How Charleston Exemplifies Our Imperial Malignancy

ASK YOURSELF WHAT the Charleston atrocity  has in common with the Vietnam War,  and you've got yourself the intellectual equivalent of a two-base hit.

Ask yourself what Charleston has in common with austerity,  with Ferguson and Baltimore  or with the ever-escalating savagery of the Gestapo-minded federal police  and the murderous brutality of their federally militarized local counterparts,  and you're rounding third base.

Ask yourself what Charleston and these other atrocities have in common with the the Trans-Pacific Partnership  and its implicitly genocidal war of austerity  against the U.S. and global 99 Percent, you've belted an out-of-the-park homer.

How, your critics will demand, could you possibly reach such an “unthinkable” conclusion about the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

First you probably noted, as we all did, the murderous bigotry underlying the statement attributed to suspected Charleston Terrorist Dylann Roof – “I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go” – “go” in this instance being synonymous with “die.”

Next maybe it dawns on you that “you have to go” was precisely the message in the slaying of Medgar Evers, in the church bombing  that killed Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair, and in the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy three months later. It was repeated ad nauseam in the years of political murders that followed: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner;  Malcolm X; Viola Liuzzo;  Martin Luther King Jr.; Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy; Fred Hampton;  the white kids gunned down by Ohio National Guard troops at Kent State  (Allison B. Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer); the black kids gunned down by white Mississippi cops at Jackson State  (Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green); and let us not forget the labor-movement martyr Karen Silkwood. 

Lastly maybe you realize the same übermenschen bigotry and arrogance and morally imbecilic indifference that killed all these people also explains why the One Percent is ramming TPP down our collective throats no matter the devastation it will inflict on nearly everyone else.

The One Percenters are utterly indifferent to the fact at least 62 percent of us  already opposed TPP and its fast-track coup last year, long before the associated controversy reached its present magnitude. And they're no doubt ecstatic over TPP's consequences – particularly that it will kill tens of thousands of us, possibly millions – in slow-motion executions inflicted by joblessness, loss of health care, increases in prescription-drug prices  and increased doses of (already genocidal) austerity in general.

“We have to do it,” say the One Percenters and their political vassals. 

What they dare not express – at least outside their posh boardrooms and luxuriant private clubs – is the reasoning their policies make undeniable.

Remember that under capitalism, greed is elevated to the ultimate virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever uttered. Remember too the sole purpose of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Atop that,  the One Percenters and their politicians believe there are too many of us 99 Percenters. They believe our needs are draining their bank accounts and diminishing their assets. They want those of us who are most obviously no longer exploitable for profit – that is, those of us who are elderly and/or disabled and/or chronically impoverished – to be exterminated first. That's why they're slashing the services -- food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, even Social Security-- on which our lives depend.

But since death camps are no longer fashionable, we're to be killed by austerity instead.

See it now? As it is in Charleston, so it is throughout the USian Empire, the de facto Fourth Reich.

*** *** ***

Sanders Calls Charleston What It Is: Racist Terrorism

The only non-opportunistic and therefore genuinely humanitarian statement issued by a U.S. politician in the wake of the Charleston atrocity was from Sen. Bernie Sanders, a declared socialist running as a Democrat for the U.S. presidency. 

I reproduce its full text here because its unpretentiousness and its laudable  absence of inflammatory rhetoric makes it so unlike the utterances of those politicians who are trying to co-opt the murders to bolster a favored cause.

Sanders seems to speak directly from his heart:

What transpired in Charleston, South Carolina last night was not just a tragedy, it was an act of terror.

Nine of our fellow Americans were murdered while praying in a historic church because of the color of their skin. This senseless violence fills me with outrage, disgust, and a deep, deep sadness.

This hateful killing is a horrific reminder that, while we have made important progress in civil rights for all of our people, we are far from eradicating racism.

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is one that has been attacked, burned, and rebuilt throughout its 200 year history. While their community mourns now, they will rebuild, and they will emerge stronger than before.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and their congregation. But we can add our actions to our prayers. The families and the community that have been hurt so very badly by this brutality need our help. Let us stand with them in their time of mourning.

You can help by making a donation to the Emanuel AME Church community today.

*** *** ***

Obama: It's Not Terrorism or Racism, It's Guns

(I began the following in response to a Reuters report republished by Reader Supported News. The report tells us President Obama is citing the Charleston murders not to engender a dialogue on USian racism but to bolster his campaign for forcible disarmament of the U.S. 99 Percent.) 

DESPITE THE ESCALATING campaigns of denial and distraction, let us not forget white racism is the sole cause of the Charleston atrocity and all other atrocities like it.

Post-Katrina polling shows about 75 percent of the nation's whites claimed they believed there was “no racism” in the government's deliberately genocidal (non) response – an obvious falsehood or self-deception only a racist could utter.

But addressing U.S. racism forthrightly would require public examination of the nation's (alleged) conscience, which in turn would require acknowledging the genocide committed against First Nations peoples, against African slaves and even now against their African-American descendants.

Because  our species has presumably progressed a bit since the days of Nazi Germany, all but the most racist whites generally closet their bigotry. In fact it's internationally embarrassing. That's why U.S. racism is allowed out only when it serves today's (equally genocidal) Ruling Class austerity agenda, typically as opposition to anything labeled "welfare," even health care, education, mass transit.

But now – with the Ruling Class so terrified of revolution it is hoarding ammunition – the refusal to confront racism has become psychological warfare. Note how the Ruling Class is trying to convince us it was Guns and the Second Amendment – not racism – that caused the Charleston atrocity.

What a clever Big Lie. How diabolically Machiavellian. Anything to further the total disarmament of the Working Class lest it unify in rebellion.

Not that I'm surprised by Obama's spin-doctoring. The One Percent's skyrocketing fear of economically provoked insurrection is increasingly obvious. 

Meanwhile, Reader Supported News – which does a vital and praiseworthy job of seeing to it we're kept abreast of what truly obtains – is in dire need of life-sustaining contributions. Any financially generous OAN readers please take note.

*** *** ***

In Seattle Area, Racism Means Bad Mass Transit

(Smiley-faced prose by Leonard Garfield in Crosscut, an eclectic, variable-quality Seattle on-line daily, prompted me to pen yet another diatribe denouncing the bigotry that fuels the Puget Sound region's self-destructive hostility to adequate mass transit.) 

GARFIELD'S PIECE IS PollyAnna propaganda/ lipstick-on-a-pig boosterism at its worst.

Yes, Seattle's long-ago accomplishments in the realm of public transport were very real.

But they are reduced to meaninglessness by the region's present-day hatred and contempt for those of us who are genuinely transit-dependent.

Goaded by a combination of "we-don-wanna-be-like-New-York" xenophobia intensified by racism and Ayn Rand socioeconomic bigotry, local voters have ensured the region's mass transit is at least a half-century behind its counterparts elsewhere in this (notoriously anti-transit) nation.

And now these voters are making it obvious – repeatedly obvious – they intend to keep it backward forever.

Given the electorate's haughty claim to environmental enlightenment, its anti-transit-user politics are astonishingly hypocritical – undoubtedly the most breathtaking example of political hypocrisy to be found anywhere in today's United States.

Hypocritical too is the not-unrelated anti-union malice that so frequently lurks behind the region's deliberately deceptive "progressive" facade. Local unions embrace mass transit, local voters reject it.

Indeed, the hypocrisies of Pugetopolis “progressives” remind me of the hypocrisies of old-time Southern Democrats: speak the New Deal language, walk the Ku Klux walk.

No doubt that's why some call this realm "Mississippi on Puget Sound."

However “progressive” its electorate might seem at first glance, its lack of adequate transit, its regressive tax structure and its worst-in-the-nation hostility to tenant rights proves it is reflexively fascist at heart.

Above all else it is aggressively white/bourgeois and relentlessly self-identified with the One Percent – with transit (or rather the maliciously sustained lack thereof) – employed as a gatekeeper to lock out "undesirables."

Which – obviously – includes anybody who can't afford to own and operate an automobile.

Here though is where Garfield's core hypothesis is absolutely correct. Puget Sound's (anti-transit-user) past, which includes widespread condemnation of mass transit as a form of "welfare,” will undoubtedly define its (anti-transit-user) future.

*** *** ***

Russia Vows Retaliation if U.S. Aggression Continues

(In keeping with this week's theme – that TPP and Charleston are kindred outrages – here is what I wrote after I recognized the news in the above headline as official U.S. policy toward anyone it regards as a threat to capitalist governance: “You're trying to take over our country...you have to die.”)

AS I HAVE been saying for at least three years now, the U.S. has become – both domestically and abroad – the de facto Fourth Reich.

Its foreign policy is the 21st Century equivalent of Hitler's: world conquest, the total subjugation of all peoples in capitalist slavery, the methodical albeit slow-motion extermination of those of us who for what ever reason are not exploitable for profit.

And just as a poster screen-named Dongi said on the news report's comment thread, the U.S. psyche has been taken over by “some sort of collective force” demanding wars of global conquest. (Precisely the same thing happened in Nazi Germany.)

That said, thank you, A_Har, for the video link.  It is not just informative; it also gives us a glimpse of the vast superiority of Russian intellectuals over the Moron Nation dunderheads who are bullying the world in an extinction-level conflict, thermonuclear jocks versus thermonuclear chess masters.

In fact U.S. foreign policy views the world as a U.S. school yard in macrocosm. The bullies rule. Boiling over with envious hatred, they ruthlessly attack and try to subjugate their intellectual superiors. But the school officials refuse to intervene because such might-makes-right savagery is the core truth of “the American Way.”

Sometimes though the victims retaliate...and in this instance they have intercontinental ballistic missiles. 

*** *** ***

Understanding Media (with apologies to McLuhan)

(A pointed but nevertheless inadequately damning Thom Hartmann column on what's wrong with mainstream media prompted me to offer my own somewhat more uncensored view. In keeping with our Charleston/TPP/Global-Conquest theme, I note that “exceptionalism” is most often a code-word for “white supremacy.”)

U.S. MASS MEDIA is what it is – a privatized version of Josef Goebbels' Nazi German Ministry of Propaganda – because it is owned by the same people who own the two major political parties and the federal, state and local government.

Whether labeled Ruling Class or One Percent, this cabal of capitalist aristocrats has the same absolute power formerly possessed by Adolf Hitler. They are the tyrants who not only rule us but shape our consciousness by their ever-more-total control of information.

Nor is there much hope for improvement. The triumphant imperial trade coalition – which defies the will of the U.S. electorate in its effort to  further slash wages, send still more jobs abroad and gleefully fling millions more U.S. workers into inescapable poverty – did everything in its power to serve the One Percent by blatantly destroying the last remnants of the American experiment in representative democracy and the so-called “American Dream.”

The One Percent's long-term, global goal is replacing the policy-making functions of local, state and national governments with zero-tolerance edicts handed down by dictatorially empowered boards of corporate managers. Under this system, the only purpose of traditional “government” is to maintain the goon squads of police and soldiers essential to enforce the corporate decrees.

For a prophetic view of existence beneath the boots of the resultant global imperium, look at the wretched conditions that prevailed in the coal towns of Appalachia, where the mine owners also owned everything else – houses, stores, schools, clinics – and every person as well.

As part of its march toward the global corporate imperium, the One Percent's more immediate goal is the reduction of the United States to fascist oligarchy – actually a uniquely USian form of Nazism in which the corporate cabal has replaced the individual despot, with the mandatory ideology a combination of (implicitly white) exceptionalism, Christian intolerance and Ayn Rand socioeconomic savagery. And – yes – exceptionalism with its implication of divine-right rule is indeed the 21st Century version of the Nazis' concept of übermenschen or Master Race.

Despite the implicit whiteness of exceptionalism, it is no accident the present U.S. figurehead is Barack the Betrayer, who makes no secret of being the tyrannical cabal's most cravenly obedient servant thus far. Indeed it is the Betrayer who personifies the One Percent's strategy and tactics. He is not just the most malicious liar ever to occupy the presidency, but in truth a hard-Right Republican who used his membership in the Democratic Party and his own skin color as false flags to scam the U.S. electorate into imagining he might provide desperately sought relief from the succession of One Percent vassals who have lorded it over us since the coup of 22 November 1963.

The One Percenters need the U.S. not for its (now-surplus) workforce or its (irremediably poisoned) agricultural lands, but rather for the cannon-fodder enlistments compelled by its otherwise-inescapable poverty and the goon-squad function of its imperial war machine.

Mass media's role in this era of unprecedented deception is merely to provide its imprimatur, thereby giving whichever Big Lie whatever appearance of truth the One Percent demanded.

As Goebbels repeatedly affirmed to Hitler, taking control of policy is only half the victory essential to total dictatorship. Full victory is achieved only when policy and the public mind are each controled with identical absolutism – precisely what happened in Germany after 1933, precisely what has happened here in the United States in the aftermath of 22 November 1963, the subsequent decade of political murders. and the Reichstag Firer of 9/11 – a slow-motion coup that gathers speed and momentum as it approaches its terminal events.

Which, by the way, explains the death-blow to representative democracy dealt by the anti-worker trade vote of 18 June. The national mobilization against fast-track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership made it clear a vast majority of the voters – I have seen figures ranging from 55 percent to 80 percent – oppose so-called "free trade." But, exactly as I predicted would happen, Congress dropped any and all pretense of representing anyone but the One Percenters, and even here in Moron Nation, such a brutal slap-in-the-face cannot be portrayed as anything other than what it was.

This means the era of charade democracy is over, and the era of unapologetic tyranny is upon us.

But I wonder how U.S. mass media – the world's first fully privatized government propaganda machine – will play the story. Will they try to explain it as yet another manifestation of how 9/11 "changed everything"? Or will they merely try to flush it down the Orwell hole?

*** *** ***

“Defining Issue" Is Whether Our Species Survives

(Thom Hartmann agrees with the International Monetary Fund's surprise conclusion that  “the defining issue of our time” is inequality  and argues accordingly. I usually agree with Hartmann, but this time he and the IMF are both dead wrong.)

ACTUALLY THE “DEFINING issue of our time” is whether life as we know it – including our own species – will survive capitalism.

As evidenced by our capitalist masters' escalating efforts to provoke an extinction-level war with Russia and their ongoing refusal to act against terminal climate change, they have already concluded we are a dead species on a dying planet.

Indeed it is an Occam's Razor moment of the most terrible sort: no other hypothesis explains the totality of Ruling Class behaviors, including the no-tomorrow savagery of their run-amok greed –  a global orgy of exploitation, oppression, contractual theft and outright armed robbery with no precedent in human experience.

That said, such an uncharacteristically humanitarian conclusion from the International Monetary Fund, which is one of capitalism's chief economic executioners, indicates the Ruling Class is finally awakening to the fact the global proletariat – even broken as it is by the One Percent's imperial omnipotence – is not so subjugated as to plod submissively into the grave.

And it makes no difference whether the genocidal intent is obvious (as when the killing is done by soldiers and police), or whether it is disguised by rhetoric (as when the mechanism of murder is euphemized as "austerity").

Obviously the real message of the IMF study is that the Ruling Class is becoming terrified.

Ninety-eight years ago, faced by the same sort of hopeless inequality and abject powerlessness that has been inflicted on us all by the One Percent of today, the Russian people rose up in a revolution that truly changed the world. Though that revolution was later betrayed and undone, its triumphs remain part of Russia's collective consciousness, the wellsprings of a yearning as profoundly heartfelt as Dark Age Britain's folk- remembrance of Arthur and their desperate longing for the rescue-from-chaos they symbolized as “the return of the king.”

Foolishly we regard our overlords as stupid, and in so doing we commit what to Sun Tzu was the warrior's ultimate and ultimately fatal error: we underestimate our enemy. We fail to acknowledge the horrid truth the One Percent is brilliant – diabolically so – and in its Machiavellian wisdom it no doubt recognizes that as the Russians once rose to fling off the shackles and hangman's-knots of capitalism, so might they rise up again.

And if it is not too late for our species – if it is not the ultimate absurdity of revolution by a doomed species on a ruined planet – this time the revolution might go as global as the malevolence of capitalism has already gone. 

If our species survives – or maybe as the very fulcrum of our survival – that is surely the legacy of the inequality thrust on us by capitalism. That is its teachable essence.

And because the Russians have already learned that lesson so well they were able, for a time, to teach it to the rest of the world, that is perhaps why the One Percent in the person of the United States government is now trying to provoke a war with Russia: anything to maintain capitalism's imperial power, anything to perpetuate its signature inequality, anything – even the dying gasp of one triumphant Kochroach to another,”we had to destroy the planet to save it.”

(With Solstice Greetings to all: may our species live to see the Sun turn North again.)

LB/21 June 2015

-30-

Does the 1% Think We're a Doomed Species on a Dying Planet? (Why Else Would They Behave as They Do?)

(My apology for the tardiness of this week's column. As does the second week of every month, this past week belonged to the editing, writing and production of the eight-page monthly newsletter I prepare for the 51-unit senior housing facility in which I reside. Due to technical challenges, this month's issue required a much more extended effort than usual, which radically diminished the time I could devote to OAN.)

 

***

COULD IT BE our capitalist overlords have secretly acquired incontrovertible proof the struggle against global warming  is already lost? Is that the terrible secret underlying the One Percent's unprecedented orgy of greed ? Is that why their political vassals refuse to unite in a common front against what increasingly looms as the greatest threat to human survival  in our species' 200,000-year  history? 

To understand what prompts me to ask such forbidden questions, it is essential we look with brutal honesty at present-day realpolitik. To do so we must set aside our habits of denial and fantasy and wishful thinking and fear and neediness and despair long enough to acknowledge what actually obtains.

 

Our entire planet has fallen under capitalist control. It is rule so absolute, the capitalists sooner or later always get what they demand, most recently the environmentally suicidal right to drill for oil in the Arctic.

Nor does capitalism tolerate any alternatives to its morally imbecilic ideology of infinite greed as the ultimate human virtue. Capitalism defeated and destroyed the Soviet Union by deluging its people with propaganda intended to inflame their greed and selfishness. The Russian successor state is so weakened, President Obama could in effect spit in the faces of all its people  – maliciously dishonoring the epic heroism of their grandfathers and grandmothers who, at the cost of as many as 43.3 million dead, literally saved the world from Nazi Germany. Capitalism also co-opted the People's Republic of China. And unless its rulers are employing a long-range Sun Tzu strategy, China too is but another satrapy of Wall Street. As a result there is no longer any force on this planet strong enough to compel the capitalists to restrain their limitless savagery.

   

All this happened because the Wall Street One Percent commands the military and economic might of the United States and uses it to seize unprecedented global hegemony. The resultant empire subjugates all the inhabitants of Earth beneath the zero-tolerance mandates of the One Percenters and their political vassals – moral imbeciles whose sole purpose is the fulfillment of their own greed. They are reducing the entire planet to the high-tech version of an antebellum slave plantation. Already they rule the world as their own electronic concentration camp.  They tyrannize every nation on earth. 

In the context of these events, the claim by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” is proven to be the biggest Big Lie of all time. Indeed history – at least history since the advent of patriarchy about 5,000 years ago – teaches us the opposite is true. Interludes of justice are but rare and fleeting sparks in a vast and seemingly endless darkness. Clearly, what “the arc of the moral universe” bends toward is not the collective good of economic democracy and “liberty and justice for all” but the absolute evil of Ayn Rand totalitarianism and its agenda of enslavement for all save the most ruthlessly greedy despots. 

That's why, of all humanity's ever-more-wantonly discarded virtues, justice remains the most elusive. It is routinely betrayed even by those societies which proclaimed the quest for justice as their reason for being. Note the ultimate hypocrisy that underlies both the Preamble to the United States Constitution  (“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice...”) and Article 156 of the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics  (“Justice is administered in the USSR on the principle of the equality of citizens before the law and the court.”) Note how political developments in both nations rendered “justice” not only meaningless, but reduced it to a convenient euphemism for its antithesis.

Though the governments of some nations still try to placate their own populations with gestures of resistance, the horrible truth is that governance itself – governance with all its implicit democratic potential whether realized or not – has been obsoleted by capitalism's mastery of electronic technology. The age of nations and national governance – the age of real or potential human liberty – has ended. The age of corporations  – the age of tyranny beyond our conception  – has begun. Increasingly we are enslaved by the corporate One Percent  – an imperial cabal that has taken the place of old-time despots and to whom technology has given both omnipotence and hitherto-divine powers of surveillance and retaliation. It is so powerful it is now attempting to cast off its political vassals and impose its will directly through its corporate managers – a primary purpose of the Trans-Pacific Partnership  trade agreement.

Moreover, the One Percent's tyranny is quite possibly forever – that is, fated to prevail until our species is extinct. Because it is based entirely on infinite greed, capitalism cannot be reformed: note its destruction of the New Deal  in the U.S. and its imposition of austerity  on Europe. And now – with capitalism protected as it is by impregnable electronic and thermonuclear defenses – it cannot be overthrown. It will prevail until thermonuclear war and/or environmental disaster renders its enabling technologies inoperable and thus reduces its tyrants to impotence. 

Then and only then might humanity throw off the yoke of patriarchy and once again rationally aspire toward the liberty of justice and the justice of liberation.

But now and for all the foreseeable future there is only capitalism and  the intensifying apocalypse  of what is connivingly called “global warming” – a label obviously chosen to maximize confusion, conflict and misunderstanding.

Let us therefore call it by a properly descriptive compound noun. Let us call it what it is: “terminal climate change.” And let us finally and unequivocally recognize that we have brought down the wrath of Mother Nature on ourselves. Now as a result we are cursed to live in the darkest most hopeless epoch of our species' experience and thereby challenged to prove our selves and our species worthy of survival. 

Why then, given that the Wall Street One Percent now controls (or at least leverages) all the leading politicians and therefore lords it over all the governments on this planet, is there not unified action to minimize the terrible impact of the already ruinous climate debacle?

Given how our species has united to combat other global threats, the only logical answer – almost too horrible to contemplate – is that the One Percent knows the battle against terminal climate change is already lost. That here is the real explanation for the global-warming squabbles between the One Percent's Democrat and Republican political vassals at home and among the One Percent's vassal governments abroad. That these quarrels are pseudo-conflicts; that they are part of a diabolically well-crafted charade intended to keep the global population from panicking. That the One Percent fears the reduction of profits that might result from the vengefully suicidal insurrection the kamikaze warfare of World War II suggests might become the last recourse of a doomed species on a dying planet. That sure knowledge of our impending extinction is the real reason the One Percent no longer makes even a pretense of restraining the Manifest Evil of its infinite (and infinitely obscene) greed. 

Perhaps, in the serial-killer mentalities of the capitalist aristocrats, the fulfillment of their greed has become their final competition. That all the One Percenters care about now is who will amass the greatest hoards of gold and pile the highest mounds of corpses, who will die smirking, “fuck you all I am the biggest winner.” 

Could this be true? I hope with every cell of my being it is not. Yet what else could explain all the variables of our circumstances? 

*** *** ***

CONTRAST HOW THE present-day Ruling Class dithers in the face of terminal climate change with how it reacted to the Nazi threat in 1941:

 

This is no time to moralize on the follies of countries and Governments which have allowed themselves to be struck down one by one, when by united action they could have saved themselves and saved the world from this catastrophe...Let us learn the lessons already taught by such cruel experience. Let is redouble our exertions, and strike with united strength while life and power remains.

The speaker was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; the excerpt is from his speech to Parliament just after the Germans had begun their invasion of the Soviet Union. The source is Churchill's six-volume history of The Second World War, volume three, The Grand Alliance, pages 372-373 (Houghton-Mifflin Company, Boston: 1950).

 

I ask again: why – given the far greater magnitude of the terminal-climate-change threat – does the Ruling Class do naught but dither? 

*** *** ***

ASKING THE ABOVE question in slightly different terms, why – if the One Percent did not already regard us as a doomed species on a dying planet – is it not commanding its political vassals to repair the increasingly broken, crumbling and abandoned U.S. infrastructure? 

Just as our overlords routinely spend fortunes to maintain the value, decor and comforts of their palatial mansions, so it would seem they'd also maintain the value and functionality of what is now effectively their own nation – unless of course they regard such expenditures as money squandered on a doomed realm.

Which in turn explains perfectly their breathtaking generosity toward the ever-more-aggressive U.S. military and militarized police apparatus. Not surprisingly, it is already practicing for the proverbial Last Roundup – the mass arrest (and probable extermination) of unthinkably vast numbers of U.S. citizens.

*** *** ***

AGAIN ASKING THE question, why else – if the purpose were not deliberate obfuscation – would our formerly informative mass media behave as it does? Not only has it been reduced to a uniquely privatized version of the propaganda machine that defines any despotism. Far more ominously, it now functions as a psychological warfare apparatus. It's apparent mission is inflicting the intellectual paralyses of maximum confusion on even the most well-informed segments of the population. 

This is a point I had not previously considered – probably because, as a former member of the working press (though I was ousted before it was fully corporatized into its present-day Josef Goebbels form), I was too close to the metaphorical trees to see the proverbial forest. 

But Truthout's Joseph Natoli pulls it into sharp focus.  Here's his most telling passage:

Carrying on such balanced discussion of anything in a society already seriously bent in one direction is just a mockery, and at worse, a front behind which the biases of that society can go on as if they were guided by a rational discourse. This front of a media conducting relentless, penetrating interpretation set on revealing lies and bullshit, set on deconstructing edifices of truth, can only always and only be the truth by which the status quo, bent as it is, perseveres. Our mainstream media coverage is either a chaos of mindless venting, a deluge of "information" whose only gatekeeper is Google's PageRank, the insulated "de-friending" domains of Facebook communication, or the disingenuousness of both balanced and biased reporting. In this way, our communication is in one way or another serving to maintain our inequitable order of things. Our media stand like the Baltimore police as servants of that order, protecting it from exposure, which is what the media are now doing, and from collapse, as what the police are paid to do as they protect and serve.

 

*** *** ***

THE DETERIORATION OF the U.S. infrastructure is not just due to neglect but – in the case of public transport – the result of a deliberate assault on facilities and service.  It is as if the One Percenters were hastening to withdraw their money from an industry they have decided is on the brink of collapse and is therefore no longer worthy of investment.

 

Long-term investment, of course, is precisely what mass transit requires. The One Percent's refusal to invest therein thus suggests the One Percenters believe we have no long-term future for which to prepare.

But a few days ago I set aside this issue as a bit too extreme for a Reader Supported News comment threat. Instead I took it as an opportunity to vent my endless bitterness at being stranded in the city with the worst most miserable mass transit I have ever encountered anywhere in the urban United States.

 

(No, that's not hyperbole. Even in the 1950s, Knoxville, Tennessee, with a population of only about 100,000, had significantly better bus service than Tacoma, a major seaport of 200,000 people, has today.) 

What follows is revised for re-publication here, hence is not italicized: 

There will never be a renaissance of public transport in the United States – and the dismal fate of Pierce Transit, which serves Tacoma and surrounding Pierce County, shows why.

By any measure, the United States has by far the worst public transport in the industrial world. We the people have been so damned ever since the politicians were bought off by the automobile industry. 

The resultant war against Working Class mobility  began in the 1920s, with the closure or downsizing of mass transit to force us into the debt slavery of total dependence on privately owned automobiles. 

While this variant of the class war is commanded from board rooms and legislative chambers, its present-day storm troopers are the majority whites, whose carefully conditioned hatred and contempt of transit-dependent lower-income people perpetuates anti-transit policies whether federal, state or local. The downsizing of Pierce Transit – a 2008-2012 service-reduction approaching 90 percent – is a textbook case. 

The Tacoma/Pierce County Chamber of Commerce is anti-transit, as is the Pierce County Council. So, albeit less obviously, are majorities on the Tacoma City Council and the other municipal governments within the PT service area.

 

Thus all it took to defeat the 2011 and 2012 ballot measures that would have restored and maintained PT service was “transit-is-welfare” hate-mongering by opponents. In other words, it was the voters themselves who sneeringly proclaimed the PT service area the home of the most vindictively anti-transit-user electorate in the nation. 

***

To put Tacoma's transit crisis in somewhat sharper focus:

(1)-Slightly more than half the population of Tacoma is officially lower-income; 18 percent of its households are officially impoverished. Nearly half of PT's regular riders have no other means of transport. 

(2)-The “transit-is-welfare” meme is far too sophisticated to have originated locally. Given the testimony of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state is a favorite Ruling Class rat-lab for perfecting methods of oppression, the meme's initial use, in 2011, was obviously a test run. Its success then and in 2012 means it will be used wherever the One Percent wants to convince an appropriately bigoted white majority to destroy a local mass transit system.

(3)-Though Washington state is allegedly “progressive,” its policies reveal its fascist heart. It has the most regressive state tax structure in the U.S.; it is the only state in which renters have no tenant-right protections whatsoever; and its electorate is relentlessly edging ever further to the Right. With its government already controlled by a Republican senate, next year's election will in all probability turn it into another Wisconsin. 

(4)-For more detail, see “Exclusive: How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies the Global Class War,” here.

(5)-The state has become so inhospitable to lower-income people, I would gladly move elsewhere if I could. Given the food-stamp cuts imposed by our Democrat president  and the absolute certainty both the Republican state senate and the Republican Congress will side with Obama to impose additional, deliberately genocidal cuts in all the programs upon which I am dependent, remaining here may indeed prove fatal. Yet where is there to go? In any case there is no way I can afford to leave. I am simply too impoverished – and probably too physically crippled – to ever move again. I am 75 years old, and (apart from Social Security), all my other income sources – and any potential I might ever again have such earnings – were slain by the capitalist downsizing known as the Great Recession.

 

***

As the fate of Pierce Transit reveals, it not just the lack of political will that is destroying public transportation in the United States. 

Even more than that, it's the morally imbecilic lack of empathy that has become a defining part of the U.S. national character. The U.S. has been thoroughly Ayn Randified – a uniquely USian form of Nazification – which means the harder times get, the more vicious the people become, not toward their oppressors, but toward one another.

 

Save in tiny (and therefore statistically insignificant) demographic enclaves, the cooperative spirit that helped U.S. communities survive the Great Depression has been methodically eradicated. 

The result is Moron Nation, the realm where moronation has eliminated class consciousness – or any other sort of social conscience or consciousness – and where the attitude of the people toward one another is increasingly that of Ted Bundy toward his victims.

 

Which is why the Republicans – who are actually neo-Nazis – are taking over, not just here in Washington state, but everywhere else as well. It's called "meanness," and it's why (precisely as exemplified by transit policy), the U.S. is becoming notorious as the meanest nation in the industrial world.

Alas, history proves that once a population sinks to that reptilian level, humanitarian reform is impossible...unless it is imposed from without by force, as it was on Nazi Germany. 

Once more I ask: what is the purpose of this deliberately induced Ayn Rand malevolence? Do the One Percenters already know terminal climate change means there is nothing left in the U.S. – or anywhere else on this planet – that can be preserved? Are they already chuckling with sadistic glee at how we the people fighting over whatever miserly tokens they let trickle down upon us from their inconceivably fat hoards of money and resources?

 

Whatever the answers to these questions, it is obvious the One Percent is deliberately thrusting our nation – and indeed our entire world – into a maelstrom of insanity. 

Quoth Longfellow's Prometheus:  “Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.” 

LB/11-17 May 2015

-30-