More on the Politics of Trauma: Hartmann Writes an Essay for the History Books -- If We the People Win

A Tacoma Clinic Defense volunteer displays her standard response – facial expression included – to harassment from male misogynists. However the vast majority of passers-by indicate their support of TCD workers. Clinic defense is one of the many ways we socialists serve the people, bypassing the oppressive power of the capitalist plutocracy. Click on image to view it full size. (Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2016)

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THE QUESTION ASKED by Thom Hartmann in  “What Happens When Neither Political Party Answers to the Bottom 90%” is answered with almost eerie synchronicity by how a Democratic official seems to be vengefully withholding vital information from a small local newsletter called Community Chronicle that serves at least 50 elderly and disabled women and men in Tacoma, Washington.

Apparently the malicious withholding is in retaliation for publishing – though not in the newsletter – a number of pointed observations about the worsening failure of the USian experiment in representative democracy. As I have often stated here in OAN, the lies purposefully told by today's Democrats are clearly part of a greater strategy of disguised malevolence that enables them to collaborate with the Republicans in fulfilling Ruling Class orders to deliberately inflict genocidal harm on low-income people.

Such an analysis, precisely because it is an (obvious) interpretation of recent USian political history rather than document-supported fact, has never appeared in the Chronicle, the publication for which I sought the information that is now being withheld. Nor will it ever appear in the Chronicle as long as the analysis (1)-has no relevance to local events and (2)-lacks the irrefutable proof that would be provided by, say, exposure of a strategic document defining the genocidal destruction of government services as clandestine compliance with the elitist demands for population-reduction  that have been part of the USian political dialogue at least since the 1960s.

More to the point, the people victimized by the Democratic official's withholding of information are not the politically motivated readers of OAN. They are instead the politically disempowered residents of the senior housing complex where I have dwelt for the past 13 years.

In other words, the elderly and disabled folk of a notably impoverished community are being punished for the activism associated with a sociologically different and geographically far-removed community. The Democratic official is thus apparently employing the same theory of misplaced vengeance we have tragically witnessed elsewhere, often with far more devastating consequences. It is noteworthy especially for how it suggests yet another dimension – a potentially malignant one – to the answer of Hartmann's oh-so-pointed question.

One of the functions of the Chronicle, as illustrated by the November 2015 cover shown below, is warning readers of impending cuts in government stipends and services. While this is a function that was formerly performed by so-called “mainstream media,” its publication of news specifically relevant to low-income people has been abandoned in compliance with the demands of its advertisers, who insist on excluding from readership those who lack enough discretionary income to buy the advertised products. Hence “news” – once defined as any information of

relevance to the public – has been  redefined by advertisers as that which is of interest only to the advertisers' specific demographic targets. Hence too the Chronicle, which I started four years ago. A big part of my intent was – and is – helping my neighbors cope with the politics of deliberately inflicted trauma by closing the information gap that results from mainstream media's increasingly discriminatory definition of news.

(Though it is something of an aside, one of the more obvious reasons for the steeply declining readership of U.S. newspapers is the rapidly deteriorating standard of living that afflicts the entire USian proletariat – those of us the Occupy Movement named “the 99 Percent” and Hartmann with greater economic precision more correctly labels “the 90 Percent.” Based on the most recently revised census data,  half the residents of the USian homeland are now officially “low income” – this as typified by a family of four living on $45,000 or less annually. [Note: fully two hours of Internet research could not unearth a comparably revised figure for one-person households.] Since low-income people no longer have the discretionary income that defines them as valuable to advertisers, and since much of the news that is specifically vital to low-income people is deliberately excluded from the newspapers, such an ignored [and thus effectively banished] population cancels its newspaper subscriptions and seeks information elsewhere, especially on the Internet.)

But only four of the Chronicle's 50 readers can afford the USian homeland's highest-on-the-planet costs of an Internet subscription, which means the other 46 persons are repeatedly denied vital information by the combination of their no-Internet poverty with mainstream media's redefinition of news. Worse, the information they are deprived includes facts that are essential for survival. That's because the ever-more-aggressive reductions in governmental stipends and services for low-income people – all such reductions due to the war against impoverished people  both parties have been waging since the 1976 election of President Jimmy Carter marked the end of the New Deal era – have potentially fatal consequences, especially for elderly and disabled folks. Which provides yet another detail in answer to the pivotal question Hartmann has dared ask.

Because I know the cuts' perpetrators cannot possibly be ignorant of their potentially fatal consequences, when I am writing in OAN or on various Internet websites I have no hesitation labeling the cuts as intentionally genocidal. The cuts are clearly designed to serve the same function, albeit in slow motion (and therefore with far less controversy), as the Nazis' Zyklon B. That is, the cuts are intended to exterminate those of us the politicians' capitalist masters have banished from the workplace as no surplus human beings longer exploitable for profit and thereby condemned as no longer worthy of life. Nor is this – at least to those of us who are its victims – especially big news; I am merely verbalizing what most of us already recognize and not infrequently – usually with extreme anger or bitterness – also say aloud.

Nevertheless, in the Chronicle – because I recognize my readers are already traumatized by constant, life-shortening economic anxiety and are therefore physically and emotionally fragile, I am careful to avoid expression of such hideous truths unless they are quotes, whether direct or indirect, and even then only when they are so essential to a given narrative they cannot be sidestepped. Otherwise there is nothing to be served by berating the powerless with the real-world purpose and consequences of the Ayn Rand/social-Darwinist savagery that is now the defining characteristic of U.S. economic policy – the maliciously imposed wretchedness we already know entirely too well.

Nor is the Democratic official likely to be unaware of the enormous editorial differences between OAN and the newsletter. One, as noted, is in the identity of readership itself. Another, already implied, is in content; the Chronicle is written only for local readers, while OAN is written for readers slightly more than half of whom are overseas, mostly in Europe, a few in Asia and Africa. Also, OAN is unabashedly opinionated. But in writing, photographing, editing and producing the Chronicle, I make a point of observing the traditional practices of so-called “objective” journalism. Lastly, OAN is strictly on-line, while the Chronicle serves a readership so impoverished – and therefore so computer-deprived – it is entirely an on-paper publication.

Moreover, though in the Chronicle I make no secret of my bias in favor of elderly and disabled persons (note again the edition illustrated here), I also go out of my way to be fair to all parties involved whenever the subject so requires, as in the ongoing coverage of the procedures by which the Republican and Democratic parties will indicate their respective choices of candidates in this year's presidential election.

In contrast, OAN claims neither fairness nor objectivity. It is – and always has been – the on-line equivalent of an editorial opinion column, the uncensored variant of an award-winning and often controversial editorial column I wrote for a local newspaper from 1977 to 1981, with all of the characteristic op-ed strengths and weaknesses.

But the Democratic official in this story – the identity of whom I am deliberately withholding – is either indifferent to the night-and-day distinction between OAN and the Chronicle or hopes the obviously punitive discrimination against the the latter's readership will silence the emphatically anti-capitalist resistance of the former.

The reason I am not now identifying this Democratic official nor even the office this Democrat holds is my hope the information embargo will soon voluntarily end – or better yet, that I misunderstood these circumstances and the embargo turns out to have been as unreal or unintentional as it was undeniably apparent.  If not – that is, if my pleas to end it are refused or ignored – then full details will be forthcoming, complete with all supportive correspondence.

Meanwhile my strongest suspicion is this particular Democratic official has never before dealt with a real journalist; that is, has never interacted with someone who – unlike the craven propagandists now hired to serve mainstream media (which after all is the for-profit propaganda machine owned by the same obscenely wealthy One Percenters who own most U.S. politicians and therefore all USian governments at every level) – will aggressively ask relevant questions and equally aggressively expose those who refuse to answer.

Which, finally, brings us to the money grafs of Hartmann's essay:

Both parties right now face a great crisis of ideology as well as a great opportunity for reinvention, and whichever party first reinvents itself successfully will begin winning elections the way the Democrats did in the 1932-1968 era.

If neither does, our nation faces a massive crisis provoked by the loss of democratic representation of the majority of the American electorate.

The root cause of this crisis is the fact is that neither party today does much of anything for the bottom 90% of Americans.

Here too is my comment-thread response, not italicized as I have revised it for publication here:

This the best, most informative, most compelling essay I have yet seen under Hartmann's byline.

It is most assuredly also – assuming We the People somehow triumph, and “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” – an essay truly for the history books.

Indeed I have only one contrary comment: it is not merely  the “emerging generation of Millennials” who have become what Hartmann labels “radical cynics.”

The same is true of many elderly people like myself, who have been painfully awakened to the deadly malevolence of the forces arrayed against us – especially as manifest in  the genocidal policies of the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals toward any of us old enough to remember how much better life was under the New Deal.

Awakening to the true magnitude of the Evil that threatens us, we are also awakening to the fact that only Marxism – and only Marxism in its Leninist/Maoist variant – offers the ideological discipline essential to overthrow those tyrants who would either reduce us all to slavery or exterminate us all by the slow-motion genocide of "austerity."

We realize that the One Percenters – and their wholly owned  Ruling Class of politicians, bureaucrats, academics, military officers and police commanders – now regard our memories of radically better times as definitively subversive. That is one of the reasons they are trying to kills us by slashing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and any other governmental stipends and services upon which capitalism forces us to depend for survival.

The other reason for their murderous intent – and it cannot be said too often or too harshly that is precisely what it is – is greed: they want for themselves the money and resources that now (barely) keep us alive.

Literally, our lives – and the lives of every member of the Working Class – are therefore at stake.

Moreover,  with the omnipotent secret police apparatus the One Percent has already built – total surveillance and federally militarized law enforcement – we need only look to our species' broader history to see, particularly in the example of Nazi Germany, the  irrefutable evidence that conventional USian politics are woefully inadequate. 

Given our dawning recognition that capitalism demands the embrace of limitless, mercilessly selfish, relentlessly greedy moral imbecility as its core principle,  we also question the effectiveness of any political ideology that does not as a first premise acknowledge capitalism as the most devastating, most potentially terminal affliction humanity has ever thrust upon itself.

Hence the “political revolution” Hartmann describes has indeed already begun. 

One hopes, as I surely do,  it will be accomplished via the ballot box. The alternative – our nation reduced to the ruin that now characterizes most of the Middle East – is too fearful to contemplate.

But knowing the murderous arrogance of the One Percent – demonstrated not just by such horrors as the Pinochet Regime in Chile but also by the emergence of death-squad police tactics here in our own homeland – it is tragically probable our smug and obscenely powerful overlords will reject a democratic solution here just as they rejected it in Iran in 1953 and in so many other places since then.

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Significantly, the secret-police/militarized-police apparatus already in place proves the Ruling Class intends in the near future to behave toward the rest of us exactly as it already behaves toward the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations population. That is proven by analysis of what in the military is called “enemy capabilities” (as demonstrated against Occupy and Black Lives Matter) and of “enemy intentions” (as demonstrated against Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and in killings at Ferguson, Baltimore, New York City etc.).

Those who question the appropriateness of my correct use of military terminology should note the U.S. military has already designated political protesters as “enemy forces.”

Thus the only question for those of us likely to be on the receiving end of the handgun rounds and rifle volleys is when the killing of innocents will become the national norm at any protest against capitalist or racist savagery.

My estimate, based on a lifetime of 76 years and a near-lifetime as both a journalist and a student of history, is that the obvious, no-longer-deniable death of U.S. representative democracy will be declared by the emergence of zero-tolerance, kill-all-resistance plutocracy soon after the 2016 elections, no matter whether the victor is Hillary Clinton nor the far more likely Donald Trump.

In this sense, there is no significant difference between Hillary and Trump: each is an unabashed fascist (although in deference to Trump it is worth noting he pledges to protect the very Social Security and Medicare programs Hillary wants to destroy) – and because each is an unabashed fascist, neither has any intention of preserving the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Hence the  difference between the United States and fascist nations of the past will soon become more a matter of euphemisms and the identity of human targets than anything else.

In this context, history shows only the most disciplined resistance has any chance of achieving liberation. History also shows that only Marxism embodies that discipline. Thus, for example, were the opponents of Diem's viciously anti-Buddhist Roman Catholic (Christofascist) theocracy in South Vietnam compelled to adopt (and adapt) Marxism: no other ideology possessed the requisite discipline.

Remember too that Marxism failed in Russia not because of Marxism but because of the dark undertow of Russian history – the fact Russia had no democratic or even libertarian traditions to sustain its people's quest for liberation  against opportunists like Stalin.  

Marxism in the  United States – with its virtually ageless background of First Nations democratic traditions,  British Common Law,  241 years of constitutional governance and its ideology of representative democracy (no matter how the inherent principles have been nullified since 22 November 1963 by capitalism and its economic mandates for domestic enslavement and global conquest) – would prove to be a very different story.

Indeed it may be our only possibility of salvation – whether as an oppressed people or a species on the brink of environmental extinction.

Curiously – again with the subtle hint of near-eerieness that so often characterizes synchronicity – the response Hartmann's essay evoked from me seems, in retrospect, almost an elaboration on the response he engendered by an especially damning exposé last week  entitled “Businesses Exploit The Poor For a Buck”:

This sort of exploitation, the human equivalent of Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon, is another example of why capitalism is the most malignant evil our species has ever inflicted on itself.

Indeed capitalism is so evil, its malevolence can only be described in religious terms. Capitalism is, in fact, the elevation of infinite greed to absolute virtue. In other words, just as religion exalts faith and piety above all other values, so does capitalism exalt selfishness and greed above other values.  As holiness is to religion, so greed is to capitalism.

What this means in practice is the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian value our species has ever articulated. Which, in turn, mandates the deliberate cultivation and imposition of moral imbecility – the psychological state that defines serial killers.

Thus capitalism is the mentality of a Ted Bundy or an Elizabeth Bathory deliberately and with malice aforethought applied not just to economics, but to governance and indeed to every other aspect of human experience.

No greater evil than capitalism has humanity ever knowingly inflicted on itself, and no greater evil has ever more relentlessly threatened human survival.

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TO FEND OFF the darkness that now ever more relentlessly encroaches upon all our lives, and therefore in keeping with my pledge to try to end these blog posts with some form of positive input, here is a nursery rhyme  – perhaps more suitable for adults than children – by the unabashedly pagan singer S. J. Tucker, whose voice in this performance is like a caress.

LB/22 March 2016

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Moron Nation Rules (with Robert Reich's Help); Millennials Suffer Worsening Poverty; Revolutionary Fervor of Staffers Aids Sanders Campaign

Men of Tacoma Clinic Defense on guard. Another image is here. Photo by Loren Bliss © 2016. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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THERE ARE THREE separate stories in this week's edition of OAN – four if you count the all-man Tacoma Clinic Defense photo I'm publishing as a clarification to whatever misleading impressions might have resulted from last week's TCD picture that showed only one man and four women. These facts alone are scarcely preface-worthy, but one of the other stories – the lead story in fact – has proven so damnably difficult to write, it demands an introduction.

Though I hate to begin an essay by recitation of all the reasons it is badly written, in this instance its disclosures are important enough I am willing to endure the mortification of yet another public confrontation with the utter (and utterly contradictory) absurdity implicit in the term “dyslexic writer.” 

Years ago, probably in 1969, when I began the first draft of what became the epic but doomed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” the 24-year odyssey of photography, research and writing that in 1983 was disseminated not via libraries and bookstores but rather as a cloud of windblown ash emanating from a smoldering ruin near the rural Washington state town of Alger, I encountered for the first time the challenge of textually addressing several new ideas at once.

The new ideas in “Dancer” – remember this was 1969, before feminist researchers had rescued the now somewhat more widely recognized evidence of our species' matrifocal (if not definitively matriarchal) past – were its hypothesis (that the Counterculture was the first wave of a spontaneous revolution against patriarchy), plus all the long-suppressed (and thus hopelessly obscure) material from folklore and mythology upon which that hypothesis was based.

Hence, if my conclusion was to make any sense, I had to first educate my readers. How, then – given that no paragraph should ever contain more than one new idea – would I write the book's opening?

It was, in fact, a problem to which I never found a satisfactory solution. It is also among the reasons I was so overjoyed when, in 1983, the late Cicely Nichols volunteered to edit the manuscript. Surely Cicely, a long-time friend whose credits included the editorship of Grove Press, would be able to cleave through the dyslexic frenzy of verbal convulsions – imagine, if you will, the conceptual equivalent of trying to wrestle hands-full of wet spaghetti into a stable rectilinear form – that always, always, always was the exasperating culmination of my efforts to write a satisfactory beginning to “Dancer.”

After the destruction of “Dancer” in Washington state – by a blaze that was started on the same day (1 September 1983) and indeed at the exact moment Cicely and I were meeting in Manhattan (7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time; 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time [which we know from the partially melted electric clock at the fire's point of origin] ) – I had assumed all such tasks were forever behind me.

But now, with this piece revealing Robert Reich's malicious and perhaps even gleeful participation in the making of Moron Nation, I am confronted with exactly the same editorial dynamic. The real story is Reich's breathtaking dishonesty. But to show its significance, I must first demonstrate the existence of Moron Nation, a condition our One Percent masters do their best to conceal. Yet if my initial focus is on Moron Nation, Reich's treachery is reduced to a kind of sequel – buried so deeply in the prefatory text it can readily be ignored. And if I focus first on Reich's professorial malfeasance, the reaction is likely to be “so what”? That's why writing this essay has already generated three top-to-bottom rewrites and consumed more than 36 hours.

Because I have decided that first exemplifying Moron Nation and only then describing Reich's role in it is the best way to approach this story – actually the better of two unsatisfactory choices – I beseech your patience. Thank you.

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“OBVIOUSLY – AND TRAGICALLY for our homeland and the world beyond – Moron Nation extends as deeply into the Left as it does into the Right”: so I wrote on the comment thread of a Politico report as republished by Reader Supported News.

Headlined “Would Sri Srinivasan Be Exxon-Mobile's Justice?,” the report discloses the plutocratic bias of the man who is emerging as President Obama's most likely choice to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of the notoriously reactionary Justice Antonin Scalia.

To put the associated debate in its proper context, here is the rest of my contribution to the “Srinivasan/ Exxon-Mobile” thread:

Given Obama's Barack-the-Betrayer record, the one certainty in this matter is that he will appoint a supporter of Citizens United. 

Indeed, the perpetuation of Citizens United is no doubt now the primary mandate of his One Percent masters.

Hence a defender of the petroleum cartel – who by his defense has proven himself an advocate of what might be termed “divine right capitalism” – is not an unlikely choice.

As I have said before, this appointment will reveal the real Obama – the Goldwater conservative who hid himself behind a Big Lie of fake “progressive” promises – which means whomever he picks will be acceptable to the Republicans with whom he clandestinely collaborates.

A while later, after my comment was repeatedly down-thumbed via RSN's equivalent of readership voting, I added the following:

Once again I am appalled by the fanatical closed-mindedness of those who remain in denial about who and what Obama is and how he conned us by his unprecedented use of the Big Lie.

Indeed it is worse than denial. It is, in fact, as clinically delusional as any of the absurd beliefs that characterize Abrahamic fundamentalism whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim...

Moreover, note that Obama's behavior apropos the Supreme Court vacancy is exactly as, on 14-15 February, I predicted it would be.

See here  (scroll down), also here.

For reasons their content will make obvious, my remarks accessed via the first of these two links deserves reprinting here in full:

Several hours ago I discovered my main comment, which pointed out that based on Obama's neo-liberal, anti-New-Deal record he is likely to appoint a Scalia clone, had been removed from this thread. Likewise the accompanying remarks by several supportive posters.

At first this was, of course, profoundly disturbing. The main reason I cherish RSN is its editorial freedom, which literally has no equal at any other Leftist website in the United States. Hence I have been a regular participant in RSN discussions since its founding. I also covered Occupy Tacoma for RSN, relying on the skills acquired during a journalism career that spans nearly seven decades (1956 to the present) to provide RSN with relevant photographs and text.

Initially I was hurt, disappointed and outraged. But after an extensive exchange of e-mails with Editor/Founder Marc Ash, I am convinced the disappearance of my posts – from here and from the thread of an expose' revealing the gross dishonesty of the Clinton campaign – was the result of unfortunate circumstances that are not likely to recur. Indeed, I have Mr. Ash's assurance the posts will be restored later today.

Hence my gratitude, both for Mr. Ash's responsiveness and for the reassurance RSN remains what it has always been – an exemplar, perhaps our very best, of that most precious freedom (allegedly) assured us by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Next is what I posted after the circumstances were somewhat more clarified:

Unfortunately not just the post in question (see my "Several hours ago," above) but the entire related (and mostly supportive) dialogue it engendered was irremediably deleted.

Though Editor Marc Ash and I differ on the source of the deletion – he says he regards it as accidental, while I regard the attendant manipulations of time signatures and the simultaneous deletion of a related post on another thread as incontrovertible proof the perpetrator is a Hilleryite infiltrator acting with maximum malice – Mr. Ash has nevertheless asked me to reconstruct and summarize the entire dialogue.

This requires two separate posts, as the suppressed material included at least a half dozen posts.

My comment was prompted by speculation on what sort of Supreme Court nominee Obama might submit given the mandates of his Ruling Class masters, his legacy quest, his neo-liberal ideology and his need for senatorial approval. I pointed out the only path to an accurate answer is analysis of his record, which in bitter truth defines Obama as a Goldwater Republican who won election under two false flags: that of the Democratic Party, and that of the progressive consciousness gullible voters – myself included – foolishly assumed to be universal amongst the USian Empire's oppressed minorities.

Hence I summarized how Obama the Orator mobilized voter support with the Big Lie of “change we can believe in” but promptly shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer.

Then as Barack the Betrayer he cut food stamps $90 per family/per month, asserting – like some latter-day Josef Goebbels – the resultant starvation budgets will protect children from hunger; he dealt the final death blow to organized labor by sandbagging the Employee Free Choice Act; he permanently betrayed health care reform to forever define U.S. health care as a privilege of wealth rather than the human right it is in the civilized world; he openly collaborated with implicitly genocidal efforts to cut and/or privatize Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all other elements of the already inadequate socioeconomic safety net; and he not only broke his pledge to restore our constitutional rights but by his unprecedented whistle-blower persecutions and other brazen depredations has defined himself more of a tyrant than even Nixon.

Moreover, if one examines the nature of the present-day U.S., it becomes obvious that – just as its ideological founding fathers are the Nazi war criminals the Ruling Class embraced after World War II – so is the Citizens United decision the judicial cornerstone of the resultant (implicitly fascist) plutocracy.

Ergo, it is obvious Obama's One Percent masters will demand he give them a Supreme Court that does not even obliquely jeopardize Citizens United.

In other words, Obama's most likely course of action is to appoint a Scalia clone.

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MORE DISMAYING EVIDENCE of Moron Nation's disabled political consciousness lies in how few people seem able to grasp the simple, obvious-as-sunrise fact the Mainstream Media is owned by the same One Percenters who own most U.S. politicians and therefore own all U.S. governments at every level.

That explains why these governments whether local, state or federal, most politicians and the Mainstream Media itself all speak with the same voices, as for example in the national pep rallies that preceded the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Syria. It also explains the lavish coverage of Trump or Hillary, the methodical suppression of news about Sanders and the malicious slanders of the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter.

But how many times must this be stated before it soaks in? Has the U.S. citizenry been utterly purged of the ability to reason? As I have said so many times before, and said again on the comment thread of John Nichols' thought-provoking analysis of “How We Got Trumped by the Media” after it was republished by RSN from The Nation:

...Mainstream Media is the first for-profit, totally and forever privatized, all-government ministry of propaganda.

That means its endorsements, whether outright or obliquely (as by its apportionment of coverage), always reflect our overlords' intentions.

Ergo, it is obvious the One Percent has chosen Trump as its primary figurehead and Hillary as the alternate should Trump lose.

Nor should this surprise anyone who knows the history of USian fascism. It began with the failed Bankers Plot of 1934; bolstered itself by the post-World-War-II embrace of Nazi war criminals; eliminated its enemies via the purges and/or assassinations of all leading Leftists and liberals (Communists, socialists, Keynesians, intellectuals) during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s; became the creeping, slowly boiled-frog fascism that began with Carter; and has now erupted into the rampaging fascism of today.

Then, to underscore my point:

Also, here's a Josef Goebbels speech, complete with English translation, for those who dismiss Trump's violent hostility to reporters and photographers as “just politics.” Watch and listen – if you dare – and note the ways in which Goebbels' 1933 oratory is similar to Trump's today.

Coincidence? Not if Trump, in preparation for becoming the first USian Fuehrer, has been studying the speeches of Goebbels, Hitler and Mussolini.

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ANOTHER TRUTH SEEMINGLY lost to moronation is how Obama's tactics typify how the Democrats use the Big Lie to obscure their role as the enablers of whatever the One Percent demands through its Republican mouthpieces.

Which explains Obama the Orator's obviously pre-planned shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer.

Just as the Betrayer's One Percent masters intended, “change we can believe in” was the most outrageous, most politically destructive Big Lie in U.S. presidential history. Moreover, given both the USian Empire's Nazi-enhanced skill at psychological warfare and Madison Avenue's predatory skill at long-range psychological manipulation, it is obvious the deception and the devastating disappointment it fostered has (deliberately) alienated more U.S. voters than any political act in the nation's post-Civil-War history.

The message is undeniable: why bother to vote if even when the candidate encourages “hope” and promises “change” the result is instead a (defiantly imposed) worsening of our circumstances.

And now, once again, in “Documents Show Obama Lobbied Strongly Against Transparency Reform,” we are confronted with Obama's penchant for lying – undeniable proof of his bottomless contempt for us, we the people, and his relentless hostility to the very constitutional rights he pledged to restore:

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IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to discuss Moron Nation without considering the state of the nation's schools.

Though I was never an education writer per se, my interest in the policies and theoretical issues of USian public education began during my senior year at Holston High School in Knox County, Tennessee, 1957-1958. It was an interest that became professionally relevant during the middle third of my journalism career, which included the years I was a part-time college instructor (1975 through 1982), and it remains a compelling interest even now.

During my teaching years I noted amongst my younger students the worsening civic ignorance that resulted from the radical downsizing of public-school curricula – specifically the methodical elimination of any courses that might teach students their constitutional rights. Imposition of this Moron-Nation-type of induced ignorance was the One Percent's response to anti-Vietnam War protests and the Countercultural Rebellion in general. The Ruling Class seemed to believe that people who were not allowed to learn their rights would never be able to assert them. As a result, the needs of younger students for remedial education began disrupting my classes, which were about photography and journalism. Whenever the Bill of Rights (particularly the First Amendment) was relevant to our discussions, I found myself teaching civics and U.S. history as well as camera work and news writing. Thus I have some real-world familiarity with how the creation of Moron Nation became one of the undisclosed purposes of USian public education. But now I am getting ahead of myself; hence let us return to the 1957-1958 academic year,

In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the world's first space satellite, which triggered throughout the USian homeland an intense, often passionate, sometimes hateful conflict between proponents of two diametrically opposed pedagogies. One group would have sustained the USian pre-Moron-Nation compliance with capitalism's insistence the public schools produce “well-adjusted” (that is, ignorant but conformist and therefore reliably obedient) graduates as demanded by corporate personnel experts. The other group would have adopted the Soviet (actually European) mandate that graduates acquire the foundation of a classical education – including the various exercises in logical thinking provided by in-depth studies of literature, science, mathematics and humanities.

For some reason – I no longer remember why (though probably because I was the managing editor of the school paper and a top student in speech and drama classes) – I was asked to participate in a public debate matching one pedagogy against the other. As I recall, I was free to choose either side, but of course – because that's where my heart was even at age 17 – I chose to advocate the Soviet pedagogy, and in preparation for the actual event, I steeped myself in everything I could find regarding educational theory. Again if memory serves, the debate – conducted at night in the high-school auditorium before a standing-room-only audience of parents, teachers and fellow students – was declared a draw. Years afterward I was told the eloquence of my presentation – never mind support for anything “Commie” in that era would have otherwise provoked immediate ostracism – was among the reasons I was voted “Boy Most Likely to Succeed.” (Holston, named after the nearby river, has since been absorbed by expansion of Knoxville's city limits and downgraded to a middle school.)

Decades later, my interest in pedagogy would again serve me well when I was a reporter assigned to investigations or the coverage of public affairs.

The stories I wrote as an investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal (Jersey City, N.J.) included an award-winning series in 1970 that revealed the magnitude of the local school-funding crisis. The Jersey City school board later used my reports as supportive evidence in its successful lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of school levies. (The court upheld Jersey City's argument that local school levies, which are based on local property values and therefore on the presumptive ability of local citizens to pay, are unconstitutionally discriminatory against lower-income school districts.)

Stories in the public affairs category (1976-1981) included dozens of reports on education policy, most of them focused on the Legislature's struggle to define “basic education” in Washington state, a fight that rages unabated even now,  35 years later. One such story, a 1978 Sigma Delta Chi winner, documented the tribulations and triumphs of an academically superior high school caught between ChristoFascist fanatics and secular rationalists in a bitterly and sometimes violently contested war over over course content and teaching methods.

The continued expansion of Moron Nation – chiefly by the denial of adequate public-school funding – remains among the most devastating consequences of such infighting. But the ruination caused by reduced funding – which (though few dare say it) is a direct expression of hostility to public education itself – is nationwide.  The hostility seems to have two primary sources: the grassroots rejection of non-biblical learning that's symptomatic of the frightening expansion of Christian Fundamentalist power in the USian homeland, and the Ayn Rand economic doctrine imposed by our One Percent overlords, which condemns as wasted money any government expenditure that presumably benefits the 99 Percent.

For those who wish to pursue the subject in greater depth, Henry A. Giroux, whose  website is here, has documented – probably more thoroughly than any scholar on earth – the destruction of USian public education. He writes in provocative detail about the downsizing of school districts and the conversion of their few remaining schools to zero-tolerance training camps, the purpose of which is to provide capitalism with legions of mindlessly obedient workers and to eliminate, via the school-to-prison pipeline and the prison-industrial system, anyone who dares resist.

Moronation has thus reduced the USian citizenry to the most frighteningly ignorant population  in the industrial world. Its ignorance is so huge, so bottomless, so malignant, many fear it is the inevitable precursor to extinction-class disaster, whether by nuclear war, environmental apocalypse or both. Thus too it seems the damning statement H. L. Mencken made 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” – is already the epitaph for the United States – and may become the epitaph for the rest of humanity.

***

BUT THE COLLEGES and universities – surely their scholars will save us before Moron Nation goes terminal. Right?

That is precisely what I believed until last week, when I read the essay by Robert Reich entitled “The American Fascist.”

Reich, the former secretary of labor who at the end of Bill Clinton's first term resigned to protest the president's vicious anti-labor policies and thereby earned my presumably undying respect, is a professor at the University of California/Berkeley and a scholar with impeccable credentials.  He nevertheless knowingly – that is, with what U.S. Courts call “malice aforethought” – penned and published the following mostly-true statement that includes one breathtakingly deceptive lie:

“But Trump has finally reached a point where parallels between his presidential campaign and the fascists of the first half of the 20th century – lurid figures such as Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, and Francisco Franco – are too evident to overlook.”

The lie is Reich's inclusion of Stalin in the list of fascists. Indeed it was Stalin and his Red Army that saved the world – at the inconceivable cost of as many as 43.3 million Soviet soldiers and civilians – from Hitler's Nazism and Mussolini's fascism.

That Reich's lie is obviously a purposeful Big Lie – one cunningly intended to serve the mind-paralyzing function identified by George Orwell as “doublethink”  – is underscored by the fact most USians regardless of age or education are so ill-informed, they have no idea that without Soviet assistance, the United States and its allies would not have been able to defeat Hitler's Wehrmacht – the best trained, best equipped war machine of its time.

Nor do USians understand that socialism and fascism are antitheticals. Both, we are taught, are “unAmerican,” therefore “bad,” and from the viewpoint of Christian zealotry, so unforgivably sinful they damn their proponents to the fires of hell forever. The resultant combination of ignorance and fear – which Reich's Big Lie intentionally perpetuates – locks USian minds closed as tightly as any miser's safe and thereby (exactly as intended) makes political consciousness-raising impossible.

Never in my life did I imagine I would encounter such a deliberate falsehood in a manuscript by a Harvard-educated professor, an alleged liberal who teaches at one of the nation's leading universities. But I did – and frankly I am still in shock. Hence here is the full text of my comment-thread response, which unavoidably includes earlier versions of the points I made above:

Mr. Reich's historically and academically dishonest inclusion of Joseph Stalin in his list of fascists is far worse than an error. Mr. Reich obviously knows better – that while Stalin was indeed a tyrant, he was most assuredly no fascist.

Thus it is obvious Mr. Reich maliciously chose to use his professorship to not only deliberately disseminate a falsehood but to contribute to the further dumbing down of the USian population – specifically by fabricating yet another variant of the already hopelessly illiterate, breathtakingly wrong notion, omnipresent throughout Moron Nation, that there is no difference between socialism and fascism.

By so doing – by literally nurturing the worst-in-the-industrial-world USian national ignorance – Mr. Reich has in all probability laid the groundwork for the real fascists to slander Mr. Sanders' democratic socialism as both “Stalinism” and “fascism” simultaneously.

I am frankly appalled by Mr. Reich's arrogant deception – so much so, all the (considerable) respect I had for him is gone forever. Indeed, with “friends” like Mr. Reich, Mr. Sanders scarcely needs enemies.

Later, in response to the down-thumbed jeers of other RSN posters, I added the following:

The number of otherwise intelligent, well-educated USian people who have been rendered politically brain-dead by the relentless deluge of anti-socialist, pro-capitalist propaganda is beyond appalling.

As best I can do in one sentence, the difference between socialism and fascism is that the former advocates economic democracy, while the latter advocates zero-tolerance economic hierarchy.

The core purpose of socialism, achievable only when we the people own the major means of production, is facilitating life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by the abolition of economic differences of class, race, ethnicity and gender. “From each according to ability; to each according to need.” Thus socialism seeks to end the One-Percent-versus-99-Percent paradigm that forms the inherently oppressive, inherently exploitative basis of capitalism.

Fascism is literally socialism's diametrical opposite. Its core principle is “der Fuehrerprinzip,” a secular version of the divine rights formerly claimed by emperors and kings. Its economic tyranny is implicit in the quote attributed to Mussolini: “Fascism should be more properly called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

(There was more to my comment, but it was in response to other posters on the thread and is therefore not relevant here.)

What is relevant is how Professor Reich's participation in the process of moronation tells me Moron Nation is far more egregiously triumphant – and thus far more carefully scripted and far more vastly conspiratorial – than ever I imagined.

Indeed the willful participation of a high-ranking scholar in the malicious dumbing-down of the United States is tantamount to the knowing participation of high-ranking German scholars in the Nazification of the Weimar Republic. (No wonder a fascist is dominating the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.)

Reich's role in moronation also tells me we must recognize the damning statement H. L. Mencken made 96 years ago is just another part of the elaborate camouflage behind the One Percenters and their servants in academia, media and government hide while they engineer our subjugation.

I have no idea how we might defend ourselves against such malevolence. But I do know if we recognize it for what it is and name it and stop blaming ourselves for what it is doing to us, we will have taken the first step toward evolving adequate countermeasures.

Meanwhile, if Bernie Sanders is the person he claims to be, he will surely purge his campaign of Robert Reich the Smirking Professor of the Big Lie.

*** *** ***

THE COMMENT ABOUT Hillary mentioned in “suppressed material” (far) above documents her clandestine collaboration with the Christofascist opponents of women's sexual freedom. Its reconstructed version is here. Alas, it was written, as all writers know is true of any such reconstruction, with the sure (and surely depressing) knowledge the second effort will not ever be as well-stated as the original.

*** *** ***

“YOUNG AMERICANS ARE now poorer than retired people,” the newscaster/blogger Thom Hartmann reported recently.

“That's the stunning take away  from a new study by The Guardian,” he said.

Furthermore, the paper says the problem of abject poverty, though most obvious amongst Millennials who live in the United States, has become a defining characteristic of their generational peers throughout Europe as well.

Hartmann elaborated on these dismal facts at some length (click the above link to access his work), though unfortunately he failed to give us a link to the original story, which I provide here and which contains much more information than Hartmann had space to provide.

When he asked, “What do you think? Tell us here,” I responded accordingly:

Fact: The Ruling Class aka the One Percent has been ranting about the necessity for forcibly reducing the global population (i.e. genocide) at least since the late 1950s.

Fact: Death camps, ethnic “cleansing” and other obvious forms of genocide are no longer fashionable (save perhaps amongst Donald Trump's supporters and others of the fascist/Nazi persuasion).

Fact: Hence the most effective method of genocide – especially since under capitalism, the victims themselves can be blamed for their own deaths – is economic downsizing.

Need I say more?

*** *** ***

NORMALLY I DO not post more than a few words from an article on which I am commenting, but “Bernie and the Groundswell on Which He Stands” is perhaps the most inspiring dispatch I have yet seen emerge from the hurly-burly of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Besides that, “Groundswell” stands in brightly positive counterpoint to the gloomy negativity of “Moron Nation” and “Millennial Poverty” stories, which means it fulfills a promise I made to myself a couple of weeks ago – that given the descending darkness in which we now seem fated to abide, I will try as best I can to find an uplifting report with which to conclude what is all too often a passage through disquieting realities.

Hopefully that antidote to depression will be, as it is today, a significant report. But it may be something as mundane as a joyful or triumphant dog story, the very sort of anecdote I as an unapologetic dog lover always appreciate – especially now that thanks to young friends I am blessed by a few joyful big-dog hours every week.

Here, then, are the lead grafs of “Groundswell,” a vitally informative piece  republished by RSN in which The Guardian's veteran journalist Paul Hilder describes the revolution-minded origins of the Sanders campaign and the internal dynamics that have sustained its unprecedented victories:

The Bernie campaign is working toward a political revolution, and they’re playing to win.

Over the last few weeks, I worked my way inside the belly of the Bernie campaign. I saw the virtual chat rooms where thousands of super-volunteers are coordinating, and mapped their digital infrastructure, fast growing into something more powerful even than the Obama campaign.

I traveled through five battleground states and spoke with hundreds of his supporters, as well as analysts and insiders. What I found was the story of a political start-up growing exponentially in a cauldron of American discontent.

Yes, I think Hilder's text really is worth reading. There's even, near the bottom of the comment thread, a good-humored exchange between another poster and I.

LB/15 March 2016

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