Persistent White Racism Defines U.S. as Fascist Nation

Manhattan, Lower East Side, 1983, the slogan calling to mind 1979's Greensboro Massacre.  Tech data: Nikon FM, 24mm Nikkor, Tri-X, probably at 800 for D-76. Photo by Loren Bliss copyrights 1983, 2015. (Click image to view it full size.)  

*

YES, THE SOUTH is every bit as malevolently Nazified as suggested by the jailing of a young black woman and her white assistant for pulling down a white supremacist banner in Charleston, South Carolina.

But it's not just the South. It's the whole damn United States.

The brutality of its racism and its kindred toxins of xenophobia, ethnic hatred and class prejudice was the one enduring lesson of the 177 (mostly miserable) months I involuntarily spent in the South during the post-New York City years of my childhood and early manhood. It's why I have not set foot in the South since 1969, and it's why I have no intention of ever going back.

However it was my subsequent years elsewhere that taught me the bigoted hatefulness of USian whites is truly ubiquitous. Though its expression may vary from region to region, its underlying malice is the same whether one is in Michigan, in New Jersey, in the Pacific Northwest or even in some parts of Manhattan.

Nor does it surprise me the Confederate battle flag  – the same icon of oppression the breathtakingly courageous Bree Newsome  yanked from one of the region's commonplace and officially defiant memorials to slavery and genocide – has become an international symbol of der übermenschen – the self-proclaimed “Aryan master race.”

After all, the Confederacy was our benighted species' first attempt to formally establish a system of government based exclusively on white supremacy. It predated the Nazis' Third Reich by 72 years. That's why. contrary to the Southern apologists' claims, any Confederate banner is unabashedly malignant, its public display the visual equivalent of shouting “nigger” in the face of any black who passes by. That's why the battle flag is now Hitler-saluted and zieg heiled by Nazis everywhere including Ukraine. 

And that's why Newsome and James Ian Tyson could no longer abide it flying – as if in smirking triumph – over the city made infamous by the most recent U.S. racial atrocity.

***

ASTUTE READERS WILL note I have linked to two mainstream-media reports describing the laudable deed done by Newsome and her protest-comrade Tyson. That's because the reports are written from differing perspectives – one from South Carolina, the other from New York City – and because each therefore contains details the other lacks.

The same is true of the alternative media report linked here,  which unfortunately spells Newsome's companion's name as “Dyson” despite the fact it is spelled “Tyson” in every other dispatch I have read.

Normally that would cause me to reject the “Dyson” piece for reportorial incompetence. But apart from the apparent misspelling, it provides additional, very interesting information about Newsome herself. And knowing the South, I can rationalize the spelling conflict as likely the result of how so many Southerners often confuse the pronunciations of D and T.

Alas, without a means of contacting Newsome's colleague directly, there is no way I can confirm which spelling is correct. So I'll follow the lead of the Associated Press, which I know to be generally trustworthy on such matters, and I'll continue to spell his name “Tyson,” with profuse apologies if I am wrong.

Meanwhile Newsome and Tyson are each facing up to three years in prison on misdemeanor changes of defacing a monument, which means they were fortunate to have been allowed to make bail so quickly.

Because of the rampant racism in Southern jails, anyone arrested on civil rights charges is in potentially deadly danger, not just from the guards but from racist inmates also. Given the violation of law with which Newsome and Tyson are charged, had either of the two spent much time behind bars, they'd have been prime targets.

Particularly during the Civil Rights Movement era, white jail guards routinely bribed white racist inmates with cigarettes, food and additional privileges to beat and rape men and women who had been arrested in civil rights protests. The persistence of racist violence throughout the nation, especially as perpetrated by federally militarized local police departments, strongly suggests such jailhouse practices continue unabated.

That's essentially what happened to a white Congress of Racial Equality activist named Phil Bacon in 1962 at Knoxville, Tennessee's Knox County Jail. Bacon was beaten into a near-coma, and the resultant injuries hospitalized him for some time – if I remember correctly, for three or four weeks. A white woman whose name I have since forgotten, herself a civil rights activist, was similarly savaged by white inmates in the jail's women's section.

The Knox County Jail was part of my Southern experience too. Arrested in the newsroom of The Knoxville Journal and charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to write a racist lie,  I spent most of the night of 3-4 June 1963 in one of its filthy, piss-reeking cell blocks before being allowed to post bail.

***

MY MOST REVEALING encounter with Southern hospitality occurred not during the overt antagonisms of the Civil Rights Movement but nearly two decades earlier, in the spring of 1944, when the entire nation was supposedly united in an all-out effort to defeat the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.

During most of 1943 my father was the acting vice-president for operations of a New York-based corporation called American Houses, the global pioneer in the manufacture of prefabricated housing. Before Pearl Harbor it had been building prefab single-family dwellings throughout the United States, and now it was erecting barracks on the nation's newly expanded military bases. Because of the grueling intensity of the war effort, my father was often working 16-hour days.

But my birthmother, a pampered and self-obsessed daughter of the Republican/isolationist bourgeoisie, refused to believe there was any (legitimate) reason for a “gentleman” to spend so much time on the job.

Fully cognizant of the damage her behavior would do his career, she stormed into my father's office atop the General Electric Building in Midtown Manhattan, interrupted a vital meeting with War Production Board officials and staged a wildly disruptive, utterly mortifying tantrum – toppling chairs, overturning water pitchers, hurling stacks of documents and shrieking out the spittle-punctuated venom of a (false and ludicrous) accusation he was working such long hours not to help fight fascism but to cover up a love affair with his personal secretary.

Just as my mother intended, the American Houses board of directors immediately canceled my father's pending formal appointment to the vice-presidential post in which he had been serving. Because the corporate world of that era regarded one's choice of a wife as a demonstration of one's personnel management skills, it would not promote men who were wedded to women who later proved themselves to be publicly vengeful harridans.

But the consequences of my mother's vindictiveness were far worse than she had anticipated. Not only was my father booted from the executive suite; he – and therefore his wife and I his son – were also exiled from New York City. He was sent to manage a plant in Jacksonville, Florida – the USian capitalist equivalent of exile to a Siberian hydroelectric power station, actually worse than Siberia because of the jungle-humid subtropical heat and the relentlessly predatory reptiles and insects.

Our new home was an upscale Jacksonville apartment complex called Catherine's Court, a cluster of recently erected red brick buildings in an attractively landscaped yard that fronted on the Saint John's River. Fenced, gated and locked, the tenants-only yard included an unsupervised playground with a large sandbox, probably 12 feet by 12 feet, filled with the white sand found on Floridian beaches.

It was there in that sandbox I learned what the South is really about, though now years later I would have to say the lesson exemplifies the attitudes that define not just one region of the United States but nearly the entire nation – particularly now that hard times permanently imposed by capitalist austerity provide a convenient excuse for any expressions of malevolence the Ruling Class cannot readily dismiss as “lone gunman” incidents.

As to the Catherine's Court sandbox, I think I had played in it several times before, but I had always been alone, and in any case my recollections are typical of those from early childhood in their frequent and often frustrating lack of contextual details.

However on this particular morning three other boys were there. They had a child-sized set of garden tools, a rake, shovel and hoe with light brown wooden handles and red-painted metal heads plus a smaller all-metal shovel, also red. I don't remember our conversation, though it's my impression they were building something, maybe a sand-castle like you'd build at the beach.

The day was cloudy, which diminished the usual sun-glare off the river, but it was also hot, and the fact I was out playing in the locked yard by myself suggests we had been living at Catherine's Court for several months, at least long enough to have become comfortable with our surroundings, which means it was probably the spring of 1944, and I with my Aries birthday was probably four years old.

As children do, I'm sure the other boys and I quickly established a hierarchy of age and size: they were older, five and six and maybe seven, and they were physically much bigger. I was small for my years, slender, dark haired, dark eyed, urban pale and vaguely Semitic-looking in contrast to their deeply tanned Aryan blue-eyed blondness. But I had that assertiveness New York City kids learn in earliest infancy, and I suppose I made it obvious I would not be intimidated by the presumptive superiority of their ages and statures.

Much of this contextual detail is, as noted above, the product of logical conjecture rather than specific recollection. The memory of what happened in the sandbox does not come into sharp focus until the three boys wanted to pull down my blue cotton overalls to see if I had a “Jew pee-pee.”

I did not. Though circumcision had been a medical commonplace in the United States of that era, I am one of those many males born c. 1939-1943 who were left uncircumcised in response to the widespread fear either the U.S. would turn officially fascist or the Nazis would win the war. Hence I would have easily passed the “Jew pee-pee” test.

But I had been raised in a dominantly progressive environment – my father had been a Communist during the 1930s and remained staunchly Marxian beneath his corporate disguise – and even as a child my sensibilities were outraged by the prospect of being forcibly disrobed. Somehow I convinced the trio – for by now I recognized them as unequivocal enemies – that de-panting me would get them in terrible trouble with their parents.

For a few blessed moments I thought I had escaped what to me was their inexplicable belligerence. Perhaps if I was motionless and quiet I could slip away from the sandbox without again provoking them.

But then these three native white Southern kids – these children of parents who apart from their Southern heritage were presumably the socioeconomic equals of my father – decided to bury my head in the sand because I “talked funny.”

I tried to run but never had a chance. Two of these Future Klansmen of America held me down while the third dug a hole in the sandbox with the red shovel. I remember realizing I would not be able to breathe once my head was in that hole. I remember watching with wordless, stomach-falling-into-a-bottomless-pit terror as the digger deepened the hole. The sand, beach-white and dry on the surface, was dark and damp in the hole's bottom.

When the hole was big enough to bury my entire head, the digger set aside the red shovel and the biggest boy grabbed my feet and stood me on my head while the other two held my arms. I kicked and fought and bit and screamed and pleaded and cried but they were too strong and they forced me face-first into the hole and began kicking in the sand and then my eyes and mouth and nose were full of sand and I couldn't see or breathe.

And then suddenly I was free again and spitting sand out of my mouth and snorting it out my nose and crying sand tears and trying to blink them out of my eyes and the three boys were fleeing in terror from the five-year-old next-door-neighbor girl who had descended on them like some relentlessly vengeful elf and snatched up their hoe and beat them with it and bloodied the scalp of at least one of them and in a wild flurry of ash-blonde hair chased them all away bawling like babies.

After that she came back to the sandbox and though I don't remember how or from where, she got some fresh water and a washcloth or a handkerchief and helped me clean myself up so my mother wouldn't have another of her frightfully hysterical tantrums as she would have surely had if I gone home obviously a victim.

The girl's name was Mary Alice Shotwell and I'm no longer sure about the color of her eyes because when I close my own eyes and try to picture them I sometimes see them as robins'-egg blue but usually as green as fire. If I remember correctly she was the daughter of a U.S. Navy officer.

We never did tell any adults what happened that day. Obviously Mary Alice sensed I was bitterly ashamed of the entire incident – after all, I had been defeated in what but for her intervention would have been mortal combat – and to my recollection we never spoke of it again, though we remained close, as near to lovers as children that age can be, until in 1946 we were permanently parted by the end of the war and her father's assignment to some far-off naval base or ship at sea.

I have often wondered what became of her, not the least because I owe her a huge debt of gratitude.

Thank you, Mary Alice, should you ever happen to read this. You no doubt saved my life.

***

REALLY, THOUGH, AS I noted at the beginning and have implied throughout, it is dead wrong to blame only the South. Outside of certain genuinely civilized parts of Manhattan – which just as the late James Baldwin called it is indeed Another Country – xenophobia, white racism and Nazified attitudes in general are as “American” as the proverbial apple pie.

In fact the only difference between white-supremacist Southerners and white supremacists elsewhere in the United States is the former have remained pridefully ignorant of the methods by which the latter routinely conceal their venom until they can safely display it in secret, as via the ballot.  (Scroll down to “In the Seattle Area, Racism Means Wretched Mass Transit.”)

Though the denizens of Washington state like to hide their racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia behind a “progressive” facade, the ugly truth is revealed both by the so-called “Seattle Freeze”  and by the state electorate's relentless march toward a Wisconsin-type Republican majority. 

My own experience of the Seattle Freeze includes two managing editors of major Puget Sound daily newspapers who bluntly told me “(my) kind” (I was often mistakenly assumed to be Jewish) was not welcome in the area and that I should “do (myself) a favor and catch the next plane back to New York City.” Seattle – where I first heard my birthplace labeled “Jew York” and where I had the misfortune to live for nearly four years (1972-1976) – had by far the most bigoted and deliberately exclusive social climate I have ever encountered, infinitely worse than any place I ever dwelt in the South.

Bellingham, even on the Western Washington University campus, was nearly as bad as Seattle. By contrast, Tacoma, the working-class seaport town where I lived c. 1978-1982 and where I now have resided since 2004, is notably friendly.

Nor was my own family immune to the cancer of bigotry. As I would learn after puberty, my birthmother lived with constant horror I might become involved with a girl who was Jewish or of another race.

No doubt her paranoia was exacerbated by my father's antithetical values, one of the many reasons their marriage ended in 1945.

As an official of the War Production Board and later of the War Assets Administration (1945-1948), my father several times intervened to save African-Americans who had been seized without charges by Southern cops and shipped off to prison camps to fill vacancies on chain gangs.

After my father became a mortgage banker in 1950, he was the one such white man in Tennessee – more likely in the entire South – who would lend money to creditworthy African-Americans to buy houses in previously all-white neighborhoods.

Whenever and to whatever degree was possible, he lived his politics. His Marxism as much an expression of his heart as of his mind.

But in the final years of his life, white vengeance made him pay dearly for his earlier efforts toward integration and racial equality – another story for another time. For now, suffice it to say that when he died in 1971, this Boston-born former upper-echelon executive and federal official was running a gas station and automotive repair shop on the outskirts of Knoxville.

In this context, the passage from Richard Wright's 1945 non-fiction memoir Black Boy cited in a recent Guardian report is pointedly relevant.

The white population of the United States, wrote Wright, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.

The conclusion of Guardian reporters Joanne Braxton and Michael Sainato – the epicentral grafs of their analysis – is equally damning:

That cloak of righteousness shields white America from having to face its contemporary prejudices and the historical biases from which they are a result. This cloak of invisibility also inhibits white America’s moral and psychological capacity to acknowledge and understand the magnitude of those historical and contemporary prejudices, and the effects they have on our society.

The Charleston shooting was not an anomaly, but a manifestation of the violence cultivated in America towards black communities. The shooter, Roof, is a product of a system that has been breeding hatred and bigotry in America since the first Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported here in the 15th century as slaves under deplorable, inhumane conditions.

As to the breadth and depth of white racism in the United States, the history of New Orleans  is notably instructive. But the most irrefutable evidence is in post-Katrina polls that show four-fifths of the Caucasian population refused to recognize the bigotry  manifest in the deliberate withholding of rescue and relief. This data provides  an ultimate measurement of USian racism's real-world extent.

Relevant to these poll results is the legal concept of “countenancing” criminality – that is, of recognizing the commission of a crime while refusing to call the cops or otherwise act to stop or prevent it. By application of this principle of English law, we see that those who refuse to acknowledge racism are in fact “countenancing” it – which reveals them to be as racist as the perpetrators of overtly racist acts.

As if to underscore the post-Katrina results, the Southern Poverty Law Center's constantly updated “Hate Map” shows that each of the 50 states is the homeland of its own coterie of white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan klaverns and Nazi bruderbands.

One of the cornerstones of their solidarity is the U.S. doctrine of “exceptionalism” – the 21st Century equivalent of Hitler's Master Race, a malignant combination of white supremacy, Ayn Rand imperialism, divine-right rule and the Christian Prosperity Gospel merged into a hoo-yah ethos of global conquest.

A notorious white supremacist is already hailing the Charleston atrocities as “a preview of coming attractions.”

Meanwhile the self-proclaimed “Progressive Left” – our nation's sole (alleged) defender of all the precious freedoms We the People so desperately require if we are ever again to thrive and prosper – is demonstrating its ideological bankruptcy by collaborating with the Ruling Class to forcibly disarm us all, leaving us ever more  defenseless against the escalating fascist threat. 

LB/28 June 2015

-30-

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.

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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

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