The 2014 Elections Tell Us the Democratic Party Is Dead -- That It Was Slain by Its Own Lies and Contradictions

FORGET THE COMPENSATORY BULLSHIT the sorely beaten “progressives” are spouting. Forget Lakoff's “Democratic strategies,”  Nader's “people have to believe,” Rich's “change without hope,”  Cherlin's “the GOP is deeply divided” and all the other dementia spawned ad nauseam by the Democratic disciples of our national cult of self-deluded positive thinking. The post-election truth no vacuously happy-faced mainstream pundit dares say aloud is the national Democratic Party is dead: that Barack Obama will be its last president ever. 

 

To be sure, the party will survive in local jurisdictions for some years to come. It will endure in those domains where – despite its ever-more-contradictory words and deeds – the party apparatus is somehow able to maintain whatever Big Lies  are essential to convince a majority of local voters it represents them rather than the One Percenters to whom all Democrats have long been secretly pledged.  But even in benighted realms where Ruling Class media is able to guarantee the continued ignorance of a majority of the voters, the Democratic Party's days are obviously numbered. 

Moreover, the Democrats' death is entirely self-inflicted, though the date you perceive as the beginning of its death-throes is probably determined by your age.

For my generation – I was born in 1940 – the party's suicide began with its pathetically servile acceptance of the official verdicts scripted to reassure the world the U.S. is not a banana republic and ensure the assassinations of its own leaders would never be properly investigated much less avenged.  The party's unavenged dead – for those too young to remember – are President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was murdered in Dallas on 22 November 1963, and his brother Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy,  who was slain in Los Angeles on 6 June 1968.

Others see the Democrats' suicidal progression as beginning with President Lyndon Baines Johnson's  now infamous 1964 Big Lie campaign, which Daniel Ellsberg later truthfully denounced as “a conspiracy to manipulate the public into a war and to win an election through fraud.”

 

Or maybe it began with President Jimmy Carter's piously Christian assault on lower-income women.  Perhaps it started with President Bill Clinton's  dual offensives against the U.S. working class  and against the nation's welfare recipients. 

Possibly, for those too young to remember these earlier betrayals, it started when Albert Gore Junior surrendered the presidency  to George Bush.

Or maybe it was when Obama the Orator finally taught us the utter imbecility of hope by becoming Barack the Betrayer and making it obvious “change we can believe in” was an even more outrageous, more malicious Big Lie  than LBJ's bogus peace candidacy.

Whenever or wherever one assumes the Democrats' path to self-destruction began, the outcome is undeniable: now, in 2014, the Democratic Party has finally choked itself to death on the irremediable tangle of its own deceptions. 

***

FROM SUCH AN IGNOMINIOUS  end there is neither the triumphant rebirth of the Phoenix nor the possibility of resurrection.

The Phoenix arises from the ashes of honorable death. Resurrection – as Christianity teaches, and as European paganism taught long before Jesus was a gleam in his daddy's eye – is only for a Messiah who honorably suffers on behalf of all humanity.

But there is neither honor nor sacrifice in how the Democratic Party has killed itself.

Though it is true the USian people have been reduced to abysmal ignorance,  the resultant Moron Nation is not yet quite so pathetically stupid as to be continuously duped by a party that claims to represent the Working Class yet repeatedly throws working families, women, socioeconomic minorities and lower-income people (especially those of us who are aged and/or disabled) under the proverbial bus.

“At least the Republicans” – or so I have heard it said more times than I can count – “tell us no lies.”

In a sense, that's true. Unlike the Democrats, who still maliciously try to present themselves as humanitarians, the Republicans make no Big Lie effort to conceal the fascists they are. Their ultimate purpose is to make the United States the global model of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else – including “austerity” to guarantee extermination of those of us who are no longer profitable.

Besides which – though it pains me to admit it – we are now a nation in which the vast majority are vehement Ayn Randers, conditioned from birth to be reflexively anti-intellectual, unapologetically self-obsessed and aggressively selfish. Our national spirit – as once heroically proven at Iwo Jima,  Belleau Wood,  Gettysburg, New Orleans and Cowpens – is now evident only in fights-to-death over trinkets  at discount stores.

The mind-set that boldly rammed the New Deal down the capitalists' defiant throats – the humanitarian vision  that formerly empowered the Democratic Party – is obviously banished forever. And the attendant hopelessness so vividly expressed in 2014's low voter turnout – “let the Republicans win because it damn sure can't get any worse” – means there is no possible way the Democratic Party can ever recover.

This is because the Democratic Party has betrayed the electorate so many times it no longer has any credibility at all. Its populist posturing is rendered meaningless by its plutocratic policies. That's why it will lose the White House in 2016, after which even the most moronic of the Moron Nation voters will recognize it as a corpse.

Moreover, as the Democratic Party sinks into its grave, it is taking the entire USian Left with it.

The Democrats, of course, remain in vindictive denial.

At least since the closeted Republicanism and theocratic Christofascism of the Jimmy Carter presidency, the U.S. has been a de facto one-party nation. But the death of the Democratic Party now enables the U.S. to become a de jure one-party nation as well – a goal Republicans and their (anti-New-Deal) Democratic collaborators have sought at least since the Bankers' Plot of 1934.

Thus the now-inevitable 2016 Republican tsunami will no doubt sweep away all remaining pretenses of USian “democracy” as well.

***

MY EARLIER POST-ELECTION COMMENTS were all variants on this same theme. The most complete  are on “Dispirited America Votes for Change, Gives Up on Hope”:

Obama's broke his promises deliberately and with malicious intent: 

(1)-He killed single-payer public-option health-insurance by letting the insurance barons and the prescription drug lords write ACA, which ensures U.S. health care forever remains a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. This is now a wealth-protected principle of law, hence permanently unchangeable.

(2)-He killed the Employee Free Choice Act. This not only killed organized labor but ensured its death beyond any possibility of resurrection.

(3)-He killed the remnants of our constitutional rights. Obama is the most tyrannical president in U.S. history – note in particularly his persecution of whistle-blowers.

He has also, by his transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, proven himself the most brazen liar in U.S. presidential history.

Wake up, people. This Republican Congress – the intentional result of Obama's intransigence – is not an accident.

Nor is it a loss for this president. Now he can do what he was hired to do.

He will resume genocidal warfare against lower-income people, slashing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – and slashing food stamps yet again. He will complete the nullification of the constitution.

And in the process – given U.S. racism – he will eternally discredit all future black aspirations. 

That's why, from the perspective of his Ruling Class masters, the Republican Congress is Obama's greatest victory yet. 

I said much the same thing, albeit with links to documentation, in response to “If You Think DC Is Awful Now, Wait Until Wednesday”:

Only now, with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, is Obama the Orator able to finalize his transformation to Barack the Betrayer, which is the real reason the (white) Ruling Class paid his way into the White House.

The chief victims of this transformation will be lower-income people, especially those of us who are elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed.

While our victimization will be euphemistically described as “austerity,” its true purpose will be genocide. It will be accomplished by the same murderous cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid Obama has already attempted.  And there will be more of the deadly food-stamp cuts Obama has already approved. This is the real “change we can believe in” – the final fulfillment of Ruling Class intent.

Bank on it, these atrocities – and other far more deadly horrors – are exactly what await us. How do I know? I am no prophet. But as a Marxian I understand capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us, including the methodical extermination of those of us no longer exploitable for profit. This is our now-inescapable future.

On the comment thread of “What's in Store for New Senate? Much of the Same Gridlock And Grind,” I essentially repeated what I had said before.  And when another poster demanded to know if I had voted, I replied accordingly:

Yes; I have voted in every election since I came of voting age in 1961. But that does not change the fact our elections are meaningless.

Despite the Big Lie of the two-party system, we are ruled by one Ruling Class (capitalist) party.

But there are degrees of one-party rule.

There is de facto one-party rule, wherein the two parties maintain a charade of “democracy.”

Then there is the less euphemistic single-party rule resulting from the destruction of the national Democratic Party. (Its destruction, now a fact of life, provides the only plausible explanation for why Ruling Class bought Barack Obama the presidency.)

Lastly there is overt fascism – the historically inevitable final stage of capitalism – with de jure one-party dictatorship. This will no doubt be imposed after the Republican Party (which since the 1920s has been the primary U.S. vessel of fascism) wins total control of the federal government in 2016.

Of course it won't be called fascism or Nazism. It will be called something like Christian Republicanism. The name of the nation will probably also be changed, perhaps to the United States of Christ in America or the United States of God. This will fulfill the theocratic intent the Ruling Class declared by adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.

Given U.S. military might, it will also end forever any hope our species will achieve real democracy.

 

Today, recognizing the environmental dimensions of the Republican landslide – which is a victory for the JesuNazi hatred of Nature and Nature's embodiment as Woman – I realize it also ends forever any hope our species can escape self-inflicted extinction. In truth, there were no such hopes before; Obama the closet Republican is as much a misogynist  and Nature-hater  as his un-closeted collaborators. But now the Republican victory has given Barack the Betrayer precisely the cover he needs to pursue his real, ruthlessly anti-environmental, pro-capitalist agenda.

***

Truthout's William Rivers Pitt, in “Reaping the Whirlwind, Again,” brags he saw the Republican landslide coming. “Hell, I called it on the third of October,” he wrote.

But I called it eight months ago on 23 March:

...it seems Obama and his national Democratic apparatus are determined to facilitate Republican victory in the U.S. Senate, reinforce Republican domination of the House and foster Republican triumph at state and local levels as well...The Republicans openly declare their fascism and govern accordingly. By contrast, the Democrats lie. They get elected by pretending to be progressives, then govern like fascists, thereby rendering our votes meaningless.

By October I was already foreseeing the election's results:

What, therefore, will change if the Republicans – as expected – win a majority of seats in the Senate? Not much; arcane, pro-plutocracy Senate rules already give the Republicans de facto control,  so all that will happen is the nation's march toward overt fascism and Christian theocracy and its simultaneous descent to the total wretchedness of de facto slavery for the 99 Percent will merely accelerate a bit.

At this point I must also confess I am just a bit sardonically amused by the great irony the Democratic Party's festering corruption – the source of the lies, deceptions and betrayals that finally fulfilled Kevin Phillips' prediction  of The Emerging Republican Majority – may in our post-2016 future be used by gleefully back-stabbing Republicans to prosecute the selfsame Democrats who knowingly enabled their ascent to power.

In the alleged mind of Moron Nation, which rejects history as irrelevant, this will eternally damn the Democratic Party as a criminal organization.

But given the party's methodical, five-decade betrayal of the Working Class, it would surely be poetic justice.

***

WHAT NEITHER RULING CLASS propaganda media nor even the alternative media of the Second Amendment community dares acknowledge is the long-range Democratic Party cunning that's apparently behind the 59 percent voter approval  for Washington state Initiative 594.

This new law not only imposes mandatory background checks on all firearms sales. It also makes a felon of any legal firearms owner who merely hands a gun to another legal firearms owner – as for example in a “see-what-my-husband-bought-me-for-my-birthday” moment – without first having the temporary “transfer” approved by the federal government.

The anti-gunowner, anti-hunting fanatics who are now a majority amongst Washington state's game wardens are another legitimate I-594 worry.  Granted the same powers of arrest and confiscation possessed by any other police officers, they are justifiably notorious for their zero-tolerance enforcement of game and fish regulations – rules deliberately made so complex, unintentional violation is nearly impossible for the average citizen to avoid. That any of these wardens would mercilessly file charges against two licensed hunters who had held one another's firearms for a moment to facilitate climbing a fence or bending to tie a bootlace is an absolute certainty.

Such charges would, again by law, be accompanied by confiscation of the hunters' guns and vehicles – a huge windfall revenue source for the perpetually tax-hungry state government. 

And – yes – I-594 makes it an illegal “transfer” for one legal firearms owner to even touch another legal firearms owner's gun save under the most severely limited circumstances.

Though many of the state's federally licensed firearms dealers were essentially bought off by a section of the initiative that guarantees them substantial profits by allowing whatever-the-market-will-bear fees for processing the transfers and registering the guns, there is now growing concern the voter-enacted law has made it illegal for gun-shop employees to allow customers to handle intended purchases. If this concern is validated, it will put most of the gun stores in the state out of business.

When you read the initiative's frustratingly turgid 19 pages of text  – which most Washinigton voters were too lazy or too illiterate to do – you discover it is clearly intended to felonize everyday firearms handling. The unspoken purpose thus becomes obvious: making firearms ownership so legally hazardous most firearms owners will surrender their guns rather than risk inadvertent violation of the law.

To those of us aware of semiotics and symbolism, I-594's more subtle purpose is sneakily making real the forcible-disarmament movement's claim firearms ownership is an act of violence. Now because of the criminal liabilities imposed by I-594, legal gun ownership has become – if you're not careful to the point of paranoia – an act of violence against yourself.

The deadly consequences of imprisonment for an USian male without a previous criminal background – that is, without Mafia, street-gang, Muslim or Aryan Nations  protection – is repeated gang rape. Because AIDS is rampant in U.S. prisons,  such imprisonment is often a death sentence.  The law is thus clearly intended to be a fatal blow not only to a legally armed U.S. Working Class but to the centuries-long USian gun culture in general.

But the real back-story of I-594's triumph goes far beyond the emergence of the forcible disarmament movement as a political power in in Washington state.

The movement's strength was first evident in its takeover of the state Democratic Party, which spawned the 1994 Legislature's attempt to prohibit firearms ownership by anyone who was ever in outpatient psychotherapy or even grief counseling for more than two weeks.

That effort to forcibly disarm the public – it was based on the (then newly discovered) statistic that about half of all USians will in their lifetimes suffer at least one episode of mental illness  – was killed by gubernatorial veto. The veto was imposed after mental health professionals unanimously complained to the governor the legislation criminalized treatment. Veterans' representatives agreed, also protesting the measure's disproportionate impact on former soldiers.

However, the I-594 story actually begins a decade earlier, with now-suppressed testimony by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman – that Washington state is commonly used by the Ruling Class as a Skinner-box in which to test and refine strategies and tactics of oppression. (Ehrlichman's remarks, considerably more euphemistic than my paraphrasing, were given widespread local publicity during the mid-1970s, but the stories have since vanished down the Orwell hole, which is why I cannot link to them.)

One of the more devious but now obviously successful of these oppressive methods was the widespread closure of public access to hunting lands, a deliberately unwritten, mostly secret policy initiated by Democratic Governor Booth Gardner  in the mid-1980s. 

The closures, which eventually also shut down nearly all the state's once-numerous informal shooting ranges, have been forcefully continued by every governor since then, all of whom are Democrats.

Their clandestine purpose – repeatedly confirmed to me by two Democratic Party insiders – is to reduce the number of firearms owners in the state not by forcible disarmament (aka “gun control”) but rather by radically reducing the opportunities for legal firearms use – and thereby reducing the number of recreational firearms owners.

The strategy's apparent success is demonstrated at the ballot box. In 1997, Washington state voters rejected anti-gunowner Initiative 676  by a landslide 71 percent majority. Seventeen years later, the state's voters embraced the infinitely more draconian I-594 by a majority of nearly 340,000 votes. 

Even so, there is compelling evidence for an alternative hypothesis: that I-594 became law only because its proponents ran a classic Big Lie campaign, maliciously deceiving the electorate about the measure's true intent.  If deception rather than an overall reduction in firearms ownership is the correct explanation for I-594's passage, the state's legal firearms owners are about to suffer a brutally rude awakening.

These gun owners, whose per capita possession of concealed pistol licenses is one of the nation's highest,  will express their fury just as they previously expressed their ignorance of the measure's content. They'll vote – this time against I-594's proponents.

Once again, the Democrats – whose forcible-disarmament fanaticism has been driving Working Class men and women into the arms of the Republicans for nearly a half century – will lose badly. The result could be a Republican sweep of the entire state – another (self-inflicted) death blow to the Democratic Party.

******

THE COLUMN I HAD originally planned for today, already half written, was to have lauded the activities of Tacoma 15 Now, which brought 27 speakers and a petition of 1,308 signatures to the Tacoma City Council demanding it raise the city-wide minimum-wage to $15 per hour.

Though the council meets at 5 p.m. – a time obviously intended to exclude Working Class people from its allegedly “democratic” decision-making – presentation of the petition and its associated pleas for councilmanic action were nevertheless the highlight of the governing body's 14 October regular meeting.

Seemingly attentive – but in cold truth as arrogantly unresponsive as any Ruling Class governing body in Tsarist Russia or pre-revolutionary France – the council members accepted the petition as required by law.  Predictably, they have since declined to act upon it.

Such is the new aristocratic haughtiness of USian elected officials, who at all levels of governance – local, state, federal – are ever more brazen in pandering to the Ruling Class and effectively disenfranchising everyone else.

In all probability the council members hope the 15 Now campaign will dwindle in despair and – like the Occupy Movement from which it was born – eventually disintegrate as a result of its own internal conflicts.

But all this may now be either moot or irrelevant. It is rendered so by the national Republican landslide, which, as reported above, has removed the last obstacles in the way of President Barack Obama's implicitly genocidal “austerity” agenda.

This means lower-income workers will undoubtedly lose the food stamps and Medicaid programs by which they are now sustained.

And if one is too sick or too hungry to work – and thereby hurled into homelessness as many are now doomed to be – one's wage is of little concern.

The Republican triumph will also radically accelerate the imperial homeland's skyrocketing transition to overt fascism, under which all forms of resistance – labor activism included – will eventually be outlawed as domestic terrorism.

Not that it wouldn't have happened anyway. Fascism is the inevitable final-stage consequence of capitalism.

And as an exceptionally astute Occupy activist named Francesca observed in 2011, “the 99 Percent is (already) terribly broken” – perhaps so broken its organization into an effective resistance movement is no longer possible.

Which shows us, once again, our desperate need for a genuine Working Class party.

LB/3-9 November 2014

-30-

War on the Working Class: a New Year Anthology

Say hello to Mister Wretched: a likeness of the face drawn on the window of a Pierce Transit bus, no doubt by an employee soon to be jobless due to radical downsizing maliciously imposed by the voters' hatred of public transport and their sneering, we-don't-want-you-here contempt for those of us who are so poor we have no alternative ways to access medical appointments, shopping and other necessities.

*

I WAS RIDING Pierce Transit bus 240, the Number 1 Route. It was 16 January 2013, a Wednesday afternoon, and there drawn in the exterior grime coating the window adjacent the front door was a big freehand caricature of a frowning face, its grimace nearly filling the frame, the perfect metaphor for why I have been so long absent from this space.

 

The startling graffito, most likely made by one of the many Pierce Transit workers about to be hurled into inescapable poverty by the Ayn Rand hatefulness of Tacoma-area suburbanites and the supportive cowardice of Tacoma City Council members, was the most succinctly apt political commentary I have seen since the November election.

 

It was a phantom image, too faint to photograph – and in any case the aches and pains of geriatric disability long ago forced me to give up regularly carrying a camera – but I yet possess a modicum of drawing skill and so have reproduced it above. The frown says it all: the news in the United States has become so overwhelmingly bad – and our political and socioeconomic circumstances so undeniably hopeless – there is nothing left to smile about.

 

True, the newest consequences of the Puget Sound area's 44-year hostility to public transport are not going to be quite as bad as Pierce Transit officials predicted. These same politicians and bureaucrats – whether deservedly or not increasingly notorious for deliberately misleading the public – now say the reduction in service-hours will be 34 percent, not the 53 percent cutback they originally claimed the November election loss would inflict. And instead of imposing the cuts next month, as originally threatened, or in June, as the transit authority's Chief Executive Officer Lynne Griffith demanded, the downsizing is delayed until September.

 

But the voter-inflicted cutback remains the most calculatedly vicious electoral decision I have witnessed anywhere in the United States, a deliberate atrocity against transit users.

 

It means the end, probably forever, to local weekend, holiday and nighttime bus service, which not only leaves thousands of riders with no way to get to jobs, shopping or life-sustaining medical appointments, but according to transit advocates makes Tacoma and its environs the most populous urban area in the industrial world without adequate public transport.

 

Nor is there any rational hope for a reprieve. Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland has already made it clear she and her fellow city council members lack the political courage to save bus service within the city limits, which they could do by funding it through their recently created Public Transportation Benefit District. Instead the PTBA's taxation authority will serve only motorists, mostly by street improvement. Never mind Tacomans voted by 55 percent to restore and maintain the now doomed bus service; never mind the anti-transit-user majorities are entirely outside the city limits; the city council members are nevertheless too indebted to their notoriously anti-transit Ruling Class masters to muster any effective resistance.

 

Not surprisingly given her all-too-typical transformation from self-proclaimed progressive to real-time reactionary, the mayor recently led opposition to a city council resolution protesting the notorious Citizens United decision, the Ruling Class judicial coup by which the U.S. Supreme Court gave the absolute power of unlimited political expenditure to the capitalist aristocracy. Earlier last year, Strickland had already revealed a hitherto-secret opposition to organized labor. 

Though nearly half Tacoma's population is definitively lower income, all such people – myself among them – are effectively disenfranchised. As everywhere else in today's United States, in Tacoma the politicians represent only their de facto owners.

 

In this same context, President Obama's carefully scripted and ultimately ruinous surrender in the so-called “fiscal cliff” negotiations once again demonstrates how beyond the Big Lies of rhetoric, the Democrats and the Republicans are ideological twins. Their shared antagonism to the Bill of Rights is confirmed by their unanimous approvals of the National Defense Authorization Act, renewal of the Patriot Act, etc. ad nauseam. The hidden ideological unity of these (allegedly) separate parties is further confirmed by their increasingly deadly hostility to the Working Class, especially toward those of us who are elderly and/or disabled and/or chronically poor – that is, no longer exploitable for profit.

Any notion we of the 99 Percent have even a scintilla of representation in the White House or in Congress is now obviously as absurd as belief in a flat earth. We are at least as powerless in today's United States as were the sans culottes of pre-revolutionary France or the proletarians and peasants of Tsarist Russia. In fact we are infinitely more powerless. These earlier oppressed peoples had at least the hope of eventual revolution, while for us there is naught but the inconceivable technological superiority of the Ruling Class, the real-world equivalent of the fictional (?) Borg, to which resistance is ever more obviously futile.

Such is the reality of the present-day United States of America – our circumstances summarized by the face drawn on the bus window, the iconic Mister Wretched.

 

*** 

Because I no longer see any point in pounding my head against the indestructible wall of capitalist tyranny, my deepest preference is to abandon not only all political activity but even all political thought. We are enslaved, irremediably so, and so we shall remain until our species renders itself extinct by its suicidal greed and sacrilegious disregard for Mother Earth. But I who would rather spend my final years contemplating the Gaian mysteries and perhaps also finishing an unapologetically pagan memoir am instead still diverted by the habits of a near-lifetime of activism. Hence I yet dare utter small declarations of defiance. As I commented on the thread generated by Robert Reich's Happy New Year piece, “Lousy Deal on the Edge of the Cliff”:

 

“Vintage Obama” indeed: the shape-changer-in-chief, Obama the Orator (again) transforming himself into Barack the Betrayer; a White (hearted) Republican enabler disguised as an African-American Democrat; a mortal enemy of lower income, elderly and disabled people deftly concealing his own Ruling Class malevolence behind the purposeful smokescreen of Republican rhetoric; most of all the president who slaps us in the face with irrefutable proof U.S. elections are the biggest of Big Lies: vote for a Democrat, get a Republican. Happy New Year from the rulers of Moron Nation, where the One Percent in its now-eternal omnipotence has reduced all political participation to a doomed and therefore pointless, ultimately meaningless waste of time.

 

Not that I was surprised. Matthew Rothschild had reported two weeks earlier how Obama was “Caving on Social Security,” to which I responded accordingly: 

A 72-year-old physically disabled man who will now be one of Obama's victims, I admit I voted for him again last November, though only in the frightened hope his campaign transformation from Barack the Betrayer into Obama the Orator might have some enduring substance.

 

Obviously it did not.

 

The result is a perfect example of the imbecility of hope: Barack the Betrayer is back with a vengeance, and our fate – the fate of every lower-income person in the United States – is forever sealed.

 

But what else was one to do? This is Moron Nation, which means – particularly given the malevolent selfishness and savagely reflexive anti-intellectuality of the majority population – there is absolutely no possibility of a viable third-party movement: not now, not ever.

 

Thus we were allowed only a choice between a declared fascist or a congenital liar, the latter seducing us with humanitarian falsehoods only to later reveal he is every bit as much a fascist as the candidate he defeated.

Could it be our only remaining alternative is to vote in the declared fascist – and thereby, like some frenzied Samson, bring the metaphorical temple down on our own heads?

 

***

Nor am I shocked by how President Obama and his administration are using “gun control” – actually forcible civilian disarmament – as a red herring to distract us from his impending betrayals on the vital issues of job-creation and the debt-limit threat to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food-stamp payments. I have long predicted  something akin to this Obamanoid variant of the bait-and-switch scam, and though I got the timing wrong, the president and his cronies are nevertheless doing what I foresaw. As I wrote in response to a Politico report on Obama's fiscal “cliff” treachery:

 

Interesting synchronicity in how – just as Obama the Orator shifts back into Barack the Betrayer – the massacre of school children in Connecticut diverts our attention from the potentially far more deadly abandonment of lower-income seniors and disabled people our one DemoPublican Party is now obviously organizing on behalf the One Percent. A conspiracy theorist would argue such an ultra-convenient confluence of events could hardly be coincidental, though surely the Ruling Class of the United States would never stoop so low.

 

Later the same day, commenting on a Guardian report headlined “Obama Will Act Swiftly on Gun Control,” I elaborated:

 

Because the politicians have repeatedly proven their true allegiance to the One Percent and its single-party (capitalist) ideology by voting unanimously to strip us of all rights guaranteed by the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments, it is only logical they would now strip us of our Second Amendment rights as well. 

 

Only then – with the entire Constitution rendered meaningless – will the members of the Ruling Class be able to impose the Nazi-style dictatorship by which they and their ancestors have sought for nearly 80 years to subjugate the United States. Only then will they have fulfilled their grandfathers' and great-grandfathers' dreams of reshaping the United States, both at home and abroad, into the true successor of the Third Reich.

 

Meanwhile the fact the (alleged) Left in this ever-more-oppressed realm openly collaborates with the Ruling Class to rid the proletariat of its final means of defense tells us all we need to know about the bourgeois toxins that neutralize USian "progressivism." Thus the fascists, though admittedly empowered by their lockstep discipline, are carried to ultimate victory not by their own dreadful prowess but rather by the willfully blind ineptitude of the so-called Left.

 

***

 

In bitter truth, the Obamacrats – here differentiated from other Democrats by the anti-Second-Amendment fanaticism of the former – are now attempting to disarm the very people who most need firearms for self-defense. A majority of gun owners owners live in rural areas,  where police response times can range up to an hour. But estimates on Rightist websites – usually reliable in such matters and therefore probably true – say the Obamacrats intend to outlaw about 80 percent of the handguns in current U.S. use and likewise ban about half the rifles and shotguns. 

 

But that's only part of their forcible disarmament effort. 

H.R. 137, just introduced in the House, would dramatically expand the roster of persons permanently prohibited firearms ownership.  It would do so by redefining “mental defective” to include anyone who has ever had any formally diagnosed condition – learning disabilities included – that required therapy, counseling or medication. Because the Center for Disease Control estimates about 50 percent of the U.S. population will at some time require mental health treatment, H.R. 137 would therefore automatically disarm approximately half the U.S. citizenry, no exceptions, no appeal. 

 

Thus to label the Obamacrat effort anything other than “forcible disarmament” is to propagate deliberate disinformation if not outright lies.

 

*** 

Based on the political consequences of President Bill Clinton's similarly dishonest war against legal firearms owners during the early 1990s, Obama's far more draconian effort probably guarantees another long-term period of minority status for the Democratic Party.

 

USians love legally owned firearms and cherish even more their legal rights of self-defense. The voters (dimly) recognized Clinton's efforts at forcible civilian disarmament as an attempt to impose mandatory pacifism and thereby create the uniformity of compulsory victimhood that is an essential precursor to a slave state. The angry reaction gave Republicans control of Congress in 1994, a dominance that despite varying majority-minority numbers the so-called Grand Old Party has never since lost.

 

The backlash provoked by Obama's far more draconian campaign against legal firearms ownership is likely to be proportionately more intense. Unless Obama manages to enact a job-creating, safety-net-restoring resurrection of the New Deal, his forcible disarmament efforts virtually guarantee a Republican sweep of the 2014 congressional elections and in all likelihood a landslide GOP presidential victory in 2016.

Why then would a Democrat undertake a program that is so obviously suicidal for his party?

 

If one reasons from two now-proven premises – that the party labels are meaningless (that the Democrats and Republicans are merely factions of a single Ruling Class party), and that the GOP is the true voice of the Ruling Class – the answer becomes obvious.

From the perspective of the One Percent, the greatest domestic threat to capitalist governance is the increasing radicalization of USian youth. To nullify this incipient rebellion, the Democrats must co-opt the rhetoric of the Occupy Movement and organize the youth into a “new” or “revitalized” Democratic Party – precisely as they are already doing.

 

Obviously the minority status to be inflicted on the party by Obama's forcible disarmament campaign would ensure the youth movement's failure even as the Gestapo powers of the police and military mercilessly crush any genuinely radical opposition from beyond the party's ranks. But this would appear to be its clandestine purpose: creation of a youth movement that – exactly like the Democratic party's resistance movement in Wisconsin – was secretly intended to fail.

 

Thus the status quo – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – is preserved in perpetuity.

 

Machiavellian? Indeed. But that is precisely what happened in Wisconsin  and later in Michigan and is sure to happen elsewhere as well. 

The common denominator in all such ruinous defeats? It's how the alleged Left in the United States – hopelessly disempowered without the ideological analysis and discipline provided by a genuine Left – chronically underestimates the malevolent cunning of the One Percent.

 

*** 

Another Obamanoid betrayal cleverly obscured by the firearms frenzy is the administration's continuation of its relentless war against marijuana users – a campaign of oppression so merciless marijuana arrests already exceed by 24 percent the arrests for all violent crimes combined.  And now, as Naomi Wolf reports, Obama is threatening to sue the states of Washington and Colorado, apparently just for allowing the question of legalized marijuana to be placed on their ballots.

 

Again I'm not surprised:

 

Ms. Wolf asks if the President respects "local democracy," but I think we all know Barack the Betrayer respects only his masters: the lords of Wall Street and the barons of Big Business.

 

And since his masters make more money enslaving marijuana users in for-profit prisons than by ending Prohibition II, the Betrayer's position is obvious – never mind the irony of a (pretend) African-American Democrat actively supporting the newest corporate variants of the old antebellum plantation system.

 

But there's one issue Ms. Wolf overlooks – the claim by marijuana users it alters forever one's spiritual views, invariably reducing patriarchal religion to absurdity.

 

If this metaphysical construct is true, the capitalist servitude in Obama's stance is doubly confirmed. Capitalism depends on theocracy to maintain the fear and oppression essential to maximum profit –hence Obama's support for forcible Christianization as evidenced by his dramatic expansion of faith-based initiatives and the methodical conditioning of the military to fundamentalist zealotry.

 

Thus Obama's war against marijuana users emerges as both a fanatical crusade against what Christianity defines as heresy and – in the medical context – endorsement of the "pain is punishment by god" doctrine underlying prohibitive U.S. restrictions on painkillers readily available everywhere else in the civilized world, including across the border in Canada.

 

***

Meanwhile no one on either the alleged Left or the all-too-real Right has dared comment on the multiple lies and contradictions implicit in present-day political controversies. Why? Because each side is silenced by its own brand of political correctness.

 

In Obama's case, forcible disarmament is an effort he reportedly promised in private as early as 30 March 2011, even as he was repeatedly implying in public he had no such intention. The Washington Post quotes Sarah Brady as saying the president told her, “I just want you to know that we are working on it. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

 

If this is what Obama actually said, the implication is beyond damning: that the president and his staff were working on a forcible disarmament proposal but hiding it until some atrocity like the Newtown massacre gave the administration the chance to agitate the requisite levels of outrage, which brands this newest campaign as the most grotesquely opportunistic such effort to date.

 

Moreover, the lynch-mob intensity of Obama's anti-gun-owner rhetoric tellingly contrasts with the craven submissiveness of his post-2008 refusals to fulfill his campaign pledges of unyielding support for single-payer/public-option health care, restoration of labor rights via the Employee Free Choice Act or personal efforts on behalf beleaguered workers, as he notably declined to provide in Wisconsin and Michigan. These word-versus-deed differences not only reveal the extent to which “change we can believe in” was the biggest of Big Lies; they also expose the Betrayer's true values and intentions more effectively than any other sequence of events since he took office.

 

The same distinctions also show us the hopelessly bourgeois nature of the Democratic Party, which despite its protestations to the contrary is at its psychological core as anti-Working Class as its Republican counterpart.

 

Nevertheless there is one historical difference between the two parties. The Republican hostility to the 99 Percent is an expression of the fact it is – and always has been – the party of the capitalist aristocracy. But as the late Jack Newfield observed in a number of Village Voice essays now curiously excluded from the Internet, Democratic hostility to the Working Class dates from the conflicts of the Vietnam Era: specifically the fear, hatred and contempt with which the draft-exempt elite belittled those of us whose socioeconomic status left us no choice but military service.

 

Precisely as Newfield foresaw, the party's post-Vietnam antagonism toward the 99 Percent provides a yardstick of the extent to which the Democrats, despite their former New Deal populism, now operate from the Republican psychodynamic paradigm of total identification with the One Percent or the Ruling Class, i.e., the oppressor.

 

Hence the emergence of a unique and definitive brand of USian female consciousness that can only be described as Ayn Rand feminism: for example, pretend support within the Democratic Party for “universal” reproductive rights – no matter that for Working Class women, the huge loss of jobs imposed by Democrat-enabled free-trade profiteering is also the loss of health insurance, which means the loss of access to birth control and abortion and therefore the revocation of all sexual freedom formerly so provided.

 

Hence too – and again as I repeatedly predicted – the arrogantly triumphant, anti-Working Class hatefulness implicit in this newest forcible-disarmament campaign has silenced all Obama's critics on the alleged Left – “alleged” because there has been no real Left in the United States since the post-World-War II purges. 

Indeed the emergence of the forcible disarmament campaign has turned the vast majority of Obama's allegedly Leftist critics, female and male alike, into sycophants now trying to outdo one another in proclaiming his sainthood: “at least he's getting the guns off the streets” – in other words, out of the hands of legal firearms owners. 

The Republicans, who in earlier years might have pounced on at least some of the Democrats' glaring inconsistencies, are effectively silenced by their embrace of two ultra-reactionary doctrines: one is Abrahamic misogyny – the hatred of females at the core of Jewish, Christian and Islamic dogma; the other is the Ayn Rand variant of fascism – infinite greed as ultimate virtue – particularly the concept of the all-deserving ubermenschen versus undeserving untermenschen, the latter destined for extermination, whether via death camps as under the Nazis or by the deliberately murderous policies of abandonment pioneered by the United States.

Never mind the Democrats' turn-abouts are so brazen they reek of premeditated treachery. Hitherto presenting themselves as defenders of “working families,” they have not only abandoned their efforts to create jobs or preserve social services but, in Obamacrat mode, are now expending many times more energy, political capital and campaign dollars to fanatically attack legal firearms ownership. This radical difference in expenditures reveals as truth a longstanding Rightist claim: that the Democrats' one true agenda – their only real agenda – is the forcible disarmament of the civilian population. 

 

But the Republicans' own brand of fanaticism – zero-tolerance opposition to female reproductive freedom, health-care reform, unionism, mass transport, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps or anything else that might conceivably benefit the 99 Percent – prohibits the very criticism previous generations of (Rockefeller/Evans) Republicans would almost certainly have uttered.

 

***

Objective analysis – reasoning from the premise all political conflict is class warfare whether acknowledged or not – shows us the USian Ruling Class is waging two-front war on the Working Class.

The Republicans, on one front, are attacking economically – downsizing, outsourcing, union-busting, destroying government services, imposing Christian theocracy to ensure Working Class subjugation – while the Democrats, on the other front, claim to defend “working families” but in truth repeatedly surrender and thereby facilitate the Republican assault.

 

Now the Democrats have gone over to the offensive; now they reveal their true function by redirecting their efforts to forcible disarmament. The combined results of the Republican/Democrat onslaught – loss of jobs, medical care, pensions, homes, police protection, mass transport and now the looming loss of any rational means of self-defense in an ever more violently needy world – form a perfect storm of incipient enslavement.

 

Here too in the imperilment of self-defense is yet another glaring measure of the grotesque inequality that has become the defining trait of the United States. The aristocrats are increasingly protected not just by soldiers and cops but by squads of kill-hardened mercenaries employed as armed guards. Meanwhile we of the 99 Percent are increasingly abandoned by the downsizing of local police forces and/or their conversion to paramilitary units tasked primarily with the suppression of dissent.

 

Once again we see how the Republicans and the Democrats are now merely separate factions of a single Ruling Class party. Our betrayal – the final betrayal of the ideals implicit in “we the people” – has clearly advanced well beyond the point of no return.

 

Such is the neo-feudal Ruling Class response to the impending environmental apocalypse: death to everyone below the salt.

 

***

Apparently I spoke another truth when I said long ago the murder of Sen. Robert Kennedy took from us the last man who might have saved us from ourselves. 
 

Never since RFK has there been anyone with the paradoxical mix of established power and unyielding selflessness required to lead a genuine resistance. Nor is this deficit entirely the result of the Ruling Class skill at neutralizing all such potential leadership.

 

As I said in reply to Noam Chomsky's lament of our nationally defining rejection of humanitarian ethics:

 

Alas, Mr, Chomsky fails to recognize the concept of noblesse oblige has – at least in the United States –been ousted from human consciousness by the Ayn Rand doctrine of infinite greed as ultimate virtue.

 

What's worse is the resultant moral imbecility is as characteristic of the 99 Percent as it is of the One Percent.

 

Contrary to Mr. Chomsky's nonsensical optimism, history proves that a people so deliberately self-degraded – the ultimate example is of course Nazi Germany – are incapable of self-restoration.

 

Indeed the only cure is of the sort imposed on Germany in 1945 – and given the renaissance of Nazism in Germany today, that (apparent) healing may have been nothing more than a too-brief period of remission.

 

***

Finally, after the courtier-journalist Jonathan Chait inadvertently revealed his caste-bias via a New York Magazine piece making light of the debt-limit crisis, I penned what feels like a denouement:

 

The most damning revelation yet of the extent to which the United States has descended into moral imbecility is the cavalier manner in which the courtiers of the pseudo-Left joke about non-solutions to the looming debt crisis.

 

Indeed it is as if they are all channeling Marie Antoinette:"The masses need money? La, let them have platinum."

 

Thus elderly and disabled people and anyone else whose lives will be destroyed by default – if indeed we are not murdered outright by the end of our pensions and the sudden termination of our health care and access to life-sustaining drugs – are again reduced to abject terror.

 

But because we do not matter – because we are not members of the Ruling Class and in fact have no representation anywhere at any level of government in the savage plutocracy the former United States has become – we are ignored or implicitly made the butt of the aristocrats' jokes.

 

Meanwhile major media – serving its Ruling Class masters by agitating yet another forcible disarmament frenzy to distract Moron Nation from the real crisis – shrinks the default story to an obscure, badly headlined print report most USians are too illiterate to read. 

“This is the way the world ends”: cacophonies of gibberish so loud the pleas and curses of the victims go forever unheard. 

* * *

Welcome to the new year – at least as bad as the old year if not many times worse – what the ancient Chinese reputedly labeled “interesting times.” 

LB/17-22 January 2013

-30-