Moron Nation Rules (with Robert Reich's Help); Millennials Suffer Worsening Poverty; Revolutionary Fervor of Staffers Aids Sanders Campaign

Men of Tacoma Clinic Defense on guard. Another image is here. Photo by Loren Bliss © 2016. (Click on image to view it full size.)

*

THERE ARE THREE separate stories in this week's edition of OAN – four if you count the all-man Tacoma Clinic Defense photo I'm publishing as a clarification to whatever misleading impressions might have resulted from last week's TCD picture that showed only one man and four women. These facts alone are scarcely preface-worthy, but one of the other stories – the lead story in fact – has proven so damnably difficult to write, it demands an introduction.

Though I hate to begin an essay by recitation of all the reasons it is badly written, in this instance its disclosures are important enough I am willing to endure the mortification of yet another public confrontation with the utter (and utterly contradictory) absurdity implicit in the term “dyslexic writer.” 

Years ago, probably in 1969, when I began the first draft of what became the epic but doomed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” the 24-year odyssey of photography, research and writing that in 1983 was disseminated not via libraries and bookstores but rather as a cloud of windblown ash emanating from a smoldering ruin near the rural Washington state town of Alger, I encountered for the first time the challenge of textually addressing several new ideas at once.

The new ideas in “Dancer” – remember this was 1969, before feminist researchers had rescued the now somewhat more widely recognized evidence of our species' matrifocal (if not definitively matriarchal) past – were its hypothesis (that the Counterculture was the first wave of a spontaneous revolution against patriarchy), plus all the long-suppressed (and thus hopelessly obscure) material from folklore and mythology upon which that hypothesis was based.

Hence, if my conclusion was to make any sense, I had to first educate my readers. How, then – given that no paragraph should ever contain more than one new idea – would I write the book's opening?

It was, in fact, a problem to which I never found a satisfactory solution. It is also among the reasons I was so overjoyed when, in 1983, the late Cicely Nichols volunteered to edit the manuscript. Surely Cicely, a long-time friend whose credits included the editorship of Grove Press, would be able to cleave through the dyslexic frenzy of verbal convulsions – imagine, if you will, the conceptual equivalent of trying to wrestle hands-full of wet spaghetti into a stable rectilinear form – that always, always, always was the exasperating culmination of my efforts to write a satisfactory beginning to “Dancer.”

After the destruction of “Dancer” in Washington state – by a blaze that was started on the same day (1 September 1983) and indeed at the exact moment Cicely and I were meeting in Manhattan (7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time; 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time [which we know from the partially melted electric clock at the fire's point of origin] ) – I had assumed all such tasks were forever behind me.

But now, with this piece revealing Robert Reich's malicious and perhaps even gleeful participation in the making of Moron Nation, I am confronted with exactly the same editorial dynamic. The real story is Reich's breathtaking dishonesty. But to show its significance, I must first demonstrate the existence of Moron Nation, a condition our One Percent masters do their best to conceal. Yet if my initial focus is on Moron Nation, Reich's treachery is reduced to a kind of sequel – buried so deeply in the prefatory text it can readily be ignored. And if I focus first on Reich's professorial malfeasance, the reaction is likely to be “so what”? That's why writing this essay has already generated three top-to-bottom rewrites and consumed more than 36 hours.

Because I have decided that first exemplifying Moron Nation and only then describing Reich's role in it is the best way to approach this story – actually the better of two unsatisfactory choices – I beseech your patience. Thank you.

*** *** ***

“OBVIOUSLY – AND TRAGICALLY for our homeland and the world beyond – Moron Nation extends as deeply into the Left as it does into the Right”: so I wrote on the comment thread of a Politico report as republished by Reader Supported News.

Headlined “Would Sri Srinivasan Be Exxon-Mobile's Justice?,” the report discloses the plutocratic bias of the man who is emerging as President Obama's most likely choice to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of the notoriously reactionary Justice Antonin Scalia.

To put the associated debate in its proper context, here is the rest of my contribution to the “Srinivasan/ Exxon-Mobile” thread:

Given Obama's Barack-the-Betrayer record, the one certainty in this matter is that he will appoint a supporter of Citizens United. 

Indeed, the perpetuation of Citizens United is no doubt now the primary mandate of his One Percent masters.

Hence a defender of the petroleum cartel – who by his defense has proven himself an advocate of what might be termed “divine right capitalism” – is not an unlikely choice.

As I have said before, this appointment will reveal the real Obama – the Goldwater conservative who hid himself behind a Big Lie of fake “progressive” promises – which means whomever he picks will be acceptable to the Republicans with whom he clandestinely collaborates.

A while later, after my comment was repeatedly down-thumbed via RSN's equivalent of readership voting, I added the following:

Once again I am appalled by the fanatical closed-mindedness of those who remain in denial about who and what Obama is and how he conned us by his unprecedented use of the Big Lie.

Indeed it is worse than denial. It is, in fact, as clinically delusional as any of the absurd beliefs that characterize Abrahamic fundamentalism whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim...

Moreover, note that Obama's behavior apropos the Supreme Court vacancy is exactly as, on 14-15 February, I predicted it would be.

See here  (scroll down), also here.

For reasons their content will make obvious, my remarks accessed via the first of these two links deserves reprinting here in full:

Several hours ago I discovered my main comment, which pointed out that based on Obama's neo-liberal, anti-New-Deal record he is likely to appoint a Scalia clone, had been removed from this thread. Likewise the accompanying remarks by several supportive posters.

At first this was, of course, profoundly disturbing. The main reason I cherish RSN is its editorial freedom, which literally has no equal at any other Leftist website in the United States. Hence I have been a regular participant in RSN discussions since its founding. I also covered Occupy Tacoma for RSN, relying on the skills acquired during a journalism career that spans nearly seven decades (1956 to the present) to provide RSN with relevant photographs and text.

Initially I was hurt, disappointed and outraged. But after an extensive exchange of e-mails with Editor/Founder Marc Ash, I am convinced the disappearance of my posts – from here and from the thread of an expose' revealing the gross dishonesty of the Clinton campaign – was the result of unfortunate circumstances that are not likely to recur. Indeed, I have Mr. Ash's assurance the posts will be restored later today.

Hence my gratitude, both for Mr. Ash's responsiveness and for the reassurance RSN remains what it has always been – an exemplar, perhaps our very best, of that most precious freedom (allegedly) assured us by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Next is what I posted after the circumstances were somewhat more clarified:

Unfortunately not just the post in question (see my "Several hours ago," above) but the entire related (and mostly supportive) dialogue it engendered was irremediably deleted.

Though Editor Marc Ash and I differ on the source of the deletion – he says he regards it as accidental, while I regard the attendant manipulations of time signatures and the simultaneous deletion of a related post on another thread as incontrovertible proof the perpetrator is a Hilleryite infiltrator acting with maximum malice – Mr. Ash has nevertheless asked me to reconstruct and summarize the entire dialogue.

This requires two separate posts, as the suppressed material included at least a half dozen posts.

My comment was prompted by speculation on what sort of Supreme Court nominee Obama might submit given the mandates of his Ruling Class masters, his legacy quest, his neo-liberal ideology and his need for senatorial approval. I pointed out the only path to an accurate answer is analysis of his record, which in bitter truth defines Obama as a Goldwater Republican who won election under two false flags: that of the Democratic Party, and that of the progressive consciousness gullible voters – myself included – foolishly assumed to be universal amongst the USian Empire's oppressed minorities.

Hence I summarized how Obama the Orator mobilized voter support with the Big Lie of “change we can believe in” but promptly shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer.

Then as Barack the Betrayer he cut food stamps $90 per family/per month, asserting – like some latter-day Josef Goebbels – the resultant starvation budgets will protect children from hunger; he dealt the final death blow to organized labor by sandbagging the Employee Free Choice Act; he permanently betrayed health care reform to forever define U.S. health care as a privilege of wealth rather than the human right it is in the civilized world; he openly collaborated with implicitly genocidal efforts to cut and/or privatize Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all other elements of the already inadequate socioeconomic safety net; and he not only broke his pledge to restore our constitutional rights but by his unprecedented whistle-blower persecutions and other brazen depredations has defined himself more of a tyrant than even Nixon.

Moreover, if one examines the nature of the present-day U.S., it becomes obvious that – just as its ideological founding fathers are the Nazi war criminals the Ruling Class embraced after World War II – so is the Citizens United decision the judicial cornerstone of the resultant (implicitly fascist) plutocracy.

Ergo, it is obvious Obama's One Percent masters will demand he give them a Supreme Court that does not even obliquely jeopardize Citizens United.

In other words, Obama's most likely course of action is to appoint a Scalia clone.

***

MORE DISMAYING EVIDENCE of Moron Nation's disabled political consciousness lies in how few people seem able to grasp the simple, obvious-as-sunrise fact the Mainstream Media is owned by the same One Percenters who own most U.S. politicians and therefore own all U.S. governments at every level.

That explains why these governments whether local, state or federal, most politicians and the Mainstream Media itself all speak with the same voices, as for example in the national pep rallies that preceded the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Syria. It also explains the lavish coverage of Trump or Hillary, the methodical suppression of news about Sanders and the malicious slanders of the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter.

But how many times must this be stated before it soaks in? Has the U.S. citizenry been utterly purged of the ability to reason? As I have said so many times before, and said again on the comment thread of John Nichols' thought-provoking analysis of “How We Got Trumped by the Media” after it was republished by RSN from The Nation:

...Mainstream Media is the first for-profit, totally and forever privatized, all-government ministry of propaganda.

That means its endorsements, whether outright or obliquely (as by its apportionment of coverage), always reflect our overlords' intentions.

Ergo, it is obvious the One Percent has chosen Trump as its primary figurehead and Hillary as the alternate should Trump lose.

Nor should this surprise anyone who knows the history of USian fascism. It began with the failed Bankers Plot of 1934; bolstered itself by the post-World-War-II embrace of Nazi war criminals; eliminated its enemies via the purges and/or assassinations of all leading Leftists and liberals (Communists, socialists, Keynesians, intellectuals) during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s; became the creeping, slowly boiled-frog fascism that began with Carter; and has now erupted into the rampaging fascism of today.

Then, to underscore my point:

Also, here's a Josef Goebbels speech, complete with English translation, for those who dismiss Trump's violent hostility to reporters and photographers as “just politics.” Watch and listen – if you dare – and note the ways in which Goebbels' 1933 oratory is similar to Trump's today.

Coincidence? Not if Trump, in preparation for becoming the first USian Fuehrer, has been studying the speeches of Goebbels, Hitler and Mussolini.

***

ANOTHER TRUTH SEEMINGLY lost to moronation is how Obama's tactics typify how the Democrats use the Big Lie to obscure their role as the enablers of whatever the One Percent demands through its Republican mouthpieces.

Which explains Obama the Orator's obviously pre-planned shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer.

Just as the Betrayer's One Percent masters intended, “change we can believe in” was the most outrageous, most politically destructive Big Lie in U.S. presidential history. Moreover, given both the USian Empire's Nazi-enhanced skill at psychological warfare and Madison Avenue's predatory skill at long-range psychological manipulation, it is obvious the deception and the devastating disappointment it fostered has (deliberately) alienated more U.S. voters than any political act in the nation's post-Civil-War history.

The message is undeniable: why bother to vote if even when the candidate encourages “hope” and promises “change” the result is instead a (defiantly imposed) worsening of our circumstances.

And now, once again, in “Documents Show Obama Lobbied Strongly Against Transparency Reform,” we are confronted with Obama's penchant for lying – undeniable proof of his bottomless contempt for us, we the people, and his relentless hostility to the very constitutional rights he pledged to restore:

***

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to discuss Moron Nation without considering the state of the nation's schools.

Though I was never an education writer per se, my interest in the policies and theoretical issues of USian public education began during my senior year at Holston High School in Knox County, Tennessee, 1957-1958. It was an interest that became professionally relevant during the middle third of my journalism career, which included the years I was a part-time college instructor (1975 through 1982), and it remains a compelling interest even now.

During my teaching years I noted amongst my younger students the worsening civic ignorance that resulted from the radical downsizing of public-school curricula – specifically the methodical elimination of any courses that might teach students their constitutional rights. Imposition of this Moron-Nation-type of induced ignorance was the One Percent's response to anti-Vietnam War protests and the Countercultural Rebellion in general. The Ruling Class seemed to believe that people who were not allowed to learn their rights would never be able to assert them. As a result, the needs of younger students for remedial education began disrupting my classes, which were about photography and journalism. Whenever the Bill of Rights (particularly the First Amendment) was relevant to our discussions, I found myself teaching civics and U.S. history as well as camera work and news writing. Thus I have some real-world familiarity with how the creation of Moron Nation became one of the undisclosed purposes of USian public education. But now I am getting ahead of myself; hence let us return to the 1957-1958 academic year,

In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the world's first space satellite, which triggered throughout the USian homeland an intense, often passionate, sometimes hateful conflict between proponents of two diametrically opposed pedagogies. One group would have sustained the USian pre-Moron-Nation compliance with capitalism's insistence the public schools produce “well-adjusted” (that is, ignorant but conformist and therefore reliably obedient) graduates as demanded by corporate personnel experts. The other group would have adopted the Soviet (actually European) mandate that graduates acquire the foundation of a classical education – including the various exercises in logical thinking provided by in-depth studies of literature, science, mathematics and humanities.

For some reason – I no longer remember why (though probably because I was the managing editor of the school paper and a top student in speech and drama classes) – I was asked to participate in a public debate matching one pedagogy against the other. As I recall, I was free to choose either side, but of course – because that's where my heart was even at age 17 – I chose to advocate the Soviet pedagogy, and in preparation for the actual event, I steeped myself in everything I could find regarding educational theory. Again if memory serves, the debate – conducted at night in the high-school auditorium before a standing-room-only audience of parents, teachers and fellow students – was declared a draw. Years afterward I was told the eloquence of my presentation – never mind support for anything “Commie” in that era would have otherwise provoked immediate ostracism – was among the reasons I was voted “Boy Most Likely to Succeed.” (Holston, named after the nearby river, has since been absorbed by expansion of Knoxville's city limits and downgraded to a middle school.)

Decades later, my interest in pedagogy would again serve me well when I was a reporter assigned to investigations or the coverage of public affairs.

The stories I wrote as an investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal (Jersey City, N.J.) included an award-winning series in 1970 that revealed the magnitude of the local school-funding crisis. The Jersey City school board later used my reports as supportive evidence in its successful lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of school levies. (The court upheld Jersey City's argument that local school levies, which are based on local property values and therefore on the presumptive ability of local citizens to pay, are unconstitutionally discriminatory against lower-income school districts.)

Stories in the public affairs category (1976-1981) included dozens of reports on education policy, most of them focused on the Legislature's struggle to define “basic education” in Washington state, a fight that rages unabated even now,  35 years later. One such story, a 1978 Sigma Delta Chi winner, documented the tribulations and triumphs of an academically superior high school caught between ChristoFascist fanatics and secular rationalists in a bitterly and sometimes violently contested war over over course content and teaching methods.

The continued expansion of Moron Nation – chiefly by the denial of adequate public-school funding – remains among the most devastating consequences of such infighting. But the ruination caused by reduced funding – which (though few dare say it) is a direct expression of hostility to public education itself – is nationwide.  The hostility seems to have two primary sources: the grassroots rejection of non-biblical learning that's symptomatic of the frightening expansion of Christian Fundamentalist power in the USian homeland, and the Ayn Rand economic doctrine imposed by our One Percent overlords, which condemns as wasted money any government expenditure that presumably benefits the 99 Percent.

For those who wish to pursue the subject in greater depth, Henry A. Giroux, whose  website is here, has documented – probably more thoroughly than any scholar on earth – the destruction of USian public education. He writes in provocative detail about the downsizing of school districts and the conversion of their few remaining schools to zero-tolerance training camps, the purpose of which is to provide capitalism with legions of mindlessly obedient workers and to eliminate, via the school-to-prison pipeline and the prison-industrial system, anyone who dares resist.

Moronation has thus reduced the USian citizenry to the most frighteningly ignorant population  in the industrial world. Its ignorance is so huge, so bottomless, so malignant, many fear it is the inevitable precursor to extinction-class disaster, whether by nuclear war, environmental apocalypse or both. Thus too it seems the damning statement H. L. Mencken made in 1920 – “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron” – is already the epitaph for the United States – and may become the epitaph for the rest of humanity.

***

BUT THE COLLEGES and universities – surely their scholars will save us before Moron Nation goes terminal. Right?

That is precisely what I believed until last week, when I read the essay by Robert Reich entitled “The American Fascist.”

Reich, the former secretary of labor who at the end of Bill Clinton's first term resigned to protest the president's vicious anti-labor policies and thereby earned my presumably undying respect, is a professor at the University of California/Berkeley and a scholar with impeccable credentials.  He nevertheless knowingly – that is, with what U.S. Courts call “malice aforethought” – penned and published the following mostly-true statement that includes one breathtakingly deceptive lie:

“But Trump has finally reached a point where parallels between his presidential campaign and the fascists of the first half of the 20th century – lurid figures such as Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, and Francisco Franco – are too evident to overlook.”

The lie is Reich's inclusion of Stalin in the list of fascists. Indeed it was Stalin and his Red Army that saved the world – at the inconceivable cost of as many as 43.3 million Soviet soldiers and civilians – from Hitler's Nazism and Mussolini's fascism.

That Reich's lie is obviously a purposeful Big Lie – one cunningly intended to serve the mind-paralyzing function identified by George Orwell as “doublethink”  – is underscored by the fact most USians regardless of age or education are so ill-informed, they have no idea that without Soviet assistance, the United States and its allies would not have been able to defeat Hitler's Wehrmacht – the best trained, best equipped war machine of its time.

Nor do USians understand that socialism and fascism are antitheticals. Both, we are taught, are “unAmerican,” therefore “bad,” and from the viewpoint of Christian zealotry, so unforgivably sinful they damn their proponents to the fires of hell forever. The resultant combination of ignorance and fear – which Reich's Big Lie intentionally perpetuates – locks USian minds closed as tightly as any miser's safe and thereby (exactly as intended) makes political consciousness-raising impossible.

Never in my life did I imagine I would encounter such a deliberate falsehood in a manuscript by a Harvard-educated professor, an alleged liberal who teaches at one of the nation's leading universities. But I did – and frankly I am still in shock. Hence here is the full text of my comment-thread response, which unavoidably includes earlier versions of the points I made above:

Mr. Reich's historically and academically dishonest inclusion of Joseph Stalin in his list of fascists is far worse than an error. Mr. Reich obviously knows better – that while Stalin was indeed a tyrant, he was most assuredly no fascist.

Thus it is obvious Mr. Reich maliciously chose to use his professorship to not only deliberately disseminate a falsehood but to contribute to the further dumbing down of the USian population – specifically by fabricating yet another variant of the already hopelessly illiterate, breathtakingly wrong notion, omnipresent throughout Moron Nation, that there is no difference between socialism and fascism.

By so doing – by literally nurturing the worst-in-the-industrial-world USian national ignorance – Mr. Reich has in all probability laid the groundwork for the real fascists to slander Mr. Sanders' democratic socialism as both “Stalinism” and “fascism” simultaneously.

I am frankly appalled by Mr. Reich's arrogant deception – so much so, all the (considerable) respect I had for him is gone forever. Indeed, with “friends” like Mr. Reich, Mr. Sanders scarcely needs enemies.

Later, in response to the down-thumbed jeers of other RSN posters, I added the following:

The number of otherwise intelligent, well-educated USian people who have been rendered politically brain-dead by the relentless deluge of anti-socialist, pro-capitalist propaganda is beyond appalling.

As best I can do in one sentence, the difference between socialism and fascism is that the former advocates economic democracy, while the latter advocates zero-tolerance economic hierarchy.

The core purpose of socialism, achievable only when we the people own the major means of production, is facilitating life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by the abolition of economic differences of class, race, ethnicity and gender. “From each according to ability; to each according to need.” Thus socialism seeks to end the One-Percent-versus-99-Percent paradigm that forms the inherently oppressive, inherently exploitative basis of capitalism.

Fascism is literally socialism's diametrical opposite. Its core principle is “der Fuehrerprinzip,” a secular version of the divine rights formerly claimed by emperors and kings. Its economic tyranny is implicit in the quote attributed to Mussolini: “Fascism should be more properly called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

(There was more to my comment, but it was in response to other posters on the thread and is therefore not relevant here.)

What is relevant is how Professor Reich's participation in the process of moronation tells me Moron Nation is far more egregiously triumphant – and thus far more carefully scripted and far more vastly conspiratorial – than ever I imagined.

Indeed the willful participation of a high-ranking scholar in the malicious dumbing-down of the United States is tantamount to the knowing participation of high-ranking German scholars in the Nazification of the Weimar Republic. (No wonder a fascist is dominating the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.)

Reich's role in moronation also tells me we must recognize the damning statement H. L. Mencken made 96 years ago is just another part of the elaborate camouflage behind the One Percenters and their servants in academia, media and government hide while they engineer our subjugation.

I have no idea how we might defend ourselves against such malevolence. But I do know if we recognize it for what it is and name it and stop blaming ourselves for what it is doing to us, we will have taken the first step toward evolving adequate countermeasures.

Meanwhile, if Bernie Sanders is the person he claims to be, he will surely purge his campaign of Robert Reich the Smirking Professor of the Big Lie.

*** *** ***

THE COMMENT ABOUT Hillary mentioned in “suppressed material” (far) above documents her clandestine collaboration with the Christofascist opponents of women's sexual freedom. Its reconstructed version is here. Alas, it was written, as all writers know is true of any such reconstruction, with the sure (and surely depressing) knowledge the second effort will not ever be as well-stated as the original.

*** *** ***

“YOUNG AMERICANS ARE now poorer than retired people,” the newscaster/blogger Thom Hartmann reported recently.

“That's the stunning take away  from a new study by The Guardian,” he said.

Furthermore, the paper says the problem of abject poverty, though most obvious amongst Millennials who live in the United States, has become a defining characteristic of their generational peers throughout Europe as well.

Hartmann elaborated on these dismal facts at some length (click the above link to access his work), though unfortunately he failed to give us a link to the original story, which I provide here and which contains much more information than Hartmann had space to provide.

When he asked, “What do you think? Tell us here,” I responded accordingly:

Fact: The Ruling Class aka the One Percent has been ranting about the necessity for forcibly reducing the global population (i.e. genocide) at least since the late 1950s.

Fact: Death camps, ethnic “cleansing” and other obvious forms of genocide are no longer fashionable (save perhaps amongst Donald Trump's supporters and others of the fascist/Nazi persuasion).

Fact: Hence the most effective method of genocide – especially since under capitalism, the victims themselves can be blamed for their own deaths – is economic downsizing.

Need I say more?

*** *** ***

NORMALLY I DO not post more than a few words from an article on which I am commenting, but “Bernie and the Groundswell on Which He Stands” is perhaps the most inspiring dispatch I have yet seen emerge from the hurly-burly of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Besides that, “Groundswell” stands in brightly positive counterpoint to the gloomy negativity of “Moron Nation” and “Millennial Poverty” stories, which means it fulfills a promise I made to myself a couple of weeks ago – that given the descending darkness in which we now seem fated to abide, I will try as best I can to find an uplifting report with which to conclude what is all too often a passage through disquieting realities.

Hopefully that antidote to depression will be, as it is today, a significant report. But it may be something as mundane as a joyful or triumphant dog story, the very sort of anecdote I as an unapologetic dog lover always appreciate – especially now that thanks to young friends I am blessed by a few joyful big-dog hours every week.

Here, then, are the lead grafs of “Groundswell,” a vitally informative piece  republished by RSN in which The Guardian's veteran journalist Paul Hilder describes the revolution-minded origins of the Sanders campaign and the internal dynamics that have sustained its unprecedented victories:

The Bernie campaign is working toward a political revolution, and they’re playing to win.

Over the last few weeks, I worked my way inside the belly of the Bernie campaign. I saw the virtual chat rooms where thousands of super-volunteers are coordinating, and mapped their digital infrastructure, fast growing into something more powerful even than the Obama campaign.

I traveled through five battleground states and spoke with hundreds of his supporters, as well as analysts and insiders. What I found was the story of a political start-up growing exponentially in a cauldron of American discontent.

Yes, I think Hilder's text really is worth reading. There's even, near the bottom of the comment thread, a good-humored exchange between another poster and I.

LB/15 March 2016

-30-

Obamacare as a Microcosm of What Is Killing Us

THE BIG LIE of the so-called “Affordable Care Act” – an Orwellian name if ever there was one – is already obvious in its prohibitive co-pays.

Moreover – as if there were any remaining doubts – the death of any rational hope  for achieving single-payer/public option health insurance in Vermont underscores what was obviously one of the key purposes behind Obama the Orator's shape-shift to Barack the Betrayer. ACA – “Obamacare” as it is ironically labeled – cares only for ensuring insurance-company profiteering.

Yes, as Vermonters have learned to their embitterment, ACA methodically perpetuates the deliberately genocidal U.S. policy of health care as a privilege of wealth.

And it does so with typical Madison Avenue cunning. In the eyes of those fortunate folks who are neither Obamacare's victims nor its supplicants, it creates the illusion of an actual national health care system. It thereby silences that global chorus of humanitarian critics who were rightfully damning the United States as the only industrial nation on earth which refuses to accept that health care is a basic human right.

Said one U.S. physician in a 2012 protest-letter  to The Wall Street Journal:  “(ACA) will not achieve universal coverage, as it leaves at least 26 million individuals uninsured. It will not make health care affordable to Americans with insurance because of high co-pays and gaps in coverage that leave patients vulnerable to financial ruin in the event of serious illness, and it will not control costs...It denies care in order to increase insurers' bottom line, and it obstructs any serious effort to control costs.”

The law – or rather the absence of humanitarian reform the law locks into place – is also driving an unknown number of U.S. doctors to seek professional asylum elsewhere.

A physician recruiter  quoted by The Star, the newspaper of Windsor, Ont., says that over the past decade at least 105 U.S. doctors have relocated to that city alone.

One of these soon-to-be exiles is Dr. Emily Queenan MD, a family physician in upstate New York. She is moving to Canada  because, as she put it in an Evidence Network piece republished by Truthout, “I'm tired of doing daily battle with the same adversary that my patients face – the private health insurance industry, with its frequent errors in processing claims (the American Medical Association reports that one of every 14 claims submitted to commercial insurers are paid incorrectly); outright denials of payment (about one to five percent); and costly paperwork that consumes about 16 percent of physicians' working time, according to a recent journal study.”

“I've also witnessed the painful and continual shifting of medical costs onto my patients' shoulders through rising co-payments, deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses,” wrote Dr. Queenan. “According to a survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, 66 million – 36 percent of Americans — reported delaying or forgoing needed medical care in 2014 due to cost.”

As I cannot say too often, such is life – and death – under capitalism. For what is capitalism but infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue? What is capitalism but the malicious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth? Just ask the late Ayn Rand, whose fictionalization of Hitler's Mein Kampf polls as second only to The Bible as the most influential book  in the United States.

Given that background – given my horror at the Moron Nation to which my homeland has been reduced – I suppose my response to the Truthout piece was in a sense predictable. But several others made supportive comments. Hence I reproduce it here in totality: 

I commend Dr. Queenan for her courageous decision to embrace civilization by moving to a nation not ruled by Ayn Rand savagery. May she, her family and her future patients all thrive.

That said, her naive belief "the U.S. will get there some day" is a classic example of the futility of hope.

The ultimate fate of any and all efforts to achieve single-payer/public-option health insurance in the U.S. is proven beyond dispute by the (Democrat) gubernatorial treachery that killed – forever – the apparently successful grassroots effort to create such a system in Vermont.

Indeed the lesson of the Vermont debacle sends a terminal message to health insurance reformers everywhere in the U.S.: don't bother trying for single-payer/public-option because even your best most diligent efforts will be defeated in the end by political betrayal.

And so it shall remain until the oligarchy is overthrown or our species renders itself extinct, whichever comes first.

Another poster noted that “Vermont activists haven't given up on seeking Single-Payer.”

True – but only in that some people will never acknowledge the U.S. experiment in representative democracy has failed (or, rather, has been murdered), and that these same people will always continue banging their heads against the proverbial stone wall.

As long as the One Percent owns and rules the U.S. political system – that is, for how ever much longer the United States exists – a public-option/single-payer system will never be allowed.

To imagine otherwise is to ignore the primary purpose of Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer: to prohibit socialism (especially including socialized medicine), and thereby ensure the neo-Nazi savagery of Ayn Rand capitalism is forever. All this, of course, with the additional cover provided by the Republicans accusing the president of being a "socialist."

Such is the diabolical methodology of de facto one-party rule.

In which context note that Obamacare cunningly prohibits the states from initiating public-option/single payer insurance – which would have killed it in Vermont even without the (Democrat) governor's service to his One Percent masters.

The tragic failure of the U.S. Left to understand realpolitik – specifically to acknowledge the extent to which we have already been subjugated and enslaved – defines this Left as being as much a part of Moron Nation as the Right.

Until we admit the magnitude of our powerlessness, we will remain unable to evolve an effective response to it. Which – particularly given the extinction of our species made inevitable by the combination of terminal climate change and the looming thermonuclear war with Russia -- relegates such hope to the realm of nonsense.

Sorry, but that's just the way it is. The hydrogen bomb trumps everything, and even without that, if you understood the true magnitude of the climate-change disaster (even now at its alleged "beginning"), you'd recognize Nature has clearly decided our species is unworthy of survival.

Later, in response to multiple posts, I wrote:

I had not meant to trigger an extended discussion, but it appears I have done just that. Hence this reply is to Ted, PGreen and whomever else might choose to to join in.

Admittedly I write and speak from the cynical perspective of one who has been an activist/journalist (or a journalist/activist) since my late teens in the 1950s. 

During the subsequent 58 years, I have witnessed the defeat of every cause to which I committed time, energy, a brief stay in jail, some bloodshed and a helluva lot of suffering and deprivation. These causes include organized labor (the American Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO); post-Sputnik education reform; the Civil Rights Movement (Knox County Jail, 1963); the anti-Vietnam War Movement; the Back-to-the-Land Movement; the alternative press; the creation of an anti-capitalist Counterculture, and of course the associated defenses of the Bill of Rights.

Every one of these causes has failed. Given the time-span involved – I say again 58 years – these failures cannot be dismissed as short-term or temporary phenomena.

Each failure is in fact symptomatic of the relentless destruction of U.S. liberty begun by the One Percent in response to the close proximity of Communist revolution that evolved during the 1930s. The retaliatory purge – and that is precisely what it is – began literally the day World War II ended and continues even now.

Ideologically speaking, the abject failure of the U.S. Left to combat this aggression is rooted in its rejection of the historical truth of class warfare. Thus it has blinded itself to the nature and lineage of capitalism.

But what marks the U.S. Left as part of Moron Nation is actually a triple failure.

The first failure is failure to understand that capitalism is literally infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – precisely as Ayn Rand states in her fictionalizations of Mein Kampf. the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

Failure number two is refusal to recognize that capitalism is the direct descendant both of patriarchy and patriarchal religion. It is therefore the immediate, innately misogynistic ancestor of both fascism and Nazism. In other words, Nazism (whether in its misogynistic anti-Jewish German form or in its misogynistic Christian/exceptionalist U.S. form), is the ultimate form of capitalism. Its savagery is therefore as inevitable as the death of a corn crop after a hard freeze.

In the past, the ostensibly Marxian domains of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Peoples' Republic of China offered enough competition to capitalism, the U.S. One Percent was forced to ameliorate capitalism's most obvious savageries. Now, with the Soviet Union dead and China co-opted by Wall Street, there is no such strategic or even tactical need. Hence capitalism now openly displays its tyrannosauric nature.

Failure number three is the U.S. Left's refusal to recognize the ONLY reason the One Percent yielded to the humanitarian demands of labor, the Republican Progressives and finally the Democrats' New Deal was the One Percenters' abject terror of Communist revolution. (Note that The Communist Manifesto, which from the perspective of the capitalists is the most dangerous document in our species' history, dates from 1848.)

What all this means in terms of any present-day prospects for humanitarian change is that there are none.

History shows us such change has four prerequisites. These are (1)-ideological solidarity; (2)-leadership and organization; (3)-mastery of extant technologies military and civilian; and (4)-the aid, overt, clandestine or both, of a major foreign power.

None of the first three prerequisites exist in the United States today. Our society has been deliberately dumbed down or "moronated" into Moron Nation precisely to rob us, forever, of the requisite intellectual skills and psychological reflexes. Meanwhile the moronation of other realms (which includes the radical Islamization of the Middle East), continues apace.

And with the death of the U.S.S.R. and the co-optation of China, there is no longer any source of revolutionary outside agitation or support or even any effective antidote to capitalist depredation.

Nor will there ever be again. The U.S. will literally destroy the world before it allows any rival nation – with or without a rival ideology – to emerge.

Couple that with the already ruinous apocalypse inflicted by what should properly be labeled "terminal climate change" – for that is exactly what it is – and you have then begun to arrive at a realistic assessment of our present circumstances: literally the darkest, most hopeless epoch in our species' 200,000-year history.

However, this does not mean we should give up. It merely means we should recognize that surely the notion of revolution by a dying species on a dying planet is the ultimate cosmic joke. We should therefore give up the grandiose in exchange for doing the best we can, locally, to better peoples' lives.

(Even at a physically disabled age 75, I still manage to serve my community by producing an informationally vital monthly newsletter and, as its editor, sometimes functioning as an unofficial ombudsman.)

But to attempt anything on any greater scale is merely to court despair.

Though I cling, perhaps foolishly, to the belief that if we can strip off the Norman Vincent Peale blinders with which the One Percent has shackled us – that is, if we can acknowledge the extent to which we have been defeated and conquered – we might yet evolve an effective response.

However, until then we are at best doing nothing more than dancing a 21st Century version of the Ghost Dance.

Meanwhile the same administration that promised us "change we can believe in" now assures us U.S. aggression in Ukraine will not require nuclear weapons. 

LB/17-24 May 2015

-30-