Capitalism Requires an Endless Succession of Big Lies

CAPITALISM, OF NECESSITY, requires constant use of the Big Lie.  That's because, when capitalism is reduced to its lowest common denominator, it is ultimately moral imbecility – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. The same is true of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – and for the same reason. Neither capitalism nor capitalist governance can exploit its victims without a perpetual smokescreen of lies and evasions to conceal its quintessential savagery.

While the lies of our capitalist masters are typically blatant – for example President Obama's knowingly false assertions the Russians are to blame for the Ukraine Crisis  – sometimes their deceptions are more subtle. One example is the methodical destruction of the career and ultimately the life of the journalist Gary Webb,  detailed by Robert Parry in “The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up.” Another is the lie-by-omission at the core of the Democratic Party's pre-election effort to make us forget how Democrats joined hands with Republicans to try to slash our already inadequate Social Security stipends. Thus a recent Truthout piece, “The GOP Social Security Deception Game Is On - Here's How to Fight Back,” dutifully disseminates the propaganda the Democrats desperately hope will enable them to retain control of the U.S. Senate. Its story-line is the Big Lie that Democrats are eternal fighters for the Working Class, and with Sen. Elizabeth Warren  arguing the case, it's an easy lie to believe – especially for those of us foolish enough to still have faith in the possibility of obtaining redress from our hopelessly corrupted political system.

But lest we forget the truth – which Truthout does reliably publish save when the its election-year fealty to the Democratic Party overrides its journalistic ethics – here is an AlterNet report, “Sell-Out Alert: 9 Democrats Already Caving to GOP On Social Security Cuts,” to remind us what really happened.  As it says, “...the biggest Democrat of all – and the one not drawing a line in the sand but possibly leading a historic sellout – is President Obama.” In other words, Barack the Betrayer strikes again, targeting Medicare as well as Social Security – and now he's got Sen. Warren, the alleged defender of the 99 Percent, to cover for him. Equally ironic is the role Washington state Sen. Patty Murray – a Democrat who likes to brag about her feminist credentials – played in proposing cuts which (see below) would have been especially devastating to women.

For those who still doubt the Democratic and Republican parties are nothing more than deceptively named factions of a single party of plutocrats, there's the fact 43 of the 55 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus voted just last February to help President Obama impose an $8.5 billion food-stamp cut.  Note the Democratic numbers: 43 of 55 is 78 percent. And when you eliminate the two independents and count only the actual Democrats, you have 43 of 53 or 81 percent – which gives us the real percentage of Democratic politicians who are indistinguishable from their Republican counterparts in hatred and contempt for us, We the People of the 99 Percent. As Washington state Senator Maria Cantwell put it (scroll down the linked text), “it's time that we move forward” – never mind the vast majority of the cutback's victims are women and children. 

Cantwell is considered one of the Democrats' leading liberals and feminists. But it is her Marie Antoinette indifference to the deliberately genocidal consequences of radically downsizing the food-stamp program that underscores another of the Democrats' Big Lies – their now obviously false claim they can at least be counted on to protect the wellbeing of women.  It was Democratic President Jimmy Carter's signature  on the Hyde Amendment that robbed lower-income women of their abortion rights. It was Democratic President Bill Clinton's expansion of free trade  that took away so many jobs – and so many health-insurance policies – that were the sole sources of reproductive choice for working women who were not independently wealthy. (Rich women, Ruling Class women, always have reproductive freedom; it's one of the innumerable privileges the plutocrats are ensured by their obscene wealth.) More recently it was Obama the Orator's initial shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer – the irremediable betrayal that forever defined Usian health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right – that opened the door to Hobby Lobby  and all the other looming theocratic restrictions on abortion and contraception. And don't forget the deadly damage  the Democrats' proposed Social Security and Medicare cuts would have done to women.

What, therefore, will change if the Republicans – as expected – win a majority of seats in the Senate? Not much; arcane, pro-plutocracy Senate rules already give the Republicans de facto control,  so all that will happen is the nation's march toward overt fascism and Christian theocracy and its simultaneous descent to the total wretchedness of de facto slavery for the 99 Percent will merely accelerate a bit. Besides – just as the Social Security and food-stamp issues demonstrate – the only real difference between the two parties is rhetoric. The Republicans are already unapologetic Christofascists. The Democrats meanwhile have become breathtakingly skilled at hiding their fascism behind legislative sleight-of-hand and election-time declarations of humanitarian principles in which they no longer believe. The latter have therefore become Big Lies in their own right: the classic example is Obama's 2008 campaign slogan: “change we can believe in.”

The bitter truth is we are governed by one Ruling Class party of two names. Thus government at every level in the United States, federal, state and local, is by, for and of the capitalists, with the rest of us – despite the Big Lie of “democracy” – methodically excluded.  But when oh when will we awaken to the awful truth?

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As I said above, Truthout can be counted on to tell the truth about anything save the Democratic Party. Hence the relevance of two unusually insightful reports that explain exactly how capitalism works. One, which describes how New York City perfected a mode of zero-tolerance policing that helps force lower-income people out of neighborhoods targeted for gentrification,  is entitled “Policing for Wealth.” The other – a timely essay on how private charity preserves capitalism  and thereby facilitates its oppression of lower-income people – is headlined “The Charitable Society or 'How to Avoid the Poor and Perpetuate the Wealth Gap.” It's money quote – no pun intended – lays bare a perfect example of the systemic dishonesty essential to capitalism's survival: “...corporate charity becomes a kind of self-rewarding capitalist enterprise because it is able both to maximize profit through tax breaks, and subtly cement capitalist economic, social and political policies that reflect the interests of the super-rich – from monopolization to privatization of public goods and institutions. So, it turns out that much of the giving involved here is not giving for the sake of promoting the common welfare, but philanthropy for private profit and corporate self-interest at the expense of long-term public good” (italics as in original).

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At various times I have pissed off many of my more politically naive comrades in the USian Left by proclaiming that the so-called “revolution of the 1960s” never happened. Yes, it was a potentially revolutionary time – so much so Soviet intelligence scrutinized the era's people and events in a meticulous search for revolutionary potential. But the Soviet analysts, who (let us not forget) were themselves professional revolutionaries, concluded that only the USian minority communities had the requisite combination of grievances, leadership, anger and determination. And even these qualities, the analysts found, were nullified by the communities' relative smallness and the exclusionary bigotry of the Caucasian majority. The rebellious whites were meanwhile dismissed as mostly bourgeois faddists who had merely seized upon revolutionary rhetoric as a means of rationalizing ultimately selfish demands. Hence no Soviet advisers were ever dispatched. The analysis, by the Committee for State Security, Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or KGB, came to light after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. By then, the accuracy and indeed the prescience of the analysts' work had been confirmed by how quickly anti-war dissent and a plethora of other seemingly “revolutionary” activities were terminated by the end of the military draft in 1972. Hence my “no revolution” argument is – at least in a limited sense – validated by world-class experts.

Not all whites, of course, were faddists. Many were in fact genuine revolutionaries. But their revolution – manifest in feminism, environmentalism, the back-to-the-land movement, the alternative press, the resurrection of paganism and most of all in music and art – was no more or less than what the late Walter Bowart called it in a conversation with me in 1967, “a revolution in consciousness” rather than in political or socioeconomic terms. This was the revolution I described in the forever lost work “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which argued on the basis of a 24-year collection of evidence that the epicenteral rebellion of the 1960s was the first wave of a spontaneous global uprising against patriarchy.  (As many of you know already, “Dancer” was destroyed by fire just as it seemed destined for mainstream publication.) But other relics of that era fortunately live on, albeit sometimes only in the contents of academic papers. One of these is a carefully researched, tautly reasoned, competently written masters-degree thesis, a brief history of the feminist back-to-the-land movement,  “Country Women: Back-to-the-Land Feminism and Radical Feminist Praxis in the Women's Liberation Movement,” that despite its somewhat awkward title is useful far beyond the realm of women's studies. It contains the most complete back-to-the-land-movement bibliography I have yet encountered. Not withstanding its singular focus, it provides what is probably our best-ever portrait of the attitudes and yearnings that brought the entire back-to-the-land movement, feminist or otherwise, into being.

In this latter context, perhaps my own back-to-the-land piece, a prose elegy to an ill-fated commune,  is again relevant.

Unfortunately our understanding of the era in question remains limited by the label – “the '60s” – which the Ruling Class insists we use to describe it. But it was not merely the phenomenon of a single decade. A more accurate chronology would mark its beginning with two events in 1955. One was Rosa Parks'  infinitely courageous protest against Southern segregation; the other was Allen Ginsberg's completion of the epic poem Howl.  What followed those two seemingly disparate events was an astounding symbiosis of political and aesthetic rebelliousness that not only gave birth to a half-dozen identifiable movements – civil rights, anti-war, feminist, environmentalist, back-to-the-land, alternative press – but evolved its own signature musical and artistic forms. It also legitimized quests in realms of hitherto-forbidden spirituality including Buddhism, First Nations wisdom and goddess-centered paganism. The associated metaphysical rebellion – particularly the evolution of modern Wicca  – was especially important in adding spiritual dimensions to feminism and environmentalism.

However, from the bourgeois (and therefore culturally dominant) perspective of Caucasian university students, the era's significant rebelliousness was mostly political and is assumed to have begun with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement,  which seemed to end triumphantly and thereby raised false hopes that would eventually be forever shattered as the capitalists fought back with a slow but inexorable vengeance, turning the United States into an electronic concentration camp  and relentlessly shackling the population in the same sort of economic and political slavery that has always characterized the lives of USian minorities. Now, 50 years later, Barbara Garson, who was one of the original FSM activists, poignantly wonders what the hell happened: “Who Really Won the Battle of Berkeley.” As if in reply, an analysis by Marlene Dixon, another activist of the era, provides the best explanation  I have yet read, never mind “The Rise and Demise of Women's Liberation: A Class Analysis”was written in 1977. Dixon argues – correctly I believe – the era's political and economic revolutionary potential was nullified by widespread refusal to acknowledge the reality of class warfare and by wholesale rejection of ideology and ideological discipline – all of which failings were legacies of the reflexive anti-intellectuality drilled into the nation by the sweeping anti-Leftist purges that followed World War II. While Dixon's work focuses on Women's Liberation, it is, like much feminist writing, a microcosmic portrait of the internal conflicts that characterized the entire spectrum of the era's political movements.

As to when the era ended, that too remains in dispute. But if I were to select an arbitrary date, I'd pick 4 November 1980, national election day, when fully 55 percent of the post-World-War-II baby-boom generation  voted their bourgeois, white-racist values and elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Thus the same generation that opposed the Vietnam War and claimed to be “revolutionary” later set the United States on the counter-revolutionary path to overt fascism along which it has relentlessly marched ever since. Hence, as it turns out, the aforementioned Soviet analysis was not nearly negative enough. Too many of the bourgeois whites who claimed to be revolutionaries were not just faddists; they were also fascists at heart – a perplexing condition indeed until you factor in the soaring popularity of Ayn Rand's work, particularly Atlas Shrugged,  which, when it was published in 1957, even conservative reviewers damned as a fictionalization of Hitler's Mein Kampf. But  Atlas Shrugged's  promoters claim it sold an average of 73,400 copies per year during the 1980s and now, they say, it sells at an annual rate nearly 4.1 times that. If these figures are accurate, what they tell us is there is no likelihood at all of diverting the already global USian Empire from its ever-more-obvious goal of becoming the de facto Fourth Reich. Exactly as history demonstrates, what is fascism but the mature form of capitalism?

Nor is there any rational likelihood of a movement arising to somehow ameliorate capitalism's ever-escalating brutality. Quoth one of its victims, the activist Cicely McMillan, speaking via a recent interview by Anna Lekas Miller entitled “On Being a Woman Inside and Outside of the Criminal Justice System”: “I don’t see a movement coming unless it is led by women, cross-class, cross-culture, cross-race. I think this has got to be a highly collaborative movement. I think women are the only ones who have been socialized with a certain experience to be able to do that. If we can work on behalf of women, on behalf of families, on behalf of communities collaboratively then we will see a movement of the 99 Percent, and the only way we will get at that is through the inter-workings of the people who are the community leaders and those are still women.” McMillan is obviously correct. As Vladimir Lenin noted in 1918,  “the experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much women take part in it.”

As to what really happened to the USian revolutionary potential, whether from 1955 through 1980 or now, it seems neither Garson nor Dixon – nor for that matter McMillan – are familiar with the works of Sun Tzu.  Hence they each overlook the simple fact even the most competent of the nation's would-be revolutionaries committed the always-fatal sin of underestimating the enemy. They failed to recognize the USian Imperial Ruling Class is the most all-powerful, most malevolently cunning ruling class in human history. The Occupy Movement, in which McMillan played a key role, was undone by the same failure. Thus were squandered what were undoubtedly our species' last opportunities to escape the slave-world horrors of capitalism matured to fascism – the aforementioned electronic concentration-camp. More to the point, the rebelliousness associated with the '60s was also probably our last chance to avoid self-inflicted extinction. Already the Ruling Class is moving to ensure a fully indoctrinated, relentlessly ecocidal fascist future: Atlas Shrugged is now required reading in many of the nation's colleges universities. Other Ayn Rand diatribes have been required reading in USian high schools and middle schools since the mid-1960s. Josef Goebbels – who sought to achieve universal German readership for Mein Kampf – is no doubt smirking in his grave. 

 

Meanwhile the terrifying totality of the secret-police operations by which we are already oppressed becomes ever more evident thanks to a few die-hard journalists and civil libertarians – daring men and women who will undoubtedly be among the first persons disappeared when the Ruling Class decides it's had enough dissent and protest and orders the Last Roundup. The following is from “Police Sign Gag Order Before Getting FBI Spy Equipment,” a MuckRock report:“Advanced cell phone tracking devices known as StingRays allow police nationwide to home in on suspects or to log individuals present at a given location. But before acquiring a StingRay, state and local police must sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI, documents released last week reveal. The document released by the Tacoma Police Department is heavily redacted — four of its six pages are completely blacked out — but two unredacted paragraphs confirm the FBI’s intimate involvement with StingRay deployment.”

Yes, dear readers, that's the same Tacoma in which I now reside.

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For those of us who recognize the course toward overt fascism the U.S. has been steering since 22 November 1963 – and for those who do not, a superb primer is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (James W. Douglass; Orbis Books: 2008) – it is no accident an unprecedented campaign for forcible civilian disarmament has emerged just as the 99 percent has begun awakening to the fact the American Dream is dead beyond resurrection. With the nation's socioeconomic conditions in a permanent nosedive  and even members of the Ruling Class now openly predicting revolution,  the forcible disarmament of the civilian population is merely another (logical) element on the Ruling Class list of measures to ensure we will never escape the electronic concentration camp in which we are already imprisoned. (Yes, it's true a hunting rifle is no defense against a tank or a drone. But a hunting rifle can surely be used to acquire weapons that are – which is why, for example, Hitler began disarming his opponents as soon as he took power.)

However, the USian Ruling Class – bolstered by its mastery of psychology and its manipulative subsets in marketing and behavior modification – is infinitely more sophisticated in its application of the techniques of oppression than ever the Nazis were. That's why, here in the land of the Second Amendment, forcible disarmament is invariably cloaked with a Big Lie, always in the form of deceptions, often by censorship as well. Thus the enormous relevance of a censorship-defying report  by Charles E. Cobb, “Guns and the Southern Freedom Struggle: What’s Missing When We Teach About Nonviolence.” Cobb, a former field secretary in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is the author of This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). As I said on the comment thread when CommonDreams, which is often painfully politically correct, dared circulate the aforementioned text:

Thank you for publishing Mr. Cobb's oh-so-relevant report. Especially thank you for  having the incredible (and incredibly rare) courage  to defy the venomous, maliciously dishonest and sometimes violent hatefulness of the forcible disarmament cult -- the hysterically anti-gun fanatics who, in clandestine alliance with the One Percent, are reducing us all to compulsory pacifism and mandatory victimhood. (Yes, there really are some of us on the Left – far more than the forcible-disarmament cultists dare admit – who support the Second Amendment in its broadest interpretations. And Mr. Cobb's report illustrates one of the reasons why.) 

     

Soon afterward, perhaps fearful of being outdone by one of its rivals, Truthout published a report that refutes one of the forcible-disarmament movement's most oft-repeated Big Lies.  Entitled “Fact-Checking Feinstein on the Assault Weapons Ban,” it notes how throughout the 10 years since the federal assault-weapons ban expired, its originator, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), continues to claim the ban reduced crime and saved lives. “But gun violence experts,” the report states, “say the exact opposite.” In other words, Feinstein – like most of her colleagues in the forcible disarmament movement – knowingly lies.

The proponents of anti-gunowner Initiative 594 in Washington state are using the same tactics. They bill their initiative as a “simple” measure to tighten the restrictions that presumably keep felons and dangerously mentally ill persons from acquiring firearms. But its oppressively complex, turgidly written text is laden with prohibitions intended to criminalize many legal and commonplace uses  of shotguns, rifles and handguns – including shared usage amongst family members. And it is being promoted by some of the slickest anti-gun propaganda  I have yet witnessed. Once again, just as the late Watergate felon John Ehrlichman acknowledged in his 1974 testimony, it seems Washington state is being used as a national proving ground  for techniques of oppression.

 

Nationally the ultimate firearms-related question would now seem to be whether the Left is at long last awakening to the need for an armed Working Class to discourage capitalist savagery. Locally the question is whether the I-594 proponents' Big Lie tactics will prevail in a state the electorate of which – albeit nominally progressive – is nevertheless noted for its skepticism toward any measures that expand the authority of government. The answers will undoubtedly be vital in shaping our national future.

LB/27 September-5 October 2014

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Did Obama Throw Women under the Hobby Lobby Bus?

WAS OBAMACARE SECRETLY INTENDED to betray women? When you consider the utterly predictable outcome of the United States Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision and its de facto endorsement by President Barack Obama's refusal to employ his executive powers against its sweeping ban on birth control, the possibility becomes too evident to ignore. Indeed it clamors for investigation. Moreover, Obama's long and embittering record of making campaign promises he had no intention of keeping suggests the betrayal may have been part of the Affordable Care Act's hidden agenda from the moment the newly elected president began his closed-door scheming  with the health-insurance-industry executives who actually authored the legislation.

I said nearly as much in response to Abby Ohlheiser's brief and tautly reasoned “Ginsburg's Passionate 35-Page Dessent of Hobby Lobby Decision,” part of my daily email from Reader Supported News. Six days later,my suspicions intensified by many hours of research, what began as an embittered comment-thread remark had become the key passage of this column:

Assuming the correctness of Justice Ginsburg's dissent, the impact of the Hobby Lobby decision is far more devastating than we are being told by mainstream media.

The devastation is inherent in the fact at least 90 percent of U.S. business is “closely held.” 

Hobby Lobby thus allows the imposition of theocratic restrictions on most of the U.S. workplace. Not only does this abolish the reproductive freedom of most of the workforce; it is also a giant step toward replacing constitutional governance with Biblical law – a subversive goal lavishly funded by the One Percent as the ultimate means of subjugating the Working Class.

Meanwhile, imposition of theocracy via the private sector has become a standard Christian tactic. The takeover of the nation's health care facilities by the Roman Catholic Church is already, wherever it occurs, prohibiting access to all forms of contraception.

Financially, Hobby Lobby's main beneficiaries are the insurance barons. By making birth control unobtainable, the ruling further maximizes Affordable Care Act profits. Mandatory insurance generates obscene windfall profits even as prohibitively expensive co-pays and deductibles radically limit the public's ability to actually obtain care. Hobby Lobby furthers this process, minimizing cost by eliminating birth control from ACA coverage.

 

Given the lies and treachery by which we are now ruled, who can doubt this atrocity was carefully scripted in advance?

Though the president's sycophants will loudly denounce any such notion as unthinkable, U.S. history proves otherwise. Legislation at all levels – federal, state and local – is invariably peddled as an essential solution to some pressing crisis. But many such measures are sneakily written to perpetuate the very grievances they falsely claim to redress. By legalistic sleight-of-hand and other devious means – especially alleged “benefits” that on closer inspection turn out to be nonexistent – they defeat the democratic will of the people and impose instead the tyrannical goals and objectives of Ruling Class politicians and bureaucrats. Under the direction of their One Percent masters, these functionaries have honed the strategy and tactics of deliberate deception to sadistic perfection at every level of government – federal, state or local – inside the United States and its possessions.

The associated methodology is obviously a Machiavellian variant of the marketing practices by which the capitalists routinely dupe us into buying defective products. In the marketplace it is infuriating. In its political application – with all its heightened expectation of collective socioeconomic improvement and its subsequent plunge into defeat and disillusionment – it is perhaps the most injurious psychological warfare weapon in the Ruling Class arsenal. Not only does it foster alienation and despair; it subverts democracy and undermines even the hope of democracy by convincing us the entire democratic processes is a sham.

An ultimate example of this sort of deception is the New Deal. By ameliorating the morally imbecilic savagery of capitalism, it co-opted, demobilized and eventually dispersed a definitively revolutionary majority coalition of Communists, other socialists, Progressives and Left Democrats. But it (deliberately) preserved the irresistible power of the One Percent and thereby ensured its own eventual death. It also facilitated – chiefly by temporarily disguising the predatory nature of capitalism – the re-emergence of capitalism's unapologetic malevolence.

Another example is Medicare, which is funded by a combination of payroll taxes and mandatory premiums. It is touted as a European-style program that provides health care to all the nation's citizens age 65 and over and to recipients of Social Security Disability Insurance stipends as well. Though Medicare is widely believed to signal the government's endorsement of the principle that health care is a human right, in truth it does nothing of the kind. It covers only “about 48 percent” of an individual's authorized health-care costs  – far less if the non-reimbursed costs of vision, hearing and dental services are included in the calculations. The remainder, 52 percent of the approved expenses plus the full price of everything else that is not covered – eye glasses, hearing aids, dental care, many other services – comes out of the so-called beneficiary's pocket.

“No part of Medicare,” states the reference linked in the preceding paragraph, “pays for all of a beneficiary's covered medical costs, and many costs are not covered at all.” For the average recipient, the necessary co-payments and deductibles are too often prohibitive.  This means innumerable Medicare recipients, though saddled with the mandatory premiums deducted from their Social Security pensions, are chronically unable to obtain adequate health care. They are locked out of the system by its additional fees. And the little Medicare does cover is under constant attack by Republicans and Democrats alike – one of the many ways the two Ruling Class parties demonstrate their absolute fealty to the One Percenters, who now make no secret of the fact they regard humanitarian expenditures as wasted money. The only people genuinely served by Medicare are thus the wealthy, for whom it is merely another bonus on a seemingly endless list of taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Medicare's functions are therefore actually fourfold. (1)-Medicare rewards the wealthy. (2)-It punishes – and sometimes exterminates – the poor. (3)-It locks into place the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. (The definition's perpetuity is achieved by a system so impossibly complex, no group of citizens can change it without the intervention of politicians and bureaucrats – which means the citizens' efforts are invariably betrayed.) (4)-By its opacity, Medicare enables the U.S. to promulgate the Big Lie – within and without – that it offers some of its citizens a genuine universal health-care program.

Obamacare serves exactly the same functions in precisely the same ways. It is mandatory. The premiums it extracts are providing the health insurance cartel with the largest, most obscene windfall profits in its history – another of the president's innumerable gifts to his Wall Street masters. Yet Obamacare's deductibles and co-pays discourage and/or prohibit most of its alleged beneficiaries from fulfilling their medical needs. Like Medicare, its complexities make it incomprehensible save by politicians and bureaucrats, which further cements into permanence the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of wealth. And, again like Medicare, it enables U.S. propaganda to disseminate another Big Lie intended to disguise the deadly barbarism of its Ayn Rand economics.

Such are the ways of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else. Such too is the unmitigated deception that is the operational context of all U.S. health care.

It is in this same context Obamacare's triumphant claim “being female is no longer a pre-existing condition” emerges as yet another Big Lie. (Readers who are unfamiliar with the for-profit U.S. medical system should note that until the advent of the so-called Affordable Care Act, the health insurance barons charged radically higher premiums  for insuring reproductive-age females.) Obama the Orator repeatedly assured the voters such discrimination would soon be ended. But after he won the presidency, he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer. In that persona, he almost certainly guaranteed the insurance barons they would soon regain their ability to exploit female genitalia as a profit center. Even if he did not, it is beyond belief he and his insurance-cartel henchmen – armed as they were with all their market research and secret-police surveillance data – did not foresee the Hobby Lobby lawsuit or some other action that would yield the same result.

In any case, it is increasingly obvious the Hobby Lobby decision has now permanently rescinded what women regarded as the most compelling aspect of the ACA. As the Associated Press reported the day after the decision – “The Supreme Court has left in place lower court rulings in favor of businesses that object to covering all methods of government-approved contraception...not just the four pregnancy prevention methods and devices that the court considered in its ruling.” Since then, at least 82 more companies have indicated they intend to cancel their employees' birth-control coverage. 

Nor is there any recourse. The fund-raising claims of several women's organizations notwithstanding, Congressional remedies are impossible. The aggressively reactionary, vindictively theocratic Republican majority in the House has been gerrymandered into unbeatable permanence. And as reported above, the president – whose theocratic leanings  are so obvious they are provoking secularist protests – will not grant Hobby Lobby's growing roster of victims any other remedy.

Long term, the Hobby Lobby ruling will probably enable employers and insurers to force nearly all U.S. women to pay out of pocket for their birth control. But these expenses, like Medicare and ACA co-pays and deductibles, will be brutally prohibitive. Capitalism has downsized nearly half the population's paychecks to poverty or lower-income levels.  As Justice Ginsberg noted in her epic dissent, the cost of a single inter-uterine device or IUD “is nearly equivalent to a month's full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage." For women who cannot afford the aristocratic privilege of self-financed contraception, the only alternative is total surrender to misogyny: re-learning to despise their own bodies – to fear their own sensuality, sexuality and fertility – precisely as demanded by Christian doctrine and its regime of mandatory chastity. Theocrats everywhere are gloating. 

All of which again underscores the fact that in the United States, health care is a privilege of wealth and will remain so forever – that is, until the nation as we know it is no more.

The Hobby-Lobby case also demonstrates the ever-more-terrifying likelihood biblical-law Christian theocracy  will eventually replace Constitutional governance in the U.S homeland. Not only has the Supreme Court endorsed Jesus as the national deity; the forcible Christianization of the imperial military machine has already produced legions of troops trained in theocratic surveillance and oppression. The high command is now marching these latter-day Inquisitors and Crusaders into place.

Unfortunately, only a few Cassandra columnists,  of whom I am surely one, dare write constantly and at length about the inherent malevolence of the fanatical U.S. Christians and their schemes for imposing a Christian version of Middle Eastern theocracy (complete with public torture-executions for rebellious women, homosexuals and all other so-called “heretics”). And though we have been exposing these threats for years, our warnings are often belittled or suppressed. The above linked piece by Chris Hedges, for example, was suppressed by every major publication in the nation – never mind his stature as a mainstream writer.

Meanwhile, the ever-more-emboldened theocrats now openly denounce all women who use contraception  as “creatures...who cannot control their libido.” Such malicious slanders resurrect the bigoted dogmas of Abrahamic religion – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – that all women are like the biblical Eve, ruinously sinful, ready recruits for the Devil and therefore a seductive threat  to every devout male. But as Truthout's William Rivers Pitt aptly puts it, the U.S. seemingly remains the “land of the free” – unless you're a woman.

Though Pitt seems to carefully avoid such possibilities, it's impossible to overlook that someday in this increasingly downtrodden nation, women's cumulative anger might light the proverbial fuse. That's what happened in Paris on 14 July 1789, likewise in Petrograd on International Women's Day, 8 March 1917, 23 February by the old Tsarist calendar. The events in Paris – first the city's wives and mothers provoked to riotous rage by impossibly expensive bread, then the storming of the Bastille – are well known, but what obtained in Petrograd has been obscured by distance and anti-Russian propaganda, so I'll tell it once again: the flint-hearted bosses of the massive Lesnoy Textile Works sacked five women for trying to organize a union, and the women's 5,000 workplace sisters boiled into the streets in furious protest. Within just a few hours, their demonstration had exploded into the Russian Revolution.

LB/6 June 2014

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(Note: this week's OAN omited “Agitation Elsewhere” to better focus on the unfolding Hobby Lobby story.)

Women's Reproductive Rights the Source of All Freedom

THREE WEEKS AGO, thinking about how “'Dancer' Resurrected”  had eerily anticipated Moron Nation's most recent convulsion of misogynistic hatemongering, it dawned on me the final lesson of the Counterculture – the ultimate truth asserted by the Revolution in Conscious – is that female reproductive rights are literally the mother of all other freedoms.

The midwife of this surprising but utterly logical epiphany was an Esquire magazine piece entitled “It's a War on Women and It Isn't Stopping,” Charles P. Pierce's report about the dramatic escalation of the ongoing assault not just on women's legal status but on female identity itself. Though not an Esquire subscriber, I read Pierce's work courtesy of Reader Supported News. Then I added my insight – probably as much a memo to myself as a plea to RSN's readership – to the associated comment thread:

Wake up, people. The right of women to control their own bodies is THE most basic human right. Take away that right – precisely the Republican intent – the entire concept of democracy is nullified. Which is, of course, exactly what the One Percent wants.

I was left so metaphorically open-mouthed by this realization, no additional words would take shape.

Hence I added nothing about how the current plague of rhetorical rape – and it is precisely that – is part of the One Percent's massive, lavishly funded campaign to protect itself by imposing zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States. I did not even point out the Republicans are merely the most obvious theocratic activists – that the Democrats, though far sneakier, are equally culpable. All I could do was wonder why I had been so slow to recognize the pivotal, canary-in-the-coalmine nature of women's reproductive rights. Why had such a simple concept taken me so many years to comprehend?

Obviously I had long ago acknowledged the basic early-American hypocrisies – slavery and death whether in the name of gender or ethnicity – but not until the resurrection of “Dancer” prompted my third or fourth review of Barbara Mor's Great Cosmic Mother and maybe the twentieth such perusal of Robert Graves' White Goddess was I able to understand how oppression itself begins with the oppression of girls and women.

When women are denied the ownership of their own bodies, it is the literal Genesis of tyranny. All other freedoms are downsized accordingly, not quite to meaninglessness, but surely to a kind of hypocritical window dressing. Thus despite the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” promised by the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights is reduced to drapery, curtains hung to hide the secrets of a dwelling in which – unless one is male, white and thus a member of the (mostly undeclared) ubermenschen – the norms are brutality and abuse, as in (ongoing) genocide against First Nations peoples, the former de jure enslavement of women and Africans, the present-day efforts to “put Them back in their place.”

Here too is the core truth of “Dancer,” its proper one-sentence lead, the synthesis that eluded me for so many years, the unspoken truth of the Revolution in Consciousness: the fact we somehow recognized the liberation of women as the liberation of us all – and though we lacked the vocabulary to say it outright, it was nevertheless the core message of our finest art, our most enduring music and poetry, never more eloquently proclaimed than by the late Tim Buckley in “Phantasmagoria in Two”:

If you tell me of all the pain you've had,
I'll never smile again

Now, as penance for the writerly sin of premature expostulation, I am compelled to extensively revise the already-posted “Dancer” manuscript, a project I dread but will dutifully begin in a few days. Not the least of these revisions will be inclusion of a passage on the transformational impact of the birth-control pill, its text inspired by Ruth Rosen's recent commentary on contraception: 

 

For most of human history, sexuality and reproduction have been intricately yoked together.  Birth control, particularly the Pill, ruptured that link and gave women the right to enjoy sex without the goal of reproduction...In short, the war over contraception during the last bizarre month was never about religious freedom or women’s health care.  It was about controlling women’s right to control their own bodies and to make their own sexual and reproductive choices.

Birth control was therefore the biological wellspring of the entire Revolution in Consciousness, a fact my typically “disembodied” male intellect had overlooked. But now after reading Rosen I realized the pill had redefined womanhood – restoring and radically expanding freedoms increasingly restricted since the sack of Knossos. Without its prelude, the other revolutionary influences that shaped the 1960s and 1970s would probably never have spread beyond the bohemian subculture.

Given how these bits of information fit into one another and expand “Dancer” as well, apparently I am (again) getting assistance from Synchronicity – surely a hitherto-unacknowledged aspect of the Muse.

Another such addition showed up maybe a day after the epiphany sparked by the “War on Women” report, a gift to us all from RTTV newscaster Alyona Minkovski, who at the height of Rush Limbaugh's all-women-are-sluts tirade courageously bespoke a truth about feminism no one in the reflexively anti-sexual United States had ever dared even whisper:

“Damn it,” Minkovski said, “we spend all these years fighting for the right to be sexy and now they're trying to take it away from us.”

To put that in a context more easily comprehensible to my fellow males, imagine living in a realm in which the erect penis is the ultimate symbol of evil – where we males are forced from puberty onward to cover ourselves from neck to knees in stiflingly hot barrel-like garments designed not just to minimize the physical form associated with our gender but to specifically hide any erection or even tendency toward arousal. Imagine too a zero-tolerance regime that metes out unspeakably harsh vengeance on anyone who dares violate the associated taboos: the chopping off one's hands as a punishment for masturbation; castration for any sexual expression beyond that required for breeding; the amputation of one's penis for homosexuality.

Inconceivable, no?

But that's precisely the sort of horrors by which women have been oppressed for centuries: burkas, genital mutilation, execution by fire and stoning. All intended – just as Minkovski implied – to terrify women into fleeing from their own sexuality.

Again, reproductive freedom – sexual freedom – as the wellspring of all other freedoms.

And the loss of reproductive freedom as the beginning of all other tyrannies.

Nor was it just an isolated Rush of Limp-boughed demagoguery against which Minkovsky so justifiably bristled. As the Southern Poverty Law Center's Arthur Goldwag reported, woman-hating has become a new men's movement: 

 

It's not much of a surprise that significant numbers of men in Western societies feel threatened by dramatic changes in their roles and that of the family in recent decades. Similar backlashes, after all, came in response to the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and other major societal revolutions. What is something of a shock is the verbal and physical violence of that reaction...Women are routinely maligned as sluts, gold-diggers, temptresses and worse; overly sympathetic men are dubbed "manginas"; and police and other officials are called their armed enablers...This kind of woman-hatred is increasingly visible in most Western societies, and it tends to be allied with other anti-modern emotions - opposition to same-sex marriage, to non-Christian immigration, to women in the workplace, and even, in some cases, to the advancement of African Americans.

For various reasons I did not discover this disturbing report on RSN until its (surprisingly brief) comment thread was already nearly three days old.

Had I come to it sooner, no doubt I'd have criticized how Goldwag underplays the connection between the New Misogyny, the alarming growth of Dominionist Christianity and the effectively limitless funding of the latter by the One Percent (see “At Last, Acknowledgement We're Being Herded into Christian Theocracy”). But my comments on another aspect of this aggressive thrust toward Bible-based tyranny had already been rejected by RSN, so I remained silent.

I likewise did not initially react to a disturbing memoir of what happens to homosexual males – or even to seemingly effeminate heterosexual males – under the dreadful sorts of economic and religious oppression that remains the norm throughout most of the Islamic world, was once the norm in the United States as well and now, by the greedy backlash-mandate of the One Percent, threatens to again become the norm here.

But in this case my silence bears no message. That's because I did not discover Abdellah Taia's “A Boy to Be Sacrificed” until maybe an hour ago. It was first published by The New York Times, then picked up by RSN:

In the Morocco of the 1980s, where homosexuality did not, of course, exist, I was an effeminate little boy, a boy to be sacrificed, a humiliated body who bore upon himself every hypocrisy, everything left unsaid. By the time I was 10, though no one spoke of it, I knew what happened to boys like me in our impoverished society; they were designated victims, to be used, with everyone's blessing, as easy sexual objects by frustrated men. And I knew that no one would save me - not even my parents, who surely loved me. For them too, I was shame, filth...How is a child who loves his parents, his many siblings, his working-class culture, his religion - Islam - how is he to survive this trauma? To be hurt and harassed because of something others saw in me - something in the way I moved my hands, my inflections. A way of walking, my carriage. An easy intimacy with women, my mother and my many sisters...The truth is, I don't know how I survived. All I have left is a taste for silence. And the dream, never to be realized, that someone would save me. Now I am 38 years old, and I can state without fanfare: no one saved me. 

Reading it over a working dinner – whole wheat bread, cheddar cheese, an apple and hot tea – I recognized its relevance not just here in this sequence of links (obviously another gift of that Muse named Synchronicity), but I saw too its meaning to me personally, long ago a boy who like Taia was damned as too effeminate and who therefore learned very early in childhood to prefer the physical, intellectual and emotional safety of female companionship (see “Dancer,” Part Two).

In adolescence I was slender, slight, belittled for having “wrists like a girl” and ridiculed for the diverse ineptitudes symptomatic of dyslexia, all characteristics that had made me a disappointment to my father, a hate-object to my stepmother and an instrument of secret, subversive revenge for my mother to employ against not just the man whose sperm fertilized her egg to produce me but against maleness in general, myself included. From age 14 onward I ruthlessly purged myself of any obviously “feminine” traits, and when Nature blessed me with the deep basso voice that is often the trademark of Blissian males, I seized it as the cornerstone on which to build myself a he-man facade even as I despaired at my powerlessness over skeletal structure and disability. My makeover effort was motivated entirely by fear, not of homosexuality (which never held any terrors for me), nor of rejection by my family (which I already accepted as irremediable), but merely of being targeted by the omnipresent schoolyard bullies: the unofficial junior Gestapo by which the United States indoctrinates its children in the social Darwinist methodology of capitalism.

Thinking of these matters tonight, my memories painfully inflamed by Taia's poignant text, I could not but wonder: might my life have been more fulfilling had I not – in fear of the bullies – relentlessly stripped myself of any effeminate trait over which I (presumably) had control? Had these discarded traits been, in my case, the defining characteristics of a homosexual? Might I now in old age be more contented had I been gay?

Had I somehow allowed myself to be terrorized into the ultimate betrayal – that of one's self?

Probably not; the few times I had sex with men, I found the encounters emotionally unfulfilling, merely variants on masturbation and therefore equally dispassionate. Those long-ago experiences – with two friends many years before the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome inflicted its regime of biological terror – were in decided contrast to the physical/intellectual/emotional joys of sex with women, pleasures all the more exquisite when they are naked-souled expressions of mutual love and desire.

But the point here is not my sexuality. The point is that we have progressed as a society far enough out of prudery and shame and all the other anti-sexual legacies of Abrahamic religion, I dare ask myself such a formerly forbidden question, and do so openly, in print.

Alyona Minkovski again, this time speaking for all of us, male, female or transsexual; straight, gay or bisexual: “We spend all these years fighting for the right to be sexy, and now they're trying to take it away from us.”

Hence in conclusion the relevance of JoAnn Wypijewski's “Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding”:

If there is an upside to the right's latest, seemingly loony and certainly grotesque multi-front assault on women, it is the clarion it sounds to humanists to take the high ground and ditch the anodyne talk of "a woman's right to choose" for the weightier, fundamental assertion of "a woman's right to be."

Published by The Nation, further disseminated by Truthout and linked in its totality here, it is a piece so complete there was nothing I could add via the comment thread. I offer it both in support of Minkovski's grievance and my own belated realization the denial of women's rights is the denial of all human rights as well.

What's at stake in this struggle is not only “a woman's right to be.” It is everyone's right to be. If the One Percent can take that right away from women, then they can take anything away from any of us.

 

*****

From Santorum the Sexophobe to Rickie the Racist

APART FROM MUSIC, I rarely post videos here in OAN because I long ago realized the mainstream media makes “television news” a contradiction in terms.

But this news video is uniquely informative. It shows Republican Presidential Hopeful Rick Santorum denouncing President Barack Obama as a “government nig...”

Last time I heard that sort of hate speech in public was when I infiltrated a Ku Klux Klan rally in East Tennessee. It was 1964, I was a reporter for a small but relatively fearless daily, and I was hoping Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton would utter some quotable trash-talk indicative of the Klan's festering hatefulness, as indeed he did.

The N-word, of course, was always the Klan's trademark pejorative.

Memo to the working press: Ask Santorum if he is now – or ever has been – a member of the Klan. If the answer is no, ask if he has volunteered to serve as a Kleagle, Klan-speak for recruiter. If the answer is again no, ask if he is a Klan fellow traveler, a Klan-symp. Then – no matter how Santorum answers – ask him if he realizes the Klan is as anti-Catholic as it is anti-Black.

 

(With thanks to Yayoi Winfrey for forwarding the video link.)

*****

Lying Democrats More Dangerous Than Fascist Republicans?

 

WHILE THE REPUBLICANS make no secret of their fascist agenda – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us – the Democrats hide behind humanitarian and often populist rhetoric even as they hurl us under the proverbial bus.

I encountered a glaring example of this bitter truth in recent monthly bills from Group Health Cooperative and CenturyLink.

Both confirm last year's rumors the Democrats were secretly appeasing the Republicans and the Ruling Class masters of both parties by sneaking through several seemingly minor tax increases and Medicare cutbacks aimed exclusively at lower-income people – this as additional tax cuts pamper the One Percent.

Which demonstrates the most disheartening reality of present-day U.S. politics: the elected Democrats who campaign on New Deal principles but, once in office, behave like Republicans, slapping ever increasing taxes on the poor and ever more completely exempting the rich from any taxation at all.

Worse, unless these betrayals are genuinely glaring – as in Obama 's reversal on repeal of the Bush tax cuts – they're typically covered up by an overly protective Ruling Class Media, then further shielded, depending on the affiliation of the perpetrator, by partisan media on the Left or Right.

For example, note how unreported stealth cutbacks to Medicare Extra Help subsidies hiked prescription drug copayments by four percent and raised Extra Help premiums by one percent, adding about $54 per year to my own Medicare outlays and proportionally afflicting every other Medicare Extra Help recipient.

Hardest hit are those with the largest annual prescription drug expense. The four percent copay hike adds only about $6 to my annual prescription drug bill, but those whose outlay was $2,400 in 2011 will see it rise $96 this year to a total of $2,496.

That's an increase of $8 per month, to $208 from $200 – devastating to someone struggling to survive on a severely limited income in a time of skyrocketing food, transport and medical costs. Translated into food, that's a monthly loss of four loaves of whole-wheat bread or about two pounds of lean ground beef.

Apropos shielding by partisan media, a spokesman for the the Medicare Rights Center – supposedly the prime defender of Medicare recipients – says MRC knows nothing about such increases, even implies they're not real. AARP – formerly the American Association of Retired Persons – meanwhile ignores the issue. No doubt every Medicare Extra Help recipient in the nation is as vexed by these fuck-you denials as by the fuck-you message of the increases themselves.

Meanwhile the regressive federal fees on my telephone and Internet bill went up $1.30 per month – another unpublicized hike in another flat-rate rate tax, which means it penalizes the poor even as it favors the rich.

As someone far wiser than I once observed, “the lesser of two evils is still evil.”

*****

Email Embargo against Outside Agitator's Notebook URL Finally Ends

MY THANKS TO THE Nurds at CenturyLink for (1) again acknowledging the reality of the embargo imposed on the URLs of Outside Agitator's Notebook and (2) finally – after almost seven weeks – lifting the blockage.

 

I don't know if it was my constant nagging in OAN print or my repeated complaints to CenturyLink or some combination of both that finally convinced whomever needed to be persuaded to toggle whatever needed to be switched, but something surely did the trick.

Let's hope the blockage doesn't happen again – not the least because CenturyLink's Internet is otherwise vastly superior to the relatively expensive but nevertheless bottom-tier service Comcast begrudgingly provides its non-business (i.e., less profitable) users.

 

LB/2 April 2012

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