Secret Police Operations Refute Big Lie of 'Free Society'

This photograph has no connection to the story below, which mentions President Obama's genocidal efforts against life-sustaining social services only in passing. The image is an accidental sandwich, an inadvertent double exposure with a camera so old it lacks automatic double-exposure prevention. As to whether it might have been a compensatory gift from the Muse, with poetic or subconscious relevance to the reason this posting is so tardy, I leave that for viewers to decide. Rolleicord III, Kodak Tmax 100 in D-76, each of the two exposures 1/100th at f/16; colorization – to intensify the ethereal mood – by Gimp software. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS precipitated by a medical crisis – discovery I am going blind due to cataracts but may be denied corrective surgery by another medical condition for which there is no cure – delayed this week's posting. It is also the reason I'm filling this space with a commentary I wrote six days ago: anything more recent would be too bitter for public consumption. Hence the following, my pre-threat-of-blindness response to a story in Crosscut, the Seattle on-line daily, in which a local journalist – apparently too afraid of the secret police to tell the truth about what the United States has become – cravenly described our subjugated nation as a “free society.” 

The journalist, Floyd McKay, is a former long-time member of the Pacific Northwest working press and a professor emeritus at Western Washington University. I do not know him personally, but we are nevertheless indirectly connected. WWU is the descendant of Western Washington State College, the last of my own several almae matres, which through its Fairhaven College granted me an interdisciplinary bachelor of arts degree in 1976 – and 34 years later made it unmistakably clear I am one alumnus its officialdom would surely strike from their roster of graduates if they could. Though McKay joined Western's faculty long after I left its student body, I am familiar with his work via Crosscut's coverage of the ongoing Puget Sound coal-port struggle. His reporting of that wrenching conflict seems not only fair but exceptionally well researched – the sort of in-depth writing that was routine on the New York, New Jersey, Michigan and East Tennessee papers for which I worked during my first two decades in journalism but which has since gone the way of Archaeopteryx. (Apropos the coal port, the usual suspects intend to build it just outside Bellingham, a blatant “fuck you” to what is probably the most environmentally conscious city in all USia. Moreover, the obvious vindictiveness of the coal-port scheme has a nasty parallel in the equally assaultive Roman Catholic campaign to abolish female reproductive freedom here in the nation's most officially pro-choice state by buying up all the local hospitals and clinics. Might these developments be part of a multi-pronged effort to turn the entire realm into a West Coast version of Appalachia? Asking such an allegedly “unthinkable” question is well within the purview of the investigative reporter, at least as I learned the craft, but it is the one element McKay has failed to explore. Perhaps he has forgotten – or never knew about – the testimony of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state is the One Percent's favorite proving ground for its strategies and tactics of oppression.) Be that as it may, I was appreciative enough of McKay's reports on the coal-port fight, I turned directly to his analysis of the recently exposed secret police investigations of journalists, part of the (still-unfolding) story of the Obama Administration's unprecedented efforts to nullify the entire First Amendment.  

But I was sorely disappointed; McKay's lead set the (cringing) tone of his entire text: 

“Technology changes, but the basic tenets of journalism and the codes that govern reporting in a free society remain remarkably the same.”

Finally, hours after McKay's essay appeared – I had been busy all day with regular first-of-the-month errands – I wrote a response on the associated comment thread: 

(Note: Crosscut does not allow embedded live-links in comment threads, hence the URLs  below appear as in the original, this to spare me the necessity of revision. My apology for the resultant awkwardness.) 

 

Seems to me there are three points of contention in this story. These are: the nature and motives of the Obama Administration; the nature and role of the nation's informational media; and – pivotally – whether the United States remains “a free society.” 

 

It also seems to me – this from behind my own 50-plus years doing journalism – McKay's understanding of these questions is...well, less than adequate. Indeed, based on the foregoing comments, the one poster with whom I come closest to agreement is dbreneman. Given our total disagreements on public transport – I like most New Yorkers believe it is a civil right, dbreneman seems to share the defining local conviction transit is a form of welfare – our near-consensus over what should be termed the “USian press crisis” is probably an irony of the first order. 

 

The biblical admonition “by their fruits shall we know them” is at least as applicable to politicians, governments and economic systems as it is to matters of metaphysics and morality. Viewed from this perspective, Democrat Barack Obama emerges as the most carefully camouflaged and willfully deceptive Republican tyrant ever elected to the presidency. That he is in fact a latter-day Richard Nixon has been posited by many pundits both Left and Right, but none more convincingly than Jonathan Turley. Here Turley shows us how Nixon – in the persona of Obama – has achieved every imposition of tyranny the Watergate-criminal president ever imagined: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/03/25/nixon-has-won-watergate/2019443/ .
 

“More than any figure in history,” says Turley, “Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality.”

At the same time, the nature of USian informational media has also been transformed. In the era McKay and I joined the working press, about 90 percent of the nation's newspapers were locally owned. Now, today, something like 95 percent of the (shrinking number of) print news outlets are owned by monopolies, with lockstep reportorial conformity enforced nearly as rigidly on today's USian papers as it was on Hitler's Voelkischer Beobachter or the Stalin-era Pravda. (Coincidentally, my newest blog post [http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/loren-bliss-outside-agitators-notebook/2013/05/notes-on-life-after-uselessness-the-old-man-with-an-old-rolleicord.html] describes the personnel-office methods the monopolies – which also own or control all the nation's broadcast media – use to ensure the political reliability of their employees.) The result is news coverage and opinion that is almost never more than the approved, quasi-official voice of what the Occupy Movement labeled “the One Percent” – the Big Business/Wall Street aristocracy that, by its financing of both the Democratic and Republican parties, has become a genuine Ruling Class in the ancient and most arrogantly despotic sense.

Meanwhile the cult of personality that now silences Democratic criticism of Obama has again, just as it did under presidents Carter and Clinton, forced the Democratic Party to abandon its own egalitarian New Deal principles. Therefore let us not forget it was cults of personality that enabled the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, the former in the name of a prototypical Ayn-Rand-type master race, the latter in the name of the very socialist humanitarianism he so wantonly betrayed. Perhaps the far-Right's odious characterization of Obama as a new Führer is eerily prescient.

In any case we see the United States is clearly no longer the “free society” McKay claims it to be. A growing number of citizens, myself among them, would argue the nation we formerly thought of as “ours” is now but a modern, globally imperial version of pre-Revolutionary France, with the former middle class now permanently reduced to the status of the sans culottes. The politicians no longer represent us – “we the people” – at all. In fact – note the impending cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare and food stamps – “our” elected officials now make no secret their only loyalties are to the bankers and chief executive officers who are their financial masters.

In this context any discussion of “the role of informational media” is a form of denial. USian mass media is, as an institution, no less compromised – that is, no less a wholly owned subsidiary of the One Percent – than the political system or the economy. Hence the only relevant question is not how the (hopelessly corrupt) judicial system might rule on reportorial and photographic rights, or whether the (irremediably compromised) politicians will enact an effective shield law; it is instead whether individual journalists will recognize today's United States gives them only two choices: submission or revolution. Hence too the new relevance of an old Appalachian song of resistance, “Which Side Are You On” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SB0fc9CobQ ).

The problem, of course, is that today's journalists are hired precisely for their conformity and obedience. 

But history shows us even the most hopelessly submissive serfs sometimes rise up angry. History also suggests the brazen, piss-on-our-constitutional-rights intrusions the USian secret police are now tyrannically inflicting on all of us – not just journalists but everyone in the 99 Percent – might finally awaken any number of hitherto suppressed revolutionary instincts. 

Too bad resistance is now futile, exactly as under the (fictional?) Borg. Whether nonviolent or otherwise, the result – as we have already glimpsed in the Obama Regime's suppression of the Occupy Movement and its expansion of Bush Regime surveillance into Orwellian monitoring of all 99 Percenters all the time – would be a bloodbath of Third Reich magnitude and Greasy Grass futility.

Thanks to the very technology that was supposed to save us not enslave us, the One Percent has finally achieved its ultimate divine-right fantasy: re-creation of itself in the merciless and sadistic image of Yahweh/Jesus/Allah, the vengeful and implacably misogynistic god of patriarchy. Now as a result the USian Fourth Reich is truly omnipotent and eternal – that is, until the Mother of All Gods blows the whistle on our entire species. 

LB/7 June 2013

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How Citizens United Is the Death of All We Hold Dear

NOW WE ARE WITNESSING how the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision ensures our eternal enslavement by the One Percent. It has not only slain our fragile experiment in constitutional democracy; it is murdering our collective conscience as well.

In fact I cannot doubt the Citizens United date of 21 January 2010 will live in infamy centuries after 7 December 1941 is forgotten. Pearl Harbor was but an initial loss in a victorious war. CU marks the end of the United States as We the People had known it, the moment of our descent into terminal Ayn Rand barbarism and resurrected Ku Klux bigotry – as deadly to our civilization as the events of 4 September 476 were to Rome's.

Meanwhile the ugly extent to which Citizens United has transformed our elections becomes ever more obvious. It was most recently demonstrated by a scoop-the-world New York Times exposé of the blatantly racist anti-Obama hatemongering planned by one of the many Republican political action committees.

Though The Times failed to note how the proposed attacks were facilitated by the CU decision, the omission – or more likely the deliberate suppression of fact – was partially remedied by Lee Fang, a United Republic investigative reporter. The ruling, wrote Fang, “may unleash a new level of ugliness in (U.S.) campaigns. Technically, the decision only allows corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts in elections. But in practice, Citizens United might fuel a wave of advertising designed to stir racial divisions and hatred against minority groups.”

Unfortunately Fang's use of “may” and “might” severely weakened his analysis, a flaw all the more perplexing given his Asian-American ethnicity. But even the timid wording of his conclusion could not dilute the obvious – that Citizens United has bolstered to new extremes an already raging resurrection of white racism in the United States. The burgeoning bigotry Fang curiously reduced to mere potential became clearly visible during the 2008 election campaign. It was already apparent three years beforehand in the genocidal aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Its resurgent Ku Klux hatefulness is evident on even the earliest Teabagger picket-signs and in literally all the pronouncements of the anti-Obama birther cult. Now – bolstered by CU's approval of limitless expenditures for election propaganda – the One Percent are using their inconceivably vast wealth to catapult white racism out of our national closet and back into the Moronic Majority's mental mainstream.

At the very least, Citizens United allows the Republicans the endless funding to fulfill their Southern Strategy, methodically restoring bigotry to all its de facto Jim Crow venom and perhaps even launching the re-imposition of de jure segregation. At the worst, CU gives the Ruling Class carte blanche to infect the huge Moron Nation segment of our population with the Nazi mindset the barons of Wall Street and Big Business have fervently sought to impose on the U.S. since the days of Adolph Hitler.

Are they succeeding? Note the Trayvon Martin target, a best-selling outrage that would have been unthinkable outside a Ku Klux Klavern even a few months ago. Surely somewhere in Hell Josef Goebbels is chortling with glee.

Within the same week, as The Times revealed and as Fang repeated in his own lead, Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade, was close to finalizing the plans for a $10 million race-baiting advertising blitz intended to guarantee Obama's defeat. The ads – a formidable combination of video and print – were to be launched so late in the campaign Obama could not muster an effective counterattack. And even if the plan were canceled, as seemed likely late Saturday, Citizens United denies us any protection against advertising that would be equally vile if not far worse.

A day earlier, after Fang's report was further disseminated by Truthout, I had realized Ricketts' ploy – or any other such defamation now encouraged by CU – would doom the Obama presidency as surely as the Willie Horton ad doomed the Michael Dukakis candidacy in 1988. I commented accordingly:

I don't normally make election predictions this far in advance, but the outcome of the 2012 presidential vote just became obvious.

Given the malevolent racism of U.S. whites – a national characteristic already evident in the statistically proven hostility of Caucasian males toward a Black President in the White House – Citizens United's hatemongering will combine with the bitter legacy of Obama's multiple betrayals to ensure his defeat in November.

The president's oft-repeated transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer has turned the energized progressives of 2008 into the dejected nonparticipants of 2012 – a mass of voters whose initial chants of "yes we can" have become a barely audible mumble of "whatever."

Given the ruinous magnitude of those betrayals, I cannot but wonder if Obama himself intended he would never be more than a one-term president. Could it be his real service to Wall Street – his actual repayment of its overwhelming financial support in 2008 – was opening the political doors to the final triumph of imperialism abroad and ChristoFascism at home?

Surely that's what happened in 2010, when Barack's betrayals cleared the way for unprecedented Republican victories. And now – note how Obama's Democratic National Committee has abandoned the Wisconsin recall effort – it's obviously happening again.

As bad as the theocratic misogyny of the Romney presidency will be for women, its tacitly Nazi atrocities will be infinitely worse for those of us who are elderly and disabled (I am both) or otherwise no longer exploitable for capitalist profit.

Indeed, for us – we who face extermination via the cancellation of Social Security pensions and the end of Medicare and Medicaid – the deadly realities of a Romney presidency are tantamount to the horrors facing German Jews as Hitler was sworn into office.

Welcome to the Fourth Reich, where methodical destruction of the social safety net serves the same murderous Ayn Rand purpose that was served by the Third Reich's death camps.

Such is “change we can believe in.”

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But are the Caucasians of the United States truly so irredeemably racist such hatemongering would ensure the president's defeat?

Sadly, I believe the answer is an unequivocal yes. And not just because of the Trayvon Martin target.

A white male in the southern Civil Rights Movement (Knox County Jail, 1963), I was publicly damned by my fellow Caucasians as a “nigger-lover” – all the more vehemently since I had been raised partly in the South. The denunciations and the accompanying attempted murders and other acts of violence gave me a unique opportunity to experience the hatefulness suffered by African-Americans literally from birth. Perhaps because I myself was always something of an outcast – a vindictively unwanted child, an abused and bullied teenager – I had developed as a survival mechanism what I suppose is an acute sensitivity to hatred and contempt. Thus in the context of the struggle for black civil rights I found myself in constant agreement with blacks who saw many manifestations of race-hatred to which most other whites were self-servingly blind.

But the evidence for the toxic depth of the white citizenry's lingering hatred of blacks is far more political than personal. The most telling examples come from the genocidal intent implicit in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

An academic study entitled “Perceptions of Racism in Hurricane Katrina” is also worth reading. Not only does it reveal the substantial number of blacks who (justifiably) suspect the New Orleans levees were bombed by the government to murderously flood the black neighborhoods of the city, it recovers the forbidden 1927 history in which the levees were so destroyed.

The most telling part of “Perceptions” is its public-opinion data. In a Pew survey conducted shortly  after the disaster, 77 percent of the white respondents denied the racism 66 percent of the African American respondents recognized in the lethal sluggishness of the government’s response. An even higher proportion of blacks – 71 percent of compared with 32 percent of whites – felt the disaster revealed the persistence of white racism as a major cultural undercurrent in the United States. 

More significantly, 70 percent of the black respondents told Pew they were angered by the events that followed the storm. But only 46 percent of whites expressed similar sentiments. In other words, 54 percent of white America was sufficiently racist it was not troubled by Katrina's genocidal aftermath.

Combined with present-day statistics on the skyrocketing growth of hate groups in the United States, that 2005 number – 54 percent – is probably the margin by which Obama will lose.

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Lest we forget, one of the parties to blame for the Citizens United decision is the American Civil Liberties Union, which provided an amicus curiae brief in support of corporate personhood and the One Percent's contention there should be no limits on the money spent to obliterate constitutional democracy and replace it with ever-more-authoritarian capitalist tyranny.

In response to the ACLU's back-stabbing revelation of its true colors, untold numbers of its members, myself included, resigned in protest. Untold more people refused to renew their memberships. But the organization – which lives entirely on dues and grants – seemed curiously immune to the boycott.

Which raises three questions. (1)-When and for how much money did the One Percent buy off the ACLU and turn it into another instrument of oppression? (2)-When did the ACLU receive sufficient corporate funding to immunize it against disaffected members? (3)-Given its obvious servitude to the One Percent, was the ACLU functioning as a latter-day Father Gapon? That is, was it collecting names of dissidents to be turned over to the secret-police agencies that protect and serve the One Percent?

Question (3) is made especially relevant by the police-state reality of today's United States, which beyond the obvious technological differences is increasingly indistinguishable from that of Tsarist Russia.

As Lev Bronstein observed, “In any gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”

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During the on-line discussion triggered by Fang's analysis of The New York Times report, a poster who hides behind the screen name Howienica denounced me for characterizing the United States as the Fourth Reich, calling me “extreme even for Truthout.”

Because my response reviewed many taboo elements of U.S. history, all of which can be Googled for confirmation, it too is worth reproducing here:

Not extreme, Howienica, just historically accurate, as demonstrated by the following points:

(1)-We are ruled by capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue. Exactly as urged by Ayn Rand, capitalism is the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever uttered. This is indisputable, proven so by capitalism itself.

(2)-Capitalist governance – the principles of capitalism expressed in federal, state and local policy – means absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us. This is the New Order gradually imposed on the United States following the coup of 22 November 1963. It too is indisputable, proven beyond argument by the history of the subsequent decades, particularly the methodical destruction of the New Deal and the equally methodical reduction of the 99 Percent to inescapable debt slavery.

(3)-“The Fourth Reich” is an entirely appropriate label for the present-day United States because its roots – the roots of the New Order – extend to fascist Rome and Nazi Berlin (each financed by Wall Street). These toxic roots then snake back from the Third Reich to Wall Street via the (failed) Bankers Plot of 1934; thence to the official embrace of thousands of Nazi war criminals immediately after V-E Day (especially Hitler's entire intelligence apparatus, which eventually became the CIA); thence to the purge of Leftists and intellectuals that began immediately after World War II; thence to the destruction of the labor movement imposed by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948; thence to the apex purges of the McCarthy Era; thence to the political murders of the 1960s and 1970s; thence to the war on the 99 Percent that began under Nixon in 1973; thence to the increasingly authoritarian regimes of Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton; finally to the unabashed tyranny imposed by Bush II and intensified by Obama – jackboot imperialism complete with Nazi-type atrocities abroad, police-state fascism and ChristoFascist theocracy at home, the elimination of undesirables either via enslavement in for-profit prisons or death imposed by elimination of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment compensation.

Creation of a “Fourth Reich” is also – by the way – a chillingly accurate description of the intent most of the Nazi war criminals brought to their new homeland.

Hence “the Fourth Reich,” though metaphorical, is nevertheless a brutally accurate description of the nightmare reality in which We the People are imprisoned – the most internally oppressed realm in the industrial world, the most savagely aggressive empire on the planet.

I would clarify only one point, that the steadily escalating capitalist brutality described in items (1) and (2) was equally characteristic of the Third Reich, especially in terms of its huge reliance on slave labor to boost and sustain corporate profits. Indeed German Nazism was merely capitalism taken to its logical 1930s extreme – exactly what our Ayn Rand-minded One Percent is inflicting on us in 21st Century form today.

And I would add one point more. The Republican landslide of 2010 and its subsequent war against women and minorities is already demonstrating how Citizens United facilitates the imposition of Christian theocracy, fascism and racism of an intensity that edges ever closer to outright Nazism. To imagine the 2012 presidential race will not bear similarly toxic fruit is to imagine Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are all real. The pattern is now obvious, established by 2010's results. That 2012 is the first presidential vote conducted in the Nazified climate of CU is thus reduced in significance to little more than a footnote.

What is most revealing about the 2012 election is the precedent set by the fact it's a contest between two undeniable enemies of the U.S. Constitution. Never before in our national history have we been limited to an alleged “choice” between two unabashed tyrants: Barack the Betrayer versus Mitt the Malevolent. Obama has proven relentlessly hostile to the Bill of Rights, concealing his despotic agenda behind oratorical deception and a few gestures toward women and homosexuals, while Romney is already notorious not only for his enthusiastic embrace of the Republican brand of fascism in general but for his specific antagonisms toward women, homosexuals and dogs.

And this year's shift toward de facto Nazism is not over yet. Now there's a growing possibility we'll witness the emergence of Scott Walker as the true Führer the Republicans and their Ku Klux Christian kinsmen have always sought. If Scotty the Sadist and his endless supply of Citizens United money wins Wisconsin as anticipated, he'll be uniquely positioned to oust Malevolent Mitt as insufficiently brutal, then win the Republican National Hate Rally and emerge as the Betrayer's opponent.

Whatever, there's no doubt the fascists will win.

LB/20 May 2012

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