News and Dialogues: Scary Reports, Relevant Agitation

WHAT THE SPOOKS call an “estimate” is pretty much the same thing as what we who practice the craft of print journalism call a “news analysis” – or colloquially (and with characteristic green-visored cynicism*) – a “think-piece” or a “thumb-sucker.”

In either realm – whether that of Casper's less-than-friendly twin or that of the professional descendants of Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken and Louise Bryant – such studies examine events as expressions of their historical contexts. Presumably, these broader perspectives reveal “indications,” Casperian for “probable trends and outcomes.”

Ray McGovern, the Central Intelligence Agency's former chief Soviet foreign policy analyst turned Consortium News reporter, had 27 years experience in the spook role before he took up journalism. Thus his understanding of people, places and things Russian is of sufficient depth and magnitude to warrant not just our casual notice, but our most closely focused attention.

 

“The West Snubs Russia over VE Day,” linked here,  is maybe McGovern's most usefully informative piece yet on the Ukraine crisis. Not only does he lucidly present his own expert analysis; he also provides links to relevant works by other experts on Russia – academics who are now, with already tragic and potentially extinction-level consequences – being passively ignored (if not aggressively marginalized) by the world-conquest-minded One Percent and their vassals in government and media.

“(D)o not feel you must rely on me (although I have been watching what happens in Russia and Europe for half a lifetime),” McGovern wrote. “I strongly recommend the trenchant insights of John Mearsheimer, pre-eminent political science professor at the University of Chicago, and professor Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton and New York University, a distinguished Russianist who has been a Kremlin watcher even longer than I have.”

But to me the most revealing passage in “The West Snubs Russia” is a statement by former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that describes the newest origins of the USian effort at global conquest:

“It all began with the fact that the United States suddenly started talking about the creation of a ‘new empire.’ An over-empire, a super-empire. Alas, God and fate had put the task before them. Yes, they thought their moment had come.”

Knowing as I do the dreadful reality of USian Christian theocracy -- for which see Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008) or the just-released Bloomberg poll revealing the USian Christian fanaticism  that's expressed as unequivocal support for Israel – the reference to “God” is genuinely chilling.

Thus Gorbachev – like Mencken and Sinclair Lewis nearly a century earlier – has it terribly right. If you convince Moron Nation it is acting as an instrument of “God's divine plan,” it will obey without question, whether the mandate is the extermination of First Nations peoples (as it was in the 19th Century), the re-enslavement of blacks (as it is today via for-profit prisons and federally militarized police), or (as is threatened by the Ukraine crisis), the crucifixion of the planet on a thermonuclear cross of capitalist greed and imperialist ambition.

Finally there is my own answer to the question implicit in McGovern's statement that as to “what lies behind U.S. actions in central Europe...try as I may to come up with cogent explanations that make some sense – the reasons elude me.”  

To me – as to anyone else who truly understands the bottomless evil of capitalism – the answer is as obvious as it is terrifying, even if it remains officially unthinkable and unspeakable in mainstream U.S. society.

Because the One Percent has outsourced nearly the entire U.S. economy, most of us in the 99 Percent are now surplus workers. We are therefore people whom our overlords – once they finish imposing their Ayn Rand variant of Nazism – would gleefully exterminate, just as our overlords' ancestors smirkingly exterminated their surplus slaves.

And what today are our overlords' easiest, most efficient, most euphemistically camouflaged methods of extermination?

 

One is the abandonment of unprofitable populations to natural disasters, as were the blacks of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Another is “austerity,” the euphemism for intentionally genocidal cutbacks in government social and medical services.

A third, as McGovern notes in “Snubs Russia,” is the de facto military draft driven by poverty and joblessness. Already operational, its killing machine is methodical escalation of the wars of empire, with the inconceivable casualties of thermonuclear war thus positioned to provide extermination in its most optimum and efficient form.

 

The One Percenters and their political and military vassals are of course meanwhile protected in presumably atom-proof bunkers.

 

Could this be the ultimate reason behind the intensifying U.S. provocation of Russia? Particularly given the genocidal intent evident in other U.S. policies, no other explanation seems so likely.

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ANOTHER CONSORTIUM NEWS piece on this week's list of recommended reading is Robert Parry's careful documentation of “Obama's 'Openness' and Deceit,” which summarizes in stark detail many of the more glaring elements of Obama the Orator's obviously premeditated self-transformation into Barack the Betrayer.

Here's a key paragraph:

“This failure to trust the people with accurate information has arguably done great harm to U.S. democracy by promoting false narratives on a range of foreign conflicts. With all its talk about 'public diplomacy' and 'information warfare,' the Obama administration seems intent on using half-truths and falsehoods to herd the people into a misguided consensus rather than treating them like the true sovereigns of the Republic, as the Framers of the Constitution intended with the explicit phrase 'We the People of the United States.'”

Which again makes relevant my comments last week  on Parry's “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust.” Parry wrote of the Nazi death squads now (predictably) at work in Ukraine and of equally predictable “propaganda efforts by the Obama administration and the major U.S. news media to play down western Ukraine’s legacy of Nazi collaboration.”

As I wrote in reply,  “Give Moron Nation ten more years of dumbing-down – at the current rate of moronation, maybe even less than that – and it will be official policy the United States was on the wrong side in World War II: that U.S. support would have enabled capitalism's conquest of the planet 70 years ago.”

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*Green visors, or eye-shades, described here, were frequently worn by old-time newspaper editors, including many of those for whom I worked during my younger manhood. The visors protected its wearer's eyesight from the harsh overhead glare that often characterized newsroom lighting in the days before the American Newspaper Guild and other such unions made on-the-job eyestrain a bargaining issue.

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I DEEPLY APPRECIATE websites on which the discussion encourages real thinking (and therefore writing that is sometimes lively and interesting rather than, for example, the soporific parroting of Democratic Party talking points we encounter at Daily Kos and so many other self-proclaimed “Leftist” domains.

 

One of my all-time favorites is Thom Hartmann's Blog,  which has an attached discussion thread that seems to bring out the best from its regular participants. The occasional fascists who stomp in anticipating easy prey soon discover they are hopelessly outclassed, and usually they quickly retreat. A very few stick around for a while, hopefully long enough to loosen the stranglehold Ayn Rand and all the other Hitler surrogates have on their alleged minds.

In any case, if I may paraphrase the clever late-1950s advertising campaign  that briefly tempted me to switch from Pall Malls to Viceroys, Hartmann offers “a thinking person's blog for a rebellious person's taste.”

 

I've contributed to its dialogue off-and-on for several years, probably starting in 2009 or 2010, though alas the files that would confirm my actual starting-date were destroyed in the recent computer debacle.

As I started getting back on-line, an exceptionally informative Hartmann news analysis prompted me to elaborate in writing an idea that has intrigued me for some time – that China's capitalism is a Sun-Tzu-type ruse,  perhaps the most clever such ruse in our species' history. Here is the full text of my comment:

"All warfare is based on deception" -– Sun Tzu, c. 500 BCE 

 

Knowing something of the history of our species' long and mostly unsuccessful struggle for economic democracy –- knowing also just a bit about the Chinese revolution -– I have always found the apparent Chinese embrace of capitalism perplexing. East Asian civilization, with a cultural continuity extending back at least 5,000 years, has no counterpart on this planet. Though the civilizations of Europe and the Middle East are equally old, the inherent savagery of Abrahamic religion has ensured the total suppression of all of the cultural wisdom of these region's first 3,000 years, with the result that -– never mind for example our European DNA can be traced to the paleolithic -– we "barbarians" (for that is how East Asia regards us) -– are, culturally speaking, mere children. For this reason China has always seemed to me far better prepared to resist the deadly temptations of capitalism, which in truth is not just an economic system but an entire universe of hierarchy, governance and exploitation based on a single precept: that there is no greater virtue than greed. Thus I was genuinely astounded when the People's Republic of China seemed to adopt the very ideology against which its people had fought for most of the first half of the last century.

The easy answer, of course, was that the Chinese government had been infiltrated and co-opted. But that never felt right to me – and though now I was in the realm of gut feelings and journalistic intuition rather than facts or even factually based speculation – I began to suspect the Chinese were (again) following the principles of Sun Tzu, one of which is defeating an enemy by turning his greatest strength into his greatest vulnerability.

Viewing the relationship between China and the United States from this perspective, it appears China has used the bottomless greed that is capitalism's greatest strength to seduce the U.S. with cheap labor and endless credit and so ensnare it. The U.S. no longer has an economy; it's manufacturing capabilities have all been outsourced –- mostly to China -– and it is as dependent on Chinese money as any junky is dependent on the pusher for the next fix. When the incipient U.S.-Chinese conflict ends in war, as is inevitable, the U.S. will have its master-race ideology of divinely ordained "exceptionalism" and the Fourth Reich arrogance of its military omnipotence and the zomboid submissiveness of its Moron Nation masses as cannon fodder but none of the manufacturing capabilities essential to a sustained conflict. That is why the better-dead-than-Red capitalists will most likely try to nuke China into quick surrender and by so doing will destroy the world instead. Any other sort of war -– that is, a conventional and therefore extended war -– the U.S. would lose precisely because it no longer has an economy of its own. (Ironically, the same conditions -– lack of economic depth and manufacturing capabilities -– are what defeated the Axis in World War II.)

But what if China did not really embrace capitalism? What if China's embrace of capitalism was merely an expression of Sun Tzu's principles in present-day strategy? What if China today is as Communist -– that is, as committed to real economic democracy -– as it was under Mao Ze Dong? The relentless prosecution of capitalists reported by Mr. Hartmann suggests this is may well be the case. If this is so, the global Working Class has precisely the powerful ally it hitherto seemed to lack. Remembering that it was the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union that terrified the world's capitalists into making all the humanitarian concessions of the last century, the implications for the future are profound indeed.

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A more recent Hartmann piece protesting the workplace consequences of the zero-tolerance, divine-right tyranny  being imposed on us by our Christofascist overlords prompted a website regular screen-named Aliceinwonderland to start the discussion thread with one of the most appropriately caustic comments I have read anywhere on the 'Net:

All I can say is -– WOW. Just one question though: how the hell would employers even know whether someone uses birth control? I'm not aware of any birth control methods that are visually apparent to the onlooker.

Beyond that, I keep wondering how far these pigs have to raise the bar on fascism in America before enough people wake up and we see widespread rebellion occurring. I keep waiting, wondering, hoping...

 

So hey ladies- You want your boss peeking in your underwear?! Seriously.

 

* * *

Soon I would post my own response to the ensuing dialogue:

As I have said so many times before, the one flaw in Mr. Hartmann's otherwise excellent reporting is his failure to recognize that capitalism is in fact the societal equivalent of  cancer.

This means -– exactly as the last 70 years of history prove beyond rational argument -– capitalism is a malignancy. And like all other malignancies, it cannot be rendered benign.

 

A second, equally important lesson is that no matter how strict the regulatory restrictions by which we attempt to neutralize capitalism's deadly toxicity, it will always  revert to its original malignant form.

 

This means it will eventually kill its host.

 

Hence –- since we the people are capitalism's host –- it is literally our species' terminal illness. Either we find a cure -– which seems increasingly impossible –- or we perish.

 

But the ultimate lesson of this most dreadful epoch is that democracy – which we fervently believed was the one sure antidote for the toxins of tyranny – has turned out to be no cure at all. 

 

In fact it is the antithesis of a cure. It is via what we call "democracy" –-  verbal shorthand for presumably representative government elected by presumably universal suffrage -– that capitalism has conquered the world.

It turned the United States into its puppet realm at least 120 years ago.

Since then it has triumphed even in the two nations wherein it was thought to be permanently defeated: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China. Though  capitalism's co-opting of Communism in the latter may be a colossal deception facilitated by the principles of Sun Tzu,  as I said here on 18 March 2015. 

 

What then empowers capitalism's success?

What is the essence of its deadly seductiveness?

 

Capitalism's core dynamic is the transformation of the Absolute Evil of total moral imbecility –- the mindset of a serial killer –- into apparent goodness.

 

Stripped of its camouflage, capitalism is the vileness and venom of infinite greed and infinite selfishness hidden by the perfume of false abundance and cloaked in the brightly compelling fashions of ecocidal acquisitiveness.

It is, in fact, the secular proof of a core Christian dogma I as a pagan agnostic instinctively reject –- original sin, the notion we are a species accursed and damned.

But if indeed we are not accursed and damned, why is there still such a thing as capitalism, and  why is it thriving?

* * *

Then I followed up by describing capitalism's lineage as a direct descendant of patriarchy:

Conceptually, just as capitalism is the direct descendant of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)...

Just as fascism and Nazism are the (sole and historically inevitable) descendants of capitalism...

 

So are all these malignancies the direct descendants of patriarchy, which appeared on this planet only about 5,000 years ago.

Before patriarchy's sudden and mysterious onset, we humans regarded motherhood as our species' most important individual and collective function.

Mothers were thus properly recognized as our most important individuals.

 

Indeed the original creation story went something like "In the beginning was the Mother, and She gave birth..."

Human societies were therefore matrilinear, matrifocal and (most likely) matriarchal.

Though it is a truth maliciously concealed by U.S. archaeologists and anthropologists,  their counterparts elsewhere freely acknowledge the socioeconomic systems of these early societies were definitively communistic: from each according to ability, to each according to need.

The people of these societies were also earth-respecting in a reflexive, bow-to-the-five-directions manner most of us today cannot imagine, much less to make our own.

Then cometh patriarchy. Its advocates as described in the Old Testament of the Bible were variously  a "fiery wheel" or a "burning bush" or some creature from the sky who met Moses atop Mount Ararat and handed him a set of tablets inscribed with "divine" mandates that must be obeyed lest we all be nuked like Sodom and Gomorrah.

Here in this demonstration of force is obviously is the origin of the Christian and Islamic practice of "conversion" at swordspoint and by the burning-stake or impalement.

Significantly -– apart from the fact these primitive technologies of oppression have been replaced by  total surveillance, electric-shock torture, drones,  napalm and Willie Peter -– capitalism, fascism and Nazism employ patriarchy's  traditional missionary practices even today.

Point being, what ScaryMary and stecoop01 are telling us about the "Christian agenda" is not only absolutely true but absolutely in keeping with the patriarchal legacy as manifest not just in  all  Abrahamic religion but in its capitalist, fascist and Nazi descendants.

Yet above all else, the core purpose of patriarchy was –- and remains -- upending the natural order, seen everywhere in Nature,  in which the female is the epicenter of society.

Which leads us to the core patriarchal principle: that it's virtuous to murder the macrocosm of Mother Earth and  despise her microcosmic form Woman because, as it says in a favorite Bible-thump hymn, "thar's a better land a-waitin in the sky Lord in the sky."

Patriarchy and its descendants are therefore expressions of a kill-the-planet death cult, a truth at last made undeniable by capitalism.

  

Which in turn -– though I do not believe in extraterrestrial visitations -- makes me wonder just what cockroach universe those fiery wheels came from and whether their sowing of the deadly poison seeds of patriarchy was the ultimate (original) form of the smallpox-infested blankets my European ancestors gave my First Nations ancestors.

That's right: trash the planet enough –- as we are in fact doing –- it becomes cockroach heaven, perfect even for such highly-advanced intergalactic cockroaches (we hope) don't exist.

(Yes, I reject the Marxian explanation of patriarchy as a logical consequence of socioeconomic change. Instead I accept the Marija Gimbutas/Rianne Eisler/Barbara Mor hypothesis of patriarchy as an oppressive system forced onto conquered peoples at swordpoint –- exactly as it was, for example, forced onto First Nations folk in the Americas. But what was patriarchy's origin? For that we have only the glimpses given us by folklore, as in the biblical tale of Moses or the oldest traditional poems and ballads.)

Meanwhile the astute observer will note there is a substantial difference in the way I paragraphed the Sun Tzu post as compared to the capitalism-as-cancer/intergalactic-cockroaches post. The former is paragraphed like an academic paper. The latter reverts to journalistic form.

Why?

 

I'm not sure. Stay tuned. When I figure out what's happening I'll let you know.

*** *** ***

ANOTHER OF MY favorite websites is Popular Resistance,  which seldom evokes the lengthy and informative discussions that characterize Hartmann's place but often provides essential reporting that is not readily available anywhere else.

Though the website does not (yet) generate the epic dialogues one often finds in Hartmann-land, it is nevertheless possessed of a subtle (and perhaps subtly female) ambiance that encourages an emotional honesty so much of the Internet lacks.

 

Hence the following, the opening post in a gentle exchange between two old men, our conversation focused on Steve Early's comprehensive account of the ongoing rebellion  provoked by (yet another) betraying Democrat, a governor who lied his way to re-election, then killed the widely heralded Vermont single-payer/public-option health-care plan.

Thanks to Mr. Early for the most informative report I've yet seen on the Democrats' calculated betrayal of the Working Class in Vermont.

Elsewhere it's the same infuriating story –- note for example Washington state Democrat Maria Cantwell's anti-worker vote for free-trade fast-track -– but at least Vermonters have their Progressive Party through which to fight back.

Nevertheless those Democrat betrayals now virtually guarantee a total Republican landslide in 2016.

This is not because of the popularity of Republican (that is, Ayn-Rand/neo-Nazi) dogma, but because the corruption of the Democratic Party has left the electorate without any viable national alternative.

Hence the vast majority of progressives will vote "none of the above" by refusing to vote at all.

Indeed -– given Obama's record of unprecedented Big Lies and betrayals -– it is as if the Democrats are actually working to engineer a Republican victory.

Which of course makes perfect sense once we recognize the two parties serve one single cabal of capitalist overlords.

And what is Nazism – whether as expressed by the German "master race" or by the "exceptionalist" United States – but capitalism's ultimate form.

Point being, as few freedoms as we dissidents have left now, after a Republican landslide in 2016 we will have none at all.

 

In fact we will probably discover our role here in the de facto Fourth Reich reduced to that of the White Rose Society in the Third Reich.

 

Were I a believer in the Abrahamic god, which I am not, I would pray we find the courage and determination we will need to sustain any meaningful resistance.

Meanwhile –- not the least because of my own fondness for Vermont -– I salute Vermonters for daring to continue the struggle.

LB/19-26 April 2015

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Obamacare Betrayals Prove Barack's Treachery

A slightly better picture than the one I published in 2009. (For my additional photos of the event, see “Faces of the Fight” (left-hand column near bottom). Don't know why I chose that frame over this one, particularly since the determined-looking the woman holding the near end of the “Health Care is a Human Right” banner is more visible in this image. Pentax K1000, 70mm-210mm f/4 Tokina zoom, Kodak 800 color negative film, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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NOW AS WE DISCOVER yet another dimension of how Obamacare victimizes everybody but the very rich,  we are beginning to fully understand what Barack the Betrayer, the most brazen liar in U.S. political history, promised the prescription drug lords, the insurance aristocrats and the Wall Street barons during all those secret meetings  at the White House. Again we get schooled in the first law of understanding U.S. politics: anything a politician says in public is a lie – especially when the “change we can believe in” promises to make things better for us 99 Percenters. Thus we see once more how the bottom line of our everyday lives is the bottomless despotism of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and ever-worsening poverty for all the rest of us. In other words, if we're not part of the One Percent, we're fucked. 

While Chris Hedges says the bloodshed that now characterizes everyday life in Egypt “offers a window into the coming dystopia,” so indeed does the Judas-like transformation of Obama the Orator into Barack the Betrayer. Just as the Egyptian crisis shows us the methodology of ruling the Third World, so does political treachery demonstrate how the Ruling Class imposes tyranny on more allegedly civilized nations, especially the United States.

In this context, the Obama phenomenon is a case-study in mass deception. Obama and his Madison Avenue hucksters shamelessly used his race to project an “I-knew-hard-times-and-I'll-govern-accordingly” Big Lie of empathy with everyday people, particularly our struggle for survival against a capitalist system completing its inevitable transition into Ayn Rand fascism. But his presidency has shown us that in truth he is just another obedient servant of the Ruling Class, differing from other USian politicians only in the magnitude of his lies and the totality of his obedience. Thus because of the nasty peculiarities of USian race-relations – the fact all African-Americans are unjustly blamed for the misbehavior of one – Obama's exploitation of his racial identity cannot but hurt his own fellow blacks. Thus too he betrays the cause of racial and ethnic equality and drives yet another wedge into any rational hope of 99 Percent solidarity. And given Obama's political savvy, I cannot doubt these outcomes are part of a far more diabolical agenda. The president, it seems, is not just a typical politician scheming to fulfill his own self-obsessed, morally imbecilic greed. He has also emerged as the most effective facilitator of the capitalist dictatorship the USian One Percent has sought at least since the failed Bankers Plot of 1934.

But Obama's unprecedented use of racial camouflage – his concealment of tyrannical intent behind the facade of the one people who most powerfully symbolize the USian struggle for freedom – is not the only treachery of which he is guilty. He also carefully hid his Wall Street heart and his Machiavellian mind behind the false flag of the Democrat Party. True, the party was terminally corrupted by the events of 22 November 1963, and now differs from the Republican Party only in the false rhetoric required to hide its embrace of the neo-fascist principles that unite both parties into One Party of Two Names. But Obama has thrust the Democrats' deceptiveness to never-before-known extremes. And by so doing, he has probably inflicted the coup-de-grace on the already fatally wounded USian experiment in constitutional democracy. He has taught us politics is a waste of time, that it is never anything more than a rigged game, one in which the house – in this instance the Ruling Class – is the only possible winner. Our vote is thereby proven meaningless; regardless of for whom we cast our ballots, we get a Republican – that is, an unapologetic fascist. We ourselves are thus reduced to the abject powerlessness of medieval serfs; our hopelessness is ever-more-clearly that of slaves for whom the Jubilee will never come. Hedges again: we live in “...the final stage of human habitation of the planet.”

I should point out that while I have enormous admiration for Mr. Hedges and his courageous outspokenness, I vehemently disagree with his notion religious extremism is nothing more than a reaction to oppression. I have experienced firsthand the often-violent religious fanaticism that defines the USian South as a de facto theocracy, where the Ku Klux Klan was known colloquially as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class,” an acknowledgement of its broader function as the local equivalent of the Islamic Morality Police. Hence I take the more conventionally Marxian view of religion – especially Abrahamic religion – as not just a key mechanism of oppression but most often its chief perpetrator. Indeed it is the seductive Jewish, Christian and Islamic notion of ego-survival in an eternal afterlife that so effectively obstructs revolution everywhere on this dying planet. That's why U.S. policy in the the Muslim world, despite claims to the contrary, always favors the imposition of theocracy.  It's also why the One Percent seeks to impose Christian theocracy on the entire United States – the better to brain-police its United Estates, the One Big Plantation on which we are all herded ever more relentlessly toward the corporate slave pens.

Speculate as we might on these matters, the vindictiveness of the Obamacare scam – and it is now obvious it was a scam from the very beginning – is undeniable. Not only is Obama setting aside the out-of-pocket limits that were to protect patients from runaway profiteering by the health-insurance and prescription-drug cartels; the rule requiring employers to provide insurance for their workers has also been discarded  – each betrayal a huge windfall for the obscenely wealthy One Percenters to whom Obama now gives his only loyalty. Predictably, organized labor – the only representation for USian 99 Percenters that still effectively resists capitalism's new paradigm of zero-tolerance authority – has meanwhile been excluded from any of the associated discussions. Moreover, just as any other Republican would surely do, the allegedly “Democratic” president has designed Obamacare to methodically further the wretchedness of the USian 99 Percent. He has given the capitalists tacit encouragement to shrink full-time employment by forcibly expanding the ranks of part-time workers.  And via Medicaid expansion, he has granted the states unlimited authority to fatten their treasuries by post-mortem seizure of all the possessions of anyone  whose income is at or below the new eligibility limit, which after 1 January 2014 is 133 percent of poverty. Based on this year's definitions of poverty,  this is an annual income of $15,282 for a one-person household; $20, 628 for a couple; and $31,322 for a family of four.

Thus our poignantly desperate yearnings for affordable, adequate health care – that which the civilized nations regard as a basic human right – have been perverted by political deception, presidential sleight-of-hand and outright Big Lies into yet another mechanism by which we Working Class USians, already the most oppressed people in the industrial world, are further victimized by those who see us as nothing more than beasts of burden.

LB/18 August 2013

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Obama's Ayn Rand Zeal Makes Government Our Enemy

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A plea to us all: an Occupy Tacoma activist rests with his picket sign after a long march in the rain, October 2011. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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I WAS TRUDGING home in an unseasonably frigid surprise downpour, my mind awash in hot anger and cold fear provoked by President Barack Obama's smirking betrayal of Social Security and Medicare recipients, when I finally understood what is surely the most bitter truth of the post-American-Dream United States: that its governments now serve only the One Percent.

 

This epiphany was so startling I'd normally have stopped whatever I was doing and written of it the little pocket notebook I always carry, a gift from Adrienne that can often grow an initial realization into more detailed exposition. But the April weather made any writing impossible. The hard rain of this unpredicted terminal-climate-change storm was pouring off the broadly protective brim of my brown felt Akubra, the sudden cold north wind had already numbed my wet fingers beyond any ability to legibly use a pen, and in any case the proverbial light of comprehension had flared from my subconscious just as I was hobbling with my hickory cane across a busy street, watchful lest some sadistic Tacoma motorist use the gloomy afternoon as an excuse to play vehicular dodge-em with a crippled old man.

 

By the time I got home and was exchanging my drenched jeans and sweater and jacket for the sensual pleasure of a warm and dry sweat-suit, I had recognized that perhaps the most self-constraining intellectual error of my adult life was my chronic failure to recognize that government – all government (precisely because what used to be at least presumably our government has been captured and turned against us by the One Percent) – is now ironically the enemy the Right always claimed it to be.

The underlying truth of this new U.S. paradigm is that government whether federal, state or local no longer fulfills its original constitutional purpose. It no longer enables us to do collectively what we cannot do individually. Instead – exactly as it did to the Occupy Movement and is doing now to Social Security and Medicare recipients – it aggressively obstructs us. Thus what was once notable as government by, for and of ourselves (even given its socioeconomically limited definition of “we the people”), has become indistinguishable in purpose from the governments of pre-revolutionary France or pre-revolutionary Russia. Antoinette France, Tsarist Russia or the present-day United States, such government exists only to protect the Ruling Class, to perpetuate its wealth and power and to subjugate all the rest of us.

Coincidentally – or perhaps not coincidentally at all if you believe in Jungian synchronicity or telepathy – an old friend on the opposite side of the continent was having similar thoughts and emailed me a long but stunningly relevant quote by the 19th Century French revolutionary Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: 

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is it's justice; that is it's morality.”

Reduced to sound-bite simplicity and translated into modern terms, what Proudhon is telling us is that beyond the smokescreens of rhetoric, there's no real difference between the government of North Korea and the government of the United States.

The North Korean rulers claim to be Communists but are in fact an (allegedly nonexistent) Ruling Class that governs by old-fashioned despotism. Anyone who dares criticize the dominant Kim Il Sung/Kim Jong Il/Kim Jong U personality cult is denounced as an ultimate political criminal and liquidated in the traditional manner: killed by a bullet to the back of the head or worked to death in a slave-labor camp.

 

United States leaders are figureheads who enact the clandestine decrees of an (allegedly nonexistent) capitalist Ruling Class. These leaders whether Democratic or Republican claim to be defenders of constitutional liberty but are, like their Ruling Class masters, fanatical Ayn Rand fascists. The ultimate USian political criminal is therefore not one who has broken any written law but rather one who is no longer exploitable for capitalist profit and/or whose poverty embarrasses the Ruling Class by revealing the underlying savagery of its Ayn Rand dogmas.

Because death camps are still considered unfashionable in today's United States – “O what would the (international) neighbors think?” – capitalism's undesirables are eliminated by more subtle means than are used in North Korea. Our jobs are abolished, our unemployment compensation is terminated, we're evicted from our homes, our gardens are bulldozed, our schools are closed, our public transport is shut down, our pensions are looted, our medical insurance is canceled, our welfare is cut off, we're denied disaster relief and we're abandoned in every other way conceivable. Thus we're slain by whatever mechanism fate decrees: starvation, sickness, suicide. In the end we're just as dead as the victims of the North Korean secret police.

Even the reactions of the two (allegedly nonexistent) Ruling Class hierarchies are undoubtedly similar.

The North Korean commissars damn their victims as “enemies of the people,” shrug self-righteously Maoist shoulders and say “otso commen jo so wah,” which is in their native language Hangul and means approximately “what can you do?” Such dismissals are no doubt followed by the exclamation “hiyu” and a Hangul phrase that would translate into English as “these criminals brought their punishments on themselves.”

In the United States, which has the planet's largest numerical and per-capita prison population, the One Percenters who are the masters of the Democrats and Republicans damn their victims as “failures who chose the poverty lifestyle,” shrug their self-righteously Ayn Randite shoulders and say, “the poor will always be with us; better to let them all die.”

Perhaps if we were to see all this as clearly as I saw it that afternoon in the rain, we could purge ourselves of our traditional (and obsolete) belief in government as a servant of the people and replace it with recognition that today's USian government has become the goon squad of the One Percent and will never again be anything else. Then maybe Left and Right could together build a solidarity based on common grievances and open ourselves to evolving an ideology that might enable us to effectively resist what is being done to us.

But that's not likely. The directional momentum of the USian population, controlled as it is by the One Percent, is toward ever-deepening ignorance, which means ever-intensifying subjugation.

Never in human history has the creation of a dark-age mentality been so methodical, so sustained, so perpetuated by zero-tolerance methods and technologies of oppression. After a half century, our ignorance is already an inescapable prison. Note again the example of Occupy: how the toxins of induced ignorance – anti-intellectuality, selfishness, distrust, class hatred, bigotry – destroyed the movement from within even as government storm troopers were crushing it from without.

To understand what looms – to know why I am ever more thankful my one child did not survive outside his mother's womb – you need only look at the horrors of the post-Minoan and post-Roman dark ages, each of which lasted at least a thousand years and by some estimates continue into the present. But no matter your view of history, this darkness that approaches now is undeniably forever – that is, until the United States is torn asunder by the baronial feuds of the One Percent and the fallout whether literally or figuratively renders our species extinct.

***

Real Obama (I): New Deal Rhetoric Hides Ayn Rand Economics

To strip away the Big Lies by which Barack the Betrayer disguised himself as Obama the Orator and twice scammed us into electing him president, it's necessary to apply only two principles. One is that deeds reveal what words conceal, or as the Bible puts it in the book of Saint Matthew, “By their fruits shall ye know them.” The other is Occam's Razor, which tells us the simplest, most straightforward explanation of a mystery is usually the closest to the truth.

In 2008, presented as the antidote to eight years of despotic misrule by George W. Bush, Obama ran as the personification of “change we can believe in.” A compelling orator, he promised restoration of the constitutional rights nullified by Bush, promised single-payer/public-option health care and promised to revitalize the union movement via the Employee Free Choice Act.

But Obama's key promises, like “change” itself, were soon proven to have been Big Lies. 

Once in office, Obama refused to reverse Bush's nullification of our constitutional rights. In fact he escalated it.  Now, given the resultant omnipotence of the U.S. surveillance-and-murder apparatus, we are far closer to serfdom than we were in pre-revolutionary 1774 as subjects of King George III. Our closest political and economic counterparts are the officially powerless proletarians and peasants that characterized Tsarist Russia.

Meanwhile, even before Obama took office in 2009, he had engineered health-care reform into what may be the greatest financial betrayal in U.S. history.  Making secret deals with top executives of the pharmaceutical and health insurance cartels, he deliberately eliminated the possibility of competition between for-profit insurance and any non-profit single-payer/public-option health-care system like Medicare for All.

Obama also used his (Republican) brand of health insurance to further abolish the remnants of our liberty. Via the so-called individual mandate – the requirement we all buy insurance – Obama reduced the entire U.S. population to chattel.  We are now – each and every one of us – de facto serfs required to labor for the trillion-dollar enrichment of our masters, the prescription drug lords and the for-profit insurance-industry's sultans of sickness.

By the beginning of the 2012 presidential election campaign season, Obama's serial betrayals raised grave questions as to whether he could win a second term. But the One Percent arranged for him to be opposed by George Romney and Paul Ryan – a terrifying ticket of avowed Ayn Rand fascists even the more rational Republicans found repugnant. Barack the Betrayer then obscured the ugly realities of his presidency by once more donning his Obama the Orator persona. And once again he deceived the forgetful, frightened and hopelessly ignorant electorate with a new set of promises, among which was the protection of Social Security and Medicare – the biggest of his 2012 Big Lies.

***

Real Obama (II): the Most Effectively Anti-Labor President Ever

If we apply Saint Matthew's deeds test, we discover Obama is the U.S. One Percent's most effective class warrior ever. His signature triumph is his methodical destruction – almost entirely by stealth – of the nation's labor movement. He has thus arguably done more to imprison the 99 Percent in permanent poverty than any other politician in U.S. history.

In 2009, Obama killed the Employee Free Choice Act, thereby terminating any possibility of a union comeback. In 2011, despite his earlier promise to walk picket lines,  Obama ruinously back-stabbed all unionized workers in Wisconsin and Michigan. In 2012 – no doubt to ensure the labor movement will never arise from its grave – he neutralized the National Labor Relations Board by the most maliciously cunning political sleight-of-hand I have ever witnessed.  He filled NLRB vacancies by the legally questionable tactic of recess appointments, thereby ensuring the support of organized labor in the 2012 election even as he invited the post-election judicial challenge that not only overturned the appointments but shut down the NLRB. 

Given political reality – the near certainty Republican control of Congress will continue indefinitely – the closing of the NLRB is effectively permanent. This means there is no longer any federal mechanism for enforcing union contracts  or otherwise protecting workers from the ever-intensifying malevolence of capitalism.

Thus Obama again revealed himself as Barack the Betrayer. He stripped organized labor of its last remnants of power, giving lethal credence to the anti-labor stooges who now argue it's a waste of money to continue paying union dues when – thanks to Obama – unions are no longer defended by the government. And tragically, there is truth in the stooges' claims. Though unions were gravely diminished by the vicious realities of the post-American-Dream economy, they nevertheless retained their legal role as the (only remaining) defender of USian workers' rights. But now with the de facto death of the NLRB so cleverly arranged by the president, the entire concept of legally recognized workers' rights is in jeopardy.

Verily, it is as if Congress has repealed the Wagner Act,  as if our (African-American) president has (ironically) reversed the nation's departure from slavery and indentured servitude by signing the Wagner Act's repeal, and as if the Supreme Court has ruled this disempowerment of the entire 99 Percent to be precisely what the Founders intended.

What unites all of Obama's betrayals,  whether of our constitutional rights, of our pleas for adequate health care, of our right to Social Security or of our need for jobs and unions – what proves each betrayal to be no more than a separate outrage in a single unprecedented economic atrocity – is the manner in which the total package strengthens the paradigm of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Obviously here is the real Obama: a man who has nothing but hatred for unions and contempt for the entire 99 Percent.

***

Shaving Away Deception (I): Questions about Obama's Education

While the Right's “birther” arguments are beyond absurd, another of the Right's questions – how Obama was able to overcome the prohibitive barriers of racism, caste and economics to attend Columbia and Harvard and teach at the University of Chicago – is well worthy of investigation.

Because I was an exceptionally bright child whose academic ambitions were blocked by economic obstructions that by the late 1950s were again becoming as insurmountable as they had been before World War II, I know from painful experience that even when you're a male Caucasian of acknowledged talents, no combination of drive and intelligence is by itself sufficient to unlock the gates of academe. No matter I had my first daily newspaper reporting-and-writing job at age 16, no matter my verbal skills and reasoning ability tested in the topmost percentiles; where I dwelt with my father and stepmother in Tennessee, either your parents were rich enough to pay your tuition, or you somehow raised the money yourself. Otherwise you were locked out; you either enlisted in the military or waited to be seized by the draft.

By 1979, when Obama reached college age, the draft had ended, and the Ayn Rand, admission-only-by-ability-to-pay standard that defined higher education in the South had been imposed on the entire nation. But beyond the obvious economic segregation, the requirements for admission to such aristocratic realms as Columbia or Harvard were much the same as they had been in the 1950s or are now: you must either be to the manor born or you must somehow acquire influential sponsorship by a member of the One Percent. To achieve the latter, as Obama did, you must repeatedly prove yourself to be unquestionably politically reliable – never left of center if you seek a career in public service or journalism, avowedly apolitical if your aspirations are in the arts and/or literature.

The same system functions at the lower levels of the United States – that is, at the financial gateways to state universities and even community colleges. At this level, the unofficial guardians are the ministers, priests, rabbis and local business executives required as references or endorsements on applications for scholarships and most other forms of student aid. Given my political history – perhaps more importantly given my father's political history and my mother's psychological history of spectacular and therefore scandalous matrimonial dysfunction – no such testimonials or endorsements were ever forthcoming. Thus even when I was on a dean's list for academic excellence, I was never able to obtain more than the most minimal work-study supplements to the already miserly Vietnam Era G.I. Bill. Indeed, without the G.I. Bill, I would not have finished college at all, not even at the small, inexpensive, relatively obscure state school that (reluctantly) granted me a bachelor of arts degree in 1976.

At the higher levels, Columbia and its ilk, the required endorsers are far more exalted: Big Business chief executive officers, major newspaper publishers, senators, bishops, cardinals, distinguished alumni and the like, people so far above me I would scarcely be allowed to collect their garbage, much less set foot inside their clubs and mansions.

How a person of Barack Obama's socioeconomic status managed to pass such impregnable barriers thus remains a legitimate mystery even considering his mother's subsequent rise in academic and governmental circles. Where did the money for her education come from? Was her long employment by the U.S. Agency for International Development a cover for a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency career? Is this – and USAID's notorious association with far-Right politicians abroad – perhaps the back-story to Obama's own ascent?

The Obama example is all the more mysterious given the huge number of equally promising USian youth of all races and genders who are marginalized merely because of their socioeconomic status and thus cast forever into the cesspools of poverty, welfare and prison.

In this context it would be especially enlightening to know when – and by whom – the plebeian Barack Obama was first singled out for his future service to the One Percent. Clearly it was long before he matriculated at Harvard. Who paid his prohibitively expensive tuition at Punahou? Who arranged for his admission to what is authoritatively said to be the most selectively elitist private school in the state of Hawaii and amongst the top ten such institutions in the entire U.S.?

Clearly, the choice of the young Obama to eventually be the perfect facilitator of all Ruling Class intentions suggests a level of long-range psychoanalytical skill and human probabilities-analysis available only in the CIA.

Moreover, as his post-2008 conduct demonstrates beyond argument, a core part of the conditioning that elevated him first to Columbia, then to Harvard and finally to the White House reduced Obama to a moral imbecile – the perfect One Percent operative – a man unable to empathize with anyone other than the obscenely privileged aristocrats he now so obediently serves.

Which leads us to the pivotal question: is Obama the ultimate creation of the shadow government that has ruled the U.S. since the coup of 22 November 1963?

***

Shaving Away Deception (II): Questions about Obama's Intentions

Whatever else Obama might be, there is no doubt that behind his Afro/Democrat camouflage, he serves the One Percent as the perfect restoration of Richard Nixon, the man who (before the still relatively free press exposed his tyrannies),  was probably 

slated by the One Percent to have been the nation's first true dictator.

But how was Obama, an African-American man of apparently modest background – a person one would assume would have great empathy for the 99 Percent – trained to become such a startlingly Machiavellian tyrant?

Was Obama's initial conditioning gradual and subtle? Was there then a point at which his lily-white proctors sat him down and described to him the devil's-bargain he (or more likely his mother) had made with those who now effectively owned him for life? Was he told the ugly truth that his color would forever bar him from the arrogantly white-supremacist Caucasian aristocracy? Was he then informed he could earn for himself, his family and their descendants the privilege to live as aristocrats, complete with limitless wealth and impenetrable defenses, if he faithfully served the One Percent's schemes?

Was he taught that as an African-American, his color was the perfect cover behind which to impose the One Percent's tyrannical agenda – that even after the most glaring betrayals he could still use race to silence or marginalize his opponents and discredit even his most legitimate critics as closet racists?

Was he made to understand how as a Democrat he is a symbol of all Democrats, and that his lies and betrayals will thus besmirch the Democratic Party for decades to come? Is this indeed one of his clandestine purposes?

Was he cautioned that as an African-American in a white-racist nation, he is a symbol of his own entire race? Was he warned the blame for his betrayals will thus unjustly fall on all African-Americans – that the resultant re-inflammation of racial antagonisms will set back the cause of black civil rights for as much as a century? Is this another of his clandestine purposes?

Was his childhood rejection by blacks and his parallel rejection by whites manipulated by his proctors into his adulthood's haughty disregard for the 99  Percent – the deftly concealed malice that so obviously defines his policies? Is this the emotional basis of his indifference to lower income peoples, of his obscene favoritism toward the One Percent?

Did his tenure at the University of Chicago – which because of its economics department should be renamed Ayn Rand Memorial University – include his training in the Ayn Rand ideology he falsely denies even as he imposes it on the nation and the world?

Did the aristocrats of the One Percent thus anoint Obama as their perfect tool, the man who behind his Afro/Democrat cover would at last complete their 80-year effort  to turn the United States into a one-party fascist state? Did they hire him as the one man who would at last build their USian empire into the global equivalent of a Fourth Reich, thereby fulfilling the dreams of countless Nazi war criminals? Do the caricatures of Obama as Hitler  thus ironically and unwittingly point to a terrible truth?

Occam's Razor suggests the answers to most if not all of these questions are an ominous yes, confirmed by Obama's betrayals, underscored again by his declaration of genocidal war against elderly and disabled Social Security and Medicare recipients like myself.

But why would Obama target us now, when our prepaid pensions have no part in the deficit he and his masters so loudly decry?

I think it is more than the money. I think it is because the One Percent regards us as dangerous, even subversive. We remember when this nation, in spite of its flaws, was truly the hope of the world, with a representative government and a healthy economy and all the promise and potential implicit in real constitutional democracy. We tell stories of better times; we inspire grandchildren and great-grandchildren with the possibility they could bring such good times back again. Because of what we remember, the Ruling Class wants us dead.

And when we are gone the true story of Obama's ascent and his eradication of the last vestiges of USian freedom will no doubt be suppressed. It will become the most terrible story never told – an unchanted lamentation, an unsung dirge, an unspoken epic of the brief flame of liberty that o-so-rarely brightens the endless centuries of patriarchal darkness and how methodically that flame was extinguished forever.

LB/6-11 April 2013

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