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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are, in a word, fucked.

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

Meanwhile – woe to us all – Evil has won.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/1-31 December 2016.

-30-

Beyond the Newest Squabbles of the Two Evils, a Faint Possibility Sanders Might Be the Perfect Compromise

JILL STEIN'S EFFORT TO nullify the 2016 presidential election by last-minute recounts reeks of Green Party naivety, typically dishonest Democratic (sic) Party sleight-of-hand and the sinister guile for which Hillary Clinton is rightfully infamous. In all probability, Stein is Hillary's figurehead, positioned to be the perfect scapegoat for the debacle that will inevitably follow if this newest campaign to monkeywrench Donald Trump's victory is even half as effective as Hillary's felonious suppression of Sen. Bernie Sanders' candidacy.

Properly cynical analysis of the Stein campaign – Stein's relative innocence and limited finances as opposed to Hillary's bottomless corruption and obscenely unlimited wealth – indicates it can hardly be anything but another Clinton operation. In any case it has turned a long-cliched Madison Avenue hyperbole into new reality. Advertisers often boast their product “changes everything,” but this is precisely the outcome the breathtakingly Machiavellian recount-ploy will have if it triumphs, which several sources say is highly probable. For this “everything” truly is everything – not just the hitherto-certain, now unnervingly dubious outcome of the election, but the now equally dubious longevity of our nation, our species and our planet.

As I have said for months, the actual choice allowed us by our capitalist overlords – minor parties, write-ins, incomplete ballots and hell-no-I-won't-vote abstentions aside – was between two latter-day Hitlers and the horrific agenda each represents: the new Holocaust as promised by Donald Trump; the attack on Russia and the resultant thermonuclear apocalypse as sought by Hillary Clinton. In other words, we were forced to choose between possibly survivable horrors versus absolutely certain extinction.

Obviously exploiting Stein as her puppet – and obviously both as Stein's financier and puppet-master (diabolical, yes, especially in its multiple betrayals, but nevertheless the only conclusion allowed by logic) – Hillary is timing the recount to invalidate enough electoral votes to deny Trump the presidency and possibly – depending on whether the Democratic (sic) election-fixing apparatus can alter recount results as efficiently as it killed Sen. Sanders' primary victory – give it to herself.

Here's how it might work:

As The Hill reports, failure to complete an official recount by the federal 13 December deadline probably nullifies the state's electoral votes. Rightist websites – in this instance to be believed – are already saying Stein's belated filing of the recount demands is intended to ensure the three states' miss the 13 December deadline, thereby subtracting their electoral votes from Trump's total and throwing the presidential election into the House of Representatives.  (Apologetic note: this link to Inquisitr.com,, which summarizes the associated arithmetic, is obnoxiously clogged by advertisement monitoring and takes at least five minutes to stabilize to readability.)

What would happen were the presidency to be decided by the Republican-ruled House remains to be seen. There are at least three possibilities: that it confirms Trump's election; that it finds another Republican whose domestic Nazism is perhaps more closeted than Trump's but who will obey with absolute reliability the One Percent's global-conquest mandates Trump seems to opposes; or that it will find a compromise candidate acceptable to both parties – a possibility no less remote than Alpha Centauri, but one that nevertheless could put the hugely popular Sen. Sanders in the White House. (You read it first here.)

But let us not forget the recounts could also reverse enough votes to give Hillary the presidency. Thus she would seize the White House after having positioned Stein and the Green Party as the immediate scapegoat for the civil war that is certain to result. Meanwhile who can doubt the recount is yet another product of Hillary's limitless vindictiveness? As I said before, Stein not only lacks the requisite malice, but – without Hillary's clandestine intervention – it's gravely doubtful she'd have been able to access the requisite wealth. Cynicism – which sometimes is the most revealing Muse of all – suggests only two possibilities: that Hillary has blackmailed Stein into becoming her figurehead, or that Stein's ambitions have reduced her to Hillary's sacrificial lamb and turned her into another of Clintons' useful idiots. (Wikileaks: please tell all!)

As to the danger of civil war, the KuKlux/Christian/Nazi militias have already threatened to rise in armed rebellion if Trump is denied the presidency. They would be even more enraged were Trump's ouster – seemingly accomplished by the same typical Democratic (sic) deviousness that invariably spares the Clintons from prosecution despite their brazen criminality – to succeed in putting Hillary in the White House.

Unfortunately, and just as I have written elsewhere,  the violence of a second civil war would kill forever the nonviolent revolution now brewing at Standing Rock, which is fast evolving the potential of mobilizing sufficient overseas support  to succeed much as Gandhi's revolution did against the British Empire in India. But with the nonviolent revolution aborted by unrelated violence, the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals could rest in absolute certainty the nonviolent threat to capitalist governance was permanently terminated even as the government's technological superiority was ensuring the defeat of the Rightist militias.

Moreover, a second civil war (perhaps labeled by future historians “the War of Presidential Succession”), would – under the unlimited powers Obama has bequeathed the presidency – allow declaration of a permanent state of emergency, thereby nullifying what little remains of the Constitution and ensuring the eternal omnipotence of capitalist tyranny.

Were Hillary the president, it would also facilitate her most cherished domestic ambition: zero-tolerance forcible disarmament – confiscation without compensation of every civilian-owned firearm in the United States.

Hillary would ultimately blame Russia for the millions of deaths and millions of dollars of damage so inflicted, whether by civil war, forcible disarmament or both. She would no doubt claim it was all the result of some alleged Kremlin conspiracy involving Trump, Stein, the Greens and Vladimir Putin – thereby giving herself a “nothing-to-lose” rationale for nuking Moscow and triggering thermonuclear apocalypse.

As to why Hillary would do anything so obviously suicidal, there are only two possible answers.

One is that her decades  of fanatical Christian brainwashing  by The Family  have driven her beyond what should be labeled JesuNazism to clinical insanity, perhaps even turning her into a believer in biblical End Times and the Apocalypse  as the only sure route for the Christian god's devotees  to depart this world of sin and get to Heaven.

(I apologize for the above paragraph's link-heavy text. But now with the growing likelihood  Hillary Clinton will be the next USian president – remember how she stole the primary  from Sen. Sanders – I think it vital for us to recognize what a JesuNazi she truly is, and that once she is in the White House, she is likely to attack the remnants of the First Amendment at least as vindictively as we know she will attack the Second Amendment.)

The other possible explanation for Hillary's obvious intent to start World War III – an explanation that does not negate the first possibility (and could in fact be the expression of its Noah's Ark intent) – is that the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals have secretly built and stocked a vast subterranean network of bunkers to allow themselves and a few carefully chosen and meticulously bred slaves to survive a 25-year nuclear winter. Rumors of such refuges have persisted for years, and knowing our overlords' genocidal contempt for all the rest of us, we the people of the 99 Percent, I cannot doubt the rumors are founded on truth. Thus the plutocrats, their children and their slaves – the slaves no doubt dark-pigmented for easy identification – would emerge from these latter-day Noah's Arks as unchallenged rulers of a planet “cleansed” of all “sinful” humans and, not coincidentally, also healed of global warming.

In this context, let us further examine what might be the hidden agenda of the recount.

As I said above, on 8 November 2016 we were forced to choose between two Hitlers: Donald Hitler of the Renewed Holocaust versus Hillary Hitler of the Thermonuclear Apocalypse. But ultimately our choice was between (possibly survivable) horror or (certain) extinction. And our decisions revealed to the One Percent's psychological warfare experts the magnitude of our national courage.

The courageous – those of us who dared vote against Hillary (whether by voting for Trump or one of the lesser alternative-party candidates – voted to gamble on the likelihood of survival and thus to fight on.

But those who voted for Hillary chose thermonuclear suicide. Some chose suicide because their fanatical Christianity convinced them they were better dead than Red – “Red” in this instance encompassing not only the uncertainties of socialist revolution (as by the nonviolence of Standing Rock), or at the very least the long-overdue rejection of Prosperity Gospel Christianity,  the consequence implicit in Senator Sanders's efforts to resurrect the New Deal. Others chose suicide because they are terrified by the prospect of life on a planet undergoing terminal climate change or in a nation in which people – especially Working Class people – are allowed to own firearms. Still others – perhaps the moronic majority of Hillary's voters – chose suicide out of Moron Nation ignorance – ignoring all the damning evidence of Hillary's closet fascism and attachment to theocracy, and remaining in clinical denial of Hillary's ever-escalating threats, whether against any remnants of USian civil liberties or against Russia and ultimately against human survival.

In any case, the fact Hillary is winning the popular vote – overwhelmingly so, if the latest figures are to be believed – also tells the psychological warfare experts Moron Nation is already significantly subjugated, too cowardly to alter the status quo save by imposing forcible disarmament – that is, mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – on all civilian firearms owners.

Even so, what might the One Percent and its Ruling Class hope to accomplish by forcing a recount and at the very least nullifying the election? Is the One Percent perhaps still indecisive about which Hitler will serve it best as Führer? Or is something else afoot – say deliberate provocation of a Rightist uprising, with civil war its inevitable result.

To reiterate: civil war would kill forever the potentially successful nonviolent revolution taking shape at Standing Rock. And – again reiterating – the resultant “state of emergency” would enable the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals to terminate – also forever – any rational hope of ever restoring USian liberty. Plus – last reiteration – a civil war's destruction, its magnitude akin to that of Germany in 1945, would give the Hillary the perfect “nothing-to-lose” rationale for starting World War III.

Think, people. We are tyrannized by Evil, our species' most diabolical plotters ever.

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THE FOLLOWING ARE the titles and links that were part of the blog post I had written for OAN before the news of the recount literally changed everything. The material – most of it about the transition to overt Nazism that would have occurred under Trump – is still relevant. But it is way too lengthy to add to the above, so I am reducing it to a recommended reading list, with the briefest possible notes about content and whether I commented on the associated discussion thread.

Fascism in Donald Trump's United States (Henry A. Giroux):  Trump's comments form a discourse of hate, bigotry and exclusion...resonating deeply in a landscape of U.S. culture and politics crafted by 40 years of conservative counterrevolution...We heard this same hatred in the words of Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet and other demagogic orators who have ranted against Jews, communists and other alleged “infidels.” (No comment by LB.)

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Honor Roll Student Shares Fruit With Classmate, Gets Suspended for Violating Weapons Policy: An honor roll student...shared part of her lunch with a classmate. The school suspended her for six days...after she cut a peach in half with a child’s butter knife...The Pembroke Pines Police Department said it has turned over their investigation to the State Attorney’s Office. (No comment by LB.)

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His horror show hides Clinton's rotten agenda (Elizabeth Schulte and Alan Maass):  Donald Trump is so despicable that no one is paying attention to what Hillary Clinton actually stands for.  (No comment by LB.)

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Goodbye, American Neoliberalism. A New Neo-Fascist Era Is Here (Cornel West):  (T)he abysmal failure of the Democratic party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of US democracy. And since the most explosive fault lines in present-day America are first and foremost racial, then gender, homophobic, ethnic and religious, we gird ourselves for a frightening future. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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President Obama's Last Stand (Matt Taibbi):  As Taibbi often does, he buried his lead, probably in embarrassment: ...There are a lot of people these days wondering if the election of the race-baiting Donald Trump will end up staining or outright repudiating the legacy of Barack Obama. I think it will be the other way around. Trump's presidency is almost sure to throw the best qualities of this unique and powerful historical figure into relief. (Brief comment by LB.)

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Obama Refuses to Pardon Edward Snowden. Trump's New CIA Pick Wants Him Dead (Alex Emmons and Naomi LaChance):  President Obama indicated on Friday that he won’t pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even as President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to run the CIA: Kansas congressman Mike Pompeo, who has called for “the traitor Edward Snowden” to be executed. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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7 Big Areas Where Jeff Sessions Could Change Policy at DOJ (Danny Vinik):  Sen. Jeff Sessions was an instantly divisive figure when President-elect Donald Trump named him as his next attorney general: conservatives and immigration hardliners welcomed the choice, while civil-rights groups and Democrats spent the day attacking the pick...the critics’ focus was on controversial past comments by Sessions, such as accusations that he said the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union were “un-American,” and joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK, until I learned they smoked pot.” But much of the concern is what he’d actually do as AG: that he’d undermine civil rights protections, prosecute more undocumented immigrants and allow companies to go wild with mergers...Here are seven areas where Sessions could most dramatically change public policy. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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Life Under Trump (Rebecca Gordon): Can we hold back the rising seas that are already closing over island nations on a planet where Donald Trump promises to abandon the fight against climate change and walk away from the historic Paris climate accord? And...(j)ust how vulnerable are we, two middle class white lesbians in our sixties, during a Trump presidency? (Brief comment by LB.)

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Here's What We Do Now - a Personal Note (Greg Palast):  Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction.  Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed—and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and a howling anti-Semite as White House Senior Counselor. But the horror we face is countered by this one hard and hopeful fact: Donald Trump did NOT win this election. (Brief comment by LB.)

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Medics Describe How Police Sprayed Standing Rock Demonstrators With Tear Gas and Water Cannons (Alleen Brown):  (T)he Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council...estimated that 300 people were treated for injuries, including 26 who were taken to area hospitals. (Brief comment by LB.)

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War Has Broken Out in North Dakota (Marc Ash):  The situation in North Dakota at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline has degenerated into what can now only fairly be described as a war zone. (Extensive comments by LB.)

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IN SUCH TERRIBLE times as these I am occasionally asked what weird insight or sickness of imagination enables me to (accurately) portray our capitalist overlords as they truly are – that is, as boundlessly more cunning (and therefore infinitely more Evil) – than any diabolical creature ever conceived by the authors of the Torah, the Bible, the Qur'an or even the far more ancient and dreadful Chaldean catalogue of demons.

Usually I merely shrug my shoulders – a nonverbal “I dunno” – and leave the question unanswered.

But if I am asked this same how-do-you-do-it question by someone with whom I am already psychologically comfortable, I might, if there is time, explain it as the hidden blessing of my childhood, which was all the more miserable for the absence of physical evidence that hid its unhealable gashes of psychological trauma. So wounded was I that even now on adult word-association tests I equate “family” with “betrayal” and “deception” and “scapegoating” and “rejection” and “despair.” Thus the microcosm of family brutality prepared me – quite thoroughly in fact – to cope with our species-wide macrocosm of bottomless Evil.

Evil is in fact humanity's default reality. (I capitalize it not for theological reasons – I am an ever-more-devoutly skeptical agnostic – but to provide the proper literary emphasis due what is undeniably our sole defining quality, intellect and soul alike, if indeed the latter is more than hallucination.) Nor will I debate my admittedly misanthropic conclusion; it has been confirmed more times than I can count, proven far more conclusively by what I've witnessed done to others than by what was ever done to me, whether during my first 18 years, or my award-winning but grievously underpaid and overworked decades as a journalist and social-documentary photographer, or now finally in my final seasons as a crippled old man with a failing heart, no longer exploitable for capitalist profit and thus like everyone else in such circumstances knowingly, deliberately, maliciously sentenced to death by the slow but methodically certain genocide of ever-deeper cuts to Medicare and food-stamps and Social Security and any other programs on which we depend for survival. Such is the quintessential Evil of Homo sapiens sapiens: Evil as it was in the beginning, Evil as it is now and Evil as it ever shall be, Evil without end amen.

Thus the one truly vital lesson to be gleaned from life is to learn to beware our species' penchant for perverting our most hypothetically exalted principles into real-time rationales for mass murder as at Wounded Knee and Mai Lai, mayhem as in Birmingham or at Standing Rock, and the sort of sadism the invading Germans sometimes inflicted on Russian children: bloating their bowels with gasoline enemas, lighting matches to their petrol-leaking anuses, then – much as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cackled at Qaddafi's execution by anal impalement – chortling with glee at the children's shrieking, running, sometimes exploding and always indescribably agonized deaths. Thus do the ubermenschen – our “brightest and best” – behave toward those of us they damn as untermenschen. Such is the Evil that defines our species.

Merry Christmas, Happy Easter, and here's a thermonuclear egg to brighten your basket. Our Evil demonstrably exceeded our ability at self-control when we nuked Japan to terrify our then-ally Josef Stalin and serve him notice that henceforth we'd be his deadliest enemy, far deadlier than the Germans his Red Army had just defeated.  Now – thanks to this election and its aftermath – no matter its outcome our Evil will almost certainly overwhelm any possibility we might have escaped it.

LB/28 November 2016

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