Nightmare: Government Shutdown Reductio Ad Absurdum

“Premonitions”: a sandwich made of Hare Krishna dancers in Tompkins Square Patk and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in Central Park c. 1967, the moon added with my editor's punch in Seattle c. 1974. Tri-X, other data lost. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1976 and 2012. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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RECOGNIZABLY PROPHETIC DREAMS come to me very rarely, no more than a dozen times in all my 73 years, and thus far they have foretold only personal disasters, occurrences of no significance to anyone but myself or maybe a few other members of my relentlessly dysfunctional family. 

A few of these events were relatively minor vexations that at the time of their occurrence seemed bottomlessly horrific, like the vengefully inflicted delays by which my birthmother ensured I missed an end-of-summer passenger train and was fretfully tardy in returning to my academic-year residence in the home of my father and stepmother and even more anxious about my entrance to the bully-dominated jungle of a southern public high school – itself a profoundly disturbing transition after four years in the carefully regulated sanctuary of Roman Catholic parochial education. 

Some episodes in which my nightmares came true were a bit more problematical, like Vietnam-Era G.I. Bill education checks inexplicably delayed so long the resultant poverty nearly flung me into homelessness, which happened three times in 1971 and once in 1972. 

Another incident, of which I dreamed at least twice beforehand, was irremediably injurious: it was a Godzilla-versus-Bambi car crash at 4:30 p.m. on a rainy 23 September 1978, when one of Washington state's obscenely coddled habitually criminal drunken drivers slammed his huge 442 Oldsmobile into my tiny new Honda Civic and inflicted the spinal injuries that now in old age have reduced me to a cripple.

(For the record, “obscenely coddled” contains not one scintilla of hyperbole. The moral imbecile at the wheel of the monster Oldsmobile had been arrested 19 times on charges of driving while intoxicated, but the arrests were all dismissed or reduced to meaninglessness, a fit prelude to his 20th offense, when he crippled me, destroyed my little car and reportedly rang the Breathalyzer bell with a near-record blood-alcohol score of point-32. But the associated charges, which included assaulting an officer, also were thrown out, and this obviously well-connected Chug-a-Lug Charley continued his potentially deadly spree of defiantly dipsomaniacal motoring until only a few years ago, when terminal liver failure rather than a blind [drunk?] judiciary at last took him permanently off our streets and highways.) 

Nor could I have foreseen my encounter with this malicious sociopath clearly enough to avoid it. Unfortunately for my prospects as a professional seer, I never recognize my dreams as prophetic until they are confirmed by subsequent events. There are never any of those Biblical jazz angels whose trumpet riffs are alleged to signify prophecy; neither is there – as would surely be more appropriate in my case – a Celtic or perhaps Scythian priestess with Jecsa Hoop's  astonishingly evocative voice chanting of “Havoc in Heaven” or singing of a woman with “hair of fire and skin of snow” as if to warn me I am about to bear witness to my own future. 

Having duly acknowledged the relevant metaphysical handicaps, I will now try to write coherently of the dream that, five nights ago, scared me into palpitations of such intensity I thought for a moment I was having a heart attack. Then of course I remembered the Yoga by which I had held my deteriorating spinal injuries at bay for nearly three decades – that is, until the exercises themselves became impossibly painful – and there in my bed of post-frightmare cold-sweat nightfullness I soon managed to deep-breathe my pulse back to normal. 

Yet the content of the dream continues to haunt my waking hours, which tells me the only way I can exorcise its chilling grasp is by revealing it. Hence I describe it here as best as I can reconstruct its curious sequence of images, not because I suspect it might be prophetic – in fact I pray it is not – but rather because I hope full disclosure will be fully healing. 

I've also no doubt the dream expresses something of the awful anxiety the now undeniably total corruption of the U.S. political system and both its parties is inflicting on all of us – particularly on those of us who are dependent on the government for survival, as for example are all Social Security and Medicare recipients. We are afraid because we know cutbacks to these programs will literally kill us, and these days – given that the Republican and Democratic party labels are themselves Big Lies and that we are in fact ruled ever more despotically by one party of two names – our fears are rational, constant and mercilessly relentless.

Thus in this dream I am logically as I am now, old and crippled though still as journalistically capable as ever. But in its surrealism I am also again the investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal as I was in 1969 and 1970, when I scooped the world on the heroin-addiction epidemic inflicted on the U.S. by the Vietnam War, only to be robbed of proper credit for my greatest story ever by some back-shop patriot's vindictive removal of my byline and the resultant unrestrained glory-hogging by The New York Times the following morning. 

Jersey Journal Managing Editor August Lockwood has been dead since 1997, yet now in the dream he is again my boss. With his omnipresent corner-of-the-mouth cigar he looks exactly as he did when I was one of his star reporters, and just as he might have done in real life, he has assigned me to track down and interview a Jersey City man who supposedly knows the details of President Richard Nixon's plan to suspend the 1972 elections.

Perhaps significantly, this Nixon aspect is based on an obscure but damning truth. By Christmas 1969, a few Washington D.C. insiders were credibly claiming Nixon had commissioned the Rand Corporation to prepare the rationale for just such a coup, and their allegations were courageously exposed by the Newhouse News Service, another property of The JJ's parent corporation, which gives these parts of the dream even more logical cohesion.

But then as so often happens in dreamtime, the meaning of “now” shifts without warning or advance notice and it is suddenly 1 October 2013. I am still on assignment, still working for the resurrected Gus Lockwood, still at my battered oaken desk, still banging out my copy on a Royal Standard mechanical typewriter in The Journal's smoke-filled newsroom, and my reportorial thought process is still subconsciously punctuated by the suck-bang of the pneumatic tubes that carried copy to the composing room, but the Nixon story has morphed into an elaborate conspiracy by which the Democrats and Republicans and their Wall Street masters are scheming to end all pretense of constitutional governance. 

These politicians have gridlocked Congress behind a charade of controversy and shut down the government, and now they intend to hurl the nation into internationally ruinous default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. The stock market has plunged to an all-time low and the resultant chaos already includes breathtakingly violent rioting by desperate people who are condemned to death by the end of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and every other federal socioeconomic-assistance program. 

Meanwhile the same sources who had defied federal secrecy to reveal the Vietnam Era heroin-addiction scandal have returned from their own graves and retirement homes and are restored to the bodies they occupied in 1970, and now in my dream they are telling me the entire shutdown crisis is the deliberately scripted prelude to a military takeover intended to be at least as bloody as the 1973 Chilean murder-and-torture coup that was engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency to protect USian imperial business interests and capitalism in general. The military, these sources say, will impose the fascist dictatorship the One Percent has sought since the failure of the Bankers' Plot in 1934. And one source has finally squirreled away the top secret documents to prove it.

The purloined papers indicate the dreamland junta will immediately transfer power to a national board of directors chosen from the chief executives of the most profitable USian corporations. The formerly elected politicians whose deceptions facilitated the coup will be rewarded with lifetime appointments as local managers who carry out the board's decrees. The board's absolute and unchallengeable authority will be explained to the USian citizenry as vital to the defense of corporate personhood against angry parasites turned domestic terrorists – seniors, disabled people, welfare recipients, all the “takers not makers” officially despised in accordance with Ayn Rand doctrine.

"At last" – or so the nation's most expensive advertising campaign will announce as soon as the coup is complete – “we're running government as a business.” 

Now in the dream I recognize my story is shaping up to be one helluva fine exposé, and in the old days before the news monopolies turned USian journalism into Randite propaganda, I already know it would have earned me a sure Pulitzer. But it is still 2013; even in dreamtime  I must convince the presumably immortal Gus to defy the invisible censors if the scoop is ever to see the light of day. 

But when I gather my notes and unhook my cane from a slightly open desk drawer and lurch up from my swivel chair to go tell Gus what I've unearthed and plead the case for its full disclosure, The JJ's busy East Coast newsroom is suddenly an empty but familiar Pacific Northwest newspaper office with a torn and faded “Tired of the Same Old Shit” poster on its far wall, a defiant bit of Manhattan outrageousness the politically correct staffers of this particular publication would never have tolerated in actuality.  

What has happened is I've been dream-teleported into an abandoned and thoroughly trashed version of the ramshackle space in the faded-brick-and-crumbling-plaster, Klondike gold-rush-era building from which a self-consciously countrified but environmentally competent alternative journal called Northwest Passage was published in Bellingham's Fairhaven District during the height of the Back-to-the-Land Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I am utterly alone. There is no one else in this structure save the fearsomely malevolent ghosts I know are lurking in its darker corners and behind its closed doors and at the ends of its oppressively lightless corridors. I have been in this place during other dream odysseys and have learned from experience my magick is not strong enough to protect me from these ectoplasmic predators. 

In self-protective revulsion I hurredly limp outside, but now the entire physical environment has changed. The building is no longer a nightmare variant of the Good Earth Community Center, which was a countercultural meeting hall and a crash-pad for itinerant hippies as well as a food co-op and the editorial home of the Passage. Instead it has become the ominous remnant of a three-storey Georgian mansion amidst a Blair Witch Project forest, toxically gnarly versions of the deciduous trees common to New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, oak and ash and sycamore and willow, their branches stripped bare by winter, the overwhelming sense of desolation eerily intensified by occasional white pine or blue spruce grown uncomfortably like exclamation points of silent screams. 

Then beyond the ruin I see a river, thick and murky and steaming with pollution, and amidst the barren willows on its further bank is a squad of soldiers – present-day U.S. soldiers with their Darth Vader assault rifles and camouflage uniforms and Nazi-like helmets – and now the soldiers are shooting at me and their bullets are cracking past my head and smacking into the building and gouging the surrounding trees and I am fleeing, hobbling as fast as I can through damply matted piles of brown leaves and across cold slippery patches of dirty snow ever deeper into the forest and my arthritic knees hurt and now I am too old and too tired and too winded to go any further and my fear gives way to terrible sadness and I wake up gasping for breath and grateful to have been rescued by wakefulness from torture and death.

Thank Goddess or god or fate or karma or randomness or entropy or the divine self or whatever higher power you choose, it was only a nightmare. I hope.

LB/6 October 2014 

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Did 'Limits to Growth' Incite Capitalist Tyranny, Greed?

(Thanks to Mary Plante for help with this story's Internet research.)

Was the One Percent's ongoing frenzy of tyranny and greed triggered by a hitherto-unsuspected and possibly accidental perpetrator?

It's a whodunit that begins in 1970 with a Club of Rome research project conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the results of which were revealed two years later in The Limits to Growth. 

Controversial even before its publication, Limits is a 205-page exposé of our species' imprisonment in the expanding bubble of capitalism's demand for ever-increasing profit. It defines the present mode of capitalist “growth” as not just unsustainable but deadly. It offers several environmentally centered alternatives – each within a capitalist context – by which to achieve healthy, relatively egalitarian and above all sustainable human societies. It's conclusion is grim: if the bubble continues to swell, when it bursts – as eventually it must – life as we've known it will end forever.

But this prediction violates one of our nation's most rigidly enforced taboos; it confirms, albeit in apolitical terminology, a core truth of Marxian economics: that capitalism will eventually self-destruct, killing untold millions as it implodes. Capitalists and their hirelings in Ruling Class Media and academia thus predictably denounced Limits as “doomsday” negativity. Despite widespread rebuttals by environmentalists, the unusually toxic clamor of rejection eventually succeeded: the book was marginalized as lunatic-fringe prophecy, and the fickle public soon forgot its urgent message.

Now though it appears the trashing of Limits may have been an especially clever Big Lie. The One Percent may have clandestinely adopted its projections as the basis for their own long-range planning, then publicly attacked it to hide their true purpose and intent – a classic example of disinformation and misdirection. Here's the evidence:

The year following the start of the Limits project, Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote for his colleagues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the (formerly) super-secret Powell Memo, the Mein Kampf of modern capitalism.But what prompted the memo? Had Powell been alerted that Limits – despite its carefully phrasing – would give capitalism's opponents statistical confirmation of their arguments?

Soon afterward, no doubt as a reward for writing the memo, Powell was appointed by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court. There Powell laid the groundwork for corporate personhood,  the legal doctrine that has annulled our constitution, destroyed our representative democracy and reduced most of us to embittered subjects of an increasingly despotic plutocracy.

Less than two years after the Powell appointment, the newly re-elected Nixon issued his then-astounding declaration of war on the 99 Percent, vilifying us as spoiled, pampered ingrates, proclaiming his second-term policies would be designed to inflict maximum hardship on us all. Even William Randolph Hearst Jr., the interviewer, friend and political ally to whom Nixon disclosed his intent, said in print he was shocked by the President's outspoken harshness.

Not surprisingly, the historically damning text of the interview – Page One in every Hearst newspaper of the day (early 1973) – has seemingly been suppressed. My own clipping of the original article was lost, with all my files and most of my life's work, in the 1983 fire. My many efforts to obtain a replacement copy of Hearst's report – efforts that included letters to librarians at two of his newspapers – have been unsuccessful.

(Memo to the Working Press: a diligent investigative reporter with sufficient resources could probably find many more connections between the Limits project, the Powell Memo and Nixon's anti-99 Percent proclamation. A good starting point would be the MIT Trustees roster. Scan it for anyone who was amongst Powell's friends and associates and thus might have informed him of Limits and its anti-capitalist implications.  Bear in mind the lesson of the well-documented friendship between the arch-conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater and the genuinely liberal President John Fitzgerald Kennedy: that within the One Percent, political labels are ultimately meaningless – that One Percenters are united by their common Ruling Class economic interests far more than they are divided by the charades of partisan politics.)

Meanwhile consider what has been done to us since 1973. Capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and murderous poverty for everyone else – is now the defining reality of life in the United States. At the same time a growing body of evidence suggests the conclusions of Limits are frighteningly accurate. The bubble concept is proven beyond dispute: note the ongoing atrocities inflicted by the collapse of the housing market. That's a mere prelude – if Limits is correct – to the global disaster that looms.

Such a debacle, said to be only about 18 years away, would inflict unprecedented starvation, sickness and death – particularly in combination with terminal climate change.

Nevertheless even the newer Limits data has remained obscure, suppressed – as the original work eventually was – by a relentless, Powell-type deluge of antagonism. A recent sequel (The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update; Earthscan: 2004), is scarcely known outside academia. But now, as Common Dreams tells us, the projections of both the original Limits and its Update are reaffirmed by yet another study, this reported in the current issue of Smithsonian magazine. Perhaps Limits will at long last attain its deserved place as one of the most pivotal works in human history.

In any case the fact such studies continue – impossible without Ruling Class approval and financing – is still more evidence in support of a connection linking Limits and the Powell Memo to capitalism's methodical destruction of our quality of life. Indeed the environmentalist focus of Limits may itself be camouflage. Perhaps from the very beginning (and surely unbeknownst to its researchers and authors), its core purpose was that of an in-depth intelligence estimate, a detailed analysis of long-term threats to the One Percent's dominance. The likelihood of such a disguised purpose – the closely guarded secret of few executives and trustees – is underscored by MIT's extensive involvement with the U.S. military-industrial complex and the Club of Rome's relationship with the global monopolies.

Whether the book's urgent plea for environmental sanity expressed its authors' heartfelt intent or was merely eyewash, present-day conditions make it clear the One Percent chose long ago to reject the Limits alternatives and instead embraced the Ayn Rand option: business as usual, the 99 Percent and the world in which we live be damned. Capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – has become the planetary version of terminal cancer. What the Ruling Class is doing to us – the slaying of our American Dream and the termination of our American Experiment in constitutional democracy – is obviously far worse than just a proverbial rough spot on our national highway.

Contrary to the Big Lies disseminated by politicians and Ruling Class Media, the losses of our liberty and livelihood are not the temporary consequences of “war on terror” or “recession.” The associated restrictions are intended to last forever – and they probably will. Such is the real “change we can believe in”: the scheming that began with the Powell Memo, its purpose to ensure Ruling Class wealth and power survive – invariably at our expense, no matter the cost in death and suffering, no matter the magnitude of the impending environmental and economic disasters.

That's why – despite the fact we outnumber the oppressor 99 to 1 – our feeble efforts at resistance are already being crushed: witness the unprovoked attacks on the Occupy Movement. Despite our protests, those of us who are not useful as slaves will soon be cast into fatal impoverishment; the abandonment has already begun. This is the malevolent purpose that unites the downsizing of the economy, the destruction of the social-safety net, the attacks on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the war against women, the methodical elimination of our constitutional rights. The horrors of post-earthquake Haiti and post-Katrina New Orleans are previews of the misery to which the One Percent is condemning us.

Nor is the obviously genocidal intent of present-day capitalist policy anything new. Its 19th Century equivalent – disabled, sick or otherwise unprofitable slaves flung overboard during the mid-Atlantic passage – created a sea of death so genetically memorable it's even now infamous for its people-hungry sharks.

When we view today's United States in the context of the Powell Memo and the Limits project, we see a long-range cause-and-effect sequence that cannot be denied. We see too how we woefully underestimated the determination and Machiavellian cunning of the One Percent. We realize there will be no restoration of our constitutional rights, no economic recovery, no relief from debt slavery unless We the People – we the 99 Percent – mobilize in sufficient numbers to compel the necessary changes.

But the One Percent has already adopted a policy of brute-force attacks against nonviolent protesters. These tactics combine with the invincible terror-weapons in the Ruling Class arsenal of oppression to nearly eliminate our likelihood for success. Never in our species' history has such absolute power been possessed by so few. Peaceful resistance – already an expression of great courage – is fast becoming our sole opportunity to experience freedom.

(Copyright Loren Bliss 13 April 2012. Permission to reproduce is granted, conditional upon crediting the author and linking to Outside Agitator's Notebook.)

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