Three Essays: Is U.S. Socialism Doomed?; Today's U.S. Was Not My Birthplace; Notes On Boudica the Rebel

(Sorry this is so late. Computer troubles -- plus the infuriating fact the Internet's plague of unrestricted advertisement-monitoring software now makes U.S. broadband as slow as dial-up was 15 years ago -- turned production of today's OAN into an exhausting all-nighter.) 

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OCCASIONALLY THE REPORTS I read on other websites prompt me to address in comment threads subjects about which I already intended to write detailed columns here. But last week that happened as never before – not once but three times.

As most of you know, I am an avowed socialist – these days ever-more-strongly influenced by Marx, Engels and Lenin. (No doubt this is the concluding legacy of my involvement with “communists and stuff” that in 1963 convinced my first wife to end our marriage.)

In any case I long ago realized socialism is our only viable alternative if indeed we are to (maybe) save ourselves and our sorely wounded planet.

What attracted me to socialism was its innate humanitarian fairness – from each according to ability/ to each according to need. It was a concept in which I was tutored as a child by my Marxian father, and it became the core of my own ideology after I was jailed in connection with a 1963 civil rights incident –  the same atrocity that ignited my undying taste for the political activism that prompted my first wife's departure.

Prior to 1963, many people including my employers thought I was destined for The New York Times or some comparable journalistic Mount Everest. But my prospects of major newspaper employment died with my arrest in the newsroom of The Knoxville Journal – never mind the false charge of disorderly conduct was quickly dismissed.

Hence for the next 26 years I straddled the divide between lesser mainstream print-media outlets and the alternative press, at the same time participating not just in the Civil Rights Movement but also in the Anti-Vietnam War and Back-to-the-Land movements and even for a time in the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party.

But in 1983, all my life's work – including a book seemingly on the brink of publication, another in progress and a possible third in concept notes – was destroyed by a mysterious fire. The ensuing clinical depression led to an extended clash with a breathtakingly vicious, relentlessly vindictive Washington state welfare bureaucracy. Thwarting forever my three-year struggle to return to work (1987-1990), the bureaucrats maliciously destroyed my life by declaring me permanently unemployable.

Enraged by the end of all my aspirations and embittered by the realization I had been condemned to abjectly inescapable poverty, I allowed my anger to drive me deep into the camp of the Libertarian Conservatives.

But by late 2004, my own humanitarianism had resurfaced, again in socialist form, and I was mortified by my former apostasy.

Now though I was also keenly aware of how easily even those of us with presumably elevated political consciousness can be recruited to fascism by bitterness and rage – especially when such emotions are fully justified, as they were in my case.

Asking myself how I might have avoided such seduction, I realized the only preventative is ideological discipline. Hence the relevance of Marx, Engels and Lenin – not only in my life, but as a general antidote to the ever-more-obvious tyranny of capitalist governance.

It we are to successfully confront capitalism as it matures into unabashed fascism – as Wall Street's global empire imposes its regime of absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – the solidarity evoked by Marxian ideological discipline is an absolute necessity.

But, here in the USian Homeland, does socialism – Marxian or any other kind –have even the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell?

I frankly doubt it. I have been debating with myself for some time whether to write about the diabolical cleverness with which our Ruling Class masters condition us all in Ayn Rand moral imbecility, thus to ensure socialism – or any other form of humanitarianism – will never again jeopardize the One Percent's obscene profits.

The question I asked myself was whether I should regard my thesis as too defeatist and therefore keep silent. Or should I speak my piece, in hope identifying a key Ruling Class tactic will enable us to combat it?

Two essays on the Internet this week made the decision for me. 

One was “Red Cross: How We Spent Sandy Money Is a 'Trade Secret',” here.  My hypothesis – that there will never be a socialist United States unless we can again learn to trust one another – fit naturally on the “Red Cross” comment thread:

The Ayn Rand mindset – moral imbecility for personal gain – poisons USians at every level, from the executive boardrooms, the politicians' mansions and the bureaucratic directorates to the ranks of the lowest level employees and government clerks, in for-profit and non-profit operations alike.

Exactly as (another poster) says, “greed, ignorance and corruption” have become the sole (and soul) defining characteristics of the modern United States.

That's why socialism – though it is the only possible solution to the problems that are destroying our species and our planet – seems forever doomed in the U.S.

 

Socialism requires mutual trust – especially trustworthy leadership. But too many episodes like this breaking Red Cross scandal demonstrate how the nation's relentless Ayn Rand conditioning has (deliberately) created a people for whom infinite greed is maximum virtue (and thus the rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth). 

Thus too neither any leader nor any organization will ever again be regarded as trustworthy. This is how the One Percent ensures its power is absolute and eternal – that is, until our entire species is extinct.

*** 

The second decision-maker was “The United States of Cruelty,” by Charles Pierce of Esquire, here.  Writing about the manifest cruelties of USians – especially the growing hostility to lower-income people – Pierce inevitably prompted a discussion of U.S. complicities in mass murder. My contribution, sufficiently controversial its thumbs-up/thumbs-down counts continue to nullify each other, noted mass murder's origin in Abrahamic religion:

(I)t is at least arguable (mass murder) is the invention of the Abrahamic god, the deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

“And the Lord our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain...” (Deuteronomy 2: 33-34.)

Moreover, to make certain the faithful understand such genocide is truly the mandate of the Heavenly Führer, his will is repeated as a commandment:

“But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth...” (Deuteronomy 20:16)

Sarcastically parodying biblical style (which too many readers probably didn't get), I hammered out my conclusion:

Behold in these massacres commanded by the Divine Sadist the celestial glories of patriarchy and the amazing grace of Abrahamic governance. Verily, thus does man, ancient and modern, prove he was created in the image of this god of cruelty.

To me the above seems the perfect footnote to a piece on why the USian people will probably never embrace socialism.

As Francesca, a compellingly articulate woman of Occupy Tacoma, so memorably said to me on a rainy winter night three years ago: “the 99 Percent is terribly broken.”

Not only are most 99 Percenters Ayn-Randed to fascist moral imbecility; they're also Bible-thumped to genocidal hatred. And now with the First Nations people nearly exterminated, we their lower-income grandparents and parents and brothers and sisters – we who are elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed – we are undoubtedly next.

Why then do we socialists persist? Because we know resistance is our only remaining taste of freedom – the defining experience, however fleeting, of what it is to be fully human.

******

Another Internet story, “JBLM may shelter detained immigrant children,” here (scroll down), prompted me to write a snide retort, and an equally snide rejoinder inspired another long-considered text. First I wrote:

Apropos Joint Base Lewis-McChord: I wonder how many of these imprisoned kids will be "encouraged" to enlist in the imperial war machine?

(Child recruitment age is 17-18. Given the skyrocketing unpopularity of the empire's wars, maybe that's the reason the Defense Department is interested in providing transit camps for child deportees.)

Then a poster screen-named ArthurKing (his real name?) denounced my reference to the imperial war machine as “a degrading, insulting comment toward our men and women in uniform and all those who have previously served.”

And I answered with an essay I might have titled “Today's United States Is Not the U.S. in Which I Was Born”:

Just for the record, Mr. King, I was part of the imperial war machine myself: Regular Army enlistment, active duty 1959-1962, overseas service in Republic of Korea, extended there by the Berlin Crisis of 1961, ETS September '62, honorable discharge from reserves in 1965. In those days we crossed the seas on troop transports: for me it was the USS Mann en route, the USNS Sultan returning.

Had you been amongst those of us who served – which I doubt – surely you would know soldiers are not insulted by truth. You would also know that honor is ultimately a personal matter – which is why, after the guns fall silent and the scalding venom of war has cooled and dried to dust, we recognize there was honor not only amongst ourselves but amongst our enemies as well.

The rest of your profiling is dead wrong too – laughably so in fact. I neither eat pot brownies nor attend drum circles, and – as I have all my life – I recognize the Second Amendment as intended for the ultimate defense of our Constitution.

But that does not change the fact the dear and promising nation from which I enlisted no longer exists.

A nation that was notably democratic if one were white (as indeed I am), but which ranged from not-so-democratic to openly tyrannical if one were a person of color – it was promising precisely because it shone with the potential of extending its radical notions of representative democracy at least to all its citizens and perhaps even to the world.

Then it was dealt a fatal wound on 22 November 1963. After that, it convulsed and twitched through its death-throes during a decade of political murders (Malcolm X; Martin Luther King Jr.; Sen.Robert Kennedy [the last man who could have saved us from ourselves]; Fred Hampton; the dead and permanently crippled at Kent State University and Jackson State College, etc. ad nauseam.

Since then, the ruling cabal of plutocrats and politicians has reduced us to irremediable wretchedness. We the people are powerless. Debt-slavery, foreclosure, eviction, inescapable poverty and homelessness have become our defining economic realities. The Constitution I swore to defend has been deliberately nullified. Its Bill of Rights has been maliciously repealed by the ironically named Patriot Act and the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act. And now the socioeconomic and political tyrannies that formerly defined the lives of its people of color define the conditions endured by nearly all of us.

A working journalist since my 16th year (1956), I was a general-assignment reporter the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered, and more than once I had to wipe the tears from my eyes as I hammered out my assigned segments of our local reaction story and updated them for our extras.

During the years after the president was slain, I watched with horror while events that followed one another “as the night the day,” confirmed our darkest suspicions of what had obtained in that most mournfully infamous moment. (JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters; James E. Douglass, Orbis Books: 2008, presents an incisive analysis of our post-Kennedy history that proves beyond any scintilla of doubt the assassination was indeed a coup.)

Now, because I do so knowing I live in a realm in which the Bill of Rights exists only on paper, I feel a twinge of fear every time I write of the “imperial war machine” or dare state any other political truth. I know that in the new post-constitutional United States – our homeland ruled by the Ayn Rand moral imbecility of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy; total subjugation for all the rest of us) – I (or anyone else) can now be disappeared or murdered at the government's whim. (If you doubt this, you are either ignorant or in psycho-neurotic denial.)

But I don't really care. I am 74 years old and increasingly crippled by ever-more-painful osteoarthritis. Given how our nation has been stolen from us – given how its thieves have made it the most relentless predator on our terminally sickened planet – my one remaining hope is I will be dead before these robber-baron plutocrats complete their unspeakably evil, 80-year scheme of global imperialism: the whole world an electronically overseen slave-plantation, its master the de facto Fourth Reich.

******

The third comment-thread writing of an essay I had long intended for this space – speculation about Boudica, the Celtic revolutionary – was inspired by Chris Hedges' “The Ghoulish Face of Empire.” here.  The Boudica material, in my mind for years if not decades, emerged slowly:

This is some of Mr. Hedges best writing, and I salute its indictment of the USian Empire's Ayn Rand moral imbecility.

But many Romans feared the end of their imperium had come in 9 CE (AD), when guerrillas under Arminius (aka "Herman the German") massacred 20,000 Roman soldiers in the Teutoburg Forest. (A superb book on this war, which forever changed the map of Europe, is The Battle That Stopped Rome, [Peter S. Wells, W.W. Norton and Co.: 2003]).

Then within living memory was Boudica's Rebellion of 61-62 CE, in which the Romans' public flogging of a Celtic noblewoman and the public rape of her two daughters triggered what would be the bloodiest uprising in all Roman history.

Boudica was perhaps the original exemplar of the aphorism “never underestimate a redhead.” We're told she was a queen of the Iceni, a Celtic tribe from today's Norfolk area. But I suspect she was more likely the Archdruid, the equivalent of a pope, for no leader of a single tribe could have so quickly raised an entire people as she did: her mandate of revolutionary solidarity not only ended ancient feuds but mustered warriors from all Celtic tribes everywhere.

Though these events indeed blunted Roman hubris (and were amongst the reasons the early Christians believed the end of the world was nigh), the imperium survived to murder and vex my Celto-Pictish ancestors for another 414 years. Tragically for us all, the USian Empire is likely to prove just as resilient.

 

***

Boudica's Rebellion is in some ways eerily similar to events in Iraq and thus warrants further discussion:

By Boudica's time, the Archdruidship had become a secret office due to Roman persecution of the ancient Celtic religion. Though polytheistic, Celtic belief centered on a variously-named goddess: the “mother of all being” said to have given birth to the universe and all its inhabitants. The religion's age is suggested by the genetically kindred Picts, residents of the isles and highlands of the Scottish north, who seem to have claimed direct descent from the legendary Tuatha de Danann – the “people of the Goddess Danu” whose traditions date to 1800 BCE and are recorded in the Medieval Irish Book of Invasions. 

Throughout the Celtic world, the Druids were pan-tribal leaders who combined the functions of teacher, scholar, scientist, judge and priest. A Druid's education is said to have taken 33 years. Because the Celts reckoned descent through the mother and regarded females as equal to (and in some instances superior to) males, Druids were as likely to be women as men. The resultant admixture of matriarchal theology and tribal democracy gravely threatened the Romans, who in service to their proto-capitalist economy sought to impose patriarchal authority on all imperial domains.

The Celts and Picts, for whom the personal was always political, thus viewed Roman conquest as triple tyranny – spiritual, intellectual, cultural.

 

Thus too the public flogging of Boudica and the public rape of her two daughters, girls of about 12 or 14 years old whose names have seemingly been lost, became to the Celts the ultimate symbol of Roman malevolence.

Two facts bolster my hypothesis Boudica was the Archdruid, as powerful as any ayatollah: 

(1)-Cassius Dio says she wore a tunic of many colors – a sartorial right the Celts reserved only for the the Chief Bard and the Archdruid.

(2)-Boudica's ability to stop feuds and raise warriors from tribes that were formerly hostile to one another (and possibly even from Ireland and the European mainland) demonstrates authority far beyond that of a tribal chief.

In any case she cleverly launched her rebellion when nearly all the strength of the Roman garrison was on the opposite coast laying siege to the Druid sanctuary at Ynys Mon. She attacked the Roman cities of Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium, which her army burned to the ground, killing an estimated 70,000 persons and leaving a dense signature of now-archaeological ash.

Then in a battle that no doubt reinforces today's Bushkin/Obamanoid hubris, she lost, defeated by superior Roman communications and the disciplined technology of the legions. The battle was thus akin to combats between modern-day natives and invading Europeans. Its site remains curiously unknown, as does the fate of Boudica and her daughters, who yet live in the revolutionary legends of the Occident.

Later I added another comment:

The Muse was in this recounting of history and will not let me rest without this addendum. Today, by what is said to have been Boudica's last speech before her final battle – “Let the men live as slaves if they want. I, a woman, would rather die” – Boudica has become not just a revolutionary heroine but an exemplar of the People's War, a symbol of the fighting spirit that made the female partisans and soldiers of the Soviet Union amongst the most feared warriors of modern history. (Doubt me? Google Ludmilla Pavlechenko or Zina Portnova.) Perhaps paradoxically, Boudica is also the neo-pagan equivalent of a saint (if not an embodiment of their Goddess herself). Which suggests the native traditions she defended have never really died. Beyond the borders of Imperium Romanum, amongst the Caledonians on the far side of the Hadrian and Antonine walls and across the water amongst the Eiru, the old ways lived on, and now they reappear, often spontaneously (and therefore sometimes quite eerily), in today's art and music and in many cultures of resistance as well, as if in answer to the very plea Chris Hedges so often articulates for all of us. As is said of others like her, Boudica Lives!

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In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

No doubt the following comment added to my misbehavior quotient on several bad-boy lists maintained by the various USian secret police agencies – though undoubtedly I was on those lists already. (I know for a fact the spooks were tracking me in the '60s – in 1967 they killed my best job offer of this lifetime, from the news department of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – and I'm sure they prod the rubble of my life regularly even now. Or maybe especially now, particularly after my involvement in Occupy.) But as a once-very-dear-but-now-sadly lost friend named Alyce used to say (and I hope she still does), “joke 'em if they can't take a fuck.”

My venue was the president's own attempt to reposition himself as something other than an obedient servant of the One Percent, a propaganda piece entitled “Family-Friendly Workplace Policies Are Not Frills - They're Basic Needs,” here.  To which – yes with accompanying fear (I am no fool) – I typed my reply:

Any time President Barack Obama claims he's helping the Working Class (especially when he says something like “I'll work with anyone – Democrats or Republicans – to increase opportunity for American workers”), it's at least as big a Big Lie as “change we can believe in.”

Indeed his deceptiveness is proven by another story in this very edition of RSN: “A Secret Plan to Close Social Security's Offices and Outsource Its Work.” 

Here is an excerpt:

“Worse, the report also suggests that many of the SSA's critical functions could soon be outsourced to private-sector partners and contractors...The fact that neither the SSA, the Administration, nor the President himself are publicly fighting these brutal cuts is a betrayal of Social Security's promise. That betrayal is made even more acute by the fact that cuts to Social Security's administrative budgets do not help the deficit in any way, since the SSA is fully funded from Social Security's revenues.”

Once again, we see how Obama the Orator shape-shifts into Barack the Betrayer whenever his Wall Street masters snap their fingers – in this instance to sneakily facilitate the looting of our own pensions.

In terms of the bitterness and alienation so inflicted, he is undoubtedly the worst president in U.S. history – and idiot that I am, I voted for him twice.

My additional remarks were in response to other posters:

The one meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the former are brazen Ayn Rand fascists while the latter cover up their moral imbecility with sleight-of-hand maneuvers and the Big Lie of progressive slogans.

The truth is both parties are against the female autonomy represented by Plan B. Apropos which, see for example “It's not Plan B if you can't get it,” also “How the right took over the debate.”

***

Contrary to your Obama-the-victim fantasy, the president began his betrayals immediately after he won election, secretly meeting with the health insurance barons, promising he would rig the system so that USian health care would remain forever a privilege of wealth: the primary purpose behind ACA.

(Obamacare's secondary purpose is to enable USian propaganda that says “yes we have national health insurance” even as its co-pays and deductibles are so prohibitively expensive only the rich can afford them. Thus the obscene windfall profit atop the insurors' already obscene profits – all of us now enslaved by the requirement to buy mandatory insurance that the co-pays and deductibles guarantee we can never afford to use.)

Again before taking office, Obama squelched the effort to enact Employee Free Choice.

And he was already plotting to expand the national secret police apparatus to complete the nullification of the Bill of Rights begun by the Bush League.

Meanwhile, guess what – until the 2010 elections, when betrayed progressives voted none-of-the-above by not voting at all -- Obama had a Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress.

So the fantasy he is a victim of Republican intransigence is just that – a fantasy. Or more aptly, a Big Lie to con those who believe in yet another Big Lie – that the U.S. is still a representative democracy.

LB/29 June 2014

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Inspection, Police Atrocities, Unhealthy Care, Iraq, Guns

THE INSPECTION THAT prompted me to pen a genuine rant last week is now behind me, and of course I passed – I always do – but the physical cost of preparing for two inspections in three weeks is such that my normal 24/7 pain has doubled.

This comes from various long-ago injuries inflamed by geriatric osteoarthritis, and its normal 2-3 range has doubled to a relentless 4-6 I can only hope will eventually abate.

The numbers refer to the medical profession's 1-to-10 discomfort scale, with my 10 – since as a male I have obviously never experienced childbirth – a wisdom tooth that simultaneously impacted and abscessed on a Friday at the beginning of a seemingly endless four-day holiday weekend, which meant no treatment was available until the following Tuesday. The pain was so intense that when I finally got to a dentist, I was lapsing in and out of unconsciousness.

Meanwhile, back in the present, the time these accursed inspections have stolen from my life – essentially 14 days counting preparation and aftermath – has effectively killed OAN for another week.

So again there will be no Cassandra column today, as I was once more too limited by opportunity and energy to do anything more than respond to other writers' work. Goddess grant by next week I'll be recovered enough to again do some original writing.

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In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

The Associated Press reported the angry response of an oppressed urban citizenry that for the past four years has been targeted by some of the most murderously brazen police brutality in the USian imperial homeland. Reader Supported News aptly headlined the AP story “Albuquerque Protesters Put Police Chief 'On Trial'.” I used its comment thread to reveal one of my darker suspicions – that the national epidemic of atrocities being inflicted on us by our federalized, militarized, Gestapo-ized local police is a top-level, One Percent-mandated experiment in which we the people are the lab rats – its purpose to determine how much we will suffer before our obedience and submission turns to rebellion.

This entire sequence of events – the police violence, the federal response – needs to be understood in its probable context:

(1)-Some federal agency or agencies responsible for the defense of capitalism – that is, the suppression of the Working Class – wondered how far the USian public can be pushed before it will revolt.

(2)-The federally militarized police were therefore ordered to behave in Albuquerque as an army of occupation.

(3)-After years of murderous brutality, the people rose up.

 

(4)-The federal government ordered an investigation.

(5)-The killing (maybe) stopped, not because the federal government stands for justice (just ask Edward Snowden), but because the feds now have a laboratory-tested yardstick of the intensity of oppression at which rebellion becomes likely.

Such is life – and death – under capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else.

 

Such is capitalism itself: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth.

Such is our Ayn Rand future: posh, impregnable palaces for the One Percenters and their politicians, bureaucrats, military officers and police commanders; for all of us, the slave world of the electronic concentration camp and the darkest Dark Age our species has ever known.

Wake up, people: Cassandra columnists like Chris Hedges are speaking naught but the hideous truth.

******

Tara Culp-Ressler of ThinkProgress bared some nauseating facts about the one industrialized nation on this dying planet in which health care remains a privilege of wealth, a genocidal condition intentionally perpetuated by Barack the Betrayer's so-called “Affordable Care Act,” the name of which is itself a Big Lie so outrageous it would make Josef Goebbels proud. Culp-Ressler's damning report, “The US Has the Most Expensive and Least Effective Health Care in the Developed World,” thus prompted a good deal of applause and agreement, some of which was mine:

Absolutely. The health-care difference between the civilized world and the United States is that in the civilized world, health care is intended to genuinely care for the people. But in the U.S., what is deceptively labeled “health care” actually has an antithetical purpose. It exists (A)-to make the obscenely wealthy aristocracy wealthier and (B)-to exterminate lower-income people by defining health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a basic human right.

Moreover, the Affordable Care Act – so-called “Obamacare” – does nothing to change the U.S. system's genocidal Ayn Rand dynamics. In fact it locks them in place forever.

By making health insurance mandatory, it enables USian propagandists to generate the Big Lie of near-universal insurance. But its profit-boosting co-pays and deductibles still make health care prohibitively expensive. Hence its victims – and that is precisely what we are – are now forced to pay for insurance we can never afford to use. The result is the huge windfall with which Barack the Betrayer gifted the insurance barons.

It is also a classic example of the miasma of lies, disinformation and murder by which capitalism perpetuates its bottomless evil – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever expressed.

******

Apropos health care and capitalism, a Crosscut piece entitled “Is the NW a breeding ground for a new kind of capitalism?” prompted a discussion-thread that enabled me to protest how upper management is converting my beloved Group Health Cooperative into a personal profit center for predatory business-school graduates:

(T)hough (Group Health) remains officially a cooperative, nearly all the old socialist spirit that back in the '70s prompted me to become a permanent voting member of the co-op has been extinguished.

Meanwhile the greed of its MBA-brandishing, Ayn-Rand-minded management is methodically revising Group Health's policies to make it indistinguishable from any for-profit insurance company, and it is apparently up-scaling (gentrifying) its customer base accordingly.

Given the moral imbecility at the core of the MBA ethos, such focus on managerial profiteering is now as likely to occur in allegedly “non-profit” contexts as it is in conventional capitalism.

Thus to boost revenues Group Health has done what only a few years ago would have been unthinkable. It has suppressed its members' reproductive and end-of-life rights by subcontracting with the viciously theocratic Franciscan (Roman Catholic) Health System for lowest-bid hospital care.

While the Franciscan arrangement is objectionable for many reasons, its significance here is its proof that boosting revenues, which is essential to boost managerial compensation packages, has taken precedence over patients' physical and emotional wellbeing.

Predictably, as if to declare its new pro-managerial orientation, a recent Group Health document, “Patient Financial Responsibility ('Rev. Date 2014112'),” omits the term “cooperative” entirely and describes the organization as “your insurance company.”

***

What is destroying Group Health is of course capitalism:

Even camouflaged by euphemisms and lies, the core value of capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue. Capitalism is therefore, exactly as described by its disciple Ayn Rand, the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever put forth – human history's closest approximation to absolute evil.

 

******

Anyone who seeks to understand what is happening in Iraq should read “Who Are Iraq's Sunni Arabs and What Did We Do to Them?,” a superb backgrounder by Juan Cole of Informed Comment. My contribution to the comment thread thus appropriately started with an expression of gratitude:

Thank you, RSN and Mr. Cole, for this vital background.

But then I focused on what – perhaps even more than petroleum lust – I'm sure prompted the folly of what will no doubt soon be known as the First Iraq War:

As to what truly motivated Bush and still motivates his henchmen (including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton), Mr. Cole's last paragraph says it all:

“Sunni Iraqis had been in the 20th century cosmopolitan and often modernists. Many were liberals yearning for democracy. From 1968 they turned to more of a Soviet model, a strongly secular one.”

Thus again we witness the bottomless savagery of USian imperialism – In Vietnam, “we had to destroy the village to save it” (from Communism). Now it's the destruction of a whole nation to “save” it from Communist influences. Next will be the entire planet.

Such is the absolute evil of capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the violently malicious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth.

******

Unfinished Dirty Business: Antivenin for an Anti-Gun Snakebite

Scatterbrained and hurting as I was with the preparation for the quarterly premises inspection, I failed to notice how a poster who hides behind the screen-name Billy Bob had slandered me in the comment-thread hissy provoked by a significant truth – that Civil Rights Movement non-violence was empowered by armed African-American citizens – a definitive reality the forcible-disarmament fanatics have been desperately trying to flush down the Orwell hole for six decades.

As I noted last week, Charles E. Cobb Jr.'s forthcoming book boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis” – yes, literally. Reader Supported News published Cobb's important essay about the book, but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted its title, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014).

Meanwhile, Billy Bob's antagonism toward me had shown that where firearms are concerned, the Left – at least the pseudo-Left that won't rest until the Working Class is totally disarmed – has its own equivalent of the Hard Right's corps of Big Liars and Ku Klux demagogues.

I replied appropriately:

Billy: I'm sorry I was too preoccupied with the demands of survival to note earlier the personal venomousness of your response.

If you'd bothered to learn anything about me, you'd know I'm a 74-year-old semi-retired journalist, a former Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam-War, back-to-the-land, alternative-press and Occupy activist. A declared socialist, I currently serve on a 15 Now organizing committee.

Hence for you to try – as you did above – to maliciously equate me with the Republican Sharron Angle (whose name you misspelled), merely puts you at one with those fanatically anti-gun Democrats and anti-union “progressives” who hysterically slander all supporters of the Second Amendment as “Nazis.”

I thank you for that disclosure. I will keep it in mind anytime I read anything else of yours – if indeed I bother. I will also remember the craven cowardice of hiding behind screen-name anonymity to insult a person who posts under his or her own name.

 

That said, never in my life have I advocated political violence. Nor will I. Though the death of the Soviet Union has forever doomed non-violent resistance to capitalism – that's why “hope” is idiocy rather than “audacity” – I have also glimpsed the face of war, and that alone mandates my lifelong commitment to political non-violence.

Meanwhile your nasty effort to associate me with “Second Amendment remedies” is surely reminiscent of the defining tactics of agents-provocateur.

LB/22 June 2014

-30-

Another Inspection Again Wrenches My Life

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

LB/15 June 2014

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“Seattle Process”: a Tool for Savaging the Working Class

TO UNDERSTAND HOW Seattle's campaign for a $15 minimum wage was stabbed in the back – how “15 Now” became “15 Maybe Someday” – it is essential to first understand a perversion of democracy called “the Seattle Process” which, for brevity's sake, we'll hereinafter call “TSP.”

TSP is occasionally lauded as representative democracy at its best, but it is more often damned  as endless debate that results in permanent “indecision” or – on the rare occasions it actually achieves consensus – an approach that succeeds only by inflicting “exhaustion” on the participating groups and individuals.

Probably the most glaring example of TSP legacy is the wretched state of public transport  in Seattle and the metropolitan area on the eastern shore of Puget Sound, the so-called Pugetopolis, which includes Tacoma and Olympia to the south and Everett and Bellingham to the north.

In terms of mass transit, the entire region is nearly a half-century behind Portland, Oregon, which is its southern just-across-the-Columbia-River neighbor. And – not only in transit but in terms of all public services and humanitarianism in general – Pugetopolis is at least a century behind its nearby northern neighbor, European-minded Vancouver in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

While Pugetopolis seemingly dithered – “seemingly” because behind the dithering was a carefully scripted Ruling Class campaign to torpedo mass transit – Portland applied for and received federal funding that, by today's miserly standards, seems astonishingly generous. 

The money was available to U.S. municipalities through the Urban Mass Transit Administration, part of President John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Such were the halcyon years before UMTA – and indeed nearly all federal support for local transit – was killed forever by President Ronald Reagan and his Ayn-Rand-minded successors, all of them, whether Republican or Democrat, the obedient servants of Big Oil and Big Automotive.

On its surface, TSP appears to be nothing more than a local example of self-destructive indecisiveness, and indeed that is how it is invariably portrayed by its mainstream critics, who point to the seemingly endless debates and neighborhood-versus-neighborhood/whites-versus-minorities squabbling that – once Seattle-area light-rail construction was finally approved by voters in 1996 – delayed it another 10 years.

But if you look at these results using the tools of objective analysis – that is, if you analyze the results in terms of class struggle (or in parlance of old-time investigative reporters, “who got rewarded and who got fucked”) – then it becomes obvious TSP is yet another of the deceptive weapons the One Percenters use to perpetuate their power and ensure the rest of us remain forever below the salt.

Again taking the example of mass transit, the (mostly-unacknowledged) fact is the Pugetopolis Ruling Class has vehemently opposed it since it became an issue – mainly because adequate mass transit (think of New York City, Chicago or Boston), is one of the major factors that determine whether an area is attractive to lower-income people. Washington state has long been deliberately gentrified by any number of policies – the nation's most viciously regressive tax structure is one; the closure of wilderness access roads to all but equestrians and bicyclists is another – and the aristocracy clearly intends to keep it that way.

Not surprisingly, Seattle Ruling Class opposition to adequate mass transit became most obvious when the availability of the requisite public funding was at an all-time high – that is, during the late 1960s. Emerging via the the editorial pages and news columns of The Seattle Times, the opposition was soon mainstreamed by a nasty grassroots whisper campaign that played on xenophobic fears the subway and light-rail system proposed by Forward Thrust would destroy forever the region's cherished but cleverly undefined “Pacific Northwest lifestyle.”

These whispers inflamed the bigotry characteristic of the city's Northern European majority, claiming subways would turn Seattle into “another Jew York” and attract “criminal” minorities to prey on the (white) citizenry. The outcome, which included a de facto 26-year moratorium on rail transit, is a particularly telling example of how the USian Working Class is convinced to vote against its own interests.

It is also significant for the likelihood – raised by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's testimony Washington state is often used as a proving-ground by the Ruling Class to test and refine methods of oppression – the anti-transit campaign was a rat-lab experiment in voter manipulation. (My apology for the fact I cannot link to this testimony; all published references to it have seemingly vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Meanwhile, assuming Ehrlichman's admission was truthful, the strategy and tactics remain devastatingly effective. (See again the “wretched state” link above.) Note how the implicitly racist meme “transit is welfare” convinced voters in the Pierce Transit service area to viciously downsize their own barely adequate system – never mind most of Pierce Transit's ridership comes from the seaport city of Tacoma, where half the population is definitively lower income and nearly half of the approximately 36,000 daily bus riders have no other means of transportation.  (In its new policy of pandering to relatively wealthy suburbanites – mostly rabid Republicans who despise all lower-income people as “parasites” – Pierce Transit has purged from its website anything its newly favored riders might denounce as “sob-story” data. Thus the link is to OAN and ridership numbers PT released in 2012.)

But the point is not the Pugetopolis transit crisis per se. The point is acknowledging what the Seattle Process really is: a pseudo-democratic mechanism of negation and disempowerment that serves the One Percent and – exactly as intended – savages the rest of us.

Which is precisely what happened to Seattle's fight for a $15 minimum wage – how it was transmogrified from “15 Now” to “15 Maybe Someday.”

Before I continue, I need to stress two important facts. One is I am speaking here only for myself. Yes I am a member of the 15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee, but the views expressed here are my own, only my own, and most assuredly not those of the group. Two – the second fact – is I have no inside knowledge of what obtained behind the scenes in Seattle. My one reliable inside-Seattle source is long dead. My divorcement from all things Seattle is permanent and so poisoned by its native-born residents' notorious hostility to outlanders,  it is unlikely I would visit there even if invited. Therefore the information I have comes only from the same sources available to us all.

That said, why I view the fate of 15 Now Seattle as a loss rather than a win – indeed a devastating loss – is my application of Marxian principles of objective analysis: specifically that any loss for the Working Class is a victory for the Ruling Class, and, by extension, that any victory for the Working Class is a defeat for the Ruling Class.

“Working Class” as used here is an accurately descriptive synonym for the 99 Percent – those of us who, whether our jobs are mental or physical, must work if we are to survive. “Ruling Class” in this context includes not only the One Percent – the aristocrats who own the United States and regard all the rest of us as real or potential slaves – but the cadre of military officers, police commanders, politicians and bureaucrats who serve the One Percenters by obedience to their orders in compliance with the Führerprinzip   that rules USian capitalism and capitalist governance just as it ruled German Nazism and Nazi Germany.

***

In the early days of Seattle's fight for a minimum wage, the 15 Now Seattle organization was, whether intentionally or not, virtually indistinguishable from Socialist Kshama Sawant's astoundingly successful campaign for a city council seat. Sawant is an outspoken member of Socialist Alternative, and she campaigned as such.

For those unfamiliar with present-day USian politics, Socialist Alternative is a Marxian party that like the Socialist Workers Party acknowledges Marxism's enormous debt to Leon Trotsky. But unlike SWP, which publishes the informative and often provocative Socialist Worker but otherwise functions as little more than a debating society, SA embodies the “think globally/act locally” strategy that emerged from the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Its 15 Now campaign, which is spreading throughout the U.S. and is embraced by growing numbers of workers employed by U.S. Big Business abroad, is a textbook example of the global/local approach.

The Ruling Class response to Sawant's victory has been the co-optation effort she anticipated in her city council victory speech  (relevant videotape begins at 11:35 minutes). But it was first evidenced, as I noted last January, “by subtle changes in Obamanoid rhetoric” that indicated the electoral triumph of a revolutionary socialist was already frightening the capitalist Ruling Class back into aspects of its former, Soviet-era pretense of humanitarianism.

Seven months later the Seattle City Council unanimously approved a $15 minimum wage ordnance that transformed “15 Now” into what some 15 Now supporters elsewhere have sarcastically dubbed “15 Eventually.” A caustic statement on the Portland, Oregon 15 Now website, edited here only for brevity, tells the whole story: 

Even while we should acknowledge and celebrate this accomplishment there are so many problems with the deal in Seattle that declarations of victory seem somewhat premature and have left many people feeling justifiably deflated.

• Corporations that make billions of dollars in annual profits don’t need years to phase in. While it is true that under this deal the minimum wage for many of Seattle’s low wage workers will rise to $11 per hour in less than one year, the fact is that large corporations can afford to pay $15 now, but they are not paying $15 for a few years.
• Tip credits and health care credits actually reduce workers’ real wages that can be used to buy food and pay rent. Even if eventually phased out, these credits mean that at first there are likely to be some workers who actually see a decrease in their monthly net pay.
• Lower “training wages” could encourage companies to move to a model of short-term temporary labor in order to take advantage of the lower short-term rate of pay, especially among large, low- wage-paying corporations that already have high employee turnover.
• The sub-minimum wage for teenagers fails to help the many teens in Seattle who work not for extra spending money, but because their family needs the income extra income to help pay the rent and the bills.
• Categorizing businesses with up to 500 employees as “small” for the purpose of the phase in schedule is ludicrous.

So while those of us within the $15 Now movement who have worked hard justifiably want to celebrate the accomplishment of getting a large city like Seattle to pass a bill for $15, we also need to be open and honest about the fact that the workers of Seattle themselves are not getting $15 Now, they are getting $15 Eventually, in about a decade. While we allow ourselves a moment to celebrate what we have accomplished so far, we also need to make certain we recognize the fact that even in Seattle, and certainly in the rest of the country, the Fight for $15 is far from over.

Predictably, Seattle's mainstream media – which is really Ruling Class Media (i.e., capitalist propaganda) – celebrated the reduction of 15 Now to 15 Eventually – or as I prefer to call it, (because Big Business is already moving to reverse the city council's decision), “15 Maybe Someday.”

Meanwhile Crosscut columnist Knute Berger proclaimed the nullification of 15 Now a significant victory for “incrementalism,” noting how the associated maneuvers “put out the potential fire of a populist rebellion.”

“As left-wingnutty as Seattle is sometimes caricatured,” wrote Berger, “it's still a town of business, big and small...Our capitalistic roots are strong and deep; radical activism has occasionally surged, but rarely gained power. Labor may score an occasional strategic victory, but workers never really run the show (ask Boeing's machinists).”

And since Berger proved the point with which this essay began – that Seattle Process is merely an especially devious method to ensure the Working Class remains disempowered – I'll also give him the last word. Applauding how 15 Now became 15 Pie-in-the-Sky, Berger called it “an example of Seattle process...”

I rest my case.

******

In Case You Missed It/Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because this was the first week of the month with all its snail-paced bus-errands and those vexations multiplied to the Nth power by a couple of emotionally wrenching household disasters – the sorts of undeserved misery that prompt me to sing my own personal variant of the Doxology (“Curse god from whom all misery flows/ curse him ye victims here below”) – I had little time for reading my daily deluge of email, much less for posting comments on other websites. Nevertheless I did manage a few forays into Internet Land.

Hence when The Guardian reported on the burgeoning Department of Veterans Affairs scandal,  “White House Fights to Restore Veterans' Trust: 'It's Not Going to Be Quick or Easy',” I was quick to point out the easy back-story the Ruling Class Media dare not report:

The veterans' health-care scandal is a microcosm of the national health-care scandal, which can be explained in five words: the One Percent's genocidal greed. The One Percenters and the politicians and bureaucrats who serve them don't give a damn for the wellbeing of anyone outside the obscenely pampered Ruling Class. The result for ailing veterans is there is never enough money to give them the care they need. The result for the rest of us is health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. Both are functions of Ruling Class miserliness. “Why bother to treat the poor,” the aristocrats sneer. “The poor are always sick, and they die accordingly. Besides, their lives are worthless...”

This is not hyperbole. A prominent Ayn Rander – a Marie Antoinette political theorist whose fortunes are rising as the United States becomes ever more like pre-guillotine France – publicly made such statements a couple of months ago. (Sorry I don't have time to ferret out her identity.)

And though the politicians and bureaucrats are doing everything in their power to cover it up, and though the veterans' organizations are too compromised to ever acknowledge these sorts of atrocities are intrinsic to capitalism, it is the Ruling Class hatred and contempt for the Working Class – that and nothing else – that is measured in the resultant deaths.

My only other contribution this miserable week was on the comment thread of a disturbing report on the rise of neo-Nazism in Greece,  “SS Songs and Antisemitism: The Week Golden Dawn Turned Openly Nazi”:

Three points:

(1)-Note that Golden Dawn attracts "ever-growing numbers of the middle class." That's because, in times of economic crisis, modern history proves the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie), will ALWAYS turn to fascism. (It's only members of the proletariat and peasantry who turn Left.)

(2)-That's why, when the One Percent decides its time to impose capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the workers (in other words unabashed fascism) – it's the middle class that's targeted for discomfiture and the poor who are scapegoated and targeted for extermination.

(3)-Greece did NOT “give birth” to democracy. It coined the word that describes the mode of governance that had been characteristic of all human society until the advent of patriarchy. (A state of being is not named when it is the norm; it is named only after it has become rare enough to require description.) Moreover, if Robert Graves' hypotheses are correct, the real Greek contribution was imposing democratic process on patriarchy – which may (though I'm increasingly doubtful), yet rescue our species not only from patriarchy but from patriarchy's direct descendants, capitalism, fascism and Nazism.

***

And this in response to another poster on the same thread:

You are, jsluka, partially correct. But what you describe as "mass support from 'workers'" was typically induced by terror: unabashed extermination of Marxians and indeed all representatives of any Left alternatives in Germany, Italy and Spain; the less violent but more permanently psychologically damaging purge of Leftists and intellectuals in the postwar United States; Pinochet's extermination of class-conscious workers in Chile, etc. ad nauseum.

In terms of innate tendencies – and I erred in my failure to make this clear, for which I apologize – I believe what I said obtains: the petit bourgeoisie turn right, the peasantry and proletariat turn Left. 

Again as a generalization, this is because for the petit bourgeoisie, who have no identity beyond their possessions, the destruction of the status quo is the loss of everything. But for proletarians and peasants, who have far more flexible identities, the destruction of the status quo may actually mean relief from oppression.

And yes, the USian Homeland does indeed have peasants and proletarians. The former are mostly agricultural workers – near-slaves, actually – while the latter are mostly the legions of minimum-wage workers employed by Big Business.

LB/8 June 2014

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