A Not-So-Fond Farwell to Reader Supported News

Occupy Tacoma's last demonstration, May Day 2012. Click image to view it full size. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2012.

*

WHAT FOLLOWS IS one of those stories I never imagined I would write – a report about an event I never imagined could happen.

When I first encountered Reader Supported News, probably sometime in 2010, it seemed a welcoming haven of uncensored reportage and vital, intelligently expressed dialogue. Hence I soon became something of a regular contributor to its comment threads, and in October 2011, after e-correspondence with owner Marc Ash, I volunteered to cover Occupy Tacoma for the site. I provided both text and pictures – the latter at considerable personal expense because in those days I was still shooting film (mostly in a beloved pair of Leica M4s) – but I no longer had my own darkroom and was therefore dependent on commercial processing.

An Occupy Tacoma activist from the local group's beginning, I stayed with its story until the entire Occupy Movement was crushed the following spring.

I made the picture above, one of my final Occupy Tacoma frames, on May Day 2012. It was as telling an end-shot as any photo-essay-concluding image I've ever made, but it was my one Occupy submission RSN owner Marc Ash declined to run. And in light of subsequent events I cannot but wonder if that was my first taste of his own peculiar brand of censorship, for in the accompanying text, as in many subsequent comment-thread posts, I violated the politically correct taboo against telling Occupy's most embittering core truth – that the movement was as much a victim of its own pseudo-anarchistic anti-intellectualism as it was prey to brutal oppression by the new Gestapo of the Empire's federalized, militarized local police. Apparently Ash considered this alleged heresy to be allowable in a comment thread, but verboten in the more formal medium of a photographically illustrated news report.

Though it is perhaps an aside, I should disclose here that since my teenage years I have been aware, sometimes rather painfully, of the deadly danger of USian anti-intellectualism – the methodically conditioned, socioeconomically fatal mental paralysis first inflicted by capitalism's postwar purge  of Communists, socialists and New Deal Democrats, later by its relentless escalation  to marginalize or silence any politician, journalist or academic who dared show even minimal humanitarian tendencies. But I was shocked to discover, via Occupy, just how thoroughly much of the younger USian population – particularly those who, despite their self-proclaimed  anarchism,  have never heard of Bakunin  or Kropotkin  – has been so irremediably conditioned.

While people who have never before been allowed the opportunity to think and learn often become superior students – that is one of the more obvious lessons of the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions – those who have been taught to despise knowledge and to fear thinking are definitively unteachable. Such is the dreadful rationale behind Moron Nation and the process of dumbing down – of “moronation” – that has reduced the citizenry of the United States to the most notoriously ignorant population in the developed world. Induced ignorance policed by anti-intellectualism is capitalism's ultimate – and ultimately impregnable – defense.

***

IN EARLY 2013, when 15 Now Tacoma emerged from Occupy Tacoma's ashes to rally for a $15-per-hour minimum wage inside Tacoma, which is Washington state's second largest seaport and the third busiest seaport on the West Coast, I volunteered to cover that story for RSN too. But Ash never replied to my inquiries. At the time, early 2013, I assumed Ash dismissed the Tacoma campaign as too local to be nationally relevant and that in any case he was too busy to respond. As for me, I remained a 15 Now activist through the fall of 2014, when health problems – the geriatric afflictions of old age – forced me to drop out.

Eventually the Tacoma electorate, perhaps 65 percent of which has been reduced to official low-income status, was terrorized into semi-submission by Ruling Class threats of retaliatory job losses and thus in November 2015 voted against itself and $15 Now but approved “$12 Later” – a minimum-wage hike begrudgingly proposed by the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, added to the ballot by the chamber's Tacoma City Council vassals, and now to be staged in over four years. Again Ash seemed uninterested in the story, and again I assumed it was merely the situation I myself had experienced countless times as a member of the working press, particularly as the news editor (1968-1969) of The Daily Record in Morristown, N.J. – too many stories, not enough news hole i.e. editorial space.

But then last summer, Ash threw all his weight behind the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Of necessity given Hillary's arrogance, lies, corruption and most especially her Goldwater Girl ambition to be the first-ever conquer of Russia and therefore the personification of thermonuclear apocalypse, Ash began noticeably shifting the content of his website. Not only did he deliberately exclude reports critical of Hillary and her Democratic (sic) Party. He also began relying more and more on the material disseminated by the so-called “mainstream media.”

Owned as it is by the same One Percenters who own USian government at all levels, this “mainstream media” is in fact the world's first privately owned, for-profit, Josef-Goebbels-type ministry of propaganda.

Not surprisingly I began to wonder if Ash's rejections of my final Occupy story and all my post-Occupy story suggestions are more than mere journalistic coincidence – if indeed they are perhaps reflective of the same “neo-liberal” (aka fascist) anti-99-Percent bias that in the past year has become one of the ideological cornerstones not just of of present-day Democratic (sic) Party but of RSN as well.

***

THE CHINESE WARMASTER Sun Tzu observed 2,500 years ago that “all warfare is based on deception.” This is never more true than in class warfare which – because it is ultimately a fight to the death to determine who will be the predators and who will be their victims – is the most mercilessly vicious warfare of all time. Both sides employ tactics derived from strategies of deception. One such tactic, used by a tyrannical ruling class to identify, concentrate and neutralize its opponents, is to organize those opponents into false opposition movements.

Perhaps its ultimate example, pioneered by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, is Father Gapon's  Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of St. Petersburg. As Lev Bronstein aka Leon Trotsky famously remarked, “in every gathering of three or more revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.” Likewise, the post-World-War-II Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was rumored to contain more agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the main USian secret police agency, than actual Communists. Since then, the creation of fake revolutionary cells and the subsequent arrest of their members has become a primary USian secret police tactic. 

The practice of today's Democratic (sic) Party – spouting humanitarian rhetoric like “change we can believe in” while imposing genocidal cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and other socioeconomic services – is another tactic formulated from the same strategy of deception.

To be absolutely clear, I am not – say again NOT – accusing Ash of being a latter-day Father Gapon. But I am saying there's enough of a parallel between Gapon's betrayal of the Petrograd proletariat and RSN's abandonment of and increasing hostility toward the 99 Percent and their (our) hard-Left, invariably socialist, often Marxian advocates to prompt three pointed questions: (1)- When did RSN's now-undeniable alliance with the Hillaryite Democratic (sic) Party begin; (2)-What financial benefits, if any, has RSN received as a result; and (3)-Has RSN offering its services to, or has it been hired by, one or more of the USian secret police agencies as a Left-magnet – that is, a Gaponishka mechanism for identifying, cataloging and perhaps eventually disappearing those us who are genuinely committed to resisting capitalist savagery.

***

RSN PUBLISHED SCOTT Galindez's “Our Opportunity in 2017” on 11 January.  Another of Galindez's fanatically anti-Trump, implicitly pro-Hillary diatribes, the following quotes are taken directly from its text:

“The political revolution must be ready to... transform the Democratic Party...we have to defend progressive gains we’ve made over several decades...I don't believe all Trump supporters are racist, sexist bigots...Trump did convince working-class voters in the Rust Belt that he would bring back the factory jobs that bad trade deals drove out of the country. We have to win those voters back...We have to offer them an alternative that benefits their families. Every time Trump makes a move that threatens the quality of life of working people and the poor, we need to fight hard to stop him. Those fights are opportunities for us to reach new communities...we also must continue to fight for people of color, the LGBTQ community, and women. We don't want Donald Trump's America. We have come too far to let fearmongering take us backward.”

Like all effective wartime propaganda, Galindez's text is a seductive mixture of truth and falsehoods. The latter, designated above and below by bold italic, are glaring Big Lies. Given how the so-called “Reagan Democrats” embraced code-word Republicanism as an expression of their bigotry – the same hatefulness demonstrated by the 77 percent of white USians who refused to acknowledge the murderous racism in the Bush Regime's abandonment  of post-Katrina New Orleans – there is no possible way to win those voters back, not even by an alternative that benefits their families. Among the irrefutable lessons of my nearly 77 years, 56 of which have been in journalism of one form or another, is that white racism and/or homophobia trumps all other considerations – no pun intended.

Because the Democratic (sic) Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street, the notion any political revolution can transform the Democratic Party is not only a lie but a contradiction in terms – like arguing Nazism could have cured Germany of Antisemitism or the Ku Klux Klan could end USian racism.

Apart from a few identity-politics victories – pseudo-triumphs allowed only because they destroy the class solidarity essential to the struggle for economic democracy and therefore clandestinely serve our capitalist overlords – there have been absolutely no progressive gains...made over several decades. Galindez's claim is thus a picture-perfect example of the verbal sleight-of-hand by which he tries to conceal the Democratic (sic) Party's post-JFK history as the nation's chief betrayer of the 99 Percent. The last “progressive gain” was the U.S. Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973. Since then there have been naught but defeats. Many of these debacles are deadly, as in the ruinously impoverishing (and therefore life-shortening) destruction of labor unions or the huge loss of reproductive health care. (The latter is the result of JesuNazi violence, murder included, that is tolerated by Democrats and encouraged by Republicans. As of last year it has left approximately 90 percent of the nation's counties – homes to about 40 percent of the nation's reproductive-age women – without abortion facilities.)

United in the tyranny of ever-more-obviously Nazified capitalist governance, the two parties are in fact a single Ruling Class entity that functions as a good-cop/bad-cop enforcement team. Thus Galindez's claim we (presumably the Democratic [sic] Party) also must continue to fight for people of color, the LGBTQ community, and women is deception of the first order; see for example The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Governance (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008), particularly pages 272-277. A vital companion-book – especially now that Trump's victory has given the JesuNazis absolute power, is American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges; Simon & Schuster: 2006); see also The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Naomi Klein; Henry Holt and Company: 2007), most notably chapters 14 and 15. In truth the Democrats have been openly waging genocidal war on minority communities since President Bill Clinton's welfare-cutoff and mass-arrest laws were enacted during the 1990s. The Democratic (sic) Party's begrudging support for gay marriage climaxed years of outspoken opposition, and women – supposedly a favored Democratic (sic) constituency – were shafted both by Obama's sneaky gift to the anti-birth-control Christian fanatics and by his massive cuts in food stamps,  its victims including millions of single-mother families.

Moreover there is the now-obvious impermanence of the identity-politics wins – especially since the Trump Regime intends to wage war against gay rights and to re-impose nationwide zero-tolerance marijuana prohibition by mass internments, first in the states where marijuana is legalized or decriminalized, with fatally long federal prison sentences for anyone who survives arrest and is so convicted. Thus Galindez's we have come too far is an especially egregious Big Lie, an attempt to hide the hideous truth we have been – and indeed are being – thrust so far backward, no recovery may be possible.

There is no question we have been in a Dark Age for many years – I would say at least since the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963, maybe since the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. There is now no question it is about to get infinitely darker under Trump, just as it would have, albeit in different and perhaps more universally fatal ways, under Hillary. And history tells us such dark ages typically last 500 years or more – eternity for those who are born and die amidst the darkness.

***

IT WAS IN response to the shameless lies and deceptions asserted by “Our Opportunity in 2017” I fired off a comment-thread post in which I respectfully addressed Galindez as “Mr. Galindez” – a courtesy I always observe in such circumstances whether my reaction is positive or negative – and took him to task for his dishonesty.

I opened with the statement that transformation of the Democratic (sic) Party into a revolutionary organization was no more possible than the transformation of black widow spiders into household pets. I probably noted, much as I did above, that Galindez's ever-more-obvious support for identity politics was not only collaboration  with the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals, but perpetuated the capitalist governance that had reduced the future of the Empire (and therefore the future of humanity and the planet) to a choice between two Hitlers: Hillary Hitler, who intended to try to conquer Russia via World War III, and Donald Hitler, who intended a new Holocaust as his Final Solution to the Empire's problems with minorities, women and poverty. I ended by pointing out that in such revolutionary times as these, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution, and Mr. Galindez's ideology clearly identified him as belonging to the former category.

Unfortunately my exact wording is lost because I did not save the comment as a word document. I had no reason to believe Ash would suppress it. But suppress it he did. And when I asked that my text be returned, he first ignored my request, than said returning it was impossible. Here is the resultant e-correspondence:

On 12-Jan-17 08:31, Marc Ash wrote:

Loren, Sorry man but we are tired of the personal attacks on our authors. Did not approve you comment condemning Scott. Sorry.

m

On 12-Jan -17 09:11 Loren Bliss wrote:

Mr. Ashe:

Firstly, please do me the courtesy of returning to me the text of what will be my last-ever attempt to comment via Reader Supported News. That comment was not a “personal attack"; it was legitimate criticism that has obviously been suppressed for its (bluntly truthful) response to Mr. Galindez's efforts as a Democratic (sic) Party identity-politics ideologue and therefore his (seemingly) inadvertent role as one of the facilitators of Trump's no-doubt-permanent transformation of the United States into a Nazi nation.

Actually the censored post was relatively restrained as I did not point out that Mr. Galindez's claim "we have to defend progressive gains we’ve made over several decades" is nearly as slick a Democratic (sic) Party Big Lie as "change we can believe in." Apart from one economically meaningless identity-politics victory, there have been no "progressive gains" in this country since the Supreme Court's legalization of abortion in 1973. Indeed the reverse is true: since 1973 there have been naught but skyrocketing progressive losses. Thus Mr. Galindez's claim is but another example of the Democrats' wantonly dishonest rewriting of history to sustain the especially egregious Big Lie the Democrats represent and/or defend progressive values.

In this context, that you would suppress any rebuttal of Mr. Galindez's falsehoods thus unmistakably redefines RSN's purpose, from its hitherto-professed function of speaking truth to power to its now painfully obvious goal of serving the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals by dissemination of the lies and maintenance of the charades -- including those of Gapon-type pseudo-opposition -- deemed essential to the expansion of capitalist governance, i.e., the uniquely USian brand of Nazism now emergent.

Secondly, and very regretfully, your imposition of censorship makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion you and RSN have become a Democratic (sic) Party asset and therefore too an asset of one or more of the nation's 17 secret police agencies. Thus RSN demonstrates an ever-more-obvious similarity to the functions of Father Gapon and his movement on behalf the Okhrana in Tsarist Russia. Thus too, the only valid question is no longer whether RSN so serves but for how long it has been so serving. As I said in the post you suppressed, in revolutionary times such as these, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution; though the extent of your cooperation with the secret police remains unknown, by your defense of the fascism-facilitating Democratic (sic) Party, you and RSN obviously fall into the former category.

Thirdly, given these givens – particularly your decision to escalate your pseudo-progressive facilitation of fascism – I can no longer in good conscience attempt to contribute to your website, particularly now it is obvious you will suppress any genuine dissent.

Please in this context and for future reference be advised I own the copyrights to the Occupy Tacoma photography I contributed to RSN c. 2011-2012 and will, through my ongoing membership in the National Writers Union, promptly take action against any violations thereof.

I am sorry this ends as it does. Though I am not surprised. I have yet to meet a bourgeois self-proclaimed "progressive" who is not invariably more faithful to the bourgeois ethos and is therefore ultimately a (typical) betrayer of genuinely progressive values.

Loren Bliss

On 12-Jan-17 09:45, Marc Ash wrote:

Mr. Bliss,

With all due respect, I’ve known Scott Galindez for 17 years. He is one of the most dedicated grass-roots organizers I have ever met. He has been arrested for going over the White House fence in a peace demonstration. He always defends the weak and the poor and he’s is not afraid to pay the price for doing it. Scott was at Vandenberg in 2002, NY in 2004, Crawford Texas in 2006. And a host of other places most so called activists will never go.

Enough is enough.

Marc Ash,
Founder Reader Supported News

On 12-Jan-17 12:19, Loren Bliss wrote:

Mr. Ashe:

As I requested in my last, please return to me the text of the suppressed post.

Thank you,
Loren Bliss

On 12-Jan-17 12:34, Marc Ash wrote:

My last name is spelled “Ash.”

The post was deleted by one of our admins. So we don’t have a copy.

Marc Ash,
Founder Reader Supported News

On 12-Jan-17 13:20, Loren Bliss wrote:

My apology for the misspelling. My fault entirely, particularly since
your name is spelled correctly in my address book. Had no intention of making an Ashe of you, nor for that matter of myself.

Obviously I did not bother to note that no matter how many nationwide demonstrations Galindez might have participated in, it excused neither his identity politics nor the divisiveness so evoked. Nor did I note the obvious wealth – including the equally obvious question about its origins – that granted Galindez seemingly far greater mobility then the late, genuinely saintly Father William J. Bichsel S.J.,  a fellow alumnus of the Knox County Jail.

In this context I find it extremely interesting that Galindez seemingly shares not just Hillary's Democratic (sic) Party ideology; like Hillary, he also has Goldwater roots. Quoth RSN: “Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice...”

And then there is what the hatefully Hillaryite RSN poster screen-named Robbee said at 22:06 on 13 January 2017 in response to librarian 1984, one of the site's most knowledgeably articulate posters:

Quoth librarian:

I request that RSN put a picture of a soothing landscape or mischievous kittens at the head of a Hayden article or, better yet, don't run any more. I have a visceral urge to regurgitate on seeing this repulsive individual.

Quoth Robbee:

we'll look into it!
while you're at it? any more requests?

Apparently Robbee – continuously red-thumbed as perhaps the most obnoxiously unreadable Hillaryite troll ever to invade RSN – is now one of Ash's censors. Robbee's emergence as a site authority plus Ash's viciously McCarthyite attack  on investigative reporters Glenn Greenwald, Robert Parry and Ray McGovern, all of whom Ash attempts to smear as “Trump's enablers,” makes it obvious I'm well out of there. I'll miss the former RSN dialogue – especially with Radscal, economagic and librarian 1984 – but just as Ash said so dismissively to me, “enough is enough.”

LB/15 January 2016

-30-

Labor Day Blues: Reflections on the Imbecility of Hope

“Stop The War On Workers”: another hitherto-unpublished Occupy Tacoma picture from a November 2011 demonstration, a perfect image for Labor Day 2013 or any other year, especially since the September holiday is itself a weapon in that very same war, for which see below. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.  (Click on image to view it full size.)

*

SEPTEMBER'S LABOR DAY is a capitalist weapon against organized labor. Everywhere else on this beleaguered planet, “Labour Day” – International Workers Day – is celebrated on May Day or 1 May. But in the United States, the first Monday in September was chosen for the specific purpose of driving a lethal wedge between the U.S. labor movement and socialism.  Why? Because the One Percent understands that without socialism, there is no clarifying focus on the historical truth of class struggle. And without acknowledgement of class struggle – without recognition that anyone whose survival is dependent on the whims of a boss or a bureaucrat is definitively a member of the Working Class – there is no basis for 99 Percent solidarity. Such is the inconceivably malicious cunning of the USian Ruling Class.

Moreover it is in the disturbing but mostly forgotten anti-labor history of Labor Day we see once again how the greatest most deadly mistake of the modern-day USian (pseudo) Left is its blindly arrogant assumption that “capitalist” and “stupid” are synonymous. But it is history – the vital discipline the (pseudo) Left so vehemently rejects – that shows us the terrifying extent to which the capitalists are diabolically brilliant. Even in the late 1800s, the One Percenters were smart enough to recognize the revolutionary implications of socialism's insistence on Working Class solidarity – without which there is no effective anti-capitalist resistance.

Since then the Ruling Class – the One Percenters and the politicians, bureaucrats, academics, professionals and clergy who serve them with unquestioned and often unconscious obedience – has transformed the U.S. experiment in constitutional governance into its diametrical opposite, the Ayn Rand variant of fascist tyranny, the new paradigm of USian goverenance. Where once the U.S. proclaimed itself a nation of “freedom and justice for all,” now it is a realm of absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Thus we of the 99 Percent in the United States today are the most savagely oppressed, most hopelessly disempowered Working Class in the industrial world. But until we embrace the solidarity of class identity; until we acknowledge that capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue; until we admit capitalism is the total rejection of all humanitarian morality and therefore the closest approximation to absolute Evil that has yet appeared on this Earth; until we recognize the capitalists themselves as true sociopaths; until we know them as the most evil geniuses our species has yet spawned – our resistance will remain futile if not suicidal. 

*****

When Thom Hartmann reported last week the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is being sued for its defiant refusals to revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that are illegally active in partisan politics, it focused me again on the looming but mostly unacknowledged threat of Christian theocracy. Hence I commented accordingly:

Obviously the real issue here has two parts. One is (again and as always), the fact the Democrats and the Republicans are but factions within the One Party of Two Names that rules the United States for the capitalist aristocracy known as the One Percent. The other is the extent to which the entire Ruling Class – the One Percent and the politicians, the bureaucrats, the military officers, the  police commanders, the executives and the professionals who obediently serve these Wall Street aristocrats – is quietly but fanatically committed to the global imposition of Abrahamic theocracy, whether Judaic, Christian or Islamic.

 

This is why, for example, the so-called “liberation of Iraq” was in fact engineered to enable Islamic fundamentalists to take over the one genuinely secular state in the entire Islamic world. It is also why Hillary Clinton clandestinely collaborates with Sam Brownback to abolish women's sexual freedom in the United States. (For documentation of Hillary's commitment to theocracy and how she functions as a traitor both to her gender and to the principles of religious freedom, see pgs. 272-276 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008])  In either case, the objective is to employ the core savagery of Abrahamic religion – particularly its hatred of women and Nature and its endorsement of divine-right rule (whether by the kings of yesterday or the executives of today and tomorrow) – to brain-police and opiate all the rest of us as we are herded into capitalism's slave pens. The intent, as always under capitalism, is the total enslavement of all of us who are not part of the Ruling Class. The goal is an electronically enforced, theologically sustained tyranny intended to guarantee the One Percent's wealth and power literally forever.

 

The USian model – I refuse to call it “American” because, at least at present, there are still many nations in the Americas that remain outside the USian imperial boundaries – is of course the post-Reconstruction South, which has been a de facto theocracy since the late 1860s. The Ku Klux Klan is colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” because of how, in addition to its activities as a racist death squad, it traditionally functions as the Christian equivalent of the breathtakingly sadistic Islamic Morality Police.

 

In this environment, where the Big Lie of “American democracy” is so vividly revealed,  it is absurd to imagine the One Percent has allowed the appointment of any higher-court judges who would dare thwart capitalist governance – that is, absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – by ruling in opposition to the theocratic onslaught.  Of course I support the Freedom From Religion Foundation's lawsuit, but I have no doubt it will fail.

***** 

 

Thinking more about Hillary's false-flag feminism and her huge but mostly unreported betrayal of women's biological freedom, I remembered something I had written in my 2013 New Year's piece: 

(D)espite its protestations to the contrary, (the Democratic Party) is at its psychological core as anti-Working Class as its Republican counterpart.

 

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

 

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

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

 

There was personal heartbreak concealed in these angry and denouncing words because – much as my late father had once believed the black activism of the Civil Rights Movement would at last force the United States to live up to its constitutional promise – I had likewise believed for a time Women's Liberation would be our national salvation. But then USian feminists veered away from their original, Marxian-influenced quest for socioeconomic democracy, a sudden right turn authoritatively said to be the result of infiltration by Central Intelligence Agency operatives.  As a consequence, while the world feminist movement remained solidly Leftist and therefore focused on the role of gender in class struggle, its USian counterpart deteriorated into the counter-revolutionary, implicitly fascist toxicity of identity politics. Predictably, much of USian feminism was thus eventually manipulated into nothing more than a genderized argument for capitalism, even unto the casting of Ayn Rand as a feminist heroine.  Curious whether any feminists had dared document the socioeconomic hypocrisy that resulted – especially after second-wave feminism was absorbed and reshaped by the Democratic Party – I spent an entire day researching the topic. What I found was sufficiently exciting I immediately announced it in an email to a few of my closest relatives, friends and colleagues:

Hello all...You have read my references to “Ayn Rand feminism,” which is a semi-intuitive, semi-reasoned construct of my own making. But here, thanks to the New School for Social Research (which alas I could never afford to attend), is a link to a scholarly work entitled “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History” that confirms my observations and explains how Ayn Rand feminism  came to be. While some of you will find it unattractively turgid, the points it makes are critical to understanding how Ayn Rand feminism is aiding the process by which capitalism's most vicious form yet is being rammed down our throats. The analysis provided in the first two sections is invaluable. The third section, however, is scarcely worth reading. It is reduced to intellectual garbage by the English author's naive belief Barack Obama genuinely represented “change we can believe in,” that is, deliverance from the new (slave state) paradigm of capitalist governance rather than the treacherous imposition of its ever-worsening tyrannies he now so obviously was chosen to facilitate.

As so often do all academics, author Nancy Fraser buried her lead. Here it is on page 17 of the pdf file:  

“In general, then, the fate of feminism in the neoliberal era presents a paradox. On the one hand, the relatively small countercultural movement of the previous period has expanded exponentially, successfully disseminating its ideas across the globe. On the other, feminist ideas have undergone a subtle shift in valence in the altered context. Unambiguously emancipatory in the era of state-organized capitalism, (feminism's) critiques of economism*, androcentrism*, etatism* and Westphalianism* now appear fraught with ambiguity, susceptible to serving the legitimation needs of a new form of capitalism. After all, this capitalism would much prefer to confront claims for recognition over claims for redistribution, as it builds a new regime of accumulation on the cornerstone of women's waged labor and seeks to disembed markets from social regulation in order to operate more freely on the global scale.”   

In other words, the protective recognition of women's identity demanded by feminists (or the protective recognition demanded by racial, ethnic and sexual-identity activists), has been co-opted by  the One Percenters into a breathtakingly deceptive  means of seeming responsive to calls for greater democracy even as the savagery of anything-goes capitalism reduces all of us to slavery. 

 ________
*These terms are European synonyms for, respectively, belief in the supremacy of the marketplace; patriarchy or male supremacy;  statism or the primacy of the state as a regulator;  the modern, absolute sovereignty of nation-states as expressed in the Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648 to end the 30 Years War.

*****

 

Meanwhile the Ruling Class has already begun the propaganda onslaught by which it seeks to reassure us of the legitimacy of the 2014 and 2016 elections. The Democrat propagandists, because they assume a more intelligent party rank-and-file, at least attempt to be subtle. But re-legitimation of the party of Barack the Betrayer is still Kim Messick's obvious purpose. Hence my comments on the associated thread:

The disappearance of the Republicans would change nothing because the Democrats – the other, more blatantly dishonest half of the One Party of Two Names – would ensure the continuation of the One Percent's ever-worsening despotism.

 

Anyone who doubts this is in clinical dementia, denying irrefutable evidence. This includes the worst-in-U.S.-history treachery of Obama the Orator's permanent shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, also the unprecedented endorsements of tyranny evident in the unanimous and near-unanimous votes by which “both” parties routinely expand the de facto slavery of so-called “free trade” and eagerly nullify the Constitution to rob us of any residual ability to resist enslavement.

 

In this context, it becomes obvious Mr. Messick's analysis is merely pro-Democrat propaganda – very subtle propaganda indeed, but nevertheless nothing more than tacit restatement of the Big Lie of “American democracy” – that is, the now-utterly disproven claim the U.S. electoral system can ever again represent anything more than the mandates and decrees of the One Percent.

 

The Republicans – xenophobes to the bitter end – recognize the bigotry and conditioned ignorance of their minions and propagandize accordingly. That's no doubt the explanation for Hollywood's resurrection of old-time fascist scare tactics:  Given the density of Moron Nation, who can doubt this cinematic provocateur of yellow-peril hysteria will provide the newest and most compelling rationale yet for the USian policies of genocide by abandonment – the slashing and/or elimination of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation and all other safety-net stipends. In the past it was the abstract and therefore ambiguous specter of national debt; now it's the imaginary but nevertheless vividly concrete prospect of conquest – actually foreclosure – by the People's Republic of China. I can hear the new Republican arguments now: “we have to kill grandma because her mere existence is providing aid and comfort to the enemy.” 

Somewhere in the Great Beyond – if indeed there is such a thing – Leni Riefenstahl is surely smirking. So is Joseph Goebbels. And both of them are no doubt gleefully zieg-heiling the Fourth Reich, aka the United States of America. 

(Thanks to Brian Weaver for spotting the anti-Chinese, anti-safety-net film and reporting it via his excellent By the Allegro Desk newsletter.)

***** 

 

Waiting to learn whether the United States Government will attack Syria, it came to me the USian method of governance has remained unchanged since the overthrow of British rule. Whether the government's chosen adversaries were First Nations peoples, minorities, organized labor, domestic protest movements or rebels against the imperial will in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the response is and always has been the same: brute force. Thus the USian empire rules its conquered planet exactly as it ruled the banana republics that were among its first overseas conquests. 

But the death toll and the other consequences of such governance are always deftly hidden, all the more so given the easy malleability of electronic media. Thus it is only after one penetrates innumerable layers of deception the United States stands revealed as not just the ultimate conquistador, but also the most murderous nation in human history. 

A small but important part of that deadliness is the sheer terror the USian One Percent knowingly (and therefore with the greatest possible malice) inflicts on those of us who are poor, elderly or disabled citizens. For a person dependent on Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicare supplements or any of the various welfare programs, there's no more frightening prospect than a government shutdown as described eight days ago  in The Washington Post: “The United States is set to run out of borrowing authority in mid-October, leaving the government at a high risk of not being able to pay for Social Security checks, military salaries and other operations, the Obama administration said Monday.” 

Life in the great USian electronic concentration camp  is already difficult enough, especially given the government's increasingly blatant hostility toward lower-income folks – those of us the One Percent wants to exterminate by reducing or ending our pensions and stipends because we are no longer exploitable for profit. Hence all readers of this page should ask themselves how many people – especially elderly people – will die as a result of the escalation in stress inflicted by this newest episode of debt-limit terrorism. Indeed I might be one of the casualties: not long after I read the above-linked WaPo story, the episodic atrial fibrillation that has plagued me for the past three years seemingly became permanent. 

LB/2 September 2013

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