News and Dialogues: Scary Reports, Relevant Agitation

WHAT THE SPOOKS call an “estimate” is pretty much the same thing as what we who practice the craft of print journalism call a “news analysis” – or colloquially (and with characteristic green-visored cynicism*) – a “think-piece” or a “thumb-sucker.”

In either realm – whether that of Casper's less-than-friendly twin or that of the professional descendants of Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken and Louise Bryant – such studies examine events as expressions of their historical contexts. Presumably, these broader perspectives reveal “indications,” Casperian for “probable trends and outcomes.”

Ray McGovern, the Central Intelligence Agency's former chief Soviet foreign policy analyst turned Consortium News reporter, had 27 years experience in the spook role before he took up journalism. Thus his understanding of people, places and things Russian is of sufficient depth and magnitude to warrant not just our casual notice, but our most closely focused attention.

 

“The West Snubs Russia over VE Day,” linked here,  is maybe McGovern's most usefully informative piece yet on the Ukraine crisis. Not only does he lucidly present his own expert analysis; he also provides links to relevant works by other experts on Russia – academics who are now, with already tragic and potentially extinction-level consequences – being passively ignored (if not aggressively marginalized) by the world-conquest-minded One Percent and their vassals in government and media.

“(D)o not feel you must rely on me (although I have been watching what happens in Russia and Europe for half a lifetime),” McGovern wrote. “I strongly recommend the trenchant insights of John Mearsheimer, pre-eminent political science professor at the University of Chicago, and professor Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton and New York University, a distinguished Russianist who has been a Kremlin watcher even longer than I have.”

But to me the most revealing passage in “The West Snubs Russia” is a statement by former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that describes the newest origins of the USian effort at global conquest:

“It all began with the fact that the United States suddenly started talking about the creation of a ‘new empire.’ An over-empire, a super-empire. Alas, God and fate had put the task before them. Yes, they thought their moment had come.”

Knowing as I do the dreadful reality of USian Christian theocracy -- for which see Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008) or the just-released Bloomberg poll revealing the USian Christian fanaticism  that's expressed as unequivocal support for Israel – the reference to “God” is genuinely chilling.

Thus Gorbachev – like Mencken and Sinclair Lewis nearly a century earlier – has it terribly right. If you convince Moron Nation it is acting as an instrument of “God's divine plan,” it will obey without question, whether the mandate is the extermination of First Nations peoples (as it was in the 19th Century), the re-enslavement of blacks (as it is today via for-profit prisons and federally militarized police), or (as is threatened by the Ukraine crisis), the crucifixion of the planet on a thermonuclear cross of capitalist greed and imperialist ambition.

Finally there is my own answer to the question implicit in McGovern's statement that as to “what lies behind U.S. actions in central Europe...try as I may to come up with cogent explanations that make some sense – the reasons elude me.”  

To me – as to anyone else who truly understands the bottomless evil of capitalism – the answer is as obvious as it is terrifying, even if it remains officially unthinkable and unspeakable in mainstream U.S. society.

Because the One Percent has outsourced nearly the entire U.S. economy, most of us in the 99 Percent are now surplus workers. We are therefore people whom our overlords – once they finish imposing their Ayn Rand variant of Nazism – would gleefully exterminate, just as our overlords' ancestors smirkingly exterminated their surplus slaves.

And what today are our overlords' easiest, most efficient, most euphemistically camouflaged methods of extermination?

 

One is the abandonment of unprofitable populations to natural disasters, as were the blacks of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Another is “austerity,” the euphemism for intentionally genocidal cutbacks in government social and medical services.

A third, as McGovern notes in “Snubs Russia,” is the de facto military draft driven by poverty and joblessness. Already operational, its killing machine is methodical escalation of the wars of empire, with the inconceivable casualties of thermonuclear war thus positioned to provide extermination in its most optimum and efficient form.

 

The One Percenters and their political and military vassals are of course meanwhile protected in presumably atom-proof bunkers.

 

Could this be the ultimate reason behind the intensifying U.S. provocation of Russia? Particularly given the genocidal intent evident in other U.S. policies, no other explanation seems so likely.

*** *** ***

ANOTHER CONSORTIUM NEWS piece on this week's list of recommended reading is Robert Parry's careful documentation of “Obama's 'Openness' and Deceit,” which summarizes in stark detail many of the more glaring elements of Obama the Orator's obviously premeditated self-transformation into Barack the Betrayer.

Here's a key paragraph:

“This failure to trust the people with accurate information has arguably done great harm to U.S. democracy by promoting false narratives on a range of foreign conflicts. With all its talk about 'public diplomacy' and 'information warfare,' the Obama administration seems intent on using half-truths and falsehoods to herd the people into a misguided consensus rather than treating them like the true sovereigns of the Republic, as the Framers of the Constitution intended with the explicit phrase 'We the People of the United States.'”

Which again makes relevant my comments last week  on Parry's “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust.” Parry wrote of the Nazi death squads now (predictably) at work in Ukraine and of equally predictable “propaganda efforts by the Obama administration and the major U.S. news media to play down western Ukraine’s legacy of Nazi collaboration.”

As I wrote in reply,  “Give Moron Nation ten more years of dumbing-down – at the current rate of moronation, maybe even less than that – and it will be official policy the United States was on the wrong side in World War II: that U.S. support would have enabled capitalism's conquest of the planet 70 years ago.”

_________

*Green visors, or eye-shades, described here, were frequently worn by old-time newspaper editors, including many of those for whom I worked during my younger manhood. The visors protected its wearer's eyesight from the harsh overhead glare that often characterized newsroom lighting in the days before the American Newspaper Guild and other such unions made on-the-job eyestrain a bargaining issue.

*** *** ***

I DEEPLY APPRECIATE websites on which the discussion encourages real thinking (and therefore writing that is sometimes lively and interesting rather than, for example, the soporific parroting of Democratic Party talking points we encounter at Daily Kos and so many other self-proclaimed “Leftist” domains.

 

One of my all-time favorites is Thom Hartmann's Blog,  which has an attached discussion thread that seems to bring out the best from its regular participants. The occasional fascists who stomp in anticipating easy prey soon discover they are hopelessly outclassed, and usually they quickly retreat. A very few stick around for a while, hopefully long enough to loosen the stranglehold Ayn Rand and all the other Hitler surrogates have on their alleged minds.

In any case, if I may paraphrase the clever late-1950s advertising campaign  that briefly tempted me to switch from Pall Malls to Viceroys, Hartmann offers “a thinking person's blog for a rebellious person's taste.”

 

I've contributed to its dialogue off-and-on for several years, probably starting in 2009 or 2010, though alas the files that would confirm my actual starting-date were destroyed in the recent computer debacle.

As I started getting back on-line, an exceptionally informative Hartmann news analysis prompted me to elaborate in writing an idea that has intrigued me for some time – that China's capitalism is a Sun-Tzu-type ruse,  perhaps the most clever such ruse in our species' history. Here is the full text of my comment:

"All warfare is based on deception" -– Sun Tzu, c. 500 BCE 

 

Knowing something of the history of our species' long and mostly unsuccessful struggle for economic democracy –- knowing also just a bit about the Chinese revolution -– I have always found the apparent Chinese embrace of capitalism perplexing. East Asian civilization, with a cultural continuity extending back at least 5,000 years, has no counterpart on this planet. Though the civilizations of Europe and the Middle East are equally old, the inherent savagery of Abrahamic religion has ensured the total suppression of all of the cultural wisdom of these region's first 3,000 years, with the result that -– never mind for example our European DNA can be traced to the paleolithic -– we "barbarians" (for that is how East Asia regards us) -– are, culturally speaking, mere children. For this reason China has always seemed to me far better prepared to resist the deadly temptations of capitalism, which in truth is not just an economic system but an entire universe of hierarchy, governance and exploitation based on a single precept: that there is no greater virtue than greed. Thus I was genuinely astounded when the People's Republic of China seemed to adopt the very ideology against which its people had fought for most of the first half of the last century.

The easy answer, of course, was that the Chinese government had been infiltrated and co-opted. But that never felt right to me – and though now I was in the realm of gut feelings and journalistic intuition rather than facts or even factually based speculation – I began to suspect the Chinese were (again) following the principles of Sun Tzu, one of which is defeating an enemy by turning his greatest strength into his greatest vulnerability.

Viewing the relationship between China and the United States from this perspective, it appears China has used the bottomless greed that is capitalism's greatest strength to seduce the U.S. with cheap labor and endless credit and so ensnare it. The U.S. no longer has an economy; it's manufacturing capabilities have all been outsourced –- mostly to China -– and it is as dependent on Chinese money as any junky is dependent on the pusher for the next fix. When the incipient U.S.-Chinese conflict ends in war, as is inevitable, the U.S. will have its master-race ideology of divinely ordained "exceptionalism" and the Fourth Reich arrogance of its military omnipotence and the zomboid submissiveness of its Moron Nation masses as cannon fodder but none of the manufacturing capabilities essential to a sustained conflict. That is why the better-dead-than-Red capitalists will most likely try to nuke China into quick surrender and by so doing will destroy the world instead. Any other sort of war -– that is, a conventional and therefore extended war -– the U.S. would lose precisely because it no longer has an economy of its own. (Ironically, the same conditions -– lack of economic depth and manufacturing capabilities -– are what defeated the Axis in World War II.)

But what if China did not really embrace capitalism? What if China's embrace of capitalism was merely an expression of Sun Tzu's principles in present-day strategy? What if China today is as Communist -– that is, as committed to real economic democracy -– as it was under Mao Ze Dong? The relentless prosecution of capitalists reported by Mr. Hartmann suggests this is may well be the case. If this is so, the global Working Class has precisely the powerful ally it hitherto seemed to lack. Remembering that it was the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union that terrified the world's capitalists into making all the humanitarian concessions of the last century, the implications for the future are profound indeed.

* * *

A more recent Hartmann piece protesting the workplace consequences of the zero-tolerance, divine-right tyranny  being imposed on us by our Christofascist overlords prompted a website regular screen-named Aliceinwonderland to start the discussion thread with one of the most appropriately caustic comments I have read anywhere on the 'Net:

All I can say is -– WOW. Just one question though: how the hell would employers even know whether someone uses birth control? I'm not aware of any birth control methods that are visually apparent to the onlooker.

Beyond that, I keep wondering how far these pigs have to raise the bar on fascism in America before enough people wake up and we see widespread rebellion occurring. I keep waiting, wondering, hoping...

 

So hey ladies- You want your boss peeking in your underwear?! Seriously.

 

* * *

Soon I would post my own response to the ensuing dialogue:

As I have said so many times before, the one flaw in Mr. Hartmann's otherwise excellent reporting is his failure to recognize that capitalism is in fact the societal equivalent of  cancer.

This means -– exactly as the last 70 years of history prove beyond rational argument -– capitalism is a malignancy. And like all other malignancies, it cannot be rendered benign.

 

A second, equally important lesson is that no matter how strict the regulatory restrictions by which we attempt to neutralize capitalism's deadly toxicity, it will always  revert to its original malignant form.

 

This means it will eventually kill its host.

 

Hence –- since we the people are capitalism's host –- it is literally our species' terminal illness. Either we find a cure -– which seems increasingly impossible –- or we perish.

 

But the ultimate lesson of this most dreadful epoch is that democracy – which we fervently believed was the one sure antidote for the toxins of tyranny – has turned out to be no cure at all. 

 

In fact it is the antithesis of a cure. It is via what we call "democracy" –-  verbal shorthand for presumably representative government elected by presumably universal suffrage -– that capitalism has conquered the world.

It turned the United States into its puppet realm at least 120 years ago.

Since then it has triumphed even in the two nations wherein it was thought to be permanently defeated: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China. Though  capitalism's co-opting of Communism in the latter may be a colossal deception facilitated by the principles of Sun Tzu,  as I said here on 18 March 2015. 

 

What then empowers capitalism's success?

What is the essence of its deadly seductiveness?

 

Capitalism's core dynamic is the transformation of the Absolute Evil of total moral imbecility –- the mindset of a serial killer –- into apparent goodness.

 

Stripped of its camouflage, capitalism is the vileness and venom of infinite greed and infinite selfishness hidden by the perfume of false abundance and cloaked in the brightly compelling fashions of ecocidal acquisitiveness.

It is, in fact, the secular proof of a core Christian dogma I as a pagan agnostic instinctively reject –- original sin, the notion we are a species accursed and damned.

But if indeed we are not accursed and damned, why is there still such a thing as capitalism, and  why is it thriving?

* * *

Then I followed up by describing capitalism's lineage as a direct descendant of patriarchy:

Conceptually, just as capitalism is the direct descendant of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)...

Just as fascism and Nazism are the (sole and historically inevitable) descendants of capitalism...

 

So are all these malignancies the direct descendants of patriarchy, which appeared on this planet only about 5,000 years ago.

Before patriarchy's sudden and mysterious onset, we humans regarded motherhood as our species' most important individual and collective function.

Mothers were thus properly recognized as our most important individuals.

 

Indeed the original creation story went something like "In the beginning was the Mother, and She gave birth..."

Human societies were therefore matrilinear, matrifocal and (most likely) matriarchal.

Though it is a truth maliciously concealed by U.S. archaeologists and anthropologists,  their counterparts elsewhere freely acknowledge the socioeconomic systems of these early societies were definitively communistic: from each according to ability, to each according to need.

The people of these societies were also earth-respecting in a reflexive, bow-to-the-five-directions manner most of us today cannot imagine, much less to make our own.

Then cometh patriarchy. Its advocates as described in the Old Testament of the Bible were variously  a "fiery wheel" or a "burning bush" or some creature from the sky who met Moses atop Mount Ararat and handed him a set of tablets inscribed with "divine" mandates that must be obeyed lest we all be nuked like Sodom and Gomorrah.

Here in this demonstration of force is obviously is the origin of the Christian and Islamic practice of "conversion" at swordspoint and by the burning-stake or impalement.

Significantly -– apart from the fact these primitive technologies of oppression have been replaced by  total surveillance, electric-shock torture, drones,  napalm and Willie Peter -– capitalism, fascism and Nazism employ patriarchy's  traditional missionary practices even today.

Point being, what ScaryMary and stecoop01 are telling us about the "Christian agenda" is not only absolutely true but absolutely in keeping with the patriarchal legacy as manifest not just in  all  Abrahamic religion but in its capitalist, fascist and Nazi descendants.

Yet above all else, the core purpose of patriarchy was –- and remains -- upending the natural order, seen everywhere in Nature,  in which the female is the epicenter of society.

Which leads us to the core patriarchal principle: that it's virtuous to murder the macrocosm of Mother Earth and  despise her microcosmic form Woman because, as it says in a favorite Bible-thump hymn, "thar's a better land a-waitin in the sky Lord in the sky."

Patriarchy and its descendants are therefore expressions of a kill-the-planet death cult, a truth at last made undeniable by capitalism.

  

Which in turn -– though I do not believe in extraterrestrial visitations -- makes me wonder just what cockroach universe those fiery wheels came from and whether their sowing of the deadly poison seeds of patriarchy was the ultimate (original) form of the smallpox-infested blankets my European ancestors gave my First Nations ancestors.

That's right: trash the planet enough –- as we are in fact doing –- it becomes cockroach heaven, perfect even for such highly-advanced intergalactic cockroaches (we hope) don't exist.

(Yes, I reject the Marxian explanation of patriarchy as a logical consequence of socioeconomic change. Instead I accept the Marija Gimbutas/Rianne Eisler/Barbara Mor hypothesis of patriarchy as an oppressive system forced onto conquered peoples at swordpoint –- exactly as it was, for example, forced onto First Nations folk in the Americas. But what was patriarchy's origin? For that we have only the glimpses given us by folklore, as in the biblical tale of Moses or the oldest traditional poems and ballads.)

Meanwhile the astute observer will note there is a substantial difference in the way I paragraphed the Sun Tzu post as compared to the capitalism-as-cancer/intergalactic-cockroaches post. The former is paragraphed like an academic paper. The latter reverts to journalistic form.

Why?

 

I'm not sure. Stay tuned. When I figure out what's happening I'll let you know.

*** *** ***

ANOTHER OF MY favorite websites is Popular Resistance,  which seldom evokes the lengthy and informative discussions that characterize Hartmann's place but often provides essential reporting that is not readily available anywhere else.

Though the website does not (yet) generate the epic dialogues one often finds in Hartmann-land, it is nevertheless possessed of a subtle (and perhaps subtly female) ambiance that encourages an emotional honesty so much of the Internet lacks.

 

Hence the following, the opening post in a gentle exchange between two old men, our conversation focused on Steve Early's comprehensive account of the ongoing rebellion  provoked by (yet another) betraying Democrat, a governor who lied his way to re-election, then killed the widely heralded Vermont single-payer/public-option health-care plan.

Thanks to Mr. Early for the most informative report I've yet seen on the Democrats' calculated betrayal of the Working Class in Vermont.

Elsewhere it's the same infuriating story –- note for example Washington state Democrat Maria Cantwell's anti-worker vote for free-trade fast-track -– but at least Vermonters have their Progressive Party through which to fight back.

Nevertheless those Democrat betrayals now virtually guarantee a total Republican landslide in 2016.

This is not because of the popularity of Republican (that is, Ayn-Rand/neo-Nazi) dogma, but because the corruption of the Democratic Party has left the electorate without any viable national alternative.

Hence the vast majority of progressives will vote "none of the above" by refusing to vote at all.

Indeed -– given Obama's record of unprecedented Big Lies and betrayals -– it is as if the Democrats are actually working to engineer a Republican victory.

Which of course makes perfect sense once we recognize the two parties serve one single cabal of capitalist overlords.

And what is Nazism – whether as expressed by the German "master race" or by the "exceptionalist" United States – but capitalism's ultimate form.

Point being, as few freedoms as we dissidents have left now, after a Republican landslide in 2016 we will have none at all.

 

In fact we will probably discover our role here in the de facto Fourth Reich reduced to that of the White Rose Society in the Third Reich.

 

Were I a believer in the Abrahamic god, which I am not, I would pray we find the courage and determination we will need to sustain any meaningful resistance.

Meanwhile –- not the least because of my own fondness for Vermont -– I salute Vermonters for daring to continue the struggle.

LB/19-26 April 2015

-30-

We Are Slowly Boiled Frogs, Yet No Leftist Dares Admit it

THE BOILED FROG analogy of politics – the notion we the people are being gradually but deliberately subjugated, so that like a frog in water warmed ever-so-slowly to a boil, we will not be aware of the danger until it is too late to escape – is seemingly anathema to the U.S. Left.

Not once in all the years I have written about politics, roughly from late 1963 until the present, have I heard even one Leftist spokesperson use the boiled-frog comparison to explain the tactical and strategic significance of the ever-increasing restrictions imposed on our political and economic freedom – especially the latter.

Nor is there any widespread recognition the recent culture-war victories – marriage equality and legalized marijuana – are entirely illusory. Neither costs the One Percent a penny. Hence neither does a thing to alter the wage-slavery dynamic that defines capitalism.

Though I support marriage equality, I am equally aware the freedom to marry is meaningless if you can aspire to nothing better than a grueling minimum-wage job, a miserable lifetime of debt slavery and an early death imposed by the lack of adequate health care – the sure fate, regardless of their sexual preferences, that already awaits at least half the families in the United States.

Legalized marijuana in this context becomes merely another opiate by which to numb ourselves against our abject wretchedness, thereby ensuring our masters we are that less likely to rebel.

And yes, the One Percent is indeed that cunning.

But rejection of the boiled-frog analogy leaves the Left without any effective means to describe the gradual imposition of tyranny that has followed, “as the night the day,” the now-undeniable coup of 22 November 1963.

As of now, the most blatant of these tyrannies is the Hobby Lobby decision, which already was becoming the women's equivalent of the Dred Scott decision, as I argued last week.  (Scroll down to “Outside Agitation Elsewhere.”)

But now it looks as if Hobby Lobby may be the Dred Scott equivalent for the entire 99 Percent.

“By declaring that “closely held” corporations may hold religious beliefs, the court may have provided businesses with a new tool for crushing workplace unionization drives,” an MSNBC analyst wrote on 15 July.  “In addition to declaring themselves exempt from contraception mandates and non-discrimination laws, religious employers may soon be able to argue for an exemption from collective bargaining laws.” 

If so, any boss will be able to make such a claim. Not only will it be a giant step toward the One Percent's goal of reducing the U.S. to an officially Christian theocracy.  It will also be a huge stride toward fulfillment of what seems to President Barack Obama's primary domestic goal: reducing the entire U.S. Working Class to the inescapable socioeconomic wretchedness that formerly defined only the nation's racial and/or geographic minorities.

What the frog analogy would show us is how these restrictions on our freedom are parts of a relentless, multi-generational, multi-faceted war of subjugation waged against us by the One Percent.

Though traceable to the 19th Century, the war's present form took shape at least as early as 1934 with the so-called Bankers Plot.  (Scroll down for my addition of historical facts to the comment thread.)  According to the era's Communist Party sources, this was a joint Wall-Street/Nazi-German effort to impose fascism on the United States and make it part of the greater fascist New Order proposed by Hitler. 

Had the plotters succeeded, this nation with its vast natural and industrial resources would have become the chief financier and primary supply source for what would have been the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo/Washington D.C. Axis and der Führer's plan for global conquest.

The U.S. plotters, placed above the law by their status as members of the uppermost ranks of the (unacknowledged) capitalist aristocracy, were never punished.

And their descendents are to this day continuing the One Percent effort to impose fascism. This is manifest in the violent suppression of dissent (as in the crushing of the Occupy Movement) and in the wars against organized labor and against the rights of women and minorities. The power of the One Percent – now defined as the right of corporate “personhood” – is used to abolish the rights of all the rest of us. That's why the struggle has now (predictably) morphed into a war against every civil right we the people ever imagined we might have.

But the Left seemingly dare not use the one English phrase that would make all those connections obvious.

The same lack of language – or, more accurately, avoidance of language – illustrates vividly how the One Percent uses wedge issues to perpetuate the powerlessness of the 99 Percent. It also demonstrates how the U.S. Left, weakened by its signature rejection of formal ideology and thus by its lack of analytical ability, often unwittingly serves the very oppressor it seeks to topple.

What then actually prompts the Left to reject the boiled-frog analogy?

I strongly suspect it is misguided political correctness. In my lifetime, the frog likeness was first applied to U.S. politics by the Second Amendment community. That happened at least 38 years ago, even before the membership of the National Rifle Association – in furious and embittered response to the de facto national gun registration imposed by the Gun Control Act of 1968 – elected a revolution-minded board of directors who radically transformed the organization into what it is today.

Founded in 1871, the NRA had been, until the enactment of GCA '68, an avowedly apolitical group of target shooters and firearms experts with close connections to the War Department and its successor the Department of Defense. The academic credibility of its journal, The American Rifleman, had elevated it to the world standard as the definitive source for historical and technical material about firearms.

NRA's primary purpose in those pre-GCA-'68 years was the promotion of rifle marksmanship – a realm in which, until the previously widespread familiarization of youth with firearms was abolished by the ongoing escalation of cleverly fostered anti-gun hysteria – the U.S. led the entire world. But now, in response to the often subtle but nevertheless undeniable Ruling Class effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – that is, to reduce the 99 Percent to mandatory defenselessness and compulsory pacifism – the NRA has become one of the most powerful advocacy groups in the nation.

It has also, of necessity, become one of the nation's most outspokenly anti-government organizations, in the course of which it has (unfortunately) allowed itself to not only be captured by the Hard Right, but to become a front organization for the Republican Party, also known as the “Grand Old Party” or simply the GOP.

Though the GOP is one of the two U.S. Ruling Class parties, it is the only one that dares speak openly for the racist, sexist, imperialist (and thus definitively fascist) One Percent.

The NRA – though it actively courts women and minorities as members and participants in marksmanship training and shooting sports – has nevertheless by its association with the most reactionary elements in the Republican Party become the favorite hate-object of a huge majority within the U.S. Left. 

But this so-called “Left” is actually a pseudo-Left. It is proven so by its anti-intellectuality and rejection of ideology (and the resultant lack of ideological discipline) that fosters its reflexive identification with the oppressor – its petit-bourgeois arrogance and its carefully closeted Ayn-Rand-conditioned selfishness.

Thus it fears an armed Working Class far more than it fears the ever-escalating depredations of the One Percent.

Never mind how the One Percent's coterie of politicians, judges, generals, academics, executives, bureaucrats and police commanders have destroyed the American Dream and are now methodically nullifying the last remnants of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy. The U.S. Left will not use the best phrase in the English language to describe what is being done to us all merely because those words were first uttered in a political context by the people it most despises.

Moreover – and uniquely – the present-day U.S. Left has little or nothing to do with Working-Class consciousness.

Therefore its most intense hatred is not directed at the One Percenters, nor at their obscenely well-recompensed servants in the upper echelons of government and industry, but rather at the (mostly blue-collar) men and women of the 99 Percent who yet own firearms and hold to the right of personal self-defense.

This particularly vicious twist in the class war is amongst the lingering legacies of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In its immediate aftermath, newly inaugurated President Lyndon Baines Johnson – as faithful a servant of the One Percent in 1964 as President Barack Hussein Obama is today – reversed the policies of the murdered President Kennedy and so ballooned a shrinking U.S. involvement in a Vietnamese civil war into a World-War-Two-sized windfall to military-industrial profiteers.

But that wasn't all LBJ gave his masters. The war's biggest bonus to the One Percent was its destruction, forever, of the New Deal coalition, a united front of white-collar and blue-collar interests – revolutionaries and reformists alike – brought together by their demands for socioeconomic relief from the malevolence of capitalism.

The New Deal coalition had (sort of) kept the more obvious forms of institutional fascism out of (most of) the U.S. homeland since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic reforms saved U.S. capitalism from the revolution its savagery had nearly provoked. Not only did the New Deal co-opt a looming Communist rebellion – an uprising that, given the aid of the Soviet Union, would undoubtedly have succeeded. It also prevented the civil war – including a second secession by the South – that would have inevitably followed such a revolution.

But only three decades later, the domestic conflict inherent in the Vietnam War – the schism within the 99 Percent between the white-collar and blue-collar classes (and the breathtaking hatred and contempt with which the draft-exempt children of the white-collar elite viewed those of us whose poverty and lack of influence left us no choice but prison or service in the imperial war machine) – killed the New Deal coalition just as surely as the assassins' bullets slew President Kennedy.

Soon afterward, the smirkingly draft-exempt white-collar elite became the snarlingly anti-gun elite, which redefined us no-choice-but-to-soldier blue-collar folk accordingly. We who had been “baby killers” and “war criminals” were now “gun-crazed thugs” instead.

Thus, by the diabolical cunning of the One Percent, was any sort of 99 Percent solidarity rendered forever impossible.

From then on, the Boiled Frog Protocol was the One Percenters' primary method.

It would take the One Percenters a few more decades – and even then they could not be sure of victory until the Soviet Union was destroyed – but the end result would be a USian Empire as thoroughly fascist, inside and out, at home and abroad, as anything the aristocrats' Bankers Plot ancestors might have imagined.

Yet the alleged Left – robbed of appropriate language by its fanatical hatred of firearms owners and all the craven fears and intimations of inadequacy that fuel its loathing – never dares speak of the Boiled Frog.

Meanwhile, as the One Percent slowly turns up the heat, we flounder about ever deeper in ever-hotter water.

* * * * * * 

Outside Agitation Elsewhere (In Case You Missed It) 

When the Bill Gates division of the New World Order hurled an unprecedented number of workers under the unemployment bus,  it seemed a perfect example of capitalism in action, complete with a vicious lesson for those 99 Percenters who reject the historical truth of class warfare and mistakenly assume they and the One Percenters have common interests. Hence my less-than-sympathetic remarks on the comment thread of “Microsoft Announces Largest Layoffs in History, Stocks Rise”:

Nurds and techies are amongst the most fanatical fans of Ayn Rand, whose fictionalizations of Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") formalized capitalism's philosophy of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the emphatic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. 

But now so many of these women and men and have been flung out of work – at least 18,000 human beings cast off by Microshaft as if they were nothing more than obsolete software.

Given the relentless savagery of the economy so many of these newly jobless persons hitherto celebrated and served, most likely they will soon discover they have been permanently condemned to minimum-wage slavery.

I wonder if they will then finally begin to recognize the true nature of capitalism – that it is not just moral imbecility, but moral imbecility run amok – and that they who were previously its prideful facilitators are now its abject victims, utterly defenseless against the smirking malevolence of their creditors.

The only sure beneficiaries of these layoffs are the secret police. There is no person on this planet more dangerous than an angry Nurd turned revolutionary – which means the government agents assigned to spy on these newcomers to the Golden Arches slave-pens will soon be collecting unprecedented hours of overtime pay.

* * * * * * 

Reader Supported News, which along with Consortium News are my favorite sources for uncensored reporting, uncharacteristically posted a curiously anti-Russian story on the latest Ukraine crisis,  a dispatch all the more perplexing for its usually reliable Guardian UK origin. My addition to the comment thread of “Recording Strongly Suggests Russian Separatist Shot Down Malaysian Jet” was therefore notably skeptical:

With the CIA and its neo-Nazi militias running the Ukraine government, this tragedy could have been scripted well in advance, much as the Gulf of Tonkin incident was scripted by President Johnson to justify massive U.S. intervention to support the fascists in Vietnam's civil war.

Therefore what we should fear most is capitalist media turning the shooting down of the airliner into an episode equivalent to the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and/or the sinking of the Lusitania – that is, a pretext for escalating the Ukrainian Civil War into an all-out war against Russia – with the U.S. commanding the action exactly as in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the truly pivotal question – why was a civilian airliner flying in the midst of a war zone – remains not just unanswered, but shamefully unasked.

Such is capitalist media, of which Josef Goebbels would be justifiably proud.

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Late last night, in one of those geriatric moments of brutally honest self-evaluation, I was thinking about why I persist in political activism despite the fact my knowledge of human history tells me it is almost certainly pointless – that barring a genuine miracle (an event in which I cannot believe) – conditions in the United States will continue to worsen until this nation is no more.

Not only have the capitalists made themselves as powerful as the sadistic Abrahamic god they so obviously emulate; they have perpetuated their omnipotence by mastery of the most malevolent technologies of oppression. And now they are deliberately herding us into a new Dark Age from which – because their depredations are also killing our planet – our species will most likely never emerge.

That's why, when I discovered the dreadful detail that dooms Vermont's brave effort to declare health care a human right  (and thereby overturn Obamacare's deliberate reinforcement of the capitalist mandate that health care is to remain forever a privilege of wealth), I became quite angry at Tara Culp-Ressler for burying this pivotal fact and otherwise writing as if the Vermont plan were fait accompli. Hence my antagonistic words on the comment thread of her well-written but nevertheless deceptively optimistic “Beyond Obamacare: Health Care as a Human Right”:

I am sick unto death of these “there's a better tomorrow” stories, which are secular versions of the Santa Claus or Jesus myths and are thus actually nothing more than propaganda cunningly designed to stave off rebellion by perpetuating false hopes.

The key sentence in this report, which contains the fact that should have been its lead, is “Vermont plans to apply for a waiver to sidestep the Affordable Care Act beginning in 2017 so it can implement its own single-payer system.”

What this means is Vermont's plan is doomed without federal approval, which in turn means it is nothing more than pie-in-the-sky. Indeed to hope for such approval under present conditions is as absurd as hoping for Congressional relief from the Hobby Lobby decision.

Neither recognition of health insurance as a human right nor restoration of female sexual freedom will ever be allowed under the present system. The U.S. experiment in representative democracy, like the so-called “American Dream,” is dead beyond any hope of resurrection.

The hideous truth is that government at every level in this savagely oppressed nation has been reduced to a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. Until we the people recognize that without economic democracy there is no democracy at all, we will continue to suffer beneath the truncheons of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Why then do I persist in humanitarian activism, as for example my ongoing involvement with 15 Now Tacoma and its quest for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour? Why, for that matter, do I even bother to write this blog?

Because when I was a child age 11 or so and a Boy Scout on my first camping trip, I rather joyfully embraced the notion of leaving the campsite in better condition than I found it. Later, as a young adult, I realized that precept was amongst the rules by which I governed my life – that in fact it was an apt metaphor for one of the instincts that led me into journalism. And though I now know such improvement is no longer possible – that our campsite, which is our planet, is trashed beyond repair – I cannot live with myself unless I keep trying, in my own small way, to clean up the mess.

LB/20 July 2014

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