Tacoma: Microcosm of Capitalism and Class Struggle

Foggy night in Tacoma. Photo by KD, OAN copyright

2014. Click on image to view it full size.

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(Note: in the interest of clarity, some of the links below are used more than once in the text.)

 

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WHENEVER I FOCUS a critical eye on the operations of local government in my adopted home city of Tacoma, it seems I discover a new dimension of class warfare. 

Verily, I should not be surprised. A former investigative reporter, I witnessed the same dynamics in New York City, Seattle, Bellingham and various places in Michigan, Tennessee and New Jersey – literally every place I ever worked and even when I was a teenager covering sports not news. (I lasted 30 years in mainstream media, 1956-1986, only because I was able to hide my ever-more-emphatically confirmed recognition U.S. “democracy” is our species' ultimate Big Lie.) I had understood capitalism as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth – long before Ayn Rand  gave me the vocabulary to express its true malice.

And, yes, capitalism is everywhere malicious. While the lessons of Bhopal,  Exxon Valdez,  Deepwater Horizon and Bangladesh are infinitely more grotesque than the back-room banalities of local betrayals by bureaucrats, legislators and municipal officials in lockstep service to the Ruling Class, capitalism's bloody history proves it has always, even in its most innocuous forms, been an economic system run by killers.  The photographs from Madhya Predesh  or Dhaka are themselves sufficient to define capitalism as serial murder. 

As if this damning evidence were yet inadequate – as if Nature in one last act of maternal mercy had decided her human children are such slow learners we yet need further proof of capitalism's innate maliciousness – there is the now-indisputable fact capitalism is fatally poisoning our planet.  Our world is dying, and its death wounds are inflicted by capitalism's relentless avarice, of which the local impact alone should be a constant goad to raise the red banner of resistance.

In the context of these present circumstances – the context of terminal climate change, of the atrocities of Bangladesh and Bhopal and of all the other too-awful-to-conceal demonstrations of capitalist truth – we scarcely notice many of the daily depredations of capitalism we typically encounter here in the USian homeland. That's because we have been conditioned to accept them as everyday realities, as irremediable as weather and therefore as moot as settled matters of law. 

But we should also recognize how capitalism's defining disasters – including all its greed-spawned horrors that will assail us in the years ahead – typically begin as lesser evils, the quashed traffic tickets and all the other apparently harmless examples of minor malfeasance that arise from the invariably chummy relationships between the local business executives and the politicians themselves. The wealthier the capitalist, the more deeply the politicians bow to his demands. That's why the case against the rich kid caught dealing cocaine to his private-school classmates vanishes before it gets to court, and the case against the impoverished black kid who got busted with a single marijuana cigarette results in a 10-year prison sentence.

And there's no relief. Eventually even the reformist politicians become capitalist puppets, a process that most often starts with a single act of petty graft, the capitalist buying a politician or a bureaucrat or maybe even a journalist an elaborately catered private-club dinner or giving him an expensive watch or guaranteeing the admission of his children to an exclusive private college. Sooner or later the capitalist con-man's newest mark is entrapped by outright bribes or perhaps – in the most extreme forms – a video-taped night amongst the Stepford courtesans,  female or male, of some unimaginably compliant executive whorehouse. The eventual result is total malfeasance – a government that is theoretically elected to represent the people but in fact represents only the capitalists – the realpolitik behind all the atrocities cited above. 

Ultimately – exactly as is said of USian politics – all corruption is local. Capitalism's ways and means are thus always the same, whether at Bhopal or in our own back yards. The capitalists' sole purpose is always identical: more for themselves, no matter the cost to us and our children and our Mother Earth. 

But even Ayn Rand, capitalism's most outspoken evangelist, dared not admit what capitalism truly is: that it is self-induced moral imbecility, the deliberate embrace of evil, the ethos of the serial killer shaped into global strategies and tactics that – once we discover how to look – are as obvious in the banalities of local governance as they are in the bodies of capitalism's victims. 

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BECAUSE I HAVE adopted the Pacific Northwest as my homeland, I tend to think of it as a place that is better than anywhere else. And though I have long been convinced neither our species nor our planet will survive the depredations of capitalism, it still disturbs me when I discover some new capitalist toxin poisoning my own back yard. Perhaps a tiny, eternally foolish part of me retains a vestige of hopefulness. 

But regardless of our perspective, and no matter how seemingly trivial the issue, once we have learned to recognize capitalism for what it is, we cannot escape the fact we are confronting absolute, absolutely intransigent evil. Even in the smallest examples of malfeasance we see the same ugly truth proven by the atrocities itemized above – that capitalists are sociopaths intent on victimizing all the rest of us. Thus the moral imbecility that defines capitalism is as evident in the everyday politics of the U.S. state of Washington  as it is in Bangladesh.

Note how, as a matter of official policy, Washington robs its taxpayers and gives the loot to the capitalists – sneering aristocrats  who are already so obscenely rich their wealth is inconceivable to those of us condemned to live our lives below the salt. Note how Washington politicians knowingly perpetuate the most deliberately regressive tax structure  in the nation. Note how they sadistically punish Washington's poorest peoples with the nation's highest state tax burden and simultaneously pamper its One Percenters with the nation's third lowest taxes. 

More to the point, note how Washington gives Boeing an $8.5 billion tax exemption – the largest such gift in U.S. history – even as it refuses to properly serve its citizens.  It is in (openly defiant) contempt of court for its refusal to provide its children with their educational needs. It cannot even maintain its physical infrastructure.  Yet in no other U.S. state are the politicians more generous to their capitalist puppet-masters. 

Though the gloating sadism of Washington state's capitalist overlords is not as brazenly obvious as that of the capitalist masters of Detroit,  we can be sure the only reason for the difference is racial. Washington state's population is 77 percent Caucasian, the USian homeland's favored majority. This means its politicians and bureaucrats have to be a bit more subtle about their primary job – extorting money from the people and giving it to the capitalists. By contrast, Detroit's population is 82 percent black, its majority the one USian people on whom it is always open season. Whether due to the greed of the board room, the carefully closeted but Ku-Klux-caustic bigotry of about 75 percent of the white majority or the conditioned murderousness of the (mostly white) federally militarized state and local police, blacks and their neighborhoods are always the prime targets.

But if we truly open our eyes, we see that in every domain against every race on every continent, capitalism's intent is always the same. Capitalist Bangladesh allows construction so shoddy it kills at least 1,129 people. Capitalist Detroit cuts off the drinking water to 27,000 households, inflicting the horrors of Third World poverty on entire neighborhoods. Capitalist Washington state commits the same atrocities, albeit more incrementally, with greater deviousness and more certain concealment beneath the Josef Goebbels cloak of near-total news blackout. The state denies health insurance  to 70,000 lower-income workers. It damns children to eternal ignorance by refusing to properly fund its public schools. It hikes tuition and slashes state support to ensure college is a privilege only the wealthiest families can afford. It guarantees its continued impoverishment by giving Boeing – a corporation that is unapologetically vicious in its treatment of its employees  – the biggest tax break in all U.S. history. And its politicians dutifully genuflect as Boeing moves another 2,000 jobs to the anti-union, low-wage, low-skill South.

All of this – families hurled into permanent destitution by downsizing and outsourcing, workers slain by production facilities so poorly built they become death traps, local environments poisoned beyond recovery, transit, schools and other vital services slashed or eliminated – is looting. And its obvious purpose wherever it obtains – Tacoma or Detroit or Bhopal or Dhaka or any other locale made infamous by capitalist atrocities – is pandering to the insatiable, unspeakably malevolent greed of the capitalists.

Such is class warfare, the quintessence of capitalism in action. 

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IN THE SEAPORT city of Tacoma, the most vivid example of class warfare is the white suburbanites' ongoing attack on mass transit. 

It is most often cleverly disguised as a spontaneous expression of racism.

But an obscure, state-funded think-tank report entitled “Identifying Redevelopable Lands” and revealingly subtitled “Application of a Land Value Potential (LVP) Approach in Urban Centers,” suggests the war against Tacoma transit-users is a clandestine form of the socioeconomic cleansing that's being openly imposed on Detroit. The Tacoma document,  completed in 2009 for city officials and their colleagues in adjacent local governments, is a deliberately confusing, carefully euphemistic textbook on the Ayn Rand economics of gentrification. As always under capitalism, its motivating principle is greed. Beyond a smokescreen of obfuscatory jargon, it shows how the demolition of lower-income housing could clear the way for luxury apartment complexes generating rentals as high as $2,170 per month and minimum profits of 10 percent (“Exhibit 9,” page 17). Given that rent control is illegal everywhere in Washington state – the politicians' response to a 1980 attempt by Seattleites to protect themselves against greedy landlords – the actual profits in a post-urban-renewal Tacoma would no doubt be much higher. 

In both cities – brazenly in Detroit, surreptitiously in Tacoma – the politicians and bureaucrats are undoubtedly fulfilling back-room promises to make land-use more profitablefor their capitalist benefactors. The war against Tacoma's transit users has already been denounced by some of its more savvy victims as the first phase of a campaign of socioeconomic cleansing or gentrification. That it began with an eight-percent service cutback in 2010 – the year following the “Land Value Potential” report – is thus unlikely to be coincidental.

 

Moreover – though it never quite states it in any quotable form –“Land Value Potential” obviously outlines the Ruling Class response to the fact (socioeconomically “undesirable”) lower-income people are the majority demographic in Tacoma  (see “Community Profile”). Though Tacoma officials are loathe to openly admit the city's poverty, it is proven by several statistics. The city's median annual household income, $47,862 per year, is nearly $10,000 a year less than the state median, The city's poverty rate – the percentage of the population the federal government officially defines as impoverished – is 17 percent; the state's is 12. This is underscored by the fact 45 percent percent of the local transit system's 36,000 daily riders have no other means of transportation. Perhaps the most telling fact of all is that 60 percent of Tacoma's school children come from families so poor they qualify for the federal free or reduced-price school lunches. And nearly 25 percent of Tacoma's population is black or Hispanic  – the perennially favorite targets of the gentrifiers. 

Detroit is much worse off.  Its median annual income is only $26,955, and its poverty rate is 38 percent. 

That Tacoma's ongoing transit crisis is the Ruling Class response to the barriers to gentrification posed by the city's lower-income majority is proven by two developments. One is the steadfast refusal of the allegedly “progressive” Tacoma City Council – which has both the requisite legal framework and taxing authority  – to come to the aid of mass-transit users. The other is the new, crisis-perpetuating policy adopted by Pierce Transit, the local transit authority, which denies long-promised service restorations to the (impoverished) city but radically increases service to the (far wealthier) suburbs. Thus it rewards the anti-transit suburbanites while punishing pro-transit city dwellers  (scroll down). It also serves notice the cutbacks in Tacoma bus service, which now total about 73 percent, are permanent. And it expresses the Marie Antoinette indifference of local politicians and bureaucrats – yes, even the so-called “progressives” – to the fact the radically reduced bus service has already denied an unknown number of families access to their jobs and forced them to move elsewhere. 

The downsizing, of course, was cleverly done, carefully structured – as it always is – to muffle public expressions of pain and anger. Even in Tacoma the politicians are superbly schooled in manipulation and deception. Public outcry was effectively stifled by the fact the cuts and the resultant life-ruining circumstances were rationalized by the so-called Great Recession. 

Meanwhile the use of the economic crisis by politicians everywhere as a cover for granting the Ruling Class long-demanded austerity measures lends further confirmation to the probability the entire economic contraction was engineered specifically to facilitate such devastating cutbacks. 

But gentrification is only one of the many weapons by which the Ruling Class assaults us. As always in capitalist governance – which is rule in accordance with the genocidal principles laid out by Ayn Rand – anything that helps sustain lower-income people is under attack. That's why there's a war against public education nationwide,  against potable water in Detroit, against public transport in Tacoma. That's why in the real (never publicized) state budget,  the capitalists rake off $50 billion even as the state's 1,045,453 million k-12 kids are deprived of adequate schools. That's why the Tacoma City Council won't salvage local bus service, makes a viciously dishonest pretense of considering mandatory paid sick leave  and is ignoring demands for a $15 minimum wage. In every case, it is targeted socioeconomic bigotry  intended to vindictively inflict maximum hardship on anyone of lesser means. Thus, by the imposition of ignorance and hopelessness, do the capitalists' wholly owned political servants repay their Wall Street masters. 

The underlying principle is simple. The more hardship the capitalists inflict on us, the more we are afraid – and the more we are likely to surrender to socioeconomic wretchedness. Note the 15,513 “under-votes”  – ballots in which the voter refused to indicate a choice – that killed the 2012 Pierce Transit service restoration measure.  Astoundingly, 4,443 of these under-votes came from inside the Tacoma city limits (the precincts prefixed by the number 27), where the proposal was nevertheless approved by nearly 56 percent. But the anti-transit-user majority in the suburbs nevertheless won by a final official tally of 704 votes. (The linked OAN piece was written before the results were finalized.) 

What the under-votes show depends on the locale. In the anti-transit areas they are undoubtedly gestures of contempt for those of us who are dependent on buses. But in pro-transit Tacoma they can only measure the extent to which the Working Class electorate is so psychologically demoralized, it will not even muster in support of its own obvious interest. Based on the city's demographics, at least half those 4,443 persons who wouldn't specify a choice were lower-income people for whom the transit issue was surely vital and probably personally decisive. In other words, the Working Class electorate inside the city cut its own metaphorical throat by refusing to vote. As a local Occupy activist said prophetically in 2011, “the 99 Percent is broken.”

USian “representative democracy” has thus obviously failed. And the voters' increasing disdain for elections is an index of the extent of their growing recognition the system is corrupted beyond any possibility of reform. Deceptions of the Elizabeth Warren sort  not withstanding, only the capitalists' most reliable puppets are allowed into U.S. political office. This is the gatekeeper-function function of the alleged “two-party” system, which is actually a single Ruling Class party, its monolithic nature disguised by carefully scripted public rivalries. It ensures the only interests represented in USian governance whether local, state or federal are exclusively those of the Ruling Class. A few exceptions, like socialist Kshama Sawant in Seattle,  are sometimes allowed locally, but only when the Ruling Class deems it necessary to bolster the greater Big Lie of USian “democracy.” 

Politicians who truly threaten the USian Empire's financial overlords are invariably removed from office.  Some are slain outright. Not even the officials of traditionally allied nations are safe from capitalist reprisals.  are safe from capitalist reprisals. 

As for Warren, her public disclosure file seems at first glance to suggest a substantial degree of independence from our capitalist overlords. But like all other Democrats, she is the political equivalent of the Trojan Horse. Her most generous funding source is Emily's List, which despite its feminist facade is fiercely committed to Ayn Rand economics.  And Warren is one of the group's most vocal supporters,  which tells us that behind her deceptive campaign rhetoric, she is as ruthlessly fanatical a capitalist  as Ayn Rand's disciple Alan Greenspan.  This tells us were Warren to win the White House, she would undoubtedly follow the example set by Barack Obama, the all-time champion Trojan Horse of U.S. political history, who ran for the presidency in 2008 as the candidate of “change we can believe in.” 

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AS MANY OF you know, I have several metaphorical dogs – personal and political alike – in the local fights for mass transit and a $15 minimum wage. 

A socialist with strong Marxian leanings, I also find it appalling (but infuriatingly typical of capitalist governance) the United States is the only developed nation that does not mandate paid sick leave for all workers. Therefore I volunteered my editorial skills to the local campaign for a paid-sick-leave ordinance. But my offer has been ignored, probably because the campaigners, who include the Tacoma City Councilman Anders Ibsen, are loathe to be associated with an outspoken socialist. 

There are no such fears amongst the local campaigners for a $15 minimum wage, a struggle begun by Socialist Alternative  and the Harry Bridges Club,  both of which are outspokenly Marxian organizations. Thus I have been active in Tacoma 15 Now since last February, and despite a two-month hiatus (September and October) due to a potentially fatal kidney infection, I will remain as active as other personal obligations and worsening physical disabilities allow. 

I will never personally benefit from a $15 minimum wage – I am 74 years old, and the USian job-market prejudice that regards old age as tantamount to terminal disability ensures I would never again be allowed to work for pay even if I were not permanently locked out of the workplace by the odium of my long-ago post-fire clinical depression. What prompts my involvement with Tacoma 15 Now is that USians are now the most viciously oppressed workers in the industrial world. Hence – however insignificant it might be – I will do whatever I can to combat this ever-worsening wretchedness the capitalists are knowingly inflicting on my Working Class sisters and brothers. The same spirit keeps me committed to the cause of organized labor through ongoing membership in the National Writers Union. 

The transit fight, however, is obviously a lost cause. As noted above, the local transit authority has made it clear there will be no improvement in bus service inside the city of Tacoma: not now, not ever. We who would benefit by such improvements have been damned as undesirables and are clearly being being targeted for socioeconomic banishment. 

Nevertheless, no doubt because I am a New Yorker by birth and was a Manhattanite by preference for much of my adulthood, I have always believed nationwide access to NYC-magnitude mass transport is a human right. In my years in the working press I advocated accordingly, and whenever possible I have done so in retirement as well. I therefore also understand why bus service inside Tacoma is maliciously kept at a prohibitively wretched minimum. In typically sadistic capitalist spirit, the transit authority's obvious intent is to inflict a perpetual transportation crisis on as many of us as possible. This is especially true for those of us who are chronically impoverished or are lower-income elderly or disabled people, of which I am all three.

What makes the crisis even more difficult for me personally is the financial atrocities of 2009 left me without a car. My meticulously maintained 1992 Ford Tempo V6 died in mid-2009 at 422,210.7 kilometers (262,349 miles), and I could not afford to repair or replace it. I was thus flung into permanent (and permanently embarrassing) dependency on vehicle-owning friends for any errands that cannot be accomplished via the vengefully downsized local bus service. 

The death of my automobile is also a kind of psychic death: it ended forever my ability to access alone the deep country solitude so essential to my spiritual wellbeing. 

Yet despite all this – despite the fact Tacoma now has by far the worst public transport of any comparable U.S. city – I am stranded here for the remainder of my life, with no possibility of ever moving to a less hatefully restricted environment. (Where does one go – and how does one get there – when one is 74 years old, physically disabled and damned by circumstance to an annual income of less than $15,000 per year?) 

The same questions afflict all of Tacoma's transit-dependent poor regardless of our age or physical condition. And in truth, there is no place we can go. Despite demographic trends elsewhere, the local suburbs remain prohibitively expensive bastions of white privilege. 

We are thus backed into the proverbial corner, our circumstances analogous to that of a wounded, once proud elk trapped in box canyon. We can either surrender or fight the predator who has entrapped us. If we surrender, we will surely lose. If we resist, our chances of winning are negligible, though at least we preserve our human dignity. 

But those 4,443 transit under-votes tell me the Tacoma Working Class has already surrendered. This puts the local $15 minimum wage effort gravely in doubt as well. If Tacoma's 99 Percenters wouldn't vote in 2012 for the transit restoration they themselves acknowledged they needed to get to work, why would they vote next year – or in any other year – to give themselves a raise? Locally at least, the revolution the aristocrats now openly fear  is undoubtedly more a creation of their guilt and paranoia than the result of any actual threat. 

LB/20 October-2 November 2014 

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Wisconsin: Why the Democrats (Deliberately) Lost

AFTER A WEEK of reading detailed analyses of the Wisconsin recall debacle, I will say aloud what no one else on the Left apparently dares even whisper: the Democrats were not “beaten”; they deliberately lost the fight.

When we examine what happened in Wisconsin – when we look at it from the (forbidden) perspective of class struggle – no other conclusion is possible. We need only review the associated history. Gov. Scott Walker's manifest fascism – his  termination of collective bargaining and his genocidal cutbacks in government services vital to seniors, disabled people and lower-income folk in general – goaded a huge faction of the 99 Percent into rising up angry. If the Democrats were truly advocates for “change we can believe in,” they would have been overjoyed: not only was organized labor rediscovering its lost militance, the party itself was again attracting genuine radicals – the sorts of people who made the New Deal a new reality and, four decades later, gave the Civil Rights Movement the endorsement and protection of federal law. But the Democratic Party's' actual response to Wisconsin's revolutionary potential was a public succession of meaningless gestures – the bare minimum essential to keep alive (the imbecility of) “hope.” Behind the scenes, the party's top-level operatives worked overtime to co-opt, nullify and eventually destroy the community of rebellion that was (seemingly) emerging from the uprising Walker had provoked.

In truth – because the (covertly fascist) Democrats are as beholden to the One Percent as the (overtly fascist) Republicans, the Democrats were terrified by the activist solidarity that was evolving in Wisconsin, and they suppressed it accordingly. They did not use the brute force reserved for mass movements that can be denounced as rabble via the Ruling Class Media propaganda machine. Instead they employed a high-intensity mix of stealth and co-optation – strategy and tactics no doubt crafted by the same secret-police types who plotted the campaign of thuggery and infiltration that destroyed Occupy. As a consequence, Walker's 58-percent unpopularity (November 2011) became, within six short months, a 54 percent victory margin. The magnitude of Walker's funding meanwhile gave the Democrats the perfect excuse beneath which to hide their (additional) disempowerment of the 99 Percent and their malice toward organized labor in particular.

Since then any number of U.S. and European writers have detailed how the Democrats destroyed the Wisconsin Rebellion. But not one has thus far dared call the destruction by its proper name: betrayal. And that word alone, though infinitely damning, is not sufficient. For the result of this betrayal is (yet another) fascist triumph, and with it the demobilization of any segment of the Wisconsin population that might actively resist or otherwise jeopardize the methodical expansion of capitalist tyranny. As always, it's absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent; total subjugation and genocidal poverty for the rest of us – the Wall Street master-plan ever-more obviously served by Democrats and Republicans alike.

See for yourself – especially if you doubt my conclusion. Rather than attempt to condense all the Wisconsin postmortems into a summary that would of necessity eliminate their nuances, I here provide links to a representative sampling. By far the most revealing of these analyses (and therefore the most essential to my case) is Gary Younge's “There's class war in Wisconsin, yet the Democrats sing Kumbaya,” The Guardian (UK). The head tells the whole story. The text spells out the ugly details – and does so with enough clarity we can (if we are so inclined) extrapolate for ourselves the operational doctrines by which the Madison Rebellion was reduced to the Wisconsin Waterloo.

Here too by title and author is a bibliography of seven more vitally informative reports, each with its own unique perspective on the defeat, each providing another piece of the proverbial puzzle that – when assembled – gives us a panoramic object lesson in how the One Percent easily suppresses a potential revolution even when the revolutionaries have sufficient respectability to protect themselves from armored cars, pepper gas and mass arrests by truncheon-wielding thugs. The articles preceded by one asterisk are those I especially recommend; two asterisks means I consider them vital:

“Accountability in Defeat: On a Whupping in Wisconsin,” Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive via Common Dreams;

**“Five Things to Consider in the Walker Recall Vote,” Robert Borosage, Campaign for America's Future (website) via Truthout, with one commentary and three rebuttals to hostile posters as my contributions to the associated discussion thread;

*“Get Left or Be Left,” Carl Gibson, original reporting for Reader Supported News;

“Getting Rolled in Wisconsin,” Andy Kroll, TomDispatch.com via Common Dreams;

“How Republicans Prevented Thousands of Wisconsin Students from Voting,” Scott Keyes, (with the story carefully omitting the fact the Obama Justice Department did nothing to prevent this egregious violation of the 1964 Voting Rights Act), Think Progress via Reader Supported News;

**“In Wisconsin, an Ominous Crucible of U.S. Politics,” Arun Gupta, The Guardian (U.K.) via Common Dreams, with two commentaries by me – one a pull-no-punches explanation of “what is being done to us”;

*“The Sliver Lining in Walker's Victory,” Arun Gupta and Steve Horn, misleadingly headlined but otherwise excellent original reporting for Truthout;  and

**“The Wisconsin Recall Aftermath,” Charles Pierce, Esquire via Reader Supported News;

The combined weight of the these disclosures make it clear the Democrats' tactics were so obviously self-defeating, not even stupidity is a plausible excuse. In the parlance of sports-gambling, the Big D threw the game. No other conclusion is possible.

*****

'Little Chance' of Victory in Wisconsin...Or in November 

One of my earliest essays on Wisconsin, “Madison's Pivotal Challenge: Finding Our Way Beyond Capitalist Greed,” published here 27 February 2011, provides something of an (eerily prophetic) backdrop to the newer material material above.

As I wrote then, almost a year and a half ago, “our national credo of infinite greed and limitless selfishness is becoming as commonplace amongst politicians and bureaucrats and even their receptionists as it is (and always has been) amongst banksters and tycoons...Indeed this signature combination of capitalist greed and Ayn Rand selfishness has become the binding unum of the e pluribus, the one anti-value that unites the many. It is now the defining characteristic of the nation as a whole. In a terrifyingly real sense, the gang-banger with the fist-sized solid-gold dollar-sign dangling from his solid gold neck-chain is the common denominator of us all.”

Greed – specifically the core ethos of Moron Nation as manifest in workers so suicidally idiotic they turn against their comrades in hatred and envy whenever those comrades successfully resist capitalist oppression – was the major factor in the Wisconsin outcome: that's how the Republicans won 38 percent of the union vote.

A week earlier in February 2011, via a piece titled with a line from an old Red Army song – “'Far & away the road goes winding; look & see how merrily the road goes'” – I correctly reported how “The revolutionary potential of the Labor Uprising that started in Wisconsin and is spreading across the nation is already terrifying the Ruling Class. Definitive proof of the extent to which the capitalist aristocracy is genuinely frightened comes from two seemingly unrelated developments. One of these is the government's decision to charge Private First Class Bradley Manning with a death-penalty crime – the intent obviously to make him an example a la Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The other development is Time magazine's publication of an anti-Marxist warning that eerily recalls the Rosenberg era...”

Thus as Madison evolved into a liberation movement, the covertly fascist Democratic Party responded accordingly, employing a variation on the tactics by which the CIA's Operation Chaos infiltrated and destroyed the old Counterculture, particularly the alternative press. First the Democrats endorsed the rebellion, then they used their endorsements to leverage infiltrators into key positions, then finally the infiltrators generated enough chaos, disinformation, divisiveness and disunity to neuter the rebellion from within.

Why? For the same reason (and essentially by the same methods) the Democrats killed Employee Free Choice and public-option/single-payer health care: each of these – the promised Wisconsin recall and the promises of “change we can believe in” – represented acts of rebellion. Each threatened not just to revitalize the labor movement but – by alleviating hopelessness and raising expectations – to resurrect anti-capitalist resistance amongst lower-income peoples, who might then join ranks with larger and more economically and politically powerful factions of the 99 Percent to build a genuinely powerful Working Class. But nothing is more horrifying to the One Percent, who believed such activism had been permanently extinguished by the political murders of the 1960s, particularly the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Snug in now-eternal servitude to the Ruling Class, the Democrats could not abide the possibility their party might again become the vehicle of near-revolution it had been under the aegis of the New Deal. To today's Democrats, repaying their debt to Wall Street by ensuring the continued oppression of the Working Class is infinitely more important than electoral victory. Hence their record of brazen betrayals: EFC, health care...and, yes, Wisconsin.

In this dark context, the unanimous and near-unanimous Congressional votes by which the Democrats and the Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated their hostility to our (former) constitutional rights is the most revealing fact of all: to paraphrase an infamous Nazi slogan: One Percent, One Party, One Tyranny.

Which is precisely why I believe the Democrats intend to lose November's national election exactly as they lost June's Wisconsin recall: by suppressing the language of class struggle, by allowing the Republicans to divide and conquer – in either case, Wisconsin or the nation, the Democrat payoff to Wall Street. Thus will the Democrats facilitate Republican victory, performing their last remaining service to the One Percent.

(Memo to the Working Press: if you dare, probe the extent to which the events in Wisconsin were investigated by the Department of Homeland Security and all the rest of the Ruling Class equivalent of SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency included. My bet is the Gestapo types were out from the first days of the demonstrations in Madison – with direct lines both to the White House and the main mansion of the Koch Brothers.)

Such is realpolitik on the Big Plantation of the post-American Dream, post-constitutional United Estates.

*****

Wisconsin Recall: Another Charade to Ensure We Remain Sedated 

Wisconsin is also (yet more) additional proof of what I have come to think of as the Bill Moyers theorem: that for many years now – I would say since the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy – U.S. politics have been nothing but a charade carefully scripted by the One Percent and acted out by the two parties.

As Moyers says, the real decisions are now always made behind closed doors, in the star chambers of the Ruling Class and the privy councils of the politicians who impose their increasingly despotic will.

The purpose of the deception is not just to conceal the reality of plutocratic tyranny; it is also to Big Lie us into submission, convincing us the American Experiment in constitutional democracy is functioning as the Founders intended and the American Dream therefore lives on – never mind the contrary evidence increasingly provided by our five senses. 

It astounds me so few people understand what is being done to us – especially after the Moyers disclosure, which verbalized an ugly truth the working press has known since the 1970s but none of us dared reveal lest in retaliation we be forever banished from journalism.

Perhaps the reason the Democrats' role in this process is so difficult for so many to understand is too few of us are hunters anymore. The sustaining service the Democrats provide U.S. electoral politics is exactly analogous to the function of decoys in duck hunting: just as the decoys convince the ducks all is well, bringing them into shotgun range and luring them to their eventual doom in the hunter's oven, so do the Democrats reassure us, herding us into helplessly passive acquiescence to the non-alternatives provided by our hopelessly corrupted voting booths and positioning us within easy reach of the Republican genocide invariably facilitated by Democrat “cave-ins”: permanent joblessness, bankruptcy, foreclosure, eviction, homelessness, unrelieved hunger, untreated sickness, termination of Medicare and Medicaid, unsurvivable reductions in Social Security, death.

Thus the Ruling Class intends to achieve its final self-serving objective: radical reduction of the global population, forcible shrinkage of the 99 Percent to exclude all of us who are no longer profitable as slaves.

LB/10 June 2012

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