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| FR. WILLIAM BICHSEL S.J., the 87-year-old radical Roman Catholic priest who has been repeatedly jailed by USian Empire authorities in retaliation for his support of world peace, urges $15 Now activists to persevere in their nonviolent efforts despite the intensification of capitalist opposition. For details, see “$15 Now Tacoma Rallies in Downpour,” below. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2014; click on image to view it full size.) |
*
AT FIRST GLANCE, the two statements in the above headline may seem unrelated, perhaps even two halves of a perplexing non sequitur.
But
on further reflection we see they are opposite sides of the same
proverbial coin, just as Fr. Bichsel – Bix to his friends and comrades –
represents an ancient but revolutionary interpretation of Christianity
that is the antithesis of the authoritarian, pro-capitalist dogmas
espoused by the theocrats and their enablers.
Prompted
by the oppressive example of how Christian theocracy polices the former
Confederacy, the One Percent and the Ruling Class in general have long
been major financiers and facilitators of the campaign to impose
Biblical Law on the USian homeland – this as the most successful means
of suppressing anti-capitalist dissent. And just last week, the U.S.
Supreme Court hastened the national march toward a Christian state and
state Christianity, ruling that government-sponsored public prayers can now be addressed exclusively to Jesus.
The court also effectively said anyone who is offended by such theological discrimination can go to hell.
Meanwhile, the $15 Now movement – which was begun by Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative to
counteract the selfsame capitalist savagery the expansion of Christian
theocracy is intended to justify and preserve – has exploded across the
USian homeland and is catching fire even in overseas realms of the USian global empire.
In
the context of this growing rebellion, the Supreme Court's decree
becomes doubly significant. It's obvious intent is to back the nation
further away from the constitutionally mandated separation of church and
state, thereby thrusting us closer to the Taliban-like Biblical-Law dictatorship long sought by the lavishly funded Christian fanatics. But its clandestine purpose – note the court's obvious anti-democracy bias –
is clearly to bolster the white Christian prosperity-gospel prohibitions
against organized labor, especially any notion the USian Working Class
deserves better pay and conditions.
Exemplifying these restrictions, white Christian fanaticism in the South has long been a formidable barrier to
unionization, also to women's rights, racial or sexual equality and
intellectual freedom in general. The white Southern workforce is conditioned
from birth to believe bosses and aristocrats are god's chosen
representatives and that disobeying or even questioning their orders is
therefore a sin. Observing the results in a century-long succession of
debacles like the recent defeat of the United Auto Workers union at the
Chattanooga Volkswagen plant, the One Percenters have concluded
Abrahamic theocracy is capitalism's best friend. That's why USian policy
invariably favors Christian theocracy in the homeland and various other
forms of theocracy throughout the empire, Judaic in Israel, Islamic in
the remainder of the Middle East.
Thus
the implacably pro-plutocracy Supreme Court overturned a longstanding
judicial precedent that required public prayer to be non-sectarian,
referencing a deity only in the most generic terms. The former policy,
as explained to The Washington Post by George Washington
University Law Professor Ira Lupu (see the “exclusively to Jesus” link
above) was intended to make public prayer mutually acceptable to the
followers of all three Abrahamic religions, and to render it at least
not gravely objectionable to Buddhists, Wiccans, First Nations
traditionalists and any others including agnostics or atheists.
The
widespread imposition of prayer to open public meetings and other
governmental proceedings including public school ceremonies and sporting
events was begun about the same time the phrase “under God” was added to the national pledge of allegiance. (See also Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,
Harper: 2008; pgs. 195-204, especially pgs. 198-199.) As critics have
been pointing out ever since, the addition of that phrase to the pledge
in 1954 was the declaration that formally set the nation on its
present-day course toward theocracy.
And
now, thanks to the court's newest religious ruling, it is legal to
flaunt Christianity as if it were the one state-approved religion,
thereby theologically spitting in the faces of all non-Christians.
Those
of us who are offended by the references to Jesus or to the Christians'
triune god of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, says the court, can simply “leave the room” –
never mind such public acts of dissent will, in many parts of the USian
interior, surely invite a visit from the Ku Klux Klan or some other
vigilante group.
Nor,
as I can personally attest, are such realms limited to the South, where
the Klan functions much like the dread Islamic morality police and is
therefore colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study
Class.” Parts of Whatcom County, Washington – the northernmost county in
the lower 48 states – are similarly “policed” by JesuNazi vigilantes.
Earlier OAN reports documenting the escalating threat of Christian theocracy are here, here and here. Other relevant reports on the the court's new endorsement of Christian supremacy are here and here.
Another oppressive aspect of USian Christian theocracy – the purity
ball, a public ritual in which young girls are forced to pledge to their
fathers they'll be totally chaste until they give themselves to men in
male-supremacist marriage – is covered here.
******
Conditions in Ukraine
continue to deteriorate into warfare as neo-Nazi stormtroopers, now
part of Kiev's “national guard,” repeatedly assault enclaves of
pro-Russian separatists. Meanwhile the putsch regime in Kiev is being
advised by USian Empire secret agents, much as the Saigon regime was
advised during the early stages of the Vietnam War. Given the givens, I
can only hope the USian drive for global domination, which in this
instance is tantamount to goading a mother bear in her own den, does not
trigger World War III. Here, In Case You Missed It, is an anthology of last week's most telling dispatches:
“Putting the Ukraine Crisis in Context,” a Consortium News analysis by William Blum and “What Obama Can Do to Save Ukraine” by Robert Parry
are probably the most vital of these reports. The former reveals
additional historical and geopolitical details of how USian aggression
precipitated the crisis. The latter implies President Obama has lost
control of his administration, a chilling likelihood further detailed by
“Putin's Subtle Message to Obama,” another of Parry's superb reports. The remainder, “Burning Ukraine's Protestors Alive,” also by Parry, and “Odessa Atrocity Erupts in Peaceful City and No One Wonders Why?,” by William Boardman for Reader Supported News, portray the neo-Nazi horrors that have begun to characterize the crisis.
******
More Indications the President Is Secretly a White Republican: Momentarily displaying his former Obama the Orator persona and his now obviously bogus promise of “change we can believe in,” the Janus-faced USian president (sort of) condemned skyrocketing income inequality but then demonstrated his true Barack the Betrayer values by honoring Wal-Mart as a leader in the fight for environmental sustainability – a claim that is a huge exaggeration if not an outright Big Lie. Though Obama's Wal-Mart endorsement has already generated an angry petition campaign,
his heartfelt fondness for the nation's most anti-union employer is
proven by his appointment of former Wal-Mart Foundation President Sylvia
Mathews Burwell to head the Department of Health and Human Services,
for which see the “huge exaggeration” link above. The appointment
indicates the petition will be ignored – if not passed on to the various
secret police agencies to fulfill the Father Gapon function of identifying any and all opponents of capitalism and capitalist governance.
Meanwhile
the prospect of federal health and welfare programs administered by a
Wal-Mart executive makes perfect and terrifying sense in the context of a
president who slashed food stamps, killed single-payer/public-option
health care, sandbagged the Employee Free Choice Act and just issued yet
another gag-order directive that (again) proves his promise of “governmental transparency” was just another Big Lie.
******
An analysis by Crosscut, the Seattle on-line daily, “How the Metro Transit vote ran into a deep ditch,” says the resounding defeat
of the recent mass-transit sustainment-measure was inflicted by
“alienated suburban voters... (expressing a mindset) that cannot simply
be attributed to anti-transit sentiments.” The piece, published on
Friday 9 May, is written as if it were a response to my OAN column of Sunday 4 May, “Exclusive: How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies the Global Class War,” which cites the “transit is welfare” meme and defines anti-transit activism as
part of the One Percent's war against any government service that
benefits the 99 Percent. The comment thread associated with “deep ditch” gives me an opportunity for Outside Agitation Elsewhere:
I argue at length the real cause of the defeat is a suburban shift to
the Hard Right – a change also manifest in the (permanent) Republican
takeover of the Washington State Senate – never mind the fact Seattle's
PollyAnna progressives are loathe to recognize its reality.
******
Thom Hartmann asks, “Are Banksters responsible for autism?”
He then praises various measures by individual members of Congress,
bills that – if ever enacted – might indeed ease the nation's inconceivably oppressive student debt.
But I recognize all of these efforts will never become law and are
therefore nothing more than maliciously deceptive Big Lies, intended to
opiate increasingly angry students into believing relief might actually
be forthcoming:
Lifetime
enslavement by student debt will never be eliminated in the U.S.
precisely because the One Percent views it as a primary method of
suppressing student activism – which is precisely the motive behind the
policies that created the indebtedness.
Indeed,
the rationale for targeting students and academics – academe damned as
"the single most dynamic source" of anti-capitalist resistance – is the
primary topic of the infamous Powell Memo of 1971, which is widely
considered the original operations plan for the imposition of
zero-tolerance Ayn Rand fascism on the USian homeland. (The memo is
reprinted in full here.)
Meanwhile
Sen. Elizabeth Warren's interest-reduction measure, like Mr. Hartmann's
notion of a jubilee of student-debt abolition, are nothing more than
pie-in-the-sky manifestations of the imbecility of hope. Neither Sen.
Warren's mildly ameliorative bill nor any other genuinely humanitarian
measure will ever again be enacted by the U.S. Congress simply because
the Republican majority in the House has been gerrymandered into
permanence.
This
means de facto Republican control of the U.S. government is literally
forever. It will not end – it cannot be ended – until the entire system
is overthrown or the nation itself is toppled, most likely by the
looming environmental apocalypse, at which point the entire student debt
issue becomes moot.
Until
then – precisely as the diabolically clever, inconceivably powerful
One Percent intend – impossible-to-enact initiatives Ms. Warren and her
ilk will perpetuate the Big Lie of USian representative democracy even
as we of the peasantry and proletariat, students and professors
included, are driven ever deeper into slavery.
***
Another Hartmann piece, “Austerity 'savings' are built on 'blood money,'” details how austerity kills. I emphatically agree:
As I say almost every week in OAN,
"austerity" is nothing more than a euphemism for genocide: the
deliberate extermination of the Working Class. albeit without the odium
of death camps. Such is capitalist governance: absolute power and
unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the
rest of us. In other words, fascism.
******
Different Strokes from Different Folks: I got at least three thumbs-up clicks on the Reader Supported News comment thread of “The Bundy Ranch Militia Is Wearing Out Its Welcome,” Sara Morrison's 5 May report on the aftermath of the now-infamous retreat
of federal officers from vigilantes gathered to protect an
anti-government scofflaw. But when I posted an abbreviated but pointedly
relevant form of the same speculation on the RSN thread of “Disturbing New Pictures of the Arrest of Cecily McMillan,” Michelle Dean's text of 7 May that accompanies Stacy Lanyon's photos of the incident, I got nine thumbs down.
Here is what won three thumbs-up on the “Bundy Ranch” thread:
The
probable significance of the government's alleged retreat is at least
as terrifying as Barack the Betrayer's National Defense Appropriations
Act and its Supreme-Court-approved repeal of the Bill of Rights.
The
alleged retreat may be an act of accommodation and alliance rather than
an act of surrender. If so, it is directly analogous to Obama's
appointment of the Christofascist Rick Warren to give the 2009 inaugural
invocation. Just as Rev. Warren's appointment gave the Biblical Law
theocrats the clandestine kiss of Obamanoid acceptance and
encouragement, so too might the regime's departure from the Bundy Ranch
communicate acceptance and encouragement to the burgeoning USian
neo-Nazi movement and its storm-trooper “militia.”
Like
the Rev. Warren appointment, the withdrawal could be a telling
indication of how the Obama Regime sees our future – a scenario in which
opposition from the Left becomes so overpowering, the government can
defend itself only by open alliance with the extreme Right – exactly as
occurred in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic.
This
is the likelihood that links the gestures to Rev. Warren and the storm
troopers with NDAA, the slaying of the Bill of Rights and the
total-surveillance apparatus of the emergent USian secret-police state.
As others have noted, were the Bundy Ranch defenders from Occupy, by now
they would all be dead or disappeared.
All of which suggests the crude and repugnant portrayal of Obama as a second Hitler may have been eerily prophetic.
And here is what got nine thumbs-down – two days later and still with no militia arrests – on the “Disturbing New Pictures” thread:
The
obvious conclusion (to be drawn from the contrast between the
government's ongoing tolerance of the armed Bundy Ranch militia and the
persecution of unarmed and nonviolent Occupy Movement activists) is the
Obama Regime is tacitly siding with the militia – no doubt because
because its long-range fascist agenda is so bottomlessly malevolent, the
regime and its One Percent masters believe it will need all the help it
can get – vigilante militia, Ku Klux Klan, American Nazi Party, armed
Tea Baggers, whatever – to suppress the additional Leftist resistance
that's bound to arise. That's why a terrifying example is being made of
Ms. McMillan – same reason the regime is trying so hard to start World
War III in Ukraine.
Why
the big difference in the Rule of Thumbs? I've no idea, particularly
since my other comments on the “Pictures” thread – a discussion of the
photos themselves – drew clicks of approval. Perhaps on that thread, the
Obama-can-do-no-wrong disciples – of whom there remain far too many on
the USian Left – were out in force.
******
$15 Now Tacoma Rallies in Downpour:
Especially during the Pacific Northwest Coast's rainy season, which
lasts nearly nine months, the increasingly painful arthritis in my spine
and shoulders often dissuades me from photographing. Though back in the
day I comfortably carried three cameras, typically two M Leicas around
my neck and a single-lens reflex off my right shoulder, now even one
camera around my neck quickly becomes uncomfortable. And the combined
weight of two cameras – as I was using to shoot the $15 Now Tacoma rally
on 3 May – has left me hurting ever since, with a stiff nagging
soreness in my upper back, neck and right shoulder I haven't yet managed
to wriggle out from under.
Nevertheless
the effort was worth it, both for the rally itself, which despite the
rain drew about 100 persons, and for the work it produced, more of which
– including digital camera and cellphone imagery by other
photographers, is on the $15 Now Tacoma Facebook page.
Never mind the weather – I shelter my cameras with an old GI poncho –
it was damn nice to be out photographing again, and the fact the event
produced two pictures I'd have considered portfolio pieces back in those
thrilling days of yesteryear more than compensates for the aftermath of
lingering geriatric discomfort. The two pix are the portrait of Father
Bix above (which perhaps because I recognize him as a genuine saint
reminds me of an old-time holy card), plus a lucky grabshot, also in
black-and-white, of a rally-visitor's kid joyfully running across the
rainy meadow of Tacoma's People's Park, for which see the Facebook link.
(Disclosure:
I am a member of the $15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee and in that
capacity was also manning an informational table at the rally.)
Photo data:
Pentax MX, Tokina f/4 70-210mm zoom (mostly at 210mm and f/5.6), Sigma
f/4 35-70mm zoom (mostly at 35mm and f/5.6), Fujicolor 800 and Kodak
Professional BW400CN, the latter the last two rolls of a batch I'd
stored in my refrigerator since 2008. One MX body contained the color,
the other MX the B/W, and I switched the lenses back and forth as
necessary. Exposing about 50 24-exposure rolls of the BW400CN for a
commissioned story c. 2006-2008, I had discovered its actual daylight
ASA is closer to 600, and I set the meters accordingly. Yes, even after
years of shooting color, I still see better in chiaroscuro.
LB/11 May 2014
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