Remedying an Omission: Notes on the Nature of Fascism

Somehow this oft-published, increasingly iconic war-protest photograph seems  appropriate as a  lament for the United States.  Tech data: Nikon F w/105mm f2.5 Nikkor; Tri-X at 800 ASA for development in D-76. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1971. (Click image to view it full size.)

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A READER WHO is a friend, a fellow professional writer and therefore also a trusted critic says my otherwise accurate portrayal of the present-day United States as a “fascist nation”  is incomplete without a formal definition of “fascism.”

Then as I was contemplating my response synchronicity  provided me an all-too-typical example of U.S. fascism in action. Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland had just postponed city council consideration of a proposed minimum-wage hike, thereby stuffing a procedural gag down the throats of about 200 workers who had intended to testify in favor of higher pay.

The hearing was later added to the council's July 7 agenda. But Max Hyland, a spokesperson for 15 Now Tacoma,  says the tactical intent behind the surprise agenda-change was to nullify the energies evoked by a pro-wage-hike demonstration  and simultaneously minimize the number of its supporters who would be able to address the council. Many had taken time off work to participate in the rally and testify at the June 30 meeting.

“A lot of these people,” said Hyland, “can't afford more time off their jobs – and Strickland damn well knows that.”

Having witnessed Strickland in action, I don't doubt Hyland's contention. Though she ran for mayor as a progressive, in office she has proven herself an obedient servant not of the public but rather of her masters in the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, even unto her refusal to use the city's legal authority to protect residents from the chamber-supported radical downsizing of local bus service  imposed by openly racist white suburban voters in 2011 and 2012. (Scroll down to the paragraph beginning “Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland...”)

By design, Tacoma city council meetings are already difficult for people with jobs to attend. As I know from my years covering local governments for various daily and weekly newspapers (1959-1981), U.S. municipalities that encourage Working Class participation in decision-making schedule their relevant public meetings during evening hours, typically at 7 or 7:30 p.m., as exemplified here,  here,  here  and here. 

But such meetings in Tacoma start at a deliberately exclusionary 5 p.m. – never mind State Rep. Laurie Jinkins has told me nearly 60 percent of the seaport town's 200,000 population is officially lower income – that is, below the federal standard of a family of four earning less than $45,000 per year.

U.S. Census figures  show that in 2013 – the most recent year for which data is available – fully18 percent of Tacoma's households eked out their existences with incomes below the official federal poverty line,  $24,250 for a family of four. That makes Tacoma the second most poverty-stricken municipality  in the state of Washington.

The tiny difference between the Tacoma poverty figures given by the census bureau and the University of Washington, 18 percent versus 17.7 percent respectively, is probably due to when the data was collected. Despite the claimed “economic recovery,” ongoing cuts in social services are forcing many Tacomans, especially those of us who are elderly and/or disabled, ever deeper into inescapable poverty.

Thus chamber-of-commerce vassal Strickland's rescheduling of the minimum wage discussion adds a new and obviously premeditated class-war injury to a deliberately inflicted and long-festering class-war wound – a topic to which we shall return.

Meanwhile, here are two points apropos last week's OAN edition: one, the incipient racism and class hatred in the comment thread attached to the Strickland/minimum wage story (linked again for ease of access) is yet another exemplar of the bigotry I described in “Fascist Nation”; two, the individual installments of this blog have become too long and too topically diverse for me to call them “columns” anymore. Hence “edition,” in acknowledgment of how OAN has evolved into a mini-journal.)

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MY FIRST REACTION to my friend's criticism was surprise.

That's because I cannot count the number of times I have defined fascism as the relentlessly logical, mature form of capitalism, which in turn is the direct, eventually extinction-level debacle thrust on us by what capitalism actually is: the morally imbecilic elevation of infinite greed into ultimate virtue.

Hence capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us. That's the core reality of fascism, whether in today's United States and its imperial conquests, Ukraine included, or in fascism's earlier manifestations via Mussolini, Hitler and Franco.

Nor does it matter how the subjugation is imposed. In the U.S., with its ignorance-opiated electorate, it's done more often by political sleight-of-hand (as in Strickland's last-minute rescheduling of the minimum-wage discussion) than by the brute force routinely employed elsewhere. But there's brutality aplenty  whenever exceptionally brave U.S. citizens dare resist capitalist tyranny. 

And not only is such brutality a defining characteristic of fascism in action. It's also an expression of what has long been the uniquely USian form of Nazism, the antique but eerily Hitlerian philosophy of the U.S. as the Christian god's global übermenschen. Since World War II it has morphed into mainstream U.S. politics – probably with encouragement by all the Nazi war criminals  embraced by the government and private industry after 1945 – and it is now regurgitated as “exceptionalism”: the belief the U.S. has the divine right to conquer and rule the entire planet. 

Even without such (often censored) information, or so I said in mental response to my critic, surely everybody who took eighth grade civics remembers the working definition  provided us by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – “ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling power.”

Moreover, you don't get out of junior high school – or “middle school” as they call it today – without passing civics. Right?

Wrong. Critics Left,  Right  and center  express grave concern about the abysmal ignorance of the U.S. citizenry, particularly its younger members. Which of course I should have recognized – not the least given my frequent condemnations of Moron Nation  (scroll down to “Understanding Media”). Nor can I count my denunciations of the dumbing-down that imposed Moron Nation, the induced intellectual deterioration I damn as “moronation.”

Indeed I had seen and recognized the results of moronation as far back as when I was teaching photography and journalism – mostly the former – at a couple of public colleges in Washington state. That was 1975 through 1981, truly another era. But already the induced political ignorance of my younger students exemplified the post-Vietnam, post-Civil-Rights-Movement, post-Counterculture curriculum-changes forced on U.S. public schools to ensure that never again would there be another era of protest and resistance as had erupted during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.

Don't teach the kids their legal and constitutional rights – or so the Ruling Class reasoned  – and then they won't know when those rights are violated or abolished.

Thus my older students, people who had graduated from high school well before the U.S. was routed from Vietnam,  were well enough versed in the democratic principles embodied in this nation's founding documents to see the infuriatingly vast and hypocritical difference between text and reality. As had I, they had been required to memorize the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution  and the Gettysburg Address,  and to be enough familiar with the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation,  the 14th  and 19th amendments and President Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech  to be able to discuss each in accurate detail.

But most of my younger students, the kids who got out of high school after about 1974, couldn't even summarize the First Amendment  – this in an introductory class about newspaper reporting.

I should have remembered this, if only because at the time of discovery it was so disturbing to encounter journalism students who didn't know their signature quest for information was protected by the U.S. Constitution. Sometimes though I get so focused on the proverbial trees – some of which were in this instance growing bitter-sweet seeds of memory and previously unexpressed emotion – I'm blinded to the metaphorical forest. And that's precisely what happened when I was writing “Persistent Racism Defines U.S. as Fascist Nation.”

My critic is therefore correct. (It's an aside, but that's why I so appreciate cogent critics and competent editors: they are often an oracular expression of my own subconscious, verbalizing that which I know or at least sense but have somehow ignored.) At the very least I should have included FDR's definition, which I have always cherished both for its get-to-the-point minimalism and its obviously prescient understanding of what the United States has become today. Here it is in full: 

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

Note how the late president's definition embodies the elements present in what I label “capitalist governance.” Indeed I use that term at least as often as “fascism” because the former does not always immediately evoke Moron Nation's (Pavlovian) closed-mind reflex.

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STRICKLAND, FOR WHOM I voted in two successive mayoralty elections and about whom I was originally enough enthusiastic I successfully pled her case to a number of neighbors, has turned out to be another example of what all (real) Leftists should by now in the era of Obama the Orator and his shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer recognize as a standard Ruling Class tactic.

A ploy Niccolo Machiavelli and even Sun Tzu would admire, it calls for recruiting a minority person who now as capitalism herds us into the age of inescapable poverty and de facto enslavement has special voter appeal because of his or her ethnicity.

Its false promise, though usually unspoken, is that because of minority ethnicity – Strickland is African-American and Korean – the candidate can readily empathize with the sufferings of all of us who are being crushed by capitalism, whether the oppression dealt us by the downpresser man  takes the form of joblessness, racism, sexism, classism, able-ism, ageism or the genocidal austerity by which such malevolence is enforced.

The tactic – yet another proof of the diabolical cunning possessed by our capitalist overlords – is enough effective at the ballot box to overcome the deep-seated racial animus that simmers beneath the (alleged) consciousness of four-fifths of the nation's white majority. Hence the deceptive anomaly of a black president as chief executive of nation that's murderously racist not just in the Charleston sense but also and far more often in the official, federally militarized context of Ferguson-type atrocities.

(For a brief but pointed discussion of our most revealing index to the extent of carefully closeted but nevertheless unreconstructed white racism in the U.S., see “Fascist Nation,” linked again here  for convenience, and scroll down to the last section, the graf beginning “In this context, the passage...”)

Hence too Mayor Strickland's little war of attrition against Working Class folk who wished to speak to the Tacoma City Council in favor of wage-hike measures that could literally enable us to vote ourselves a raise.

Obviously – as I have said repeatedly in recent weeks – the era of charade democracy is over, and the era of unapologetic tyranny is upon us.

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BUT IS IT really fascism?

Based on FDR's definition, it most assuredly is: private, for-profit greed vastly stronger than the democratic state, ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power, specifically the One Percent and its Ruling Class of executives, politicians, bureaucrats, generals and commanders of the federal and federalized police whether uniformed or secret.

The definitions given by Wikipedia – the one best compendium of definitions of fascism I have yet encountered on-line (its link repeated here for convenience and clarity) – mostly elaborate on the words of our late and still lamented president.

Since Wiki material is all in the public domain, I have copied and pasted herein some of its most relevant parts. Italic type indicates the material is copied word-for-word, complete with the variances in punctuation that distinguish computer-age texts from earlier works.

In his 1995 essay “Eternal Fascism”, Umberto Eco lists 14 general properties of fascist ideology. He argues that it is not possible to organise these into a coherent system, but that “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it”.  (Emphasis added.)

Six of Umberto's 14 properties are as follows, copied and pasted as above with my comments in parentheses:

“Disagreement Is Treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action; (Note the thoroughly documented cult of USian anti-intellectualism.) 


“Fear of Difference”, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants; (Self- explanatory; see again “Fascist Nation.”)

“Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups; (Note in particular the envy and hatred methodically churned up against immigrants, union-protected workers and minimum-wage workers who dare organize to seek higher pay.)

“Contempt for the Weak” – although a fascist society is elitist, everybody in the society is educated to become a hero; (Note the official, tacitly genocidal hostility expressed in austerity policies that victimize impoverished and/or disabled people.)

“Non-truths & Lying/Spread of Propaganda”. (Situational synonyms include Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.)

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The Communist Third International in 1935 published the first definition of fascism I learned as a: child: “the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism”.

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Leon Trotsky wrote: “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.” (Emphasis added.)

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Stanley G. Payne created a list of characteristics that identify fascism:

Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use violence and war...

The goal of empire, expansion, or a radical change in the nation's relationship with other powers...

Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance...

Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of the generations...(Note how today's youth are conditioned to scapegoat seniors  for the dystopian state of human society.)

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Emilio Gentile describes fascism as the “sacralization of politics” through totalitarian methods and argues that it has ten constituent elements:

These include: a police apparatus that prevents, controls, and represses dissidence and opposition, even by using organized terror... (For example the murder of Fred Hampton  and the slaying of protesters at Kent State University  and Jackson State College.)

(A) foreign policy inspired by the myth of national power and greatness, with the goal of imperialist expansion... (Precisely as mandated by USian exceptionalism).

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The definition of fascism by Ernesto Laclau includes implacable hostility to feminism and socialism (as in the bipartisan war against women  and Obama's Janus-faced embrace of the formerly Republican demand to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority ).

Significantly, Laclau's work explains why a fascist nation grants marriage equality and permits the legalization of marijuana: Fascists are pushed towards conservatism by common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests – family, property, religion, the universities, the civil service – where the interests of the nation are considered to require it. Fascist radicalism also derives from a desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women's movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority. (Emphasis added.)

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Then there is Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, who defines fascism in his book The Anatomy of Fascism as: A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (Emphasis added.)

All of which brings us back to the definition of fascism articulated by the man who, at some time in the future (if indeed capitalism does not reduce us all to extinction), will surely be honored as our greatest president ever: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

I rest my case.

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Time for Whites to Acknowledge Slavery's Horrors

ROBERT PARRY'S DENUNCIATION of white Southern recalcitrance prompted a lengthy discussion thread in which I made two contributions, each in response to other posters with whom I was generally in agreement:

When franpryor speculated on what might happen were the Germans to resurrect the Swastika, I noted:

The Swastika is being resurrected not by Germany but by the United States via its arming and financing of the U.S./Nazi conquest of Ukraine.

Moreover the U.S. puppet government that now rules the Ukraine flies not only the Nazi banners but also the Confederate battle flag and the flag of the Ku Klux Klan.

All of this is in keeping with the evil nature of capitalism, which – with its morally imbecilic ethos of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – inevitably matures into Nazism.

In this context, we see at last why the U.S. perpetually speaks with the proverbial “forked tongue,” claiming to defend liberty while in fact seeking global conquest to impose the zero-tolerance tyranny of a Fourth Reich on all the peoples of the world.

Which reveals the true (and truly horrific) reason behind the persistence of the Confederacy's emblems of slavery and genocide: they express the horrific truth of what the U.S. – or more specifically the U.S. Ruling Class – actually believes and intends.

Later when Granny Weatherwax wrote there is a “significant difference” between fascism and Nazism, I said:

Actually there's not. As Marx and Engels clearly understood, capitalism requires an “üntermenschen” – an allegedly inferior group – to maximize its profits and otherwise rationalize its savagery.

While the definitions of that “üntermenschen” often vary from country to country – Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and Communists in Nazi Germany; communists and socialists in Fascist Italy; communists, socialists and non-Catholics in Fascist Spain; blacks, Hispanics, First Nations peoples, females of all races and ethnicities, lower-income elderly and disabled people plus all other lower income people in the “exceptionalist/under God” United States – the psychodynamic and socioeconomic reality is everywhere the same.

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No, Michael, It's Not 'a New America,' Not Yet

When Michael Moore claimed, “It is a New America,”  I was almost as outraged as I am by Hillary Clinton's ongoing, astoundingly dishonest effort to position herself – a war-hawk and an austerity advocate – as a latter-day Eleanor Roosevelt.  Hence I responded accordingly:

Mr. Moore's ignorance of history and the insufferable arrogance he shares with his fellow “Americans” whether Right or Left are surely on display in the above.

In the first place, the U.S. Working Class has NEVER been as impoverished – and as powerless – as it is now. In terms of the quest for economic democracy, there was never a better era than the New Deal and its immediate aftermath. Nor – without the total overthrow of capitalism – will there ever be again.

Secondly, ALL of the gains of the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements have either been abolished or are methodically being undone. Meanwhile the Environmental Movement, which might have saved our species from extinction, has either been co-opted by the capitalists or is paralyzed by its refusal to acknowledge the realities of the class war.

Thirdly, it is dishonest for Mr. Moore to claim “we have never been so free” merely because a wealthy, mostly white and often notoriously conservative minority has gained the right to marry. Though I applaud marriage equality, I also recognize it as a feel-good distraction that contributes nothing to the resistance against capitalism.

Lastly, the U.S. is not “America” and we are not “Americans.” We the People are USians, a people who unlike any other has wantonly discarded the potential of liberty and embraced the opiate of ignorance instead.

Thus to call ourselves “Americans” insults the inhabitants of every other nation on the American land mass.

Two post-expostulation points: one, the sentence “we have never been so free” appeared in Moore's original piece and was later changed, obviously in response to my criticism (for which thank you, Mr. Moore, as your revised version is much more accurate); two, my use of the inappropriate loudness of capital letters, a technique I normally deplore, is an index of just how much anger the original form of the comment evoked. (Yes, Moore is apparently at least an occasional reader of OAN.)

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Important Note to Readers on OAN Schedule Change

LIFE CHANGES, ALL positive, keep pressuring me to modify OAN's self-assigned schedule. Thus the blog's gradual but relentless transition to a Monday publication date.

But the most substantial change arises from the monthly newsletter I write, photograph, edit and produce as a volunteer for the 51-unit apartment complex in which I reside.

I began the newsletter project three years ago as a two-page, four-hours-per-month favor to the resident community, but it has expanded into a publication of at least eight pages with some color photography, a growing volunteer staff and readership that – because I make a point of including only stories of relevance – has come to depend on each month's edition of Community Chronicle for vital information as well as entertainment.

As a result its editorship has, throughout the second week of each month, become the equivalent of a full-time job. (As I have many times said, and not always approvingly, journalism is like organized crime in that you don't ever really get to retire.)

But that means there's not enough time left over for all the research that normally goes into OAN.

Hence starting this month and from now on, OAN will not – save as maybe a photograph or two or with such breaking news as in olden times would have demanded a daily newspaper print an extra edition – be published on the third Monday of each month.

Apropos the photography, thanks to the generosity of a friend, I now have a digital single-lens-reflex, a Canon Rebel T-5, so maybe – once I get past the mental mine-field of learning its computer-operation procedures – I can maybe at long last recover some of the passion for photography I lost after that 1983 fire destroyed all my life's work.

LB/28 June-6 July 2015

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Activism and Renewed Vision at Age 74; 12 Revealing Reports and Essays on U.S. Fascism and Theocracy

PROUD AND ANGRY: A member of the 15 Now Tacoma organizing committee, I spent a bit more than an hour Sunday collecting signatures on our petition to the Tacoma City Council demanding the minimum wage inside this municipality be raised to $15 per hour.

In that brief span of time – never mind I am 74 years old and visibly crippled – I filled two petition-pages, front and back, with a total of 48 signatures complete with addresses and contact information.

The venue was very much in 15 Now's advantage – an annual celebration of Tacoma's diverse ethnicity, a food-and-music festival in a large and pleasant city park near my dwelling, and I should have brought many more than two of our petition-sheets with me, but alas I did not. It was my first time working alone as a signature-gatherer, and I had foolishly under-estimated the campaign's popularity.

Meanwhile, “15 Now” is becoming a slogan of the increasingly radicalized Working Class, not just in Washington state but throughout the U.S. imperial homeland, and minimum-wage data tells why.

Here, where the minimum wage is set by the legislature, it is $9.32 an hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. But neither provide a so-called living wage, the sum required for self-support without reliance on food stamps and other subsidies  the ever-more-unabashedly Ayn-Rand-fascist federal and state governments are relentlessly slashing or eliminating entirely.

(Note: the above-linked wage and cost-of-living data is not current. In one place the source-website says it's data is from the year 2010; in another it says it was updated in 2012. Thanks to bureaucratic lag – the increasing reluctance of U.S. governance to acknowledge how bad things truly are – these are the last full years available. However, the site is nevertheless useful as it does show the relationship between minimum wage and living wage.)

Had the federal minimum wage kept pace with inflation – that is, were the capitalists and their political servants not gleefully lining their own pockets by savaging workers and working families – the federal minimum wage would be $23 per hour.

Combine that with the fact at least half the population of Tacoma is lower income – 60 percent of the children in Tacoma schools are on free or reduced-price lunches  – and it becomes easy to understand why it took me only 75 minutes to gather all those signatures.

Despite my error in not bringing more petition-pages to the park, I am fiercely proud of my effort today. I frankly had no idea I could be continuously on my feet without serious discomfort for anything approaching that span of time and distance, equivalent to walking about three miles.

I was also reveling in the exquisiteness of my new eyesight, 20/20 in my right eye due to cataract surgery, its result a re-familiarization with the sensuality of seeing that is tantamount to discovery of a fountain of youth – an experience I would be denied had I not applied for, and gotten, a special medical-expense grant.

At the same time, I am again forced to confront the fact the United States of America – once a nation of which I was proud to be a citizen – is again expanding at every level its traditional economic hostility toward people of color.  But now it has gone much further. It has become the enemy of all working peoples everywhere, at home and abroad, regardless of our race and ethnicity.

It is from this perspective – pride in what I did today, pride in the fact I am able to remain defiantly active, anger in what this nation has become – I devote my Sundays to writing this blog.

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On the Rise of Theocracy and Fascism in Obama's U.S.

Here is an analysis that reveals the connections beneath five seemingly unrelated reports:

“Right-Wing Militias Are Thriving - and the Media Won't Talk About It.” Nor is the Obama Regime protecting us against the depredations of these latter-day storm troopers.

The report's most revealing passage is frightening indeed:

“The problem is much more one of inter-agency coordination, leadership and simple recognition of the widespread threat of right-wing violence—a failure epitomized by the Obama administration’s knee-jerk disavowal of a Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism, leaked to right-wing media in April 2009. As Potok noted, this disavowal came despite two basic facts: first, that a similar report on the virtually nonexistent radical left had been issued six months earlier, and second, the fact the report itself was “a fair, sober and prescient analysis of what was going on.” In fact “virtually everything that was written in that report came to pass in one way or another. But it’s not just the government that’s been caught flat-footed. The media’s sensationalist approach obscured as much or more than it revealed...”

AlterNet's Paul Rosenberg, who wrote this otherwise excellent summary of material from the Southern Poverty Law Center, nevertheless failed in two significant ways.

He seems to regard the government's inactivity and the media's dissemination of disinformation as separate phenomena – never mind the fact governance and mass media in today's U.S. are each wholly owned subsidiaries of the One Percent. In other words, it appears the militia are – no doubt in anticipation of their future function as defenders of capitalism – definitively under Ruling Class protection.

And – though Rosenberg does report the intimate connections between the new storm troopers, the imperial war machine and Christian fanaticism – he fails to place these disturbing facts in the context of the much larger, lavishly financed, increasingly successful effort to impose biblical-law theocracy  on the United States.

Predictably, here too the U.S. government demonstrates its servitude to the One Percent. There's the Hobby Lobby case – which is turning out to be the Dred Scott decision not just for women but for the entire U.S. 99 Percent.  There's also President Obama's dramatic increase in funding for religion-based social-services that notoriously discriminate against non-believers.

Most of all there's the story implicit in “US Air Force Prepares to Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of Fundamentalist Christians Proselytizing War.” which details the forcible conversion of the imperial war machine into an onward-Christian-soldiers force of heretic hunters and infidel eliminators. These modern-day Crusaders are tasked with converting the world,  not at swords-point as in the previous Dark Age, but with cluster-bombs, napalm, depleted-uranium munitions, torture, deliberate collateral damage and other such technologies and tactics suitable to the new Dark Age in which we are befallen.

Here's the report's key paragraph:

“Look, let's just call it what it is. 'Spiritual rape' perpetrated by 'fundamentalist Christian religious predators' is how we at the civil rights organization I lead — the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF)— describe the profound sense of vicious, personal violation that is being mercilessly inflicted upon tens of thousands of our MRFF military clients, 96% of whom are practicing Christians themselves. Forced religious indoctrination, mandatory prayer sessions, active, abusive measures towards the promotion of one or another fundamentalist Christian sect, the shaming and savaging of freethinking, atheist, and agnostic service members – these barbaric tactics define the monstrous modus operandi of the Christian dominionist hegemony that lies as a cancerous plague metastasizing briskly across the whole of the Air Force and the U.S. Military.”

Another aspect of the theocracy issue – made so by the bottomless hatred of women that defines all Abrahamic fanatics whether Judaic, Christian or Muslim – is obliquely covered by “What I Learned Growing Up in the South as a Feminist, and the Problems With Today's Feminist Movement.” An essay by Lynn Stuart Parramore on the present-day plight of feminism, its most noteworthy paragraph promises much but delivers little:

“Part of this I blame on the Democratic Party, which often embraces a superficial 'hooray for women!' attitude while kicking women, particularly those at the lower rungs of the economic ladder, under the bus. Too often, mainstream moderate women's organizations seem to be class-blind and oblivious (or even hostile) to the need to confront economic structures that oppress both women and men.”

Too bad Parramore did not detail how the Democratic Party, beneath its never-ending Big Lie of progressive politics, proves itself to be as bad (if not actually worse), than the Republicans in effective hostility to women. How many millions of women have been robbed of their reproductive freedom – forever – by the loss of their jobs, and therefore the loss of their health insurance, as the direct result of Democrat “free trade” policies?

And now how many women who desperately hoped Obamacare would restore those freedoms are now suffering the cruelty of Hobby Lobby – the permanent, theocratic destruction of their hopes via Obamacare, the now-officially unconstitutional legislation presumably written and approved by the president whose first claim to fame was as a Harvard Law School constitutional scholar. 

Given the innumerable shape-shifts from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer that prove the president to be the most brazenly dishonest occupant of the White House ever, who can doubt the Hobby-Lobby outcome – the denial of free contraception to untold numbers of women – was intended from the very beginning?

The last two reports in this anthology, “Elderly Veteran Arrested For Asking County Officials To Speak Louder,” here and “We're Arresting Poor Mothers for Our Own Failures,” here, each illustrate the ever-more-zero-tolerance police-state malevolence that now increasingly afflicts the (increasingly Christian, hence increasingly brutal) imperial homeland.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere (in Case You Missed It)

 

“Obama Administration Eyes Significant Direct Involvement in Ukrainian Civil War,” Reader Supported News' republication of a terrifying New York Times report of looming escalation on behalf the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine War, sparked an unusually vitriolic comment thread, to which I added my own analysis:

Don't let the quibbling...obscure the terrifying fact escalations of this sort are bound to trigger World War III.

Because Russia is not North Vietnam – because Russia has a genuinely global military capability – U.S. intervention on behalf the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine can only lead to thermonuclear holocaust.

 

Remember too the sole purpose of the U.S. government (and therefore of the CIA or any of its agencies whether foreign or domestic), is the advancement and perpetuation of U.S. capitalism and its global empire, the de facto Fourth Reich. This role it now fulfills perfectly.

Capitalism today has only three goals, all subsets of its mandate for absolute power and unlimited profit. These goals are: (1)-total control of global resources; (2)-extermination of surplus populations (that is, of all workers and working families rendered unnecessary by automation); (3)-reduction of the remaining workers to de facto slavery.

These goals are evident wherever there is a U.S. presence – Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, New Orleans, Ukraine – anywhere the empire exerts itself.

That's because the U.S. government is capitalism personified: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, the rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth – moral imbecility writ into foreign and domestic policy.

Later on the same thread a poster screen-named “geraldom” seemingly tried to lead three of us into criminal statements:  “So what you, lorenbliss, and dsepeczi are basically saying (bottomline) is that Putin should surrender control of Russia to the U.S. in order to avoid igniting a hot-war and certain destruction of all life on earth.”

To which I responded:

The maliciously provocative nature of this false assertion – a statement to which nearly any rational response would be actionable by the secret police as treason – makes me wonder for whom geraldom is working.

 

Never forget Lev Bronstein's axiom: “in any gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”

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“Fear and Retaliation at the VA” exposes vindictive management within the Department of Veterans Affairs  – a grim reality no different from the oppressive management that characterizes the entire Obamanoid bureaucracy and indeed governmental bureaucracy throughout the United States. The excellent report, by Lydia Dennett of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), was reprinted by Popular Resistance.org, a website that is always worth reading. On the comment thread I pointed out how bureaucratic malevolence whether internal or external is one of the ways capitalist governance ensures itself against socialism:

As I said on Outside Agitator's Notebook...a few weeks ago, the problems with VA health care are a microcosm of the problems with U.S. health care in general –  (scroll down), an analysis that, whether coincidentally or not, was repeated by Paul Krugman  10 days later.

But these problems are also what is wrong with all government bureaucracies – federal, state and local – that are responsible for providing services to the Working Class people of the United States.

The ultimate source of these problems is class warfare – the fact that managers (who presume themselves to be part of the Ruling Class elite), are indifferent if not outright hostile to the needs of the people they are theoretically responsible for serving.

This hostility is a logical byproduct of extent to which the U.S. population – particularly the college-educated elite – have been trained in (indeed brainwashed in), the morally imbecilic credo of Ayn Rand.

Hence the attitude in the bureaucracies from the top down is essentially the same as on Wall Street: infinite greed as ultimate virtue – the conscious and deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

As a consequence, management is focused not on serving the people but on maximizing earnings while minimizing personal effort. Moreover, the same attitude applies, in varying degrees, at all levels of bureaucracy.

The result is one of the many ways the One Percent perpetuates the popular hatred of government that perpetuates hostility to socialism. It is also yet another dimension of the methodical reduction of the 99 Percent to abject serfdom.

******

“Coal exports from Bellingham could ramp up rapidly” reveals that railroad tracks are already being upgraded to carry billions of tons of coal to a proposed new international port near Bellingham, Washington. But Crosscut's usually skillful reporter Floyd McKay sidesteps entirely the obvious implication of the new construction – that the proverbial fix is already in, and the coal port will be built regardless of local opposition. I commented accordingly:

Anyone who doubts the Bellingham coal port is not already a done deal need only note how BNSF is upgrading the relevant rail lines.

The upgrading proves the associated political process – environmental-impact statements included – is nothing more than another charade of the sort that now exemplifies the Big Lie of U.S. democracy.

Under the new paradigm of U.S. governance, anything the capitalists want, the capitalists get – no matter how many will suffer or die as a consequence.

 

Were the fix not already in, the railroad would not be spending the money to bolster its tracks to support increased traffic.

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“The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist,” by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux, of The Intercept, reports the ugly details of how easily a political activist* can be damned forever as a public enemy.  I damn the government in response:

 

By these standards, anyone who exercises the First Amendment right to protest can be labeled a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer – and that is obviously the government's intent.

Participate in a demonstration wherein a few secret-police thugs trash a building to create an excuse for mass arrest, you're on the list – your life destroyed forever unless you manage to escape to political asylum somewhere else.

What this makes clear is that Obama will not be content until all of us in the 99 Percent regardless of ethnicity or gender are reduced to the endless fear and total subjugation that was originally the wretched lot of minorities in the Ku Klux Klanfederacy whether south or north.

Indeed, that very kind of terror-state (so akin to Tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany), seems to be the Obamanoid model for good governance.

And in Obama's wanton and willful embrace of tyranny – never mind the clamor of deliberate lies and misinformed protests by DUDs (Democrats Uttering Denials) – the Republicans can no longer be blamed as initiators.

Once again, in his transition from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, the president proves himself to be infinitely more tyrannical than Richard Milhous Nixon ever dreamed of being.

_________

*Under the Obama Regime, this applies only to activists on the Left. Those on the Right – even those advocating violence against the government – are clearly exempt. See “Right-Wing Militias Are Thriving,” above. 

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“How Anonymous Cops Online Are Reacting to the Death of Eric Garner” gives us an insider's glimpse of the savagery characteristic of capitalist governance. My response gets right to the point:

Envision these remarks as part of a dialogue amongst soldiers in an army of occupation inside a conquered nation and you have at last glimpsed the core truth of life in the imperial USian homeland.

******

“Federal Appeals Court Deals Blow to Obamacare” is a Washington Post report that discloses what I suspect is yet another deliberate betrayal of lower-income people maliciously built into the so-called Affordable Care Act.  Thus my comment:

It ain't just “the Republicans.”

The Affordable Care Act was written by Democrats – or more specifically by insurance-monopoly lawyers empowered by Democrats.

Which means this newest “failure” – actually another example of Obama the Orator shape-shifting into Barack the Betrayer – was intended from the very beginning.

Why?

Because Obama is the quintessential capitalist. Because he is the biggest Big Liar ever to occupy the White House. Because he rules by capitalism's credo of Ayn Rand moral imbecility: infinite greed as maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

Mostly because it's yet another truncheon with which to beat the Working Class into submission.

The victims of mandatory Obamacare – the people who cannot afford insurance without government subsidies – will be ruined by bankruptcies, foreclosures, families flung into permanent homelessness.

Meanwhile – with the subsidy money diverted to more profitable forms of corporate welfare – there'll be even bigger payoffs for Obama's One Percent masters.

Wake up, people. It's capitalism in action: absolute power and infinite profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Later, in response to a hostile poster, I added this:

I'm well aware of Obamacare's Republican origins.

So let's be honest about who inflicted it on the people of the United States. (It was Barack the Betrayer and the Democratic Party).

Also let's be honest about why it was inflicted on us.

(It pays off the health care cartel and the prescription drug lords with the most obscene windfall profits in their obscene-profit histories.)

(Plus – let us not forget this all-important point – Obamacare perpetuates forever the definitive USian policy of health care as a privilege of wealth.)

Lastly, let's be honest about why the Republicans pretend to oppose it.

(Opposing anything with a “Democratic” label is the Republicans' predetermined, carefully scripted role in maintaining the Big Lie of USian "representative democracy" – their function in the One Party of Two Names.)

Wake up, people. There is no democracy here. There is only the tyranny of the One Percent – camouflaged by charades performed by its wholly owned servants in government at every level.

 

And my next retort was unapologetically antagonistic:

I see by the negative numbers I'm getting, there's a bunch of DUDs – Democrats Uttering Denials – on this thread. Hmmmm...must be an election year, as the defenders of the indefensible are again out in force, trying once more to sell us their Big Lie of “change we can believe in” – never mind our reality is exactly as Audre Lorde said: “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”

Likewise my concluding comment, though its animosity was directed at the Democratic Party and not at the poster to whom I was responding:

...Wyden sounds like a male clone of the Patty Murray/Maria Cantwell duet here in the state of Wishywash.

 

But that's the sort of marionette mediocrity we get – Democrat or Republican it matters not – now that the Soviet Union is no longer around to scare the capitalists into a pretense of humanitarianism.

******

“No, Obama Has Not Failed” is a short essay by Charles Pierce of Esquire, republished by RSN, that disputes the growing conviction on the Left the president is “an incompetent, a sellout, or an incompetent sellout.”

 

My response is equally blunt:

Obama is also the best president the Bankers Plot conspirators ever had.

(These never-prosecuted criminals of 1934 wanted an officially fascist United States as part of a Rome/Berlin/Tokyo/Washington D.C. Axis and Hitler's New Order, a four-part global empire that was the conceptual forerunner of Bush's New World Order, the neocons' American Century and the Democrats' Global Economy.)

Indeed I would not be the least surprised if in the privacy of his own smugness, Obama already thinks of himself as “Imperator Mundi”– emperor of the world – not just POTUS but IMPOTUS.

LB/27 July 2014

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