Why I Will Probably Never Again Vote for a Demoicrat

THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS explain why it's almost certain I will never again vote for a Democrat – not even Bernie Sanders. Each essay describes an aspect of the defining truth of present-day U.S. politics: that when we vote a self-proclaimed Democrat into office, we almost always discover afterward we have elected a Republican instead.

This has been the result of an overwhelming deception – simultaneously Orwellian and Machiavellian – that became the operational core of U.S. “democracy” in 1964, when President Lyndon Banes Johnson presented himself as the “peace candidate” even as he and his henchmen were engineering the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify the Vietnam War. Thus LBJ escalated limited military assistance to the viciously anti-Buddhist Diem regime into a major regional conflict that killed millions of human beings and reaped the USian One Percent literally untold profits.

While the Republicans make no secret of their warmongering and their intent to savage us every way they possibly can – “us” meaning the U.S. 99 Percent, and “every way they possibly can” including the slow-motion genocide of intentionally deadly social-service cuts – the Democrats raise our expectations by feeding us an entire mushroom-farm of bullshit humanitarian rhetoric. Then, exactly as if they were Republicans in disguise, they methodically inflict upon us all the GOP's proposed depredations – all the while claiming “political reality” leaves them no other choice.

In other words, just as it took a seemingly pacifist Father Gapon to set up the original Bloody Sunday,  so does it take the Democrats to turn the Republicans' visions of a permanently enslaved Working Class into inescapable and ever-more-harsh U.S. reality.

This is the Big Lie writ large, and the ultimate example of how it has become the Democratic Party's signature strategy is President Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign. Obama the Orator proclaimed “the audacity of hope” as the one sure path to “change we can believe in,” only to demonstrate – by his instantaneous and obviously pre-planned post-election transformation into Barack the Betrayer – that hope is imbecility instead.

Three additional examples of the imbecility of hope should suffice to underscore the point, but here for the record are five...actually six, when I include the fact that – despite Washington state's (allegedly) Democrat administration – its Department of Social and Health Services has begun inflicting on seniors the same deliberate viciousness that has always characterized its response to the needs of younger impoverished people.

***

Example One: Democrat Doublethink – Cancellation as “Restoration”

ACCORDING TO AN obnoxiously upbeat newsletter snail-mailed to all registered voters in September by the House Democrat Caucus of the Washington State Legislature – bear in mind, Washington is allegedly a “progressive” state – the Democrat-approved budget for the 2015-2016 biennium “restores damaging cuts to public assistance programs made during the lean years of the Great Recession.”

Sounds good, right? (We'll take up the ironically misplaced modifier – apparently the combined work of a less-than-literate writer overseen by a woefully incompetent editor – in a moment.)

But days before I received this latest example of Democrat deception as part of the daily deluge of huckstering that endlessly floods my Postal Service mail box, I had gotten a disturbing notice from the Washington State Department of Health Services:

“You have been getting help paying for your home phone (landline) through the Washington Telephone Assistance Program (WTAP). We are sorry to tell you that WTAP will end August 31, 2015. This is because the legislature did not fund WTAP in the current budget. As a result, your landline phone service will cost you more.”

The bottom line is that, thanks to the Legislature's decision to eliminate WTAP, our telephone bills will spike approximately $17 per month, in my case an increase from a subsidized $2.97 to an unsubsidized $18.80 or 533 percent. This combined with other devastating cuts in 2016 (for which see below) will inflict enough of an income-loss to force many low-income seniors and disabled people to cancel their landline telephone service. The only alternative will be going without food, medicine or shelter.

It was the Republican Senate, the Democrats claim, that made us do it. But it was the Democrats who in 2013, when they controlled both houses of the Legislature,  enabled the 2015 destruction  of WTAP by abolishing its tax base. The legislation that ended WTAP's funding was part of a measure that increased phone bills by imposing Washington state's highest-in-the-nation retail sales tax on residential telephone service. This year's termination of the WTAP program and its potentially ruinous phone-bill hike was thus not only predictable but obviously planned at least two years beforehand.

Welfare bureaucrats – never truly empathetic with the poor – now say people afflicted by the end of WTAP should apply to the federal government for free cell phones.  But here in Washington state, this is all too reminiscent of the infamous “let them eat cake” comment that – whether apocryphal or not – was one of the provocations of the French Revolution. That's because in Washington, severe storms are the wintertime norm and seismic or volcanic disasters are a constant threat. Cell-phone service, especially in rural parts of the state, is notoriously unreliable – and therefore effectively useless as a (life-preserving) communication medium.

Which means the legislators have undoubtedly murdered some of their constituents. No such death has been reported yet – at least not to my knowledge. But the winter is young. And the first time one of the cutback victims needs to call 911 for emergency medical care but has no way to do it, he or she will almost certainly die.

Why then are we denied reliable landline service? One reason is to enable the state to continue its obscene, largest-in-the-nation's history tax exemptions for Big Business.  The other reason – increasingly axiomatic amongst lower-income seniors – is the Ruling Class wants us dead, albeit without the public embarrassment of death camps.

WTAP served at least 121,404 households including 19,500 persons age 65 and above,  all of whom the Democrats hurled under the proverbial bus. (Alas, thanks to ever-intensifying efforts by the One Percent and their wholly owned politicians to conceal the true magnitude of U.S. poverty, 2008 was the last year for which I could find WTAP recipient statistics.)

Oh, yeah: one more thing:

Out of perverse curiosity, I checked to see if DSHS had publicly announced the end of WTAP,

It should have been big news when the Democrats met in a back-room during the 2015 legislative session and decided not only to end the program forever but to make sure their decision was kept secret until it was too late to fight it.

But did DSHS even bother to send out a press release reporting the death-dealing decision to end the program? Of course not. See for yourself.

Nor was it ever reported by “mainstream” media – not surprising, since “mainstream” media is owned by the same One Percenters who own the politicians who killed the WTAP program. Indeed it is “mainstream” media's (intentionally) damaging refusal to adequately cover politics that provides the cover under which our plutocratic overlords are looting the country.

But the point here is the restoration of public assistance programs touted in the Democrat newsletter is (another) Big Lie – (another) example of how the Democrats talk humanitarianism but actually govern as if they were Republicans.

Perhaps, though, that phrase “restores damaging cuts” should be taken not as a badly misplaced modifier but as a sneaky statement of truth a crafty, subversion-minded editorial team slipped past the censors.

***

Example Two: Routine Betrayal of the Most Powerless Constituents

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION – which like all persons and groups labeled Democrat tries desperately to hide the party's Ayn Rand viciousness behind a smokescreen of deceptive oratory – is more effectively hostile to the social-safety net than any presidential administration since Herbert Hoover.

Yes, it was President William Jefferson Clinton – aka “Slick Willie” or “Blowjob Bill” – who by so-called “welfare reform” sentenced untold numbers of welfare recipients literally to death  and created a new and particularly insidious form of institutionalized racism  as well.

But Democrat Clinton's depredations were inflicted during a time of relative prosperity, which means they pale by contrast to the economic wounds inflicted on us by Obama the Orator and his cronies after his speed-of-light post-2008-election transformation into Barack the Betrayer.

First there was the death of Employee Free Choice, which ended forever any hope of resurrecting the U.S. labor movement. Next was the death of real health-care reform, also the death of the remnants of our (former) constitutional rights.

Then there was Obama's steady escalation of the war against the poor – the constant, obviously methodical destruction of the already-damaged socioeconomic safety net. It is a process that is ever more obviously a carefully conceived program of slow-motion genocide – a “final solution” by any other name – against all of us the Ruling Class deems useless because we are not exploitable for profit.

The Republicans threaten it openly, but the Democrats, hiding behind their “humanitarian” rhetoric, are the ones who make it happen. Every time.

Thus the slashing of food stamps, first, in 2013, by $35 a month for a family of four, then, last year, by $90 more  – a savaging the Democrats deceptively applauded as “maintaining the important benefits for families” (doublethink by Sen. Debbie Stabenow) and making the program “more legitimate than it was” (doublethink by Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack) – truly Orwellian examples of Big Lies  topped only by the Betrayer himself, who said the cuts will “make sure America's children don't go hungry” – probably the most damning example of presidential doublethink to date.

Indeed that's almost as big a Big Lie as “change we can believe in,” since proven to be the biggest Big Lie in U.S. presidental history.

***

Example Three: Depredation and Disenfranchisement by Appointment

JAY INSLEY, THE Democrat governor of Washington state, appointed a plutocrat to run DSHS, the state's largest agency, which has long been deservedly infamous – especially amongst welfare rights activists and the few remaining members of the working press who actually care about the increasingly Dickensian circumstances of lower income people – as quite possibly the most arrogantly vindictive governmental bureaucracy in the entire United States.

The plutocrat's name is Kevin Quigley,  who said from the beginning he would run the welfare department like a business – that is, by doing everything possible to maximize the gains of the stockholders (in this instance the state's taxpayers) and therefore doing everything possible to enslave the workers and short-change the customers.

Selecting a capitalist business executive to head a state welfare bureaucracy is thus rather like appointing a Ku Klux Klansman to run a for-profit nursery school for African-American children. By definition a capitalist is one for whom insatiable greed is the highest virtue, and the fulfillment of that infinite greed is the ultimate in virtuous behavior. The poor – no matter our circumstances – are viewed either as serfs to be exploited for maximum profit or as lazy and therefore worthless parasites to be eliminated as expeditiously as possible – again, as already noted, without the public-relations damage done by death camps.

Quigley's definitively punitive, definitively exploitative (Ayn Rand) conception of welfare and welfare recipients is glaringly evident in one of DSHS's recent press releases about food stamps, for which SNAP – Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – is the current acronym:

“DSHS Takes Additional Steps to Reduce Food Assistance Fraud...The Department also has worked hard to improve the efficiency of the program. In fiscal year 2013 (the latest federal data available), the total administrative cost per SNAP case associated with eligibility determinations was $18.24, compared to $22.51 in fiscal year 2012. This efficiency is saving taxpayers in excess of $2.5 million per month, based on an average monthly caseload of 595,115 cases. Washington’s SNAP administrative costs are among the lowest in the nation, and much lower than Oregon ($25.81) and California ($67.84).”

Note how the text of the release methodically reinforces the public image of welfare recipients as thieves and thereby focuses on “saving taxpayers in excess of $2.5 million per month” rather than the agency's (alleged) purpose of helping people escape poverty.

Indeed this is more evidence of the same 180-degree turnabout – the shift from defining the poor as victims of circumstance to damning us, a la Ayn Rand, as perpetrators of our own wretchedness – that underlay Clinton's “welfare reform.” It – and the ongoing Randification of USian public opinion – is also reflected in the fact that, between 1970 and 1990 inclusive (and as shown by data in Statistical Abstract of the United States), the federal and state welfare bureaucracy increased its administrative costs by 5,390 percent even as it slashed stipends and services to recipients by 66 percent.

Nor is Washington state in any way exceptional. The Democrat/Republican war against the poor is equally evident in how Obama has stacked the Social Security Board of Trustees with people who want to slash stipends and privatize the program, another of the (deliberately unreported) facts that show how the Democrats are working hand-in-glove with the Republicans.

The Democrats' intent – identical to the Republicans' intent – is to pay back their capitalist benefactors by robbing us of the money the government deducted from our paychecks. The downsizing and privatization of Social Security has at least two purposes, further intensifying economic fear within the Working Class, and giving the money to the Wall Street robber-barons the Democrats and Republicans so dutifully serve.

Here is a list of Obama's trustees and a brief description of their views and activities, with Wikipedia links for documentation:

Jacob J. Lew – Secretary of the Treasury and Managing Trustee of the trust funds. (Clintonite, bankster, unindicted housing-bubble criminal, loved by the Republicans.)

Thomas E. Perez –  Secretary of Labor and trustee. (Clintonite, hence presumably in favor of Social Security cuts but hated by the Republicans nevertheless.)

Sylvia M. Burwell –  Secretary of Health and Human Services and trustee. (Bankster associate, former Wal-Mart exec, loved by the Republicans.)

Carolyn W. Colvin –  Acting Commissioner of Social Security and trustee. (Obvious Obamanoid; will no doubt do whatever the president orders; significantly, approved by most of the Republicans.)

Charles P. Blahous III –  trustee. See also here. (Bushnik, outspokenly conservative, is Obama's chief destroy-Social-Security hitman on the board of trustees – hence his presence as Obama's appointee reveals the Betrayer's true [and truly genocidal] agenda.)

Robert D. Reischauer –  trustee. (Obama's token [apparent] liberal, but like all Obama appointees, he would not have been chosen were there any question about his unquestioning obedience to the president's orders.)

Virginia P. Reno –  trustee. (Seemingly a friend of the worker, but scanty on-line biographical material makes her true ideology and intent uncertain.)

Admittedly I don't know how much influence the anti-Social-Security majority on the board had over the decision to deny us a cost of living increase in a year of skyrocketing medical expenses. But what is significant here is that despite my reportorial resourcefulness, I could not find anybody in authority willing to talk to me about it.

Nevertheless I have no doubt the denial of a COLA will kill some of us before 2016 is finished. I also have no doubt the denial's deadly impact is intentional. Moreover, after years of covering municipal and state government, I know the interactive machinations of politicians and bureaucrats well enough to recognize the pro-genocide trustees undoubtedly influenced the decision.

Obviously, in this new United States – so different from the United States in which I was born – the fact I am old and no longer exploitable for profit has not just nullified but definitively canceled what I was taught were my rights as a citizen.

Worse, because I am old, I remember when the U.S. was – assuming you were white – a fairly good country to live in. And the fact I remember such good times makes me a genuine subversive. It does likewise to every other elderly person who remembers when the U.S. actually made an effort to live up to its ideals.

That's no doubt among the reasons we seniors are forced to live apart, ghettoized in age-segregated housing and activity centers. Obviously the Ruling Class fears our memories of good times might foster rebelliousness amongst our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It's also another reason the Ruling Class unquestionably wants us dead – the quicker the better.

***

Example Four: How Media Silence Helps Democrats Abolish Tenant Rights

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION has joined hands with the national landlord associations in a new effort to suppress tenants' rights – in this case by shifting pest-control costs from landlords to tenants.

What is especially significant about this story is that it isn't a story. Though OAN has several times over the years broken stories that soon thereafter were apparently picked up by major media, my exclusive report on the administration's curtailment of tenants rights has been resoundingly ignored. Once again, we see what happens when the government and the media are owned and controlled by the same unimaginably wealthy (and therefore unimaginably powerful) clique of One Percenters.

The bottom-line truth is that behind its seductive glitz and glitter, the United States is a fascist dictatorship little different from any of the world's other fascist dictatorships – those of Mussolini, Hitler or Pinochet. But here the dictator is a capitalist cabal rather than a single individual and the de facto propaganda ministry is the for-profit media monopoly, which includes the deceptive genius of Madison Avenue and its almost inconceivable skill at sustaining the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

Though now, with Donald Trump bidding to become the dictatorship's public face – the 21st Century equivalent of der Führer...

I ask you readers: is the Trump poster in the photograph at the end of this linked report  disturbingly reminiscent of some of the Hitler posters here?  And does Trump's “Make America Great Again”  have the same jack-booted, Horst Wessel  resonance as “Deutschland Erwache”  (“Germany Awaken”)? Knowledgeable as I am in semiotics – including the unspoken messages in commercial art – I believe the answer in each instance is yes.

***

Example Five: Democrat Precursors to Barack the Betrayer

LEST WE FORGET, the Democratic Party's standardization of the Big Lie began with President Lyndon Banes Johnson, who immediately after the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 reversed the dead president's efforts to disentangle the U.S. from its escalating military involvement in Southeast Asia.

In this instance, the Big Lie was LBJ's presentation of himself as the “peace candidate” even as he and his henchmen were scheming to expand U.S. military aid to South Vietnam into a major war. In retrospect, this began the first of the USian Empire's efforts at preemptive global conquest or – failing that – the deliberate, shock-doctrine  creation of international chaos from which only capitalism can benefit.

An equally damning example of the Democrat Big Lie was the party's longstanding pledge to protect women's reproductive rights – a pledge the Clinton Administration knowingly violated with the North American Free Trade Agreement. Imposed in 1994, by 2003 it had already stolen 1,673,453 jobs from U.S. workers. Women were at least 35 percent  – and in many industries 66 percent  – of these job-theft victims. Thus were as many as 1,104,479 women denied health insurance and as a result robbed of their sexual freedom – an atrocity about which the USian feminist movement (shackled as it is to the Democratic Party) – remains astoundingly silent even now.

Those who wonder at the motives underlying this particular Democrat hypocrisy – and also wonder what force could possibly be powerful enough to so completely silence U.S. feminists – should read The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008), Jeff Sharlet's carefully researched exposé of how the U.S. government has become the global executive-action agency of fundamentalist Christianity, which itself is the ideological handmaid of capitalism.

But Clinton's betrayal of women via NAFTA was not the first instance of the Democrats' unreported collaboration in the deceptively labeled “Republican” war against women – which is, in ugly truth, a relentless campaign by the USian Ruling Class to force Working Class women back into domestic slavery. The first Democrat betrayer of women was the defiantly Christian theocrat Jimmy Carter, who even before he took office had effectively nullified the party's platform-pledge to protect women's reproductive rights.

I should note here I was a member of the working press during the Carter campaign and distinctly remember the (subsequently validated) pre-election concerns of my female friends, all of whom were veterans of women's liberation. Given Carter's publicly declared Southern Baptist fundamentalism – a declaration tantamount to proclaiming one's self a biblical-law misogynist – all these women (very rationally) feared he would try to abolish their sexual freedom. But most of them voted for him anyway because – in what I now recognize as preview of future Ruling Class election strategy – they were convinced their only alternative was voting for “the far greater evil” of a Republican.

When I am writing of such matters I always – at least whenever possible – authenticate recollection by documentation. Thus it is both relevant to this essay and indicative of the magnitude of our allegedly “nonexistent” Internet censorship here in the USian homeland that virtually every reference to Carter's pre-election public pretense of supporting women's rights has vanished down the Orwell hole. The last time I sought this topic's corroborative links, probably four years ago, I found many within a very few minutes. Now, after three hours of diligent searching, I have found only one – a formerly famous, once universally available Time magazine piece describing Carter's denial of abortion rights to impoverished women via the Hyde Amendment as “mean spirited” – a report that is now price-censored by a pay-wall.

Obviously – just as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia -- the historical revisionists have been busy. Thus does the malevolently theocratic USian Imperial Ruling Class  methodically protect its own.

Nevertheless, the Internet search paid off by showing me the best analysis and historical summary I have yet read anywhere of the Democratic Party's lethal transformation from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism, which is actually a new and frightfully Orwellian name for fascism.

***

Example Six: Intensifying Bureaucratic Hostility to Low-Income Seniors

AT THE BEGINNING of this piece, I mentioned how DSHS, the Washington state welfare bureaucracy, has extended to seniors and disabled people the unprovoked viciousness with it has always responded to younger, more conventional welfare applicants. For the latter group, the function of DSHS was never to provide assistance, but rather to gate-keep public funds by maximizing denial, cancellation or reduction of stipends and services. But toward seniors and physically disabled people, the agency was until now relatively friendly, as I myself – a DSHS beneficiary since the Great Wall Street Ripoff permanently obliterated nearly 70 percent of my post-retirement income – can personally attest. Indeed it seemed to me DSHS personnel often went out of their way to be helpful to folks in my demographic group.

To me this was a double surprise, since I had encountered naught but hostility – often extremely vindictive hostility – when I was forced to deal with DSHS during the clinical depression that followed the destruction of my life's work by fire in 1983 and, in the decade before that, when I was a member of the working press, during my (invariably adversarial) contacts with DSHS when it was a source of news.

But under the plutocratic despotism of Kevin Quigley, the scornful antagonism that always defined the DSHS attitude toward younger welfare supplicants now defines its interactions with elderly and disabled people too. Two examples – each unthinkable in previous years – should suffice to illustrate the agency's new, decidedly Ayn Randish policy of deliberate nastiness:

The worst of these examples is the victimization of a woman of the lower-income Working Class who is both physically disabled and officially retired. A lower-level menial employee all her worklife, she was receiving pension payments of $255 per year plus a Social Security retirement stipend of $1001 per month for a total income of $12,267 annually. Including the two tiny pension payments, this averaged out to $1022.25 per month, which included subsidies for nearly 100 percent of her health-care costs. This is definitively rock-bottom poor, which also qualified her for $134 in food stamps each month. Apart from these stipends and subsidies, she had no other income, but by living frugally, she was able to survive.

A few months ago, DSHS randomly audited her case and mistakenly recalculated her pension payments as monthly rather than annual. Thus they abolished all of her health-care subsidies and food stamps,which leaves her only $870 per month to live on. When she appealed, submitting all the requisite documentation, the welfare bureaucrats rejected the documents as fake, called her a liar to her face and refused to reverse their decision. Now – denied all access to health care and needing more than half her monthly income for rent – she lives in abject terror, wondering which will kill her first, the denial of medical services, starvation or homelessness.

In the second example, various non-governmental organizations had stepped up to help process DSHS paperwork in the wake of the huge bureaucratic downsizing fostered by the Great Wall Street Ripoff – no doubt one of the primary reasons the capitalists engineered the crash, as I speculated in 2010  (and for which I was immediately and forever banished from Facebook). Typically the NGOs take welfare applications, verify the documentation and electronically forward the work to DSHS. Now however DSHS has begun rejecting these applications, demanding the supplicants appear in person at the local welfare office, bringing the documentation there for further review. This adds weeks (and sometimes months) to the process and – obviously as intended – also makes it profoundly difficult for many elderly and/or physically disabled people to comply.

The second-example maliciousness I have experienced personally: specifically the arbitrary denial of nearly $700 in medical expenses that – supported as they are by official receipts – would previously have been factored into my monthly food-stamp allotment.

Hence – and I say this again for emphasis – the purpose of the Washington state welfare bureaucracy (which is now the purpose of the federal welfare bureaucracy in Washington D.C. and in all the 49 other states), is not to help the poor, but rather to placate the ever-more-frightened taxpayers – that is, those who still have living-wage jobs -- by denying us life-sustaining stipends and services, and thereby shoving us as quickly as possible into our graves.

Welcome to the Democratic Party's United States.

***

Conclusion: the Big Lie Has Become the So-Called “American” Way

THE ULTIMATE LESSON here is in the varied applications of Josef Goebbels' famed Big Lie.  His basic principle was simple: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Application of the Big Lie by the USian Ruling Class is evident two forms, firstly in how the Republicans routinely lie about reality (as in the “weapons of mass destruction” falsely claimed  to be in Iraq), secondly in how the Democrats routinely lie about their intent (as in Obama's “change we can believe in”).

The first Big Lie form – the knowingly false description of reality – is ultimately subject to fact checking and is therefore maintainable only by the strictest censorship, in which context the remainder of the Goebbels quite linked above is especially relevant: “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State” (emphasis added).

In the Big Lie's second form – deliberate falsehoods about intent – the truth cannot be established save by the (invariably speculative) indications of past conduct, which in the case of a carefully managed candidate may themselves be deliberately deceptive. From the perspective of the Ruling Class, the primary advantage of the second form is that it requires a much-less-severe regime of censorship and is therefore particularly amenable to maintaining the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

Thus, in these applications of the Big Lie – one to drum up support for an imperial conquest, the other to dupe the voters into accepting “progressives” who in fact are no less fascist than their Republican rivals – we see how the Democrats are far worse than the Republicans, not only in their savaging of the socioeconomic safety net (and of non-police, non-military government services in general), but most especially in the long-term damage they have done to the U.S. experiment in representative democracy – damage obvious in the unprecedentedly low voter turnout  and in the various expressions of public hopelessness that sometimes surface via random polling, for example here  and here. 

In short, the Democrats hide their malevolence behind humanitarian Big Lies even as the Republicans brandish their own viciousness to make the eventual Democratic alternative palatable – never mind in principle it is equally savage. The Republicans thereby create the perfect diversion behind which to camouflage the ugly fact the Democrat Party of today is as much the party of Ayn Rand as the GOP. The Democrats meanwhile lie about who and what they are, exploiting the genuinely humanitarian history of the (forever abolished) New Deal and the (never-to-be-fulfilled) expectations deliberately raised by carefully selected, allegedly “progressive” personalities such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alan Grayson to further conceal the party's predatory intent. This is, indeed, the defining Big Lie of USian Empire politics – an alleged two-party system that is in fact a single-party dictatorship diabolically disguised as its opposite.

Why then vote at all? However much our election process has been perverted – and I believe that since Citizens United  it has been totally perverted – I think it is vital to preserve the franchise itself against the (faint) possibility of revolutionary reform. The more we don't vote, the easier it will be for the Ruling Class to abolish elections entirely.

For whom then will I vote? For third-party candidates: Communists, socialists, maybe even Greens if they'd set aside their white-bourgeois hostility to unions.

Why only third party candidates? Because – as we see from the above – the notion that not voting for a Democrat automatically aids the forces of reaction is yet another Big Lie. Both parties are instruments of the Ruling Class, and by playing the good-cop/bad-cop role, they intimidate us into giving the Ruling Class everything it wants. Hence, as a member of the Working Class, I know I'm fucked whomever I vote for – or whether I vote or not. That's because we in the Working Class are methodically denied any influence in U.S. governance,  whether it's the Democrats in power or the Republicans.

Again – and it cannot be said too often – that's why voter turnout is already at an all-time low and still declining. Why cast a ballot if your vote is meaningless?

Though the U.S. population yet remains too Moron Nation ignorant to understand the necessity of voting to preserve the franchise, it is at least awakening to the fact elections don't matter when the country is ruled by a handful of nameless, faceless plutocrats who, individually and collectively, have the same serial-killer mentality as Adolph Hitler, whom their fathers and grandfathers financed into power to be the savior of capitalism – the very role Trump now seeks for himself.

LB/10-24 November 2015

-30-

Anti-Black Slander from the Democratic Party?

THE OLDEST QUARREL inside the Left is undoubtedly the fight between pacifists and those who believe humanitarian reforms can be wrest from the capitalist Ruling Class only by violence or credible threats thereof. 

Events in Ferguson  re-heated the dispute to a simmer, but Baltimore  brought it to a rolling boil, and last week it bubbled onto the pages of mainstream media. 

Yet that's only half the story. The other half is that one writer, Jonathan Chait of the aggressively upscale New York Magazine, is using the discussion to slyly blame U.S. African Americans  for the downfall of the Democratic Party.

Thus, in Chait's obliquely presented view, black rebelliousness is responsible for the party's reduction to the me-too fascism that has characterized Democratic foreign policy since the ascendance of Lyndon Baines Johnson to the presidency, and defined its domestic policy since President Jimmy Carter's theocratic signature  enshrined the Republican war against women as federal policy. 

Meanwhile the appearance of the violence-versus-nonviolence debate in mainstream publications is, I believe, of profound political and historical significance. It is unlike anything I have seen during the nearly 60 years I have been a professional writer, editor and/or photographer. Nor have I heard of its like occurring anytime during the 75 years I've been living this lifetime. 

Moreover – and let us not forget this all-important point – Chait and the writers he cites all represent the Ruling Class regardless of the political disguises assumed by their publishers. Thus it is arguable the widespread coverage suddenly being given this issue is the most accurate yardstick yet of Ruling Class fears that Working Class anger in the U.S. is approaching the ignition-point of revolution. 

That's why Chait's opening graf, which builds a pro-violence argument he soon demolishes with volleys of academic research, is worth quoting in totality, especially for its links: 

The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon . “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox's German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.” In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson  asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds to answer her own question in the negative.

But then three paragraphs later Chait not only refutes the writers he cited. He also reaches a conclusion I would expect to find – albeit stated in more obviously racist terms – only in an avowedly Rightist journal:

The 1960s saw two overlapping waves of protest: nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations, and urban rioting. The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson swept every region of the country except the South running a liberal, pro-civil-rights campaign; in 1968, Richard Nixon won a narrower victory on the basis of social backlash.

Because I (of course) do not read New York Magazine, I owe Margaret Flowers and her excellent on-line daily Popular Resistance a salute of thanks for making Chait's “Riots and Social Change” available to a proletarian such as I. PR routinely does a damn fine job of bringing to Working Class attention important stories we 99 Percenters would otherwise be denied by the nation's various mechanisms of de facto censorship, but this time Flowers outdid herself.

All of which is prefatory to what I said on the associated comment thread. But it is more than just another en passant response. It is important for two reasons: it addresses the revisionist history by which the Ruling Class increasingly beclouds what happened within the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It also – or so I hope – alerts a few significantly placed people to a new Democratic Big Lie as potentially malicious as the “welfare queen” Big Lie the Democrats borrowed from the Republicans to justify enactment of genocidal “welfare reforms” in 1995.

(My apology for the fact there are a few repetitions between the explanatory grafs above and those below. The repetitions are unavoidable because I have reprinted my original comment word-for-word.)

Let us not forget that as a writer for aggressively upscale New York Magazine, Mr. Chait's perspective is necessarily that of the Ruling Class.

Hence the subtle but nevertheless implicit race-bating and victim-blaming in his statement that "The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order."

The truth, however, is quite different. The New Deal coalition was not "crack(ed) open" by the Republican Party but rather by the Democrats themselves.

President Lyndon Johnson's 180-degree turn in foreign policy immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led directly to the Southeast Asian (aka "Vietnam") War.

In turn -- and exactly as the Ruling Class intended -- the war destroyed the Working Class solidarity that had created and sustained the New Deal. The war divided the U.S. Working Class -- what today we would call the 99 Percent -- into two venomously hostile camps: the sneeringly contemptuous draft-exempt elite and the equally embittered draft-bait, cannon-fodder majority of those of us who (because we lacked the money and influence to bribe our way out of the draft), had no choice but to serve.

Contrary to the implications of Mr. Chait's remark -- a clever falsehood that seems designed to protect white Ruling Class Democrats by blaming blacks for the party's troubles -- all the significant non-racial divisions in present-day U.S. politics date from that history-changing Vietnam-era divide.

As to racist hate-mongering by the Republicans, that indeed occurred, but again contrary to Mr. Chait's disingenuous claim, the class warfare implicit in the Vietnam draft had already destroyed the New Deal.

Vietnam had also -- because of the tacitly genocidal U.S. policy of sending a preponderance of African-American combat troops to fight its colonial wars -- radically inflamed the long-simmering racial injustices that underlay the riots.

The Republican Party, which since the 1920s has been the primary vessel of U.S. fascism, predictably pounced with malicious glee on the resultant white fear. Obviously -- at least in retrospect -- this too was precisely as the Ruling Class intended.

Subsequent U.S. history makes it equally obvious what happened next. The Ruling Class deftly expanded Vietnam's divisiveness by manipulating it into a plethora of profoundly emotional clashes over firearms, jobs, unions, welfare, immigration, education, abortion, sexuality, Christian supremacy and ultimately the prevalent definitions of patriotism and what it means to be a U.S. citizen.

Again exactly as the Ruling Class intends, the resultant hostilities -- perpetuated as they are by a media machine more psychologically effective than even Josef Goebbels might have imagined -- destroy any future possibility of ever again restoring 99 Percent solidarity.

(Disclosure: I am not a Vietnam veteran but am a Vietnam-era vet: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1965, three years active duty, overseas service in Korea 1961-1962, honorably discharged after completion of three-year reserve obligation).

LB/8-14 June 2015

-30-

Baltimore: the Capitalist Pressure Cooker Blows a Gasket

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

 *

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

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

Here are three examples of their best work: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I said on the associated comment thread: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

But Sanders has no chance of winning the White House.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not that I am surprised. 

As I remarked: 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

Welch gets right to it: 

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

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

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

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

 

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

Here is the concluding graf of what the poster said: 

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

Here is what I said in response:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

To put it in the most simple terms possible: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you get it now?

Or is this still too complex an argument?

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

 

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

* * *

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

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

*** *** *** 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine too what our overlords might do in retaliation.

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

To some extent, it's already happening. 

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

LB/27 April-3 May 2015

-30-