Beware the Christian Fanatics: Are You Their Next Target?

“RAM”: more Tacoma graffiti from the newly rediscovered work I did in 2009. Of course I cannot state with any certainty the artist's intent, but the trinity of monster, phallic serpent and human appears to be mostly an expression of anger and disgust at life itself. 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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THE FRIGHTENING SUCCESS of the stealth campaign by Christian fanatics to abolish the reproductive and deathbed rights of Washington state citizens  shows us just how devastatingly effective such extra-legal measures can be. Now even Group Health – the Puget Sound-area health care cooperative that was formerly a national leader in the fight for women's reproductive freedom – has retreated from its hitherto uncompromising stance on access to abortion and end-of-life choices. Not only have its agreements with Catholic hospitals severely restricted its members' options (for which see the OAN essay linked above), it has also omitted abortion coverage from its Obamacare programs. 
 
Meanwhile the Roman Catholic Church has already bought or acquired policy-making control of approximately half the state's hospitals, thereby imposing de facto bans on abortion and legally assisted suicide in all the associated service areas. Never mind the bans are brazen defiance of the will of the people, the voters who legalized abortion and approved death with dignity as an alternative for those who are terminally ill. The church fathers have learned, no doubt from the One Percent, how to use the institutional structures of capitalism to make the ballot box irrelevant and reduce the Constitution to executive toilet paper
. 

As if that were not scary enough, two ultra-conservative legislators – one a Protestant, the other a Catholic – are sponsoring a bill that would make it legal for Christian doctors, pharmacists and business owners to persecute nonbelievers  by denying birth control to women and refusing to provide care and services to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people.

Sen. Adam Kline (D-Seattle), who has emerged as the chief opponent of the measure, Senate Bill 3090,  warns its passage would also enable medical professionals and merchants who belong to white-supremacist Christian sects to withhold medical care, prescription drugs and many other services from African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations peoples and non-whites in general.  Even the Ku Klux Klan – known throughout the South as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” (and reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be active in Kirkland and Yakima) – could claim religious protection for its bigotry.

The bill's sponsors are Sen. Mike Padden (R-Spokane) and Sen. Steve O'Ban (R-Tacoma). Padden's credentials are summarized on his state Senate web site, with additional details on Google. O'Ban's political biography is likewise available from the Senate,  with a more inclusive portrait on the left-leaning Washblog site.

Political insiders assure me SB 3090 has no chance of passage during the 2013-2014 legislative session. But the mere fact of its introduction proves again the relentless intent of the Christian fanatics, who have traded their denominational antagonisms for the solidarity of a formidable political-action cult. Instead of battling one another, its members whether Protestant or Catholic now wage war against human sexuality. Ecclesiastical attorneys are meanwhile reinterpreting “freedom of religion” to include the alleged “right” of the faithful to discriminate against non-believers, with SB 3090 one of many kindred measures nationwide. In every instance, the goal of such legislation is to further the imposition of Christian theocracy on the United States.

The associated electoral strategy and tactics are exemplified in the state of Washington by John Connelly's 2012 campaign for a Tacoma state Senate seat. Unsuccessful despite his all-time-record spending, it provides a rare glimpse of the fanatics' organizational structure,  which not only transcends denominational boundaries but encompasses both major political parties as well. Though Connelly ran as a Democrat, it should be noted that particular label is often meaningless and not infrequently a deliberate deception, a confusing reality exemplified by the president's stunning shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer. Had Connelly won, it was feared he'd side with the Republicans against marriage equality and reproductive freedom.

What else was at stake is demonstrated by how two other conservative Democrats betrayed their constituents and enabled a state Senate coup that gave the Republicans control of the entire Legislature. 

In all probability the Republican takeover was scripted well before the 2012 election. And Connelly's record-breaking expenditures suggest he desperately wanted to be part of it. But even without the Tacoman's participation, the coup has paralyzed state government. (“Coup” is the label I correctly affixed to this cunning overthrow of representative democracy weeks before any of the state's other journalists dared so much as whisper the word, for which scroll down to the linked story's comment thread.)

Predictably, the paralysis has had dire consequences, especially for women and mass-transit users. The former were treated as if their demands for guaranteed inclusion of birth control in employer-provided health insurance marked them as sluts; the latter – myself included – are routinely damned as parasites who are dependent on the “welfare” provided by minimal bus service and pathetically undersized rail operations. 

If the situation in Washington state seems familiar, that's because an eerily similar affliction paralyzes the federal government. The result is unbreakable gridlock save when congressional Democrats and Republicans join hands in unanimous or near-unanimous votes to (further) nullify the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution. It's no longer Democrats versus Republicans. It's now the One Party of Two Names versus the entire 99 Percent. And that One Party is methodically imposing the new paradigm of USian governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

But why has Washington, of all the allegedly “progressive” coastal states, been singled out for theocratic transformation? Wouldn't the forces of Christian fanaticism be more successful if they continued their efforts in openly theocratic jurisdictions like Texas  or North Dakatoa?

 

Obviously, locale alone is not the answer. Wherever one might be in the United States, the imposition of despotism via the marketplace is actually quite easy. This is because there is no economic democracy anywhere in the nation. Big Business – which generously finances the drive toward theocracy as its favored means of guaranteeing a maximally submissive workforce – has nearly absolute power. Its lawyers have manipulated the laws to deny anyone who is on business property – particularly in workplaces and shopping malls – the liberties theoretically guaranteed by the Constitution. And private property rights generally trump all others, particularly when the property owner is an all-powerful corporation. Though abortion is at present a constitutional right, business enterprises (including non-profits) cannot be forced to provide it. 

Also, as proven by Washington's oft-demonstrated 45-year hostility to mass transit,  the state's voters hide a decidedly hypocritical preference for the savagery of Ayn Rand economics beneath their claims of “progressive” political sensibilities. Perhaps – recognizing how quickly one sort of bigotry can be morphed into another – the Christian fanatics believe they can gradually expand Washington's hatred of transit users into a more general hatefulness. That vindictive hope would surely explain the misogyny, homophobia and racism now evident in SB 3090. In any case, it's clear the state is again functioning as a test-lab for the One Percent's strategies and tactics of oppression.

Meanwhile the magnitude of the fanatical Christian threat to health care throughout the United States is revealed in the coverage given it on 12 May by The New York Times and by the website Think Progress the next day.  (These stories appeared less than three weeks after the Outside Agitator's Notebook report published on 25 April and linked in this essay's lead paragraph. It was not the first time OAN with its small but international readership has seemingly influenced coverage of U.S. domestic conflicts.) Nevertheless, the USian mainstream media refuses to acknowledge the theocratic threat as such. It's as if the editors and reporters believe they can eliminate the fanatical Christian onslaught merely by tabooing any mention of its long-range intent. The taboo is apparent whether in Ruling Class publications like NYT or pseudo-leftist Internet journals like TP. Meanwhile the anti-theocratic warnings by Chris Hedges, Jeff Sharlet and several other notably credible authors go unheeded, putting all humanity at risk.

For those who foolishly continue to doubt we are in deadly peril, I can only suggest they remember the direction taken by Rome after Constantine decreed Christianity its state religion. In its day, Rome ruled the greatest empire of the ongoing patriarchal age, just as the United States rules that age's greatest empire ever.  Now imagine the USian empire becoming the modern counterpart of post-Constantine Rome, like Romani imperii post Constantinum, a fanatical Christian theocracy maintained by the most powerful military machine of its time and, again like that Rome, believing itself divinely tasked to impose a new world order, commanding its subjects to bow down to the cross of Jesus or die. I can already hear the One-President-Under-God declaring his fulfillment of biblical prophecy: “brethren in Christ, it is with heavy heart I come before you to announce we have to nuke this planet to save our souls from the Devil.”

LB/15 September 2013

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Censorship, Ralph Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity

Rise Up: yet another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma pix, this a view of Pugnetti Park shortly after it was taken over by the movement in early October 2011 and temporarily renamed Occupation Park. One of these days I will assemble all this work into an extended photo essay. From the hopeless perspective of the present, the optimism of those days is as poignant as the naivety my 23-and-24-year-old self displayed in dealing with two of the many forms of unofficial USian press censorship, described below. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. Click on picture to view it full size.

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RALPH NADER, FOR whom I have never voted but for whom I have the greatest respect, has written for Reader Supported News a denunciation of President Barack Obama that will undoubtedly be noted by historians as the most bravely outspoken such commentary by any public figure to date. 

Hence I urge all of you not just to read it but to disseminate it as widely as possible and communicate your approval to RSN, even if only with a word or two, as in the traditional “Yes man yes!” by which we long-ago beatniks used to shout our approval of exceptional poetry or music. My own applause is already included in the associated comment thread.

That said, in the interest of full disclosure and as a long-overdue expression of gratitude, I should acknowledge I owe Nader a big debt of thanks. In 1964 he entrusted me with the revelations that, a year later, would be published in Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of capitalism in action, specifically of how the U.S. automobile manufacturers were maximizing profits by minimizing vehicular safety. 

At the time I was the sports editor and one of three news-reporter/photographers for The Oak Ridger, a small but notably excellent East Tennessee daily. It was in acknowledgement of all these roles I had been assigned to interview Nader about his research. Not only had I added car stuff to our sports coverage – I was then the proud owner of a 1958 Porsche super-coupe – I had also demonstrated a knack for unusual news stories, and Nader's findings felt like the biggest scoop of my career to date. But this piece never saw the proverbial light of day. It was killed by Managing Editor Dick Smyser, who in one of those indicative ironies of USian history was also the chairman of the Associated Press Managing Editors' Freedom of Information Committee.

It was my second bitter schooling in the harsh realities of censorship that are cleverly hidden beneath the claim the United States has “freedom of the press,” and it was memorably painful because I had expected better – much better – from The Oak Ridger. Why? Because its top executives, Publisher Don McKay, Business Manager Tom Hill and Smyser himself had been courageous enough to hire me despite The Knoxville Journal's continuing effort to slander me into professional and personal oblivion.

That episode is a story unto itself. I had worked for The Journal since September 1957, first as a part-time sports stringer through the fall of 1959, when finances forced me to drop out of college and sign up for a six-year hitch in the U.S. Army. In September 1962, having served 18 months in Korea and finished my required three-year term of active duty, I returned to Knoxville and was immediately rehired by The Journal as a full-time staff sportswriter. Obviously the paper liked me and my reporting; Assistant Sports Editor Ben Byrd once told me he believed I was destined for The New York Times or some equally prestigious publication.

But on 2 June 1963, a raid by a combined force of Knoxville cops and Knox County sheriff's deputies jailed a racially mixed group of 40 men and women on charges I knew to be utterly without basis in fact. I had been there, had been arrested and on the strength of my press card subsequently released, and now – naive idiot that I was – I believed I could convince Journal Editor/Publisher Guy L. Smith and City Editor Dick Evans the arrests were at the very least a terrible mistake and more probably a deliberate atrocity. Soon Smith and Evans concluded I was what in the parlance of the Jim Crow South was called a “nigger-lover” – probably a Communist as well – and Smith had me re-arrested in his newsroom, then publicly fired me on Page One of his newspaper. 

My termination notice was a maliciously slanderous story by Ron McMahan, who knowingly wrote a deliberate Big Lie that would have been equally at home in Adolf Hitler's Völkischer Beobachter: “Forty Negroes and whites, most of them students at the University of Tennessee, were arrested early Sunday morning during what police described as 'a drunken sex orgy' at a South Knoxville residence...Booked at county jail on a charge of disorderly conduct was Loren Bliss, 23, of 1537 Laurel Avenue, a former Journal sportswriter.”

There was of course neither orgy nor drunkenness; the gathering was nothing more than a quiet garden party, attended by nearly as many UT faculty members, civil rights activists, young local professionals and business executives as older students. It celebrated the graduation of a woman named Maline Robinson, who had just earned a master-of-fine-arts degree from UT and who would later teach art history at the University of Wisconsin. Despite The Journal's lurid prose (“partly-clad couples were lying all over the front lawn...on tables, in closets and on the floor...Lewdness charges were not placed against anyone because during the melee everyone scattered”), the sexual allegations were nothing more than fabrications of the fearful, vindictively pornographic southern mind. Such is the obscenely racist envy implicit in the old joke that asks, “what is ten inches and white,” then answers, “nothing.” 

That the raid occurred just as the local Ku Klux Klan and its many affiliated churches were pulpit-pounding against “interracial love feasts” was hardly coincidental. Martin Southern, the ironically named American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in Knoxville, said he believed the raid had been carefully planned by a cabal of high ranking officials at UT, the sheriff's office and the police department plus top executives of The Journal and The Knoxville News-Sentinel to facilitate purging the university of anyone the local Ruling Class deemed “trouble-makers” and/or “outside agitators.” 

Southern warned me that because I was the one genuinely credible witness to everything that had actually occurred – he said I was “the fly, as it were, in the segregationist ointment” – my own life was in danger. Not many days later, a would-be killer tried to invade my ground-floor apartment via its kitchen window, but the attempted hit was thwarted by my vigilant German shepherd Brunhilda and my own expert-class skill with a handgun – a story for another time. For now suffice it to say dear Brunhilda quickly got to the meat of the problem, bit the malefactor in his blue-jeaned crotch, seized him by his cock and balls and dragged him down from the window just as I was aligning my sights to shoot him between the eyes.

Meanwhile Marion Barry, then Tennessee field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later the mayor of Washington D.C., had arranged for me to cover the story for a local African-American weekly. But that report too was intrusively censored, not by blacks but by two white civil rights activists, Congress of Racial Equality members Steve Wagner and Phillip Bacon, who claimed they feared accurate description of the incident's more telling moments would discredit the narrative as “sensationalism.” Thus to my eternal regret I allowed them to cut several key passages from my original draft. These included a word-for-word account of my confrontation with Smith, in which he made it clear my alternatives were either to fabricate a lie describing an imaginary sex orgy or suffer the consequences; details of the police assault on a Latin American diplomat who was a guest at the party; and a brief description of the attempt on my life that arguably confirmed Southern's hypothesis of a Rightist conspiracy far broader than a mere police raid. The following, under my own byline, is what remained after Bacon and Wagner finished censoring it. It's from the 3 August 1963 edition of The Knoxville Flashlight-Herald:

Although The Knoxville Journal had opportunity to publish a staff member's eye-witness account of the now-famed graduation party held for some University of Tennessee students by Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Ottaway, it declined to utilize that source and relied instead upon police and sheriff's reports.

 

That those reports were something less than reliable has since been proven in Knox County Sessions Court.

 

This writer, at the time a sports reporter for The Journal, attended the party with friends and was subsequently arrested, then freed after deputies learned he was a Journal staff member. He was re-arrested and booked some 14 hours later after unsuccessfully attempting to interest Journal City Editor Dick Evans in a factual account of events before and during the arrests...

 

Included in this writer's report would have been a statement that the party was quiet and proper despite the number of persons present and information that police and deputies had acted without grounds...

 

Those taken to city jail, where there is a drunkometer (a Breathalyzer by which suspects can challenge a drunkenness charge), were not charged with drunkenness, but those taken to county jail, where there is no drunkometer, were charged with drunkenness in addition to disorderly conduct...

 

Cases against those charged by Knox County, including this writer, were dismissed July 1. City Court cases were continued by order of Journal-supported Judge Charles Kelly and will be heard in October.

 

Included on the city docket is Milton Vargas, the Panamanian Vice-Consul here. Mr. Vargas, who has filed a full report with the Panamanian government, has charged he was slapped by police officers...

 

The only uncensored coverage of the arrests was provided by TASS – Tyelyegrafnoye agyentstvo Sovyetskogo Soyuza or Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. The story appeared on page one of Pravda, as I recall in the 5 June edition. It was also – or so I was told by several UT students – broadcast in English by Radio Moscow. 

Given the often prurient hatefulness that defines southern racism, The Oak Ridger's bravery in hiring me in mid-August, even before all the court cases had been decided, was beyond exceptional. Indeed, since The Journal's continued slanders were blacklisting me even amongst Northern employers, before The Oak Ridger came to my rescue, I had feared my journalism career was over. 

Which brings us back to Ralph Nader. Maybe a year after the Knoxville incident, he was in Oak Ridge visiting his sister, a scientist with some big-league connection to what today would be called the nuclear energy cartel. My boss Dick Smyser arranged for me to interview Nader,  exactly where I no longer remember. What I do recall is that I questioned Nader for hours, that eventually we adjourned to his sister's apartment, and that after I photographed him with the paper's Polaroid-back Speed Graphic, we talked literally until dawn.

Nader doubted the story would run. Citing the paper's bold defiance of the region's characteristic racism, I assured him it would. 

Then I drove from his sister's place directly to the The Oak Ridger building on Tyrone Road, put the sports page to bed as quickly as I could and hammered out the Nader story on my issue Royal Standard typewriter. My lead said something like “'Unsafe at any speed' – that's how Ralph Nader describes many of Detroit's best-selling automobiles.” The second graf laid out Nader's credentials – a Harvard-educated lawyer, he had been campaigning for safer cars since the late 1950s – and the remainder detailed his complaints against Chevrolet's Corvair. The text ran to at least six takes – six double-spaced typewritten pages of about 300 words apiece.

Despite the befogged mind that even at age 24 is the penance we pay for a sleepless all-nighter, I thought I'd done a damn fine job of reporting. But – perhaps not the least because Smyser himself drove a sherbet-green Corvair – the story evoked not the anticipated thank you for the warning but instead provoked him to fury. It was one of two times he actually raged at me, startling the entire five-person staff by shouting his denunciations the length of the newsroom. (His one other tantrum, this in face-to-face mode, was his response to my rejection of the ballistic impossibilities set fourth as gospel by the Warren Commission.) All in all though, Smyser was a superb editor, one who taught me a great deal about reporting. Even so, my memory still flinches at how he grimaced as he dropped the Nader copy into the circular gray waist-high trash bin that stood guard beside his desk. His expression suggested he was disposing of something grossly distasteful, at least as repugnant as a cat turd. 

When I phoned Nader and apologetically told him there would be no story, he nevertheless thanked me for my effort. Years after that I realized I was the one who should have thanked him – not just for all the time he spent telling me about the built-in hazards of those Detroit cars, but for the lesson in journalistic reality.

Such is the USian variant of a “free press,” its invisible restrictions so effective, no official censorship is necessary, the result uncomfortably reminiscent of a slogan in George Orwell's 1984: “ignorance is strength.”

LB/8 September 2013

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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.

***** 

 

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. 

 ________
*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.

*****

 

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.)

***** 

 

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.)

*

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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