Tacoma: Microcosm of Capitalism and Class Struggle

Foggy night in Tacoma. Photo by KD, OAN copyright

2014. Click on image to view it full size.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/20 October-2 November 2014 

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Class Struggle: the Forbidden Secret of USian Savagery

SOMETIMES SEVERAL TOPICS mesh into a single essay, a process to which I alluded, though only en passant, as I was writing and assembling last week's OAN. But that meshing was slap-in-the-face obvious this week, as Internet reporting on governmentally sanctioned persecution by Christian theocrats at the U.S. Air Force Academy shared indicative synchronicity with five other topics. These were the release of some new data on the forcible impoverishment of the 99 Percent; the smashing of a unionization campaign in the de facto Christian theocracy of the South; the methodical falsification of U.S. history (specifically about the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon's treason and President Johnson's humanitarianism); the judicial approval of religious profiling by the ever-more-ubiquitous secret police, and a provocative review of poetry as a medium for speaking truth to power, which Reader Supported News thoughtfully picked up from The New Yorker.

What ties all these pieces together is the fact they are each – even the poetry review – about class struggle. Though we USians are conditioned to reject class struggle – even to deny its existence – its reality becomes obvious whenever you focus on the increasingly unapologetic, might-makes-right savagery of capitalism. That's because what is called capitalism is at its Ayn Rand core nothing more complex than infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever established. Its individual, clinical state is called moral imbecility or sociopathy. When it's metastasized from economic theory into a defining national philosophy, as it has in the United States, what you get is capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – another name for which is fascism. 

The class-struggle common denominator of these stories is provided by new economic-inequality data,  for which a tip of the green visor to an extremely useful email newsletter, PopularResistance.Org Daily Digest. The data, assembled by the Economic Policy Institute, show a key aspect of how we in the 99 Percent are methodically impoverished: “Between 1979 and 2007...the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 18.9 percent. Simultaneously, the average income of the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much—by 200.5 percent.” 

EPI then addresses the discrepancy state-by-state. The worst states – the realms of capitalism so malevolent the One Percenters allowed us no increase in average incomes – are Nevada, Wyoming, Michigan and Alaska. The 15 next worst, where the One Percenters made off with from half to 84 percent of all income growth between 1979 and 2007, are Arizona (where the richest of the rich grabbed 84.2 percent of all income growth); Oregon (81.8 percent); New Mexico (72.6 percent); Hawaii (70.9 percent); Florida (68.9 percent); New York (67.6 percent); Illinois (64.9 percent); Connecticut (63.9 percent); California (62.4 percent); Washington (59.1 percent); Texas (55.3 percent); Montana (55.2 percent); Utah (54.1 percent); South Carolina (54.0 percent); and West Virginia (53.3 percent). 

Another Popular Resistance dispatch – a photo essay on the homeless camps  that have become a signature presence in the USian woodlands – exemplifies the real-world consequences of the EPI data. (The suppression of these communities, which earlier generations knew as Hoovervilles, is amongst the primary reasons for the endemic closures of formerly public lands throughout the United States.) Ben Marcin's pictures of individual dwellings at these sites are well-composed, so much so they vividly portray the eerie, almost tangible sense of tragedy and banishment that haunts all such locales. Though that is part of the story's strength, I must nevertheless as a photographer and former photo editor fault the work for its failure to include the people who built and inhabited these wretched domiciles. But its publication in the same edition of PRODD as the EPI report is laudable – another wake-up call demanding we recognize the forbidden truth of class-struggle. 

Likewise the conclusion of the EPI report: “Policy choices and cultural forces have combined to put downward pressure on the wages and incomes of most Americans even as their productivity has risen...In the next decade, something must give. Either America must accept that the American Dream of widespread economic mobility is dead, or new policies must emerge that will begin to restore broadly shared prosperity.” 

Meanwhile the One Percenters' choice of alternatives – zero-tolerance fascism – is already obvious in the politicians' embrace of “austerity” at every level of USian governance, federal, state and local. Hence the class-struggle relevance that binds the following texts and comment-thread responses into a single OAN entry. 

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“How the Union Was Defeated at Volkswagen”  Kevin Drawbaugh and Nick Carey of Reuters byline an obviously-censored report that nevertheless manages to suggest the behind-the-scenes, beyond-the-workplace coordination that defeated the United Automobile Workers effort to unionize a Volkswagen plant in East Tennessee. The defeat is all the more revealing because VW's (German) management, which believes workers do have rights, welcomed the union's presence. But the wire-service dispatch, though detailed, says nothing about the anti-union fanaticism of the local white churches, to which I can attest because I lived in Tennessee for a miserable 13 years. Such theocratic malevolence is often enforced by the Ku Klux Klan – colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Hence my contribution to the comment thread: We on the Left need to “recognize the role Christianity plays -- Godzilla huge and King Kong strong -- in keeping the South anti-union. The so-called 'Prosperity Gospel,' which originated in the fundamentalist South but is now the doctrinal mainstay of Christianity throughout the USian homeland, holds that wealth and power are meted out by the Christians' god to reward godly men. An extension of the same doctrine decrees the manager is god's anointed representative in the workplace. Managerial right is thus divine right – the same entitlement formerly accorded kings. Thus too any disobedience is deadly sin -- and from this perspective, there is no greater sin than unionism. (Moreover) this is all part of 'a cultural/ideological war that extends far beyond the workplace.' It reaches into the bedroom via bans on abortion and birth control; into the schools via bans on teaching scientific truth; and into the military via the forcible Christianization imposed on the officer corps. It is nothing less than an organized campaign to replace the constitution with Biblical Law, the Christian equivalent of Sharia, and it has already conquered the federal government, for which see The Family: the Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power: (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008)” 

Ralph Nader's later, much more revealing report on how East Tennessee and Ayn Rand ideology defeated the UAW is here. But even Nader, a skilled and insightful researcher, missed the Caucasian pulpit-pounding that, sure as sunrise, hammered home the Christian  god's commandment “to put them uppety workers back in thar rightful place.” 

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“Judge Tosses Muslim Spying Suit Against NYPD, Blames Reporters”  Dan Froomkin of First Look reports in detail on a ruling by the U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., that voids the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom, blames the press for the associated controversy and grants USian secret police the right to monitor religious practices. Remembering how Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic judiciary cleared the way for Hitler, I supportively answer another poster on the story's comment thread by saying, “what is being done to us is infinitely worse than 'blow(s)' to our civil liberties. To understand the magnitude and objective of the One Percent's assault on the rule of law, and why the Democrats are as instrumental as the Republicans in subverting the Constitution, the best source is probably The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (William L. Shirer; Simon & Shuster: 1959). Apropos the total corruption of the U.S. judiciary, the parallels described in the section entitled 'Justice in the Third Reich,' pgs. 268-274 (1981 edition), are especially damning. 'The law was what (the Leader) said it was...with the power to do to death whomever he pleased.' Sound familiar? Welcome to the Fourth Reich.” 

I regret I did not comment on why the court decision is so personally disturbing: because I remember how the authorities in East Tennessee – including officials at the University of Tennessee – persecuted Unitarians during the 1950s, and how the First Amendment was ultimately our only defense. 

Now in the looming Christian theocracy of the USian Empire, I can easily envision the secret police whether local, state or federal again assigned to monitor the political conformity and even doctrinal orthodoxy not just of Muslims (as in the Newark case), but of all people – especially those in sects officially viewed as “suspicious,” as Unitarians were during the era of the postwar purges, as all non-Christians, agnostics, atheists and even non-fundamentalist Christians are today.

 

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“Lying to Survive at the Air Force Academy: An Open Letter to Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson”  Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation shares a letter he received that bitterly protests the Christian theocracy imposed upon the U.S. officer corps. I point out that “In the de facto Fourth Reich of today's USian Empire, the Christian church in its more savagely fundamentalist cults is becoming the equivalent of the Nazi Party in the Third Reich of Hitler's Germany...In which context recall the inscription around the swastikas on German military uniform belts: Gott Mit Uns -- 'god with us,' thereby granting Christian sanction even to the Holocaust.”

***

“Does Nixon's 'Treason' Boost LBJ's Legacy” Robert Parry of Consortium News reports on the oft-ignored fact President Nixon's treason prolonged the Vietnam War, adding at least 20,000 U.S. military people and perhaps a million Vietnamese men, women and children to the death toll. As a result, President Johnson's domestic humanitarianism is “overshadowed” to the point it is nearly forgotten. My answer notes what should be obvious: “Methodical censorship of historical facts that rehabilitate President Johnson's image is understandable when viewed from the perspective of class struggle. The benefits of LBJ's generosity toward the 99 Percent were very real. These included giant strides toward redefining USian health care and adequate transport as civil rights rather than privileges of wealth; equally significant steps toward ameliorating the socioeconomic disadvantages that keep lower-income peoples imprisoned in poverty; and, as a result, strong reinforcement of the New Deal/anti-Ayn-Rand notion of the United States as a genuine land of opportunity. Were LBJ to be historically rehabilitated, these aspects of his policies -- humanitarianism that is truly revolutionary in the context of the Ayn Rand fascism that rules the USian Empire today -- would be brought to the forefront.”

(Which is not, say again NOT, to  suggest LBJ's conspiratorial role in turning a little war into a big war -- and thereby handing his One Percent masters untold profits -- should ever be forgiven.) 

***

“Misremembering America's Wars, 2003-2053” Nick Turse of TomDispatch describes an ultra-high-tech 2053 in which government propaganda is the only so-called truth. He then uses this improbable fiction to legitimately criticize the Big Lie “history” of the USian Empire's wars now being disseminated by the military. While I applaud his critique, I am so vexed by its underlying PollyAnna notion of progress, I focus mostly on that: “Mr. Turse's high-tech 2053 will exist, if at all, only in the privileged quarters of the One Percent and its factotums, the politicians and bureaucrats whose job is to perpetuate capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total wretchedness for all the rest of us. The One Percenters and their enablers will live in guarded and gated compounds. As for us, think not of Star Trek but of Les Miserables; picture not houses and apartments but the sordidness and stench of slave pens and homeless camps...That will be the real 2053.” Another poster rejects the likelihood of slave pens; I say “slave pens -- specifically for-profit prisons -- are already a key part of the USian Empire's Ayn Rand economy.” 

(And this was before I had seen Marcin's photographs of homeless camps – which are so vivid you can almost smell them, exactly as I have smelled them in parts of the Cascade Mountains back country before it was closed to public access.) 

***

“Can Atrocity Be the Subject Matter of Poetry?” Robyn Creswell in The New Yorker reviews Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu, editors; W.W. Norton: 2014). 

Creswell gets the title wrong but raises compelling questions about the relationship between politics and art. As a socialist, I of course believe the two are inseparable, that what Robert Graves describes as “one story and one story only” cannot be told without reference to the elements of class-struggle that are evident even in our most ancient myths. But Creswell – a man of obvious Ruling Class privilege no doubt schooled in the capitalist dogmas that dismiss class struggle as delusion and proclaim art and politics to be like Kipling's East and West, “never the twain shall meet” – damns the anthology for its very democracy: “(t)he editors’ decision to include the voices of heroic liberalism...means there is too much verse that is, by all conventional criteria – vividness of language, ability to surprise, techniques of rhyme and rhythm – very bad.” His review -- despite its begrudging nod to editor Wu and many other critics of the socioeconomically exclusive, academically cloistered narcissism so much USian poetry has become since the 1960s -- is perhaps then an exposition of the selfsame exclusiveness. But that insight comes to me only now, after a much more careful reading. My original comment was written in delight at finding a poetry review – any poetry review – on RSN. My intent was mostly to thank RSN Founder/Editor Marc Ash for running it and to express my hope it represents another expansion of the site's already eclectically gratifying content. I also applauded a fellow comment-thread poster “for reminding us of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and 'Babiyy Yar,' which was later set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his wrenchingly powerful 13th Symphony, subtitled with same name in a slightly different spelling, Babi Yar." 

I cannot listen to Babi Yar without getting tears in my eyes, and I doubt anyone who is fully human can. It achieved enormous popularity in the allegedly brainwashed Soviet Union, but here in the allegedly free world of USian homeland, Babi Yar died in the oblivion of public indifference – one of the many reasons the Soviet citizenry often jeered us as nyekulturniy. Other great works, including virtually all of the formerly recognized occidental classics, have similarly perished. That's because the One Percent uses censorship as a weapon of class struggle. And censorship thus employed takes many forms. There is censorship by denunciation, as in Craswell's review. There is censorship by obscurity, imposed by the fact so many USians never lose the intellectual gag reflex with which our public schools condition us to reject art and literature, thus to ensure we carefully avoid the near occasion of enchantment by aesthetic agitators. There is censorship by price, as the anthology in question lists at $29.95, more than most of us in the 99 Percent can afford for anything beyond the necessities of our household budgets: food, clothing, transport, doctors, medicine, shelter. And now there's censorship by suppression (as against Edward Snowden or as implicitly demanded by the Federal District Court in Newark), plus of course censorship by the Big Lie, as in the falsified histories of the empire's wars. But let us not despair: our understanding of class struggle – in this instance the One Percent's escalating efforts to ensure we proletarians and peasants remain forever impoverished, powerless and ignorant –  now melds a plague of seemingly unrelated oppressions into a single, potentially revolutionary summation of grievances.

LB/23 February 2014 

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