We Are Slowly Boiled Frogs, Yet No Leftist Dares Admit it

THE BOILED FROG analogy of politics – the notion we the people are being gradually but deliberately subjugated, so that like a frog in water warmed ever-so-slowly to a boil, we will not be aware of the danger until it is too late to escape – is seemingly anathema to the U.S. Left.

Not once in all the years I have written about politics, roughly from late 1963 until the present, have I heard even one Leftist spokesperson use the boiled-frog comparison to explain the tactical and strategic significance of the ever-increasing restrictions imposed on our political and economic freedom – especially the latter.

Nor is there any widespread recognition the recent culture-war victories – marriage equality and legalized marijuana – are entirely illusory. Neither costs the One Percent a penny. Hence neither does a thing to alter the wage-slavery dynamic that defines capitalism.

Though I support marriage equality, I am equally aware the freedom to marry is meaningless if you can aspire to nothing better than a grueling minimum-wage job, a miserable lifetime of debt slavery and an early death imposed by the lack of adequate health care – the sure fate, regardless of their sexual preferences, that already awaits at least half the families in the United States.

Legalized marijuana in this context becomes merely another opiate by which to numb ourselves against our abject wretchedness, thereby ensuring our masters we are that less likely to rebel.

And yes, the One Percent is indeed that cunning.

But rejection of the boiled-frog analogy leaves the Left without any effective means to describe the gradual imposition of tyranny that has followed, “as the night the day,” the now-undeniable coup of 22 November 1963.

As of now, the most blatant of these tyrannies is the Hobby Lobby decision, which already was becoming the women's equivalent of the Dred Scott decision, as I argued last week.  (Scroll down to “Outside Agitation Elsewhere.”)

But now it looks as if Hobby Lobby may be the Dred Scott equivalent for the entire 99 Percent.

“By declaring that “closely held” corporations may hold religious beliefs, the court may have provided businesses with a new tool for crushing workplace unionization drives,” an MSNBC analyst wrote on 15 July.  “In addition to declaring themselves exempt from contraception mandates and non-discrimination laws, religious employers may soon be able to argue for an exemption from collective bargaining laws.” 

If so, any boss will be able to make such a claim. Not only will it be a giant step toward the One Percent's goal of reducing the U.S. to an officially Christian theocracy.  It will also be a huge stride toward fulfillment of what seems to President Barack Obama's primary domestic goal: reducing the entire U.S. Working Class to the inescapable socioeconomic wretchedness that formerly defined only the nation's racial and/or geographic minorities.

What the frog analogy would show us is how these restrictions on our freedom are parts of a relentless, multi-generational, multi-faceted war of subjugation waged against us by the One Percent.

Though traceable to the 19th Century, the war's present form took shape at least as early as 1934 with the so-called Bankers Plot.  (Scroll down for my addition of historical facts to the comment thread.)  According to the era's Communist Party sources, this was a joint Wall-Street/Nazi-German effort to impose fascism on the United States and make it part of the greater fascist New Order proposed by Hitler. 

Had the plotters succeeded, this nation with its vast natural and industrial resources would have become the chief financier and primary supply source for what would have been the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo/Washington D.C. Axis and der Führer's plan for global conquest.

The U.S. plotters, placed above the law by their status as members of the uppermost ranks of the (unacknowledged) capitalist aristocracy, were never punished.

And their descendents are to this day continuing the One Percent effort to impose fascism. This is manifest in the violent suppression of dissent (as in the crushing of the Occupy Movement) and in the wars against organized labor and against the rights of women and minorities. The power of the One Percent – now defined as the right of corporate “personhood” – is used to abolish the rights of all the rest of us. That's why the struggle has now (predictably) morphed into a war against every civil right we the people ever imagined we might have.

But the Left seemingly dare not use the one English phrase that would make all those connections obvious.

The same lack of language – or, more accurately, avoidance of language – illustrates vividly how the One Percent uses wedge issues to perpetuate the powerlessness of the 99 Percent. It also demonstrates how the U.S. Left, weakened by its signature rejection of formal ideology and thus by its lack of analytical ability, often unwittingly serves the very oppressor it seeks to topple.

What then actually prompts the Left to reject the boiled-frog analogy?

I strongly suspect it is misguided political correctness. In my lifetime, the frog likeness was first applied to U.S. politics by the Second Amendment community. That happened at least 38 years ago, even before the membership of the National Rifle Association – in furious and embittered response to the de facto national gun registration imposed by the Gun Control Act of 1968 – elected a revolution-minded board of directors who radically transformed the organization into what it is today.

Founded in 1871, the NRA had been, until the enactment of GCA '68, an avowedly apolitical group of target shooters and firearms experts with close connections to the War Department and its successor the Department of Defense. The academic credibility of its journal, The American Rifleman, had elevated it to the world standard as the definitive source for historical and technical material about firearms.

NRA's primary purpose in those pre-GCA-'68 years was the promotion of rifle marksmanship – a realm in which, until the previously widespread familiarization of youth with firearms was abolished by the ongoing escalation of cleverly fostered anti-gun hysteria – the U.S. led the entire world. But now, in response to the often subtle but nevertheless undeniable Ruling Class effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – that is, to reduce the 99 Percent to mandatory defenselessness and compulsory pacifism – the NRA has become one of the most powerful advocacy groups in the nation.

It has also, of necessity, become one of the nation's most outspokenly anti-government organizations, in the course of which it has (unfortunately) allowed itself to not only be captured by the Hard Right, but to become a front organization for the Republican Party, also known as the “Grand Old Party” or simply the GOP.

Though the GOP is one of the two U.S. Ruling Class parties, it is the only one that dares speak openly for the racist, sexist, imperialist (and thus definitively fascist) One Percent.

The NRA – though it actively courts women and minorities as members and participants in marksmanship training and shooting sports – has nevertheless by its association with the most reactionary elements in the Republican Party become the favorite hate-object of a huge majority within the U.S. Left. 

But this so-called “Left” is actually a pseudo-Left. It is proven so by its anti-intellectuality and rejection of ideology (and the resultant lack of ideological discipline) that fosters its reflexive identification with the oppressor – its petit-bourgeois arrogance and its carefully closeted Ayn-Rand-conditioned selfishness.

Thus it fears an armed Working Class far more than it fears the ever-escalating depredations of the One Percent.

Never mind how the One Percent's coterie of politicians, judges, generals, academics, executives, bureaucrats and police commanders have destroyed the American Dream and are now methodically nullifying the last remnants of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy. The U.S. Left will not use the best phrase in the English language to describe what is being done to us all merely because those words were first uttered in a political context by the people it most despises.

Moreover – and uniquely – the present-day U.S. Left has little or nothing to do with Working-Class consciousness.

Therefore its most intense hatred is not directed at the One Percenters, nor at their obscenely well-recompensed servants in the upper echelons of government and industry, but rather at the (mostly blue-collar) men and women of the 99 Percent who yet own firearms and hold to the right of personal self-defense.

This particularly vicious twist in the class war is amongst the lingering legacies of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In its immediate aftermath, newly inaugurated President Lyndon Baines Johnson – as faithful a servant of the One Percent in 1964 as President Barack Hussein Obama is today – reversed the policies of the murdered President Kennedy and so ballooned a shrinking U.S. involvement in a Vietnamese civil war into a World-War-Two-sized windfall to military-industrial profiteers.

But that wasn't all LBJ gave his masters. The war's biggest bonus to the One Percent was its destruction, forever, of the New Deal coalition, a united front of white-collar and blue-collar interests – revolutionaries and reformists alike – brought together by their demands for socioeconomic relief from the malevolence of capitalism.

The New Deal coalition had (sort of) kept the more obvious forms of institutional fascism out of (most of) the U.S. homeland since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic reforms saved U.S. capitalism from the revolution its savagery had nearly provoked. Not only did the New Deal co-opt a looming Communist rebellion – an uprising that, given the aid of the Soviet Union, would undoubtedly have succeeded. It also prevented the civil war – including a second secession by the South – that would have inevitably followed such a revolution.

But only three decades later, the domestic conflict inherent in the Vietnam War – the schism within the 99 Percent between the white-collar and blue-collar classes (and the breathtaking hatred and contempt with which the draft-exempt children of the white-collar elite viewed those of us whose poverty and lack of influence left us no choice but prison or service in the imperial war machine) – killed the New Deal coalition just as surely as the assassins' bullets slew President Kennedy.

Soon afterward, the smirkingly draft-exempt white-collar elite became the snarlingly anti-gun elite, which redefined us no-choice-but-to-soldier blue-collar folk accordingly. We who had been “baby killers” and “war criminals” were now “gun-crazed thugs” instead.

Thus, by the diabolical cunning of the One Percent, was any sort of 99 Percent solidarity rendered forever impossible.

From then on, the Boiled Frog Protocol was the One Percenters' primary method.

It would take the One Percenters a few more decades – and even then they could not be sure of victory until the Soviet Union was destroyed – but the end result would be a USian Empire as thoroughly fascist, inside and out, at home and abroad, as anything the aristocrats' Bankers Plot ancestors might have imagined.

Yet the alleged Left – robbed of appropriate language by its fanatical hatred of firearms owners and all the craven fears and intimations of inadequacy that fuel its loathing – never dares speak of the Boiled Frog.

Meanwhile, as the One Percent slowly turns up the heat, we flounder about ever deeper in ever-hotter water.

* * * * * * 

Outside Agitation Elsewhere (In Case You Missed It) 

When the Bill Gates division of the New World Order hurled an unprecedented number of workers under the unemployment bus,  it seemed a perfect example of capitalism in action, complete with a vicious lesson for those 99 Percenters who reject the historical truth of class warfare and mistakenly assume they and the One Percenters have common interests. Hence my less-than-sympathetic remarks on the comment thread of “Microsoft Announces Largest Layoffs in History, Stocks Rise”:

Nurds and techies are amongst the most fanatical fans of Ayn Rand, whose fictionalizations of Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") formalized capitalism's philosophy of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the emphatic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. 

But now so many of these women and men and have been flung out of work – at least 18,000 human beings cast off by Microshaft as if they were nothing more than obsolete software.

Given the relentless savagery of the economy so many of these newly jobless persons hitherto celebrated and served, most likely they will soon discover they have been permanently condemned to minimum-wage slavery.

I wonder if they will then finally begin to recognize the true nature of capitalism – that it is not just moral imbecility, but moral imbecility run amok – and that they who were previously its prideful facilitators are now its abject victims, utterly defenseless against the smirking malevolence of their creditors.

The only sure beneficiaries of these layoffs are the secret police. There is no person on this planet more dangerous than an angry Nurd turned revolutionary – which means the government agents assigned to spy on these newcomers to the Golden Arches slave-pens will soon be collecting unprecedented hours of overtime pay.

* * * * * * 

Reader Supported News, which along with Consortium News are my favorite sources for uncensored reporting, uncharacteristically posted a curiously anti-Russian story on the latest Ukraine crisis,  a dispatch all the more perplexing for its usually reliable Guardian UK origin. My addition to the comment thread of “Recording Strongly Suggests Russian Separatist Shot Down Malaysian Jet” was therefore notably skeptical:

With the CIA and its neo-Nazi militias running the Ukraine government, this tragedy could have been scripted well in advance, much as the Gulf of Tonkin incident was scripted by President Johnson to justify massive U.S. intervention to support the fascists in Vietnam's civil war.

Therefore what we should fear most is capitalist media turning the shooting down of the airliner into an episode equivalent to the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and/or the sinking of the Lusitania – that is, a pretext for escalating the Ukrainian Civil War into an all-out war against Russia – with the U.S. commanding the action exactly as in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the truly pivotal question – why was a civilian airliner flying in the midst of a war zone – remains not just unanswered, but shamefully unasked.

Such is capitalist media, of which Josef Goebbels would be justifiably proud.

* * * * * * 

Late last night, in one of those geriatric moments of brutally honest self-evaluation, I was thinking about why I persist in political activism despite the fact my knowledge of human history tells me it is almost certainly pointless – that barring a genuine miracle (an event in which I cannot believe) – conditions in the United States will continue to worsen until this nation is no more.

Not only have the capitalists made themselves as powerful as the sadistic Abrahamic god they so obviously emulate; they have perpetuated their omnipotence by mastery of the most malevolent technologies of oppression. And now they are deliberately herding us into a new Dark Age from which – because their depredations are also killing our planet – our species will most likely never emerge.

That's why, when I discovered the dreadful detail that dooms Vermont's brave effort to declare health care a human right  (and thereby overturn Obamacare's deliberate reinforcement of the capitalist mandate that health care is to remain forever a privilege of wealth), I became quite angry at Tara Culp-Ressler for burying this pivotal fact and otherwise writing as if the Vermont plan were fait accompli. Hence my antagonistic words on the comment thread of her well-written but nevertheless deceptively optimistic “Beyond Obamacare: Health Care as a Human Right”:

I am sick unto death of these “there's a better tomorrow” stories, which are secular versions of the Santa Claus or Jesus myths and are thus actually nothing more than propaganda cunningly designed to stave off rebellion by perpetuating false hopes.

The key sentence in this report, which contains the fact that should have been its lead, is “Vermont plans to apply for a waiver to sidestep the Affordable Care Act beginning in 2017 so it can implement its own single-payer system.”

What this means is Vermont's plan is doomed without federal approval, which in turn means it is nothing more than pie-in-the-sky. Indeed to hope for such approval under present conditions is as absurd as hoping for Congressional relief from the Hobby Lobby decision.

Neither recognition of health insurance as a human right nor restoration of female sexual freedom will ever be allowed under the present system. The U.S. experiment in representative democracy, like the so-called “American Dream,” is dead beyond any hope of resurrection.

The hideous truth is that government at every level in this savagely oppressed nation has been reduced to a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. Until we the people recognize that without economic democracy there is no democracy at all, we will continue to suffer beneath the truncheons of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Why then do I persist in humanitarian activism, as for example my ongoing involvement with 15 Now Tacoma and its quest for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour? Why, for that matter, do I even bother to write this blog?

Because when I was a child age 11 or so and a Boy Scout on my first camping trip, I rather joyfully embraced the notion of leaving the campsite in better condition than I found it. Later, as a young adult, I realized that precept was amongst the rules by which I governed my life – that in fact it was an apt metaphor for one of the instincts that led me into journalism. And though I now know such improvement is no longer possible – that our campsite, which is our planet, is trashed beyond repair – I cannot live with myself unless I keep trying, in my own small way, to clean up the mess.

LB/20 July 2014

-30-

War on the Working Class: a New Year Anthology

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

*

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

*** 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

Obviously it did not.

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

***

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

*** 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

*** 

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

 

Again I'm not surprised:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

***

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

* * *

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

LB/17-22 January 2013

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