Moron Nation Rules (with Robert Reich's Help); Millennials Suffer Worsening Poverty; Revolutionary Fervor of Staffers Aids Sanders Campaign

Men of Tacoma Clinic Defense on guard. Another image is here. Photo by Loren Bliss © 2016. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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THERE ARE THREE separate stories in this week's edition of OAN – four if you count the all-man Tacoma Clinic Defense photo I'm publishing as a clarification to whatever misleading impressions might have resulted from last week's TCD picture that showed only one man and four women. These facts alone are scarcely preface-worthy, but one of the other stories – the lead story in fact – has proven so damnably difficult to write, it demands an introduction.

Though I hate to begin an essay by recitation of all the reasons it is badly written, in this instance its disclosures are important enough I am willing to endure the mortification of yet another public confrontation with the utter (and utterly contradictory) absurdity implicit in the term “dyslexic writer.” 

Years ago, probably in 1969, when I began the first draft of what became the epic but doomed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” the 24-year odyssey of photography, research and writing that in 1983 was disseminated not via libraries and bookstores but rather as a cloud of windblown ash emanating from a smoldering ruin near the rural Washington state town of Alger, I encountered for the first time the challenge of textually addressing several new ideas at once.

The new ideas in “Dancer” – remember this was 1969, before feminist researchers had rescued the now somewhat more widely recognized evidence of our species' matrifocal (if not definitively matriarchal) past – were its hypothesis (that the Counterculture was the first wave of a spontaneous revolution against patriarchy), plus all the long-suppressed (and thus hopelessly obscure) material from folklore and mythology upon which that hypothesis was based.

Hence, if my conclusion was to make any sense, I had to first educate my readers. How, then – given that no paragraph should ever contain more than one new idea – would I write the book's opening?

It was, in fact, a problem to which I never found a satisfactory solution. It is also among the reasons I was so overjoyed when, in 1983, the late Cicely Nichols volunteered to edit the manuscript. Surely Cicely, a long-time friend whose credits included the editorship of Grove Press, would be able to cleave through the dyslexic frenzy of verbal convulsions – imagine, if you will, the conceptual equivalent of trying to wrestle hands-full of wet spaghetti into a stable rectilinear form – that always, always, always was the exasperating culmination of my efforts to write a satisfactory beginning to “Dancer.”

After the destruction of “Dancer” in Washington state – by a blaze that was started on the same day (1 September 1983) and indeed at the exact moment Cicely and I were meeting in Manhattan (7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time; 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time [which we know from the partially melted electric clock at the fire's point of origin] ) – I had assumed all such tasks were forever behind me.

But now, with this piece revealing Robert Reich's malicious and perhaps even gleeful participation in the making of Moron Nation, I am confronted with exactly the same editorial dynamic. The real story is Reich's breathtaking dishonesty. But to show its significance, I must first demonstrate the existence of Moron Nation, a condition our One Percent masters do their best to conceal. Yet if my initial focus is on Moron Nation, Reich's treachery is reduced to a kind of sequel – buried so deeply in the prefatory text it can readily be ignored. And if I focus first on Reich's professorial malfeasance, the reaction is likely to be “so what”? That's why writing this essay has already generated three top-to-bottom rewrites and consumed more than 36 hours.

Because I have decided that first exemplifying Moron Nation and only then describing Reich's role in it is the best way to approach this story – actually the better of two unsatisfactory choices – I beseech your patience. Thank you.

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“OBVIOUSLY – AND TRAGICALLY for our homeland and the world beyond – Moron Nation extends as deeply into the Left as it does into the Right”: so I wrote on the comment thread of a Politico report as republished by Reader Supported News.

Headlined “Would Sri Srinivasan Be Exxon-Mobile's Justice?,” the report discloses the plutocratic bias of the man who is emerging as President Obama's most likely choice to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of the notoriously reactionary Justice Antonin Scalia.

To put the associated debate in its proper context, here is the rest of my contribution to the “Srinivasan/ Exxon-Mobile” thread:

Given Obama's Barack-the-Betrayer record, the one certainty in this matter is that he will appoint a supporter of Citizens United. 

Indeed, the perpetuation of Citizens United is no doubt now the primary mandate of his One Percent masters.

Hence a defender of the petroleum cartel – who by his defense has proven himself an advocate of what might be termed “divine right capitalism” – is not an unlikely choice.

As I have said before, this appointment will reveal the real Obama – the Goldwater conservative who hid himself behind a Big Lie of fake “progressive” promises – which means whomever he picks will be acceptable to the Republicans with whom he clandestinely collaborates.

A while later, after my comment was repeatedly down-thumbed via RSN's equivalent of readership voting, I added the following:

Once again I am appalled by the fanatical closed-mindedness of those who remain in denial about who and what Obama is and how he conned us by his unprecedented use of the Big Lie.

Indeed it is worse than denial. It is, in fact, as clinically delusional as any of the absurd beliefs that characterize Abrahamic fundamentalism whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim...

Moreover, note that Obama's behavior apropos the Supreme Court vacancy is exactly as, on 14-15 February, I predicted it would be.

See here  (scroll down), also here.

For reasons their content will make obvious, my remarks accessed via the first of these two links deserves reprinting here in full:

Several hours ago I discovered my main comment, which pointed out that based on Obama's neo-liberal, anti-New-Deal record he is likely to appoint a Scalia clone, had been removed from this thread. Likewise the accompanying remarks by several supportive posters.

At first this was, of course, profoundly disturbing. The main reason I cherish RSN is its editorial freedom, which literally has no equal at any other Leftist website in the United States. Hence I have been a regular participant in RSN discussions since its founding. I also covered Occupy Tacoma for RSN, relying on the skills acquired during a journalism career that spans nearly seven decades (1956 to the present) to provide RSN with relevant photographs and text.

Initially I was hurt, disappointed and outraged. But after an extensive exchange of e-mails with Editor/Founder Marc Ash, I am convinced the disappearance of my posts – from here and from the thread of an expose' revealing the gross dishonesty of the Clinton campaign – was the result of unfortunate circumstances that are not likely to recur. Indeed, I have Mr. Ash's assurance the posts will be restored later today.

Hence my gratitude, both for Mr. Ash's responsiveness and for the reassurance RSN remains what it has always been – an exemplar, perhaps our very best, of that most precious freedom (allegedly) assured us by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Next is what I posted after the circumstances were somewhat more clarified:

Unfortunately not just the post in question (see my "Several hours ago," above) but the entire related (and mostly supportive) dialogue it engendered was irremediably deleted.

Though Editor Marc Ash and I differ on the source of the deletion – he says he regards it as accidental, while I regard the attendant manipulations of time signatures and the simultaneous deletion of a related post on another thread as incontrovertible proof the perpetrator is a Hilleryite infiltrator acting with maximum malice – Mr. Ash has nevertheless asked me to reconstruct and summarize the entire dialogue.

This requires two separate posts, as the suppressed material included at least a half dozen posts.

My comment was prompted by speculation on what sort of Supreme Court nominee Obama might submit given the mandates of his Ruling Class masters, his legacy quest, his neo-liberal ideology and his need for senatorial approval. I pointed out the only path to an accurate answer is analysis of his record, which in bitter truth defines Obama as a Goldwater Republican who won election under two false flags: that of the Democratic Party, and that of the progressive consciousness gullible voters – myself included – foolishly assumed to be universal amongst the USian Empire's oppressed minorities.

Hence I summarized how Obama the Orator mobilized voter support with the Big Lie of “change we can believe in” but promptly shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer.

Then as Barack the Betrayer he cut food stamps $90 per family/per month, asserting – like some latter-day Josef Goebbels – the resultant starvation budgets will protect children from hunger; he dealt the final death blow to organized labor by sandbagging the Employee Free Choice Act; he permanently betrayed health care reform to forever define U.S. health care as a privilege of wealth rather than the human right it is in the civilized world; he openly collaborated with implicitly genocidal efforts to cut and/or privatize Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all other elements of the already inadequate socioeconomic safety net; and he not only broke his pledge to restore our constitutional rights but by his unprecedented whistle-blower persecutions and other brazen depredations has defined himself more of a tyrant than even Nixon.

Moreover, if one examines the nature of the present-day U.S., it becomes obvious that – just as its ideological founding fathers are the Nazi war criminals the Ruling Class embraced after World War II – so is the Citizens United decision the judicial cornerstone of the resultant (implicitly fascist) plutocracy.

Ergo, it is obvious Obama's One Percent masters will demand he give them a Supreme Court that does not even obliquely jeopardize Citizens United.

In other words, Obama's most likely course of action is to appoint a Scalia clone.

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MORE DISMAYING EVIDENCE of Moron Nation's disabled political consciousness lies in how few people seem able to grasp the simple, obvious-as-sunrise fact the Mainstream Media is owned by the same One Percenters who own most U.S. politicians and therefore own all U.S. governments at every level.

That explains why these governments whether local, state or federal, most politicians and the Mainstream Media itself all speak with the same voices, as for example in the national pep rallies that preceded the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Syria. It also explains the lavish coverage of Trump or Hillary, the methodical suppression of news about Sanders and the malicious slanders of the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter.

But how many times must this be stated before it soaks in? Has the U.S. citizenry been utterly purged of the ability to reason? As I have said so many times before, and said again on the comment thread of John Nichols' thought-provoking analysis of “How We Got Trumped by the Media” after it was republished by RSN from The Nation:

...Mainstream Media is the first for-profit, totally and forever privatized, all-government ministry of propaganda.

That means its endorsements, whether outright or obliquely (as by its apportionment of coverage), always reflect our overlords' intentions.

Ergo, it is obvious the One Percent has chosen Trump as its primary figurehead and Hillary as the alternate should Trump lose.

Nor should this surprise anyone who knows the history of USian fascism. It began with the failed Bankers Plot of 1934; bolstered itself by the post-World-War-II embrace of Nazi war criminals; eliminated its enemies via the purges and/or assassinations of all leading Leftists and liberals (Communists, socialists, Keynesians, intellectuals) during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s; became the creeping, slowly boiled-frog fascism that began with Carter; and has now erupted into the rampaging fascism of today.

Then, to underscore my point:

Also, here's a Josef Goebbels speech, complete with English translation, for those who dismiss Trump's violent hostility to reporters and photographers as “just politics.” Watch and listen – if you dare – and note the ways in which Goebbels' 1933 oratory is similar to Trump's today.

Coincidence? Not if Trump, in preparation for becoming the first USian Fuehrer, has been studying the speeches of Goebbels, Hitler and Mussolini.

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ANOTHER TRUTH SEEMINGLY lost to moronation is how Obama's tactics typify how the Democrats use the Big Lie to obscure their role as the enablers of whatever the One Percent demands through its Republican mouthpieces.

Which explains Obama the Orator's obviously pre-planned shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer.

Just as the Betrayer's One Percent masters intended, “change we can believe in” was the most outrageous, most politically destructive Big Lie in U.S. presidential history. Moreover, given both the USian Empire's Nazi-enhanced skill at psychological warfare and Madison Avenue's predatory skill at long-range psychological manipulation, it is obvious the deception and the devastating disappointment it fostered has (deliberately) alienated more U.S. voters than any political act in the nation's post-Civil-War history.

The message is undeniable: why bother to vote if even when the candidate encourages “hope” and promises “change” the result is instead a (defiantly imposed) worsening of our circumstances.

And now, once again, in “Documents Show Obama Lobbied Strongly Against Transparency Reform,” we are confronted with Obama's penchant for lying – undeniable proof of his bottomless contempt for us, we the people, and his relentless hostility to the very constitutional rights he pledged to restore:

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IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to discuss Moron Nation without considering the state of the nation's schools.

Though I was never an education writer per se, my interest in the policies and theoretical issues of USian public education began during my senior year at Holston High School in Knox County, Tennessee, 1957-1958. It was an interest that became professionally relevant during the middle third of my journalism career, which included the years I was a part-time college instructor (1975 through 1982), and it remains a compelling interest even now.

During my teaching years I noted amongst my younger students the worsening civic ignorance that resulted from the radical downsizing of public-school curricula – specifically the methodical elimination of any courses that might teach students their constitutional rights. Imposition of this Moron-Nation-type of induced ignorance was the One Percent's response to anti-Vietnam War protests and the Countercultural Rebellion in general. The Ruling Class seemed to believe that people who were not allowed to learn their rights would never be able to assert them. As a result, the needs of younger students for remedial education began disrupting my classes, which were about photography and journalism. Whenever the Bill of Rights (particularly the First Amendment) was relevant to our discussions, I found myself teaching civics and U.S. history as well as camera work and news writing. Thus I have some real-world familiarity with how the creation of Moron Nation became one of the undisclosed purposes of USian public education. But now I am getting ahead of myself; hence let us return to the 1957-1958 academic year,

In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the world's first space satellite, which triggered throughout the USian homeland an intense, often passionate, sometimes hateful conflict between proponents of two diametrically opposed pedagogies. One group would have sustained the USian pre-Moron-Nation compliance with capitalism's insistence the public schools produce “well-adjusted” (that is, ignorant but conformist and therefore reliably obedient) graduates as demanded by corporate personnel experts. The other group would have adopted the Soviet (actually European) mandate that graduates acquire the foundation of a classical education – including the various exercises in logical thinking provided by in-depth studies of literature, science, mathematics and humanities.

For some reason – I no longer remember why (though probably because I was the managing editor of the school paper and a top student in speech and drama classes) – I was asked to participate in a public debate matching one pedagogy against the other. As I recall, I was free to choose either side, but of course – because that's where my heart was even at age 17 – I chose to advocate the Soviet pedagogy, and in preparation for the actual event, I steeped myself in everything I could find regarding educational theory. Again if memory serves, the debate – conducted at night in the high-school auditorium before a standing-room-only audience of parents, teachers and fellow students – was declared a draw. Years afterward I was told the eloquence of my presentation – never mind support for anything “Commie” in that era would have otherwise provoked immediate ostracism – was among the reasons I was voted “Boy Most Likely to Succeed.” (Holston, named after the nearby river, has since been absorbed by expansion of Knoxville's city limits and downgraded to a middle school.)

Decades later, my interest in pedagogy would again serve me well when I was a reporter assigned to investigations or the coverage of public affairs.

The stories I wrote as an investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal (Jersey City, N.J.) included an award-winning series in 1970 that revealed the magnitude of the local school-funding crisis. The Jersey City school board later used my reports as supportive evidence in its successful lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of school levies. (The court upheld Jersey City's argument that local school levies, which are based on local property values and therefore on the presumptive ability of local citizens to pay, are unconstitutionally discriminatory against lower-income school districts.)

Stories in the public affairs category (1976-1981) included dozens of reports on education policy, most of them focused on the Legislature's struggle to define “basic education” in Washington state, a fight that rages unabated even now,  35 years later. One such story, a 1978 Sigma Delta Chi winner, documented the tribulations and triumphs of an academically superior high school caught between ChristoFascist fanatics and secular rationalists in a bitterly and sometimes violently contested war over over course content and teaching methods.

The continued expansion of Moron Nation – chiefly by the denial of adequate public-school funding – remains among the most devastating consequences of such infighting. But the ruination caused by reduced funding – which (though few dare say it) is a direct expression of hostility to public education itself – is nationwide.  The hostility seems to have two primary sources: the grassroots rejection of non-biblical learning that's symptomatic of the frightening expansion of Christian Fundamentalist power in the USian homeland, and the Ayn Rand economic doctrine imposed by our One Percent overlords, which condemns as wasted money any government expenditure that presumably benefits the 99 Percent.

For those who wish to pursue the subject in greater depth, Henry A. Giroux, whose  website is here, has documented – probably more thoroughly than any scholar on earth – the destruction of USian public education. He writes in provocative detail about the downsizing of school districts and the conversion of their few remaining schools to zero-tolerance training camps, the purpose of which is to provide capitalism with legions of mindlessly obedient workers and to eliminate, via the school-to-prison pipeline and the prison-industrial system, anyone who dares resist.

Moronation has thus reduced the USian citizenry to the most frighteningly ignorant population  in the industrial world. Its ignorance is so huge, so bottomless, so malignant, many fear it is the inevitable precursor to extinction-class disaster, whether by nuclear war, environmental apocalypse or both. Thus too it seems the damning statement H. L. Mencken made in 1920 – “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron” – is already the epitaph for the United States – and may become the epitaph for the rest of humanity.

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BUT THE COLLEGES and universities – surely their scholars will save us before Moron Nation goes terminal. Right?

That is precisely what I believed until last week, when I read the essay by Robert Reich entitled “The American Fascist.”

Reich, the former secretary of labor who at the end of Bill Clinton's first term resigned to protest the president's vicious anti-labor policies and thereby earned my presumably undying respect, is a professor at the University of California/Berkeley and a scholar with impeccable credentials.  He nevertheless knowingly – that is, with what U.S. Courts call “malice aforethought” – penned and published the following mostly-true statement that includes one breathtakingly deceptive lie:

“But Trump has finally reached a point where parallels between his presidential campaign and the fascists of the first half of the 20th century – lurid figures such as Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, and Francisco Franco – are too evident to overlook.”

The lie is Reich's inclusion of Stalin in the list of fascists. Indeed it was Stalin and his Red Army that saved the world – at the inconceivable cost of as many as 43.3 million Soviet soldiers and civilians – from Hitler's Nazism and Mussolini's fascism.

That Reich's lie is obviously a purposeful Big Lie – one cunningly intended to serve the mind-paralyzing function identified by George Orwell as “doublethink”  – is underscored by the fact most USians regardless of age or education are so ill-informed, they have no idea that without Soviet assistance, the United States and its allies would not have been able to defeat Hitler's Wehrmacht – the best trained, best equipped war machine of its time.

Nor do USians understand that socialism and fascism are antitheticals. Both, we are taught, are “unAmerican,” therefore “bad,” and from the viewpoint of Christian zealotry, so unforgivably sinful they damn their proponents to the fires of hell forever. The resultant combination of ignorance and fear – which Reich's Big Lie intentionally perpetuates – locks USian minds closed as tightly as any miser's safe and thereby (exactly as intended) makes political consciousness-raising impossible.

Never in my life did I imagine I would encounter such a deliberate falsehood in a manuscript by a Harvard-educated professor, an alleged liberal who teaches at one of the nation's leading universities. But I did – and frankly I am still in shock. Hence here is the full text of my comment-thread response, which unavoidably includes earlier versions of the points I made above:

Mr. Reich's historically and academically dishonest inclusion of Joseph Stalin in his list of fascists is far worse than an error. Mr. Reich obviously knows better – that while Stalin was indeed a tyrant, he was most assuredly no fascist.

Thus it is obvious Mr. Reich maliciously chose to use his professorship to not only deliberately disseminate a falsehood but to contribute to the further dumbing down of the USian population – specifically by fabricating yet another variant of the already hopelessly illiterate, breathtakingly wrong notion, omnipresent throughout Moron Nation, that there is no difference between socialism and fascism.

By so doing – by literally nurturing the worst-in-the-industrial-world USian national ignorance – Mr. Reich has in all probability laid the groundwork for the real fascists to slander Mr. Sanders' democratic socialism as both “Stalinism” and “fascism” simultaneously.

I am frankly appalled by Mr. Reich's arrogant deception – so much so, all the (considerable) respect I had for him is gone forever. Indeed, with “friends” like Mr. Reich, Mr. Sanders scarcely needs enemies.

Later, in response to the down-thumbed jeers of other RSN posters, I added the following:

The number of otherwise intelligent, well-educated USian people who have been rendered politically brain-dead by the relentless deluge of anti-socialist, pro-capitalist propaganda is beyond appalling.

As best I can do in one sentence, the difference between socialism and fascism is that the former advocates economic democracy, while the latter advocates zero-tolerance economic hierarchy.

The core purpose of socialism, achievable only when we the people own the major means of production, is facilitating life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by the abolition of economic differences of class, race, ethnicity and gender. “From each according to ability; to each according to need.” Thus socialism seeks to end the One-Percent-versus-99-Percent paradigm that forms the inherently oppressive, inherently exploitative basis of capitalism.

Fascism is literally socialism's diametrical opposite. Its core principle is “der Fuehrerprinzip,” a secular version of the divine rights formerly claimed by emperors and kings. Its economic tyranny is implicit in the quote attributed to Mussolini: “Fascism should be more properly called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

(There was more to my comment, but it was in response to other posters on the thread and is therefore not relevant here.)

What is relevant is how Professor Reich's participation in the process of moronation tells me Moron Nation is far more egregiously triumphant – and thus far more carefully scripted and far more vastly conspiratorial – than ever I imagined.

Indeed the willful participation of a high-ranking scholar in the malicious dumbing-down of the United States is tantamount to the knowing participation of high-ranking German scholars in the Nazification of the Weimar Republic. (No wonder a fascist is dominating the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.)

Reich's role in moronation also tells me we must recognize the damning statement H. L. Mencken made 96 years ago is just another part of the elaborate camouflage behind the One Percenters and their servants in academia, media and government hide while they engineer our subjugation.

I have no idea how we might defend ourselves against such malevolence. But I do know if we recognize it for what it is and name it and stop blaming ourselves for what it is doing to us, we will have taken the first step toward evolving adequate countermeasures.

Meanwhile, if Bernie Sanders is the person he claims to be, he will surely purge his campaign of Robert Reich the Smirking Professor of the Big Lie.

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THE COMMENT ABOUT Hillary mentioned in “suppressed material” (far) above documents her clandestine collaboration with the Christofascist opponents of women's sexual freedom. Its reconstructed version is here. Alas, it was written, as all writers know is true of any such reconstruction, with the sure (and surely depressing) knowledge the second effort will not ever be as well-stated as the original.

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“YOUNG AMERICANS ARE now poorer than retired people,” the newscaster/blogger Thom Hartmann reported recently.

“That's the stunning take away  from a new study by The Guardian,” he said.

Furthermore, the paper says the problem of abject poverty, though most obvious amongst Millennials who live in the United States, has become a defining characteristic of their generational peers throughout Europe as well.

Hartmann elaborated on these dismal facts at some length (click the above link to access his work), though unfortunately he failed to give us a link to the original story, which I provide here and which contains much more information than Hartmann had space to provide.

When he asked, “What do you think? Tell us here,” I responded accordingly:

Fact: The Ruling Class aka the One Percent has been ranting about the necessity for forcibly reducing the global population (i.e. genocide) at least since the late 1950s.

Fact: Death camps, ethnic “cleansing” and other obvious forms of genocide are no longer fashionable (save perhaps amongst Donald Trump's supporters and others of the fascist/Nazi persuasion).

Fact: Hence the most effective method of genocide – especially since under capitalism, the victims themselves can be blamed for their own deaths – is economic downsizing.

Need I say more?

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NORMALLY I DO not post more than a few words from an article on which I am commenting, but “Bernie and the Groundswell on Which He Stands” is perhaps the most inspiring dispatch I have yet seen emerge from the hurly-burly of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Besides that, “Groundswell” stands in brightly positive counterpoint to the gloomy negativity of “Moron Nation” and “Millennial Poverty” stories, which means it fulfills a promise I made to myself a couple of weeks ago – that given the descending darkness in which we now seem fated to abide, I will try as best I can to find an uplifting report with which to conclude what is all too often a passage through disquieting realities.

Hopefully that antidote to depression will be, as it is today, a significant report. But it may be something as mundane as a joyful or triumphant dog story, the very sort of anecdote I as an unapologetic dog lover always appreciate – especially now that thanks to young friends I am blessed by a few joyful big-dog hours every week.

Here, then, are the lead grafs of “Groundswell,” a vitally informative piece  republished by RSN in which The Guardian's veteran journalist Paul Hilder describes the revolution-minded origins of the Sanders campaign and the internal dynamics that have sustained its unprecedented victories:

The Bernie campaign is working toward a political revolution, and they’re playing to win.

Over the last few weeks, I worked my way inside the belly of the Bernie campaign. I saw the virtual chat rooms where thousands of super-volunteers are coordinating, and mapped their digital infrastructure, fast growing into something more powerful even than the Obama campaign.

I traveled through five battleground states and spoke with hundreds of his supporters, as well as analysts and insiders. What I found was the story of a political start-up growing exponentially in a cauldron of American discontent.

Yes, I think Hilder's text really is worth reading. There's even, near the bottom of the comment thread, a good-humored exchange between another poster and I.

LB/15 March 2016

-30-

How Charleston Exemplifies Our Imperial Malignancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*** *** ***

Sanders Calls Charleston What It Is: Racist Terrorism

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

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

Sanders seems to speak directly from his heart:

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

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

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

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

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

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

*** *** ***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Seattle Area, Racism Means Bad Mass Transit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Russia Vows Retaliation if U.S. Aggression Continues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Understanding Media (with apologies to McLuhan)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Defining Issue" Is Whether Our Species Survives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/21 June 2015

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