Another Inspection Again Wrenches My Life

I CAN'T OBJECT to the idea behind the federally mandated quarterly inspections of the individual dwelling units in any lower-income senior housing complex that was built with even a tiny percentage of public funds. Officially the purpose is to make certain the facilities are fully functional – that the plumbing, exhaust fans, alarm systems and electric ranges are all operational.

(I should note here we seniors are forbidden gas cooking, which means that 10 years after encountering my first electric range, I still can't successfully cook even the most simple meals. Indeed I despise electric ranges, which as far as I am concerned are worthless for anything save boiling water or heating soup. With a gas flame, you can see what you're doing; with electricity, you can only guess, which in my case means everything has to be burned on the outside to make sure it is not raw in the middle. But that is another issue for another time.)

Unofficially, the purpose of the quarterly inspections is to monitor the mental health of the occupants: detection of an unkempt or dirty apartment that might indicate the onset of Alzheimer's, hoarding that might endanger an occupant or create fire hazards for an entire complex, that sort of thing.

 

Nevertheless and in reality I resent these intrusions more than anything that fate and bureaucratic tyranny has ever dealt me. This is not just because of the violation of my privacy; the medical truth is that each inspection literally steals six or seven days from my life. Four of these days are taken by the preparatory cleanup, which for me – because of my arthritic spine, shoulders, left wrist and right knee – is an excruciatingly painful ordeal of dusting, vacuuming, mopping and, finally, on the morning of the inspection, neatening my bed into semi-military, Suzi-homemaker presentableness. This is in fact the most agonizing chore of all, which due to its hurtful extremes of bending and reaching takes me at least 30 minutes and sometimes half again that, the very reason I do it as seldom as possible. The remainder of the stolen time – the post-inspection hours of inspection day plus one or two days afterward – is required for recovery, most of it in my newly made bed.

But I have not verbalized these objections – at least not emphatically – until now, when the combination of the surprise state inspection inflicted on us at the end of last month and the upcoming regular inspection Tuesday is stealing 12 whole days from my life. (The interval between the first inspection and the second was just long enough all the cleaning had to be repeated.) The result – because the time-theft occurs at a peak of volunteer obligations (this blog; the monthly newsletter I produce for my fellow tenants; work for the organizing committee of 15 Now Tacoma; public relations for a friend who is a playwrite and musician) – is I am more frantically jammed up and therefore more jaggedly stressed than I have been at any time in memory, including the many years I worked at two and sometimes three jobs.

Another very big part of the problem is the wrenching time-theft imposed by my dependence on Pierce Transit. PT's bus service was only marginally adequate in 2009, the year my car died, and now after five years of anti-transit-user downsizing, it has been shrunken by least 70 percent. The transit authority bureaucracy will no longer disclose the actual size of the cuts, but the result is unquestionably the worst bus service I have ever seen anywhere in the urban U.S. Indeed there was more frequent bus service – far more frequent – provided by Knoxville Transit Lines in Knoxville, Tennessee during the 1950s. (For example, KTL buses ran until 1 a.m.; most PT buses cease operations at 9 p.m., some as early as 5 p.m. – and Knoxville in 1954 had half the population of Tacoma in 2014.) Bottom line, because of the bus service here – or rather the abysmal lack thereof – an errand that took me maybe 45 minutes when I had an automobile can now take up to an entire day.

 

I was of course prepared for the interruption inflicted by this month's quarterly inspection, but the additional seven days stolen by the surprise state inspection was the proverbial straw that broke the metaphorical camel's back. Such are the punishments capitalism maliciously inflicts on those of us it exploited into inescapable poverty.

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because so much time during these past few weeks has been stolen by inspections, OAN again gets shortchanged; again no real essay, and only five Internet posts during the past seven days:

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote about the mix of theocratic Christianity and Hard Right populism that enabled a Teabagger to beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor last week. But “David Brat: Free-Market Purist, Ayn Rand Devotee” said nothing about the campaign's historical precedent, and I responded accordingly:

What we are witnessing in David Brat – and mark my word (because you read it here first) – is the combination of strategy, tactics and rhetoric that will leverage the USian Homeland's final transition to unabashed neo-Nazism.

Doubt me? Read William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Simon and Schuster: 1959, 1960, 1987, 1988, 1990).

It's by studying Shirer we see what we might aptly dub the "Bratley Method" is precisely how the Nazis sold themselves and their programs to the seemingly ultra-civilized German people as Germany suffered from the devastation inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression.

***

Yes (Rise and Fall) is long, but it's vividly written, and its well worth the effort. For me it was the perfect sea-cruise book, and I had lots of time to read it – on the troopship returning from Korea, the U.S.N.S. Sultan, which in 1962 made the passage from Inchon to Oakland Army Terminal in about three weeks. For me, that was the blessed passage of return to civilian life after the three-year, Regular-Army active-duty portion of a six-year enlistment. (The remainder was in the reserves, but – luck of the draw or blessing of the Goddess – I was not recalled for Vietnam.) And of course I've reviewed Rise and Fall many times, as it's been part of my library ever since.

******

Alan Pyke exposed another atrocity of USian governance  in “Impoverished Mother Dies in Jail Cell Over Unpaid Fines for Her Kids Missing School.” I noted how it exemplifies capitalism in action:

What this Dickensian tragedy tells us is that in the merciless new world of the former United States – a realm transmogrified into the de facto Fourth Reich – any one of us who is not part of the Ruling Class could suffer the fate of Eileen DeNino

Indeed the death of Eileen DeNino – and the deaths of so many others like her, always from the denial of basic human needs that now under the savagery of Ayn Rand economics have become privileges of wealth – makes me think perhaps the Hans Christian Anderson story of the “Little Match Girl” is replacing the Horatio Alger tales as the epic that properly symbolizes our present and future. (Indeed, recast in a 21st Century setting by cinematographer Filip Matevski's 12-minute film, it becomes just that.)

Apropos which, perhaps (an anti DeNino poster) would say the Match Girl too "refused to help herself" when, as in Matevski's work, the child chose to spend the night in the freezing cold rather than submit to sexual abuse, or – as in the older versions of the story – refused to go home to be beaten by her father.

Meanwhile let us all mourn Eileen DeNino, a mother dead in debtor's prison, another victim of capitalism's New World Order.

******

Trevor Timm of Guardian UK revealed another of the dark and menacing secrets of Obamanoid tyranny in “The US Government Doesn't Want You to Know How the Cops Are Tracking You.” I pointed out an even darker truth:

It is a great irony the wanna-be Nazis of the Confederate-Flag/Swastika-Banner Hard Right – the Christians who claim the U.S. Constitution gives them the right to persecute non-believers; the white racists who believe their god gives them dominion over non-whites; the misogynists who think all women are sluts at heart – were the first to caricature Obama as another Hitler.

Perhaps it was just one of those oddball examples of accidental prophecy from a wildly incongruous source.

More likely it was a case of psychological projection, the mechanism of recognition embodied in a taunt once commonplace on Southern schoolyards: “it takes one to know one.”

However it came about, its terrifying truth becomes more evident every day. Barack Obama is worse than Bush, even worse than Nixon. He is the first genuine tyrant to hold the office of President of the United States, and by his embrace of the modalities of tyranny, he is methodically transforming this nation and its empire into the de facto Fourth Reich.

But the greatest irony of all is how it is his own race – more than any other group of us who, because we are lower-income people, are being scapegoated into equivalents of Nazi Germany's Jews – that is already bearing the brunt of this looming new holocaust in which federalized local police are trained and equipped to function as the new Gestapo.

******

Charles E. Cobb Jr. discussed his forthcoming book, which boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis.” Reader Supported News titled Cobb's important essay “Guns Made Civil Rights Possible: Breaking Down the Myth of Nonviolent Change,” but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted the actual title of the book, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). Then my comment-thread response got right to the point:

A similar volume, Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense (University of North Carolina Press: 2004), was marginalized by the same zero-tolerance codas of political correctness with which the U.S. Left fanatically suppresses all positive references to firearms.

Meanwhile, with the Working Class more in jeopardy than ever, the USian Left's signature effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – i.e., mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is surely amongst the greatest ironies of human history.

Contrary to its claims, pacifism cannot succeed without the threat of violence. The British surrendered to Gandhi's pacifism only because it was backed by the potential of armed revolution organized by the Soviet Union. The same is true of Rev. King's nonviolence.

Indeed all the humanitarian gains of the 20th Century – unions, labor rights, civil rights, safety-net programs – were wrested from the capitalists only by the Soviet threat. That's why, now the U.S.S.R. is dead, capitalism is methodically abolishing all those concessions.

But with the USian Left embracing pacifism and thus functioning as the chief spokesperson for the One Percent's effort to disarm the 99 Percent, these bitter truths are now also tabooed.

***

It was the armed Anglo-Saxon and Cymru yeomanry with their deadly longbows – the massed repetitive firepower of which was not equaled until the invention of the machine gun – that eventually brought the invading Norman kings (of England) to heel. Nevertheless it took what amounted to 300 years of intermittent civil war, some of which is immortalized in the epic of Robin Hood.

Though it is another truth suppressed by political correctness, the most important historical difference between Britain and the continental nations originated from Roman forcible disarmament of conquered peoples. Universal throughout the imperial mainland, it was for a number of reasons never successful in the province of Britannia. Hence even before the Anglo-Saxon conquest, the British peasantry was always at least minimally armed, which is why the remnants of what we know today as "democracy" were never totally exterminated there, seeds that began thriving in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

******

Juan Cole wrote a piece on the criminality of the Iraq War,  but “Blair-Bush & Iraq: It’s Not Just the Quagmire But the Lawbreaking & Deception” ignored what may be the most important aspects of the story:

(1)-That it was the perfect distraction from the questions about 9/11 that were then gathering momentum;

(2)-That, apart from Turkey (which is now hopelessly lapsing back into Islamic theocracy), Iran was the only genuinely secular society Islamic culture has ever produced. Thus its destruction brought about the immediate re-imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy, whether Sunni or Shiite, with all its misogynistic savagery. This is an obvious victory for the One Percenters whose intent is to make capitalism safe by imposing Abrahamic theocracy – Jewish in Israel, Christian or Islamic everywhere else – on the entire world.

I keep hoping maybe next week won't be so grim, but then I remember we're all residents of a dying planet – a world we ourselves are killing. 

LB/15 June 2014

-30-

Obama Debate Failure: Ineptitude or Obedience?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S performance in the first 2012 presidential debate last night was appalling.

 

It was also profoundly embarrassing, the most disappointing such spectacle I have ever witnessed, its wretchedness subtly underscored by the slumped-shoulder body-language of First Lady Michelle Obama as she walked on-stage to hug her husband at the televised event's conclusion. No doubt a part of her excellent mind was wondering how she might console her man in the wake of such an obvious and glaringly public failure.

 

While the pundits offered any number predictable excuses for the president's atrocious showing, none dared ask the pivotal question: given that today's politicians are nothing more than surrogates of the One Percent, bound to obey Ruling Class mandates as a condition of their survival, what if Obama was just following orders?

 

Think about it. It is obvious the corporate aristocracy overwhelmingly favors Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It is equally clear the unpredicted intensification of terminal climate change – apocalyptic weather and the resultant famine, disease and rebellion – has added new urgency to the capitalists' plans for self-preservation through fascism.

 

Romney/Ryan would kill forever the last remnants of U.S. constitutional democracy and finalize almost overnight the conversion of the United States to the United Estates of a de facto Fourth Reich. Obama – not the least because of the First Lady's powerful and emphatic commitment to women's rights – would continue on the somewhat slower path toward unabashed fascism that characterizes his present regime.

 

But given the crises generated by skyrocketing climate-change, the slower path is no longer acceptable to the Ruling Class. The aristocrats want capitalist governance now – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and (population-reducing) genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

 

Indeed this is the class-struggle backdrop of all modern global politics. The aristocracy is assuring its own survival – and condemning all the rest of us to death – by imposing Nazi-style zero-tolerance regimes on the entire planet, with the U.S. military as the primary instrument of oppression.

 

Therefore we should consider the likelihood – I would say very high probability – Obama is again proving himself to be the obedient servant of the Ruling Class. Hence – just as after 2008 Obama the Orator became Barack the Betrayer – now he is once more following orders, handing the election to Romney/Ryan, albeit with assurance he and his family are guaranteed a permanent place in the castle.

 

Which, if one applies Occam's Razor, is the only logical explanation for the president's horrid performance last night. Too bad no brand-name journalist – not even those on the (alleged) Left – has dared raise the question.

***** 

Women's Rights: the Only Remaining Reason to Vote Democratic 

 

Editor's Note: Though I frequently post comments to story-threads on other sites, I remain conflicted about whether those words should also be published here in Outside Agitator's Notebook. Yes, I have posted such work in the past, but I have never really been comfortable with it. The contrary argument is that it is not just unnecessary duplication but ostentatious self-glorification – a notion underscored by the stylistic problems implicit in quoting one's self. Do I use quotation marks or italic to denote text that first ran elsewhere? Do I revise it for publication here? And – the biggest problem of all – how do I summarize the piece upon which I am commenting without violating the ever-more-stringent limitations on so-called “fair use”? Meanwhile the best argument for such posting comes from one of my newest readers, the New England environmental activist/organic farmer whose screen name is cleanearth. “I was asking myself the same question,” she wrote in a recent email. “Shall I put my online comments into my blog (which I haven't written in months)?  I like some of my online comments, so I think I'll do that and you should, too, so we don't use up our best thoughts online and none of our communicants (isn't that what they call churchie people?) get to see them.......so, yes, do include them in your Blog.” Thank you, Nancy; I'll do as you suggest. Here goes: 

*

Jill Filipovic of The Guardian reported recently on the Republican Party's obvious and intensifying war against women and Reader Supported News republished her story, election-year important because it underscores the one and only realm in which the Democrats have at least begrudgingly lived up to their rhetoric, remaining (somewhat) less theocratically fascist than their GOP counterparts.

Though I did not see Ms. Filipovic's scathing analysis until rather late in the day, I nevertheless commented accordingly:

The Republican Party's bottomless hatred of women is in fact absolute proof of its function as the political-action agency of fundamentalist Christianity.

Indeed it would not be far afield to regard today's GOP -- with its legions of Teabaggers, Ku Klux Klanners and JesuNazi fanatics -- as a Christian version of Hamas or Al Qaeda.

Meanwhile the magnitude of the financial support the party gets from the One Percent underscores the fact theocracy (whether Christian, Islamic or Jewish), has emerged as the favorite Ruling Class method of imposing and perpetuating capitalist tyranny.

Why? Because under theocracy, corporate management rules by divine right.

Thus Republicans are theocrats. Their not-so-hidden agenda includes making Christianity the official state religion and using "Biblical Law" to dis-empower women and destroy the few remnants of our constitutional democracy.

Hence -- because women are always at the forefront of struggles for liberty (note how Liberty is always portrayed as female) -- women are the Republicans' primary target.

Which is the one point where the Democrats truly differ from the Republicans. The Democrats at least acknowledge women's rights, while the Republicans make no secret of their hatred and contempt for women.

And that by itself is reason to vote Democratic at all levels, federal state and local. To vote otherwise is literally to vote against women and Womanhood. 

*****

Seattle's Crosscut: Three Local Reports of Global Significance

Crosscut, an on-line journal published in Seattle, often reports on local issues that have national significance. Last week its writers hit a kind of trifecta. Dick Nelson exposed how the Democrats are no different from the Republicans in protecting the Ruling Class from fair taxation, Floyd McKay described how environment-hating capitalists will destroy a genuine near-Ecotopia in the northwest corner of Washington state, and Crosscut publisher David Brewster wrote a mini-history that omitted vital facts about how Ruling Class hostility doomed Seattle's best efforts in alternative journalism.

Mr. Nelson's report – a comprehensive update on the ugly truth that inflicts ever-deepening despair on progressives and exemplifies political reality throughout the United States – elicited my shortest (and snarkiest) comment: 

The (permanent) obstruction to meaningful tax reform in Washington state is the fact both parties are equally controlled by the One Percent and therefore represent and serve no purposes beyond those of the Ruling Class.

Though the Democrats still make a pretense of honoring the New Deal, and though a few Democratic legislators still (try to) remain true to its principles, beneath this clever disguise they are thus indistinguishable from the Republicans on all relevant economic issues.

Hence regardless of which party is in power, the rich will continue to be pampered by obscene dispensations from taxation while the rest of us suffer accordingly. 

***

Bellingham is the one city in Washington state – maybe in the entire U.S. – that not only talks environmentalism but genuinely lives it. 

For example, Bellingham voters overwhelmingly support mass transit. When the auto-centric suburbanites, the Teabaggers and all the other anti-public-transport troglodytes in the surrounding county voted to kill the city-county transit system, the courageous little metropolis saved its buses by defiantly creating its own transit authority.

The move generated immeasurable controversy, including the predictable bigotry and hatefulness from the transit-is-welfare Republicans. But it demonstrated Bellingham's stern commitment to environmental sanity – a test failed abysmally by other municipalities in this allegedly “evergreen” state, my own Tacoma included. 

Which may exemplify the biggest (unspoken) reason the Ruling Class has targeted Bellingham for destruction by turning it into an international coal port: the fact that, under capitalism, environmental steadfastness is intolerable subversion – heresy to be crushed by any means and at any expense. 

As I said in response to Mr. McKay's status report on the coal-port struggle: 

Obviously the fix is already in; the decision has already been made on Wall Street and in the relevant board rooms, and now all that remains is for it to be rammed down our throats, no matter the extent to which it triggers our gag reflexes.

Thus the coal port with all its attendant environmental ruin is to be imposed on us all, exactly as implied by the pivotal verb in Mr. McKays' second paragraph: not the conditional "would" but the defining (and definitively militaristic) "will serve." 

Anyone who imagines otherwise is in denial about the long history of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the traditional spear-point for environmentally destructive projects favored by the One Percent. Precisely as Mr. McKay reports, the corps is already restructuring the misleadingly named "process" to minimize opportunities for effective dissent.

Which is not to say we should surrender without a fight. In a struggle of this sort, literally a battle for the future of the entire Puget Sound region, any obstruction placed in the enemy's path is a victory. 

But we should nevertheless recognize that the war -- to prevent Puget Sound from being reduced to Appalachia West and to save Western Washington from being turned into a satellite of West Virginia -- is already lost. We are thus (again) victimized by the death of the U.S. experiment in constitutional democracy and by imposition of its vultures-come-home-to-roost replacement: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

As to Craig Cole and the role he is playing in the Appalachianization of Western Washington, I am not the least bit surprised. Cole was a slippery sycophant of the Ruling Class – a Republican in Democratic disguise – when I knew him at Western Washington State College in 1971, and obviously he remains so today. 

Meanwhile in the entire coal-port affair we see yet another bitter example of what is emerging as our most painful 21st Century lesson: that without economic democracy there is no democracy at all. 

***

Apropos Seattle's generally excellent on-line daily Crosscut, Mr. Brewster's curiously selective memory reveals the protect-the-One-Percent stance essential to journalistic success in the present-day United States. He thus exemplifies why today's so-called “alternative” media often differs from its Ruling Class counterpart only in the breadth and depth of its offerings, but almost never in its willingness to challenge the core shibboleths of capitalism. Obviously I could not abide Mr. Brewster's omissions: 

Interesting retrospective by Mr. Brewster, but deficient in at least three ways. 
 

There's no mention of The Seattle Sun (1974-1981), which under the editorship of Dick Clever (and later of Jane Hadley) set the pace for alternative newspaper journalism in Seattle.

One of The Sun's many coups was the series by Bruce Olson that scooped the world on the impending bankruptcy of the Washington Public Power Supply System, the largest municipal bond default in U.S. history. Alas, it was in retribution for just such fearless reporting The Sun was destroyed by a Ruling Class advertising boycott -- a pivotal fact in any history of Seattle journalism. 

Nor does Mr. Brewster make any mention of how the same vindictiveness on the part of the local One Percent, again expressed via an advertising boycott, killed Seattle Magazine in 1970.

Lastly there is the capitalist macrocosm illustrated by the Seattle microcosm.

If capitalism is to thrive in an age of terminal scarcity, it demands two dictatorial prerequisites. The first is that government at every level must be restructured in accordance with the principles set out by Benito Mussolini: absolute power and unlimited profit for the (corporate) Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else – exactly the regime now being imposed on the United States. Secondly – and as the pivotal element of the first – it is essential the masses be kept as ignorant as possible: note for example the One Percent's effort to bolster its profits by concealing the deadly dangers of genetically modified foods.

A major part of shutting off the information flow and thus dumbing down the public is, of course, the methodical destruction of newspapers – a process that becomes especially evident when the relative health of British and European print media is contrasted to the terminal sickness with which its U.S. counterpart has been (deliberately) infected.

Surely the notably thoughtful Mr. Brewster cannot be unaware of these factors, especially how various governmental policies, postal rates in particular, have been constructed specifically to destroy the U.S. press. Thus it is disingenuous of him to attribute the termination of public access to vital information as merely a consequence of random forces in an allegedly free market – a market that is in fact as deliberately structured as any psychology lab's rat maze. 

(Disclosure: a working journalist since 1956, I have had at least one proverbial foot in the alternative press since 1963, when I wrote for The Knoxville Flashlight Herald under the editorship of Marion Barry, who was then a field secretary for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. In 1966-67, I was the text editor for Marc Crawford's TransMundo, the world's first alternative photo agency. From 1967 through 1971, my photographs and/or writing appeared in several alternative publications, among them The East Village Other, The Manhattan Tribune and Northwest Passage. From 1974 through 1976 I was the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, and into the early '80s wrote occasional in-depth reports for Tacoma Review. Most recently, I covered Occupy Tacoma for Reader Supported News, an on-line alternative.) 

LB/4 October 2012

-30-

Solar Flares Could Fry Reactor Safeties, Nuke Us Dead

Truthout has published a genuinely scary special report on a hitherto-undisclosed risk implicit in nuclear reactors. Entitled “Four Hundred Chernobyls: Solar Flares, Electromagnetic Pulses and Nuclear Armageddon,” it should be required reading for every anti-nuclear activist on the planet. 

Alas, it probably won't be. Truthout's relatively limited readership combines with a by-permission-only restriction on additional dissemination that seemingly guarantees the report's vital revelations will remain under-publicized.

Nevertheless – invoking “fair use” – I offer the following quote from the report's text:

“In the past 152 years, Earth has been struck by roughly 100 solar storms, causing significant geomagnetic disturbances (GMD), two of which were powerful enough to rank as "extreme GMDs." If an extreme GMD of such magnitude were to occur today, in all likelihood, it would initiate a chain of events leading to catastrophic failures at the vast majority of our world's nuclear reactors, similar to but over 100 times worse than, the disasters at both Chernobyl and Fukushima.”

Meanwhile a more recent report circulated via Reader Supported News warns us the Fukushima debacle is infinitely worse than we are being told – that it could literally become an extinction-level event: 

“Japanese diplomat Akio Matsumura...warned that the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant may ultimately turn into an event capable of extinguishing all life on Earth.”

Perhaps because I have witnessed firsthand the nightmare fragility of our astonishingly presumptuous technology, I felt no need to add to the discussion threads generated by these glow-in-the-dark warnings of our suicidal nuclear folly. Besides, what came to mind after I read “Four Hundred Chernobyls” would have required I first apologize for paraphrasing T.S. Eliot and then explain to the illiterates why the apology was due:

This is how world ends: not with a bang but a shimmer.

*****

Case Study: Bribery Suppresses Innovation, Loots Our Pocketbooks

A courageous investigative-reporting service called United Republic, which does an exceptionally good job of showing how capitalism and tyranny are synonymous, recently published an exposé entitled “Corruption Responsible for 80 Percent of Your Cell Phone Bill.”

The report reveals why U.S. cell phone service – frustratingly bad and oppressively expensive – will probably remain so forever. It also provides a superb example – one of the best I have yet seen – of how (real) capitalism operates through capitalist governance to destroy the innovation and competition (theoretical) capitalism claims as the cornerstone of its alleged success. Thus we learn how (real) capitalism reduces (theoretical) capitalism to a Big Lie, a scam in which the One Percent always prosper and the rest of us are invariably ripped off.

“Last year,” says the report, “a new company called Lightsquared promised an innovative business model that would dramatically lower cell phone costs and improve the quality of service, threatening the incumbent phone operators like AT&T and Verizon...The phone industry swung into motion, not by offering better products and services, but by going to Washington to ensure that its new competitor could be killed by its political friends...”

“And how much does this cost you?  Take your phone bill, and cut it by 80%.  That’s how much you should be paying.  You see, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, people in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland pay on average less than $130 a year for cell phone service.  Americans pay $635.85 a year.  That $500 a year difference...(is) the cost of corruption...the return on (the phone monopolies') campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.”

Because the report is complete unto itself, I added nothing to its comment thread. But that thread is of at least clinical interest: note the vehement, even fanatical denials characteristic of the disciples of capitalism, an ideology so evil it requires compulsive lying merely to function.

*****

Stealth Theocracy: Tennessee Would Let Teachers Be Preachers

A Ruling Class Media report picked up by Reader Supported News informs us the Tennessee legislature has overwhelmingly approved a law that would allow fanatical Christians who are also public school teachers to preach in their classrooms against climate change and evolution.

The bill's opponents argue the measure gives legal protection to the state's many teachers – probably a significant majority – who would abandon science and in its place teach fundamentalist doctrine that rejects evolution and either denies the reality of climate change or describes it as divine punishment inflicted on humanity and Nature by the Christians' sadistic god.

As I said on the comment thread: 

Having had the extreme misfortune to have spent three of my four public high school years in Tennessee, I know the state's K-12 "education" system is dominated by Bible-thumpers.

These are not just the "church twice on Sunday and once in the middle of the week" fundamentalists of country-music fame. They are raging fanatics who regard the separation of church and state as a hateful imposition by "the Yankee tyrants" who won the Civil War. Thus too "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class," the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan.

Given these realities, what the legislature has enacted is a de facto ban on the teaching of evolution and climate change, a new, stealth version of the anti-evolution law that made the state infamous. 

Which reminds me of something a fellow New Yorker said when he returned from a visit to the land of the Scopes Monkey Trial: “I'd rather be a peasant in Brooklyn than a king in Tennessee.”

And where is Clarence Darrow now that we so desperately need him?

*****

In Transit: the Long Ago Origin of OAN's Newest Feature

“In Transit” is what its name implies: anecdotes – most humorous, some poignant, a few troubling – collected during rides on public transport. The material will mostly be new, appearing here whenever events warrant, but the idea to collect and write such vignettes is one of my older professional impulses. It came to me back in the Stone Age 1960s, when I was a young journalist in Manhattan and often rode the train to visit a then-lover in Asheville. For various reasons, mainly the long-since-remedied absence of a local airfield capable of accommodating jets, the trip to North Carolina's unpublicized bohemian enclave took (only) 12 hours by rail: you boarded at the original Penn Station, switched to a Southern Railroad express train in Washington, D.C., then switched again to an over-mountain local at Greensboro. Compared to an air-odyssey of about 26 hours with at least three and maybe four changes of planes, it was a comfortable, relatively quick trip.
 

The Pennsylvania Railroad train – I believe it was the Congressional Limited – departed at 5:30 p.m. It was powered by a GGI, a piece of functional sculpture, probably the finest and surely now the most legendary type of electric locomotive ever built.

On the Southern (the train known as The Southerner), we sped over the route immortalized by “The Wreck of the Old 97,” and my first time on that leg of the trip I was a bit surprised to realize I was singing the lyrics in my head: “it's a long long road from Monroe to Danville and she's lined on a three mile grade.” Later when I mentioned it to my lover, herself a folk singer of considerable skill, she laughed and said “Well, what did you expect? It's a real song.” She meant in her southern verbal shorthand the song was powerful because of its basis in historical fact – the crash of a speeding mail-train that killed 11 railroaders and severely injured nine others. She also meant my proximity to the accident's locale and my general Celtic sensitivity to such things had probably opened me to some subtle residue of the Old 97's gory denouement.

Riding the over-mountain local – a combination of coaches and freight cars called the Asheville Special – was also a novel experience. As I remember, we left Greensboro at 3 a.m. and arrived in Asheville four hours later. As we were pulling out of the station, the conductor passed out menus: eggs, bacon, sausage, fried grits, sliced tomatoes, toast, pancakes and syrup, biscuits and gravy, coffee, tea, milk. The train stopped briefly at High Point so he could radio the orders ahead to a trackside café – don't remember whether it was at Statesville or Hickory – where we halted just long enough to pick up the hot food in covered, cafeteria-style trays that, emptied, would be dropped off on the return trip. (I always ordered eggs over easy, bacon, grits, tomatoes, toast, coffee – and yes it was always delicious.) Then as we ate our breakfasts the train continued westward into the mountains, eventually passing another place of railroad legend and song: Swannanoa Tunnel, built by convicts, nearly all of them Blacks, at the cost of uncounted deaths: the estimates vary from 120 to 400 men killed.

(If you link to the video, note how the the singer subtly identifies himself as a ghost, implying he was one of the many slain by the frequent cave-ins that plagued the tunnel's construction. “I'm goin back to Swannanoa Tunnel,” he sings, “cause that's my home.” Note too how the melody of the opening words echoes the incomparable wail of a steam locomotive's whistle, a haunting, heart-rending wellspring-of-the-blues sound known to nearly all my generation but now, like some phantom train dwindling into eternal night, sadly ever more distant from collective memory.)

The gray-haired conductor on the over-mountain local lamented the loss of steam engines more eloquently than anyone I've ever met. He had been with the railroad his entire worklife, “nigh onto 50 year,” and as a younger man he'd been a steam locomotive engineer. “Them engines were alive,” he said, his blue eyes alight with recollected joy. “Fireman gets yore firebox right an ye find the sweet spot on yore throttle, that stack she'll talk to ye.” For a telepathic instant I was with him in his cab, heard not just the harsh edgy rhythm of the exhaust but the entire symphony of hiss and roar and clank and rumble, felt the throbbing tempo of the locomotive and the heat of its cindery breath. Far ahead is a grade crossing. Now for an instant the engineer is a denim-overalled virtuoso, his solo a long minor-keyed riff in white steam notation. Then he waves from the cab window to a few children walking the red clay road home from school, my boyhood self amongst them. Finally he's beyond our vision, a soot-begrimed shepherd of human lives and cargo, his smoke-wreathed passage a momentary epic of fire and thunder and the song of the banshee, dwindling, gone. “Aint nothin like it anymore,” he said. “Damn diesels jes machines, no life in em at all.”
 

On one of my trips south a talkative, ostentatiously effeminate young man hopped aboard just as we were leaving Manhattan, announced to everyone within earshot he was bound for Asheville, then explained how his concern for a sick friend there was forcing him to “abandon civilization” for “at least a week among the cross-burning barbarians.” Though at first his sarcastic monologue about the South was genuinely funny, by the time we crossed the Potomac River into Virginia it had become wearying, even potentially offensive, so much so a few of us were concerned he might provoke some die-hard Southron to real violence. As we rolled into Asheville, he began pacing back and forth the length of the car, seemingly anxious about where he might exit the train. Finally he asked the conductor: “Which end do we get off?”

The old railroad man – who several times in the interest of maintaining peace had asked the outspoken passenger to please keep his prejudices to himself – glared in combined perplexity and disgust, then answered in a classic Southern Appalachian basso: “Well, either end I reckon. By god they both stop.”

LB/19 April 2012

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