trade” as an ongoing disaster that has shut down “almost 60,000 factories in our country...since 2001.” 

But Sanders has no chance of winning the White House.

As to what will defeat him, its name – at least in this space – is Moron Nation, where labeling people “socialist” is akin to calling them sons-of-bitches or bastards. The product of 70 years of methodical conditioning, this anti-socialist bias was demonstrated by 60 percent of the respondents  to a recent Pew poll. 

No political campaign ever has undone such brainwashing in a year's time. 

That's why Moron Nation may truly be forever. It is the realm where the oppressed are reduced to such ignorance – and ever afterward imprisoned therein – they always vote against their own economic interests. 

Hence they do not respond to Sanders' long-overdue rhetoric. They are not mobilized by the ongoing disclosures and public acknowledgments of our overlords' viciousness. (Were it otherwise, U.S. censorship would be even more total than that of Nazi Germany.) 

But no formal censorship is necessary here because the denizens of Moron Nation are so self-obsessed they have no social conscience at all. They react only when they themselves are victims. And then – never mind capitalism has just reduced them to helplessness – they blame only themselves. Verily, Ann Rand rules. 

Meanwhile the alternative press works toward the hoped-for moment of Moron Nation's eventual awakening.

That's no doubt what prompted Reporter Deirdre Fulton to scoop the world on the latest Affordable Care Act atrocity – how the insurance barons are cheating women out of free birth control and reproductive health care.

Citing Women's Law Center investigative reports, Fulton revealed that insurance companies across the country are also “violating a slew of other women's health requirements related to maternity care and more.”

What Fulton did not tell us – though it was clearly implied by her report – is the sheer magnitude of the Obamacare problem strongly suggests three damning facts: (A)-the cheating is premeditated; (B)- the president is aware of the violations; but (C)-he has (typically) chosen to protect the lawbreaking capitalists from prosecution. 

Not that I am surprised. 

As I remarked: 

Given the vast sums of corporate money specifically underwriting the war against women (and generally financing the campaign to impose Christian theocracy on the United States), the Women's Law Center findings are hardly surprising.

Moreover, the fact the federal government is doing nothing to enforce these deliberate violations of ACA confirms the closeted misogyny of the Obama Administration first revealed by how he knowingly gave Christian fanatics the upper hand in writing birth-control policy, for which see Elizabeth Schulte's report entitled "How Obama allowed the right to take over the debate," at SocialistWorker.org.

As for Sen. Patty Murray, she is a typical Ayn Rand Democrat, talks like a New Dealer at election time (she's up for re-election in 2016), but reliably votes like a hard-right Republican on economic issues. Hence to expect her to actually remedy the problem would be like expecting the pope to endorse free abortion on demand.

(Note: Despite the fact I have been posting here for at least five years, Common Dreams' new [and newly malicious] management regards me as a "new poster," hence restricts me accordingly, including denying me the right to post links. Hence (1)-my apology for the lack of a link to the Elizabeth Schulte piece cited above [which is otherwise extremely difficult to find]; and (2)-the probability that – given the restrictions so maliciously imposed – I will never trouble myself to post here again.)

 

What makes it difficult to find is how the editors at Socialist Worker – for reasons known only to themselves – keep burying it. Their most recent ploy is to change its title: Now it's merely “How the right took over the debate” and is linked here. 

By the way, the malign influence of religious fanatics  on USian politics is a story older than the Republican Party or for that matter the republic itself. But the most informative work on the topic remains – at least in my opinion – Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). 

However the main point here is that despite investigation by the Women's Law Center and Fulton's bold reporting of its findings, nothing is likely to change.

And with Christian misogyny turned into official policy by a Republican landslide in 2016, the plight of USian women will radically worsen. 

(It was women, remember – the angry women of Petrograd's Lesnoy Textile Works, furious at their bosses for firing five union organizers and fed up with capitalist depredations in general – who started the Russian Revolution.)

* * *

THE BEST ESSAYS on Baltimore's immediate revolutionary significance appeared under Daniel Patrick Welch's byline in Consortium News and in a Morgan Freeman interview RSN picked up from Newsweek. 

Welch gets right to it: 

“The youth of Baltimore are rising and expressing a pent up rage that is centuries in the making. It is not for me to tut-tut and impose my idea of political organization. The Left needs to watch, and learn. Look at who is protecting whom, who is threatening whom, who is siding with whom. Judge the media. Judge the police state. Judge a white supremacist society in all of its tentacles that shape our perception and experience in so many fields. This is the lens through which to understand what’s going on.” 

Freeman is equally outspoken.  “That unrest [in Baltimore] has nothing to do with terrorism at all, except the terrorism we suffer from the police,” he is quoted as saying.

But for most black people, as for a significant number of Leftist whites, there remains the underlying anger, grief and hopelessness inflicted by Obama the Orator's obviously pre-planned shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. That's especially true now, as he ever-more-defiantly reveals the worshipful obedience with which he serves his white One Percent masters and the bottomless contempt with which he views Working Class people of all races. 

Or as Robert Reich put it, discussing why we feel so powerless,  “The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.” 

 

Reich's column prompted, via its comment thread, an angry exchange with a poster screen-named davidr, who refuses to accept that capitalism responds only to vastly superior force, that the sole former epicenter of that force was the Soviet Union, and that its absence is what now gives the capitalists absolute freedom to rule with infinite greed and whatever savagery they think they can get away with. 

Here is the concluding graf of what the poster said: 

We have learned what to do: break up overly concentrated power; diffuse social goods; organize & don't despair. There's no end point, no equipoise of power, just incremental change. But we can do as much in our 40 years as FDR did in his. (Emphasis added.)

Here is what I said in response:

With all due respect, you forget it was the One Percent's absolute terror of the Soviet Union and its Red Army that made the New Deal possible.

Capitalists are definitively Evil. They enact humanitarian reforms only when revolutionary violence or the threat thereof leaves them no other alternative.

But without that threat, the capitalists quickly revert to their true and truly savage moral imbecility, the mindset of a serial killer imposed, a la Ayn Rand, via morally imbecilic governance. 

Thus the New Deal: born to counteract the threat of revolution, slain when the threat itself had been slain. 

That's why the death of the Soviet Union was also the death, forever, of both the American Dream and the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.

 

Davidr answered, belittling my comment with the snide arrogance of a professional pedagogue lecturing the class dunce. My retort was polite but assertive: 

I have never read an essay on history that contains so many correctly stated facts but is yet so radically wrong in its conclusions.

On the eve of FDR's first election, the U.S. was on the brink of a Communist revolution. Even in comparison to the present, the party was the best-organized such group in U.S. history and the third largest ever.

Meanwhile, because of huge popular support for Nazism particularly in the South and southern Middle West, the U.S. was also on the brink of a civil war that would have erupted had the revolution begun. 

The Ruling Class meanwhile was divided. On one side were the One Percenters who had financed the rise of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany and now were financing Nazism here at home. (This is the same Ruling Class cabal that in 1934 plotted with Hitler in the Bankers Plot, the failed Nazi/Wall Street effort to overthrow FDR.) On the other side were the more liberal-minded One Percenters – of whom FDR was one – who like their pro-Nazi peers were terrified of Communism but regarded fascism as...well, unAmerican. 

That FDR prevailed was not a miracle at all when you factor in his election was – largely on orders from Moscow – supported by the most unified Left the U.S. has ever known. 

That said, there is not the space here to correct all your erroneous conclusions. I'm sorry to say if your propagandistic view is the byproduct of what passes for education in today's U.S., we are in deep trouble indeed.

 

My words prompted another dunce-cap diatribe, including a “sic” on my reference to the Bankers Plot. This time I was a bit less restrained: 

To put it in the most simple terms possible: 

Firstly, remember the core function of capitalist ideology: the repositioning of profound evil – specifically infinite greed and selfishness – to the height of virtue. 

Secondly, the Soviet Union – never mind it was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be – offered an apparently humanitarian alternative to capitalism's malevolence. 

By so doing, it forced the capitalists to ameliorate their infinite savagery.

Hence FDR's New Deal, JFK's New Frontier, LBJ's Great Society and the subsequent Democrats until Clinton who merely lip-served New Deal ideology.

Thirdly, the Soviet collapse, in 1991, was literally the death of capitalism's only competitor. (China, via its need for industrialization, had by then already been co-opted by capitalism.)

Lastly, with the world now and forever purged of rival ideologies and systems, the capitalists are again free to indulge the serial-killer moral imbecility of their true selves – this time forever...that is, until capitalist savagery renders our species extinct.

Do you get it now?

Or is this still too complex an argument?

(Grammatical asnide: "Bankers Plot" – no apostrophe – is accepted usage for the same reason "Veterans Administration" or "Drivers License" – again no apostrophes – are accepted usages, though each is technically incorrect.)

 

Yes, dear readers, my “asnide” was deliberate. 

* * *

DESPITE MY PESSIMISM about the likelihood of successful resistance to the imperial tyranny that has subjugated the land I loved and swore to defend, there remains Robert Parry to describe how the empire might destroy itself by its own folly.

And then a retrospective act of penance by one of Parry's colleagues reminds me nothing short of heroism can steer the proverbial ship of state back to a saner, safer course. 

*** *** *** 

MAY DAY is the common name for International Workers Day. It is officially recognized throughout the world. 

Nevertheless, celebrations of it are banned in many places. They are prohibited by capitalist authorities, including in parts of the United States, where it is denounced as a “Communist” holiday. 

May Day and the night before it is also Beltane, which on the old, more ecologically accurate calendar of pre-Christian Europe was the first day of summer. It is celebrated throughout the European continent, where Goddess-centered paganism is now the fastest growing religion. It is likewise celebrated – though not so publicly – in North America. 

As with May Day, celebrations of Beltane are forbidden in many places. They are prohibited by religious authorities and/or political authorities so influenced, including in parts of the U.S., which with its relentless wars against women's reproductive freedom is trending ever-more-officially toward Christian theocracy. 

Here, as a follow-up to this week's cover shot, are more views of May Day's political expressions.

And here, both for inspiration and cosmic balance, are footage and still photographs of how the Scots in Edinburgh celebrate Beltane.  (Hint: many of the photos are stunning – especially the professional work in Getty Images.) 

Given how enraged the capitalists are by all such expressions of freedom – their Ruling Class greed threatened by a labor movement that refuses to die and their vindictive Abrahamic prudery challenged by the resurrection of the Goddess and its threat to the entire patriarchal system – imagine what we might accomplish if the two groups were to unite. 

Imagine too what our overlords might do in retaliation.

In “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” the book that was approaching publication just as it was destroyed by the mysterious fire that in 1983 obliterated all my life's work, I noted the converging views of socialists and peoples of the Goddess and dared suggest such a coalescence might be our evolutionary salvation. 

To some extent, it's already happening. 

For those who wish to learn more about this resurgent paganism in which material being is not just acknowledged as the substance of the stars but is honored as the flesh of the divine, I (again) suggest Barbara Mor's The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (Harper San Francisco: 1991). 

LB/27 April-3 May 2015

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