Microcosm: War on Women and Constitutional Rights

To view the graphic associated with this report, go to my blog on TypePad. Blogger's software will not allow it to be uploaded. My apology for the inconvenience. 

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THE BATTLE FOR a seat in the bicameral Washington state legislature provides a unique and troubling picture – a portrait relevant to readers everywhere – of the lengths to which religious conservatives will go to wage war against women, homosexuals and progressive modes of governance.

 

Superficially, the fight is a heated clash between between six-term-incumbent Rep. Jeannie Darneille and political upstart John Connelly over who will be Tacoma's next state senator. But most of the heat comes from Connelly, who is attacking Darneille with a campaign that is notable both for its million-dollar budget and its use of smear tactics so outrageous they are condemned even by some of Connelly's former colleagues.

 

What is at stake is whether the (mostly) Republican forces of misogyny and sexual oppression can hide behind a Democratic label to capture or paralyze the Legislature in a state that has long been considered progressive – so much so a Roosevelt Administration official once sarcastically labeled it “the Soviet of Washington.” 

Darneille, a Democrat who typifies the state's progressive element, has proven herself a fierce defender of female reproductive freedom and women's rights in general. A modern personification of the traditional New Deal humanitarian, she is a dependable protector of the social safety net and an impassioned proponent of universal health care. She also advocates granting marriage equality and all other forms of anti-discrimination protection to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals. 

Connelly, who goes by the Kennedy-esque nickname “Jack,” is a successful trial lawyer who lacks legislative experience. Though he claims the Democratic Party label,  he has publicly acknowledged he's against abortion even in cases of rape or incest, that he opposes granting LGBT people the right to marry and that he's “undecided” on whether sexual minorities deserve any other civil rights protections. Connelly also boasts of leadership roles in two arch-conservative Catholic organization, the Knights of Columbus and a notoriously anti-LGBT Tacoma parish. 

His law firm, Connelly Law Offices, is listed as an “ultrasonic champion” of 4US, an anti-abortion organization that describes itself as a primary donor of ultrasound machines to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers.” Reproductive-rights advocates condemn these clinics for disseminating false or deceptive information intended to bully abortion-seekers into carrying their fetuses to term no matter how unwanted the birth or ruinous its consequences. But 4US defends deliberate deception – a tactic curiously parallel to Connelly's claim of Democratic Party values – as essential to its mission.  “A pregnant woman in crisis sees her baby for the first time on an ultrasound machine,” the 4US website explains, and 96 percent of those mothers “will bring a baby into the world.”

Significantly, the Knights of Columbus is another 4US “ultrasonic champion.”

And Wal-Mart – perhaps the most relentlessly anti-union corporation on the planet – is listed as a 4US “sonic champion.”

Connelly thus has demonstrable ties – each one revealed by credible material readily available on the Internet – not only to the forces of the Christian Right and its wars against women and homosexuals but to Ayn Rand capitalism and its war against American workers.

Each of these associations is equally damning. But the Knights connection is clearly the more threatening for women and LGBT people. Through his local Knights trusteeship,  Connelly has significant connections to the outspoken homophobe Rick Santorum, and through Santorum to the mysterious Opus Dei organization.  Also via the Knights, Connelly is associated with the ecumenically homophobic National Organization for Marriage;  with the vindictively fundamentalist Focus on the Family; likewise with the notably homophobic Church of Latter Day Saints; and – once again – with Opus Dei.

Any notion Knights opinion in Washington state might be less intolerant than elsewhere is refuted by the website material linked above: note how it commands members to “avoid supporting evil acts...reject Referendum 74.”

Despite the fact Connelly shares the zero-tolerance position of Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan on abortion; despite Connelly's use of Republican campaign tactics; despite the undeniable role of the above-listed organizations in converting the Republicans into fundamentalist storm troops – despite all these  facts, definitive evidence Connelly is a deep-cover agent of the Republican Party itself remained elusive.

 

Nevertheless Connelly's anti-woman, anti-LGBT positions transform his oft-brandished history of anti-government lawsuits into a powerful appeal to the district's conservative minority. So does the subtly Teabagger-tainted rhetoric sometimes encountered on his website, as in the “Final Thoughts” section of his “Issues” page.  “The District needs more than a straight line party voter who has very little real experience in the private sector.”

Connelly is attacking on so broad a front he is now attempting to discredit even Darneille's professional background. (Washington's Legislature, though always a full-time occupation when in session, is ultimately a part-time job, which means its members necessarily pursue non-legislative careers.) Contrary to Connelly's innuendo, Darneille's career is indeed in “the private sector,” specifically in the successful management of nonprofit human-service agencies.

Though Darneille trounced Connelly in the Democratic primary by 59-40 percent, he refused to concede. Allowed by quirky Washington state law to again oppose Darneille in the general election (6 November 2012), he soon began deluging 27th District voters with anti-Darneille attack ads, their negative content quickly emerging as a campaign issue in its own right.

The advertisements and flyers with which Connelly is flooding the district's airwaves and mailboxes denounce Darneille as “against public safety,” a tactic that prompted immediate condemnation from Democrat Bill Baarsma, a former Tacoma mayor. In a letter published by The News Tribune, the McClatchy-owned local daily, Baarsma implicitly called Connelly a liar:

“I thought I had seen it all during my many years involved in local politics, but trial lawyer Jack Connelly’s desperate, over-the-top, self-funded...campaign for state Senate sets a new standard. He is now running televised attack ads against his opponent, state Rep. Jeannie Darneille, suggesting she was in some way complicit in two horrific criminal acts committed years before she was elected to the Legislature.”

“In point of fact,” Baarsma continued, “Darneille has the sole endorsement of those people who have to fight crime each and every day – local police (Tacoma Police Union 6 and the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs) and the state patrol (Washington State Troopers Association).”

Sen. Debbie Regala, who has endorsed Darneille as her replacement, joins Baarsma in decrying Connelly's smear tactics. “He has resorted to...innuendo, distortions and manipulations of the facts to imply Darneille is not concerned about public safety. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Many local Democrats wonder why Connelly is waging such a desperate fight for a state senate seat. More to the point, they are perplexed by the record-breaking sums of money – Connelly claims it is all his own – he is lavishing on his campaign. 
 

To put Connelly's unprecedented outlay in perspective, a Washington State Public Disclosure Commission spokesperson says each Democratic legislative candidate spent an average of $124,170 in 2010. According to Connelly's own reports to PDC, to date he has already spent $783,634.34 – 6.1 times that 2010 statewide norm.

What could motivate such extravagance?

“I've wracked my brain trying to figure out what his game is,” said one longtime Democratic activist. “The only thing I can think of is he hopes the campaign will benefit his law practice.”

Connelly's connections with conservative Christianity and his unapologetic use of classic Republican smear tactics may therefore be the most indicative evidence of his intentions. Perhaps a broader explanation may be found within the warning published three years ago in several progressive media outlets, that Christian fundamentalists – having successfully infiltrated the Republican party, purged it of liberals and turned it into an army of religious fanatics – are attempting to take over the Democratic Party the same way they captured the GOP.

And “fanatical” is an accurate description of Connelly's astounding campaign expenditures, which – backed by a PDC-reported $1.07 million war chest – provide a grim picture of his capabilities. 

“Once upon a time, though it may seem strange to think of it...the Republican Party was moderately progressive,” wrote Bruce Wilson of the Talk to Action website. “So there's no reason Democrats can't become populist theocrats, especially if they are willing to jettison core principles such as support for secular government and minority rights...Along a wide range of fronts, the American religious right has been infiltrating, influencing, befuddling, and neutralizing the Democratic Party and the American left.”

Similar disclosures, all relevant given Connelly's opposition to homosexuality and female reproductive freedom, are the subject of several recent books by widely recognized authors. These works include American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges; Simon & Schuster: 2006); American Theocracy (Kevin Phillips; Viking Press: 2006); and The Family subtitled The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet; Harper Collins 2008). Each warns of an extended campaign by Protestant and Catholic zealots, all lavishly financed by Big Business, to replace constitutional governance with zero-tolerance biblical law, the Christian counterpart of Islam's Sharia.

The campaign to impose Christian theocracy on the United States is thus proven to be terrifyingly real.  The present-day war against women – in truth a war against human sexuality in every form – is merely its most visible manifestation, whether in Tacoma or elsewhere.

Another index to the theocratic threat is a 2005 Rasmussen poll that reveals 63 percent of the U.S. population believes the Bible “is literally true,” that it is the incontestable word of god. The core belief of Christian fundamentalism whether Catholic or Protestant, this is the doctrine that fuels the burgeoning threat of theocracy.

The Manhattan Declaration,  effectively a fatwa of Christian jihad against secular society, confirms the magnitude of the theocratic threat, both by its number of signatories and by its text:

“We, as Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical Christians...act together in obedience to the one true —God...especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn...are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.”

Its concluding lines are especially revealing:

“(W)e will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.”

Many civil libertarians fear the only way the Manhattan Declaration's signers can achieve their ends is by abolishing constitutional democracy, imposing biblical law, disempowering women and outlawing sexual minorities.

In its most extreme form, the U.S. theocracy movement “is well known for its proposals that alleged sinners, including homosexuals and rebellious teenagers, be put to death by stoning,” notes Talk to Action's Wilson.

Connelly, like his Christian conservative associates, is already redefining religious liberty in accordance with Manhattan Declaration principles. No longer is freedom of religion the separation of church and state or the freedom from persecution guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Now it is the Ryan/Santorum definition: the alleged freedom of religious extremists to discriminate against those with whom they disagree.

In this context, Connelly's “Issues” statement, linked above, is especially revealing. It describes contraception as “an area where increasing respect for differences of opinion and beliefs is necessary and desirable.” Which begs the question whether Connelly believes an anti-contraception pharmacist has the right to nullify women's reproductive freedom by withholding birth control – even if that pharmacy is the only accessible source.

His conservative stance on other matters of women's rights, LGBT equality and human sexuality in general proves him to be radically out-of-step with much of the state's progressive history.

Meanwhile the Republicans – here (as everywhere else in the U.S.), the party of Ayn Rand economics mated with the Christian drive toward biblical theocracy – say they believe the Legislature is theirs for the taking.  And if they win the governor's mansion as well – at this writing Democrat Jay Inslee has only a narrow lead over Republican Rob McKenna –  Washington would almost certainly go the way of Wisconsin, where Scott Walker's anti-labor victories in 2010 and in this year's failed recall vote also imposed a maliciously anti-woman, anti-homosexual coup.  

It's the Wisconsin example that makes the possibility of a Connelly victory so frightening to so many real Democrats. Given Connelly's anti-woman, anti-LGBT views and his membership in misogynistic and homophobic organizations, Darneille supporters rationally fear he would vote with the Republicans in any legislative assault against reproductive freedom or any attack against the other hard-won liberties of women and sexual minorities.

Connelly tries to give the impression he would respect all such rights: “Jack does not believe that anybody should be discriminated agains,” the “Issues” section of his website states. “No one wants to see a teenage girl drop out of school and face a lifetime of poverty because she became pregnant. Nor should she feel compelled to suffer the pain and anguish of a termination where this can be prevented.”

An unknown factor in the senatorial election is Referendum 74, which seeks voter endorsement of a gay marriage bill passed by the Legislature and signed by the Democratic governor earlier this year. The referendum's presence on the ballot promises an unprecedented turnout from progressives and religious conservatives alike. The former clearly dominate the 27th District. But the latter are under unprecedented pulpit-pressure to vote against the measure. What this might mean in terms of Connelly's election prospects remains unknown.

There's also the fact Darneille has only slightly more than $233 thousand in her total campaign budget, small change compared to Connelly's million plus. Darneille has not made an issue of it, but the inequality between the two candidates is a perfect microcosm of the socioeconomic chasm that defines the present-day United States.

Though such a lopsided fight usually ends in victory for the wealthier contender, a poll conducted in June by a Seattle-based political consulting firm indicated the 27th District's voters are a solid 64.6 percent in favor of women's reproductive rights. With the general election already underway – these days Washington casts its ballots by mail – Darneille and her supporters are counting on pro-choice voters for the numbers they need to triumph over Connelly's lies, distortions and money. 

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(My thanks to Pat Fletcher for her graphics skills and for helping edit this text.)

 

LB/10-21 October 2012

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EXTRA: Forceful Obama Bests Romney in Debate

BITTERLY CONSCIOUS OF the narrow range of political options allowed the U.S. by its capitalist masters, I twice noted that President Barack Obama's unspeakably wretched performance in the first presidential debate two weeks ago might indicate he has been ordered to throw the election.

But after witnessing Obama's eloquent, Tai-Chi-like mastery of the verbal bullying attempted by Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney last night, I am delighted to report I have been cleansed of all such suspicions.

For those who were unable to watch the fireworks of the debate live, here thanks to Politico is a transcript and video. 

Despite my cheers and applause for this seemingly re-energized Obama, I remain acutely conscious of the fact he and Romney are each candidates of the Ruling Class. Save on the familial and socioeconomic issues of women's rights and marriage equality – where Romney/Ryan misogyny and homophobia demonstrate the Republicans' enthusiastic collaboration in the Christofascist effort to replace constitutional governance with biblical law – the two candidates' policies differ mainly by degree. 

Neither dares admit the driving ethos of capitalism – elevation of infinite greed to maximum virtue – demands the overthrow of every humanitarian principle our species has ever formulated. 

And each plans to slash Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, thereby producing gargantuan windfalls for the One Percent while forcing the rest of us, the 99 Percent, the (formerly) Working Class, ever deeper into hopeless poverty. 

But the Republicans would abolish the entire social safety net almost overnight, while the Democrats will do it more gradually – or so they say. 

Hence another part of my 13 October essay remains undeniably true: “With terminal climate change accelerating beyond all projections, the One Percent is racing to protect itself by converting the United States into the de facto Fourth Reich: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty (including mass poisoning by genetically modified foods) for all the rest of us, the entire system increasingly sustained by Ayn Rand indoctrination, Christian prosperity gospel and the Big Business variant of rule by divine right.” 

What this means is that regardless of who wins the election, those of us who live below the salt, as I do, will be allowed nothing more than crumbs from the capitalist table. 

But I have no doubt we'll get many more of those crumbs if we vote to retain Obama in the White House for another four years. 

Which leaves me, at age 72, with the one last realistic hope of my lifetime: that an Obama victory will allow me to die of natural causes before I am murdered by the Ruling Class policy of genocidal abandonment – extermination of elderly, disabled and chronically poor people by the termination of the stipends and services that now keep us alive.

LB/16 October 2012

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Veep Debate Exposes Religion's Role in War on Women

MSNBC'S LAWRENCE O'DONNELL and the many others who condemn Vice Presidential Debate Moderator Martha Raddatz for daring ask the candidates how their religious beliefs shape their views on abortion are clearly loathe to acknowledge the depth to which the United States has already been thrust into zero-tolerance Christian theocracy.

 

That such acknowledgement has become one of the paramount taboos of U.S. politics makes the critics' objections – whether spawned by pathological denial or deliberate deception – all the more indefensible. Three unimpeachably credible books on the subject, their revealing subtitles shown here in parentheses, have documented in terrifying detail this unprecedented threat to U.S. liberty. Chris Hedges' American Fascists (The Christian Right and the War on America) and Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy (The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century) were released in 2006, while Jeff Sharlet's The Family (The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power) appeared in 2008, each the product of a major publisher. A 2005 Rasmussen poll  had already revealed 63 percent of the U.S. population believes the Bible is literally true – the core litmus test for whether one is a fundamentalist and thus presumably favorable to overthrowing constitutional governance and replacing it with biblical law, the Christian version of Sharia. And no one can deny the Republican Party has become the scimitar with which Christian fanatics are hacking away women's rights, their success measured by the fact women in 87 percent of the nation's counties now lack access to abortion. 

 

In this ever-more-reactionary context, the answers to Raddatz's question undoubtedly produced the most revealing moment of the entire presidential campaign, its relevance reaching far beyond the debate between Vice-President Joe Biden and Vice-Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan.

 

The candidates' views on women's rights – Obama/Biden generally supportive, Romney/Ryan fanatically opposed – have thereby emerged as the one defining issue in an election that, beneath its rhetorical histrionics, is otherwise scarcely more than a clash over the tactics and strategies of how capitalism is to complete its (inevitable) transition to fascism. The Democrats reflexively conceal their tyrannical agenda behind lip service to once-genuinely progressive values; the Republicans make no secret of their bigoted intent to abolish the rights of women and minorities and their genocidal plan to immediately destroy all remaining socioeconomic safety nets, thereby revealing themselves to be the modern-day equivalent of the Nazis. And like the Nazi Ruling Class, the Republican One Percent regards Christianity as a primary mechanism of social control. Meanwhile – their cooperation deftly concealed by corporate-controlled mass media – both parties quietly collaborate to end forever the American experiment in constitutional democracy: note the near-unanimous Congressional votes to abolish constitutional rights and grant the president the unlimited powers of a führer or a tsar.

 

Thus Biden's performance against Ryan – no question it was superb – does not diminish my deeper, more cynical suspicion President Barack Obama has been ordered to lose the election. With terminal climate change accelerating beyond all projections, the One Percent is racing to protect itself by converting the United States into the de facto Fourth Reich: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty (including mass poisoning by genetically modified foods) for all the rest of us, the entire system increasingly sustained by Ayn Rand indoctrination, Christian prosperity gospel and the Big Business variant of rule by divine right.

 

Though it is a bit of an aside, I cannot but wonder how long it will take the Ruling Class to expunge Rand's atheism from her (numbingly tedious) writing as it is elevated into the U.S. equivalent of Mein Kampf.

 

In any case Obama's behavior in the next two debates will demonstrate whether his abysmal showing in the first bout was accidental or deliberate. If the latter, and if Romney therefore wins, those of us who are elderly, disabled and/or chronically impoverished – I am all three – have nothing to look forward to save the various forms of misery and death inflicted by deliberate abandonment. And those of us who are critics of capitalism will no doubt end our lives in prison or concentration camp.

 

Hence, given our only electoral choice is between the more gradual boiled-frog fascism of the Democrats and the blitzkrieg JesuNazism of the Republicans, I'm obviously voting for Obama/Biden.

*****

Elsewhere: Reflections on Capitalism, Theocracy and the Imbecility of Hope

 

When Reader Supported News ran a detailed indictment of Wall Street thievery (“...the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain - and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare”), I responded accordingly. As the negative numbers show – at least once going as high as -9 – many RSN readers were infuriated by my condemnation of the anti-intellectuality that renders the U.S. Left powerless in the face of capitalist savagery, a classic example of the proudly ignorant closed-mindedness that too often characterizes today's USians regardless of their ideology.

As I have said more times than I can count, such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

 

The questions – the only questions really – are (1) how to fight back and (2) whether the U.S. population has enough residual courage to mount an effective resistance.

Unfortunately, answering the first question requires the very intellectual processes the self-proclaimed Left despises and rejects: note for example the hateful anti-intellectuality characteristic of the Occupy Movement.

 

As to the second question, the answer is self-evident. Just as the Anti-Vietnam War Movement collapsed in the wake of the Kent State Massacre, so has Occupy – denied ideological solidarity by its frenzied anti-intellectuality – collapsed in the face of police brutality.

Thus – unless we are saved at the last minute by some miraculous awakening – have we doomed ourselves to inescapable slavery.

 

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A former Arkansas Department of Human Services lawyer, an avowed Christian theocrat running as a Republican for a seat in the state's Legislature, is urging the death penalty for rebellious children, calling it “a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents.” 

Alas, far too many of those who commented on this terrifying report obviously dismiss its significance as a harbinger of horrors to come:

We jeer this JesuNazi at our own peril.

He is the quintessence of Republicanism, the ultimate, Ruling-Class-financed purpose of which is imposing zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States.

Charlie Fuqua makes no secret of this intent because he lives in the South, which is already a de facto theocracy.

 

Yes, murdering children for disobedience is in fact part of the Biblical Law the corporate-funded theocrats intend to impose. So is stripping women of all rights (including the right to vote). Likewise the public burning of unbelievers.

 

But surely, you say, the people who run corporations can't be that savage.

 

Guess again: consider Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon. Remember Karen Silkwood.

 

Never forget the core truth of capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

 

Then recognize that under theocracy, CEO's rule by divine right. Work orders are holy writ. As in the Parable of the Talents, the person who has least is punished with the most harshness. 

 

Unless we awaken, such is the future that awaits us. 

 

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Meanwhile, in a detailed report on the surveillance devices by which the nation's school children are increasingly monitored, we learn the technology to enforce zero-tolerance theocracy is already being installed.

 

Which leaves me profoundly grateful I was born 72 years ago and lived the first decades of my life in a United States that truly was – at least for most Caucasians – a “sweet land of liberty.” But that realm no longer exists, nor – thanks to (self-inflicted) terminal climate change – will our species ever again know anything so wondrously comfortable and comforting:

 

When I view the future imposed on us by Ruling Class technology – a slave world overseen by zero-tolerance electronics – I am glad I am old. Surely I will be dead before consciousness becomes naught but horror.

 

LB/13 October 2012

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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: 

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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

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