Did Obama Throw Women under the Hobby Lobby Bus?

WAS OBAMACARE SECRETLY INTENDED to betray women? When you consider the utterly predictable outcome of the United States Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision and its de facto endorsement by President Barack Obama's refusal to employ his executive powers against its sweeping ban on birth control, the possibility becomes too evident to ignore. Indeed it clamors for investigation. Moreover, Obama's long and embittering record of making campaign promises he had no intention of keeping suggests the betrayal may have been part of the Affordable Care Act's hidden agenda from the moment the newly elected president began his closed-door scheming  with the health-insurance-industry executives who actually authored the legislation.

I said nearly as much in response to Abby Ohlheiser's brief and tautly reasoned “Ginsburg's Passionate 35-Page Dessent of Hobby Lobby Decision,” part of my daily email from Reader Supported News. Six days later,my suspicions intensified by many hours of research, what began as an embittered comment-thread remark had become the key passage of this column:

Assuming the correctness of Justice Ginsburg's dissent, the impact of the Hobby Lobby decision is far more devastating than we are being told by mainstream media.

The devastation is inherent in the fact at least 90 percent of U.S. business is “closely held.” 

Hobby Lobby thus allows the imposition of theocratic restrictions on most of the U.S. workplace. Not only does this abolish the reproductive freedom of most of the workforce; it is also a giant step toward replacing constitutional governance with Biblical law – a subversive goal lavishly funded by the One Percent as the ultimate means of subjugating the Working Class.

Meanwhile, imposition of theocracy via the private sector has become a standard Christian tactic. The takeover of the nation's health care facilities by the Roman Catholic Church is already, wherever it occurs, prohibiting access to all forms of contraception.

Financially, Hobby Lobby's main beneficiaries are the insurance barons. By making birth control unobtainable, the ruling further maximizes Affordable Care Act profits. Mandatory insurance generates obscene windfall profits even as prohibitively expensive co-pays and deductibles radically limit the public's ability to actually obtain care. Hobby Lobby furthers this process, minimizing cost by eliminating birth control from ACA coverage.

 

Given the lies and treachery by which we are now ruled, who can doubt this atrocity was carefully scripted in advance?

Though the president's sycophants will loudly denounce any such notion as unthinkable, U.S. history proves otherwise. Legislation at all levels – federal, state and local – is invariably peddled as an essential solution to some pressing crisis. But many such measures are sneakily written to perpetuate the very grievances they falsely claim to redress. By legalistic sleight-of-hand and other devious means – especially alleged “benefits” that on closer inspection turn out to be nonexistent – they defeat the democratic will of the people and impose instead the tyrannical goals and objectives of Ruling Class politicians and bureaucrats. Under the direction of their One Percent masters, these functionaries have honed the strategy and tactics of deliberate deception to sadistic perfection at every level of government – federal, state or local – inside the United States and its possessions.

The associated methodology is obviously a Machiavellian variant of the marketing practices by which the capitalists routinely dupe us into buying defective products. In the marketplace it is infuriating. In its political application – with all its heightened expectation of collective socioeconomic improvement and its subsequent plunge into defeat and disillusionment – it is perhaps the most injurious psychological warfare weapon in the Ruling Class arsenal. Not only does it foster alienation and despair; it subverts democracy and undermines even the hope of democracy by convincing us the entire democratic processes is a sham.

An ultimate example of this sort of deception is the New Deal. By ameliorating the morally imbecilic savagery of capitalism, it co-opted, demobilized and eventually dispersed a definitively revolutionary majority coalition of Communists, other socialists, Progressives and Left Democrats. But it (deliberately) preserved the irresistible power of the One Percent and thereby ensured its own eventual death. It also facilitated – chiefly by temporarily disguising the predatory nature of capitalism – the re-emergence of capitalism's unapologetic malevolence.

Another example is Medicare, which is funded by a combination of payroll taxes and mandatory premiums. It is touted as a European-style program that provides health care to all the nation's citizens age 65 and over and to recipients of Social Security Disability Insurance stipends as well. Though Medicare is widely believed to signal the government's endorsement of the principle that health care is a human right, in truth it does nothing of the kind. It covers only “about 48 percent” of an individual's authorized health-care costs  – far less if the non-reimbursed costs of vision, hearing and dental services are included in the calculations. The remainder, 52 percent of the approved expenses plus the full price of everything else that is not covered – eye glasses, hearing aids, dental care, many other services – comes out of the so-called beneficiary's pocket.

“No part of Medicare,” states the reference linked in the preceding paragraph, “pays for all of a beneficiary's covered medical costs, and many costs are not covered at all.” For the average recipient, the necessary co-payments and deductibles are too often prohibitive.  This means innumerable Medicare recipients, though saddled with the mandatory premiums deducted from their Social Security pensions, are chronically unable to obtain adequate health care. They are locked out of the system by its additional fees. And the little Medicare does cover is under constant attack by Republicans and Democrats alike – one of the many ways the two Ruling Class parties demonstrate their absolute fealty to the One Percenters, who now make no secret of the fact they regard humanitarian expenditures as wasted money. The only people genuinely served by Medicare are thus the wealthy, for whom it is merely another bonus on a seemingly endless list of taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Medicare's functions are therefore actually fourfold. (1)-Medicare rewards the wealthy. (2)-It punishes – and sometimes exterminates – the poor. (3)-It locks into place the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. (The definition's perpetuity is achieved by a system so impossibly complex, no group of citizens can change it without the intervention of politicians and bureaucrats – which means the citizens' efforts are invariably betrayed.) (4)-By its opacity, Medicare enables the U.S. to promulgate the Big Lie – within and without – that it offers some of its citizens a genuine universal health-care program.

Obamacare serves exactly the same functions in precisely the same ways. It is mandatory. The premiums it extracts are providing the health insurance cartel with the largest, most obscene windfall profits in its history – another of the president's innumerable gifts to his Wall Street masters. Yet Obamacare's deductibles and co-pays discourage and/or prohibit most of its alleged beneficiaries from fulfilling their medical needs. Like Medicare, its complexities make it incomprehensible save by politicians and bureaucrats, which further cements into permanence the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of wealth. And, again like Medicare, it enables U.S. propaganda to disseminate another Big Lie intended to disguise the deadly barbarism of its Ayn Rand economics.

Such are the ways of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else. Such too is the unmitigated deception that is the operational context of all U.S. health care.

It is in this same context Obamacare's triumphant claim “being female is no longer a pre-existing condition” emerges as yet another Big Lie. (Readers who are unfamiliar with the for-profit U.S. medical system should note that until the advent of the so-called Affordable Care Act, the health insurance barons charged radically higher premiums  for insuring reproductive-age females.) Obama the Orator repeatedly assured the voters such discrimination would soon be ended. But after he won the presidency, he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer. In that persona, he almost certainly guaranteed the insurance barons they would soon regain their ability to exploit female genitalia as a profit center. Even if he did not, it is beyond belief he and his insurance-cartel henchmen – armed as they were with all their market research and secret-police surveillance data – did not foresee the Hobby Lobby lawsuit or some other action that would yield the same result.

In any case, it is increasingly obvious the Hobby Lobby decision has now permanently rescinded what women regarded as the most compelling aspect of the ACA. As the Associated Press reported the day after the decision – “The Supreme Court has left in place lower court rulings in favor of businesses that object to covering all methods of government-approved contraception...not just the four pregnancy prevention methods and devices that the court considered in its ruling.” Since then, at least 82 more companies have indicated they intend to cancel their employees' birth-control coverage. 

Nor is there any recourse. The fund-raising claims of several women's organizations notwithstanding, Congressional remedies are impossible. The aggressively reactionary, vindictively theocratic Republican majority in the House has been gerrymandered into unbeatable permanence. And as reported above, the president – whose theocratic leanings  are so obvious they are provoking secularist protests – will not grant Hobby Lobby's growing roster of victims any other remedy.

Long term, the Hobby Lobby ruling will probably enable employers and insurers to force nearly all U.S. women to pay out of pocket for their birth control. But these expenses, like Medicare and ACA co-pays and deductibles, will be brutally prohibitive. Capitalism has downsized nearly half the population's paychecks to poverty or lower-income levels.  As Justice Ginsberg noted in her epic dissent, the cost of a single inter-uterine device or IUD “is nearly equivalent to a month's full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage." For women who cannot afford the aristocratic privilege of self-financed contraception, the only alternative is total surrender to misogyny: re-learning to despise their own bodies – to fear their own sensuality, sexuality and fertility – precisely as demanded by Christian doctrine and its regime of mandatory chastity. Theocrats everywhere are gloating. 

All of which again underscores the fact that in the United States, health care is a privilege of wealth and will remain so forever – that is, until the nation as we know it is no more.

The Hobby-Lobby case also demonstrates the ever-more-terrifying likelihood biblical-law Christian theocracy  will eventually replace Constitutional governance in the U.S homeland. Not only has the Supreme Court endorsed Jesus as the national deity; the forcible Christianization of the imperial military machine has already produced legions of troops trained in theocratic surveillance and oppression. The high command is now marching these latter-day Inquisitors and Crusaders into place.

Unfortunately, only a few Cassandra columnists,  of whom I am surely one, dare write constantly and at length about the inherent malevolence of the fanatical U.S. Christians and their schemes for imposing a Christian version of Middle Eastern theocracy (complete with public torture-executions for rebellious women, homosexuals and all other so-called “heretics”). And though we have been exposing these threats for years, our warnings are often belittled or suppressed. The above linked piece by Chris Hedges, for example, was suppressed by every major publication in the nation – never mind his stature as a mainstream writer.

Meanwhile, the ever-more-emboldened theocrats now openly denounce all women who use contraception  as “creatures...who cannot control their libido.” Such malicious slanders resurrect the bigoted dogmas of Abrahamic religion – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – that all women are like the biblical Eve, ruinously sinful, ready recruits for the Devil and therefore a seductive threat  to every devout male. But as Truthout's William Rivers Pitt aptly puts it, the U.S. seemingly remains the “land of the free” – unless you're a woman.

Though Pitt seems to carefully avoid such possibilities, it's impossible to overlook that someday in this increasingly downtrodden nation, women's cumulative anger might light the proverbial fuse. That's what happened in Paris on 14 July 1789, likewise in Petrograd on International Women's Day, 8 March 1917, 23 February by the old Tsarist calendar. The events in Paris – first the city's wives and mothers provoked to riotous rage by impossibly expensive bread, then the storming of the Bastille – are well known, but what obtained in Petrograd has been obscured by distance and anti-Russian propaganda, so I'll tell it once again: the flint-hearted bosses of the massive Lesnoy Textile Works sacked five women for trying to organize a union, and the women's 5,000 workplace sisters boiled into the streets in furious protest. Within just a few hours, their demonstration had exploded into the Russian Revolution.

LB/6 June 2014

-30-

(Note: this week's OAN omited “Agitation Elsewhere” to better focus on the unfolding Hobby Lobby story.)

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.) 

*

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!

******

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

-30-

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.

******

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-