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

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One Year Later: a Former Occupier's Dissenting View

Samuel Farber's “Occupy Wall Street and the Art of Demanding,” published by Truthout on 13 September 2012, is the best analysis I have yet seen of Occupy's tragic but mostly self-inflicted failure,  the magnitude of which was painfully apparent in the collapse of the demonstrations planned for downtown Manhattan on the 17th, the first anniversary of  the movement's emergence.

Carefully sidestepping assignment of blame, Farber wrote that Occupy's avowedly “anarchist” refusal to formulate a program of demands “might have been beneficial initially in that it might have created a more welcoming atmosphere to newly radicalized people.”

As I noted repeatedly during my own involvement with Occupy Tacoma,  encouraging the articulation of grievances is the first step in any effective organizing campaign. 

“But as  movements develop and mature,”  Farber continued, “they need to state more clearly what they stand for and not only what they stand against. Movements need to develop some kind of theory to guide their actions, not as an obscure, technical body of thought only accessible to the select few, but as the clearest possible ideas about the nature of the enemy and of the movement.”

Again, Farber is absolutely correct. And it was in these pivotal functions – formalization of grievances into demands, formulation of supportive ideology – that Occupy failed so abysmally, betraying not only its initial promise but the (briefly) bolstered hopes of the 99 Percent it claimed to represent.    

Which brings me to the one huge flaw in Farber's work: his obvious reluctance to forthrightly address the broader reasons for those betrayals. Thus – apparently as a byproduct of an admirable but misguided effort to avoid confrontation – he omits the two most vital factors in the historical and psychodynamic processes that, in retrospect, probably made Occupy's downfall inevitable.

One of these is global, the fact the death of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has removed all the restraints that previously compelled the capitalists to ameliorate or conceal their innate savagery.

Though the U.S.S.R. was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be, its official Marxism nevertheless provided an obvious alternative to capitalism. The socioeconomic democracy promised by Soviet-backed Marxian revolution so terrified the denizens of Wall Street and comparable enclaves elsewhere, they cunningly erected a  seductive facade to hide capitalism's darkest and most murderous reality – the fact it is based on the overthrow of all humanitarian morality and, in its place,  the elevation of infinite greed to maximum virtue, with Ayn Rand's impossibly turgid prose as the latter-day equivalent of Mein Kampf.   

Underlying the Ruling Class response was its fearful recognition the Soviet intelligence agencies – the variously-named KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security) and the lesser known but infinitely more formidable GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye or  Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff) -- were genuine cadres of professional revolutionaries.  It is in this context Communism's explicit threat to capitalism – backed not just by rhetoric but by the overwhelming might of the Red Army –  explains all the humanitarian successes of the 20th Century. What empowered organized labor, gave birth to the New Deal and fostered the now-forever-dead American Dream, what enabled the victories of Gandhi in India and King in the U.S. South, was not the (nonexistent) beneficence of capitalist overlords but rather the capitalists' terror of the violent consequences were the forces of non-violence defeated.

Painfully ironic as it may be to admit, the Red Army was thus the ultimate protector of the American experiment in constitutional democracy, just as organized labor was the only real defender of the  American Dream.  Hence, with the labor movement nullified and the Soviet Union consigned to history, we suffer the unabashed brutality with which the capitalists now routinely suppress their adversaries,  particularly here in the allegedly "democratic" United States. Such (steadily intensifying) brutishness would never have been allowed when the Soviets were prepared to foment revolution whenever the Big Lie of "capitalist democracy" was revealed, as it nearly was, for example, in the Bankers' Plot or 1934 or in the atrocities committed against the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s.     
      
The second factor Farber omits in explaining in Occupy's failure is implicit in his mistaken choice of “anarchist” to describe the movement's primary ethos. Anarchism, despite the capitalist propaganda that associates it with maniacal bomb-throwers in Tsarist Russia, is an avowedly humanitarian ideology developed logically from approximately 2,600 years of grievances; one of its exemplars was Mikhail Bakunin, who no doubt would have been appalled by Occupy's fanatical rejection of reasoned analysis.

Precisely because it generally despised intellectuals and angrily rejected intellectuality in any form, Occupy was therefore not “anarchist” at all. It was instead a nationwide uprising by nihilists, a  typically short-lived expression of the self-centered  nihilism unique to the United States. It embodied the widespread USian belief human society has become so oppressive – or so evil – we can achieve liberation only by its total destruction, and it shared with the Ayn Randers the fervent conviction that self – and selfishness – are the only truths. But the latter is not just a singularly USian restatement of the existential paradox that meaning is meaningless; it is also – what else? – the enabling precept of the moral imbecility essential to capitalism and capitalist growth.   

Like the Teabaggers, Occupy was thus a manifestation of the psychological condition unique to the United States,  something I long ago labeled the Moron Nation syndrome – the carefully induced anti-intellectuality  intended to guarantee We the People of the most oppressed realm in the industrial world never again  formulate an effective program of humanitarian change and resistance to capitalist tyranny, much less evolve an ideology of actual revolution. 

We are brain-soaked in these anti-intellectual reflexes literally from birth, so much so they have become the defining characteristic of  the U.S. population.  Venomous even in its most casual everyday expressions, it is the toxic legacy of the political purges that began the moment World War II ended, peaked during the McCarthy Era and continued well into the 1960s. Though the targets were presumably only Communists, in bitter truth the victims were socialists of every persuasion. Eventually (and obviously just as the Ruling Class intended), the persecution was expanded to demonize anyone deemed an “egghead” – that is, an intellectual.

"Intellectual" thus eventually became synonymous with "subversive" and even "traitor," a hostility so intense during the 1950s, the children of families with substantial home libraries, myself included, were instructed by our parents never to publicly admit the presence of books in our homes. The cultural result (or more aptly the anti-cultural consequence) is one of the major psycholinguistic perversions of all time – the intellectual as a bad guy, intellectuality as a sin if not a demonic trait –  shibboleths that rule even avowedly secular U.S. society to this day.   

The national mindset so imposed includes unconditional rejection of ideology, analytical thinking and even logic itself. As already noted, the same irrational bigotries – and bigotries is precisely what they are –  are found on both Left and Right, whether in New Age, Deconstructionist,  Teabagger or Christian fundamentalist movements. And the associated fanaticism is again increasing, just as it did during the years of the Purge, perhaps now fueled by our species' (impotent) rage at its betrayal-unto-extinction, seemingly by all modern (logic-based) institutions.
     
Not surprisingly, the same kinds of frenzies appear to have motivated the nihilistic disruptions that nullified Occupy as any sort of meaningful force for change, whether ameliorative or revolutionary,  which soon silenced the movement's ability to express the common grievances of the 99 Percent it claimed to represent.

This was as dismayingly apparent in Occupy Tacoma, in which I was among the earliest activists, as it was elsewhere throughout the U.S. Unlike many local Occupy groups, we did – after  exceedingly bitter infighting – produce a statement of purpose, never mind by the time of its publication it had been reduced to meaninglessness by nihilistic obstructionism.

We also managed – just once – to confront an eel-slippery politician with a well-formulated list of demands.   

But we were already discovering any thoughtful exercise of our constitutional rights invariably came at a price of internal hatefulness many of us were unwilling to endore. The following excerpts are from “OT Blues: a Clash with 'Important' Helps Me Occupy My Mind,” published via Blogger on 7 December 2011, during the time Outside Agitator's Notebook was banished from TypePad:

When I heed Occupy Tacoma's best slogan to date – “Occupy Your Mind” (for which thanks to Nikki Weatherhead, Joy Bonney and Autumn Jacobs) – the resultant introspection insists that above all else I am still a journalist, whether with camera or keyboard or both.

My commitment to journalism is nearly lifelong. It dates from 1952, when my father gave me a Kodak Brownie Reflex for my 12th birthday. Two years later he gave me a Polaroid Land Camera. In 1955, via the what-will-I-be-when-I-grow-up unit of my 10th grade English class, I declared myself a future reporter and photographer. Late the following year I was hired by The Grand Rapids Herald, a Michigan daily. I was a combination copyboy and stringer, in the latter role a regular contributor to the sports and youth sections. That's also when I got my union card, becoming – at age 16 – a fiercely proud member of the American Newspaper Guild.

Since then I have tried to live in accordance with journalism's oldest creed: “to comfort the afflicted...and afflict the comforted.”

It was in the latter context I wrote a blistering retort to two posters on the OT Forum.

The two were trashing a thread-starter who was trying to alert us to the huge danger implicit in the National Defense Authorization Act, which is wending its way through Congress bearing a concentration-camp provision that would turn stateside-stationed armed forces into national police, enable the imprisonment of citizens without trial and thus move the United States that much closer to becoming the de facto Fourth Reich.

Because the trashers' onslaught against this latter-day Paul Revere seemed not only unfair but vindictive, I opened the ball accordingly:

“The reactionary anti-intellectuality implicit in (the first respondent's) attack is surprising even here in the region of the United States most noted for its vindictive xenophobia and venomous anti-intellectuality.”

The first trasher, clearly enraged, misquoted me to the forum's moderator, then withdrew in a huff after the moderator pointed out the distortion.

Meanwhile the second trasher, whose screen name is “Nobody Important” and who claims to be an Occupy Seattle website moderator, was already boiling over with self-important arrogance.

Important had been subtly protecting the One Percent by denying the ruined state of our constitutional democracy, telling us the system was working and we had nothing to worry about – a tactic typical of capitalist-party operatives whether DemocRat or GOPorker.

My response was intended to end what I already recognized as pointless confrontation: “It seems – please correct me if I'm wrong – your underlying purpose is to defend the status quo, including the infinity of betrayals perpetrated by Barack the Betrayer. That being the case I see little point in debating you.”

But this gentle rebuke provoked an on-line tantrum that lasted nearly two days, with Important repeatedly proving the screen name to be not just devoid of its implied humility but a classic example of passive-aggressive camouflage.

In the parlance of the old-time newsrooms in which I learned my craft, obviously I drew blood.

Important then asserted a despotic sense of privileged entitlement, demanding ever more fiercely I be banished for “hate speech.” Apparently  Important searched not just the OT Forum but even Outside Agitator's Notebook to cobble together a less-than-literate denunciation based on my characterizations of our neo-feudal politicians (Barack the Betrayer, Christine the Cruel); our treacherous political parties (DemocRats, GOPorkers); and my factually correct, historically proven statement Nazism (and fascism in general) are logical fulfillments of capitalism.

But one brave moderator persisted in defending my right to write as I see fit, and Important finally left in a hissy, still spewing venom, a trail of petulantly self-deleted posts littering the path of departure.

***

Despite the Occupation Movement's outspoken commitment to transparency, the forum incident was not my first encounter with OT's would-be censors.

When OT was formed, Tacoma's First Methodist Church offered its facilities as an indoor locale for meetings of OT's governing body, the General Assembly. The offer was gratefully accepted; the frigid rains characteristic of winter on the Pacific Northwest Coast are of such monsoonal intensity as to discourage extended outdoor meetings – and GA sessions tend to last two, three, even four hours.

But not long after OT took its first collectively approved policy stance – a list of formal demands it presented to Washington state's U.S. Sen. Patty Murray – the church withdrew its offer, forcing the GA outdoors in the rain and cold and thereby effectively excluding most elderly and disabled people from the decision-making process.

The reasons for the church's sudden reversal have never been adequately explained, though it should be noted most OT activists emphatically assert the cause was nothing more ominous than administrative error and organizational confusion.

Nevertheless it's difficult to overlook the fact the excluded seniors and disabled people had been amongst those most active in shaping the demands OT addressed to Murray. Citing Murray's position as co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, OT insisted she block proposed cutbacks in Social Security and prevent further slashing of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits and federal aid to education.

Coincidence? Probably – though the demographic identity of the chief victims of the church's sudden denial of its meeting facilities surely arouses my investigative reporter's suspicion.

***

Since the beginning of my involvement with OT I have sensed – particularly amongst its younger leaders – an underlying bias against those of us who are elderly, especially those of us who are lower-income elderly.

What brought this into sharp focus was OT's decision to center itself on a 24/7 on-line presence and on computer technology in general.

Recognizing the prohibitive nature of computer costs, I spoke up at several GAs citing current statistics that fully half the nation's lower-income households are economically denied computer access and thus remain cut off from an increasingly computer-oriented world. I myself, I admitted, am nearly at the economic bottom of the 99 Percent; I live in constant fear my computer will die and leave me irremediably isolated. I have no funds with which to replace a computer and short of a miracle will never have such funds again.

To exclude me and all the others who are in these dire circumstances, I said, is to nullify the core purpose of the Occupy Movement.

Again I was told I was being divisive.

The expressions on the faces of those around me left no doubt it was the majority opinion...

***

Thus, by fomenting intellectual and physical vandalism –  whether under the mindless banner of "anarchy" (as in Occupy's suicidal hostility toward analysis and ideology), or in reflexive obedience to the Ayn Rand doctrines with which we in the United States are conditioned from birth (as demonstrated by the foregoing indifference of self-proclaimed “progressives” to legitimate concerns of elderly, disabled and lower-income people) –  does the Ruling Class sustain its ever-expanding despotism. Thus too, at least partly because of Occupy's nihilistic rejection of politics,  we are once again allowed only the most limited electoral choice, the greater evil of the unapologetic neo-Nazism offered by the Republicans versus the lesser evil of the stealth fascism the Democrats hide behind compellingly progressive but demonstrably untrustworthy slogans.  Such is “change we can believe in.”  

LB/17 September 2012

-30-








     

Psycho Jail: Cruelest Twist in U.S. War on Free Speech

I HARDLY KNOW how begin this piece because it covers three subjects – each controversial – that at a glance might seem only distantly related.

First and most obvious is the rapidly intensifying political oppression within the United States. Its newest manifestation is the unprecedented arrest-without-charges and psychiatric confinement of Brandon Raub – another example of the smirking, any-cruelty-allowed tactics by which the One Percenters boast to the world they have terminated the American Dream, slain the American Experiment in constitutional democracy and are now burying the remains forever.

The second topic is the self-serving (and ultimately self-defeating) hypocrisy of our domestic Leftist media. The third is journalistic ethics in general: whether to report atrocities we know are intended mostly to intensify fear and thereby bully us into (further) relinquishment of our (former) constitutional rights.

Which – if I am to practice full disclosure – links to a fourth topic: my own growing terror at the encroaching police-state darkness that moves ever closer to becoming the defining characteristic of governance in the United States.

Dare I, for example, even write this essay? 

*** 

 

Never in my journalism career – it began in 1956, now spans 56 years and includes extensive daily-newspaper coverage of The Decade of Political Murder that effectively terminated our republic – have I encountered a story as frightening as the RT exclusive I summarized, live-linked and forwarded to everyone on the Outside Agitator's Notebook mailing list earlier this week:

Federal agents employed a terrifying new tactic to silence protest when they apprehended an alleged Libertarian activist in Virginia and – instead of charging him with a crime – confined him in a psychiatric hospital.

Fearing the government's intent was to "disappear" him permanently, several friends intervened, and  a judge eventually ordered the man's release. Nevertheless the permanent, indelible  odium of "involuntary commitment" to a mental hospital – infinitely more damning than a felony rap sheet – has undoubtedly ruined his life in ways he probably has not even begun to discover.     

Here's the story as broken last night by Liz Wahl of RT: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogVdPvNoVQQ&feature=related

This is the most terrifying news report I have ever heard. What it means is that the feds can now seize and detain anyone without charges merely by jailing them in a mental institution, theoretically forever. What happens next -- what can and does happen in such places -- is rightfully the stuff of horror films: brains destroyed by electric shock, lobotomy, psychotropic drugs or all of these together, once-functional people reduced to drooling, mewling cretins urinating and defecating uncontrollably and covered in their own reeking filth. 

Unfortunately some of you who receive this mailing will note the fact the victim is a Rightist and gloat accordingly. But what the federal secret police agencies can do to a Rightist they can also do to a Leftist – or anyone else.

Make no mistake: this arrest marks a new escalation in government efforts to silence protest. Indeed this is precisely the tactic the Soviet Union used against dissidents: locking them up as psychiatric patients, then methodically destroying their minds.

***

Exactly as I predicted, Leftist media ignored the illegal detention and involuntary commitment by which the federal government has forever destroyed the life-prospects of a retired Marine named Brandon Raub.
 

Ruling Class Media ignored it too.

The Left undoubtedly suppressed the story out of ideological hatefulness – the fervent belief right wingers deserve not even the few considerations (allegedly) accorded criminals.

This is precisely the principle described by Nat Hentoff in his superlative book Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee (HarperCollins: 1992). Hentoff's subtitle, How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other, tells us why the Brandon Raub atrocity never made it into Reader Supported News or Truthout or Common Dreams or – at least to my knowledge – never saw the proverbial light of day via any other such publication whether on-line or off.

When Ruling Class Media censored the story, it also most likely acted from ideological motives. Take your pick: (A)-Since the Raub atrocity occurred on President Obama's watch, Obama and the Democrats will get the blame, making the story an election-year no-no for any pro-Obama news outlet; (B)-The infinitely sinister extra-legal method employed for the permanent destruction of Raub's quality of life vividly reflects the ongoing overthrow of our constitutional democracy, which makes the story verbotten – bad propaganda – in any international-circulation U.S. media; (C)-This same revelation of hideous truth – again the bad-propaganda factor – makes the story unsuitable for mainstream/Right news outlets; (D)-All of the above.

I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if publications written primarily for capitalists – business magazines like Forbes or newspapers like The Wall Street Journal – tacitly applauded the tactic by giving it at least some coverage, however subdued.

Meanwhile I myself hesitated several hours before forwarding the story.

Part of my hesitation was concern for journalistic ethics, specifically traditional journalism's entirely proper prohibition against blatant fear-mongering. I recognized the Raub story as a 21st Century variant of a witch-burning: a public example so horrific – as involuntary confinement in an insane asylum undeniably is – it will deter the modern-day heresy of opposition to capitalism.

Heresy? Indeed: the increasingly dominant Christian fundamentalists increasingly zieg-heil the capitalist aristocrats – the new Ruling Class – as their vindictive god's chosen vessels: men whose edicts are therefore the “word of god” and who therefore tyrannize by Divine Right.

Hence to forward the story was to intensify the very climate of oppression I deplore.

But not to forward it was to leave the relatives, friends and colleagues on my mailing list possibly ignorant of a new threat: as if had I refused to shout “snake” when I knew someone was about to step on a cottonmouth.

There was also the dark side of my hesitancy: I was terrified.

What might be done to me if I forwarded the story?

Now too I wonder what might be done to me in retaliation for all my other criticism of the status quo.

Such terror cannot but dilute one's writing.

***

Both as a journalist and because two of my late relatives were repeatedly locked up in mental institutions, I am fully aware of the Bedlam horrors that persist in such U.S. facilities to this day.

I also recognize these unspeakable realities for what they are: direct expressions of the hatred and contempt with which Moron Nation views mental patients. According to any number of sources, ours is by far the most sadistically backward, bigoted and brutal such stance anywhere in the industrial world. (Google: “stigma as related to mental disorders,” no quotes.) 

Here of course is why involuntary confinement in a mental institution is such an unspeakably terrifying prospect. 

One so detained becomes the powerless victim of a society in which the prevalent belief is little changed from the Middle Ages: that mental illness is demonic possession or, at the very least, punishment for sin, the viewpoints of a surprising plurality of U.S. Christian clergy as revealed by a Baylor University survey in 2008.

While the Baylor study was confined to local churches, a more broad-based Northwestern University investigation completed in 2011 reveals such attitudes are widespread and intensifying, no doubt paralleling the wildfire growth of Christian fundamentalism and its ever-more-rapacious imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy.

***

Perhaps – if beyond the terminal climate change the capitalists have inflicted on all of us there is by some miracle a future for our species – historians to come will grant the decade of the 1960s its proper lamentation: not for the failure of its pseudo-revolutions, but rather because it was The Decade of Political Murder, when We the People were robbed of the last men who could have saved us from ourselves: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy.

That plague of death – and the failure of any woman or man to pick up the banners of the slain – was the death of our Republic.

Thus today we grovel in ever-more-restricted, ever-more-terrorized poverty beneath the ruthless paradigm of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Though it is still new to the USian homeland – “USian” because journalistic ethics forbid I slander the other American peoples by furthering the misappropriation of their continent's name – such governance is old news everywhere else in the empire so mislabeled.

But now, just as Malcom X predicted, the proverbial chickens – vultures actually – are coming home to roost.

LB/2 September 2012

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(©Loren Bliss 2012: permission to quote or reproduce is conditional upon attribution to the author and link to Outside Agitator's Notebook.)

Capitalist Genocide: We're Targets No Matter Who Wins

But Romney/Ryan Is Surely More (Overtly) Murderous Than Obama/Biden

THE LESSON TAUGHT by the present-day economic crisis is that all capitalists – like the Democrat and Republican politicians who do their bidding – are sociopaths. They have no conscience. They value us only to the extent we can be exploited for profit, whether in the workplace, the marketplace or the voting booth.

 

Capitalists also despise spending money on anyone whose existence does not promise them enormous gain, either immediately or in the near future. U.S. jobs are thus outsourced to cheap-labor foreign countries, the national defense budget thus grows fat as the socioeconomic safety budget starves. War is Big Business, and war specifically for profit is the biggest Big Business of all.

 

Not that we should be surprised: the forcible extraction of profit – the same process by which a parasite kills its host – is what capitalism is all about. 

That's why, once we're elderly, disabled, unemployed – once we're unprofitable for any reason – the capitalists tell us we have no value, that we're worthless. Then they discard us as if we were worn out machinery.

 

It's the capitalists' effort to throw us all away that's behind the attacks on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, veterans' benefits and government services in general. The capitalists and their politicians want the money we've put into these services, and they want us dead.

 

***

 

The capitalist grandfathers of today's Wall Street profiteers financed Nazi Germany. In effect, they paid the Nazis to build death camps – to enslave and murder anyone deemed unprofitable.

In the Bankers Plot of 1934, these same capitalists sought to impose Nazism on the United States. But the Communist Party exposed their scheme and saved both the American Experiment in constitutional democracy and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Perhaps – if the infiltrators who defeated the Bankers Plot were indeed Soviet agents (a story I heard when I was much younger) – that explains FDR's uniquely favorable regard for Soviet Premier Josef Stalin.

 

It also explains the relentless hatefulness with which U.S. capitalists began attacking Communists, socialists, even liberals – intellectuals in general – literally hours after the end of World War II. The Left had blocked the capitalists' attempt to make the U.S. part of Hitler's Axis, and now – by the purge that started in August 1945 and peaked a decade later under Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisc.) and the House Un-American Activities Committee – Wall Street was extracting full revenge.

 

In any case, though the downfall of the Bankers Plot was bloodless, it was nevertheless a prelude to how the Soviet Union – at cost of 35 million of its own citizens dead – would later play the major role in defeating the Nazis themselves. Yes, Stalin was subsequently proven to have been a murderous tyrant. But that does not excuse how we are all conditioned to shamefully forget the epic heroism of the Soviet people and how their unprecedented sacrifice kept alive the light of liberty they themselves were denied.

 

Now, as a legacy of that sacrifice and of the larger victory in World War II, death-camps are forbidden. At present they are too offensive – too embarrassing – for today's capitalists to publicly endorse. But such restraints are under constant assault and are crumbling accordingly. Already we live in a world in which only a dwindling number of governments still protect our human rights and fulfill our species' humanitarian instincts.

Frighteningly, the United States is not one of the protectors. Its privately owned for-profit prison system has already re-imposed slavery. Could for-profit death camps be far behind?

***

Under capitalism we are all potentially throw-aways: throw-away children, throw-away teenagers, throw-away women, throw-away men, throw-away elders.

 

The purpose of a socioeconomic safety net is to keep us alive even after we have been thrown away – after the capitalists have abolished our jobs and declared us surplus; after the capitalists have discarded us as broken by disability or worn out by age; after the capitalists have told us that if we are not profitable, we have no right to live.

 

Hence the humanitarian response: the safety net. Socioeconomic safety is an expression of community solidarity, of love and hopefulness. The capitalists regard these qualities as obstacles to “growth” and hate them with a hatred too intense to convey in words.

The safety net is therefore public confirmation – and public condemnation – of capitalism's predatory nature, of the conditions that make the net essential to human survival.

 

Which are the very reasons the capitalists despise it even more than they despise community solidarity and the love and hopefulness from which it is born.

Thus in the capitalists' reactions we see socioeconomic safety as the ultimate nonviolent antidote to capitalist venom.

***

For many years, the post-World-War-II taboos against slavery and death camps forced the capitalists to allow the socioeconomic safety nets of Europe, industrial Asia and the United States to function as intended.

Thwarted by these safety nets, the capitalists nevertheless continued scheming and plotting how to get rid of us. Eventually they developed the strategy and tactics of attacking not just the safety net but the entire concept from which it was born, the so-called Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

 

Hence the imposition of Ayn Rand as required reading in most U.S. high schools. Her core doctrine – that infinite greed is our species' greatest virtue – is the rejection of every moral code ever articulated.

 

In the United States, the near-universal indoctrination of the population in Randite moral imbecility is capitalism's greatest triumph.

 

Hence too – after years of Randite conditioning – the successful and ever-escalating attacks on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, all other forms of humanitarian stipends and services.

 

Here are five examples:

 

(1)-The genocidal Romney/Ryan budget – sure to become law if the Republicans win in November – will destroy Medicare. 

http://www.medicareadvocacy.org/2012/04/05/medicare-under-threat-health-reform-versus-the-ryan-budget/

 

(2)-But never imagine the Republicans are our only enemy. An Oregon Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden, joined with Ryan to jointly propose a kill-Medicare measure almost identical to the one in the Romney/Ryan budget. 

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2012/march/20/ryan-budget-medicare-medicaid-republicans.aspx

 

(3)-The bitter reality of post-American-Dream U.S. politics – the fact we are effectively disenfranchised, that both parties represent only the capitalists and no one else – is already old news. Remember the Super Committee and how even its Democrat members promised to slash Social Security? Far less widely reported but equally embittering are the bipartisan attacks on veterans' benefits.

http://strengthensocialsecurity.org/where-the-super-committee-members-stand-on-social-security-medicare-and-medicaid

http://militaryadvantage.military.com/2011/10/bi-partisan-attack-on-veterans-benefits/

(4)-Meanwhile, an AARP report – predictably censored by Ruling Class Media – notes that we elderly are already among the hardest hit by the U.S. housing crisis, with 600,000 Americans over the age of 50 facing foreclosure. The proposed cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans' benefits will throw many millions more into foreclosure. Many of these victims of capitalism, perhaps most, will be flung into homelessness.

http://rt.com/usa/news/hit-foreclosure-percent-facing-629/

(5)-As if all this were not disturbing enough, there's the conflict between President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden over the future of Social Security. In momentary departures from his election-year role of Obama the Orator, Barack the Betrayer says repeatedly he wants to slash Social Security. Biden says it won't happen. Who are we to believe? 

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2012/08/15/biden-promises-no-changes-to-social-security/

 

Hence a petition we should all sign: “If they want to run on the guarantee that Social Security will not be touched, that's commendable – but they must be held to that promise during and after the campaign.”

http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/biden-guarantee

 

It probably won't change anything, but at least we'll have stood up for what we know is right.

***

I had planned to end this piece here, but the capitalists' war against us – we the increasingly impoverished, increasingly oppressed people of the United States – continues to escalate, with even applicants for unemployment compensation now targeted by Ruling Class Media hatefulness.

 

The nastiest such slandering I have yet seen – “yet” including a five-decade journalism career that began in 1956 – was spat at thrown-away workers by The News Tribune, which in an exceptionally venomous headline described these newest victims of capitalism as “Jobless pay seekers.”

TNT is the McClatchy daily published in Tacoma. Typical of McClatchy rags, it is notorious for its opposition to workers' rights, its relentless attacks against unions and unionized workers. 

But the deliberately inflammatory defamation of traumatized people suddenly deprived of their jobs and rationally terrified by the probability they will never work again was a new low even for anti-worker McClatchy.

As I commented via the paper's website: “Used to be you only saw this sort of hate-mongering in overtly fascist publications, but these days Ruling Class Media makes no effort to conceal the Ayn Rand maliciousness of its executives – and too many of its editorial people as well.”

“That's why U.S. newspapers – note again the genuinely vicious but nevertheless non-actionable slander in the above head – read more and more like the old Voelkischer Beobachter,” which, as most of us know, was published by the German Nazi Party. 

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/08/24/2266509/jobless-pay-seekers-up-4000-last.html

 

LB/26 August 2012

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