A Not-So-Fond Farwell to Reader Supported News

Occupy Tacoma's last demonstration, May Day 2012. Click image to view it full size. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2012.

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WHAT FOLLOWS IS one of those stories I never imagined I would write – a report about an event I never imagined could happen.

When I first encountered Reader Supported News, probably sometime in 2010, it seemed a welcoming haven of uncensored reportage and vital, intelligently expressed dialogue. Hence I soon became something of a regular contributor to its comment threads, and in October 2011, after e-correspondence with owner Marc Ash, I volunteered to cover Occupy Tacoma for the site. I provided both text and pictures – the latter at considerable personal expense because in those days I was still shooting film (mostly in a beloved pair of Leica M4s) – but I no longer had my own darkroom and was therefore dependent on commercial processing.

An Occupy Tacoma activist from the local group's beginning, I stayed with its story until the entire Occupy Movement was crushed the following spring.

I made the picture above, one of my final Occupy Tacoma frames, on May Day 2012. It was as telling an end-shot as any photo-essay-concluding image I've ever made, but it was my one Occupy submission RSN owner Marc Ash declined to run. And in light of subsequent events I cannot but wonder if that was my first taste of his own peculiar brand of censorship, for in the accompanying text, as in many subsequent comment-thread posts, I violated the politically correct taboo against telling Occupy's most embittering core truth – that the movement was as much a victim of its own pseudo-anarchistic anti-intellectualism as it was prey to brutal oppression by the new Gestapo of the Empire's federalized, militarized local police. Apparently Ash considered this alleged heresy to be allowable in a comment thread, but verboten in the more formal medium of a photographically illustrated news report.

Though it is perhaps an aside, I should disclose here that since my teenage years I have been aware, sometimes rather painfully, of the deadly danger of USian anti-intellectualism – the methodically conditioned, socioeconomically fatal mental paralysis first inflicted by capitalism's postwar purge  of Communists, socialists and New Deal Democrats, later by its relentless escalation  to marginalize or silence any politician, journalist or academic who dared show even minimal humanitarian tendencies. But I was shocked to discover, via Occupy, just how thoroughly much of the younger USian population – particularly those who, despite their self-proclaimed  anarchism,  have never heard of Bakunin  or Kropotkin  – has been so irremediably conditioned.

While people who have never before been allowed the opportunity to think and learn often become superior students – that is one of the more obvious lessons of the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions – those who have been taught to despise knowledge and to fear thinking are definitively unteachable. Such is the dreadful rationale behind Moron Nation and the process of dumbing down – of “moronation” – that has reduced the citizenry of the United States to the most notoriously ignorant population in the developed world. Induced ignorance policed by anti-intellectualism is capitalism's ultimate – and ultimately impregnable – defense.

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IN EARLY 2013, when 15 Now Tacoma emerged from Occupy Tacoma's ashes to rally for a $15-per-hour minimum wage inside Tacoma, which is Washington state's second largest seaport and the third busiest seaport on the West Coast, I volunteered to cover that story for RSN too. But Ash never replied to my inquiries. At the time, early 2013, I assumed Ash dismissed the Tacoma campaign as too local to be nationally relevant and that in any case he was too busy to respond. As for me, I remained a 15 Now activist through the fall of 2014, when health problems – the geriatric afflictions of old age – forced me to drop out.

Eventually the Tacoma electorate, perhaps 65 percent of which has been reduced to official low-income status, was terrorized into semi-submission by Ruling Class threats of retaliatory job losses and thus in November 2015 voted against itself and $15 Now but approved “$12 Later” – a minimum-wage hike begrudgingly proposed by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, added to the ballot by the chamber's Tacoma City Council vassals, and now to be staged in over four years. Again Ash seemed uninterested in the story, and again I assumed it was merely the situation I myself had experienced countless times as a member of the working press, particularly as the news editor (1968-1969) of The Daily Record in Morristown, N.J. – too many stories, not enough news hole i.e. editorial space.

But then last summer, Ash threw all his weight behind the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Of necessity given Hillary's arrogance, lies, corruption and most especially her Goldwater Girl ambition to be the first-ever conquer of Russia and therefore the personification of thermonuclear apocalypse, Ash began noticeably shifting the content of his website. Not only did he deliberately exclude reports critical of Hillary and her Democratic (sic) Party. He also began relying more and more on the material disseminated by the so-called “mainstream media.”

Owned as it is by the same One Percenters who own USian government at all levels, this “mainstream media” is in fact the world's first privately owned, for-profit, Josef-Goebbels-type ministry of propaganda.

Not surprisingly I began to wonder if Ash's rejections of my final Occupy story and all my post-Occupy story suggestions are more than mere journalistic coincidence – if indeed they are perhaps reflective of the same “neo-liberal” (aka fascist) anti-99-Percent bias that in the past year has become one of the ideological cornerstones not just of of present-day Democratic (sic) Party but of RSN as well.

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THE CHINESE WARMASTER Sun Tzu observed 2,500 years ago that “all warfare is based on deception.” This is never more true than in class warfare which – because it is ultimately a fight to the death to determine who will be the predators and who will be their victims – is the most mercilessly vicious warfare of all time. Both sides employ tactics derived from strategies of deception. One such tactic, used by a tyrannical ruling class to identify, concentrate and neutralize its opponents, is to organize those opponents into false opposition movements.

Perhaps its ultimate example, pioneered by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, is Father Gapon's  Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of St. Petersburg. As Lev Bronstein aka Leon Trotsky famously remarked, “in every gathering of three or more revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.” Likewise, the post-World-War-II Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was rumored to contain more agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the main USian secret police agency, than actual Communists. Since then, the creation of fake revolutionary cells and the subsequent arrest of their members has become a primary USian secret police tactic. 

The practice of today's Democratic (sic) Party – spouting humanitarian rhetoric like “change we can believe in” while imposing genocidal cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and other socioeconomic services – is another tactic formulated from the same strategy of deception.

To be absolutely clear, I am not – say again NOT – accusing Ash of being a latter-day Father Gapon. But I am saying there's enough of a parallel between Gapon's betrayal of the Petrograd proletariat and RSN's abandonment of and increasing hostility toward the 99 Percent and their (our) hard-Left, invariably socialist, often Marxian advocates to prompt three pointed questions: (1)- When did RSN's now-undeniable alliance with the Hillaryite Democratic (sic) Party begin; (2)-What financial benefits, if any, has RSN received as a result; and (3)-Has RSN offering its services to, or has it been hired by, one or more of the USian secret police agencies as a Left-magnet – that is, a Gaponishka mechanism for identifying, cataloging and perhaps eventually disappearing those us who are genuinely committed to resisting capitalist savagery.

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RSN PUBLISHED SCOTT Galindez's “Our Opportunity in 2017” on 11 January.  Another of Galindez's fanatically anti-Trump, implicitly pro-Hillary diatribes, the following quotes are taken directly from its text:

“The political revolution must be ready to... transform the Democratic Party...we have to defend progressive gains we’ve made over several decades...I don't believe all Trump supporters are racist, sexist bigots...Trump did convince working-class voters in the Rust Belt that he would bring back the factory jobs that bad trade deals drove out of the country. We have to win those voters back...We have to offer them an alternative that benefits their families. Every time Trump makes a move that threatens the quality of life of working people and the poor, we need to fight hard to stop him. Those fights are opportunities for us to reach new communities...we also must continue to fight for people of color, the LGBTQ community, and women. We don't want Donald Trump's America. We have come too far to let fearmongering take us backward.”

Like all effective wartime propaganda, Galindez's text is a seductive mixture of truth and falsehoods. The latter, designated above and below by bold italic, are glaring Big Lies. Given how the so-called “Reagan Democrats” embraced code-word Republicanism as an expression of their bigotry – the same hatefulness demonstrated by the 77 percent of white USians who refused to acknowledge the murderous racism in the Bush Regime's abandonment  of post-Katrina New Orleans – there is no possible way to win those voters back, not even by an alternative that benefits their families. Among the irrefutable lessons of my nearly 77 years, 56 of which have been in journalism of one form or another, is that white racism and/or homophobia trumps all other considerations – no pun intended.

Because the Democratic (sic) Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street, the notion any political revolution can transform the Democratic Party is not only a lie but a contradiction in terms – like arguing Nazism could have cured Germany of Antisemitism or the Ku Klux Klan could end USian racism.

Apart from a few identity-politics victories – pseudo-triumphs allowed only because they destroy the class solidarity essential to the struggle for economic democracy and therefore clandestinely serve our capitalist overlords – there have been absolutely no progressive gains...made over several decades. Galindez's claim is thus a picture-perfect example of the verbal sleight-of-hand by which he tries to conceal the Democratic (sic) Party's post-JFK history as the nation's chief betrayer of the 99 Percent. The last “progressive gain” was the U.S. Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973. Since then there have been naught but defeats. Many of these debacles are deadly, as in the ruinously impoverishing (and therefore life-shortening) destruction of labor unions or the huge loss of reproductive health care. (The latter is the result of JesuNazi violence, murder included, that is tolerated by Democrats and encouraged by Republicans. As of last year it has left approximately 90 percent of the nation's counties – homes to about 40 percent of the nation's reproductive-age women – without abortion facilities.)

United in the tyranny of ever-more-obviously Nazified capitalist governance, the two parties are in fact a single Ruling Class entity that functions as a good-cop/bad-cop enforcement team. Thus Galindez's claim we (presumably the Democratic [sic] Party) also must continue to fight for people of color, the LGBTQ community, and women is deception of the first order; see for example The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Governance (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008), particularly pages 272-277. A vital companion-book – especially now that Trump's victory has given the JesuNazis absolute power, is American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges; Simon & Schuster: 2006); see also The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Naomi Klein; Henry Holt and Company: 2007), most notably chapters 14 and 15. In truth the Democrats have been openly waging genocidal war on minority communities since President Bill Clinton's welfare-cutoff and mass-arrest laws were enacted during the 1990s. The Democratic (sic) Party's begrudging support for gay marriage climaxed years of outspoken opposition, and women – supposedly a favored Democratic (sic) constituency – were shafted both by Obama's sneaky gift to the anti-birth-control Christian fanatics and by his massive cuts in food stamps,  its victims including millions of single-mother families.

Moreover there is the now-obvious impermanence of the identity-politics wins – especially since the Trump Regime intends to wage war against gay rights and to re-impose nationwide zero-tolerance marijuana prohibition by mass internments, first in the states where marijuana is legalized or decriminalized, with fatally long federal prison sentences for anyone who survives arrest and is so convicted. Thus Galindez's we have come too far is an especially egregious Big Lie, an attempt to hide the hideous truth we have been – and indeed are being – thrust so far backward, no recovery may be possible.

There is no question we have been in a Dark Age for many years – I would say at least since the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963, maybe since the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. There is now no question it is about to get infinitely darker under Trump, just as it would have, albeit in different and perhaps more universally fatal ways, under Hillary. And history tells us such dark ages typically last 500 years or more – eternity for those who are born and die amidst the darkness.

***

IT WAS IN response to the shameless lies and deceptions asserted by “Our Opportunity in 2017” I fired off a comment-thread post in which I respectfully addressed Galindez as “Mr. Galindez” – a courtesy I always observe in such circumstances whether my reaction is positive or negative – and took him to task for his dishonesty.

I opened with the statement that transformation of the Democratic (sic) Party into a revolutionary organization was no more possible than the transformation of black widow spiders into household pets. I probably noted, much as I did above, that Galindez's ever-more-obvious support for identity politics was not only collaboration  with the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals, but perpetuated the capitalist governance that had reduced the future of the Empire (and therefore the future of humanity and the planet) to a choice between two Hitlers: Hillary Hitler, who intended to try to conquer Russia via World War III, and Donald Hitler, who intended a new Holocaust as his Final Solution to the Empire's problems with minorities, women and poverty. I ended by pointing out that in such revolutionary times as these, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution, and Mr. Galindez's ideology clearly identified him as belonging to the former category.

Unfortunately my exact wording is lost because I did not save the comment as a word document. I had no reason to believe Ash would suppress it. But suppress it he did. And when I asked that my text be returned, he first ignored my request, than said returning it was impossible. Here is the resultant e-correspondence:

On 12-Jan-17 08:31, Marc Ash wrote:

Loren, Sorry man but we are tired of the personal attacks on our authors. Did not approve you comment condemning Scott. Sorry.

m

On 12-Jan -17 09:11 Loren Bliss wrote:

Mr. Ashe:

Firstly, please do me the courtesy of returning to me the text of what will be my last-ever attempt to comment via Reader Supported News. That comment was not a “personal attack"; it was legitimate criticism that has obviously been suppressed for its (bluntly truthful) response to Mr. Galindez's efforts as a Democratic (sic) Party identity-politics ideologue and therefore his (seemingly) inadvertent role as one of the facilitators of Trump's no-doubt-permanent transformation of the United States into a Nazi nation.

Actually the censored post was relatively restrained as I did not point out that Mr. Galindez's claim "we have to defend progressive gains we’ve made over several decades" is nearly as slick a Democratic (sic) Party Big Lie as "change we can believe in." Apart from one economically meaningless identity-politics victory, there have been no "progressive gains" in this country since the Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973. Indeed the reverse is true: since 1973 there have been naught but skyrocketing progressive losses. Thus Mr. Galindez's claim is but another example of the Democrats' wantonly dishonest rewriting of history to sustain the especially egregious Big Lie the Democrats represent and/or defend progressive values.

In this context, that you would suppress any rebuttal of Mr. Galindez's falsehoods thus unmistakably redefines RSN's purpose, from its hitherto-professed function of speaking truth to power to its now painfully obvious goal of serving the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals by dissemination of the lies and maintenance of the charades -- including those of Gapon-type pseudo-opposition -- deemed essential to the expansion of capitalist governance, i.e., the uniquely USian brand of Nazism now emergent.

Secondly, and very regretfully, your imposition of censorship makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion you and RSN have become a Democratic (sic) Party asset and therefore too an asset of one or more of the nation's 17 secret police agencies. Thus RSN demonstrates an ever-more-obvious similarity to the functions of Father Gapon and his movement on behalf the Okhrana in Tsarist Russia. Thus too, the only valid question is no longer whether RSN so serves but for how long it has been so serving. As I said in the post you suppressed, in revolutionary times such as these, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution; though the extent of your cooperation with the secret police remains unknown, by your defense of the fascism-facilitating Democratic (sic) Party, you and RSN obviously fall into the former category.

Thirdly, given these givens – particularly your decision to escalate your pseudo-progressive facilitation of fascism – I can no longer in good conscience attempt to contribute to your website, particularly now it is obvious you will suppress any genuine dissent.

Please in this context and for future reference be advised I own the copyrights to the Occupy Tacoma photography I contributed to RSN c. 2011-2012 and will, through my ongoing membership in the National Writers Union, promptly take action against any violations thereof.

I am sorry this ends as it does. Though I am not surprised. I have yet to meet a bourgeois self-proclaimed "progressive" who is not invariably more faithful to the bourgeois ethos and is therefore ultimately a (typical) betrayer of genuinely progressive values.

Loren Bliss

On 12-Jan-17 09:45, Marc Ash wrote:

Mr. Bliss,

With all due respect, I’ve known Scott Galindez for 17 years. He is one of the most dedicated grass-roots organizers I have ever met. He has been arrested for going over the White House fence in a peace demonstration. He always defends the weak and the poor and he’s is not afraid to pay the price for doing it. Scott was at Vandenberg in 2002, NY in 2004, Crawford Texas in 2006. And a host of other places most so called activists will never go.

Enough is enough.

Marc Ash,
Founder Reader Supported News

On 12-Jan-17 12:19, Loren Bliss wrote:

Mr. Ashe:

As I requested in my last, please return to me the text of the suppressed post.

Thank you,
Loren Bliss

On 12-Jan-17 12:34, Marc Ash wrote:

My last name is spelled “Ash.”

The post was deleted by one of our admins. So we don’t have a copy.

Marc Ash,
Founder Reader Supported News

On 12-Jan-17 13:20, Loren Bliss wrote:

My apology for the misspelling. My fault entirely, particularly since
your name is spelled correctly in my address book. Had no intention of making an Ashe of you, nor for that matter of myself.

Obviously I did not bother to note that no matter how many nationwide demonstrations Galindez might have participated in, it excused neither his identity politics nor the divisiveness so evoked. Nor did I note the obvious wealth – including the equally obvious question about its origins – that granted Galindez seemingly far greater mobility then the late, genuinely saintly Father William J. Bichsel S.J.,  a fellow alumnus of the Knox County Jail.

In this context I find it extremely interesting that Galindez seemingly shares not just Hillary's Democratic (sic) Party ideology; like Hillary, he also has Goldwater roots. Quoth RSN: “Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice...”

And then there is what the hatefully Hillaryite RSN poster screen-named Robbee said at 22:06 on 13 January 2017 in response to librarian 1984, one of the site's most knowledgeably articulate posters:

Quoth librarian:

I request that RSN put a picture of a soothing landscape or mischievous kittens at the head of a Hayden article or, better yet, don't run any more. I have a visceral urge to regurgitate on seeing this repulsive individual.

Quoth Robbee:

we'll look into it!
while you're at it? any more requests?

Apparently Robbee – continuously red-thumbed as perhaps the most obnoxiously unreadable Hillaryite troll ever to invade RSN – is now one of Ash's censors. Robbee's emergence as a site authority plus Ash's viciously McCarthyite attack  on investigative reporters Glenn Greenwald, Robert Parry and Ray McGovern, all of whom Ash attempts to smear as “Trump's enablers,” makes it obvious I'm well out of there. I'll miss the former RSN dialogue – especially with Radscal, economagic and librarian 1984 – but just as Ash said so dismissively to me, “enough is enough.”

LB/15 January 2016

-30-

“Everywhere There's Rain, My Love, Everywhere There's Fear”

(Headline quote from Tim Buckley's "Phantasmagoria in Two," linked below.)    

THE CRUSHING DEFEATS We the People suffered in the past year leave us with only two alternatives: submission or resistance, either of which portend a descent into darkness of such unprecedented magnitude, its intensity and probable duration should refute forever our comforting but utterly deluded notion  “the arc of the universe...bends toward justice.”

What has obtained in 2016 should also force us to acknowledge the bitter truth we symbolize as darkness – tyranny, subjugation, slavery and genocide – is in fact proven by history to be our species' default condition. Our ancestors, most of them serfs or slaves and therefore utterly powerless, rarely knew anything better than the birth-to-death, always-beneath-the-overseer's-whip wretchedness Thomas Hobbes' so memorably described as “nasty, brutish and short”– the one true human eternity in its most absolute and irremediable sense.

Thus instead of revolution, which we now know is doomed by the moral imbecility that invariably corrupts all our species' endeavors – witness revolution's colossal failures in the United States, France, the Soviet Union and China – our chronic powerlessness fosters either bottomless despair or addiction to the false opiates promised by religion: fake eternities of imaginary euphoria supposedly guaranteed by a nonexistent god in alleged compensation for the absolute reality of our eternal misery.

Resistance enters our equation not as the valiant expression of hope it was during previous eras but – in existential epiphanies akin to Jean Paul Sartre's realization during the World War II years Nazi Germany seemed invincible  – as a quest for the entirely internal personal meaningfulness that in such circumstances is the only possible antidote to despair. The underlying lesson of the past 53 years – actually, reckoning from 4 July 1776, the cumulative lesson of the past 241 years – is that hope is absurd. Despite how fascist sensationalism wildly inflates our numbers, we true progressives are the tiniest of minorities, too few in number to be more vexing to the One Percent and its Ruling Class than a single mosquito might be to an elephant. And even if our numbers were truly great, we now at the dawn of 2017 know our overlords have the capability to kill us by the flick of a switch or the press of a button and the intention to do so in as expeditious a manner as possible, no doubt even to the extent of neutron-bombing  an entire city to exterminate us but save all its material wealth.

Such is the shark-womb price  we pay for being the only mammalian predators whose primary prey is our own species, our children, ourselves. Capitalism is obviously the ultimate and most likely terminal fulfillment of our genetic defectiveness, the grotesque reality underlying the Abrahamic legend of original sin.  The inescapable destitution capitalism now relentlessly imposes on 99.9 percent of the global population is thus the latest (and probably last) self-generated affliction in our 200,000-year epic of suffering.

Donald Trump's looming transformation of the United States into Ku Klux Nation thus combines with the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton campaign of suicidally provoking war with Russia, which combination leaves no doubt we are at the beginning of yet another of our species' periodic descents into total darkness – this time most likely forever and unto our own extinction.

Note – especially in this context of the again-escalating  Obamanoid/Hillaryite threat of thermonuclear apocalypse – the revelations  by Washington's Blog historian Eric Zuesse:

“America’s aristocracy and its vassal-aristocracies controlling the U.S.-allied nations (billionaires, centi-millionaires, and their top agents in both the public and private sectors) are buying and building deep-underground nuclear shelters for themselves...(As for everybody else, those other people are not involved in geostrategic decisionmaking, and so are being ignored.) However...none of the West’s elite are condemning the path toward nuclear war that their governments are on. So: buying or building nuclear-war shelters is more acceptable to them than is stopping America’s planned conquest of Russia. The higher priority is to conquer Russia.”

What Zuesse correctly implies – but unfortunately does not state outright – is the nuclear winter that would result from the apocalypse intended by Hillary and Obama would almost immediately solve the problem of global warming. What Zuesse omits entirely is how such an apocalypse would fulfill the long-term Ruling Class goals of reducing the world population by as much as 99 percent while simultaneously ensuring the Caucasian-capitalist domination of wealth and technology that would also ensure eternal white-race tyranny over the planet and all its inhabitants. In other words, from the perspective of the One Percent and its vassals, World War III is the perfect solution to all global problems – the resurrection of radical socialism included.

We are, in a word, fucked.

If We the People of the 99 Percent are to evolve resistance powerful enough to defeat our enemies or at the very least hold them at bay as Vladimir Lenin and his successors did for 74 years with the Soviet Union or as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did for a mere 14 years with the New Deal (in truth ended by enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947), we must first acknowledge the hitherto unspeakable truth that in 2016 We the People of the United States lost not just a battle but a war. It was a war that – though never formally declared outside the esoterica of ecclesiastical creeds and political dogma – was in fact the most important conflict in all our history: a species-defining clash between benevolence and malevolence and therefore quintessentially between Good and Evil. All that remains is equivalent to the die-hard guerrilla fight that typically follows conquest by an ultimately irresistible power, much as occurred in the North America's so-called “Indian Wars” and now obtains in the Middle East. Because of the global omnipotence of the USian Empire, in which this final struggle is being fought, its outcome will determine the fate of every living creature on this planet. Our victory could lead to a world in which the true Golden Rule – from each according to ability; to each according to need – is th dominant ethos. But history proves – again the example of the Indian Wars – such an outcome is unlikely at best.

Meanwhile – woe to us all – Evil has won.

***

UNTIL THE LAST few years our defeat was inflicted so slowly it is hard to know just when We the People began losing. Evil's useful idiots whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim date it to the Garden of Eden and blame it on women. More rational folk date it to colonial times or the earliest days of the republic, blaming religious fanatics and slave-owners respectively. Though I cannot disagree with the culpability of zealots and slavers, I find it more useful to date our defeat to 1934, when President Roosevelt granted the Bankers' Plot  traitors immunity in return for their pledge to stop fighting the New Deal. 

What happened next is obvious: when World War II did not go as the One Percenters hoped – when their (by-then clandestine) champions Hitler and Mussolini were unable to defeat the Red Army and conquer the Soviet Union – the One Percenters imported legions of Nazi war criminals to tutor them in the postwar strategy and tactics of converting the U.S. into the Fourth Reich. Men who had given their monstrous intellects to the Evil personified by Hitler and the German Nazi Party now gave their repulsive talents to the less obvious but far greater Evil personified by the USian One Percenters. Soon reinforced by the sociopathic psychiatrists and psychologists who served Wall Street via Madison Avenue, this secret, diabolically Machiavellian cabal, now functioning as an informal end-human-liberty-forever think-tank of refugee Nazis and pro-capitalist psychological warfare experts, began as early as 1946 scheming how to Nazify the United States – not suddenly, as Hitler had done with a German population already predisposed to acceptance of tyranny, but rather by the stealth with which one slowly boils a living frog.

Recognizing the USian homeland population's hard-shelled egotism – its bigotry, anti-intellectualism, religious fanaticism, proudly self-sustained ignorance, anarchistic disdain of governmental authority and most of all its perverse obsession with sex – the One Percent's Ayn Rand-minded advisors weaponized all these negative characteristics into the most brilliantly conceived subversion campaign of all time. Thus our apparent victories in civil, reproductive, matrimonial and gender rights were in fact defeats in that their long-term results – goading our enemies into ever more tyrannosauric frenzies just as the One Percent intended – led inexorably to the inauguration of fascist governance sought by the Bankers' Plot conspirators. Facilitated by the murders of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy, then advocated by the Powell Memo  and personified by the betrayer Barack Obama,  the anti-democratic process was finally brought to terrifying fruition by the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Given the raw material with which the One Percent's consultants had to work – an intractably racist 77 percent  within the white majority, a total USian Homeland population that by definition is 64 percent Christian Fundamentalist – it is no wonder these “motivational research” experts were able to engineer an USian majority that is either Nazi-minded or submissively apolitical and in any case is as permanently reliable and therefore politically predictable as 70 years of the world's most relentlessly intense psychological conditioning can possibly make it. The uniquely USian brand of Nazism is now the dominant ethos of the once-vaunted “land of the free.” Most of us, We the People of 2016, are now in our submissiveness indistinguishable from the Good Germans of 1933. These are not attitudes that can be changed, certainly not overnight and probably not ever.

Even so, we also need to bear in mind this nauseatingly obscene parody of an election is not technically over until 6 January, when the House either votes its formal acceptance of the electoral college's legal coup or rejects it and sets in motion a process by which the House itself, ruled by the same Republican Party that nominated Donald Trump, imposes its own presidential choice on the nation. Though it is unlikely, Hillary, who out-polled Trump by 2.9 million popular votes,  could still be chosen president. For that matter, so could Sen. Sanders, though because he represents the progressive, anti-apocalyptic populism so feared by the One Percent such a compromise  would be an upset of the first magnitude and is thus even more improbable.

But no matter who is awarded the presidency, nothing changes but the timetable of our subjugation. Whether Hillary or the Donald or some other anointed surrogate for our capitalist overlords eventually ascends to the Imperial White House, the one undeniable declaration of the 2016 presidential campaign is that We the People are irrelevant – that we are factored in imperial affairs only to the extent we can be forced or seduced into providing our masters with cheap labor, readily available canon-fodder and above all else a profitable rationale for building ever-more-inescapable slave pens walled by ever-more-irresistible technologies of total surveillance and sadistically violent death.

If we dare read the fine print of 2016's oft-unspoken but nevertheless implicitly glaring declarations – a reading far too many of us will never find the courage to undertake – we will surely be smitten by the realization the year's paramount unwritten decree is that in the eyes of the now truly omnipotent One Percent, We the People are henceforth irrelevant. Our hopes and aspirations no longer matter.  All the ideals so eloquently expressed in our Declaration of Independence and in the Preamble to our constitution – “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”; “justice, domestic tranquility, general welfare” – are rendered obsolete by the moral imbecility that sustains the capitalists' ever-more omnicidal quest for profit.

Thanks to the framework of tyranny so carefully laid by Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II and most maliciously of all by Obama – thanks indeed to the decades of now-obvious preparation for just such a pivotal inauguration as is planned for 20 January 2017 – Hillary or the Donald or someone else – whomever so chosen is now more Führer than President. Thus he or she must as a prerequisite to their ascension pledge to uphold the core principle of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percenters and their vassals, zero-tolerance subjugation for all the rest of us. Thus too our well-being – or more correctly our ever-more-wrenching lack thereof – troubles our rulers only when our anger intrudes on their endlessly predatory orgies of profiteering.

In this regard, We the People , we of the 99 Percent – all of us now forever denied even a fraction of capitalism's falsely promised wealth – are like some battered wife who throughout her years of abuse strove diligently to regain the love and respect she believed her husband pledged her during their courtship and vowed so-help-him-god on her wedding day but revealed that night as the cruelest of lies when once inside the nuptial bedroom he beat her and raped her and sneered at her pain and bewilderment, just as he would do for the remainder of their matrimonial paring. In response she did the best she could just as we all do when faced with capitalism's parallel brutalities whether in the bedroom or the classroom or the workplace or the welfare line or the church or the mosque or the temple or the clinic or the hospital emergency room. She worked hard and she obeyed the rules and above all else she believed her efforts would eventually win her the respect and security and perhaps even the comforting love she so desperately sought to fill the aching hole in her heart. But now she is battered and bruised and bedraggled and she is cast off in the most heartless of divorce actions, just as we too are cast off and abandoned when we are no longer exploitable for profit. Capitalism, the archetype of domestic abuse, is moral imbecility – and moral imbeciles are incapable of loving anyone but themselves.

Thus 2016 was the year of the moral imbecile, the year the morally imbecilic One Percenters revealed the extent to which they despise us and view us with contempt. They did so by afflicting us with two moral imbeciles as presidential candidates who reduced our once-cherished voting rights to an obscene parody – “They want elections? Let them choose between tyrants” – hence the terminally insulting choice between Hillary who promised thermonuclear apocalypse versus Trump who promised a new Holocaust and now amongst the chaos of his contradictory tweets seems intent on keeping that one promise.

Now, as if by publication of divorce decrees, our masters are making certain we get the message the era of charade democracy and the Democratic (sic) Party Big Lie of progressive populism is over. From now on the Democratic (sic) brand of fascism – which at its core differs from its Republican counterpart only in the former's fanatical commitment to forcible civilian disarmament and lip service to minority rights – will be as unapologetically tyrannical as the Republicans have been since they ended Reconstruction in 1877 and then via the long purge that climaxed with the Goldwater candidacy in 1964 and triumphed with the election of Reagan in 1980 methodically suppressed all traces of their party's former Lincolnism. That's why the Democratic (sic) Party now openly spits in all our faces by its fight against progressive reform  even as Trump and the Republican Party batter us with appointments that say “ahha we gotcha again; this time we get to rape you forever” and tell us all their populist promises were Big Lies of nearly the same malicious magnitude as Obama's eternally infamous “change we can believe in.”

Divorced by the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, divorced in the name of capitalist governance and its core ethos of moral imbecility, divorced and cast off and abandoned and soon to be denied not only our remaining jobs but food stamps and Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security and WIC and any other conceivable means of sustenance – soon to be denied not just our rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness but (whether by austerity's slow-motion genocide or war-for-profit's mass murder), denied our very right to life – We the People are now the microcosm of our species' most unfortunate divorce victim ever, our Mother Earth, the cast-down goddess of whom the late Tim Buckley dared sing,  “If you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” Though once our species loved our Mother dearly, we forsook her long ago; though once we loved our country dearly, now we ourselves are as forsaken as orphans. Our anguish is as in an old lament: “Once I had a sweetheart, but now I have none.”

Of all possible metaphors for our present circumstances, there is probably none more apt than the abused wife who finally rises up angry, the woman beaten and full of despair and rage and perhaps fighting back only for the sake of her children – or so she now may be telling herself at the beginning of her odyssey of resistance. But next may come that odyssey's healing epic of self-discovered strength, and after that...

Think Lexington Common and Concord Bridge, 19 April 1775; think Paris 14 July 1789; think Petrograd on International Women's Day, 8 March 1917.  But all these victories have been swept away, betrayed more by human Evil than by military force. Therefore think also on the fate of First Nations peoples under USian Manifest Destiny and the similar fates of Jews and and other minorities under German Nazism .

In such times as these, survival itself becomes an act of revolutionary defiance.

***

ALL OF US who are politically conscious must now become Outside Agitators. The name, which we should embrace proudly and thus redeem, is how we are damned by our enemies, the Ku Klux Klan of yesteryear and the plutocrats and their killer cops today: “We din have no trouble with our niggers,” the old Jim Crow tyrants always said, “till them damn outside agitators come down hyar an stirred em up.” But now in the eyes of the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals, skin color no longer matters: I a white male am a nigger and you whatever your race or ethnicity are a nigger and we are all niggers, and like the “uppity” niggers of the Civil Rights era, we must now in solidarity keep one another “stirred up” if we are to even begin to effectively resist the genocidal brutality of USian governance and transcend its soul-destroying omnipotence.

To succeed we must acknowledge the fact that whether we personally identify as African-American or Hispanic or First Nations or White, whether we identify as heterosexual or LGBTQ, whether we identify as Left or Right – We the People are all cast off and abandoned and alone as never before in our species' history. Individually we are of no more consequence to the One Percent and its Ruling Class than a single cockroach is to an exterminator. Involuntarily united in our abandonment and oppression, we should voluntarily unite in rejection of submission to the One Percent. And now at last we must confront the hard truth that if we are to survive, we must build our solidarity not from race or gender or sexual preference but from our socioeconomic circumstances and its commonality of grievances. Only then can we muster adequate defenses against disempowerment by the disunity inherent in the identity politics our overlords shape and sustain solely for their own protection.

We 99 Percenters must also expand our reading and viewing tastes. Sun Tzu, Niccolo Machiavelli and Vladimir Lenin are far more relevant to our present-day circumstances than Deepak Chopra, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale or any other self-help huckster might ever have been. The camera work of Gene Smith and Dorothea Lange and Jacob Riis and Walker Evans tell us more about who we are than all the fashion photographs and idealized landscapes ever shot, even those by Ansel Adams and Richard Avedon and their ilk. The wrenching realism of the 2010 Russian film Brest Fortress aka Brestskya Krepost (Брестская крепость) tells us more about World War II than the 2001 USian film Pearl Harbor, which shows us only a Disneyland version of combat, complete with glaringly comedic technical errors. Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf – long among USia's most popular reading – are relevant only as prosecutorial evidence. The primary task for those of us who are courageous enough to acknowledge we are in fact part of the (potentially doomed) 99 Percent is spreading the word our economic afflictions define us as potential patriots and partisans of that true Golden Rule which given the infinite bleakness of our future – if indeed we have a future at all – cannot be repeated too often: from each according to capability, to each according to need.

Yet despite our despair and the boiling anger it provokes we should never forget we are so few in number we can only resist by nonviolence. We must therefore continue to embrace Rev. King.'s example, never forgetting war is at this point an exclusively Ruling Class methodology. Wars are started by the Ruling Class only because our overlords know as a certainty of their privileged births they can exempt themselves from the horrors of war and wage their warfare as if it were nothing more than a board game and dump all its bloody burdens – all its shattered faces and blown-off penises and spilled-intestines – on us, we the workers and peasants who are too disempowered to prevent ourselves from being conscripted as canon fodder. As our bodies pile up, the Ruling Class profits in every way imaginable.

Thus are We the People the targets of the final moping-up operations in the long war of our own subjugation by capitalism, the most malignant Evil our species has ever spawned and unleashed on itself..

***

GLEN FORD WARNS us in Black Agenda Report we are also collateral damage in an apocalyptic clash by which the USian Ruling Class “is undoing itself.”

If we recognize Trump as the figurehead of a dissident element within the One Percent – which is in fact exactly what he is – Ford's analysis is demonstrably true. Indeed it brings to mind a lengthy report, published during the late 1960s or early 1970s and probably in The New York Review of Books, that hypothesized a “Yankee and Cowboy War" as the key element in all the USian Empire's internal struggles over foreign and domestic policy. The article was written by the late Carl Olgesby, who subsequently expanded it into a book by the same name  that is now not only out of print but censored by price, with poor-condition paperback copies starting at about $50.

As I remember – and here I must apologize for the fact my inescapable poverty prohibits the confirmation of memory I would normally seek before writing – Olgesby's epicentral conclusion was the assassination of JFK had been a pivotal, probably permanent Cowboy victory that led directly to Vietnam and doomed the Empire to a future of endless wars.

The Yankees in Oglesby's formulation were the members of the so-called “Eastern Establishment," which included FDR, the Kennedys and Republicans of the Jacob Javits/Nelson Rockefeller/Dan Evans variety. To one degree or another, these were all liberals in the New Deal/Progressive traditions that had sprung from the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties respectively. The Cowboys were equally bipartisan. Their Machiavellian archetype was the Democratic (sic) President Lyndon Banes Johnson; whose bogus peace candidacy, conducted as he and his henchmen schemed to expand the USian military presence in Southeast Asia into a major war, is second only to Obama's “change we can believe in” in Big Lie brazenness. But Cowboy ranks included Republicans Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the (venomously racist) Southern Democrats. Meanwhile Cowboy LBJ savvily governed by bribing the Left with long-sought civil rights legislation and dramatically expanded social services, thus silencing all but the most relentless opponents of his Southeast Asian wars of imperial expansion. (Two of these opponents were MLK and RFK, who were instead silenced by assassins' bullets.)

Socioeconomically the Yankees were Keynesian, while the Cowboys – secretly in the case of LBJ and Nixon – were fanatical Ayn Randers. The Yankees favored diplomacy; the Cowboys favored war. Regardless of their factional identity, each group favored capitalist tyranny – the Yankees of the stealthy Brave New World variety, the Cowboys of the openly brutal 1984 sort. But neither the Yankees nor the Cowboys were as unabashedly genocidal as the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton/Mitch McConnell imperialists of today, who until very recently hid their Nazi-like intentions of global conquest behind false flags of traditional “American” rhetoric. But now it seems they have concluded such deception – which was enabled by an ever-more-ignorant public and its ongoing mental deterioration inflicted by mainstream media (which let us not forget is the world's first privately owned, for-profit, Josef-Goebbels-type ministry of propaganda) – is no longer necessary to the advancement of their schemes.

Hillary, a political nobody when Oglesby was writing, might have been labeled a Cowboy merely by her associations Goldwater and Arkansas Democrat Bill Clinton. Trump would probably have been labeled a Cowboy too, simply because he is (apparently) so despised by the Democratic (sic) and Republican establishment. But Hillary and Trump differ radically on how best to sustain the empire. As we know, Hillary favors war – especially thermonuclear war that risks human extinction – which given her obvious hatred of Russia and all persons and things Russian, makes me wonder if someone close to her, perhaps in her family or among her ideological tutors, was one of the many German Nazi war-criminals for whom the One Percent arranged USian sanctuary.

Trump – apart from his violent intentions toward Islam and USian minorities – seems to favor economic competition rather than war: hence his apparent rapprochement with Vladimir Putin, which despite how it grants us welcome relief from the prospect of World War III nevertheless also prompts serious reflection on the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.

But given the apocalyptic intent evident in the Obama/Clinton/McConnell schemes, I am no longer certain the Yankee/Cowboy formulation – or for that matter even our present-day labels of neo-liberal and neo-conservative – are adequately descriptive. For what we are talking about – note again the Zuesse report linked above – is ultimately a clash between proponents of our species' survival and advocates of its deliberate near-extinction. And I confess my efforts to conjure up memorably simple but nevertheless properly descriptive titles – an ongoing quest that began when I started working on this piece a month ago – have thus far all failed.

Meanwhile I am beginning to wonder if the clandestine truth of the Hillary-Trump campaign is not the opposite of what was initially rumored: that instead of Trump being the One Percent's stalking horse to ensure the election of Hillary, the reverse is true: that it was Hillary who was used to ensure Trump's victory – and that she herself was not informed of her function until after the election – hence the sullen silence that so loudly suggests she is overwhelmed by post-election bitterness.

In this context note how, in Trump, the One Percenters may believe they have indeed won the shortest most direct route to the unabashedly Nazified nation  they and their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers have sought since the failure of the Bankers' Plot. Note too the undeniable liberty's-end message of Trump's appointments, discussed here on the always-informative website Popular Resistance, with a comment thread that includes my own detailed estimate of the horrors – based on the common Hard-Right ideological denominator of Trump's appointments whether rumored or confirmed – that will probably confront us after 20 January.

Nevertheless, though I am painfully aware of the implicit irony, I wish you all a Happy New Year.

Quoth the 17th Century samurai Miyamoto Musashi: “To win any battle, you must fight as if you are already dead.”

LB/1-31 December 2016.

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