Is Trump's War against Women and Minorities Mandated by 'Secret Fundamentalism' at the Heart of U.S. Power?

Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2011

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(Prefatory Note: I began this essay after reading and responding to “GOP Attack on Women Continues with House Vote to Deny Abortion Coverage” [CommonDreams, 25 January, here] and “WA: more conservative, and more divided, than you think” [Crosscut, 23 January, here]  But then on the 26th I fell ill – extremely ill – with that weirdo brand of flu that was curiously omitted from this year's flu shot. And not until 1 February – appropriately enough, the feast of Brigid, Celtic goddess of light and enlightenment – was I well enough to resume the work. By then, with Trump's malevolence becoming ever more brazenly evident, the contents had grown accordingly, so that now the text may be too long to be absorbed in a single reading. Hence, to make it more accessible, I have broken it into five subsections, each indicated by a topic sentence in which all the letters in the first three words are capitalized.)

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AS IF THERE were any lingering doubts, President Donald Trump's “grab-em-by-the-pussy”  regime has made it clear it intends to do just that – to re-subjugate U.S. women by seizing control of their reproductive organs.

Moreover, there is compelling evidence the Empire has been perfecting its strategies and tactics of sexually targeted subjugation for decades. Examples include the re-subjugation of women in Iraq and Afghanistan and the criminalization of homosexuality in Africa – all of which may have functioned as dress rehearsals for the re-subjugation of women and sexual minorities here in the United States. The associated planning has therefore been underway at least since Bush II invaded Iraq. More likely it dates to 1977, when Carter, an avowed fundamentalist, signed the misogynistic Hyde Amendment  into law and two years later began secretly arming  murderously anti-woman Islamic fanatics,  an ongoing effort that has defined the Empire's Middle Eastern policy ever since.

In other words, Trump's war against women is to be of a severity unprecedented outside the Muslim world and hitherto unimaginable by most reproductive-age USian women.  Nor is it really “Trump's war.” It is instead the fulfillment of a long, mostly clandestine campaign of experimentation and meticulous planning by Christian fanatics and their collaborators in government. It is a Pearl-Harbor-type attack on women, minorities whether sexual or racial, and ultimately on liberty itself, an indescribably vicious coup intended to reduce USian women to biological slavery and transform the USian homeland into a zero-tolerance Christian theocracy, an occidental version of Saudi Arabia.

These are the disturbing conclusions that emerge from two stories The Nation broke last week via its on-line service. The reports, “Leaked Draft of Trump’s Religious Freedom Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination” and “How the US Tests Out Some of Its Most Oppressive Domestic Policies on the World,” are here  and here respectively.

Not part of The Nation's readership – I despise its pay-walled exclusiveness as much as I scorn its endless bourgeois efforts to canonize ex-President Barack Hussein Obama, whose methodical nullification of constitutional governance  cleared the way for Trump's despotism – I accessed the reports via Crosscut, Seattle's amateurishly edited but nevertheless vitally informative on-line daily. The link to The Nation was part of an opinion piece  entitled “Trump's anti-LGBTQ order will backfire – here's why.” Because there are lesbians and gays among my relatives, friends, colleagues and political comrades, I follow such matters closely.

“Leaked Draft” publishes the full text of the proposed executive order, while “US Tests” describes – albeit with typical pseudo-Leftist suppression of the Democratic (sic) Party's role as co-perpetrator –  how the Empire has used the Third World and the Middle East as rat labs in which to perfect its efforts to re-subjugate women and outlaw homosexuality.

“Trump’s announcement today that his administration seeks to 'totally destroy' restrictions on religious organizations’ ability to engage in political activity,” The Nation concludes, “(tells us) we can expect to see more pressure on both public and private health providers in the United States to curb comprehensive family-planning care and reproductive rights.”

Though clearly frightening, the analysis lapses into disinformation because it falls prey to the pseudo-Left's cult of deceptive optimism and fails to acknowledge the even-more-frightening worst-case scenario: legal and extra-legal prohibitions against abortion, contraception and even medical care for sexually active single women, homosexuals and transgender people.

The most egregious aspect of the Trump proposal would allow gravely injured single women and sexual minorities to be murdered by denial of lifesaving treatment whenever doctors, other caregivers or hospital management claims “religious freedom” – that is, Abrahamic misogyny and homophobia – grants exemption from Hippocratic obligation.

Nor is this an even slightly fanciful scenario. During the late 1970s, when I was the investigative reporter for a Seattle-area suburban thrice-weekly, I was told the one hospital that served our circulation area would not allow rape victims in its emergency room, no matter how severely injured they might be. The hospital, owned by a Christian fundamentalist organization, was the only such facility within about 20 miles in any direction.

Word of the hospital's policy was passed on to me by some exceptionally reliable sources in the King County Police. Furious over the treatment refusals – cops and paramedics knew the resultant delays could kill a severely wounded victim – my informants documented seven recent examples and said the atrocities had been going on long before officers started recording them.

So armed, I confronted the hospital's executive director – and was sneeringly told that as a “Christian institution,” the hospital would “never” allow itself to be associated with “sexual promiscuity.” Christian dogma – particularly the notion rape is divine vengeance for unchaste behavior – thus trumped the Hippocratic oath.

But the arrogant “never” quickly gave way to a properly humiliated “always” after my editor ran the story atop Page One. (The hospital is unnamed here because it is now under secular ownership and new management,)

The point, though, is not another triumph of investigative journalism, or how, in olden times, cops and reporters sometimes cooperated in our species' quest for justice. It is instead the innate viciousness of Abrahamic fundamentalists, a viciousness that, like a serial killer's blood-lust, will spring – or more likely sneak – into malignant tyranny any time we the people are lulled into inattention.

It is the selfsame viciousness the Trump Regime would now perpetuate as the law of the land.

Once again we are shown the terrible relevance of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008). Eight years after the book's publication, Trump – allegedly Hillary's primary enemy – is fulfilling the subjugation scheme Sharlet exposed as the purpose of clandestine collaboration between Hillary, Sam Brownback “and others”: “legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it,” for which see page 275.

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THE ONE PERCENTERS and their political vassals – motivated as they are by biblical capitalism,  (an ideology of divine-right tyranny that in a less-Orwellian world would be damned as “ChristoFascism” or even “JesuNazism”) – obviously intend to reduce USian women to the hopelessly subjugated, utterly degraded status demanded by core Abrahamic doctrine whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic and thus exemplified by women in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.

Even before the advent of the Trump Regime and its “grab-em-by-the-pussy” war against women, our capitalist overlords, their politicians and their often violent, sometimes murderous Christian storm troopers had already closed or prohibited abortion clinics in 90 percent  of the nation's counties. And just before Trump's proposed executive order was leaked, there was already this:

Anti-choice House Republicans on (31 January) voted to further curtail U.S. women's healthcare access, passing a draconian bill that permanently bans the use of federal funds for abortion and prohibits anyone who receives subsidies to buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from purchasing a plan that covers abortion...

Because the JesuNazi leaders are not the ignoramuses we like to self-indulgently imagine they are – in horrid truth, precisely as proven by Trump's victory, they are among the most diabolically skilled schemers and manipulators our definitively self-destructive species has yet spawned – they understand all they need do to reduce women to chattel is outlaw contraception. 

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BUT WHY WOMEN? What is it about femaleness the One Percenters and their fundamentalist allies find so threatening? It would seem the magnitude and ferocity of Trump's war against women contradicts the keystone of the entire patriarchal order – the notion women are pathetically inferior beings.

Firstly there is the doctrine – the defining force in Abrahamic theology, but in misogynistic truth common to most of the world's organized religions – that women are the root of all earthly evil.

Though a detailed examination of this murderously absurd belief is beyond the scope of this article, the belief itself is no doubt a vindictive reaction to the fact patriarchal theology is contradicted by biological reality, for the deeper implications of which see The Great Cosmic Mother (Barbara Mor; HarperSanFrancisco: 1987), especially pages 230-243.

Given the facts of reproductive biology, how can a deity who is definitively male (and therefore without a womb) create a universe from the void of his own womblessness? “Patriarchy,” says Mor, “must maintain, by force, (this) unnatural system” (page 242). Woman's mere existence thus challenges the entire patriarchal order.

Abrahamic theologians, acutely aware of patriarchy's inherent contradictions, respond by denouncing women as inferior beings, subversives, revolutionaries, witches, vessels of evil – weak and sinful creatures to be subjugated by the divine rights of fathers, husbands and male authorities whether religious or secular.

Prior to Trump's victory, the extent to which such misogynistic views yet prevail in the so-called “modern” United States might have astounded anyone who had not lived (as I have) in the de facto theocracy of the USian South or its post-Reagan expansion into the so-called “flyover country” of the heartlands.

But let us not forget fully 63 percent of the adult U.S. population believes the Bible is literally true,  which like misogyny is one of the defining dogmas of Christian fundamentalism. Given that 53 percent  of 2016's female Caucasian voters helped put Trump in the White House, misogyny is obviously as “American” as the proverbial apple pie – even among women.

At Slate, writer L. V. Anderson suggested the majority of these women supported white supremacy. “What leads a woman to vote for a man who has made it very clear that he believes she is subhuman?” Ms. Anderson wrote. “Self-loathing. Hypocrisy. And, of course, a racist view of the world that privileges white supremacy over every other issue.”

The same self-loathing, as I know all too well from my years as a crime reporter, is what prompts the wives and daughters of misogynists to accept – and worst of all to forgive – the chronic and sometimes deadly abuse by which patriarchy sustains itself.

A second reason for the popularity of Trump's war against women is the oft-repeated Abrahamic claim feminism is a Communist ideology and feminists are agents of the so-called “International Communist Conspiracy” – never mind the Soviet Union has been dead for 26 years.

The following statement  is from a popular Christian website: “Sexual egalitarianism is basically a socialist idea, springing from socialist principles and tending to socialist results. Soviet dictator V.I. Lenin outlined the whole modern agenda of 'women's liberation' in a 1920 interview with the German feminist Clara Zetkin.”

Zetkin's full text of the interview is here.

“Feminism is a lie of the Devil,” proclaims another Christian site.  “Husbands are Biblically to Rule Over their Wives; Wives are to Obey.”

Anti-abortion zealots go even further, condemning abortion as Satanic rite, “ritual blood sacrifice to the god of child murder, Moloch.”

Such are the fanatical beliefs that fuel Trump's war against women. A corollary dogma  is that only Christians – presumably only Christian fundamentalists – are “true Americans,” a view held by 43 percent of Republicans and fully one-third of the total population.

A third reason the Trump Regime is targeting women is that what might be termed the cooperative instincts of females are a direct challenge to the hierarchical tyranny capitalism inherits from its patriarchal forefathers. Capitalism is exploitative by definition;  it cannot function without its rigid hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed.

“Female group behavior – the cooperative care-sharing among mothers and children, older and younger women, in the tasks of daily life...is the foundation of social life and human culture,” says Mor. “If the first humans had depended solely on despotic and aggressive male leaders, or on several males in chronic, ritualistic contention for power, human society would never have developed” (Pages 11-12).

Fourthly there is the morally imbecilic greed that fuels the entire capitalist system – the basic formula for which is subjugation = profit, such that the greater the subjugation of the 99 Percent, the greater the profits so extracted.

The One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals have so thoroughly subjugated the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations populations that most are forced to work at only the lowest possible wages.

Though females are equally subjugated in the workplace – typically they are allowed only two-thirds the income of their male counterparts – Trump's war against women would radically increase their financial hardships, particularly when combined with his intended elimination of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and any other remnants of the New Deal welfare system. The resultant desperation, particularly amongst single mothers, would enable ever-more-predatory bosses to lower women's wages even more – probably below legal minimums – enabling the capitalists to extract that much additional profit.

Lastly, Trump's war against women is prompted by the patriarchal male's inbred belief that not only feminist activism but female independence or even achievement beyond the domains of kitchen and nursery is tantamount to slave rebellion.

It is no exaggeration to say such a male envisions the world as a macrocosm of the Roman coliseum. He views all other humans, regardless of their genders, as competitors and therefore enemies. With the miasma of fear and hatred that is the core of his consciousness confirmed by Abrahamic scripture and bolstered by Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Hitler's Mein Kampf, he sees life as a choice between success or damnation and lives in constant terror he might be condemned by predestination to the latter.

Nothing threatens his perpetually insecure ego more than the woman who demonstrates equal or superior competence in realms that were hitherto exclusively male domains. There is also what should be termed clitoris envy, the psychological reality behind Sigmund Freud's concept of “penis envy,” in truth the projection-onto-women of the patriarchal male's resentment of multi-orgasmic femaleness and its associated sensuality of body and mind.

The fact many gay and transsexual males now openly admit their envy of female sexual organs, multi-orgasmic sexuality and unique sensual capacity  is obviously yet another reason they too are on the “grab-em-by-the-pussy” regime's enemies list.

Barbara Mor again, citing “Visions of a New Faith,” Mary Long's report in Science Digest 89, November 1981, on work by James Prescott, neuropsychologist at the Institute of Humanistic Science, Los Gatos, California: “Contemporary researchers have found neurological connections between religious or trance experience and female sexuality. In women's brains there are unique neural links between the forebrain and the cerebellum, which allow sensations of physical pleasure to be directly integrated into the cortex, or high brain center. This explains why some women experience orgasm so intense they enter “religious” trance, or altered states of consciousness” (page 53).

Sex as sacrament, as connection to the deepest self and what might lie beyond it? Women as Nature's anointed gurus? God – that is, the Abrahamic god – forbid!

Even more terrifying to the patriarchal male is the possibility the same definitively female mind-body connection uniquely qualifies women to synthesize theory with biological and socioeconomic reality and thus to function as our species' most effective revolutionary cadre. Remember it was women – specifically the women of Petrograd's Lesnoy Textile Works – who triggered the Russian Revolution.

Ultimately Trump and his JesuNazi allies target women because the more learned theocrats correctly recognize that what today is labeled “progressive” culture is profoundly anti-patriarchal, whether implicitly or explicitly. As a Socialist Worker essay stated in 1992, “It was clear that, without control over their own reproductive lives, women couldn't be the equals of men – no matter what advances women made in the job market or in higher education.”

Thus the advent of reliable birth control is not just the origin of women's liberation but, far more importantly, it is the epicenter of the entire era of anti-patriarchal progress that resulted from female independence and the vital addition of independent female perspective to the national political dialogue. Thus too Trump's efforts to expand the prohibitions against contraception and abortion – especially if combined with outlawing any sexual identity or expression outside traditional male-female heterosexual marriage – could forever erase that era's accomplishments.

Ironically, just as the Trump Regime demonstrates every day, the enemies of democracy seemingly understand better than its advocates that without economic democracy, there is no democracy at all.

Unfortunately, our enemies also understand that neither is there any freedom without female reproductive freedom – the total elimination of which is the real motive behind the Trump/JesuNazi war against women.

If the JesuNazis succeed, USian women and girls are doomed to rediscover all the oppressive agonies, genital mutilation included, traditionally inflicted by unrestricted patriarchal hatefulness and sadism – not just in the Middle East but in Europe and the Americas.

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THE FRAGILITY OF anti-patriarchal culture – the very culture Trump and his cabal of  biblical capitalists intend to wipe out – is vividly illustrated by the lives of two women in Afghanistan, a mother who came of age in secular/socialist Kabul and her daughter who has grown up under the misogynistic Abrahamic savagery facilitated by the lavish funding provided Afghanistan's Muslim fanatics by U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his successors.

Albeit without jihad's characteristic reign of murder and torture, the same fragility is demonstrated by the death of the 1960s Counterculture – the first wave of the anti-patriarchal revolution – in the United States. Labeled “a revolution in consciousness” by the late Walter Bowart, the founding editor of the East Village Other, the Counterculture was indeed revolutionary.  But its revolution was cultural, based on hope rather than ideology, which made it easy prey for our capitalist overlords, precisely as demonstrated by how it was suppressed, co-opted, absorbed, commercialized and finally misrepresented as little more than an extended tantrum by over-indulged Baby Boomers.

The Ruling Class, however, took the Counterculture much more seriously than it publicly acknowledged: hence the blueprint for fascism contained in the Powell Memo, a confidential memorandum dated 23 August 1971 that has been the bible of the One Percent and their vassals ever since.

Reading the memo, we see the Trump presidency is not an accident. It is instead the logical product of malevolent but often mutually hostile forces that have been at work in this country since the Bankers' Plot of 1934 unsuccessfully sought to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, topple his New Deal and make the United States the new dominant partner in the Nazi Germany/Fascist Italy alliance.

But it was Powell – responding to the correctly perceived threat the revolution in consciousness might birth a truly revolutionary ideology and thus evolve into economic and political revolution – who united the squabbling factions of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassalage into the ideologically disciplined, diabolically cunning fascist cabal that has lorded it over us ever since.

While I have yet to see objective proof Trump was from the beginning the One Percent's choice for the presidency, logic and circumstantial evidence allows me no other conclusion. The tweet-by-tweet coverage granted him by the One Percent's (“mainstream”) media – the world's first privately owned, for-profit ministry of propaganda – has no precedent in USian journalistic history, particularly when compared to the near-total news blackout that killed Sen. Sanders' campaign.

In my day, when real journalism was still the national norm, we covered a presidential election on the basis of its candidates' positions on the relevant issues and the popularity of those positions amongst the electorate. Whomever was leading in the polls therefore generally got the most detailed coverage, though we also took special care not to downplay the underdog.

But in 2016, an entirely different set of standards was in play – standards utterly alien to me as a former reporter and editor.

The news value of the Sanders story – how his critique of the status quo was making him 2016's most popular presidential candidate – was rejected. Its rightful place on Page One (and given its historical significance, often as the lead story), was instead given over to Trump's bellicose buffoonery.

It was as if our national denouement had been prophesied by Shakespeare: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” – this to soothe a 99 Percent boiling with definitively pre-revolutionary anger.

What I believe obtained – though it will no doubt take WikiLeaks' best efforts to ferret out the proof – is just as Powell feared the political potential of the Counterculture, so do today's One Percenters fear the far-more-immediately revolutionary potential of the public's anger. Thus they chose Trump as the shortest possible path to the manifest Nazism they need to expeditiously eliminate any individual or group who might provide revolutionary leadership. With Hillary's campaign as a diversionary effort, Trump's victory was from the beginning the One Percent's intended coup de main.

Why else would mainstream media – the One Percenters' most micro-managed monopoly – have given Trump such inexplicably lavish coverage?

In any case we the people have been ambushed as never before in our species' history – an epic betrayal in which the Democratic (sic) Party and the Republican Party are co-conspirators: once more the terrible relevance of Sharlett's revelations in The Family.

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WITH TRUMP'S FELONIZATION of peaceful protest plus openly theocratic majorities in control of both houses of Congress, there is no longer any recognizable barrier to their despotism.

Many will reply that peaceful protest is a constitutional right, which indeed it is. But like Bush, Obama and in fact every president since 22 November 1963, Trump regards the Constitution as meaningless. And unlike his predecessors, he intends to express his contempt for its Bill of Rights by maximizing his persecutions of dissidents, an embittering truth proven by the felony charges filed against journalists who were jailed for trying to cover the inauguration protests.

Short of suppressing protest and the coverage of protest with deadly gunfire, I can think of no more effective discouragement than the prospect of felony prosecution. A felony charge – even if it results in acquittal – literally destroys one's life forever.

Unless one is obscenely wealthy, the six-figure cost of defense lawyers typically inflicts bankruptcy, and the mere fact of the charge – again assuming acquittal (and unless one is either extremely privileged or astoundingly fortunate) – forever afterward dooms one to a hopelessly wretched existence of minimum-wage jobs and dependence on the few remaining governmental stipends and services Trump will soon genocidally abolish.

I know of what I speak because in a journalism career that began in 1956 and is now winding down as I slowly die of congestive heart failure, I often witnessed such circumstances. Indeed my own newspaper career was forever crippled by a Civil-Rights-Movement-related misdemeanor arrest in 1963, never mind I was acquitted, as were all the others so charged.

Where political crimes are concerned, this has never been a forgiving nation – the deceitful propaganda of the Bernadine Dohrn/Bill Ayres example not withstanding – and now under Trump's reign as neo-Führer, the U.S. threatens to become more effectively vengeful against dissidents than ever before in its history.

This is not to argue against peaceful resistance. It is, however, a warning to resistors to be aware of the malevolently escalated cost of resistance. The Trump Regime is now penalizing peaceful protest as if it were violent protest – using the powers given it for that very purpose by the Clinton, Bush II and Obama regimes.

In terms of irremediable psychological devastation, there is no difference between 10 years in prison (as the journalists arrested in Washington DC now face ) and a lifetime prison sentence – an absolute truth if one is male, does not have the protection provided by membership in a criminal organization, and is therefore the constant prey of rapists and bullies.

As President John Fitzgerald Kennedy so eloquently observed, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

Obviously the Trump Regime's intent is to provoke such violence, then seize upon it as a rationale for declaring war against all its opponents and in all probability murdering most if not all opposition leadership.

That “protest is death” is precisely the message delivered by the emplacement of two Avenger missile launchers  at Standing Rock, where the savagery of soldiers, mercenaries and federally militarized police is most likely to provoke a violent response. The Avenger  is the Empire's modern-day version of the Red Army's deadly Katyusha,  which is still honored in modern Russia as a key weapon in the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany.

But would USian troops fire rockets at their unarmed fellow citizens?

One of the other posters in the CommonDreams discussion linked in the prefatory note answered the question:

“I was speaking, over the holidays, to my College Student Nephew's friend, a nice young fellow, who is now in the Armed Forces,” she wrote. “I privately asked him if, given the order, would he fire on his Fellow Citizens.”

“His answer was a shrug, and the explanation 'You gotta do what they tell you.'”

That's what we're facing. Obviously, Trump's war against women is just the opening volley in a political purge the intensity of which this nation has never experienced. And how effectively we respond will determine not only the future of the United States of America, but most likely the futures all the nations of the world – and the future of our own species as well.

LB: 1-7 February 2017

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Dispatches from Tyranosauric Petroleum's Global Empire

AGAIN I DID no writing specifically for OAN this week, and again – this time due to voluntary albeit unavoidable interruptions – I missed my self-assigned deadline. But the comments I posted elsewhere on the Internet are nevertheless perhaps worth reading.

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“DAPL Mississippi Stand Update: Protesters Arrested on False Pretenses and Illegally Searched”: The head, like the organization's name, is written with the customary millennial contempt for precise language and is confusing enough it fooled a Reader Supported News editor into captioning the accompanying photograph as having been made in Mississippi when in fact it was taken far to the north in Illinois. The “Mississippi” in question is the river, not the state. Nor is the acronym DAPL – Dakota Access Pipeline – defined anywhere in the text, an omission corrected in the picture caption by the same RSN editor who got the locale wrong. But the story itself  and the accompanying video are much clearer – and far more troubling than sloppy syntax and geographical confusion:

“...Two of our comrades, Cameron Kennedy and James McBride, were arrested on false pretenses on the East bank of the Mississippi River yesterday afternoon near the drill pad in Illinois that bores underneath the river...DAPL private security spotted (Cameron Kennedy) and James (McBriide) on a public road near the linchpin drilling operation and within three minutes they were surrounded and blocked by multiple Hancock county squad cars as well multiple DAPL security cars...Cameron denied consent to a vehicular search by Police, but... Private DAPL security guards began conducting the search (as)...Hancock Sheriff Scott Bentzinger...said, "They are going to do what they want." These are the first known DAPL related arrests in Illinois...The money of big oil has seeped into small towns and counties across the United States and has effectively hired the police as enforcers of the Dakota Access agenda.”

HERE, I NOTED, THE EMPIRE IS OMINOUSLY HONEST: More than any confrontation in my lifetime (1940-201?), the Dakota Pipeline struggle reveals the true, unabashedly racist/fascist (actually neo-Nazi) nature of today's United States.

Thus we learn the valiant efforts of our kinfolk who died or were wounded or otherwise suffered to save humanity from the original Nazi threat were all in vain.

It also demonstrates the utter futility of peaceful protest – as if, as in Harry Turtledove's alternative-history short story, the German Nazis won World War II, conquered the world, and when Gandhi attempted peaceful protest against their brutality, they killed him and all his followers – just as in the real world the Nazis exterminated all of the German pacifist White Rose Society.

All we can do now is recall the words of another man murdered by USian fascists, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who in a comment increasingly applicable to the USian Empire and its own unique brand of Nazism, warned that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

It will not happen in my lifetime, and probably not in the lifetime of any person now living. The plutocracy – made genuinely omnipotent by its technology – is infinitely more powerful than the feudal order that tyrannized Europe for 1,441 years, from the fall of Rome until the Russian Revolution.

But eventually – if our species survives capitalism – we may evolve a revolutionary ideology with enough discipline to triumph.

WHAT I DID NOT SAY, because I was approaching the 1500-character limit that governs RSN posts, is the DAPL authorities' use of so-called “private security” as goon-squads parallels the often-deadly practice of 19th and 20th century capitalists and thus presages the same sorts of capitalism-in-action vigilante violence exemplified by the lynching of Frank Little,  by the Ludlow Massacre  and by the Battle of Blair Mountain,  known locally as the Logan County War.

A partial listing of the men and women murdered in the USian Empire for daring to challenge our capitalist overlords is here.  And let us not forget to add the name of Karen Silkwood to this roll-call of the heroic proletarian dead.

There is also the fact, relevant to any such discussion as this, that history shows successful revolutions whether peaceful (Gandhi) or violent (Marx, Lenin et al) have four prerequisites (scroll down),  none of which are present in today's USian Empire.

OTHER SIGNIFICANT ELEMENTS I did not have the space to include (1)-that Hillary's silence on the DAPL struggle is yet another indication of her typically-capitalist contempt and hatred for all of us in the 99 Percent; (2)-that Obama's refusal to halt the obvious violations of First Nations' treaty rights and protesters' constitutional rights is yet another confirmation of the tyrannical capitalist agenda evident in his federalization and militarization of local police into a de facto national police force; (3)-that the apparent equipping of the pipeline goons with automatic weapons, toxic gas and other military equipment prohibited civilians is – if indeed it is occurring as alleged – a flagrant violation of federal gun laws that exemplifies the Nazi-like realities of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its vassals; total subjugation for all the rest of us); (4)- that governmental use of private security forces as goon squads parallels Germany's use of the freikorps and later the Nazi SA   to enforce its tyrannies; and (5)-that an identical maximizing of the 99 Percent's defenselessness – indeed our reduction to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is, like Hitler's forcible disarmament of Germany's Jews, socialists and Communists, the sole purpose behind Hillary's promised campaign of forcible civilian disarmament.

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“Bernie Sanders: I'm Going to Make Sure Hillary Clinton Implements Progressive Policies: Sen. Bernie Sanders, a loyal soldier for Hillary Clinton  since he conceded the Democratic presidential nomination in July, plans to push liberal legislation with like-minded senators with or without Clinton’s support if she is elected — and to aggressively oppose appointments that do not pass muster with the party’s left wing.”

NOT SO, SAID I: Sanders' belief he can wrest “progressive” concessions from the war-mongering Goldwater Girl Hillary – whose fanatically fundamentalist Christian “Angel of Death” persona is revealed via her intent to start World War III – is the pre-doomsday equivalent of the rich German Jews' fatally deluded belief their wealth would reduce Hitler's antisemitism to mere posturing...

Hillary with her Goldwater Girl arrogance has the same morally imbecilic “USA uber alles” mentality as the generals (President) Kennedy defied.

Remember it was Goldwater, an Air Force reserve major general and thus one of Curtis LeMay's proteges, who wanted to nuke North Vietnam, which would have triggered instant war with the Soviet Union.

Clearly, Hillary has some twisted sense of loyalty to her original ideological role model and is bent on fulfilling his apocalyptic fantasies of global conquest, never mind the USSR is long gone and there is no alleged provocation by today's Russia that even remotely approaches that of the Soviet thermonuclear missiles in Cuba. (Which, by the way, were emplaced in retaliation for US emplacement of anti-Soviet thermonuclear missiles in Turkey.)

Apropos LeMay, without whose patronage Goldwater would never have been made a general, he “argued that the United States should launch 5,000 missiles on the Soviet Union...During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba.” 

Obviously, like LeMay and Goldwater, Hillary believes the US can conquer not only Russia but China as well, never mind the millions who would die as a result. Another belief undoubtedly driving Hillary is that most of humanity is 'surplus' – i.e., not exploitable for profit – and should thus be exterminated.

Such are the genocidal inputs that form the core of Hillary's apocalyptic ideology.

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“Letter From El Salvador: 'I Was Jailed for a Miscarriage': nside the women’s prison in El Salvador, set on the outskirts of the capital in a dangerous neighborhood called Ilopango, at least 21 women are serving sentences for abortions they say they never had. All of these women claim they are jailed for miscarrying their babies. 

ALAS I WOULD EXPECT NO BETTER: Abrahamic religion – in this instance Christianity – and its misogynistic, sadistic god in action: not just the opiate of the masses, but the electric cattle prod that subjugates the masses as well.

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“JILL STEIN: Many of our readers are strongly advocating the candidacy of Jill Stein. The problem is that, polling at 2% nationally, she has no chance whatsoever of being elected. In fact, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, running under the Libertarian banner, has triple the supporters Stein has, and he doesn’t even appear to be totally coherent. So it isn’t really a candidacy  at all that Stein’s supporters are promoting, it’s more of an ideal or a lecture on political responsibility. The candidacy provides the platform for the ideology.”

MY RESPONSE: Quoth Mr. Ashe: “Painting the Democratic candidate as the devil to achieve those ends is ludicrous.”

Alas, based on her oft-declared intent to start World War III (and thereby not only exterminate our species but reduce the entire planet to a radioactive death-sphere inhabitable only by cockroaches), Hillary truly IS “the devil.”

Worse, actually, because in the Abrahamic theologies (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it's not the devil who inflicts the Apocalypse; its their sadistic god. With whom we know Hillary identifies because of her long association with the Family.

(Again the damning relevance of Jeff Sharlet's work, The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Harper: 2008]. Read it, acknowledge the endless nightmare Hillary and her fanatical fundamentalist co-conspirators intend to inflict on us all and be very, very, very afraid.)

*********

“As Election Day Nears, Military Hawks Circle To Promote New Wave Of War: Though the hawkish stance of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been too often ignored  this election season, new reporting on Thursday highlights how her presumed win in November will likely usher in a more aggressive, bipartisan foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond.”

HAD I SPOKEN ALOUD, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A SNARL: how many times must it be said before Moron Nation awakens to the apocalyptic truth? A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for World War III, the thermonuclear extinction of our species and the reduction of Planet Earth to a radioactive death-sphere habitable only by cockroaches.

*********

“How Power Works: Heather Ann Thompson’s book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy is a detailed study of the inner workings of America. The blueprint for social control employed before and after the crushing of the Attica revolt is the same blueprint used today to keep tens of millions of poor people, especially poor people of color, caged or living in miniature police states. Thompson meticulously documents the innumerable ways the state oppresses the poor by discrediting their voices, turning the press into a megaphone for government propaganda and lies, stoking the negative stereotypes of black people, exalting white supremacy, ruining the lives of people who speak the truth, manipulating the courts and law enforcement, and pressuring state witnesses to lie to obstruct justice. Her book elucidates not only the past but also the present, which, she concedes, is worse...Poor people of color have been robbed of the most elemental forms of justice and basic constitutional rights. But the state, in the age of deindustrialization, has no intention of stopping there. These forms of social control, so familiar to poor people of color, will bear upon all of us.”

TO MY APPLAUSE: Thus Mr. Hedges and Heather Ann Thompson confirm what has hitherto been denounced by ignorant or deluded pseudo-Leftists as a 'racist' notion: that the purpose of the Obama Administration's federalization and militarization of the local police and his mostly unreported but nevertheless devastating cuts in food stamps, Medicare. Medicaid and other elements of the socioeconomic safety net is the methodical reduction of impoverished or rebellious whites to the statutory wretchedness already imposed on the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations communities.

Meanwhile – now under obvious (and obviously clandestine) kill-orders – the federalized local police continue their campaign of murder against those minority communities – again blacks, Hispanics and First Nations – whose histories show they are most likely to rise up against the Empire's ever-intensifying savagery.

Such is capitalist governance in action: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us – and death to any of us who dare resist.

(Thank you, Mr. Hedges and Ms. Thompson for daring to expose these hideous truths about what the United States has become, and thank you Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese for having the 24-karat chutzpah to publish their work. A clenched-fist salute to each of you.)

*********

“US Soldiers Told to Repay Thousands in Signing Bonuses From Height of War Effort: In most cases, when an employer pays a signing bonus to attract new workers, that payment is understood to be essentially unrecoverable. But the Pentagon has a different understanding — and it's ordering the California National Guard to claw back thousands of dollars  paid to soldiers who re-enlisted to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

HENCE MY SUGGESTION: The One Percenters and their Pentagon vassals who are behind this outrage need to remember what happened when Tsar Nicholas II pissed off most of the soldiers in the Russian Army and most of the sailors in the Russian Navy as well...

Veterans are NOT people to screw over.

Indeed the primary reason the military draft was ended was the huge fear by the One Percent and its Ruling Class the draft was training the revolution.

And now the pompous plutocrats are alienating the very soldiers they hired to keep themselves and their obscene wealth secure?

Astounding!

Maybe the Empire truly is teetering on the brink of collapse.

LB/27 October 2016


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Atrocities and Accomplishments That Tell Us Who We Are

THE WANTON TORTURING of an innocent young white woman by two Department of Homeland Security border guards may have at long last awakened the nation's major media to the dangerous extent the United States of America has degenerated into a de facto Fourth Reich.

First reported by The Watertown Daily Times, then covered in depth by Reason and The Atlantic, the atrocity in question has momentarily united three diverse elements of the mainstream media in a national outpouring of journalistic outrage. The Watertown paper, the flagship of an Upstate New York conglomerate of dailies and weeklies, is the trio's closest approximation of old-time independent media. But the two magazines make no pretense of being anything other than mouthpieces of the One Percent. Reason is the voice of the Ayn Rand Right,  though in this instance its libertarian opposition to government has trumped its Randite moral imbecility to produce the most informative of the three cited reports. The Atlantic is an instrument of the Bill Gates mentality, a carefully closeted form of fascism that seems to (correctly) recognize Randism as a new expression of Nazism and therefore – no doubt to avoid the associated odium – tacitly encourages Randites to self-identify as “New Democrats” or anti-union “progressives.”

Apart from the atrocity itself, the pivotal issue from the OAN perspective is the extensive coverage these three publications have given the incident. Their detailed reportage – particularly the excellent legal analysis provided by Reason – stands in stark contrast to how the mainstream media covers the ongoing war of attrition waged by the feds and federally militarized local police against blacks and Hispanics. Had the victim been a black or Hispanic woman, the incident would have almost certainly gone unreported. Such a story is deliberately suppressed unless it provokes a neighborhood rebellion, which is then denounced as an uprising of “welfare recipients” or “gangbangers” or “thugs.”

Given the geographic and sociopolitical exclusivities of its publishers, I probably would not have seen this story had Reader Supported News Editor-in-Chief Marc Ash not selected it for republication on his website.  I do not know what motivated his choice. I suspect part of his intent was to call attention, as the story surely does, to the racial discrepancies that define mainstream media's coverage of the skyrocketing incidence of police brutality.

No doubt Ash also recognizes the savaging of an unarmed and therefore defenseless white woman who dared assert her legal rights as yet another escalation in the policies that are methodically reducing U.S. citizens to captive people in a conquered land. Similar escalations occurred in post-Katrina New Orleans  and post-bombing Boston. 

But this newest incident is unique in that it was rationalized neither by disaster nor terrorism. In fact the video makes it clear the border guards' sole motive for victimizing Jessica Cooke was their obvious glee at inflicting suffering on a defenseless person.

Hence my remarks on the associated RSN comment thread:

And yet there are many idiots here amongst us who do not believe we live in the de facto Fourth Reich...

(This woman will of course be convicted and imprisoned and her life thereby ruined merely because she dared assert her rights in protest to the new Gestapo...who now claim jurisdiction over a “border” that in some places is 150 or 200 miles deep. Which means atrocities like this – albeit mostly suppressed by our Josef Goebbels media – are probably commonplace. Frankly I am astounded the video has not already been disappeared.)

(Note too the sadistic malice obvious in the border guard's voice – here as in Nazi Germany, sadism is now part of the job description for such thugs.)

Responding to another poster, I said:

Psychologically speaking, she WAS raped, a reality underscored by the obviously gloating response of the male Border Patrol thug.

(I'd bet he treats his wife or girlfriend and any children with exactly the same smirking brutality.)

And as I later added:

Alas, here in the Fourth Reich, there is no more “law.” There is only the malevolence of the authorities,which in turn is the malevolence of capitalism underscored by the Supreme Court. Now and forever the ultimate instrument of the One Percent, the court has already proven it will uphold all the brutality of capitalist governance no matter how savage or (previously) unlawful.

(Definitions: capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth; capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.)

***

MEANWHILE PROTEST DEMONSTRATIONS – and counter-demonstrations by neo-Nazis whom credible witnesses describe as “disturbingly cozy with the local police” – continue in Olympia, Washington state, where cops shot two unarmed black men on 21 May. 

The two, Andre Thompson, 24, and Bryson Chaplin, 21, are stepbrothers. Both are hospitalized. One is in critical condition with chest wounds.

They were initially accused of shoplifting beer from a Safeway supermarket. But two Olympia sources say the cops shot innocent men – that video tapes from store security cameras prove the two shooting victims were not the shoplifters – though this had seemingly not been confirmed by mainstream media as of this writing (31 May).

Because coverage of the incident has been typically spotty – once again we see that in the newsrooms of U.S. mainstream media, black lives do not matter – I am including this link  to an electronic bulletin board that attempts to provide up-to-date information on the shooting and its aftermath.

The reports and photographs thereon are posted by people who are outraged by the shootings. As is often true of the alternative press, these dispatches are typically more detailed and accurate than the trickle-down (piss-on-the-99-Percent) coverage begrudgingly provided by the media monopolies.

My own sources tell me the apparent alliance of the neo-Nazis with the police is profoundly disturbing. Such alliances were commonplace in the U.S. South during the Civil Rights Movement era, where police and sheriff's deputies were often also members of the Ku Klux Klan. But no such arrangements had hitherto been suspected in modern-day Washington state.

However, the ongoing refusal of the federal government to prosecute the armed militiamen who resisted its officials in the Bundy Ranch incident  suggests the encouragement of alliances between police and armed reactionaries may already be an un-publicized (and probably top secret) federal policy (scroll down).

***

THE EPIDEMIC OF young, often (understandably) defiant but invariably unarmed black youths murdered or severely injured by local cops has become a defining characteristic of the United States in the second decade of the 21st Century.

But few (if any) commentators have dared speculate on why – apart from racism – these atrocities are occurring so frequently.

Like soldiers, cops are trained to follow orders. Like their military counterparts, these orders allow individual officers almost no initiative.

Thus the frequency and geographic distribution of the killings suggests they are not coincidental – that they are in obedience to some (top secret) extermination order that has been handed down through police chains-of-command.

Given the federalization of local police by the Department of Homeland Security and the concurrent militarization of local police by joint DHS/Department of Defense agreements, the probable source of such an order is obvious.

The harshest critics of DHS whether on the Left or the Right say it is literally a U.S. recreation of the Third Reich's dread SS/Reichssicherheitshauptamt. 

Though three solid hours of Internet research failed to turn up a credible source for that particular claim, it revealed a somewhat more subtle bit of supportive evidence that is surely equally disturbing. The Nazi German acronym for its security department was RSHA. The originally proposed name for DHS was National Homeland Security Agency; its acronym was therefore to have been NHSA.

Coincidence? Or is there really a phantom chorus of “zieg heils” in the background? Scroll down to page viii of “Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change.” 

Note also this federal document's date: 15 February 2001. In other words, what many critics have damned as the Nazification of the United States  was underway eight months before the 9/11 attacks provided the government with an enabling equivalent of the Reichstag Fire.

Other vitally informative reads on DHS and its role in turning the U.S. into the Fourth Reich are here,  here,  here,  here and here.

(Yes, it is true many of the above links are to Libertarian [conservative] websites. That's because, when the issue is tyrannical governance, the [alleged] U.S. Left – obligated as it so frequently is to government-employee unions – is too often submissively silent.)

*** *** ***

DESPITE THE WIDELY publicized reports of a slight decline in the number of U.S. Christians, there is surely no decline in their ability to inflict their tyrannies on the U.S. population.

Among the most relentless of these theocratic despots are the Catholic bishops. They are trying to impose their misogynistic dogmas and deliberately cruel end-of-life “redemptive-suffering” doctrines on all of us via their expanding control of Catholic hospitals and medical systems. Because these institutions are heavily financed by taxpayer dollars, the bishops have access to vast sums of federal, state and local revenues with which to fund seemingly endless maneuvering through constitutional loopholes. The result is community after community inflicted by the anti-sexual and pro-agony strictures of de facto theocracy.

In Washington state, the situation is especially dire. The following is from Catholic Watch,  an on-line organization that tracks the church's methodical conquest of the nation's health care facilities:

“Almost half of the acute care hospital beds (a proxy for the health care system more broadly) are now subject to the 'moral authority' of three Catholic bishops. These bishops oversee medical policy and employment practices for all Catholic 'health care ministries,' which now include hospitals, labs, physician practices, hospices, and even insurance companies.”

The Catholic takeover of health-care facilities is fueled by missionary zeal – specifically the church's fanatical opposition to same-sex marriage, birth control, fertility treatments, abortion (even to save the life of the mother) and Death with Dignity.  By imposing the church's zero-tolerance dogmas via the marketplace – where capitalist doctrines of “economic freedom” are routinely cited to justify even the most egregious acts of oppression – the bishops are cleverly sidestepping the constitutional prohibitions that hitherto protected the U.S. from theocracy.

Predictably, the Republican Party – which with its anti-sex hatemongering often appears to be the bishops' executive-action agency – is reacting with panic  to the tiny decline in Christian membership.

***

BUT CHRISTIAN BIGOTRY is not only a defining characteristic of the U.S. Right. It was the closeted homophobia of Democrats, many of them self-proclaimed “progressives,” that terminated the 19-year career of David Olio, who just recently had been honored as one of the best high school English teachers in the nation. 

Olio's alleged sin? He dared read an outspokenly gay Allen Ginsberg poem in an advanced class for college-bound seniors.

As I said on the comment thread:

This appalling destruction of a teacher's life shows us all that is wrong with the United States.

It reveals the hypocrisy that underlies the self-proclaimed "progressive" label. It shows us that beneath the self-righteous rhetoric, a “progressive” is as anti-union, anti-First Amendment, racist, homophobic, misogynistic and reflexively fascist as any conservative, especially in the fear and loathing of sexuality.

I do not remember who it was – maybe Anais Nin or her lover Henry Miller – who noted the U.S. was the only nation on Earth to have made the Christian hatred of sexuality into a definitive national trait.

But that – though it alone explains how the U.S. population was reduced to Moron Nation, and how Moron Nation has been shaped into the Fourth Reich – is only half the tyrannical dynamic evidenced here.

The other half – "Olio refused to be interviewed for this story" – is exemplified by the teacher himself.

Thus it seems the final lesson he would teach us is in the slavish submission that has quashed forever the U.S. experiment in liberty. Why else would one whose life is irremediably ruined and who therefore has nothing left to lose refuse to fight back?

I hope of course I am wrong – that Olio is silent not because he is a coward but because he is preparing an epic lawsuit that will destroy the South Windsor School District.

Though hope, as Barack Obama has already so memorably taught us, expresses not audacity but futility.

***

Footnote: In these times, the only rational definition of our politics is provided by our socioeconomic class. We are thus either Working Class (the 99 Percent) or Ruling Class, the One Percent and its vassals.

Marx and Engels make it even clearer. We are either proletarians and peasants or we are part of the bourgeoisie.

It is the latter that includes the Ayn-Randimated status seekers that make up today's petit bourgeoisie – those who so often hide their greed and selfishness behind the self-proclaimed label of “progressive.”

How do I see this so clearly? As in Connecticut, so in “progressive” Washington state – where the fascists (in the form of the Republican Senate) already control the state government.

Next year the voters will again ride the rising wave of bourgeois hatred for the poor and shift yet further right, no doubt making Washington the newest Wisconsin – after which there will be many more cases like Olio's.

***

As a journalist – blogger, former editor-in-chief , news editor, city editor, investigative reporter etc. – I am frustrated by the many elements missing from this story.

For example:

It was reportedly a student who ratted out Olio and so began the process that destroyed his life.

From the ninth graf of the story linked above: “...the controversy began when one student in the class begged off a test in a different class the next day, claiming he (or she) couldn’t concentrate due the reading of the poem.”

The identity of this student should be published. Teens are routinely tried as adults when they they murder someone, and since this teen has maliciously murdered Olio professionally, he or she should by exposed accordingly. (I'd bet the rat is either a practicing Christian, a disciple of Ayn Rand or both.)

There is also the matter of a newspaper campaigning against the First Amendment. (Seventh graf: “The local newspaper denounced him in editorials.”)

As there at least two newspapers that serve South Windsor, the anti-Olio publication should be identified by name.

One of these papers is The Hartford Courant, which is owned by Tribune Publishing, the nation's third largest media corporation. If this is indeed the anti-Olio journal – its pay-wall prohibits the requisite archive search – hat in itself is a major news story.

Why? Because it would show us yet another dimension of mainstream media's shift toward Josef Goebbels propagandization.

*** *** ***

THE GOOD NEWS the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has tossed out an entire coda of Idaho anti-abortion laws  is also bad news as the decision will surely be appealed to the Supreme Court. And just as surely SCOTUS will toss out Roe v. Wade and affirm Christianity's hatred of women and sexuality by making abortion illegal again.

*** *** ***

THOM HARTMANN HAS written a breakthrough piece entitled “Capitalism Could Kill All Life on Earth,” for which he is to be commended. 

I responded accordingly:

Clearly Mr. Hartmann has at last realized that capitalism is literally the enemy of all life on earth – that if we are to survive, capitalism must be recognized as the cancer it is and removed accordingly.

Many of us already know this as the ultimate, pivotal truth of this the darkest most hopeless era in all the 200,000 years of our species' experience.

Verily then we are challenged by three questions:  (1)- how are the capitalists to be overthrown?  (2)- how is capitalist governance to be eliminated?  (3)-what eradication measures will ensure capitalism is never again able to threaten our rights to life and liberty? 

However, if we are to find effective answers to these terminal questions. we must first recognize the absolute evil at the core of capitalism. Stripped of its seductive rhetoric, capitalism is in fact the ultimate malevolence of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – literally  the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth. 

Once we have acknowledged that fact and its terrifying corollary – that our Earth is now ruled by moral imbeciles whose sole purpose is fulfillment of their own serial-killer fantasies of limitless wealth and power – then at last  we will have positioned ourselves  to rationally evolve the answers to the above questions.

And these answers – or rather their effectiveness – will then determine whether our species lives or dies. 

Later, I addressed a slyly pro-capitalist poster:

Chuckle8: Argue as you will, nothing changes the ugly truth that all our previous efforts to liberate ourselves from capitalism have failed. Period. End of sentence.

In this context, suggesting the New Deal could again become a vehicle of liberation makes about as much sense as suggesting a horsewhip could be used to re-start a stalled automobile.

“The best tools available” – including the electoral process that enabled the New Deal – are all nullified by hopeless corruption. The fact of the matter – I say again FACT – is the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is dead. Its fatal weakness was its failure to recognize that without  economic democracy, political democracy is meaningless. 

Thus we are imprisoned by circumstances from which there is no apparent exit. 

That's why, if we are to liberate ourselves from capitalism, we must first acknowledge the bitter truth of our abject powerlessness. 

Only then – when we have at last set aside our selfish, self-pampering  Norman Vincent Peal conformity and its attendant opiate of PollyAnna optimism – will we be sufficiently grounded in reality to (perhaps) begin to evolve an effective response to the present crisis.   

I had believed that would end our exchange. Alas, it did not. So I wrote one more rejoinder:

Wake up, chuckle8: forget all the deceptive definitions you learned elsewhere. Capitalism reduced to its essence is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. Capitalism is therefore manifest moral imbecility – the mindset of the serial killer expressed in economic terms. That is why it cannot be reformed. As to the distribution of our (increasingly scarce) resources, nothing says it better than this: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” 

*** *** ***

KATE DAVIES OF Tikkun  has written a thought-provoking essay on “hope”  that prompted me to write a respectfully contradictory response:

Ms. Davies makes valid, useful points.

Too bad the term “hope” has been so severely besmirched by Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. Too bad “hope” was reduced to a cynical joke by the most malicious liar in U.S. presidential history, the man who conned us by asserting “the audacity of hope” and then by his wanton agenda of betrayals and deceptions schooled us instead in the utter futility of hope – the most bitter truth of our species' existence.

Thus “hope” stands revealed as the ultimate expression of powerlessness, the last desperate emotion of the slave and the slave's mandatory passivity – “all I can do is hope Massa won't whip me again today.” Such is the “hope” that – exactly as the Betrayer and his One Percent masters so obviously intend – proclaims our helplessness and thereby perpetuates our hopelessness.

(Yes, the punishing contrast between “audacity” and “futility” is surely a deliberately imposed trauma – as if the true purpose of the Obama Administration is to put us all in our [disempowered] place and teach us to never again dare aspire to rise above it. And yes, do not doubt for an instant Madison Avenue is possessed of the requisite skill. It is the most diabolically skilled psychological warfare agency on this planet.)

Is there, then, an antidote to the hopelessness manifest in ideologies of hope?

There is indeed such an antidote, and its name is “defiance.”

Defiance is the fuel that fires resistance movements even when there is no hope, even when all reasons for hopefulness have been exterminated. Though itself formless, defiance is expressed in an infinity of forms. Yesteryear's defiance is what prompted my Celtic ancestors to fight their Roman and Christian oppressors when there was no possibility of victory. Today's defiance is the (now) revolutionary assertion of our species' right to survival and liberty. It is recognition that in this time of unprecedented Evil, ruled as we are by serial-killer-minded overlords, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance – the core defiance within which all lesser acts of revolutionary defiance are mothered into being.

By contrast, hope is at best a pacifier, an unguent for dreamers, a noun that even as a verb (“I hope”) reveals its crippling taint of passivity. But defiance as a verb (“I defy”) is implicitly a summons to action, to resistance, to rebellion...and perhaps even to triumphs we cannot yet recognize or envision.

*** *** ***

SOME OF THE best analytical reporting I have thus far seen on the Ukraine crisis focuses on the propaganda war with which the United States and its vassals continue to obscure who killed 298 people by shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17 last year.

One of the story's most important revelations is additional proof of the extent to which U.S. and allied mainstream media function as a uniquely privatized governmental propaganda apparatus (scroll down to “Glenn Greenwald's Exposé”). Thus we are given yet another reason Josef Goebbels would be proud to claim the MSM as his own:

“If nothing else (and with this story there is plenty 'else'), the MH-17 fallout was emblematic of the MSM’s long, well (if not fully) documented, and not so illustrious history of venal complicity in blindly validating Western governments’ approved narratives, along with sanctioning their official agendas and, whether through sins of omission or commission, suppressing their secret ones.”

*** *** ***

WASHINGTON STATE BUREAUCRATS have always pandered to the rich. But now they are granting the moneyed aristocrats exclusive rights to formerly public Washington state wilderness lands – this to facilitate Marie-Antoinette-style “glamor camping”  in $220-per-night luxury tents.

Actually it's the newest development in an old and embittering story. Ask the hunters and fishers who were forever locked out of the state's wilderness areas by the pro-equestrian road closures imposed during the early 1990s.

Precisely as they were intended to do, these closures severely restrict back-country access. They exclude everybody but those rich enough to afford extended weekends with horses and wranglers or those in good enough physical condition to mountain-bike 15 or 20 miles to reach the hunting grounds or fishing waters that are now rendered inaccessible to everybody else.

The immediate result was a staggering decrease in sales of hunting and fishing licenses – a drop so huge and sudden, officials of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife still refuse to disclose its magnitude.

To compensate for the revenue loss, the bureaucrats jacked up resident license fees to the highest in the nation,  now $117.50 plus sales tax for a hunting license and $54.25 for a combination freshwater/saltwater fishing license. Resident license fees in many states including Alaska are less than half what Washington charges,  and the lucky license-holders typically have access to vastly larger tracts of unrestricted land and water.

By the end of the '90s, the road closures had made inaccessible every place in Washington state I had ever fished or hunted. (That is one of the main reasons I so dislike this state. I had intended to spend a reasonable portion of my retirement years fishing its trout streams. But the economic and physical discrimination implicit in the closures made that impossible.) Given the democratically accessible trout waters of Upstate New York and rural New Jersey, I would literally be better off had I remained in Manhattan.

Hence it would not be stretching the point to say that the Evergreen State's embrace of glamor-camping is merely another expansion of its long-established policies of brazenly catering to the One Percent while maliciously brutalizing lower-income people with the most savagely regressive tax structure  in the entire United States.

***

THAT THESE INEQUALITIES are now as evident in the back country as they are in the cities probably explains why the graffiti vandals have suddenly begun spray-painting their fuck-you rage on convenient surfaces in state and national parks and forests. 

Whether graffiti is high art – and some of it most assuredly is – should not distract us from its semiotic message, which is “I am denied any stake in this property or place, so I will trash it.” In the wilderness as everywhere else, graffiti is thus embittered protest, the human equivalent of the animal habit of marking territory with splurts of urine, often a last desperate attempt to reclaim formerly public domains that are increasingly pay-walled or privatized into prohibitive exclusiveness.

As the advent of increasingly unaffordable fares provoked the graffiti attacks on the New York City subway system, so now does increasing exclusivity provoke graffiti and other forms of vandalism in the (formerly public) realms of rural recreation land. Illegal dumpers in these realms are merely vandals who are too stupid to employ other means of protest.

(Disclosure: I was 18 years into a photographic study of urban and rural graffiti when it was destroyed by the 1983 fire. Like everything else photographic in the wake of that life-changing disaster, I have never been able to put my heart enough back into it to resume the work.)

*** *** ***

LET US NOT FORGET that the malevolent malcontents who deface, vandalize and otherwise trash the wilderness are also expressing the Abrahamic hatred and contempt for nature that is the cornerstone of capitalism. Let us also remember that same Judaic, Christian or Islamic arrogance is what motivates the climate-change deniers whose obstructionism is jeopardizing our species' survival and threatening to kill our entire planet.

It is to those of us who battle these fanatical morons I dedicate this concluding dispatch:

“Following an abnormally warm winter, spring temperatures exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit across a broad swath of interior Alaska in May, breaking records for the earliest day with temperatures that high.”

Read the rest of it here  – and in our grief for our wounded Mother Earth, let us find the defiance we need to persevere.

LB/25-31 May 2015

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