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

Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zetkin's full text of the interview is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB: 1-7 February 2017

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Open Letter to Goddess-Centered Pagans; Important Funding Drive; Long-Overdue Eulogy for My Dead Son

HOMELESS HUMANS have become the new exemplars of capitalist reality, particularly in the United States. (I made these portraits with my digital Canon SLR while on unpaid/volunteer assignment last week, then processed the pictures as if I were once again working with my beloved M Leicas and Tri-X at 800 ASA developed in D-76 and printing the results on DuPont Varilure, which had photographic paper's highest silver content and was therefore the best paper in the world but was discontinued in 1973 due to capitalist manipulations that triggered skyrocketing silver prices.) Photographs by Loren Bliss © 2016. Click on images to view them full size.

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PLEASE CONSIDER THE following as an open letter to the pagan community, the first of the essays on the relevance of socialism to paganism and of paganism to socialism I promised on 18 July I would soon write. Please also forgive the delay; the 18th was the last time my circumstances actually allowed me the time and energy essential to prepare anything genuinely contemplative for this space; my neighbors and I here in the geezer ghetto are still plagued by our heartless landlord's innumerable and invariably disruptive intrusions as he renovates his for-profit properties to comply with federal low-interest loan requirements.

As I wrote in that most recent OAN essay, how “do I resolve the apparent conflict between being a Marxian (and therefore a dialectical materialist) and... also being a Gaian Pagan (and a Pagan not by fad or adaptation or mere inclination but as a direct consequence of two undeniable, inexplicable and unquestionably demanding encounters with its Source)?”

“Preview: in the ultimate sense, I see no conflict at all. In fact I am convinced each is essential to sustain the other.”

But of course I was describing a feeling, emotional reality rather than intellectual reality, right brain rather than left brain, and I as soon as I began applying logic to the question, I initially feared I had stepped into a miasma of contradictions I might never be able to resolve.

Then – as so often occurs in my habitually agnostic/skeptical (if not downright cynical) relationship to all forms of spirituality including my own – synchronicity intervened. As it happens, I am working, again as an unpaid volunteer, on another editorial project which brought me into contact with the mostly unacknowledged truth all philosophies – even our own informal assumptions about life – embody the bias imposed by our socioeconomic class: whether we are part of the 99 Percent or part of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassalage.  Philosophically speaking, our overlords in the One Percent and its Ruling Class view the world as their rightful “god-given” possession, an exploitable commodity – we the people included – to subjugate as greed, sadistic whim and capitalism's mandatory quest for maximum profit dictate. Meanwhile we of the 99 Percent – all of us capitalism's victims – either (further) shackle ourselves by adopting the philosophies dictated by our oppressors or we (somehow) wake up and evolve our own philosophical view.

Socialism is, of course, one of the (self-protective) results of our awakening; Marxism is merely socialism's purest and most disciplined form. Paganism – especially in its Wiccan or Gaian forms – is another such awakening. The functional twinship of socialism and paganism begins with their common purpose: the preservation of our species from extinction by capitalist depredation, either as World War III or environmental apocalypse.

Indeed I would go so far as to argue that while one may be a socialist without being pagan, one cannot be a pagan without also being a socialist.

Capitalism, remember, is a direct derivative of Protestant Christianity (for which see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). The ultimate form of Protestantism is the Prosperity Gospel,  which reasserts the divine right of kings in its modern form as the divine right of corporate executives and of the One Percent in general. It defines wealth as an expression of divine blessing and attributes poverty to sin. (Backtracking for a moment, Christianity is one of the three Abrahamic religions. It and the others, Judaism and Islam, define the universe as the asexual creation of a male deity and thereby reduce female reproductive power to virtual irrelevance. From this reduction results the contempt for Nature, the misogynistic hatred, the clitoris envy and the implicitly violent insistence on hierarchy that define all patriarchal belief systems.) Predictably, the associated malignancy is intensified to its most extreme, ecocidal and genocidal form in capitalism, which is Abrahamic religion's ultimate distillate. (The historical dynamics of patriarchal religion's distillation into an ever-more-murderous philosophy of exploitation is eloquently documented in The Great Cosmic Mother, Barbara Mor's invaluable work in post-Abrahamic, post-capitalist anthropology, a book that should be twinned with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in terms of significant revelations of our methodically suppressed past.) A basic pagan library should include a well-read copy of each volume.

Remember too the relationship between capitalism and its Abrahamic-religion father is symbiotic: one reinforces the other – hence Marx's condemnation of religion as the opiate of the masses. Hence too the liberation of scientific inquiry resulting from the Soviet suppression of Abrahamic religion – specifically the widespread Soviet investigation of subjects damned as “Satanic”  in the Christian-dominated U.S. Moreover the Soviet suppression of Abrahamic religion encouraged not only the U.S.S.R.'s indigenous tribal religions but the resurrection of European paganism by Soviet and post-Soviet youth.

Given that the official, dominant and often violently sustained philosophy of our pre-revolutionary, pre-apocalyptic era is capitalism cum Christianity (or vice-versa), what then are socialism and paganism but efforts by ourselves, the 99 Percent, to liberate ourselves from enslavement by capitalism and Christianity? (I presume I need not add our enslavement is indisputably proven by how capitalism – its depredations countenanced if not encouraged by the Prosperity Gospel -- has already reduced half the U.S. population  to low-income destitution  during the past 43 years. As to how this has come about, see Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Harper: 2008].)

Just as socialism is our instrument of economic revolution, so then is paganism our instrument of spiritual revolution – though the class-based nature of modern paganism (another expression of the socialist/pagan twinhood) – has yet to be commonly recognized by either group.

While the revolutionary origins and history of socialism are thoroughly documented,  the modern history of paganism (or neo-paganism as it is sometimes called), is virtually unknown – even to many present-day pagans. Though such a history is beyond the scope of this essay, it can nevertheless be summarized in three sentences. The modern pagan renaissance – and in particular the resurrection of the Great Goddess as its primary deity – began with the 1948 publication of The White Goddess, Robert Graves' definitively revolutionary “Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 1966). Its initial collective expression occurred within the Beat Movement of the 1950s. (See for example Diane DiPrima's epic Loba (Penguin Books, London: 1973-1998), which, probably more than any other associated work, exemplifies the spiritual revolution implicit in the Beat ethos.) The resurrection process was accelerated by the the Folk Renaissance of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which popularized traditional British and European balladry, much of it the disguised yet still-psychically potent remnants of pagan liturgy, a connection explored in detail by the late Holger Olaf Nygard, Duke University's resident folklore scholar. (Alas, Nygard's cutting-edge work, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad [Duke University Press: 1963], is long out of print – and my copy, probably one of the last in existence, was destroyed by the 1983 fire.) In any case, the point here is that paganism acquired its present global momentum  as an extension of the Counterculture of Rebellion that reached its apex during the 1960s and 1970s – an expression of the same save-the-world-from-capitalist-depredation instinct that birthed the Gaia Hypothesis,  Second Wave Feminism, Environmentalism and the Back-to-the-Land Movement. And I think it no coincidence paganism is, with feminism and environmentalism, among the only Countercultural remnants surviving today.

But from the socialist perspective is spirituality  – any spirituality – not inevitably yet another “opiate of the masses”? And thus, again from the socialist perspective, should not all spirituality therefore be discarded as expeditiously as possible?

Firstly, history shows spirituality is a characteristic human activity impossible to suppress. It is ultimately an expression of our species' quest for individual and collective meaning, as instinctive as other forms of creative expression, as definitively human as sexuality, though – alas (precisely as Abrahamic religion demonstrates) – equally subject to perversion. Secondly the emergence of Liberation Theology,  a radical variant of Catholicism that presents Jesus as a martyred revolutionary and attempts to sidestep Christianity's inherent Abrahamic misogyny, contempt for Nature and hierarchical despotism, proves even a classic, trickle-down opiate might be made to (deceptively) serve the cause of socialist revolution. Thirdly, while Liberation Theology was ultimately an effort by the Ruling Class (as personified by the church) to retain Ruling Class religious dominance (i.e. philosophical supremacy) in an era of rising revolutionary anger, paganism by contrast is an instinctively revolutionary response by those of us increasingly alienated by the roles of organized religion and capitalist governance in spawning, fostering and intensifying capitalism's threat to human survival.

As if to further confirm paganism's revolutionary nature, there is compelling evidence the One Percent and its Ruling Class consider the resurrection of paganism (and particularly its Great Goddess) to be at least as subversive as socialism. (This evidence includes several premature deaths and the mysterious fire that destroyed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” my meticulously researched collection of the evidence that would have redefined the Counterculture as the first wave of a revolution against patriarchy.) Paganism's danger to the One Percent and its Ruling Class thus lies in its accelerating rebuttal of Abrahamic despotism, which remember is the root of capitalism. The contrast between the Abrahamic god and the modern pagan goddess is literally a clash of diametrical opposites. Whether one accepts the Abrahamic god as real or symbolic, he is in fact the personification of oppression – the limitation, destruction and/or perversion of our quintessential humanity. Just as, whether one accepts the goddess as real or symbolic, she is the personification of nurturing – the recognition, encouragement and fulfillment of our individual and collective potential.

In this context paganism offers genuine liberation – not just from the Abrahamic religions' patriarchy-sustaining misogynistic anti-sex, anti-sensual and anti-Nature taboos, but from the innate Abrahamic hostility to science as well. While the Abrahamic myth of creation by a male deity is a genuinely unnatural act, contradicting physics, astronomy and biology, the Gaia Hypothesis restates in scientific terms paganism's core principle – that our planet (and by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating. Moreover, paganism – unlike so-called Liberation Theology – is not dictated from above; the Ruling Class, which sneeringly denounces paganism as childish superstition or damns it as “Devil worship,” wants nothing to do with it and suppresses it at every opportunity.  Modern paganism is thus born entirely of rebellious intent – a 99 Percent philosophy intended, as I wrote in a long-lost essay, “to fault the (patriarchal) bedrock of (what passes for) civilization” and thereby free us from the psychological component of patriarchal/Abrahamic/capitalist shackles.

Thus too modern paganism is the spiritual and emotional counterpart of what socialism is for economics and politics. If one is truly a dialectical materialist – that is, genuinely committed to understanding “the real conditions of materialist existence” (which include the material of human consciousness) – one must recognize that sociological and psychological realities are equal to economic and political realities in the symbiosis that shapes our circumstances. Moreover, if one is genuinely committed to the pagan ethos of rescuing our human selfhood from beneath the jackboots of patriarchal religion and capitalism  – thereby reconnecting ourselves with Nature and (perhaps) saving ourselves from extinction – the socialist ethos of “from each according to ability; to each according to need” is the only way to expand the pagan principle of “as above, so below” to encompass all human society.

Here ends my open letter, which I hope will achieve the widest possible circulation within the pagan community.

*****

DONATIONS FOR WARBRIDES of Japan, a documentary, are desperately needed and are 100 percent tax deductible. While I do not normally use OAN for fund-raising, this is an especially worthy cause, as detailed in an e-mail Director Yayoi Winfrey recently sent me:

“Our production team has scheduled interviews with 11 Japanese war brides and/or their adult children in eight cities and three states. However, donations to our crowdfunding campaign, which began two weeks ago, has slowed down considerably, leaving us short on production funds. We desperately need your tax-deductible dollars for two airline tickets, car rental and gas plus hotel accommodations and meals for two weeks while we shoot. Won't you please help us get this documentary onto the screen? we would appreciate your participation no matter what size your donation.  Again, every dollar is tax-deductible if you donate at this site.  And please don't hesitate to ask questions you might have about where your donation dollars will go.”

*****

I HAVE COME to regard it as a kind of cheating to re-post comments I wrote on threads at other websites, but the following is the first time I have ever been able to bring myself to write publicly of the tragedy that – because it occurred during our society's pre-feminist refusal to acknowledge reproductive trauma – shattered the marriage shared by my second wife and me.

The writing was itself a surprise, my entirely unpremeditated response to an emotionally wrenching report  detailing the birth of a dead child and the creditor-intensified emotional devastation it inflicted on both parents.

What follows is slightly expanded from the original, which was condensed to fit Reader Supported News' 1500-character space restriction:

Albeit without the crushing debt that afflicted the author of the RSN essay after the death of her daughter, my second wife and I were similarly wounded by the death of our son. Hence we share Ms. Blossom's sorrow.

Ironically, we lived in Manhattan, the psychiatric capitol of the world, but it was 1967, and the feminist movement had yet to raise USian emotional consciousness enough for the shrinks to recognize the trauma associated with a still-born child.

We had made our baby deliberately and knowingly, gazing into one another's eyes amidst the exquisite pleasure and infinite joy of love, and like the Blossoms, we were anticipating, with all the characteristic happiness and apprehension, our transformation from a couple into a family. Adrienne, in that singularly female bio-emotional way of knowing  – a mode of perception we men can never truly comprehend  – had decided as a child age seven or eight she wanted a son named Loren, and now she was collecting the requisite baby clothes and related items ancillary to the fulfillment of her desire and intention. I on my part had already decided to give up the uncertain life of an editorial freelancer, take a staff job on one of the many New Jersey dailies that surrounded the City and thus aim for an eventual slot on one of the Manhattan papers, most likely The New York Post, which then before Rupert Murdoch bought it and destroyed it was the most proudly Left-leaning daily in the United States.

But at the end of our sixth month of pregnancy a moral imbecile for whom there are not vile enough pejoratives in any language ran for a train, and in his vicious haste – cursed may he be – he knocked Adrienne down the long flight of iron stairs to the lower level of the Union Square subway station. It was a Sunday; she had gone to visit friends on the Upper East Side, returned home that evening massively bruised and limping from the fall, and three days later our son was born dead.

My wife saw him briefly in the emergency room, an experience she cannot talk about even now, 49 years later. I viewed him for a moment as a nurse carried him in a glass jar through the Beth Israel Hospital emergency waiting room.

“Is that the Bliss baby,” I asked.

“Who are you,” she asked in reply.

“I'm the father,” I said. “May I see?”

Except for his purple color, he seemed perfectly formed, almost a twin of the infant I knew from pictures of myself as a babe-in-arms, his hair as near-black as my own was then.

I cannot yet describe my feelings as the nurse bore him away; even now no words suffice.

In keeping with that era's accepted practice, we stifled our grief. A year later it seemed we despised one another, and by 1974 we were divorced – though now in the final years of our lives we are again emotionally close though we live on opposite coasts.

Thanks to feminist consciousness-raising, trauma such as ours and the Blossoms is at last acknowledged, even unto the fact it is a wound from which full healing is rarely if ever achieved. But its hurt can indeed be ameliorated by therapy – save when capitalist greed prices such relief out of our reach, an atrocity the only cure for which is the abolition of capitalism – another of the many reasons my politics are what they are.

Meanwhile, if reincarnation is real, may that which animated our son live again as someone else's child – and this time thrive.

And yes, we would have named him Loren.

LB/8 August 2016.

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Activism and Renewed Vision at Age 74; 12 Revealing Reports and Essays on U.S. Fascism and Theocracy

PROUD AND ANGRY: A member of the 15 Now Tacoma organizing committee, I spent a bit more than an hour Sunday collecting signatures on our petition to the Tacoma City Council demanding the minimum wage inside this municipality be raised to $15 per hour.

In that brief span of time – never mind I am 74 years old and visibly crippled – I filled two petition-pages, front and back, with a total of 48 signatures complete with addresses and contact information.

The venue was very much in 15 Now's advantage – an annual celebration of Tacoma's diverse ethnicity, a food-and-music festival in a large and pleasant city park near my dwelling, and I should have brought many more than two of our petition-sheets with me, but alas I did not. It was my first time working alone as a signature-gatherer, and I had foolishly under-estimated the campaign's popularity.

Meanwhile, “15 Now” is becoming a slogan of the increasingly radicalized Working Class, not just in Washington state but throughout the U.S. imperial homeland, and minimum-wage data tells why.

Here, where the minimum wage is set by the legislature, it is $9.32 an hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. But neither provide a so-called living wage, the sum required for self-support without reliance on food stamps and other subsidies  the ever-more-unabashedly Ayn-Rand-fascist federal and state governments are relentlessly slashing or eliminating entirely.

(Note: the above-linked wage and cost-of-living data is not current. In one place the source-website says it's data is from the year 2010; in another it says it was updated in 2012. Thanks to bureaucratic lag – the increasing reluctance of U.S. governance to acknowledge how bad things truly are – these are the last full years available. However, the site is nevertheless useful as it does show the relationship between minimum wage and living wage.)

Had the federal minimum wage kept pace with inflation – that is, were the capitalists and their political servants not gleefully lining their own pockets by savaging workers and working families – the federal minimum wage would be $23 per hour.

Combine that with the fact at least half the population of Tacoma is lower income – 60 percent of the children in Tacoma schools are on free or reduced-price lunches  – and it becomes easy to understand why it took me only 75 minutes to gather all those signatures.

Despite my error in not bringing more petition-pages to the park, I am fiercely proud of my effort today. I frankly had no idea I could be continuously on my feet without serious discomfort for anything approaching that span of time and distance, equivalent to walking about three miles.

I was also reveling in the exquisiteness of my new eyesight, 20/20 in my right eye due to cataract surgery, its result a re-familiarization with the sensuality of seeing that is tantamount to discovery of a fountain of youth – an experience I would be denied had I not applied for, and gotten, a special medical-expense grant.

At the same time, I am again forced to confront the fact the United States of America – once a nation of which I was proud to be a citizen – is again expanding at every level its traditional economic hostility toward people of color.  But now it has gone much further. It has become the enemy of all working peoples everywhere, at home and abroad, regardless of our race and ethnicity.

It is from this perspective – pride in what I did today, pride in the fact I am able to remain defiantly active, anger in what this nation has become – I devote my Sundays to writing this blog.

******

On the Rise of Theocracy and Fascism in Obama's U.S.

Here is an analysis that reveals the connections beneath five seemingly unrelated reports:

“Right-Wing Militias Are Thriving - and the Media Won't Talk About It.” Nor is the Obama Regime protecting us against the depredations of these latter-day storm troopers.

The report's most revealing passage is frightening indeed:

“The problem is much more one of inter-agency coordination, leadership and simple recognition of the widespread threat of right-wing violence—a failure epitomized by the Obama administration’s knee-jerk disavowal of a Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism, leaked to right-wing media in April 2009. As Potok noted, this disavowal came despite two basic facts: first, that a similar report on the virtually nonexistent radical left had been issued six months earlier, and second, the fact the report itself was “a fair, sober and prescient analysis of what was going on.” In fact “virtually everything that was written in that report came to pass in one way or another. But it’s not just the government that’s been caught flat-footed. The media’s sensationalist approach obscured as much or more than it revealed...”

AlterNet's Paul Rosenberg, who wrote this otherwise excellent summary of material from the Southern Poverty Law Center, nevertheless failed in two significant ways.

He seems to regard the government's inactivity and the media's dissemination of disinformation as separate phenomena – never mind the fact governance and mass media in today's U.S. are each wholly owned subsidiaries of the One Percent. In other words, it appears the militia are – no doubt in anticipation of their future function as defenders of capitalism – definitively under Ruling Class protection.

And – though Rosenberg does report the intimate connections between the new storm troopers, the imperial war machine and Christian fanaticism – he fails to place these disturbing facts in the context of the much larger, lavishly financed, increasingly successful effort to impose biblical-law theocracy  on the United States.

Predictably, here too the U.S. government demonstrates its servitude to the One Percent. There's the Hobby Lobby case – which is turning out to be the Dred Scott decision not just for women but for the entire U.S. 99 Percent.  There's also President Obama's dramatic increase in funding for religion-based social-services that notoriously discriminate against non-believers.

Most of all there's the story implicit in “US Air Force Prepares to Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of Fundamentalist Christians Proselytizing War.” which details the forcible conversion of the imperial war machine into an onward-Christian-soldiers force of heretic hunters and infidel eliminators. These modern-day Crusaders are tasked with converting the world,  not at swords-point as in the previous Dark Age, but with cluster-bombs, napalm, depleted-uranium munitions, torture, deliberate collateral damage and other such technologies and tactics suitable to the new Dark Age in which we are befallen.

Here's the report's key paragraph:

“Look, let's just call it what it is. 'Spiritual rape' perpetrated by 'fundamentalist Christian religious predators' is how we at the civil rights organization I lead — the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF)— describe the profound sense of vicious, personal violation that is being mercilessly inflicted upon tens of thousands of our MRFF military clients, 96% of whom are practicing Christians themselves. Forced religious indoctrination, mandatory prayer sessions, active, abusive measures towards the promotion of one or another fundamentalist Christian sect, the shaming and savaging of freethinking, atheist, and agnostic service members – these barbaric tactics define the monstrous modus operandi of the Christian dominionist hegemony that lies as a cancerous plague metastasizing briskly across the whole of the Air Force and the U.S. Military.”

Another aspect of the theocracy issue – made so by the bottomless hatred of women that defines all Abrahamic fanatics whether Judaic, Christian or Muslim – is obliquely covered by “What I Learned Growing Up in the South as a Feminist, and the Problems With Today's Feminist Movement.” An essay by Lynn Stuart Parramore on the present-day plight of feminism, its most noteworthy paragraph promises much but delivers little:

“Part of this I blame on the Democratic Party, which often embraces a superficial 'hooray for women!' attitude while kicking women, particularly those at the lower rungs of the economic ladder, under the bus. Too often, mainstream moderate women's organizations seem to be class-blind and oblivious (or even hostile) to the need to confront economic structures that oppress both women and men.”

Too bad Parramore did not detail how the Democratic Party, beneath its never-ending Big Lie of progressive politics, proves itself to be as bad (if not actually worse), than the Republicans in effective hostility to women. How many millions of women have been robbed of their reproductive freedom – forever – by the loss of their jobs, and therefore the loss of their health insurance, as the direct result of Democrat “free trade” policies?

And now how many women who desperately hoped Obamacare would restore those freedoms are now suffering the cruelty of Hobby Lobby – the permanent, theocratic destruction of their hopes via Obamacare, the now-officially unconstitutional legislation presumably written and approved by the president whose first claim to fame was as a Harvard Law School constitutional scholar. 

Given the innumerable shape-shifts from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer that prove the president to be the most brazenly dishonest occupant of the White House ever, who can doubt the Hobby-Lobby outcome – the denial of free contraception to untold numbers of women – was intended from the very beginning?

The last two reports in this anthology, “Elderly Veteran Arrested For Asking County Officials To Speak Louder,” here and “We're Arresting Poor Mothers for Our Own Failures,” here, each illustrate the ever-more-zero-tolerance police-state malevolence that now increasingly afflicts the (increasingly Christian, hence increasingly brutal) imperial homeland.

******

Outside Agitation Elsewhere (in Case You Missed It)

 

“Obama Administration Eyes Significant Direct Involvement in Ukrainian Civil War,” Reader Supported News' republication of a terrifying New York Times report of looming escalation on behalf the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine War, sparked an unusually vitriolic comment thread, to which I added my own analysis:

Don't let the quibbling...obscure the terrifying fact escalations of this sort are bound to trigger World War III.

Because Russia is not North Vietnam – because Russia has a genuinely global military capability – U.S. intervention on behalf the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine can only lead to thermonuclear holocaust.

 

Remember too the sole purpose of the U.S. government (and therefore of the CIA or any of its agencies whether foreign or domestic), is the advancement and perpetuation of U.S. capitalism and its global empire, the de facto Fourth Reich. This role it now fulfills perfectly.

Capitalism today has only three goals, all subsets of its mandate for absolute power and unlimited profit. These goals are: (1)-total control of global resources; (2)-extermination of surplus populations (that is, of all workers and working families rendered unnecessary by automation); (3)-reduction of the remaining workers to de facto slavery.

These goals are evident wherever there is a U.S. presence – Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, New Orleans, Ukraine – anywhere the empire exerts itself.

That's because the U.S. government is capitalism personified: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, the rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth – moral imbecility writ into foreign and domestic policy.

Later on the same thread a poster screen-named “geraldom” seemingly tried to lead three of us into criminal statements:  “So what you, lorenbliss, and dsepeczi are basically saying (bottomline) is that Putin should surrender control of Russia to the U.S. in order to avoid igniting a hot-war and certain destruction of all life on earth.”

To which I responded:

The maliciously provocative nature of this false assertion – a statement to which nearly any rational response would be actionable by the secret police as treason – makes me wonder for whom geraldom is working.

 

Never forget Lev Bronstein's axiom: “in any gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”

******

“Fear and Retaliation at the VA” exposes vindictive management within the Department of Veterans Affairs  – a grim reality no different from the oppressive management that characterizes the entire Obamanoid bureaucracy and indeed governmental bureaucracy throughout the United States. The excellent report, by Lydia Dennett of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), was reprinted by Popular Resistance.org, a website that is always worth reading. On the comment thread I pointed out how bureaucratic malevolence whether internal or external is one of the ways capitalist governance ensures itself against socialism:

As I said on Outside Agitator's Notebook...a few weeks ago, the problems with VA health care are a microcosm of the problems with U.S. health care in general –  (scroll down), an analysis that, whether coincidentally or not, was repeated by Paul Krugman  10 days later.

But these problems are also what is wrong with all government bureaucracies – federal, state and local – that are responsible for providing services to the Working Class people of the United States.

The ultimate source of these problems is class warfare – the fact that managers (who presume themselves to be part of the Ruling Class elite), are indifferent if not outright hostile to the needs of the people they are theoretically responsible for serving.

This hostility is a logical byproduct of extent to which the U.S. population – particularly the college-educated elite – have been trained in (indeed brainwashed in), the morally imbecilic credo of Ayn Rand.

Hence the attitude in the bureaucracies from the top down is essentially the same as on Wall Street: infinite greed as ultimate virtue – the conscious and deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

As a consequence, management is focused not on serving the people but on maximizing earnings while minimizing personal effort. Moreover, the same attitude applies, in varying degrees, at all levels of bureaucracy.

The result is one of the many ways the One Percent perpetuates the popular hatred of government that perpetuates hostility to socialism. It is also yet another dimension of the methodical reduction of the 99 Percent to abject serfdom.

******

“Coal exports from Bellingham could ramp up rapidly” reveals that railroad tracks are already being upgraded to carry billions of tons of coal to a proposed new international port near Bellingham, Washington. But Crosscut's usually skillful reporter Floyd McKay sidesteps entirely the obvious implication of the new construction – that the proverbial fix is already in, and the coal port will be built regardless of local opposition. I commented accordingly:

Anyone who doubts the Bellingham coal port is not already a done deal need only note how BNSF is upgrading the relevant rail lines.

The upgrading proves the associated political process – environmental-impact statements included – is nothing more than another charade of the sort that now exemplifies the Big Lie of U.S. democracy.

Under the new paradigm of U.S. governance, anything the capitalists want, the capitalists get – no matter how many will suffer or die as a consequence.

 

Were the fix not already in, the railroad would not be spending the money to bolster its tracks to support increased traffic.

******

“The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist,” by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux, of The Intercept, reports the ugly details of how easily a political activist* can be damned forever as a public enemy.  I damn the government in response:

 

By these standards, anyone who exercises the First Amendment right to protest can be labeled a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer – and that is obviously the government's intent.

Participate in a demonstration wherein a few secret-police thugs trash a building to create an excuse for mass arrest, you're on the list – your life destroyed forever unless you manage to escape to political asylum somewhere else.

What this makes clear is that Obama will not be content until all of us in the 99 Percent regardless of ethnicity or gender are reduced to the endless fear and total subjugation that was originally the wretched lot of minorities in the Ku Klux Klanfederacy whether south or north.

Indeed, that very kind of terror-state (so akin to Tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany), seems to be the Obamanoid model for good governance.

And in Obama's wanton and willful embrace of tyranny – never mind the clamor of deliberate lies and misinformed protests by DUDs (Democrats Uttering Denials) – the Republicans can no longer be blamed as initiators.

Once again, in his transition from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, the president proves himself to be infinitely more tyrannical than Richard Milhous Nixon ever dreamed of being.

_________

*Under the Obama Regime, this applies only to activists on the Left. Those on the Right – even those advocating violence against the government – are clearly exempt. See “Right-Wing Militias Are Thriving,” above. 

******

“How Anonymous Cops Online Are Reacting to the Death of Eric Garner” gives us an insider's glimpse of the savagery characteristic of capitalist governance. My response gets right to the point:

Envision these remarks as part of a dialogue amongst soldiers in an army of occupation inside a conquered nation and you have at last glimpsed the core truth of life in the imperial USian homeland.

******

“Federal Appeals Court Deals Blow to Obamacare” is a Washington Post report that discloses what I suspect is yet another deliberate betrayal of lower-income people maliciously built into the so-called Affordable Care Act.  Thus my comment:

It ain't just “the Republicans.”

The Affordable Care Act was written by Democrats – or more specifically by insurance-monopoly lawyers empowered by Democrats.

Which means this newest “failure” – actually another example of Obama the Orator shape-shifting into Barack the Betrayer – was intended from the very beginning.

Why?

Because Obama is the quintessential capitalist. Because he is the biggest Big Liar ever to occupy the White House. Because he rules by capitalism's credo of Ayn Rand moral imbecility: infinite greed as maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

Mostly because it's yet another truncheon with which to beat the Working Class into submission.

The victims of mandatory Obamacare – the people who cannot afford insurance without government subsidies – will be ruined by bankruptcies, foreclosures, families flung into permanent homelessness.

Meanwhile – with the subsidy money diverted to more profitable forms of corporate welfare – there'll be even bigger payoffs for Obama's One Percent masters.

Wake up, people. It's capitalism in action: absolute power and infinite profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Later, in response to a hostile poster, I added this:

I'm well aware of Obamacare's Republican origins.

So let's be honest about who inflicted it on the people of the United States. (It was Barack the Betrayer and the Democratic Party).

Also let's be honest about why it was inflicted on us.

(It pays off the health care cartel and the prescription drug lords with the most obscene windfall profits in their obscene-profit histories.)

(Plus – let us not forget this all-important point – Obamacare perpetuates forever the definitive USian policy of health care as a privilege of wealth.)

Lastly, let's be honest about why the Republicans pretend to oppose it.

(Opposing anything with a “Democratic” label is the Republicans' predetermined, carefully scripted role in maintaining the Big Lie of USian "representative democracy" – their function in the One Party of Two Names.)

Wake up, people. There is no democracy here. There is only the tyranny of the One Percent – camouflaged by charades performed by its wholly owned servants in government at every level.

 

And my next retort was unapologetically antagonistic:

I see by the negative numbers I'm getting, there's a bunch of DUDs – Democrats Uttering Denials – on this thread. Hmmmm...must be an election year, as the defenders of the indefensible are again out in force, trying once more to sell us their Big Lie of “change we can believe in” – never mind our reality is exactly as Audre Lorde said: “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”

Likewise my concluding comment, though its animosity was directed at the Democratic Party and not at the poster to whom I was responding:

...Wyden sounds like a male clone of the Patty Murray/Maria Cantwell duet here in the state of Wishywash.

 

But that's the sort of marionette mediocrity we get – Democrat or Republican it matters not – now that the Soviet Union is no longer around to scare the capitalists into a pretense of humanitarianism.

******

“No, Obama Has Not Failed” is a short essay by Charles Pierce of Esquire, republished by RSN, that disputes the growing conviction on the Left the president is “an incompetent, a sellout, or an incompetent sellout.”

 

My response is equally blunt:

Obama is also the best president the Bankers Plot conspirators ever had.

(These never-prosecuted criminals of 1934 wanted an officially fascist United States as part of a Rome/Berlin/Tokyo/Washington D.C. Axis and Hitler's New Order, a four-part global empire that was the conceptual forerunner of Bush's New World Order, the neocons' American Century and the Democrats' Global Economy.)

Indeed I would not be the least surprised if in the privacy of his own smugness, Obama already thinks of himself as “Imperator Mundi”– emperor of the world – not just POTUS but IMPOTUS.

LB/27 July 2014

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