Labor Day Blues: Reflections on the Imbecility of Hope

“Stop The War On Workers”: another hitherto-unpublished Occupy Tacoma picture from a November 2011 demonstration, a perfect image for Labor Day 2013 or any other year, especially since the September holiday is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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/2 September 2013

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Total Surveillance: Assault on Electronic Media Freedom

Another Tacoma graffito, seemingly a declaration of love, probably drawn by a young woman, and in any case unique, unlike anything of its kind I have seen anywhere including Manhattan. I photographed it in May 2009, forgot about it, then rediscovered it a couple of days ago. Leica M4, Voigtlander f/1.7 35mm Ultron, Kodak 800 color negative film, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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FORMAL, NAZI-STYLE tyranny remained unnecessary in the United States as long as the One Percent could maintain the Big Lie of “American democracy.” Public opinion was controlled not by a Gestapo – the German acronym for Geheime Staatspolizei (literally, “Secret State Police”) – but by disinformation, misdirection and outright falsehood. The resultant ignorance – the infinitely malleable and thus dependably submissive anti-culture of shrunken consciousness I mercilessly label “Moron Nation” – was maintained by a carefully fostered combination of paranoia, bigotry and xenophobia in which “intellectual,” “subversive” and “traitor” quickly became synonyms. It was perpetuated by an induced ignorance of history – an unabashed contempt for historical knowledge and a vehement hatred of history as a subject – that has no counterpart in human experience. But now, thanks to the quasi-democratic anarchy of electronic media, Moron Nation is ever-so-slowly giving way to something else. What it will be – whether it will be the Internet equivalent of an old-time Ku Klux Klan rally or an USian version of the deservedly legendary Petrograd Soviet  – remains to be seen. But it is the desperate fear of the latter that prompts the Ruling Class to impose what we already recognize as the total surveillance state: the real-world fulfillment of Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology in which a heavenly Führer tracks the lives of every one of us in meticulous, zero-tolerance detail, from the moment we are born until the instant we die. Monitored as we are from cradle to grave, it seems we cannot possibly organize any effective resistance to capitalism and its new paradigm of USian governance, absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Or is that merely what our masters want us to believe?

The bright side of electronic media is not only that it gives us fingertip access to the libraries of the world. It is also how it brings so many of us the increasingly persuasive arguments of both the libertarian Right  and the mainstream pseudo-Left, the words of fierce, often eloquent critics who credibly decry the entire “war on terror” as an extended variation on the old Reichstag Fire. Side-stepping their economic differences, these sources agree the USian Ruling Class is using the threat of Islamic terror to provide an ongoing rational for wiping out  our constitutional rights. Far more inflammatory material generated by the genuine (i.e., socialist) Left is available too, though access is often deliberately hampered by Google. Included in these worth-the-search offerings from the Real Left are the priceless archives of socialism and anarchism defiantly uploaded by the Soviet Union  during its final days and the regularly updated analytical resources of the World Socialist Web Site.  For the determined searcher – that is, one willing to look well beyond the first few Google pages – there are also any number of supplementary sources, both for reference and for breaking news. Thus a vast quantity of material that is definitively challenging One Percent absolutism is now available to more people than ever.

But electronic media has its dark side too, half of which is the built-in, seemingly permanent barrier that prohibits universal Internet access. This is the staggering cost of Internet service in the United States, its prices by far the highest in the world.  While these fees are nominally explained by the obscene salaries of Internet service-provider executives, an equal factor is no doubt Ruling Class insistence on censorship by price, which is motivated by the corporate and political aristocracy's terror of what might happen were the Internet's wealth of material to regularly reach the most viciously exploited members of the industrial world's most economically oppressed, most relentlessly overworked population. Perhaps it is partly in anticipation of Internet-agitated revolution the United States already imprisons more people, whether proportionally or in raw numbers, than any other nation on the planet. 

Predictably then, Internet access by those of us who are lower-income folks age 60 and over – which includes the 62-and-over demographic now being targeted for extermination by murderous cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food-stamps – is therefore kept at less than 20 percent by the outrageous monthly rates – as high as $70 or more – charged for USian high-speed Internet. (While the access study linked immediately above was conducted in Texas, nearly identical results – unfortunately not available on-line – were produced by studies in Washington state, which is as allegedly progressive as Texas is demonstrably reactionary.) Thus the common denominator of exclusion from the Internet is poverty – not just amongst the elderly but within all age groups. Obviously, it is no accident those of us who are most savagely victimized by capitalism are those of us who are also most excluded from the Internet's treasure-trove of information.

Nor is it coincidental the USian pseudo-Left stubbornly ignores (and often vehemently denies) the existence of this severely prohibitive class barrier. By so doing, the pseudo-Left not only proves beyond argument its maliciously bourgeois nature, but vividly demonstrates how it serves the One Percent within the broader context of the Ruling Class.

The other dark aspect of electronic media – actually its darkest – arises from the military origin of computers and the Internet itself. From this perspective – the fact the original computers were weapons, and the fact the precursors to the Internet were intended to further the USian agenda of capitalist imperialism and world conquest – we learn all we need to know. The hideous truth is the advent of the total-surveillance state is nothing more than the fulfillment of an implacably tyrannical purpose that existed from the technology's very beginning. To my knowledge, no other writer has dared point this out, nor has anyone mentioned its corollary – that believing mechanisms of death and oppression will ultimately be employed for  human betterment is no less absurd than imagining a nuclear-waste dump can be converted overnight into a vegetable garden. Moreover, the manner in which the instruments of this hitherto-unprecedented tyranny were marketed to the USian public, and the manner in which the public in its consumeroid frenzies of trinket-materialism literally fought to the death over lap-tops, digital cameras and cell-phones, has no parallel in history. Never before have people killed themselves in stampedes for enslavement. But the looming threat of the total-surveillance state has been common knowledge at least since the 1940s – which means Moron Nation knowingly embraced its own degradation, selling itself and its descendants into slavery at every opportunity and by every possible means. That's why, whether from the electronic concentration camp  of today or the grovel-in-filth servitude that is its inevitable tomorrow, only a miracle can rescue us now.

LB/25 August 2013

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Obamacare Betrayals Prove Barack's Treachery

A slightly better picture than the one I published in 2009. (For my additional photos of the event, see “Faces of the Fight” (left-hand column near bottom). Don't know why I chose that frame over this one, particularly since the determined-looking the woman holding the near end of the “Health Care is a Human Right” banner is more visible in this image. Pentax K1000, 70mm-210mm f/4 Tokina zoom, Kodak 800 color negative film, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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NOW AS WE DISCOVER yet another dimension of how Obamacare victimizes everybody but the very rich,  we are beginning to fully understand what Barack the Betrayer, the most brazen liar in U.S. political history, promised the prescription drug lords, the insurance aristocrats and the Wall Street barons during all those secret meetings  at the White House. Again we get schooled in the first law of understanding U.S. politics: anything a politician says in public is a lie – especially when the “change we can believe in” promises to make things better for us 99 Percenters. Thus we see once more how the bottom line of our everyday lives is the bottomless despotism of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and ever-worsening poverty for all the rest of us. In other words, if we're not part of the One Percent, we're fucked. 

While Chris Hedges says the bloodshed that now characterizes everyday life in Egypt “offers a window into the coming dystopia,” so indeed does the Judas-like transformation of Obama the Orator into Barack the Betrayer. Just as the Egyptian crisis shows us the methodology of ruling the Third World, so does political treachery demonstrate how the Ruling Class imposes tyranny on more allegedly civilized nations, especially the United States.

In this context, the Obama phenomenon is a case-study in mass deception. Obama and his Madison Avenue hucksters shamelessly used his race to project an “I-knew-hard-times-and-I'll-govern-accordingly” Big Lie of empathy with everyday people, particularly our struggle for survival against a capitalist system completing its inevitable transition into Ayn Rand fascism. But his presidency has shown us that in truth he is just another obedient servant of the Ruling Class, differing from other USian politicians only in the magnitude of his lies and the totality of his obedience. Thus because of the nasty peculiarities of USian race-relations – the fact all African-Americans are unjustly blamed for the misbehavior of one – Obama's exploitation of his racial identity cannot but hurt his own fellow blacks. Thus too he betrays the cause of racial and ethnic equality and drives yet another wedge into any rational hope of 99 Percent solidarity. And given Obama's political savvy, I cannot doubt these outcomes are part of a far more diabolical agenda. The president, it seems, is not just a typical politician scheming to fulfill his own self-obsessed, morally imbecilic greed. He has also emerged as the most effective facilitator of the capitalist dictatorship the USian One Percent has sought at least since the failed Bankers Plot of 1934.

But Obama's unprecedented use of racial camouflage – his concealment of tyrannical intent behind the facade of the one people who most powerfully symbolize the USian struggle for freedom – is not the only treachery of which he is guilty. He also carefully hid his Wall Street heart and his Machiavellian mind behind the false flag of the Democrat Party. True, the party was terminally corrupted by the events of 22 November 1963, and now differs from the Republican Party only in the false rhetoric required to hide its embrace of the neo-fascist principles that unite both parties into One Party of Two Names. But Obama has thrust the Democrats' deceptiveness to never-before-known extremes. And by so doing, he has probably inflicted the coup-de-grace on the already fatally wounded USian experiment in constitutional democracy. He has taught us politics is a waste of time, that it is never anything more than a rigged game, one in which the house – in this instance the Ruling Class – is the only possible winner. Our vote is thereby proven meaningless; regardless of for whom we cast our ballots, we get a Republican – that is, an unapologetic fascist. We ourselves are thus reduced to the abject powerlessness of medieval serfs; our hopelessness is ever-more-clearly that of slaves for whom the Jubilee will never come. Hedges again: we live in “...the final stage of human habitation of the planet.”

I should point out that while I have enormous admiration for Mr. Hedges and his courageous outspokenness, I vehemently disagree with his notion religious extremism is nothing more than a reaction to oppression. I have experienced firsthand the often-violent religious fanaticism that defines the USian South as a de facto theocracy, where the Ku Klux Klan was known colloquially as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class,” an acknowledgement of its broader function as the local equivalent of the Islamic Morality Police. Hence I take the more conventionally Marxian view of religion – especially Abrahamic religion – as not just a key mechanism of oppression but most often its chief perpetrator. Indeed it is the seductive Jewish, Christian and Islamic notion of ego-survival in an eternal afterlife that so effectively obstructs revolution everywhere on this dying planet. That's why U.S. policy in the the Muslim world, despite claims to the contrary, always favors the imposition of theocracy.  It's also why the One Percent seeks to impose Christian theocracy on the entire United States – the better to brain-police its United Estates, the One Big Plantation on which we are all herded ever more relentlessly toward the corporate slave pens.

Speculate as we might on these matters, the vindictiveness of the Obamacare scam – and it is now obvious it was a scam from the very beginning – is undeniable. Not only is Obama setting aside the out-of-pocket limits that were to protect patients from runaway profiteering by the health-insurance and prescription-drug cartels; the rule requiring employers to provide insurance for their workers has also been discarded  – each betrayal a huge windfall for the obscenely wealthy One Percenters to whom Obama now gives his only loyalty. Predictably, organized labor – the only representation for USian 99 Percenters that still effectively resists capitalism's new paradigm of zero-tolerance authority – has meanwhile been excluded from any of the associated discussions. Moreover, just as any other Republican would surely do, the allegedly “Democratic” president has designed Obamacare to methodically further the wretchedness of the USian 99 Percent. He has given the capitalists tacit encouragement to shrink full-time employment by forcibly expanding the ranks of part-time workers.  And via Medicaid expansion, he has granted the states unlimited authority to fatten their treasuries by post-mortem seizure of all the possessions of anyone  whose income is at or below the new eligibility limit, which after 1 January 2014 is 133 percent of poverty. Based on this year's definitions of poverty,  this is an annual income of $15,282 for a one-person household; $20, 628 for a couple; and $31,322 for a family of four.

Thus our poignantly desperate yearnings for affordable, adequate health care – that which the civilized nations regard as a basic human right – have been perverted by political deception, presidential sleight-of-hand and outright Big Lies into yet another mechanism by which we Working Class USians, already the most oppressed people in the industrial world, are further victimized by those who see us as nothing more than beasts of burden.

LB/18 August 2013

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Racial Hatred Implicit in USian Total Surveillance State

An iconic, oft-published image I increasingly regard as a lament for the United States. The woman, a student at Western Washington State College, was a participant in an anti-war demonstration. Nikon F, 105 f/2.5 Nikkor, Tri-X at 800 in D-76, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1971. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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RACE HATRED SUSTAINED by unlimited police power was one of the defining characteristics of Nazi Germany, but is it now also a core principle in the new, post-Constitutional paradigm of U.S. governance? 

That's the underlying implication of Reuters' bold revelation an elite Drug Enforcement Administration unit routinely receives National Security Agency intercepts and reports from other intelligence agencies it then relays to state and local police departments throughout the nation. The DEA unit, says Reuters, is called the Special Operations Division or SOD and is partnered with the Department of Homeland Security.

Researched and written by investigative reporters John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke, the Reuters exposé says the cops who receive the information are under strict orders to keep its source secret – “not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.” It adds that “federal agents are trained to 'recreate' the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.” 

A second Reuters report further details how the government is using spy tactics to nullify the Constitutional rights of suspects and defendants in a broader spectrum of ordinary criminal cases. 

Because the prosecutions disclosed in the initial Reuters report are all apparently drug-related, they are of especially grave concern to minority advocates, who cite compelling statistical evidence  the so-called “war on drugs” is in fact a war against African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations peoples and indeed all other non-whites in the United States. 

The racial element in this story – which the carefully self-censured U.S. corporate media monopoly has yet to acknowledge – arises from the government's hugely disproportionate arrest and imprisonment of non-whites.  Whether in percentages or in raw numbers, the U.S. imprisons more of its people than any other nation. But the selectivity of its penal harshness is disclosed by the fact the vast majority of convicts are from nonwhite minorities. Though only 27.6 percent of the USian population is non-white (2010 census data), 67.6 percent of the nation's male convicts, and 50.7 percent of its female convicts, are nonwhite (see material linked immediately above). 

While minority advocates assert these statistics prove the racism the U.S. officially denies, the One Percent's fear of revolution is undoubtedly another major element in the targeting of minorities. Hitherto top-secret files of the KGB – Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security – revealed after the collapse of the Soviet Union its analysts had carefully evaluated the USian rebellions of the 1960s and concluded only the minority communities possessed any genuine revolutionary potential. Though the U.S. and Canadian news reports of these disclosures have seemingly vanished from public access, they nevertheless might explain why the intelligence agencies are using the rationale of the drug war to focus on minorities, particularly after the emergence of the Department of Homeland Security as the de facto USian secret police.

Lastly of course is the profit motive – the unapologetic savagery of for-profit prisons  as capitalism inevitably morphs into Ayn Rand fascism. “(T)he increasing overincarceration of people of color,” says the American Civil Liberties Union, “rakes in billions of dollars a year for (Corrections Corporation of America) and other for-profit prison companies.” In other words, the intelligence agencies are now aiding the increasingly privatized criminal justice system in its unacknowledged mission to ensure white supremacy and simultaneously add to the already obscene riches of the One Percent. 

But the dire implications of USian surveillance operations go far beyond matters of race. They are legitimately frightening to any and all dissidents everywhere in the nation. What is portrayed by the newest revelations is a power-mad government intent on imposing a 21st Century version of a Nazi or Stalinist police state. Given the Obama Administration's relentless campaign to forcibly disarm the civilian population, Second Amendment advocates are now especially wary of being unconstitutionally targeted. Under the new paradigm of USian governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – all such fears are undeniably rational.

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Another element in the tsunami of tyranny that is sweeping away USian freedom is the rat-out-your-colleague program by which the government is indoctrinating its employees in how to achieve job security by spying on one another. While capitalism has always encouraged workplace paranoia and the associated back-stabbing, out-ratting and brown-nosing as a means of destroying or preventing worker solidarity, one of the (former) attractions of government employment was the relative absence of such pressures. But this new effort by the Obama Administration will make government employees as mutually distrustful as their private-sector counterparts, thereby facilitating the union-busting the Republicans openly demand and most Democrats secretly support – which may, beneath its national security disguise, be the program's primary purpose. 

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A comment by which I responded to a piece about John Kiriakou, the former Central Intelligence Agency officer who dared reveal the unconstitutional USian torture program and is now imprisoned as a result,  gets right to it: 

Government IS the enemy. Who put Mr. Kiriakou in jail? Who reads all our mail? Who monitors our lives every minute of every day? Who provides the goon squads that enforce the corporate will? Who falsely pledges to protect our freedom then damns us all to inescapable slavery?

 

This, alas, is the one point upon which the conservatives are now proven to have been truly prophetic -- and if we could but grant them that, perhaps then we could begin to build a Left/Right solidarity sufficient to salvage our liberty.

 

LB/11 August 2013

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Snowden's Disclosures Could Spark Real USian Solidarity

“Tea Partiers: You Should Be Here Too,” another of my Occupy Tacoma pictures, this one originally published by Reader Supported News. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

 
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(NOTE: Changes in the circumstances of my life – a welcome increase in activities unrelated to this blog – mandate I now make Sundays or early Monday mornings the time of my weekly posting. Please accept my apology for any resultant inconvenience.)

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EDWARD SNOWDEN'S GREAT GIFT to us, We the People of the United States, is the dawning realization our love for what used to be “our” country transcends the divisiveness that denies us the solidarity we need if we are to prevail against the One Percent. The Ruling Class is thus trembling, possibly as never before in my 73-year lifetime. Little by slow, more and more of us – even some of the most pampered politicians – are awakening to the personal dangers implicit in the hideous truth our government has been captured by a cabal of morally imbecilic plutocrats whose greed is infinite, whose potential for tyranny knows no limits and whose imperial ambitions have no earthly boundaries.

But it remains to be seen whether this fledgling coalition of patriots can thrive and mature. President Obama is already demonstrating his slithery skill at backstabbing  those who oppose his worse-than-Nixon despotism,  and far too many Democrats have abandoned their pretense of progressive values in nauseatingly hypocritical efforts to remain faithful to their leader and the total-surveillance police-state he has created. It is exactly as if they were fascists in some lockstep cult of personality, and Obama's title were führer rather than chief executive. 

Yet in this newly emergent, post-Snowden context, it seems there are nearly as many of us, myself among them, who would willingly sidestep our instinctive distrust of Ron Paul and even refrain from expressing our contempt for the Teabag faction, if only it would help form a united front for the restoration of constitutional governance. Such face-to-face, human-to-human political re-integration would probably be good medicine for us all. Though it would undoubtedly be revolutionary, it probably would not result in revolution per se, because it might go revolution one better and make it unnecessary. 

Nor is Snowden's protection by Russia without its own (obscure) pro-democracy precedent. It was Mother Russia, in the person of Tsar Alexander II with the might of the Russian Imperial Navy's Baltic and Far Eastern fleets, that saved the federal Union  by protecting our coasts from British, French and Confederate attack during the Civil War. (My profound thanks to my late father, Donald R. Bliss [1910-1971], more learned in history than anyone I have ever known, who when I was age 10 or 11 and in fifth grade studying the Civil War, revealed to me the long-suppressed facts of these nation-preserving events.) 

Could it be that, by granting Snowden temporary asylum, Vladimir Putin, Russian president and de facto Tsar, has given the restoration of USian constitutional democracy the international protection it needs to succeed? If this is indeed what obtains, if Putin thus empowers Snowden and his disclosures, the irony – and some would say the karmic or poetic justice – would be profound, establishing a subtle parallel between the events of 1861-1865 and 2013. Meanwhile, the Josef Goebbels clones of the corporate propaganda media not withstanding, Russia already helps the United States in a surprising number of ways, as reported by Juan Cole. 

Yes, the Russians are clearly acting in their own interests – but so was France in the events of 1775-1783. 

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Unfortunately the odds of forming a united front of patriots for the restoration of constitutional governance are considerably diminished by two large groups within the body politic. 

One of these is the growing cult of Christian theocrats, about which I sound the alarm as often as I can and usually in detail I hope is genuinely frightening. (If you're reading this via TypePad, click on “Archives,” then click on “Religion.” If you're on Blogger, it's more of a pain because you have to do it year by year: look under “Blog Archives,” click on a year, wait for for the search-engine blank to appear at the upper left corner of the page, then type in “theocracy” without quotation marks.) In any case, suffice it to say these “born again” followers of Jesus jeopardize us all. They are defined by their fanatical opposition to sexual freedom, female personhood, science, the primacy of Nature and anything remotely resembling political or economic democracy. They are as uncompromisingly hateful, particularly toward women, as any member of the Taliban.

The other obstacle to patriotic solidarity is the dominant majority within the USian Left, the demonstrably self-defeating, hopelessly white-bourgeois, Ayn-Rand-tainted arrogance of which continues to astound me, even though by now – having watched it destroy the Occupy Movement  – I should expect no better. Never mind its characteristic loathing of intellectuals, union members and blue-collar people, its ignorant rejection of class-struggle or any other formalized ideology or analysis, and its unthinking acceptance of Randite elitism long ago reduced it to nothing more than a pseudo-Left. Loud and petulant enough to shout down any attempt to re-form the genuine Left that was fatally weakened by the post-World-War-II purges  and slain by the class conflicts exacerbated by the Vietnam War,  its primary political contribution is sustainment of the angry divisiveness that protects the Ruling Class by discouraging solidarity amongst the 99 Percent. Thus, hiding its Randite instincts behind its progressive rhetoric, this pseudo-Left routinely wages vocal and sometimes violent warfare against loggers, commercial fishers, oilfield riggers, long-haul truck-drivers, mass transport workers  and anyone else whose job or lack thereof is deemed politically “incorrect,” which of course includes nearly all of us whose annual income damns us as “the poor.” Note how the prefatory article isolates us – the homeless, the elderly, the disabled, the minorities – the better to facilitate the genocide-by-abandonment  President “Slick Willie” Clinton peddled as welfare reform and the cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid Barack the Betrayer continues to defiantly tout as a grand bargain.

Admittedly, my attitudes toward the pseudo-Left, which used to call itself the "New Left," are profoundly influenced by the late Jack Newfield. It's a tragedy his superb Village Voice reporting on the death of the New Deal coalition has apparently never been made available on-line. But it was through those stories of the late 1960s and early 1970s I acquired the tools to recognize the escalation of class warfare that, as I entered old age, would bring about the wholly dire half-fulfillment of my own father's oft-repeated prophecy: “the time will come when things in this country get so bad, the Red Army will be welcomed as an army of liberation.” Throughout the years after 1973 and everywhere in the nation, the costs of living had skyrocketed as wages stagnated or declined. But my editors demanded I remain silent. The closest I ever came to reporting what was really happening was a piece headlined “New York Creativity: An Uncertain Future.” Published in the August 1986 issue of Art Direction magazine – the last edition for which I myself was editor-in-chief – the report's boldface summary denounced “greedy landlords” for “jeopardizing the city's position on the cutting edge.” The text elaborated: “(T)he economics of New York living are becoming increasingly inhospitable...The situation in the photo district has become so critical that many established photographers have added their voices to a growing demand for commercial rent control...Village Voice writer Erika Munk predicted (three months earlier) that 'without a drastic change of direction, Manhattan will be finished as America's creative center'” – as in fact it has been.

But it is not just capitalist economics that killed the American Dream and overthrew the USian experiment in constitutional democracy. It was also the breathtaking stupidity of the pseudo-Left. As a press officer for an Office of Economic Opportunity program in 1971 – apart from the Army, the only government job I ever had – I remember all too well how the snooty condescension of the (white bourgeois) feminists doomed their efforts to organize welfare mothers, how the pampered collegians then damned all women on welfare as “hopelessly reactionary,” vowed to infiltrate the welfare bureaucracy and thereby make feminist consciousness-raising a mandatory prerequisite for receiving stipends and services. Of a kind with the draft-exempt academic elite who yet despise those of us who served in the Vietnam Era military, these sorority-house radicals soon joined with their male counterparts to foment the still-raging campaign for forcible civilian disarmament – the imposition of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that is one of the many forms of USian class warfare.

A decade later, the impending bankruptcy of a newspaper flung me jobless into the Reagan Recession and a hunt for employment that by 1982 had turned me into a commercial fisher – engineer/deckhand aboard a 96-foot purse seiner. Thus at age 42 a mostly benevolent fate allowed me to experience firsthand not only the quiet ecstasies and high-pucker-factor hazards of working at sea but the darker truths of USian blue-collar economics, realities about which I had hitherto only written from afar. One such sociological encounter, with a trust-funded student from Western Washington University's Huxley College of Environmental Studies, was particularly enlightening. The student, who could not see beyond the grease-stains on my engine-room jeans and therefore had no idea who or what I might be, presumptuously lectured me on the new paradigm of ecological economics: “you people,” he said, “are going to have to learn to live with less.” It was the same übermenschen mentality that in its most extreme form calls for spiking trees and threatening the lives and livelihoods of loggers – the sneering pomposity that, beginning in the Vietnam Era, has driven most  blue-collar men and women into the manipulative arms of the Republican Party.

Nevertheless I had thought the collapse of the Occupy Movement, which in large measure was the byproduct of college-age Caucasians who proudly label themselves as “progressives” but are as anti-intellectual as the late Sen. Joe McCarthy and as anti-union as the late Ayn Rand, had perhaps taught these pseudo-Leftists to at least partially muzzle their self-contradictory haughtiness. Not so, as Laura Gottesdiener demonstrated by implicitly dismissing all white victims of foreclosure as somehow magically immune to its heartbreaking, gut-wrenching horrors. “(T)he difficulties white America has faced during the foreclosure crisis,” she wrote, “don't compare with what Wall Street and the banks have inflicted, physically and psychologically, on African American neighborhoods.” In other words, despite the story's misleadingly inclusive headline (“Backyard Shock Doctrine: Wall Street's Destruction Comes Home”), Gottesdiener, herself Caucasian, says white folks just don't feel the pain.

As I (unpopularly) replied in the associated comment thread, “by defining foreclosure and eviction as a racial problem, she guarantees the indifference if not the overt hostility of the white majority – the approximately 75 percent of the USian Caucasians who are definitively racist.” Hence I feel she owes her readers a triple apology: to foreclosed, evicted and homeless whites for minimizing their misery; to foreclosed and evicted Blacks for marginalizing their sufferings by setting them apart from other class-war victims; and to the entire 99 Percent for re-inflaming the racial obstacles to solidarity.

To get a clearer picture of what Gottesdiener did wrong, it is useful to compare her above-linked prose with a new essay written by Chris Hedges.  Gottesdiener's research was seemingly detailed and in considerable depth, but she mis-assembled her facts into a lament for African Americans that simultaneously (and not very subtly) demonizes whites and thereby furthers the Ruling Class purpose of sustaining maximum 99 Percent divisiveness. Hedges meanwhile assembled similar and equally credible facts that, because of his reportorial thoughtfulness, does not minimize the significance of race but nevertheless becomes a lamentation for us all. Precisely because of its portrait of the universal suffering imposed by capitalism's transformation into Ayn Rand fascism, it furthers the evolution of 99 Percent solidarity.

Perhaps the difference between Gottesdiener on one hand and Hedges and myself on the other is a difference in backgrounds. Though Hedges is as famous as I am obscure, he is, as I am, a declared libertarian socialist, an unapologetic intellectual and a journalist of several decades' experience. Gottesdiener meanwhile labels herself a “freelance journalist” and declares herself “an organizer with Occupy Wall Street” – the latter a decidedly curious description, since I as an early activist in Occupy Tacoma know the entire Occupy Movement has been effectively dead since the spring of 2012. Moreover, since it was through Occupy I met some of the indescribably bitter adolescent children of white families who had been thrown out of work, foreclosed and evicted into homelessness – the kids themselves coalesced into an unspeakably angry subculture that will either form the core of a genuinely revolutionary movement or destroy itself in criminality – I am doubly perplexed by how she could be so dismissive of the associated trauma.

LB/4 August 2013

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