Hillary Clinton's War of Extinction or Donald Trump's Holocaust: Either Way the United States Is Doomed

NO WRITING SPECIFICALLY for OAN this week – and my apology for the fact I unavoidably missed my self-assigned Thursday 20 October deadline – but it's been one hell of an interlude. First the National Weather Service forecast a “historically significant” hurricane-force storm for 15-16 October that alarmed some house-owning friends of mine enough they asked me to stay with them so that – should the weather have materialized as destructively as forecast – I would not have been subject to the post-Katrina horrors of survival in a low-income housing facility that would no doubt have been deliberately abandoned by our governmental overlords in (yet another) act of opportunistic genocide.

Spawned by Typhoon Songda, the storm veered away from Tacoma but inflicted major damage elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

Next there was the dreadful head-and-chest cold – the most debilitating cold I have had in years – I caught from a charmingly loquacious three-year-old, the youngest member of a two-child-plus-mother-and-father family who were also staying with my friends because the roof of the family's rental house had begun severe leakage just at the onset of the storm and the landlord's response, typical for tenants-have-no-rights Washington state, was the usual “fuck you if you don't like it move elsewhere.” Again my apology for the delay, but such is life amongst the lower quartiles of the 99 Percent.

That said, here below are links to eight Internet reports and comment-thread responses that may be of some significance in the final approach to this election in which we the people are asked by our capitalist overlords to make the impossible choice between the national doom of the new Holocaust proposed by the Republican Party's Donald Trump or the planetary doom of the thermonuclear apocalypse threatened by the Democratic (sic) Party's Hillary Clinton.

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Dennis Kucinich, the outspokenly pacifist, Left-leaning Ohio congressman whose seat was maliciously gerrymandered out of existence by Democratic (sic) and Republican collaborators, has penned a scathing denunciation of Hillary  entitled simply “War or Peace.” Originally appearing on the World Without War website,  where it is available in any number of languages including Russian and Chinese, it was surprisingly re-published by Reader Supported News, a nominally bold alternative website that since the Democratic (sic) National Convention has become disappointing for the censorious support it has provided Clinton, but now may finally be – or let us hope – returning to its former courageously open-minded self. Whatever, “War or Peace” is by far the best – that is, the most pointedly revealing and succinct – work of its kind this abysmal presidential campaign has yet generated:

The most consequential statement by Secretary Clinton...was her pronouncement that a no-fly zone over Syria could “save lives and hasten the end of the conflict,” that a no-fly zone would provide “safe zones on the ground,” was in “the best interests of the people on the ground in Syria” and would “help us with our fight against ISIS.”

It would do none of the above. A US attempt to impose a no-fly zone in Syria would, as Secretary Clinton once cautioned a Goldman Sachs audience, “kill a lot of Syrians,” and, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dunford, lead to a war with Russia. If the US has not been invited into a country to establish a “no-fly zone” such an action is, in fact, an invasion, an act of war.

It is abundantly clear from our dark alliance with Saudi Arabia and our conduct in support of jihadists in Syria that our current leaders have learned nothing from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya as we prepare to plunge head-long into the abyss of a world war.

THE ENSUING DISCUSSION,  inexplicably ignored for several hours by Hillary's disruptive legions of paid trolls, was thus fondly reminiscent of the mutually informative dialogues that characterized the pre-presidential-campaign RSN at its best. I contributed the following:

Frankly I think Hillary is truly mad – insane – with a combination of Goldwater Girl ambition (to be the first ever conqueror of Russia) and a fanatical vision of herself as the angel of death triggering the Christian Apocalypse (“better dead then Red” because this way – so they believe – all their sadistic god's chosen zealots go directly to heaven).

No, I am not exaggerating: read pages 272-277 of Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Governance (Harper: 2008), which expose Hillary's clandestine collaboration with Sam Brownback (and therefore presumably also with all the other JesuNazi fanatics in the fundamentalist leadership cabal).

Were she not herself a secret believer in the Christian “End Times” dogma, she would never have been accepted by Brownback and his ilk.

Moreover, were the cause of her war-mongering merely her debt to the military-industrial complex, she would want to perpetuate the profits generated by the new Cold War she and Obama have started. But instead – her intent undeniable – she wants thermonuclear Armageddon: that is, the end of all sentient life on this planet.

As I said, her warmongering proves she is insane: a homicidal maniac with her finger moving ever closer to the doomsday button.

And – yes – I am frankly terrified, many times more so than during the Cuban Missile Crisis: not for me, as I am old and chronically ill, but for all the world's children and young adults.

Later, in response to a fellow poster's observation Hillary is “deeply hypnotized by the patriarchal mindset,” I added my “hear, hear” of agreement: 

Were I a believer in alien visitation, which I most assuredly am not, I would have to regard the sudden imposition of patriarchy (via talking snakes, “divinely” inscribed tablets, burning bushes, fiery wheels, etc. ad nauseam) as the intergalactic equivalent of the smallpox-infested blankets with which European Christians began the destruction of the American First Nations. In either case, the result is deadly: in the latter to the indigenous cultures of the American continents, in the former – unless we are saved by some genuine miracle – to all sentient life on this planet.

(If perhaps the UFO-philes are correct in their assumptions, then it follows logically the creatures who infected us with the toxins of patriarchy are some species of super-cockroach, since only roaches can survive in the thermonuclear wasteland the suicidal madness of patriarchy now threatens to make real.)

All of which, whether one rejects or accepts the notion of extraterrestrial intervention, raises the most valid question of this entire election: who – or what – does Hillary Clinton truly serve?

And no, I am not being the least bit facetious.

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Stephen Eric Bronner, a political science professor at Rutgers University, acknowledges in his “Our Hillary” she stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders and represents a dire threat to world peace. But he claims she will “support equal pay for equal work, a woman’s right to choose, civil liberties...an attack on Citizens United...fund Planned Parenthood, restrict gun sales, and inject a degree of civility into a polarized environment. There is also,” Bronner asserted, “symbolic importance in electing a woman to the highest office,” never mind her presidency could in fact mean the end of all life on earth. Hence Bronner insists “any rational person (should) vote for Hillary.”

I RESPONDED ACCORDINGLY:  Hillary's feminism is entirely bogus, a Big Lie to win the votes of identity-politics zealots and (tragically misinformed) women.

The truth is that Hillary clandestinely collaborates with Sam Brownback and others of his JesuNazi ilk for “tunneling beneath...the wall between church and state” (Sharlet, ibid., page 275).

In other words – again the difference between her public and private positions – Hillary is a closet theocrat, a secret fanatic intent on imposing the Christian version of Sharia on the United States, complete with zero-tolerance prohibitions of abortion, extra-marital sex, homosexuality, trans-sexuality and gay marriage (which let us not forget she publicly opposed until she changed her public position in 2013).

As to her private position, since she still regularly attends prayer meetings with the Family, we can assume it is at least as hostile to women and sexual minorities as it was prior to 2013.

Relevant links providing additional data on Hillary's 24-year association with The Family and its unabashed reverence for Adolf Hitler are here,  here,  and here.

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“Plutocratic Forces Crippled Democracy, And Why It’s Up To Us To Fight Back” The following is an excerpt from Ralph Nader's new book, Breaking Through Power (City Lights: 2016). “In the 1920s, near the end of his spectacular career as our country’s most prominent fighter for working people, labor leader, presidential candidate, orator, and all-around progressive Eugene Debs was asked by a reporter: 'Mr. Debs, what do you regret the most in your lifelong struggle for justice?' Debs looked at him and replied: 'What do I regret the most? I regret that the American people can have almost anything they want under our Constitution, but they seem not to want much of anything at all.'”

MR. NADER, I responded, has written the best historical summation I have yet seen of how capitalism triumphed to become the most lethal tyranny in our species' history. Indeed he proves beyond argument the essence of capitalism is both genocide and ecocide. We should all salute him for his courageous text and salute Popular Resistance for the bravery required to publish it.

That said, what is tragically missing here, most assuredly not from Mr. Nader's text but obviously, just as Eugene Debs observed, from the USian majority's will, is any truly effective spirit of resistance. Now, with USian fascism an undeniable reality, only the smallest minorities – most of them non-white – are sufficiently disciplined to believe and act upon the notion “It's Up To Us To Fight Back.”

Meanwhile the vast USian majority is obviously so utterly subjugated they in their craven submissiveness are increasingly indistinguishable from the “Good Germans” whose submission to Adolf Hitler led to our species' deadliest war to date. And now, in the likely outcome of the 2016 presidential election, we the (methodically disempowered) people are being led by an unabashed tyrant into a war from which there will be no survivors save cockroaches..

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“Extremist Militias Recruiting in Fear of Clinton Winning Election, Activists Say: Dwindling services lead to a sense of abandonment. The right can easily step in and provide both a clear political narrative to explain this, and a set of simple-seeming solutions...'The Patriot movement is attracting people who feel disenfranchised...The same dynamic has been driving the election.'”

MY RESPONSE WAS blunt and to the point: There would be no “Extremist Militias” had the Democratic (sic) Party not betrayed the 99 Percent by becoming the party of forcible-disarmament Republicans.

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“Half of US Adults Are Recorded in Police Facial Recognition Databases, Study Says:” Whether they are suspects or not, “about half of all Americans are pictured in a digital 'perpetual line-up,'  composed of databases handled either by the FBI or local police departments, the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law Center finds in a new study published Tuesday.”

MY (PREDICTABLE) RESPONSE: How many times must it be said? The ONLY reason for the uniformed police and the secret police to have this technology is to facilitate mass arrests.

Wake up, people! THINK. What does that technology – particularly in combination with Total Surveillance – tell us about the the intentions of our overlords?

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“Black Children Punished for Anthem Protests: After young 11 and 12-year-boys of the Beaumont Bulls football knelt during the (national) anthem to protest police violence against Black youth, their local executive board canceled their entire football season, suspended the coaching staff, and threatened to arrest their parents if they attended any future games, practices or events.”

I HAD NO comment – what could I possibly add to this report beyond pointing out it is yet another defining moment in the USian Empire – but I post it here because a friend rightfully sent it to me and asked me to disseminate it to as many persons as possible.

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New York Police Sergeant Shoots Dead Mentally-Ill Black Woman: In the latest incident of police killings of Black people in the U.S., a New York officer Tuesday evening shot and killed 66-year-old Deborah Danner, who was mentally ill, because she was waving a baseball bat at him to which he responded with deadly force instead of following protocol and firing his taser gun to neutralize her.

NOT MUCH TO say in response to this atrocity either, save to point out its similarity to a notorious incident that occurred while I still lived and worked in the City:

Sounds like another Eleanor Bumpurs case.  And I would bet it has exactly the same outcome. 

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“Watchdog: EPA Action to Protect Flint Residents From Lead Was Delayed 7 Months: The Environmental Protection Agency had the authority and information to issue an emergency order protecting residents of Flint, Mich., from lead-tainted water a full seven months  before it did so, an EPA internal investigation has concluded. 'It is clear that EPA intervention was delayed,' the report from the EPA's inspector general states.”

SAID I: ANOTHER classic example of how the Obama Regime “protects” cities with African-American majority populations – with exactly the same genocidal opportunism we saw demonstrated in the Bush Regime's post-Katrina “protection” of New Orleans.

Where then – from the perspective of those of us who are black, Hispanic, First Nations or merely chronically impoverished – is there any difference, particularly in the body count, between what the Democratic (sic) Party does to us and what the Republican Party does to us?

Really, what does it matter who wins the White House, the wanna-be Hitler named Trump or the wanna-be Hitler named Hillary? We the (lower-income) People are dead either way.

LB/23 October 2016

How Charleston Exemplifies Our Imperial Malignancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sanders Calls Charleston What It Is: Racist Terrorism

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

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

Sanders seems to speak directly from his heart:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Seattle Area, Racism Means Bad Mass Transit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Russia Vows Retaliation if U.S. Aggression Continues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Understanding Media (with apologies to McLuhan)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Defining Issue" Is Whether Our Species Survives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/21 June 2015

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Atrocities and Accomplishments That Tell Us Who We Are

THE WANTON TORTURING of an innocent young white woman by two Department of Homeland Security border guards may have at long last awakened the nation's major media to the dangerous extent the United States of America has degenerated into a de facto Fourth Reich.

First reported by The Watertown Daily Times, then covered in depth by Reason and The Atlantic, the atrocity in question has momentarily united three diverse elements of the mainstream media in a national outpouring of journalistic outrage. The Watertown paper, the flagship of an Upstate New York conglomerate of dailies and weeklies, is the trio's closest approximation of old-time independent media. But the two magazines make no pretense of being anything other than mouthpieces of the One Percent. Reason is the voice of the Ayn Rand Right,  though in this instance its libertarian opposition to government has trumped its Randite moral imbecility to produce the most informative of the three cited reports. The Atlantic is an instrument of the Bill Gates mentality, a carefully closeted form of fascism that seems to (correctly) recognize Randism as a new expression of Nazism and therefore – no doubt to avoid the associated odium – tacitly encourages Randites to self-identify as “New Democrats” or anti-union “progressives.”

Apart from the atrocity itself, the pivotal issue from the OAN perspective is the extensive coverage these three publications have given the incident. Their detailed reportage – particularly the excellent legal analysis provided by Reason – stands in stark contrast to how the mainstream media covers the ongoing war of attrition waged by the feds and federally militarized local police against blacks and Hispanics. Had the victim been a black or Hispanic woman, the incident would have almost certainly gone unreported. Such a story is deliberately suppressed unless it provokes a neighborhood rebellion, which is then denounced as an uprising of “welfare recipients” or “gangbangers” or “thugs.”

Given the geographic and sociopolitical exclusivities of its publishers, I probably would not have seen this story had Reader Supported News Editor-in-Chief Marc Ash not selected it for republication on his website.  I do not know what motivated his choice. I suspect part of his intent was to call attention, as the story surely does, to the racial discrepancies that define mainstream media's coverage of the skyrocketing incidence of police brutality.

No doubt Ash also recognizes the savaging of an unarmed and therefore defenseless white woman who dared assert her legal rights as yet another escalation in the policies that are methodically reducing U.S. citizens to captive people in a conquered land. Similar escalations occurred in post-Katrina New Orleans  and post-bombing Boston. 

But this newest incident is unique in that it was rationalized neither by disaster nor terrorism. In fact the video makes it clear the border guards' sole motive for victimizing Jessica Cooke was their obvious glee at inflicting suffering on a defenseless person.

Hence my remarks on the associated RSN comment thread:

And yet there are many idiots here amongst us who do not believe we live in the de facto Fourth Reich...

(This woman will of course be convicted and imprisoned and her life thereby ruined merely because she dared assert her rights in protest to the new Gestapo...who now claim jurisdiction over a “border” that in some places is 150 or 200 miles deep. Which means atrocities like this – albeit mostly suppressed by our Josef Goebbels media – are probably commonplace. Frankly I am astounded the video has not already been disappeared.)

(Note too the sadistic malice obvious in the border guard's voice – here as in Nazi Germany, sadism is now part of the job description for such thugs.)

Responding to another poster, I said:

Psychologically speaking, she WAS raped, a reality underscored by the obviously gloating response of the male Border Patrol thug.

(I'd bet he treats his wife or girlfriend and any children with exactly the same smirking brutality.)

And as I later added:

Alas, here in the Fourth Reich, there is no more “law.” There is only the malevolence of the authorities,which in turn is the malevolence of capitalism underscored by the Supreme Court. Now and forever the ultimate instrument of the One Percent, the court has already proven it will uphold all the brutality of capitalist governance no matter how savage or (previously) unlawful.

(Definitions: capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth; capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.)

***

MEANWHILE PROTEST DEMONSTRATIONS – and counter-demonstrations by neo-Nazis whom credible witnesses describe as “disturbingly cozy with the local police” – continue in Olympia, Washington state, where cops shot two unarmed black men on 21 May. 

The two, Andre Thompson, 24, and Bryson Chaplin, 21, are stepbrothers. Both are hospitalized. One is in critical condition with chest wounds.

They were initially accused of shoplifting beer from a Safeway supermarket. But two Olympia sources say the cops shot innocent men – that video tapes from store security cameras prove the two shooting victims were not the shoplifters – though this had seemingly not been confirmed by mainstream media as of this writing (31 May).

Because coverage of the incident has been typically spotty – once again we see that in the newsrooms of U.S. mainstream media, black lives do not matter – I am including this link  to an electronic bulletin board that attempts to provide up-to-date information on the shooting and its aftermath.

The reports and photographs thereon are posted by people who are outraged by the shootings. As is often true of the alternative press, these dispatches are typically more detailed and accurate than the trickle-down (piss-on-the-99-Percent) coverage begrudgingly provided by the media monopolies.

My own sources tell me the apparent alliance of the neo-Nazis with the police is profoundly disturbing. Such alliances were commonplace in the U.S. South during the Civil Rights Movement era, where police and sheriff's deputies were often also members of the Ku Klux Klan. But no such arrangements had hitherto been suspected in modern-day Washington state.

However, the ongoing refusal of the federal government to prosecute the armed militiamen who resisted its officials in the Bundy Ranch incident  suggests the encouragement of alliances between police and armed reactionaries may already be an un-publicized (and probably top secret) federal policy (scroll down).

***

THE EPIDEMIC OF young, often (understandably) defiant but invariably unarmed black youths murdered or severely injured by local cops has become a defining characteristic of the United States in the second decade of the 21st Century.

But few (if any) commentators have dared speculate on why – apart from racism – these atrocities are occurring so frequently.

Like soldiers, cops are trained to follow orders. Like their military counterparts, these orders allow individual officers almost no initiative.

Thus the frequency and geographic distribution of the killings suggests they are not coincidental – that they are in obedience to some (top secret) extermination order that has been handed down through police chains-of-command.

Given the federalization of local police by the Department of Homeland Security and the concurrent militarization of local police by joint DHS/Department of Defense agreements, the probable source of such an order is obvious.

The harshest critics of DHS whether on the Left or the Right say it is literally a U.S. recreation of the Third Reich's dread SS/Reichssicherheitshauptamt. 

Though three solid hours of Internet research failed to turn up a credible source for that particular claim, it revealed a somewhat more subtle bit of supportive evidence that is surely equally disturbing. The Nazi German acronym for its security department was RSHA. The originally proposed name for DHS was National Homeland Security Agency; its acronym was therefore to have been NHSA.

Coincidence? Or is there really a phantom chorus of “zieg heils” in the background? Scroll down to page viii of “Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change.” 

Note also this federal document's date: 15 February 2001. In other words, what many critics have damned as the Nazification of the United States  was underway eight months before the 9/11 attacks provided the government with an enabling equivalent of the Reichstag Fire.

Other vitally informative reads on DHS and its role in turning the U.S. into the Fourth Reich are here,  here,  here,  here and here.

(Yes, it is true many of the above links are to Libertarian [conservative] websites. That's because, when the issue is tyrannical governance, the [alleged] U.S. Left – obligated as it so frequently is to government-employee unions – is too often submissively silent.)

*** *** ***

DESPITE THE WIDELY publicized reports of a slight decline in the number of U.S. Christians, there is surely no decline in their ability to inflict their tyrannies on the U.S. population.

Among the most relentless of these theocratic despots are the Catholic bishops. They are trying to impose their misogynistic dogmas and deliberately cruel end-of-life “redemptive-suffering” doctrines on all of us via their expanding control of Catholic hospitals and medical systems. Because these institutions are heavily financed by taxpayer dollars, the bishops have access to vast sums of federal, state and local revenues with which to fund seemingly endless maneuvering through constitutional loopholes. The result is community after community inflicted by the anti-sexual and pro-agony strictures of de facto theocracy.

In Washington state, the situation is especially dire. The following is from Catholic Watch,  an on-line organization that tracks the church's methodical conquest of the nation's health care facilities:

“Almost half of the acute care hospital beds (a proxy for the health care system more broadly) are now subject to the 'moral authority' of three Catholic bishops. These bishops oversee medical policy and employment practices for all Catholic 'health care ministries,' which now include hospitals, labs, physician practices, hospices, and even insurance companies.”

The Catholic takeover of health-care facilities is fueled by missionary zeal – specifically the church's fanatical opposition to same-sex marriage, birth control, fertility treatments, abortion (even to save the life of the mother) and Death with Dignity.  By imposing the church's zero-tolerance dogmas via the marketplace – where capitalist doctrines of “economic freedom” are routinely cited to justify even the most egregious acts of oppression – the bishops are cleverly sidestepping the constitutional prohibitions that hitherto protected the U.S. from theocracy.

Predictably, the Republican Party – which with its anti-sex hatemongering often appears to be the bishops' executive-action agency – is reacting with panic  to the tiny decline in Christian membership.

***

BUT CHRISTIAN BIGOTRY is not only a defining characteristic of the U.S. Right. It was the closeted homophobia of Democrats, many of them self-proclaimed “progressives,” that terminated the 19-year career of David Olio, who just recently had been honored as one of the best high school English teachers in the nation. 

Olio's alleged sin? He dared read an outspokenly gay Allen Ginsberg poem in an advanced class for college-bound seniors.

As I said on the comment thread:

This appalling destruction of a teacher's life shows us all that is wrong with the United States.

It reveals the hypocrisy that underlies the self-proclaimed "progressive" label. It shows us that beneath the self-righteous rhetoric, a “progressive” is as anti-union, anti-First Amendment, racist, homophobic, misogynistic and reflexively fascist as any conservative, especially in the fear and loathing of sexuality.

I do not remember who it was – maybe Anais Nin or her lover Henry Miller – who noted the U.S. was the only nation on Earth to have made the Christian hatred of sexuality into a definitive national trait.

But that – though it alone explains how the U.S. population was reduced to Moron Nation, and how Moron Nation has been shaped into the Fourth Reich – is only half the tyrannical dynamic evidenced here.

The other half – "Olio refused to be interviewed for this story" – is exemplified by the teacher himself.

Thus it seems the final lesson he would teach us is in the slavish submission that has quashed forever the U.S. experiment in liberty. Why else would one whose life is irremediably ruined and who therefore has nothing left to lose refuse to fight back?

I hope of course I am wrong – that Olio is silent not because he is a coward but because he is preparing an epic lawsuit that will destroy the South Windsor School District.

Though hope, as Barack Obama has already so memorably taught us, expresses not audacity but futility.

***

Footnote: In these times, the only rational definition of our politics is provided by our socioeconomic class. We are thus either Working Class (the 99 Percent) or Ruling Class, the One Percent and its vassals.

Marx and Engels make it even clearer. We are either proletarians and peasants or we are part of the bourgeoisie.

It is the latter that includes the Ayn-Randimated status seekers that make up today's petit bourgeoisie – those who so often hide their greed and selfishness behind the self-proclaimed label of “progressive.”

How do I see this so clearly? As in Connecticut, so in “progressive” Washington state – where the fascists (in the form of the Republican Senate) already control the state government.

Next year the voters will again ride the rising wave of bourgeois hatred for the poor and shift yet further right, no doubt making Washington the newest Wisconsin – after which there will be many more cases like Olio's.

***

As a journalist – blogger, former editor-in-chief , news editor, city editor, investigative reporter etc. – I am frustrated by the many elements missing from this story.

For example:

It was reportedly a student who ratted out Olio and so began the process that destroyed his life.

From the ninth graf of the story linked above: “...the controversy began when one student in the class begged off a test in a different class the next day, claiming he (or she) couldn’t concentrate due the reading of the poem.”

The identity of this student should be published. Teens are routinely tried as adults when they they murder someone, and since this teen has maliciously murdered Olio professionally, he or she should by exposed accordingly. (I'd bet the rat is either a practicing Christian, a disciple of Ayn Rand or both.)

There is also the matter of a newspaper campaigning against the First Amendment. (Seventh graf: “The local newspaper denounced him in editorials.”)

As there at least two newspapers that serve South Windsor, the anti-Olio publication should be identified by name.

One of these papers is The Hartford Courant, which is owned by Tribune Publishing, the nation's third largest media corporation. If this is indeed the anti-Olio journal – its pay-wall prohibits the requisite archive search – hat in itself is a major news story.

Why? Because it would show us yet another dimension of mainstream media's shift toward Josef Goebbels propagandization.

*** *** ***

THE GOOD NEWS the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has tossed out an entire coda of Idaho anti-abortion laws  is also bad news as the decision will surely be appealed to the Supreme Court. And just as surely SCOTUS will toss out Roe v. Wade and affirm Christianity's hatred of women and sexuality by making abortion illegal again.

*** *** ***

THOM HARTMANN HAS written a breakthrough piece entitled “Capitalism Could Kill All Life on Earth,” for which he is to be commended. 

I responded accordingly:

Clearly Mr. Hartmann has at last realized that capitalism is literally the enemy of all life on earth – that if we are to survive, capitalism must be recognized as the cancer it is and removed accordingly.

Many of us already know this as the ultimate, pivotal truth of this the darkest most hopeless era in all the 200,000 years of our species' experience.

Verily then we are challenged by three questions:  (1)- how are the capitalists to be overthrown?  (2)- how is capitalist governance to be eliminated?  (3)-what eradication measures will ensure capitalism is never again able to threaten our rights to life and liberty? 

However, if we are to find effective answers to these terminal questions. we must first recognize the absolute evil at the core of capitalism. Stripped of its seductive rhetoric, capitalism is in fact the ultimate malevolence of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – literally  the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth. 

Once we have acknowledged that fact and its terrifying corollary – that our Earth is now ruled by moral imbeciles whose sole purpose is fulfillment of their own serial-killer fantasies of limitless wealth and power – then at last  we will have positioned ourselves  to rationally evolve the answers to the above questions.

And these answers – or rather their effectiveness – will then determine whether our species lives or dies. 

Later, I addressed a slyly pro-capitalist poster:

Chuckle8: Argue as you will, nothing changes the ugly truth that all our previous efforts to liberate ourselves from capitalism have failed. Period. End of sentence.

In this context, suggesting the New Deal could again become a vehicle of liberation makes about as much sense as suggesting a horsewhip could be used to re-start a stalled automobile.

“The best tools available” – including the electoral process that enabled the New Deal – are all nullified by hopeless corruption. The fact of the matter – I say again FACT – is the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is dead. Its fatal weakness was its failure to recognize that without  economic democracy, political democracy is meaningless. 

Thus we are imprisoned by circumstances from which there is no apparent exit. 

That's why, if we are to liberate ourselves from capitalism, we must first acknowledge the bitter truth of our abject powerlessness. 

Only then – when we have at last set aside our selfish, self-pampering  Norman Vincent Peal conformity and its attendant opiate of PollyAnna optimism – will we be sufficiently grounded in reality to (perhaps) begin to evolve an effective response to the present crisis.   

I had believed that would end our exchange. Alas, it did not. So I wrote one more rejoinder:

Wake up, chuckle8: forget all the deceptive definitions you learned elsewhere. Capitalism reduced to its essence is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. Capitalism is therefore manifest moral imbecility – the mindset of the serial killer expressed in economic terms. That is why it cannot be reformed. As to the distribution of our (increasingly scarce) resources, nothing says it better than this: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” 

*** *** ***

KATE DAVIES OF Tikkun  has written a thought-provoking essay on “hope”  that prompted me to write a respectfully contradictory response:

Ms. Davies makes valid, useful points.

Too bad the term “hope” has been so severely besmirched by Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. Too bad “hope” was reduced to a cynical joke by the most malicious liar in U.S. presidential history, the man who conned us by asserting “the audacity of hope” and then by his wanton agenda of betrayals and deceptions schooled us instead in the utter futility of hope – the most bitter truth of our species' existence.

Thus “hope” stands revealed as the ultimate expression of powerlessness, the last desperate emotion of the slave and the slave's mandatory passivity – “all I can do is hope Massa won't whip me again today.” Such is the “hope” that – exactly as the Betrayer and his One Percent masters so obviously intend – proclaims our helplessness and thereby perpetuates our hopelessness.

(Yes, the punishing contrast between “audacity” and “futility” is surely a deliberately imposed trauma – as if the true purpose of the Obama Administration is to put us all in our [disempowered] place and teach us to never again dare aspire to rise above it. And yes, do not doubt for an instant Madison Avenue is possessed of the requisite skill. It is the most diabolically skilled psychological warfare agency on this planet.)

Is there, then, an antidote to the hopelessness manifest in ideologies of hope?

There is indeed such an antidote, and its name is “defiance.”

Defiance is the fuel that fires resistance movements even when there is no hope, even when all reasons for hopefulness have been exterminated. Though itself formless, defiance is expressed in an infinity of forms. Yesteryear's defiance is what prompted my Celtic ancestors to fight their Roman and Christian oppressors when there was no possibility of victory. Today's defiance is the (now) revolutionary assertion of our species' right to survival and liberty. It is recognition that in this time of unprecedented Evil, ruled as we are by serial-killer-minded overlords, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance – the core defiance within which all lesser acts of revolutionary defiance are mothered into being.

By contrast, hope is at best a pacifier, an unguent for dreamers, a noun that even as a verb (“I hope”) reveals its crippling taint of passivity. But defiance as a verb (“I defy”) is implicitly a summons to action, to resistance, to rebellion...and perhaps even to triumphs we cannot yet recognize or envision.

*** *** ***

SOME OF THE best analytical reporting I have thus far seen on the Ukraine crisis focuses on the propaganda war with which the United States and its vassals continue to obscure who killed 298 people by shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17 last year.

One of the story's most important revelations is additional proof of the extent to which U.S. and allied mainstream media function as a uniquely privatized governmental propaganda apparatus (scroll down to “Glenn Greenwald's Exposé”). Thus we are given yet another reason Josef Goebbels would be proud to claim the MSM as his own:

“If nothing else (and with this story there is plenty 'else'), the MH-17 fallout was emblematic of the MSM’s long, well (if not fully) documented, and not so illustrious history of venal complicity in blindly validating Western governments’ approved narratives, along with sanctioning their official agendas and, whether through sins of omission or commission, suppressing their secret ones.”

*** *** ***

WASHINGTON STATE BUREAUCRATS have always pandered to the rich. But now they are granting the moneyed aristocrats exclusive rights to formerly public Washington state wilderness lands – this to facilitate Marie-Antoinette-style “glamor camping”  in $220-per-night luxury tents.

Actually it's the newest development in an old and embittering story. Ask the hunters and fishers who were forever locked out of the state's wilderness areas by the pro-equestrian road closures imposed during the early 1990s.

Precisely as they were intended to do, these closures severely restrict back-country access. They exclude everybody but those rich enough to afford extended weekends with horses and wranglers or those in good enough physical condition to mountain-bike 15 or 20 miles to reach the hunting grounds or fishing waters that are now rendered inaccessible to everybody else.

The immediate result was a staggering decrease in sales of hunting and fishing licenses – a drop so huge and sudden, officials of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife still refuse to disclose its magnitude.

To compensate for the revenue loss, the bureaucrats jacked up resident license fees to the highest in the nation,  now $117.50 plus sales tax for a hunting license and $54.25 for a combination freshwater/saltwater fishing license. Resident license fees in many states including Alaska are less than half what Washington charges,  and the lucky license-holders typically have access to vastly larger tracts of unrestricted land and water.

By the end of the '90s, the road closures had made inaccessible every place in Washington state I had ever fished or hunted. (That is one of the main reasons I so dislike this state. I had intended to spend a reasonable portion of my retirement years fishing its trout streams. But the economic and physical discrimination implicit in the closures made that impossible.) Given the democratically accessible trout waters of Upstate New York and rural New Jersey, I would literally be better off had I remained in Manhattan.

Hence it would not be stretching the point to say that the Evergreen State's embrace of glamor-camping is merely another expansion of its long-established policies of brazenly catering to the One Percent while maliciously brutalizing lower-income people with the most savagely regressive tax structure  in the entire United States.

***

THAT THESE INEQUALITIES are now as evident in the back country as they are in the cities probably explains why the graffiti vandals have suddenly begun spray-painting their fuck-you rage on convenient surfaces in state and national parks and forests. 

Whether graffiti is high art – and some of it most assuredly is – should not distract us from its semiotic message, which is “I am denied any stake in this property or place, so I will trash it.” In the wilderness as everywhere else, graffiti is thus embittered protest, the human equivalent of the animal habit of marking territory with splurts of urine, often a last desperate attempt to reclaim formerly public domains that are increasingly pay-walled or privatized into prohibitive exclusiveness.

As the advent of increasingly unaffordable fares provoked the graffiti attacks on the New York City subway system, so now does increasing exclusivity provoke graffiti and other forms of vandalism in the (formerly public) realms of rural recreation land. Illegal dumpers in these realms are merely vandals who are too stupid to employ other means of protest.

(Disclosure: I was 18 years into a photographic study of urban and rural graffiti when it was destroyed by the 1983 fire. Like everything else photographic in the wake of that life-changing disaster, I have never been able to put my heart enough back into it to resume the work.)

*** *** ***

LET US NOT FORGET that the malevolent malcontents who deface, vandalize and otherwise trash the wilderness are also expressing the Abrahamic hatred and contempt for nature that is the cornerstone of capitalism. Let us also remember that same Judaic, Christian or Islamic arrogance is what motivates the climate-change deniers whose obstructionism is jeopardizing our species' survival and threatening to kill our entire planet.

It is to those of us who battle these fanatical morons I dedicate this concluding dispatch:

“Following an abnormally warm winter, spring temperatures exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit across a broad swath of interior Alaska in May, breaking records for the earliest day with temperatures that high.”

Read the rest of it here  – and in our grief for our wounded Mother Earth, let us find the defiance we need to persevere.

LB/25-31 May 2015

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