Food Stamp Vote ID's Dems Who Want Poor Folks Dead

14 in Progressive Caucus, 15 in Black Caucus Help Inflict $8.5 Billion Cut

JUST AS “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,”  neither will the murderous impact of the Democratic vote to slash food stamps by $8.5 billion ever be acknowledged by mainstream media. MSNBC, The New York Times and their local equivalents will never tell us what it means that 89 of the 200 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have publicly joined the Republican campaign to savage the nation's poor. That's because “mainstream media” is a clever, falsely comforting, deliberately misleading label for what should properly be known as “Ruling Class media” – the propaganda apparatus that serves (only) the One Percent by ensuring the rest of us remain intellectually imprisoned in a panem et circenses miasma of distraction, falsehood and disinformation.

Food stamps, as the Food Research and Action Center  explains, are essential to the survival of 47 million Americans each month. The $8.5 billion the Democrats are helping hack from the program – even with the cuts spread over ten years as they are – will make it ever more difficult for impoverished USians to avoid starvation. Some 850,000 households will now be devastated by food stamp reductions averaging $90 per household per month. (For the record, the proper name of the food-stamp program is Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the acronym for which is “SNAP.” The damning vote against its recipients was 251 to 166, Roll Call Nr. 31, by which the House of Representatives approved HR 2642, the “Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013.”) It was the second such blow to recipients, who already suffered a significant downsizing in benefits last November. 

But Ruling Class media will never communicate – save in the most hackneyed, stereotypical and carefully pre-approved narratives – the hunger pains and emotional anguish these malicious cutbacks inflict on the children, women and men so victimized. 

While the self-censoring protocols of Ruling Class media are many and complex (as I can personally attest from my own decades in its employ), one particular taboo is especially relevant to the food- stamp coverage – or rather the abysmal lack thereof. The taboo in question, an unwritten but inviolable rule during my decades behind a Ruling Class typewriter, governs the use of the term “genocide,” carefully limiting it to actions by declared or undeclared enemies of the USian Empire, as in “Nazi genocide,” “Communist genocide” or “terrorist genocide.” Never under any circumstances is the term “U.S. genocide” allowed, even to describe the (undeniably genocidal) wars of extermination waged by the empire and its European antecedents against First Nations peoples. That is why Ruling Class media will never report the fact its capitalist masters have contrived a seemingly flawless apparatus for exterminating huge masses of people without the embarrassing stench of death camps. It's called “austerity” – a Big Lie that is perhaps the most diabolically cunning euphemism for genocide in our species' history.

But is austerity really genocide? Isn't calling it “genocide” a bit over the top, as even some of my closest friends maintain? Decide for yourself: the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language defines genocide as “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.”  Merriam-Webster defines it similarly: “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group.”  Now consider how the One Percenters and their representatives are forever denouncing “the culture of poverty”  and its politics of dependency.  In either case, these blame-the-victim diatribes – even those that make no direct reference to racist or socioeconomic stereotypes – clearly identify the USian imperial homeland's poor as “a political or cultural group.” Then note austerity's (deliberately) death-dealing results.  Finally consider the arguments postulated in “Why the One Percent Wants Seniors and Older Workers Dead.” Not only is “genocide” the appropriate noun; it is the only truthful description of the USian war against the poor that began during the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter, radically escalated under Republican Ronald Reagan and has been continued relentlessly by every USian regime, Democrat or Republican, ever since.

(It is an aside, old news to long-time OAN readers but relevant information for newcomers, that in the vicious uniformity of economic policies imposed by Democrats and Republicans alike – Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama – is irrefutable proof the United States is ruled by One Party of Two Names. Behind its deceptive labels and rhetoric, this One Party is exclusively a Ruling Class party. Its sole purpose is to further empower the One Percent. Its long-term goal, already dangerously close to fulfillment, is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. And what is capitalism? Ayn Rand's books – the USian Empire global-economy equivalent of Hitler's Mein Kampf – define it as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue: the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated. It is an operational definition with which the notably prescient Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would surely agree.) 

Meanwhile the Ruling Class media's repeated use of the relatively innocuous “austerity” and its even more deceptively euphemistic forerunner “reform” as code-words for “genocide” has proven remarkably effective. It has not only stifled dissent but shifted (additional) blame onto the ever-increasing multitude of capitalism's victims. Indeed, Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels would applaud its success as yet another real-world confirmation of his principles for mass manipulation.  (Note how concentration of USian mass media into a half-dozen rigidly self-disciplined monopolies allows imposition of the Nazi führerprinzip – “Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority'' – without any obvious government intrusion. Such is another example of the evil genius of capitalist governance.)

As a result, only genocide's immediate victims dare label it the atrocity it is.  And they – or more precisely we – are steadfastly ignored unless we somehow manage to mount massive protests, in which case we are then brutally silenced, just as the Occupy Movement was silenced, by police truncheons and barrages of pepper gas and slander.

The disturbing fact 89 Democrats knowingly voted for what was merely a less murderous version  of reductions in the food stamp program – the still more disgusting fact Washington state's Democratic Senator Patty Murray has publicly admitted she too will vote against food-stamp recipients – are yet additional proofs (if any are needed) today's USian Homeland is governed by One Party of Two Names. That this is the first time Democrats have ever publicly acknowledge their hostility to food-stamp recipients  merely underscores the intensifying oppressiveness of the One Party's rule.

While the names of the 89 Democrats have already been publicized  by both Ruling Class and alternative media, their (allegedly) progressive affiliations have received far less notice. As reported via the preceding link, three of these class-traitors are Democratic Party stalwarts: Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Fourteen members of the Democrats' House Progressive Caucus voted for it: Suzanne Bonamici (Ore.), Corinne Brown (Fla), Andre Carson (Ind.), Emanuel Cleaver (Mo.), Sam Farr (Calif.), Lois Frankel (Fla.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio), Steven Horsford (Nevada), Jared Huffman (Calif.), Dave Loebsack (Iowa), Ben Lujan (N.M.), Rick  Nolan (Minn.), Bennie Thompson (Miss), and Peter Welch (Vt.). 

What has received far less publicity – seemingly none at all in Ruling Class media – is 15 more of these men and women who voted against food stamp recipients are members of the House Black Caucus: Sanford D. Bishop Jr. (Ga.), Corrine Brown (Fla.), G. K. Butterfield (N.C.), Emanuel Cleaver II (Mo.), James E. Clyburn (S.C.), Marcia L. Fudge (Ohio), Alcee L. Hastings (Fla.), Steven Horsford (Nev.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX), Hank Johnson (GA), Cedric Richmond (LA), David Scott (GA), Robert C. Scott (Va.), Terri Sewell (Ala,) and Bennie Thompson (Miss.). That all but two of these representatives are from states of the old Confederacy probably explains their votes as attempts to preserve their election-year attractiveness to the region's malevolently reactionary whites, who whether rich or poor decry food stamps as pandering to allegedly “lazy” minorities. Such paradoxically self-destructive hatefulness by impoverished whites perpetuates the Ku Klux Klan-type Sturmabteilungs that ensure the local white aristocracy's unbreakable hold on the levers of power. A similar, racially motivated dynamic fuels the reactionary malice of lower-income whites in the USian Homeland's interior and thus fosters the nation's ever-more-definitive socioeconomic viciousness, the vote against food stamps included. 

One (deliciously ironic) result is that Wal-Mart, a lavish financier of the reactionary politics that spawned the cuts, is now complaining of reduced grocery profits. In a far more bitter irony reported by the Food Research and Action group, the bill passed the House “almost exactly a year after an expert Institute of Medicine committee found that SNAP benefits are already inadequate for most families to purchase an adequate, healthy diet; and it comes in the same month that researchers issued a new study showing that low-income people have increased hypoglycemia-related hospital admissions late in the month because they run out of food.  The SNAP cuts will be a blow to health and nutrition, and to the government’s long-term fiscal well-being as well.” Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact the Democrats who voted for the cuts, which are now authoritatively estimated at fully $8.7 billion, are inflicting them on their own constituents,  an ultimate “fuck you” from the Ruling Class to the rest of us. (The changing numbers as to the cutback's magnitude reflect how congressional sources themselves now often obstruct the flow of accurate information – another tactic by which the One Percent works to maintain our ignorance of current events.)

In fairness, I should note a long-time Democratic Party activist who is one of my more reliable local (Washington state) sources emphatically states the Democrats who voted for the bill did so because they believed it was the only way to block enactment of the far more deadly Republican proposals. But that glib rationale does not excuse the Democrats' 38-year history of ever-more-feeble representation of the nation's lower income peoples. We the victims – children, women and men (many of the adults elderly and/or disabled) – believe the Democrats should have opposed the bill as a matter of principle. That is, assuming the Democrats still recognize any principles other Ayn Rand's coda of infinite greed as maximum virtue.

LB/2 February 2014

(With special thanks to Pat Fletcher for significant research and reportorial assistance)

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Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer: How and Why?

“BUDGETS ARE MORAL DOCUMENTS: What do we value as a nation?” A hitherto unpublished picture of a don't-slash-the-safety-net demonstration by Associated Ministries of Tacoma amidst a November 2011 downpour, the placard as relevant now as then. Pentax K1000 (my bad-weather camera), 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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(Note: an earlier, more hastily written version of this essay appeared on the comment thread of Thom Hartmann's blog.) 

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MAINTAINING THE BIG LIE of U.S. democracy requires thousands of perpetrators, but none are more vital than the stenographic journalists of the so-called “mainstream media.” Without these political prestidigitators and their verbal sleight-of-hand, the Machiavellian treachery of USian politicians would soon be apparent to all. But the One Percent's well-paid scribes falsely portray the Democratic and Republican parties as ideological enemies, when in fact the unity of the two groups is proven by their unanimous or near-unanimous votes on any measure that worsens our socioeconomic wretchedness, expands the terrifying oppressiveness of the total-surveillance police-state or otherwise nullifies our constitutionally guaranteed rights to resist capitalism's re-imposition of serfdom and slavery. The mainstream media's pseudo-Left is especially despicable in this context; we turn to it in a desperate quest for advocacy and information but instead are deluged with deftly woven illusions of two-party governance that behind the patter of allegedly “progressive” buzzwords are ultimately no less intellectually crippling than the dreck disseminated by the mainstream Right.

The hideous truth – available only through alternative media (and then only rarely) – is that we USians of the 99 Percent are tyrannized by one party of two names, a single, wholly-owned instrument of the One Percent that has perfected the old good-cop/bad-cop routine as the ultimate means of disguising a despotism as implacably authoritarian as anything ever decreed by der Führer from the Wolfsschanze. But even alternative media, with the understanding of its reporters, commentators and editors so often limited by Ruling Class success at suppressing the historical truth of class warfare, seems unable or unwilling to tell the real story. No paycheck-dependent journalist dares acknowledge the obvious – that the One Percent has decided there are too many of us who are no longer exploitable for maximum profit, that we are therefore to be run through the Darwinian ordeals of a Skinnerian rat maze until most of us drop dead – especially those of us who are old enough to remember when the United States truly was (assuming you were white) a “sweet land of liberty.” Thus even after decades of genocidal cruelties, too many of us remain oblivious to the murderous purpose that underlies the elimination of food stamps and the slashing of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or anything else that might have helped lower-income people stay alive.

My instinct when I think of how abysmally ignorant we are is to reflect on the savage anti-intellectuality that has tragically become the defining characteristic of our national mentality. If I could use my father's library to transcend the horrors of my own childhood (even unto recognizing him as a great teacher despite his psychological rejection of me as a worthy son), others from far more blessed circumstances could surely do no less. Then in a rage I begin to hammer out yet another denunciation of the mental demographic I long ago began condemning as Moron Nation. But one of the three women to whom I regularly turn for conscience and consciousness-raising invariably reminds me that while the 99 Percent is undeniably broken, it was allowed no choice in the matter. The breakage came from without, methodically imposed by parallel conditioning in workplace, classroom and media, a brainwashing more relentlessly total than anything Josef Goebbels might have imagined even in his most pornographic fantasies, a numbing of mind and spirit I escaped perhaps only as a result of a paradoxical combination of cynicism and desperate open-mindedness, the blessing wrought by the repetitive psychological trauma inflicted by my malevolently dysfunctional family.

That said, one of the less publicly acknowledged realities of old age is the time devoted to intense and brutally honest introspection, an extended form of the sort of self-evaluation a practicing Catholic would no doubt recognize as pre-confessional examination of conscience. In geezerhood, of course, it is obviously a preparation for death, which is the last of Nature's own seven sacraments (the others are conception, birth, orgasm, love, vocation and parenthood). Its scope is therefore as broad as one's own life experience, which in my case includes a passion for political activism that dates to the 1957-1958 academic year, when as a senior in high school I participated in a series of Sputnik-inspired public debates contrasting USian versus Soviet philosophies of education. (I was of course an advocate for the latter, which in truth was not merely Soviet but classically European, the classroom as a realm of genuine learning as opposed to a matrix for producing the “well adjusted” drones essential for maximum economic exploitability.)

Which brings me to the duplicity of President Barack Obama. Though I twice voted for him as the less-evil alternative, I now wish I had followed my conscience and cast my ballots for third-party candidates, perhaps Greens (though I have grave hesitations about their hostility to organized labor) or more likely Socialist Workers (never mind I am sometimes troubled by their Marxian fundamentalism). In any case I believe the truth of Obama's personhood is perfectly pictured in the unprecedented dishonesty of the slogan "change we can believe in," which has since been revealed as the biggest Big Lie in U.S. political history. I am now convinced Obama's sole purpose is to amass sufficient riches to protect himself and his family from the unspeakable horrors of our inescapably dystopian future, and I believe his quest for wealth is made all the more urgent by the conscious knowledge that his race – so useful in perpetrating the deceptions that won him the presidency – will never allow him or his family entry to the implacably white-supremacist One Percent or even the equally racist USian Ruling Class, here defined as not just the One Percent, but also their politicians and their institutional servants – bureaucrats, lawyers, academics, stenographic journalists, police and military officers, etc.

An even harsher portrait of Obama is provided by his innumerable lies and betrayals, the brazenness of his conduct a strong suggestion he governs from a position of contempt and hatred for the entire 99 Percent. Given how badly African-Americans are hurt by his policies,  it seems too he is an equal-opportunity hater, despising all Working Class folk regardless of our race. In this sense he is indistinguishable from the Ayn Rand capitalists he so diligently emulates. Even his intent appears to be definitively capitalistic – to reduce us all to the fear, wretchedness and unrelenting despair that define the lowest levels of the USian underclass. Thus he has allowed himself to become a genuine Manchurian candidate – not, of course, from the real Manchuria but rather from the Manchuria known as Wall Street – for which he is no doubt being handsomely  rewarded in terms of the riches with which he seeks to buy long-range protection for his family.

His more Machiavellian intentions, no doubt dictated to him by his One Percent masters, seem to be twofold. One is discrediting the Democratic Party, tainting it for several generations as the party of liars and betrayers, thereby ensuring the Republican Party – the real voice of the One Percent – achieves unchallenged rule. The other is cleverly discrediting or rather nullifying all the achievements and aspirations of blacks, an exceptionally diabolical application of the classic capitalist/fascist strategy of neutralizing revolutionary leadership by any means possible. Particularly since the U.S. Civil War, African-Americans have been a key part of what little genuinely revolutionary leadership the USian people have managed to produce, and in the era of the Civil Rights/Anti-Poverty/Anti-Vietnam War movements, they were the only such leadership that seemed capable of uniting the 99 Percent to the point of building solidarity across racial boundaries. Indeed, no other USian minority has ever demonstrated that capability.  Fearing the emergence of another generation of effective African-American leadership, the One Percent will use any means possible to ensure it does not happen again.

There's no doubt such efforts are already underway. The commercial co-optation of hip-hop is perhaps the most obvious part of the effort to strangle at birth any resurrection of black revolutionary leadership potential. The re-segregation of public schools and the emergence of the prison-industrial complex are identically motivated. From the perspective of the One Percent, each of these modes of oppression bear the tactical and strategic advantages of also generating enormous profits.  The role now being played by the president in his transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer would, in this context,  be nothing more than a logical expansion of the One Percent's offensive. Remember this nation remains so irremediably racist the entire African-American community is invariably judged by the dishonorable or criminal conduct of its individual members.

Damning as it is, this is the only rational conclusion Obama's record to-date allows. And the fact no paycheck journalist dares point out what is so overwhelmingly obvious tells us all we need to know about the terrible reality of our subjugation.

LB/29 September 2013

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Obama Debate Failure: Ineptitude or Obedience?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S performance in the first 2012 presidential debate last night was appalling.

 

It was also profoundly embarrassing, the most disappointing such spectacle I have ever witnessed, its wretchedness subtly underscored by the slumped-shoulder body-language of First Lady Michelle Obama as she walked on-stage to hug her husband at the televised event's conclusion. No doubt a part of her excellent mind was wondering how she might console her man in the wake of such an obvious and glaringly public failure.

 

While the pundits offered any number predictable excuses for the president's atrocious showing, none dared ask the pivotal question: given that today's politicians are nothing more than surrogates of the One Percent, bound to obey Ruling Class mandates as a condition of their survival, what if Obama was just following orders?

 

Think about it. It is obvious the corporate aristocracy overwhelmingly favors Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It is equally clear the unpredicted intensification of terminal climate change – apocalyptic weather and the resultant famine, disease and rebellion – has added new urgency to the capitalists' plans for self-preservation through fascism.

 

Romney/Ryan would kill forever the last remnants of U.S. constitutional democracy and finalize almost overnight the conversion of the United States to the United Estates of a de facto Fourth Reich. Obama – not the least because of the First Lady's powerful and emphatic commitment to women's rights – would continue on the somewhat slower path toward unabashed fascism that characterizes his present regime.

 

But given the crises generated by skyrocketing climate-change, the slower path is no longer acceptable to the Ruling Class. The aristocrats want capitalist governance now – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and (population-reducing) genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

 

Indeed this is the class-struggle backdrop of all modern global politics. The aristocracy is assuring its own survival – and condemning all the rest of us to death – by imposing Nazi-style zero-tolerance regimes on the entire planet, with the U.S. military as the primary instrument of oppression.

 

Therefore we should consider the likelihood – I would say very high probability – Obama is again proving himself to be the obedient servant of the Ruling Class. Hence – just as after 2008 Obama the Orator became Barack the Betrayer – now he is once more following orders, handing the election to Romney/Ryan, albeit with assurance he and his family are guaranteed a permanent place in the castle.

 

Which, if one applies Occam's Razor, is the only logical explanation for the president's horrid performance last night. Too bad no brand-name journalist – not even those on the (alleged) Left – has dared raise the question.

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Women's Rights: the Only Remaining Reason to Vote Democratic 

 

Editor's Note: Though I frequently post comments to story-threads on other sites, I remain conflicted about whether those words should also be published here in Outside Agitator's Notebook. Yes, I have posted such work in the past, but I have never really been comfortable with it. The contrary argument is that it is not just unnecessary duplication but ostentatious self-glorification – a notion underscored by the stylistic problems implicit in quoting one's self. Do I use quotation marks or italic to denote text that first ran elsewhere? Do I revise it for publication here? And – the biggest problem of all – how do I summarize the piece upon which I am commenting without violating the ever-more-stringent limitations on so-called “fair use”? Meanwhile the best argument for such posting comes from one of my newest readers, the New England environmental activist/organic farmer whose screen name is cleanearth. “I was asking myself the same question,” she wrote in a recent email. “Shall I put my online comments into my blog (which I haven't written in months)?  I like some of my online comments, so I think I'll do that and you should, too, so we don't use up our best thoughts online and none of our communicants (isn't that what they call churchie people?) get to see them.......so, yes, do include them in your Blog.” Thank you, Nancy; I'll do as you suggest. Here goes: 

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Jill Filipovic of The Guardian reported recently on the Republican Party's obvious and intensifying war against women and Reader Supported News republished her story, election-year important because it underscores the one and only realm in which the Democrats have at least begrudgingly lived up to their rhetoric, remaining (somewhat) less theocratically fascist than their GOP counterparts.

Though I did not see Ms. Filipovic's scathing analysis until rather late in the day, I nevertheless commented accordingly:

The Republican Party's bottomless hatred of women is in fact absolute proof of its function as the political-action agency of fundamentalist Christianity.

Indeed it would not be far afield to regard today's GOP -- with its legions of Teabaggers, Ku Klux Klanners and JesuNazi fanatics -- as a Christian version of Hamas or Al Qaeda.

Meanwhile the magnitude of the financial support the party gets from the One Percent underscores the fact theocracy (whether Christian, Islamic or Jewish), has emerged as the favorite Ruling Class method of imposing and perpetuating capitalist tyranny.

Why? Because under theocracy, corporate management rules by divine right.

Thus Republicans are theocrats. Their not-so-hidden agenda includes making Christianity the official state religion and using "Biblical Law" to dis-empower women and destroy the few remnants of our constitutional democracy.

Hence -- because women are always at the forefront of struggles for liberty (note how Liberty is always portrayed as female) -- women are the Republicans' primary target.

Which is the one point where the Democrats truly differ from the Republicans. The Democrats at least acknowledge women's rights, while the Republicans make no secret of their hatred and contempt for women.

And that by itself is reason to vote Democratic at all levels, federal state and local. To vote otherwise is literally to vote against women and Womanhood. 

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Seattle's Crosscut: Three Local Reports of Global Significance

Crosscut, an on-line journal published in Seattle, often reports on local issues that have national significance. Last week its writers hit a kind of trifecta. Dick Nelson exposed how the Democrats are no different from the Republicans in protecting the Ruling Class from fair taxation, Floyd McKay described how environment-hating capitalists will destroy a genuine near-Ecotopia in the northwest corner of Washington state, and Crosscut publisher David Brewster wrote a mini-history that omitted vital facts about how Ruling Class hostility doomed Seattle's best efforts in alternative journalism.

Mr. Nelson's report – a comprehensive update on the ugly truth that inflicts ever-deepening despair on progressives and exemplifies political reality throughout the United States – elicited my shortest (and snarkiest) comment: 

The (permanent) obstruction to meaningful tax reform in Washington state is the fact both parties are equally controlled by the One Percent and therefore represent and serve no purposes beyond those of the Ruling Class.

Though the Democrats still make a pretense of honoring the New Deal, and though a few Democratic legislators still (try to) remain true to its principles, beneath this clever disguise they are thus indistinguishable from the Republicans on all relevant economic issues.

Hence regardless of which party is in power, the rich will continue to be pampered by obscene dispensations from taxation while the rest of us suffer accordingly. 

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Bellingham is the one city in Washington state – maybe in the entire U.S. – that not only talks environmentalism but genuinely lives it. 

For example, Bellingham voters overwhelmingly support mass transit. When the auto-centric suburbanites, the Teabaggers and all the other anti-public-transport troglodytes in the surrounding county voted to kill the city-county transit system, the courageous little metropolis saved its buses by defiantly creating its own transit authority.

The move generated immeasurable controversy, including the predictable bigotry and hatefulness from the transit-is-welfare Republicans. But it demonstrated Bellingham's stern commitment to environmental sanity – a test failed abysmally by other municipalities in this allegedly “evergreen” state, my own Tacoma included. 

Which may exemplify the biggest (unspoken) reason the Ruling Class has targeted Bellingham for destruction by turning it into an international coal port: the fact that, under capitalism, environmental steadfastness is intolerable subversion – heresy to be crushed by any means and at any expense. 

As I said in response to Mr. McKay's status report on the coal-port struggle: 

Obviously the fix is already in; the decision has already been made on Wall Street and in the relevant board rooms, and now all that remains is for it to be rammed down our throats, no matter the extent to which it triggers our gag reflexes.

Thus the coal port with all its attendant environmental ruin is to be imposed on us all, exactly as implied by the pivotal verb in Mr. McKays' second paragraph: not the conditional "would" but the defining (and definitively militaristic) "will serve." 

Anyone who imagines otherwise is in denial about the long history of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the traditional spear-point for environmentally destructive projects favored by the One Percent. Precisely as Mr. McKay reports, the corps is already restructuring the misleadingly named "process" to minimize opportunities for effective dissent.

Which is not to say we should surrender without a fight. In a struggle of this sort, literally a battle for the future of the entire Puget Sound region, any obstruction placed in the enemy's path is a victory. 

But we should nevertheless recognize that the war -- to prevent Puget Sound from being reduced to Appalachia West and to save Western Washington from being turned into a satellite of West Virginia -- is already lost. We are thus (again) victimized by the death of the U.S. experiment in constitutional democracy and by imposition of its vultures-come-home-to-roost replacement: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

As to Craig Cole and the role he is playing in the Appalachianization of Western Washington, I am not the least bit surprised. Cole was a slippery sycophant of the Ruling Class – a Republican in Democratic disguise – when I knew him at Western Washington State College in 1971, and obviously he remains so today. 

Meanwhile in the entire coal-port affair we see yet another bitter example of what is emerging as our most painful 21st Century lesson: that without economic democracy there is no democracy at all. 

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Apropos Seattle's generally excellent on-line daily Crosscut, Mr. Brewster's curiously selective memory reveals the protect-the-One-Percent stance essential to journalistic success in the present-day United States. He thus exemplifies why today's so-called “alternative” media often differs from its Ruling Class counterpart only in the breadth and depth of its offerings, but almost never in its willingness to challenge the core shibboleths of capitalism. Obviously I could not abide Mr. Brewster's omissions: 

Interesting retrospective by Mr. Brewster, but deficient in at least three ways. 
 

There's no mention of The Seattle Sun (1974-1981), which under the editorship of Dick Clever (and later of Jane Hadley) set the pace for alternative newspaper journalism in Seattle.

One of The Sun's many coups was the series by Bruce Olson that scooped the world on the impending bankruptcy of the Washington Public Power Supply System, the largest municipal bond default in U.S. history. Alas, it was in retribution for just such fearless reporting The Sun was destroyed by a Ruling Class advertising boycott -- a pivotal fact in any history of Seattle journalism. 

Nor does Mr. Brewster make any mention of how the same vindictiveness on the part of the local One Percent, again expressed via an advertising boycott, killed Seattle Magazine in 1970.

Lastly there is the capitalist macrocosm illustrated by the Seattle microcosm.

If capitalism is to thrive in an age of terminal scarcity, it demands two dictatorial prerequisites. The first is that government at every level must be restructured in accordance with the principles set out by Benito Mussolini: absolute power and unlimited profit for the (corporate) Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else – exactly the regime now being imposed on the United States. Secondly – and as the pivotal element of the first – it is essential the masses be kept as ignorant as possible: note for example the One Percent's effort to bolster its profits by concealing the deadly dangers of genetically modified foods.

A major part of shutting off the information flow and thus dumbing down the public is, of course, the methodical destruction of newspapers – a process that becomes especially evident when the relative health of British and European print media is contrasted to the terminal sickness with which its U.S. counterpart has been (deliberately) infected.

Surely the notably thoughtful Mr. Brewster cannot be unaware of these factors, especially how various governmental policies, postal rates in particular, have been constructed specifically to destroy the U.S. press. Thus it is disingenuous of him to attribute the termination of public access to vital information as merely a consequence of random forces in an allegedly free market – a market that is in fact as deliberately structured as any psychology lab's rat maze. 

(Disclosure: a working journalist since 1956, I have had at least one proverbial foot in the alternative press since 1963, when I wrote for The Knoxville Flashlight Herald under the editorship of Marion Barry, who was then a field secretary for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. In 1966-67, I was the text editor for Marc Crawford's TransMundo, the world's first alternative photo agency. From 1967 through 1971, my photographs and/or writing appeared in several alternative publications, among them The East Village Other, The Manhattan Tribune and Northwest Passage. From 1974 through 1976 I was the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, and into the early '80s wrote occasional in-depth reports for Tacoma Review. Most recently, I covered Occupy Tacoma for Reader Supported News, an on-line alternative.) 

LB/4 October 2012

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