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

Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zetkin's full text of the interview is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB: 1-7 February 2017

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Total Surveillance: Absolute Proof We the People Are Nothing More Than Lab Rats in a Capitalist Skinner Box

Another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, the woman's placard as apt now as in October 2011, when her smile reflected the joy and optimism that was all too soon crushed by USian governments at all levels. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013 (Click on image to view it full size.)

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(Note: Vital medical procedures consumed so much of my time during the past seven days, this essay is again unavoidably late, and I again apologize for my tardiness. But the news is good. Contrary to what was first suspected, my eyes are free of glaucoma. Moreover, the latest surgical techniques bypass unrelated conditions that would have prohibited cataract surgery. Thus my eyesight – and therefore my ability to photograph – can be surgically restored, for which I am grateful beyond words.)

 

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THE TOTAL-SURVEILLANCE STATE is undoubtedly the most terrifying governmental application of modern technology that has yet been revealed to us. Its terror exceeds that of thermonuclear weapons or nuclear melt-downs, which we can always convince ourselves will only be inflicted elsewhere upon others. Unlike The Bomb, which save in Hiroshima or Nagasaki has not yet been dropped, or the homicidal reactor, which – at least so far as we're allowed to know – has run amok only at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima – the total-surveillance state murders us all by killing our ability to think and speak freely. It thereby makes us less-than-human. In other words, it reverses evolution, reducing us to the mind-crushed state of slaves or prisoners. And as we grasp what it does to us in the context of the additional fear generated by organized assaults against specific groups and individuals  – women; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamp recipients; organized labor; members of the working press; photographers whether professional or amateur; any other social critics whose disclosures or protests dare expose the unapologetic savagery of the new paradigm of USian governance – it should already be provoking massive, nationwide anger. The very concept of what it meant to be “American” has not only been ruthlessly violated but maliciously abandoned, as if the government itself has officially torn down our flag, burned it, urinated on the ashes and stomped them into filth. Might there then soon be the same public outpouring of humanistic, patriotic rage as followed the sinking of the Lusitania, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the massacre of innocents symbolized by the numbers 9/11? Apparently not. The vast majority of the USian people are sullenly silent – and in all probability will remain so.

Yet what is inflicted upon us is not, of course, really a new paradigm of governance at all, and that – especially the associated guilt – may be one of the reasons we are thus far so submissive. To the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, to the subjects of the colonial empire the United States seized from Spain, sought to expand into Asiatic Russia  and imposed elsewhere including Africa and other parts of Asia, the sadism and brutality that now characterizes USian governance of its homeland is an old and ugly story. All that has changed is such imperial malevolence has now become the domestic policy of the dominant political parties (or, more correctly, the One Ruling Class Party of Two Names), which means it is now enforced by the entire federal government (especially by the secret-police apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security), as well as by all the state and local governments. But it has always been the policy of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department and the various other overseas extensions of the USian empire whether official (as in Vietnam), capitalist (as at Bhopal and Bangladesh) or mercenary  (as in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans). It also means we of the USian 99 Percent are now potentially no better off than the Iraqis or even the First Nations people our ancestors genocidally displaced – perhaps the true meaning of Barack Obama's “change we can believe in.”  The only difference is we have yet to suffer our own Trail of Tears,  our own Wounded Knee. But we can be certain of one thing: equal horrors – or probably events far more horrible – are looming, and they are not on a comfortably distant horizon, which means they will occur within many of our own lifetimes. For that is the hideous truth of the total-surveillance state: it has no other purpose  than to facilitate maximum zero-tolerance tyranny. And the fact we have not already taken to the streets in massive resistance suggests we have already been conditioned to the reflexive submissiveness required of a conquered people.

However there is one flame-bright exception to this dismaying acceptance of what seems ever more likely to be our unavoidable reduction to permanent serfdom and slavery: a growing number of USian women, whose liberation movements I once believed might at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles, are again rising up angry. More than any other force within the 99 Percent – certainly more than we males whose identities are occupational rather than biological and have therefore been hopelessly shattered by permanent unemployment – these women seem closest to recognizing that the United States has been cunningly turned into the human equivalent of a Skinner Box. Though they have yet to connect the proverbial dots, I have no doubt they will soon understand how the dramatic increase in oppression – the atrocities summarized above – exemplifies the new Ruling Class methodology of forceful behavior modification even as the all-seeing god's-eye of total-surveillance enables the overseers to monitor and refine their techniques with a speed and efficiency hitherto imagined only by villains of the same Ted Bundy arrogance that characterized Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet and let us not forget our own Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. In this repugnant context – especially given that history shows the grievances of women are often the hinge-issues in successful revolutions, the methodical assaults on women's hard-won sexual freedom – the avowedly misogynistic political efforts  and the growing epidemic of physical attacks combined with the institutionalized protection of the attackers  – reveal how the Ruling Class views the suppression of female independence as the key to the abolition of liberty and justice for all. Damning enough in its own right, the revelation is underscored by the associated treachery of the Obama Administration, typical Obama the Orator ploys of eloquently endorsing women's demands while Barack the Betrayer sneakily back-stabs  the very measures he falsely claims to support. The common denominator in all these outrages – just as the would-be victims themselves proclaim – is a concerted effort to force women and girls back into the de facto slavery demanded by patriarchy, explicitly by its Abrahamic religious offspring (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), implicitly by its economic fulfillment in capitalism's final transformation to fascism. Every time a woman is imprisoned by the (very rational) fear she will not only be raped but her assailant will be officially protected, the intended behavior modification has achieved its goal. Factor in the similar barriers and prohibitions inflicted on social critics, journalists, photographers, labor activists, anyone else of either gender who might be inclined to resist the blitzkrieg by which Ayn Rand fascism is conquering the United States, and our portrait of a nation ruled like a Skinnerian rat-maze is complete and undeniable. B. F. Skinner himself stated in 1972 what is obviously the key precept of USian governance today: "The issue is to improve the way in which (humanity) is controlled." To which women are responding with increasingly public defiance.  The question, of course, is what they will do when the state confronts them with the same combination of economic retaliation bolstered by truncheon-and-pepper-gas barbarism that has already hammered us men into submission.

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Nevertheless it is by viewing the war against women as a carefully scripted campaign of behavior-modification we gain our most sharply focused picture of capitalism's thrust toward Christian theocracy as its primary modality for controlling the USian 99 Percent. But the Left is as powerless as the Right to combat it. The secular and/or libertarian Right is of course nullified by the fact the imposition of theocracy is a major objective of the Right's capitalist financiers. The Left however is paralyzed by its own insistence on political “correctness,” in this instance its refusal to recognize Islam's history of imposing its own brand of theocracy – including the most virulent forms of misogyny characteristic of human societies today – wherever it ascends to power. To denounce theocracy is therefore – at least obliquely – to denounce Islam, something the doctrinaire Left and even the pseudo-Left cannot bear to do. Though it is something of an aside, no doubt the associated taboos explain why Socialist Worker refused to publish the following letter, my response to its (above-linked) report on how President Obama backstabbed women even on the hitherto (seemingly) long-settled issue of access to contraception: 

While Ms. Schulte's reporting on how President Obama enabled the Religious Right to gain the tactical and strategic high ground in the reproductive-rights struggle is the best such work I have seen anywhere, it nevertheless omits a vital fact: the extent to which (even) Democratic Party politicians are (clandestinely) committed to the imposition of Christian theocracy on the United States.

 

Though it is fashionable for socialists of all sorts to underestimate the importance of Christianity (and Abrahamic religion generally) in USian life, a majority of at least 63 percent of the U.S. population is already fundamentalist as defined by belief in the Bible as "literally true" (see http://legacy.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Bible.htm), which itself indicates a looming danger to secular governance. Combine that with capitalism's historical preference for zero-tolerance theocracy as the most efficient means of ensuring a submissive, slave-minded Working Class, and the probable motive behind Obama's serial betrayals of reproductive freedom come into sharp and terrifying focus.

 

As for documentation of the Democrats' clandestine role in the imposition of theocracy, one source is especially useful. This is Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, (HarperCollins: 2008), which exposes Hillary Clinton's behind-the-scenes collaboration with Sam Brownback "for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it" (pg. 275). The same sort of "tunneling" is precisely what was accomplished by the Obama “compromise” that added to the USian definition of religious liberty the alleged “right” of believers to impose their doctrines on non-believers, as for example in the case of Christian pharmacists who arbitrarily deny contraception to unmarried women. Given the president's oft-demonstrated Machiavellian skill, this staggering blow to church-state separation is clearly no accident.

 

Another excellent albeit more generalized book on the threat of theocracy is Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Simon & Schuster: 2006). But in most of the United States, the danger is already reality. The Bible Belt South has been a de facto theocracy since the Civil War: note the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan – “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” – which denotes its function as a Christian equivalent of the lslamic Morality Police. And – as proven by worsening restrictions on contraception and the near-total destruction of abortion facilities – the remainder of the midlands are not far behind. It is a risk we ignore at our own huge peril – a dire hazard that indeed we have already ignored far too long.

 

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It is perhaps worthwhile to note at this point that beyond history's seemingly endless series of isms, there are only two alternative forms of human governance. One alternative is tyranny: rule by a dictator, or dictators, whether overt (as in Nazi Germany or the theocracy of Iran), or from behind various pseudo-democratic facades (as in today's United States). The other alternative is liberty – the never-fully realized theory embodied in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.” During my elementary-school days, 1946 through 1951, all third graders not only learned to recite the Preamble from memory, but to give simple examples of its meaning, a requirement long ago repealed as dangerous to capitalism and deleterious to its objectives. But the Preamble is not as unique as we USians were typically taught, back in those halcyon days when fledgling minds were still entrusted with libertarian ideals. Similar sentiments are expressed somewhat more bluntly in the concluding lines of The Communist Manifesto: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite!” Thus the greatest fear of the USian Ruling Class has always been that Communism (or some other form of socialism) would prevail here – a perfect fit with the purposes and principles of “we the people” as elicited by the Preamble and the Constitution itself. But in the Skinner Box United States, monitored as it is by total surveillance, all such potential is obliterated forever. 

The limitless tyranny of the total-surveillance state is, perhaps ironically, the final result of the so-called “revolution” brought about by computers, which have given the global Ruling Class the godlike omnipotence it has consciously sought for at least two thousand years. The computer is thus irrefutable proof of the One Percent's defining purpose – the unspeakable lust for the zero-tolerance subjugation and total enslavement of all the rest of us, which it is now after 20 centuries of effort achieving via technologies against which there is no effective defense save re-adoption of seemingly obsolete machinery.  Meanwhile the popularization of the computer is the result of the most elaborate snake-oil scam in human history. It and its offshoots are peddled to the public as the apex of modern necessity even as society is methodically restructured to make all such gadgets essential – and damn those who cannot afford to keep up. Yet all the while, and from the very beginning, the profits so amassed are focused on perfecting the computer as the ultimate weapon of oppression. Nor could this story have ended in any other way; the computer as we know it grew not from humanitarian objectives but from the profiteering instincts of the capitalists  and the deadly necessities of modern warfare.  Indeed the computer and the manner in which it was thrust upon us is an object lesson in pure capitalism – the moral imbecility of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, and therefore the closest approximation to absolute Evil our species has yet evoked. The computer, given its vital role in creation of the global slave state, is perhaps capitalism's most definitive product. It is surely capitalism's most pivotal tool. For without the computer, the Ruling Class would never have been able to shrink all human society to a Skinner Box, with ourselves reduced to nothing more than laboratory rats in the One Percent's frantic, apocalypse-driven quest for wealth and power. 

LB/13-14 July 2013 

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Microcosm: War on Women and Constitutional Rights

To view the graphic associated with this report, go to my blog on TypePad. Blogger's software will not allow it to be uploaded. My apology for the inconvenience. 

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THE BATTLE FOR a seat in the bicameral Washington state legislature provides a unique and troubling picture – a portrait relevant to readers everywhere – of the lengths to which religious conservatives will go to wage war against women, homosexuals and progressive modes of governance.

 

Superficially, the fight is a heated clash between between six-term-incumbent Rep. Jeannie Darneille and political upstart John Connelly over who will be Tacoma's next state senator. But most of the heat comes from Connelly, who is attacking Darneille with a campaign that is notable both for its million-dollar budget and its use of smear tactics so outrageous they are condemned even by some of Connelly's former colleagues.

 

What is at stake is whether the (mostly) Republican forces of misogyny and sexual oppression can hide behind a Democratic label to capture or paralyze the Legislature in a state that has long been considered progressive – so much so a Roosevelt Administration official once sarcastically labeled it “the Soviet of Washington.” 

Darneille, a Democrat who typifies the state's progressive element, has proven herself a fierce defender of female reproductive freedom and women's rights in general. A modern personification of the traditional New Deal humanitarian, she is a dependable protector of the social safety net and an impassioned proponent of universal health care. She also advocates granting marriage equality and all other forms of anti-discrimination protection to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals. 

Connelly, who goes by the Kennedy-esque nickname “Jack,” is a successful trial lawyer who lacks legislative experience. Though he claims the Democratic Party label,  he has publicly acknowledged he's against abortion even in cases of rape or incest, that he opposes granting LGBT people the right to marry and that he's “undecided” on whether sexual minorities deserve any other civil rights protections. Connelly also boasts of leadership roles in two arch-conservative Catholic organization, the Knights of Columbus and a notoriously anti-LGBT Tacoma parish. 

His law firm, Connelly Law Offices, is listed as an “ultrasonic champion” of 4US, an anti-abortion organization that describes itself as a primary donor of ultrasound machines to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers.” Reproductive-rights advocates condemn these clinics for disseminating false or deceptive information intended to bully abortion-seekers into carrying their fetuses to term no matter how unwanted the birth or ruinous its consequences. But 4US defends deliberate deception – a tactic curiously parallel to Connelly's claim of Democratic Party values – as essential to its mission.  “A pregnant woman in crisis sees her baby for the first time on an ultrasound machine,” the 4US website explains, and 96 percent of those mothers “will bring a baby into the world.”

Significantly, the Knights of Columbus is another 4US “ultrasonic champion.”

And Wal-Mart – perhaps the most relentlessly anti-union corporation on the planet – is listed as a 4US “sonic champion.”

Connelly thus has demonstrable ties – each one revealed by credible material readily available on the Internet – not only to the forces of the Christian Right and its wars against women and homosexuals but to Ayn Rand capitalism and its war against American workers.

Each of these associations is equally damning. But the Knights connection is clearly the more threatening for women and LGBT people. Through his local Knights trusteeship,  Connelly has significant connections to the outspoken homophobe Rick Santorum, and through Santorum to the mysterious Opus Dei organization.  Also via the Knights, Connelly is associated with the ecumenically homophobic National Organization for Marriage;  with the vindictively fundamentalist Focus on the Family; likewise with the notably homophobic Church of Latter Day Saints; and – once again – with Opus Dei.

Any notion Knights opinion in Washington state might be less intolerant than elsewhere is refuted by the website material linked above: note how it commands members to “avoid supporting evil acts...reject Referendum 74.”

Despite the fact Connelly shares the zero-tolerance position of Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan on abortion; despite Connelly's use of Republican campaign tactics; despite the undeniable role of the above-listed organizations in converting the Republicans into fundamentalist storm troops – despite all these  facts, definitive evidence Connelly is a deep-cover agent of the Republican Party itself remained elusive.

 

Nevertheless Connelly's anti-woman, anti-LGBT positions transform his oft-brandished history of anti-government lawsuits into a powerful appeal to the district's conservative minority. So does the subtly Teabagger-tainted rhetoric sometimes encountered on his website, as in the “Final Thoughts” section of his “Issues” page.  “The District needs more than a straight line party voter who has very little real experience in the private sector.”

Connelly is attacking on so broad a front he is now attempting to discredit even Darneille's professional background. (Washington's Legislature, though always a full-time occupation when in session, is ultimately a part-time job, which means its members necessarily pursue non-legislative careers.) Contrary to Connelly's innuendo, Darneille's career is indeed in “the private sector,” specifically in the successful management of nonprofit human-service agencies.

Though Darneille trounced Connelly in the Democratic primary by 59-40 percent, he refused to concede. Allowed by quirky Washington state law to again oppose Darneille in the general election (6 November 2012), he soon began deluging 27th District voters with anti-Darneille attack ads, their negative content quickly emerging as a campaign issue in its own right.

The advertisements and flyers with which Connelly is flooding the district's airwaves and mailboxes denounce Darneille as “against public safety,” a tactic that prompted immediate condemnation from Democrat Bill Baarsma, a former Tacoma mayor. In a letter published by The News Tribune, the McClatchy-owned local daily, Baarsma implicitly called Connelly a liar:

“I thought I had seen it all during my many years involved in local politics, but trial lawyer Jack Connelly’s desperate, over-the-top, self-funded...campaign for state Senate sets a new standard. He is now running televised attack ads against his opponent, state Rep. Jeannie Darneille, suggesting she was in some way complicit in two horrific criminal acts committed years before she was elected to the Legislature.”

“In point of fact,” Baarsma continued, “Darneille has the sole endorsement of those people who have to fight crime each and every day – local police (Tacoma Police Union 6 and the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs) and the state patrol (Washington State Troopers Association).”

Sen. Debbie Regala, who has endorsed Darneille as her replacement, joins Baarsma in decrying Connelly's smear tactics. “He has resorted to...innuendo, distortions and manipulations of the facts to imply Darneille is not concerned about public safety. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Many local Democrats wonder why Connelly is waging such a desperate fight for a state senate seat. More to the point, they are perplexed by the record-breaking sums of money – Connelly claims it is all his own – he is lavishing on his campaign. 
 

To put Connelly's unprecedented outlay in perspective, a Washington State Public Disclosure Commission spokesperson says each Democratic legislative candidate spent an average of $124,170 in 2010. According to Connelly's own reports to PDC, to date he has already spent $783,634.34 – 6.1 times that 2010 statewide norm.

What could motivate such extravagance?

“I've wracked my brain trying to figure out what his game is,” said one longtime Democratic activist. “The only thing I can think of is he hopes the campaign will benefit his law practice.”

Connelly's connections with conservative Christianity and his unapologetic use of classic Republican smear tactics may therefore be the most indicative evidence of his intentions. Perhaps a broader explanation may be found within the warning published three years ago in several progressive media outlets, that Christian fundamentalists – having successfully infiltrated the Republican party, purged it of liberals and turned it into an army of religious fanatics – are attempting to take over the Democratic Party the same way they captured the GOP.

And “fanatical” is an accurate description of Connelly's astounding campaign expenditures, which – backed by a PDC-reported $1.07 million war chest – provide a grim picture of his capabilities. 

“Once upon a time, though it may seem strange to think of it...the Republican Party was moderately progressive,” wrote Bruce Wilson of the Talk to Action website. “So there's no reason Democrats can't become populist theocrats, especially if they are willing to jettison core principles such as support for secular government and minority rights...Along a wide range of fronts, the American religious right has been infiltrating, influencing, befuddling, and neutralizing the Democratic Party and the American left.”

Similar disclosures, all relevant given Connelly's opposition to homosexuality and female reproductive freedom, are the subject of several recent books by widely recognized authors. These works include American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges; Simon & Schuster: 2006); American Theocracy (Kevin Phillips; Viking Press: 2006); and The Family subtitled The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet; Harper Collins 2008). Each warns of an extended campaign by Protestant and Catholic zealots, all lavishly financed by Big Business, to replace constitutional governance with zero-tolerance biblical law, the Christian counterpart of Islam's Sharia.

The campaign to impose Christian theocracy on the United States is thus proven to be terrifyingly real.  The present-day war against women – in truth a war against human sexuality in every form – is merely its most visible manifestation, whether in Tacoma or elsewhere.

Another index to the theocratic threat is a 2005 Rasmussen poll that reveals 63 percent of the U.S. population believes the Bible “is literally true,” that it is the incontestable word of god. The core belief of Christian fundamentalism whether Catholic or Protestant, this is the doctrine that fuels the burgeoning threat of theocracy.

The Manhattan Declaration,  effectively a fatwa of Christian jihad against secular society, confirms the magnitude of the theocratic threat, both by its number of signatories and by its text:

“We, as Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical Christians...act together in obedience to the one true —God...especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn...are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.”

Its concluding lines are especially revealing:

“(W)e will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.”

Many civil libertarians fear the only way the Manhattan Declaration's signers can achieve their ends is by abolishing constitutional democracy, imposing biblical law, disempowering women and outlawing sexual minorities.

In its most extreme form, the U.S. theocracy movement “is well known for its proposals that alleged sinners, including homosexuals and rebellious teenagers, be put to death by stoning,” notes Talk to Action's Wilson.

Connelly, like his Christian conservative associates, is already redefining religious liberty in accordance with Manhattan Declaration principles. No longer is freedom of religion the separation of church and state or the freedom from persecution guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Now it is the Ryan/Santorum definition: the alleged freedom of religious extremists to discriminate against those with whom they disagree.

In this context, Connelly's “Issues” statement, linked above, is especially revealing. It describes contraception as “an area where increasing respect for differences of opinion and beliefs is necessary and desirable.” Which begs the question whether Connelly believes an anti-contraception pharmacist has the right to nullify women's reproductive freedom by withholding birth control – even if that pharmacy is the only accessible source.

His conservative stance on other matters of women's rights, LGBT equality and human sexuality in general proves him to be radically out-of-step with much of the state's progressive history.

Meanwhile the Republicans – here (as everywhere else in the U.S.), the party of Ayn Rand economics mated with the Christian drive toward biblical theocracy – say they believe the Legislature is theirs for the taking.  And if they win the governor's mansion as well – at this writing Democrat Jay Inslee has only a narrow lead over Republican Rob McKenna –  Washington would almost certainly go the way of Wisconsin, where Scott Walker's anti-labor victories in 2010 and in this year's failed recall vote also imposed a maliciously anti-woman, anti-homosexual coup.  

It's the Wisconsin example that makes the possibility of a Connelly victory so frightening to so many real Democrats. Given Connelly's anti-woman, anti-LGBT views and his membership in misogynistic and homophobic organizations, Darneille supporters rationally fear he would vote with the Republicans in any legislative assault against reproductive freedom or any attack against the other hard-won liberties of women and sexual minorities.

Connelly tries to give the impression he would respect all such rights: “Jack does not believe that anybody should be discriminated agains,” the “Issues” section of his website states. “No one wants to see a teenage girl drop out of school and face a lifetime of poverty because she became pregnant. Nor should she feel compelled to suffer the pain and anguish of a termination where this can be prevented.”

An unknown factor in the senatorial election is Referendum 74, which seeks voter endorsement of a gay marriage bill passed by the Legislature and signed by the Democratic governor earlier this year. The referendum's presence on the ballot promises an unprecedented turnout from progressives and religious conservatives alike. The former clearly dominate the 27th District. But the latter are under unprecedented pulpit-pressure to vote against the measure. What this might mean in terms of Connelly's election prospects remains unknown.

There's also the fact Darneille has only slightly more than $233 thousand in her total campaign budget, small change compared to Connelly's million plus. Darneille has not made an issue of it, but the inequality between the two candidates is a perfect microcosm of the socioeconomic chasm that defines the present-day United States.

Though such a lopsided fight usually ends in victory for the wealthier contender, a poll conducted in June by a Seattle-based political consulting firm indicated the 27th District's voters are a solid 64.6 percent in favor of women's reproductive rights. With the general election already underway – these days Washington casts its ballots by mail – Darneille and her supporters are counting on pro-choice voters for the numbers they need to triumph over Connelly's lies, distortions and money. 

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(My thanks to Pat Fletcher for her graphics skills and for helping edit this text.)

 

LB/10-21 October 2012

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