Is Trump's War against Women and Minorities Mandated by 'Secret Fundamentalism' at the Heart of U.S. Power?

Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2011

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(Prefatory Note: I began this essay after reading and responding to “GOP Attack on Women Continues with House Vote to Deny Abortion Coverage” [CommonDreams, 25 January, here] and “WA: more conservative, and more divided, than you think” [Crosscut, 23 January, here]  But then on the 26th I fell ill – extremely ill – with that weirdo brand of flu that was curiously omitted from this year's flu shot. And not until 1 February – appropriately enough, the feast of Brigid, Celtic goddess of light and enlightenment – was I well enough to resume the work. By then, with Trump's malevolence becoming ever more brazenly evident, the contents had grown accordingly, so that now the text may be too long to be absorbed in a single reading. Hence, to make it more accessible, I have broken it into five subsections, each indicated by a topic sentence in which all the letters in the first three words are capitalized.)

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AS IF THERE were any lingering doubts, President Donald Trump's “grab-em-by-the-pussy”  regime has made it clear it intends to do just that – to re-subjugate U.S. women by seizing control of their reproductive organs.

Moreover, there is compelling evidence the Empire has been perfecting its strategies and tactics of sexually targeted subjugation for decades. Examples include the re-subjugation of women in Iraq and Afghanistan and the criminalization of homosexuality in Africa – all of which may have functioned as dress rehearsals for the re-subjugation of women and sexual minorities here in the United States. The associated planning has therefore been underway at least since Bush II invaded Iraq. More likely it dates to 1977, when Carter, an avowed fundamentalist, signed the misogynistic Hyde Amendment  into law and two years later began secretly arming  murderously anti-woman Islamic fanatics,  an ongoing effort that has defined the Empire's Middle Eastern policy ever since.

In other words, Trump's war against women is to be of a severity unprecedented outside the Muslim world and hitherto unimaginable by most reproductive-age USian women.  Nor is it really “Trump's war.” It is instead the fulfillment of a long, mostly clandestine campaign of experimentation and meticulous planning by Christian fanatics and their collaborators in government. It is a Pearl-Harbor-type attack on women, minorities whether sexual or racial, and ultimately on liberty itself, an indescribably vicious coup intended to reduce USian women to biological slavery and transform the USian homeland into a zero-tolerance Christian theocracy, an occidental version of Saudi Arabia.

These are the disturbing conclusions that emerge from two stories The Nation broke last week via its on-line service. The reports, “Leaked Draft of Trump’s Religious Freedom Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination” and “How the US Tests Out Some of Its Most Oppressive Domestic Policies on the World,” are here  and here respectively.

Not part of The Nation's readership – I despise its pay-walled exclusiveness as much as I scorn its endless bourgeois efforts to canonize ex-President Barack Hussein Obama, whose methodical nullification of constitutional governance  cleared the way for Trump's despotism – I accessed the reports via Crosscut, Seattle's amateurishly edited but nevertheless vitally informative on-line daily. The link to The Nation was part of an opinion piece  entitled “Trump's anti-LGBTQ order will backfire – here's why.” Because there are lesbians and gays among my relatives, friends, colleagues and political comrades, I follow such matters closely.

“Leaked Draft” publishes the full text of the proposed executive order, while “US Tests” describes – albeit with typical pseudo-Leftist suppression of the Democratic (sic) Party's role as co-perpetrator –  how the Empire has used the Third World and the Middle East as rat labs in which to perfect its efforts to re-subjugate women and outlaw homosexuality.

“Trump’s announcement today that his administration seeks to 'totally destroy' restrictions on religious organizations’ ability to engage in political activity,” The Nation concludes, “(tells us) we can expect to see more pressure on both public and private health providers in the United States to curb comprehensive family-planning care and reproductive rights.”

Though clearly frightening, the analysis lapses into disinformation because it falls prey to the pseudo-Left's cult of deceptive optimism and fails to acknowledge the even-more-frightening worst-case scenario: legal and extra-legal prohibitions against abortion, contraception and even medical care for sexually active single women, homosexuals and transgender people.

The most egregious aspect of the Trump proposal would allow gravely injured single women and sexual minorities to be murdered by denial of lifesaving treatment whenever doctors, other caregivers or hospital management claims “religious freedom” – that is, Abrahamic misogyny and homophobia – grants exemption from Hippocratic obligation.

Nor is this an even slightly fanciful scenario. During the late 1970s, when I was the investigative reporter for a Seattle-area suburban thrice-weekly, I was told the one hospital that served our circulation area would not allow rape victims in its emergency room, no matter how severely injured they might be. The hospital, owned by a Christian fundamentalist organization, was the only such facility within about 20 miles in any direction.

Word of the hospital's policy was passed on to me by some exceptionally reliable sources in the King County Police. Furious over the treatment refusals – cops and paramedics knew the resultant delays could kill a severely wounded victim – my informants documented seven recent examples and said the atrocities had been going on long before officers started recording them.

So armed, I confronted the hospital's executive director – and was sneeringly told that as a “Christian institution,” the hospital would “never” allow itself to be associated with “sexual promiscuity.” Christian dogma – particularly the notion rape is divine vengeance for unchaste behavior – thus trumped the Hippocratic oath.

But the arrogant “never” quickly gave way to a properly humiliated “always” after my editor ran the story atop Page One. (The hospital is unnamed here because it is now under secular ownership and new management,)

The point, though, is not another triumph of investigative journalism, or how, in olden times, cops and reporters sometimes cooperated in our species' quest for justice. It is instead the innate viciousness of Abrahamic fundamentalists, a viciousness that, like a serial killer's blood-lust, will spring – or more likely sneak – into malignant tyranny any time we the people are lulled into inattention.

It is the selfsame viciousness the Trump Regime would now perpetuate as the law of the land.

Once again we are shown the terrible relevance of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008). Eight years after the book's publication, Trump – allegedly Hillary's primary enemy – is fulfilling the subjugation scheme Sharlet exposed as the purpose of clandestine collaboration between Hillary, Sam Brownback “and others”: “legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it,” for which see page 275.

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THE ONE PERCENTERS and their political vassals – motivated as they are by biblical capitalism,  (an ideology of divine-right tyranny that in a less-Orwellian world would be damned as “ChristoFascism” or even “JesuNazism”) – obviously intend to reduce USian women to the hopelessly subjugated, utterly degraded status demanded by core Abrahamic doctrine whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic and thus exemplified by women in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.

Even before the advent of the Trump Regime and its “grab-em-by-the-pussy” war against women, our capitalist overlords, their politicians and their often violent, sometimes murderous Christian storm troopers had already closed or prohibited abortion clinics in 90 percent  of the nation's counties. And just before Trump's proposed executive order was leaked, there was already this:

Anti-choice House Republicans on (31 January) voted to further curtail U.S. women's healthcare access, passing a draconian bill that permanently bans the use of federal funds for abortion and prohibits anyone who receives subsidies to buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from purchasing a plan that covers abortion...

Because the JesuNazi leaders are not the ignoramuses we like to self-indulgently imagine they are – in horrid truth, precisely as proven by Trump's victory, they are among the most diabolically skilled schemers and manipulators our definitively self-destructive species has yet spawned – they understand all they need do to reduce women to chattel is outlaw contraception. 

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BUT WHY WOMEN? What is it about femaleness the One Percenters and their fundamentalist allies find so threatening? It would seem the magnitude and ferocity of Trump's war against women contradicts the keystone of the entire patriarchal order – the notion women are pathetically inferior beings.

Firstly there is the doctrine – the defining force in Abrahamic theology, but in misogynistic truth common to most of the world's organized religions – that women are the root of all earthly evil.

Though a detailed examination of this murderously absurd belief is beyond the scope of this article, the belief itself is no doubt a vindictive reaction to the fact patriarchal theology is contradicted by biological reality, for the deeper implications of which see The Great Cosmic Mother (Barbara Mor; HarperSanFrancisco: 1987), especially pages 230-243.

Given the facts of reproductive biology, how can a deity who is definitively male (and therefore without a womb) create a universe from the void of his own womblessness? “Patriarchy,” says Mor, “must maintain, by force, (this) unnatural system” (page 242). Woman's mere existence thus challenges the entire patriarchal order.

Abrahamic theologians, acutely aware of patriarchy's inherent contradictions, respond by denouncing women as inferior beings, subversives, revolutionaries, witches, vessels of evil – weak and sinful creatures to be subjugated by the divine rights of fathers, husbands and male authorities whether religious or secular.

Prior to Trump's victory, the extent to which such misogynistic views yet prevail in the so-called “modern” United States might have astounded anyone who had not lived (as I have) in the de facto theocracy of the USian South or its post-Reagan expansion into the so-called “flyover country” of the heartlands.

But let us not forget fully 63 percent of the adult U.S. population believes the Bible is literally true,  which like misogyny is one of the defining dogmas of Christian fundamentalism. Given that 53 percent  of 2016's female Caucasian voters helped put Trump in the White House, misogyny is obviously as “American” as the proverbial apple pie – even among women.

At Slate, writer L. V. Anderson suggested the majority of these women supported white supremacy. “What leads a woman to vote for a man who has made it very clear that he believes she is subhuman?” Ms. Anderson wrote. “Self-loathing. Hypocrisy. And, of course, a racist view of the world that privileges white supremacy over every other issue.”

The same self-loathing, as I know all too well from my years as a crime reporter, is what prompts the wives and daughters of misogynists to accept – and worst of all to forgive – the chronic and sometimes deadly abuse by which patriarchy sustains itself.

A second reason for the popularity of Trump's war against women is the oft-repeated Abrahamic claim feminism is a Communist ideology and feminists are agents of the so-called “International Communist Conspiracy” – never mind the Soviet Union has been dead for 26 years.

The following statement  is from a popular Christian website: “Sexual egalitarianism is basically a socialist idea, springing from socialist principles and tending to socialist results. Soviet dictator V.I. Lenin outlined the whole modern agenda of 'women's liberation' in a 1920 interview with the German feminist Clara Zetkin.”

Zetkin's full text of the interview is here.

“Feminism is a lie of the Devil,” proclaims another Christian site.  “Husbands are Biblically to Rule Over their Wives; Wives are to Obey.”

Anti-abortion zealots go even further, condemning abortion as Satanic rite, “ritual blood sacrifice to the god of child murder, Moloch.”

Such are the fanatical beliefs that fuel Trump's war against women. A corollary dogma  is that only Christians – presumably only Christian fundamentalists – are “true Americans,” a view held by 43 percent of Republicans and fully one-third of the total population.

A third reason the Trump Regime is targeting women is that what might be termed the cooperative instincts of females are a direct challenge to the hierarchical tyranny capitalism inherits from its patriarchal forefathers. Capitalism is exploitative by definition;  it cannot function without its rigid hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed.

“Female group behavior – the cooperative care-sharing among mothers and children, older and younger women, in the tasks of daily life...is the foundation of social life and human culture,” says Mor. “If the first humans had depended solely on despotic and aggressive male leaders, or on several males in chronic, ritualistic contention for power, human society would never have developed” (Pages 11-12).

Fourthly there is the morally imbecilic greed that fuels the entire capitalist system – the basic formula for which is subjugation = profit, such that the greater the subjugation of the 99 Percent, the greater the profits so extracted.

The One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals have so thoroughly subjugated the African-American, Hispanic and First Nations populations that most are forced to work at only the lowest possible wages.

Though females are equally subjugated in the workplace – typically they are allowed only two-thirds the income of their male counterparts – Trump's war against women would radically increase their financial hardships, particularly when combined with his intended elimination of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and any other remnants of the New Deal welfare system. The resultant desperation, particularly amongst single mothers, would enable ever-more-predatory bosses to lower women's wages even more – probably below legal minimums – enabling the capitalists to extract that much additional profit.

Lastly, Trump's war against women is prompted by the patriarchal male's inbred belief that not only feminist activism but female independence or even achievement beyond the domains of kitchen and nursery is tantamount to slave rebellion.

It is no exaggeration to say such a male envisions the world as a macrocosm of the Roman coliseum. He views all other humans, regardless of their genders, as competitors and therefore enemies. With the miasma of fear and hatred that is the core of his consciousness confirmed by Abrahamic scripture and bolstered by Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Hitler's Mein Kampf, he sees life as a choice between success or damnation and lives in constant terror he might be condemned by predestination to the latter.

Nothing threatens his perpetually insecure ego more than the woman who demonstrates equal or superior competence in realms that were hitherto exclusively male domains. There is also what should be termed clitoris envy, the psychological reality behind Sigmund Freud's concept of “penis envy,” in truth the projection-onto-women of the patriarchal male's resentment of multi-orgasmic femaleness and its associated sensuality of body and mind.

The fact many gay and transsexual males now openly admit their envy of female sexual organs, multi-orgasmic sexuality and unique sensual capacity  is obviously yet another reason they too are on the “grab-em-by-the-pussy” regime's enemies list.

Barbara Mor again, citing “Visions of a New Faith,” Mary Long's report in Science Digest 89, November 1981, on work by James Prescott, neuropsychologist at the Institute of Humanistic Science, Los Gatos, California: “Contemporary researchers have found neurological connections between religious or trance experience and female sexuality. In women's brains there are unique neural links between the forebrain and the cerebellum, which allow sensations of physical pleasure to be directly integrated into the cortex, or high brain center. This explains why some women experience orgasm so intense they enter “religious” trance, or altered states of consciousness” (page 53).

Sex as sacrament, as connection to the deepest self and what might lie beyond it? Women as Nature's anointed gurus? God – that is, the Abrahamic god – forbid!

Even more terrifying to the patriarchal male is the possibility the same definitively female mind-body connection uniquely qualifies women to synthesize theory with biological and socioeconomic reality and thus to function as our species' most effective revolutionary cadre. Remember it was women – specifically the women of Petrograd's Lesnoy Textile Works – who triggered the Russian Revolution.

Ultimately Trump and his JesuNazi allies target women because the more learned theocrats correctly recognize that what today is labeled “progressive” culture is profoundly anti-patriarchal, whether implicitly or explicitly. As a Socialist Worker essay stated in 1992, “It was clear that, without control over their own reproductive lives, women couldn't be the equals of men – no matter what advances women made in the job market or in higher education.”

Thus the advent of reliable birth control is not just the origin of women's liberation but, far more importantly, it is the epicenter of the entire era of anti-patriarchal progress that resulted from female independence and the vital addition of independent female perspective to the national political dialogue. Thus too Trump's efforts to expand the prohibitions against contraception and abortion – especially if combined with outlawing any sexual identity or expression outside traditional male-female heterosexual marriage – could forever erase that era's accomplishments.

Ironically, just as the Trump Regime demonstrates every day, the enemies of democracy seemingly understand better than its advocates that without economic democracy, there is no democracy at all.

Unfortunately, our enemies also understand that neither is there any freedom without female reproductive freedom – the total elimination of which is the real motive behind the Trump/JesuNazi war against women.

If the JesuNazis succeed, USian women and girls are doomed to rediscover all the oppressive agonies, genital mutilation included, traditionally inflicted by unrestricted patriarchal hatefulness and sadism – not just in the Middle East but in Europe and the Americas.

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THE FRAGILITY OF anti-patriarchal culture – the very culture Trump and his cabal of  biblical capitalists intend to wipe out – is vividly illustrated by the lives of two women in Afghanistan, a mother who came of age in secular/socialist Kabul and her daughter who has grown up under the misogynistic Abrahamic savagery facilitated by the lavish funding provided Afghanistan's Muslim fanatics by U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his successors.

Albeit without jihad's characteristic reign of murder and torture, the same fragility is demonstrated by the death of the 1960s Counterculture – the first wave of the anti-patriarchal revolution – in the United States. Labeled “a revolution in consciousness” by the late Walter Bowart, the founding editor of the East Village Other, the Counterculture was indeed revolutionary.  But its revolution was cultural, based on hope rather than ideology, which made it easy prey for our capitalist overlords, precisely as demonstrated by how it was suppressed, co-opted, absorbed, commercialized and finally misrepresented as little more than an extended tantrum by over-indulged Baby Boomers.

The Ruling Class, however, took the Counterculture much more seriously than it publicly acknowledged: hence the blueprint for fascism contained in the Powell Memo, a confidential memorandum dated 23 August 1971 that has been the bible of the One Percent and their vassals ever since.

Reading the memo, we see the Trump presidency is not an accident. It is instead the logical product of malevolent but often mutually hostile forces that have been at work in this country since the Bankers' Plot of 1934 unsuccessfully sought to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, topple his New Deal and make the United States the new dominant partner in the Nazi Germany/Fascist Italy alliance.

But it was Powell – responding to the correctly perceived threat the revolution in consciousness might birth a truly revolutionary ideology and thus evolve into economic and political revolution – who united the squabbling factions of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassalage into the ideologically disciplined, diabolically cunning fascist cabal that has lorded it over us ever since.

While I have yet to see objective proof Trump was from the beginning the One Percent's choice for the presidency, logic and circumstantial evidence allows me no other conclusion. The tweet-by-tweet coverage granted him by the One Percent's (“mainstream”) media – the world's first privately owned, for-profit ministry of propaganda – has no precedent in USian journalistic history, particularly when compared to the near-total news blackout that killed Sen. Sanders' campaign.

In my day, when real journalism was still the national norm, we covered a presidential election on the basis of its candidates' positions on the relevant issues and the popularity of those positions amongst the electorate. Whomever was leading in the polls therefore generally got the most detailed coverage, though we also took special care not to downplay the underdog.

But in 2016, an entirely different set of standards was in play – standards utterly alien to me as a former reporter and editor.

The news value of the Sanders story – how his critique of the status quo was making him 2016's most popular presidential candidate – was rejected. Its rightful place on Page One (and given its historical significance, often as the lead story), was instead given over to Trump's bellicose buffoonery.

It was as if our national denouement had been prophesied by Shakespeare: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” – this to soothe a 99 Percent boiling with definitively pre-revolutionary anger.

What I believe obtained – though it will no doubt take WikiLeaks' best efforts to ferret out the proof – is just as Powell feared the political potential of the Counterculture, so do today's One Percenters fear the far-more-immediately revolutionary potential of the public's anger. Thus they chose Trump as the shortest possible path to the manifest Nazism they need to expeditiously eliminate any individual or group who might provide revolutionary leadership. With Hillary's campaign as a diversionary effort, Trump's victory was from the beginning the One Percent's intended coup de main.

Why else would mainstream media – the One Percenters' most micro-managed monopoly – have given Trump such inexplicably lavish coverage?

In any case we the people have been ambushed as never before in our species' history – an epic betrayal in which the Democratic (sic) Party and the Republican Party are co-conspirators: once more the terrible relevance of Sharlett's revelations in The Family.

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WITH TRUMP'S FELONIZATION of peaceful protest plus openly theocratic majorities in control of both houses of Congress, there is no longer any recognizable barrier to their despotism.

Many will reply that peaceful protest is a constitutional right, which indeed it is. But like Bush, Obama and in fact every president since 22 November 1963, Trump regards the Constitution as meaningless. And unlike his predecessors, he intends to express his contempt for its Bill of Rights by maximizing his persecutions of dissidents, an embittering truth proven by the felony charges filed against journalists who were jailed for trying to cover the inauguration protests.

Short of suppressing protest and the coverage of protest with deadly gunfire, I can think of no more effective discouragement than the prospect of felony prosecution. A felony charge – even if it results in acquittal – literally destroys one's life forever.

Unless one is obscenely wealthy, the six-figure cost of defense lawyers typically inflicts bankruptcy, and the mere fact of the charge – again assuming acquittal (and unless one is either extremely privileged or astoundingly fortunate) – forever afterward dooms one to a hopelessly wretched existence of minimum-wage jobs and dependence on the few remaining governmental stipends and services Trump will soon genocidally abolish.

I know of what I speak because in a journalism career that began in 1956 and is now winding down as I slowly die of congestive heart failure, I often witnessed such circumstances. Indeed my own newspaper career was forever crippled by a Civil-Rights-Movement-related misdemeanor arrest in 1963, never mind I was acquitted, as were all the others so charged.

Where political crimes are concerned, this has never been a forgiving nation – the deceitful propaganda of the Bernadine Dohrn/Bill Ayres example not withstanding – and now under Trump's reign as neo-Führer, the U.S. threatens to become more effectively vengeful against dissidents than ever before in its history.

This is not to argue against peaceful resistance. It is, however, a warning to resistors to be aware of the malevolently escalated cost of resistance. The Trump Regime is now penalizing peaceful protest as if it were violent protest – using the powers given it for that very purpose by the Clinton, Bush II and Obama regimes.

In terms of irremediable psychological devastation, there is no difference between 10 years in prison (as the journalists arrested in Washington DC now face ) and a lifetime prison sentence – an absolute truth if one is male, does not have the protection provided by membership in a criminal organization, and is therefore the constant prey of rapists and bullies.

As President John Fitzgerald Kennedy so eloquently observed, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

Obviously the Trump Regime's intent is to provoke such violence, then seize upon it as a rationale for declaring war against all its opponents and in all probability murdering most if not all opposition leadership.

That “protest is death” is precisely the message delivered by the emplacement of two Avenger missile launchers  at Standing Rock, where the savagery of soldiers, mercenaries and federally militarized police is most likely to provoke a violent response. The Avenger  is the Empire's modern-day version of the Red Army's deadly Katyusha,  which is still honored in modern Russia as a key weapon in the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany.

But would USian troops fire rockets at their unarmed fellow citizens?

One of the other posters in the CommonDreams discussion linked in the prefatory note answered the question:

“I was speaking, over the holidays, to my College Student Nephew's friend, a nice young fellow, who is now in the Armed Forces,” she wrote. “I privately asked him if, given the order, would he fire on his Fellow Citizens.”

“His answer was a shrug, and the explanation 'You gotta do what they tell you.'”

That's what we're facing. Obviously, Trump's war against women is just the opening volley in a political purge the intensity of which this nation has never experienced. And how effectively we respond will determine not only the future of the United States of America, but most likely the futures all the nations of the world – and the future of our own species as well.

LB: 1-7 February 2017

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Politicians' Lies: Diabolical Way to Kill Elections without the Bad Publicity of a No-More-Civil-Liberties Decree

THE UTTER FUTILITY of trying to restore our stolen liberty here in the United States – the now-undeniable fact We the People are the disempowered subjects of a predator state ruled by gangster capitalists and their wholly-owned vassals in government, academia and mass media – is made undeniably clear by the damning revelations about Democratic (sic) Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican opponent Donald Trump.

That's because after last Friday's disclosures we now know as absolute certainty what many of us have long suspected: that the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals, in what is probably human history's most profound gesture of aristocratic contempt, are offering us a pseudo-choice that reduces our once-internationally esteemed democratic process to meaningless ritual. As if in grotesque mimicry of the (questionable) tale of Marie Antoinette's response to starving Parisians – “The people want bread? Let them eat cake” – it seems our rulers are sneering, “The people want elections? Let them choose between tyrants.”

Voting is thus reduced to an obscene satire on its former function – a diabolical feat that in its cunningly despotic destructiveness exceeds even the darkest estimates of our capitalist overlords' capabilities and intentions.

The result – as significant psychologically and ideologically as it is historically and politically – is nullification of the democratic process. It is exactly as if we the people have been officially disenfranchised by the sort of decree we associate with Hitler or Mussolini or Third-World despots. But – and here again we see the One Percent's demonic genius – our disenfranchisement is accomplished not by decree (which would leave no doubt the USian Empire is now the Fourth Reich), but by breathtakingly clever perversion of the very process that formerly ensured our liberty.

How then can we ever hope to regain our freedom?

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As I have written repeatedly during the past few months, what we are offered is tantamount to a choice between two Hitlers: Donald Hitler versus Hillary Hitler – the murders and lesser hate-crimes of a domestic holocaust versus World War III and our species' extinction.

Donald Hitler intends to resurrect the white-supremacy policies of the German Third Reich and impose them on all the unpopular minorities of the Fourth Reich United States, thus to “restore America's greatness.” He would wage war on any of us who are African-American, Hispanic, First Nations, Muslim, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual-queer, Communist, socialist or even slightly Left-leaning.

Hillary Hitler intends – just as the late Führer did – to be the first-ever conqueror of Russia. But Thermonuclear Hillary Hitler is infinitely more dangerous than Pre-nuclear Adolf Hitler. Hillary Hitler is willing to gamble our entire species' survival in her fanatical desire to reduce at least 146,600,000 Russian women, men and children either to radioactive ash or to the ultimately deadly sweatshop slavery that is increasingly the inescapable lot of the USian Empire's 99 Percent.

Depressing as it is, the One Percent's limitation of our plausible options to Clinton or Trump is not, by itself, the ultimate proof our liberty is abolished beyond any hope of recovery. That proof is in the methodical lying rationalized by what should henceforth be labeled the Hillary Axiom: in politics, “you need both a private and a public position.”

Thus the politicians privately speak the truth to their plutocratic owners, and use Big Lies – of which Obama's “change we can believe in” is the ultimate example to-date – to publicly dupe the rest of us.

While that is surely the lesson taught us by Obama the Orator's now-infamous shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, the impact of its verbalization by a personage of Hillary's stature turns it from submissive shrug-of-the-shoulders suspicion to infuriating clenched-fist fact.

And the broader implication of Hillary's Axiom – that the entire public face of USian politics is naught but scam – is as vital to understanding today's global politics as the German Nazis' conceptualization and use of the Big Lie was to understanding the politics that led to World War II.

With Hillary's inadvertent but eternally damning admission  that deceiving the public is now the core dynamic of Usian politics, we are in essence told that under capitalist governance, all politicians are of necessity liars and that no USian politician's promises can ever again be trusted – a disclosure that will surprise only those who fail to recognize the necessity of lies to capitalism itself.

Here we encounter the ultimate discouragement to any sort of conventional political activism: why bother if the relevant truths are forever hidden behind a cacophony of lies?

Voters have no defense against clandestinely pro-plutocracy politicians who – precisely as Obama did – lie themselves into office as “reformers,” then in service to their One Percent masters break the very promises by which they energized their support.

Thus capitalist governance, like capitalism itself, is by its intrinsic dishonesty placed forever beyond the reach of reform.

Thus too we must now immediately dismiss as Big Lies any and all of Hillary's claims she favors progressive demands – particularly given that Friday's revelations prove her (true) private positions are the diametrical opposites of her public assertions. For example Hillary says in private that “Simpson-Bowles” – Obama's Deficit Commission, which would have sentenced innumerable seniors and disabled people to premature deaths by slashing Social Security and Medicare – “put forth the right framework” for the most productive capitalist governance. She also notes she “did all (she) could to make sure (Wall Street) continued to prosper.”

Obviously, Hillary's private politics are those of the Goldwater Girl she was in her youth. Just as obviously, she regards the 99 Percent and all of us therein with a 21st Century version of the vindictive scorn the haughty aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France reserved for the Third Estate. Indeed it now appears she is the ultimate false-flag candidate: beneath her Democratic (sic) disguise, a fanatically conservative, nuke-em-till-they-glow Barry Goldwater disciple cunningly trained as an infiltrator – one cannot but wonder by whom – and oh-so-carefully self-closeted until she could pounce to certain victory.

In other words, the public Hillary is pure fraud.

The broader relevance of the “eternally damning admission” report linked above, jointly authored by Kevin Zeese and Dr. Margaret Flowers of the superbly informative Occupy-offspring website Popular Resistance, is that it is one of the most telling summations I have yet seen on the extent to which such fraud has become the One Percent's primary methodology for governing the Usian imperial homeland.

Its disclosures supported by a bibliography of authoritative links, it goes far beyond the immediate issue of Hillary's perpetual dishonesty and includes, for example, a forthright discussion of the Big Lie tactics that accompanied imposition of the Affordable Care Act, “the biggest insurance scam in history.”

Unfortunately Zeese and Flowers conclude by reiterating their oft-repeated claim that “when people organize they have power.” They add that “the people need to let the government know they will not be silent against systemic corruption. We will... make sure (Hillary's) is a presidency of protest; where the people will be relentless in demanding that the government represent our interests.”

Thus Zeese and Flowers – like the vast majority of USians – remain blinded by the obstructive optimism that prevents them from recognizing the zero-tolerance reality of total surveillance: that thanks to the One Percent's ownership and mastery of surveillance technology, we live in a realm wherein nothing can ever again be hidden from the omnipresent gaze of the secret police. Yet so brainwashed are we – our minds so saturated from birth with USian propaganda – we glibly dismiss the tyrannical intent of such surveillance by clinging to the Big Lie we live in the “sweet land of liberty,”

As under the fictional Borg, effective resistance – much less any possibility of evolving even one of the four prerequisites of revolution (for which scroll down)  – is therefore genuinely futile.  Lesser resistance, as in the recent Bernie Sanders campaign, will be neutralized by lies; greater resistance, as in Occupy, will be crushed by infiltration and violence.

Rescue by invasion from without – as in the Union Army's liberation of the Confederacy, the Red Army's liberation of Leningrad, the Allied Forces' liberation of Paris or the liberation of Saigon by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army– is rendered eternally impossible by the USian threat of thermonuclear weapons and the fact “better dead than Red” has been elevated from a Goldwater Girl slogan into an irrevocable principle of imperial policy. Have no doubt: our overlords would rather blow up the planet than relinquish their power – unquestionably why, with the flaring of pre-revolutionary anger in the USian Homeland (never mind the anger is hopelessly undisciplined) – the One Percenters and their Hillaryite surrogates are now openly trying to provoke World War III.

We are thus permanently subjugated. But until we recognize that rightfully terrifying fact – until we set aside our obstructive “all-will-be-well” optimism; until we stop our senseless employment of tactics rendered useless (if not suicidal) by total surveillance; until we abandon hopes long ago proven idiotic by the oft-demonstrated submissiveness of the USian Caucasian majority, (who as part of their legacy of white supremacy believe revolutionary change is theirs merely for the asking) – we have no chance of evolving an adequate resistance.

Instead we must unflinchingly examine the bitter truths of our powerlessness and the omnipotence of our masters – the fact we are already prisoners in an electronic slave-pen wherein even our most private thoughts are laid bare by computers that psychoanalyze us by the books we read, the foods we buy and even our chosen brands of tooth paste, toilet paper, menstrual supplies and condoms. Only when we acknowledge the unmitigated horror of our circumstances – a horror more devastatingly oppressive than anything in our species' history – will we be able to evolve strategies and tactics adequate to the task of self-liberation. Just as Sun Tzu asserted 2600 years ago, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.”

But even if sometime in the future we are at last possessed of the requisite knowledge and discipline to permanently overthrow capitalism, it may yet be that our only hope for victory – our only chance to make economic democracy a reality (and therefore restore both human dignity and human liberty) – will arise from the opportunity sure to handed us by Mother Nature.

Though too few of us deign to recognize her for what she is – our planet's one undeniably real deity (the selfsame Goddess the patriarchy and its direct offspring capitalism truly cannot abide) – when at last the depredations of the capitalists provoke her to apocalyptic vengeance, the technologies of surveillance and mass murder will be among the first technologies to fail. No electricity means no computers, which means our overlords will no longer have the powers they appropriated from their sadistic and misogynistic conception of divinity. And in their defenselessness – the defenselessness of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals – will be the 99 Percent's opportunity to prevail – though only if we are ideologically and organizationally prepared. I will not live to see it; probably not even the Millennial generation will live to see it, but it is bound to happen – unless of course Hillary and her masters exterminate our species first.

**********

As noted in A Government Is Seizing Control of Our Election Process, and It Is Not the Russians, (t)here is an attempt underway for a government to take control of our election process and throw the election to Hillary Clinton. It is not the Russian government. Mark this day it is when we came to understand that the American government decided to elect a president.

The report goes on to document in disturbing detail how the so-called “deep state” – that is, the imperial security apparatus – is now functioning as a key part of the Clinton campaign machine.

In comment-thread response, here with an informational link added and the text slightly enlarged, I wrote what turned out to be my longest off-OAN Internet post of the week:

I have to quibble with (any) distinction between “government” and “deep state.”

What subjugates us is capitalist governance: in other words, fascism (actually – with its claim of “exceptionalism” and its chants of “USA! USA! USA!” as variants of the traditional “Zieg Heil” – a uniquely USian form of Nazism). It is government wholly owned by, and therefore utterly obedient to, a cabal of mostly anonymous plutocrats rather than to a Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or Pinochet.

The “deep state” – the USian security apparatus – is merely the first part of government the cabal took over after the failure of the 1934 Bankers' Plot.

This was in compliance with Hitler's Mein Kampf dictum the path to power is infiltration of the most powerful organs of the state.

As soon as “the deep state” was under capitalist control, the rest was relatively easy: the postwar purge of progressives; the decade of murders; the 2000 Bush Coup; the Reichstag Fire of 9/11; Obama elected by “change we can believe in” (the most malicious Big Lie in our presidential history); and we the people thus reduced to irremediable hopelessness. All else – including the subjugation implicit in our 2016 major-party choices – follows “as the night the day.”

And anyone who is surprised what obtains has been asleep, a la Rip Van Winkle, at least since 22 November 1963.

Such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals (the so-called “deep state” included); total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Thus too the future intended by the USian Empire (should humanity survive Hillary's intended depredations): the planet transformed by neo-conservative colonialism and neo-liberal economics into one vast neo-plantation, with all of us in the 99 Percent reduced to neo-slavery.

*****

Yahoo Secretly Scanned Customer Emails for US Intelligence – Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails  for specific information (demanded) by U.S. intelligence officials...scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

As I remarked on the associated comment thread, “And how do we know the companies that claim they didn't aren't lying? (Especially since deliberate deception – the sole reason for the gazillion-dollar Big Lie Business of Madison Avenue – is the quintessential core of capitalism.)”

I also added three additional comments to this thread, these in response to other thread-contributors' posts rather than to the news report itself.

*****

US Ranks Lower Than Kazakhstan and Algeria on Gender Equality – The US, the world’s biggest economy, ranks below Kazakhstan and Algeria for gender equality, according to...the Girls’ Opportunity Index, compiled by Save the Children to mark International Day of the Girl...The US came 32nd in the index due to its low representation of women in parliament, high teenage pregnancy rates and and its record on maternal deaths. Fourteen women died per 100,000 live births in the US in 2015, a similar number to Uruguay and Lebanon. Save the Children’s head of inclusive development, Lisa Wise, one of the report’s authors, said that the low ranking of the US was surprising. “It’s one of those cases where it should be performing better.”

Indeed, hence my comment-thread editorial:

“I'm surprised Ms. Wise is surprised at the USian Imperial Homeland's relatively low ranking. She must get her "news" from the Ministry of Propaganda (aka "mainstream media") rather than from less censored sources.”

“Otherwise she'd recognize the signature destitution imposed by capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

“And now that hackers have shown us the real Hillary -- the Goldwater Girl who closeted her ideological malevolence until she had the opportunity to spring it on us -- we know with absolute certainty it will get much much much worse: deadly cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; probable elimination of food stamps; the nullification of what little remains of our constitutional rights, millions more jobs stolen by free trade, who knows how many young men and women killed in ever-expanding foreign aggression...

“(Were I a betting man, which I'm not, I'd wager Big Time the USian position on the Girls' Opportunity Index is declining [just like every other indicator of USian quality of life], and that next year it will be worse.)

“As I said: capitalist governance in action.”

*****

Tim Kaine, John Negroponte and the Priest Who Was Thrown From a Helicopter...published this week by the Daily Beast...is a cheap exercise in red-baiting: “Tim Kaine’s Time with a Marxist Priest.” That priest, Fr. James Carney, was indeed a revolutionary and, as a practitioner of liberation theology in Latin America during a period marked by populist movements fighting against death squads and murderous regimes backed by the U.S., an avid student of Marxist theory. After years spent among the poor and oppressed in Latin America, Carney renounced his U.S. citizenship and joined the armed guerrilla struggle against U.S.-backed death squads and governments. He also left the Jesuits because, he explained, the order would not condone his involvement in an armed struggle...He was thrown from a helicopter in 1983...”executed by order of... Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, who...had received training in counterintelligence from U.S. forces at the School of the Americas”...The year Carney was murdered, Negroponte praised Gen. Álvarez Martínez’s “dedication to democracy.”

As I wrote in response, “One of the many reasons I can no longer call myself 'Christian' is because of the extent to which Christianity has become a tool of capitalism, hence precisely what Marx eternally damned as 'the opiate of the masses.' But if I could, for what you said here I would give you 10, 100, even 1000 thumbs up. Thank you for reminding me of a poignant truth I too often ignore.”

*****

Bernie Sanders: Focus Wells Fargo Criminal Probe on Senior Execs – Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and their colleagues urged Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a new letter to “thoroughly investigate the culpability of senior executives” at Wells Fargo (WFC) in the fake account scandal that shocked America...The 14 U.S. Senators warned Lynch on Monday that Wells Fargo is a “critical test” of the DOJ's recent push to pursue bad behavior of individual executives, rather than just impose fines on the corporations they represent. The lawmaker said they hope the DOJ “brings all the resources it has to bear” on investigating possible wrongdoing by “senior executives.”

As I sneered on the story's comment thread, “really, good people, be rational. Expecting anyone in the business of capitalist governance to seriously prosecute their owners is like expecting Hitler's Third Reich to prosecute the SS for war crimes. As Audrey Lorde put it, 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.'”

*****

Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean (And It’s Going To Get Worse) – The nuclear disaster has contaminated the world’s largest ocean in only five years and it’s still leaking 300 tons of radioactive waste every day.

I did not comment on the above report. It is from a website of which I was unaware but to which I will subscribe if possible. However there are claims in its comment-thread the report is not accurate, claims I have neither the knowledge nor the sources to resolve. Hence I re-post it here because (1), I suspect the report is probably true, to such an extent I no longer eat any salt-water fish; because (2), even if the report's summary of Fukushima's consequences is inaccurate, the cloak of lies, disinformation and silence imposed on this ongoing disaster by USian “mainstream media” demands we be reminded of its environment-destroying continuation, which itself reflects the fact (3), that so-called “mainstream media” is owned by the same plutocrats who own all “successful” USian politicians and all USian government at every level – which means “mainstream media” is nothing more than a private, for-profit version of the Ministry of Propaganda Josef Goebbels ran for Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich.

*****

Though I commented on neither of the two following reports, I posted them on OAN because of their relevance to the Fukushima debacle and our species' suicidal penchant for poisoning the environment. These – their headlines self-explanatory, are: Monsanto's Toxic PCBs Lurking in 26,000 US Public Schools, Report Says, here, and  Industrial chemicals linked to attention problems in Massachusetts children, here.  The latter, though published in 2012, nevertheless elaborates on the present-day Monsanto story.

*****

Six Million Adults Who Won't Influence This Presidential Race – It's hard to overstate the absurdity of the divide between corporate offenders and everyone else,  when it comes to the limits on democratic influence...executives from companies that are caught for serious offenses are almost never charged criminally, meaning that they seldom lose their voting rights...these same companies almost all become major campaign contributors...whether or not you lose the right to vote for committing a crime mostly depends on who you are, not what you did...

As I have said so many times on so many other comment threads, “such is life – and death – here in the Fourth Reich, where African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations peoples and progressives are the equivalents of the Third Reich's Jews, Roma, Slavs and Communists.” 

*********

SINCE I BEGAN Outside Agitator's Notebook in October 2009 I have wrestled with the problem of how – in the midst off an alleged “retirement” that because of volunteer work often demands more of my time than my journalism career did even at its peak – to post to this blog with enough regularity to retain faithful readership.

The obvious solution was to post my contributions to other websites even when I wrote nothing specifically for OAN. But that always seemed like cheating – until I realized, quite recently, the value to readers (including the secret police) of having all my comments gathered in one locale.

Hence – again with apologies for my long but unavoidable hiatus (see below) – a new approach: a collection of links to my weekly Internet posts even when none of the comments were originally intended for publication here. Though today is a Monday – still celebrated as the Columbus Day holiday in a few places but more rightfully recognized as Genocide Day by First Nations people and their supporters (of whom I, with my tiny fraction of Mohawk blood, am surely one) – this and future such postings will (health and other circumstances permitting), most likely be on Wednesdays or Thursdays.

Meanwhile thank you for your continuing readership.

***

As regular readers already know, since October 2014 my life has been plagued by an onslaught of ongoing disruptions – many of them health-endangering, all of them gravely depressing – inflicted by my landlord. This includes the extreme physical labor, last May, of having to pack all my possessions, including a 1,026-volume personal library, for temporary eviction – the effort that literally left me breathless even a full day after the work was finished and so brought about the diagnosis I am (very slowly) dying from congestive heart failure.

The mechanism of this landlord's malevolence, which is unquestionably the most physically damaging oppression I have suffered in this lifetime, is the obviously disorganized and thus seemingly endless renovation of the apartment complex in which 89 others and I are forced by economic circumstances to dwell. It is, of course, a facility for low-income seniors and disabled people – in other words a place where those of us rendered surplus by the fact we are no longer exploitable for profit (save as victims in circumstances identical to these) are housed to await death.

Therefore, in accordance with the core principles of capitalism – which contrary to its infinity of Big Lies allocates rights and privileges only on the basis of one's financial worth and thus functions in morally imbecilic defiance of all humanitarian considerations – we the tenants are treated by our landlord as if we are sub-humans with hardly more rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” than are accorded factory-farm animals, never mind the proclamations of the USian Declaration of Independence. Nor – particularly as proven by our unprotected exposure to the lung-befouling dust-storm generated when safety-masked workers sanded all the stucco off the exteriors of the facility's two four-storey buildings – is there even one scintilla of hyperbole in the factory-farm metaphor. While the workers were at least issued protective masks, we were given no protection at all – merely the recommendation we close our windows.

Moreover, as I am repeatedly told by various government officials, we have no recourse. Our abject powerlessness is mandated by the fact Washington is the only state in the USian Empire in which the backroom legislative collaboration of the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties ensures that tenants have absolutely no legal rights at all.

Thus the landlord can compel us to pay rent no matter how long his renovation continues – never mind it is a helter-skelter operation ever-more-obviously planned to generate maximum profit at minimal cost – with minimal prior planning and therefore maximum disruption of our lives.

For example: interior, individual-apartment renovation – flooring replacement that imposed the temporary evictions I mentioned above (which in turn inflicted the physically demanding and emotionally stressful chores of packing as for a permanent move) – was unthinkingly scheduled to precede the removal of the stucco. As a result the new carpets are now begrimed by a thick layer of stucco dust and will soon have to be cleaned at tenant expense – approximately $150 per apartment. The windows are also filthy – and there on the glass the rain has turned the dust back into cement – but again we the tenants are to be billed for cleaning up the landlord's mess. That sort of thing – the fact the landlord can legally continue the extraction of rent no matter how intolerable he renders our existence – is the quintessence of “absolutely no rights at all.” Indeed it is a landlordly outrage that for me personally was far beyond imagination – that is, until I became one of the landlord's 90 victims.

Meanwhile – despite the filth and disorder the renovation continues to inflict – the landlord has resumed quarterly apartment inspections – intrusions to check for bedbug infestations and to spot early evidence (like used diapers stored in one's refrigerator) of geriatric dementia.

In my case, because of the (astonishing) quantity of stucco dust that seeped into my apartment despite the intolerable, 100-degrees-Fahrenheit discomfort of windows tightly closed in the midst of last summer's hottest days, the resumption of inspections has cursed me with the worst, most difficult, most extended and (thanks to arthritis inflamed by the onset of the rainy season), most physically painful housecleaning drudgery I have ever suffered. Ever. Again, no hyperbole: while preparation for the quarterly inspection normally takes me no more than two eight-hour days, I began this most-miserable of post-stucco-removal inspection-preparation chores six days ago, have worked at it anywhere from six to 14 hours each day since, and I still have two more days of work before this apartment – which under pre-renovation circumstances was a reasonably pleasant place – is sufficiently dust-free to pass inspection. And now I cannot but fearfully wonder what horrors all this dust might have fertilized into malignant growth in my throat and lungs – for now I am perpetually hoarse and afflicted by a chronic cough as well.

LB/13 October 2016

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