Survival in the Realm of the Divine Sadist: an Anthology

 

ABOUT THE PICTURE: having any genuine quality of life in the viciously anti-mass-transit United States demands ownership of a motor vehicle sustained by enough income to pay the increasingly prohibitive costs of fuel, licensing, insurance and maintenance. 

But my (meticulously maintained) Ford V6 Tempo died in mid-2009 after 260,000 miles. And capitalism being what it is, I will never in this lifetime have enough money to afford another car.

As a result I am often forced to impose on friends for local transport and am utterly dependent on them for any spiritually recharging visits to the country. Thus my boundless joy and endless gratitude when my friend Cate Montana – whose new book Unearthing Venus is as vital to the struggle against patriarchy as Manifesto is to the fight against capitalism-become-fascism – insisted on driving me up to Mount Rainier.

It was my first-ever trip to Paradise, the jumping-off place for hikers and climbers at 5,420 feet, the closest you can drive to the 14,411-foot crest of the volcano. We walked a short distance up the Paradise River trail, where I promptly discovered just how badly out-of-shape I am due to the combination of (irremediable) post-smoking weight gain and the oppressively prison-like inactivity inflicted by Tacoma's wretched public transport and the lack of my own car.

But I could not long remain mortified and gloomy in Cate's uplifting company. This post-Paradise cell-phone selfie, at Reflection Lakes, elevation 5,311 feet, gives a glimpse of the mountain and the happiness of the day itself. (Photo by Cate, to whom my most profound thanks.)

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(Note: Even while allegedly on a semi-vacation from blogging, I continued to blog – compulsively, you might say. Such is reality for one to whom writing has seemingly become as life-sustaining as breathing itself. The following is the result.)

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JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM – each claims a divine sadist as its founder, and each behaves accordingly. As their own scriptures tell us, “by their fruits shall ye know them.”

Thus the long, blood-drenched litany of Abrahamic atrocities new and old: Gaza; 9/11; Yugoslavia; the modern-day depredations of Jihadists and Hassidim; the Christian bigotry underlying the Nazi Holocaust; the pogroms of Imperial Russia; the massacre at Mountain Meadows; the First Nations genocide; the St. Bartholomew's massacre; the Ulster massacres; the European wars of religion; the Burning Times; the Inquisition; the depredations of the Teutonic Knights; the Crusades; the Islamic invasions of Europe; Christian persecutions of Pagans in the final centuries of the Roman Empire; the innumerable massacres by the Israelites recounted in the Torah and Old Testament, etc. ad nauseam. (See for example here  and here.)

At the core of Christianity's malevolence in the United States is the so-called “prosperity gospel,” which defines wealth as divine reward and poverty as divine punishment. That it is the dominant religious ethos within the imperial homeland explains the nation's increasing savagery toward lower-income people, especially those who are elderly and/or disabled. Its inherent misogyny fuels the war against women. Its notion of “one nation under god” – literally, god as heavenly Führer – mandates foreign policy based on “American Exceptionalism,” the 21st Century variant of the Nazi doctrine of Aryan supremacy.

Moreover, this sort of fanatically militant Christianity whether Protestant or Catholic is methodically replacing the remnants of constitutional governance with theocracy based on biblical law, a relentless campaign in which the Hobby Lobby decision is but the most recent Christian victory.

Yet most of the Left, with its collective head plunged deep in the sands of denial, arrogantly mouths wishful platitudes about religion becoming irrelevant and thus refuses to recognize the threat – never mind it is thoroughly documented on-line and in many recent books.

The most useful of these sources include three books and three web sites. The books are: The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008); American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War in America (Chris Hedges; Free Press div. of Simon & Schuster: 2006); and American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Kevin Phillips; Viking: 2006). The web sites are: Theocracy Watch; CatholicWatch; and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Such disclosures give us a telling and presumably terrifying glimpse of what our everyday lives would be like if the Christian theocrats – who now control the U.S. Supreme Court (and are therefore able to dictate the terms of all governance within U.S. borders) – continue their victorious onslaught.

(Note: The above, one of the most relevant essays I have ever written, originated on the comment thread of “Inside Mars Hill's massive meltdown,”  a breathtakingly courageous exposé of the savagery at the incipiently violent core of true-believer Christianity. Written by the upcoming freelancer Stacey Solie, “Meltdown” has probably generated more responses – and more revelations of the hatefulness spawned by Christian “love” – than anything Crosscut, the Seattle online daily, has ever published. The original text of my response therefore included a salute both to Solie and to Crosscut for their journalistic bravery. Via AlterNet, two other gripping accounts of adults recovering from Christian malevolence are here and here.)

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I GENERALLY AGREE – often emphatically – with what Chris Hedges writes. But when a public intellectual of such wisdom and eloquence belabors us with his belief in “God,” it does nothing whatsoever for the cause of humanitarian betterment. Indeed it is arguable such proselytizing – precisely because it reinforces the very ignorance that keeps so many of us in chains – is actually anti-humanitarian. In any case, it is depressingly grotesque and irremediably discrediting.

Moreover, and despite Hedges' disclaimers, the term “God” has by usage come to mean only the god of the Abrahamic religions. This deity is our species' ultimate sadist, not just the heavenly Führer but the divine model of a serial killer, proven so by the innumerable genocides committed – typically at his command – by his disciples in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Thus if this “God” is anything more than an imaginary character – if he is anything other than an adult equivalent of an especially vindictive Santa Claus – the notion he “weeps” is patently absurd. Either God doesn't care or – more likely (given the murderous histories of his followers) – he chortles with glee at the carnage.

(Posted in response to “Let My People Go,”  by Hedges on TruthDig.)

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NO LONGER CAN I doubt 9/11 was the U.S. version of the Reichstag Fire.

The pre-9/11 U.S. is no more. We the People are no longer citizens. We are instead subjects of a global empire, what is effectively the Fourth Reich. (Making it thus was the avowed intent of the Nazi war criminals the USian capitalists and politicians welcomed and embraced after 1945.)

In the Fourth Reich as in the Third Reich, unpopular minorities are the first targets of oppression – a core principle in Nazism and all other forms of fascism. (This is how the politicians retain the support of the Moronic Majority.)

In the Third Reich, ruled by Hitler and the Nazis in accordance with the principles Hitler laid out in Mein Kampf, the initial targets were Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, Leftists and trade unionists.

But for the Red Army, the Third Reich and its allies would have conquered the world.

In the Fourth Reich, ruled by the One Percent via corrupt politicians in accordance with the principles Ayn Rand laid out in her fictionalizations of Mein Kampf, the initial targets are African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations people, Leftists and trade unionists.

The Fourth Reich, whether economically or militarily, has already conquered the world and is now making of the entire planet an electronic concentration camp.

Who then can save us from this looming fascist darkness? Who has the requisite courage, solidarity and discipline?

(The above remarks originated as my contribution to the comment thread of “Ferguson Holds Up a Mirror to Our Militarized Police State,” by Carl Gibson of Reader Supported News.)

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THE MOST TELLING fact about Hillary Clinton is she began her political life as a “Goldwater Girl” – the 1960s version of someone fiercely proud to publicly declare herself an Ayn Rand fascist.

Moreover, Hillary made that self-defining choice at a time when the issues – race, domestic poverty, Vietnam, the Cold War – were unequivocally clear.

If you backed the Civil Rights Movement, supported the War on Poverty and believed in making every possible effort toward world peace, you voted for President Lyndon Johnson. But if you opposed the Civil Rights Movement, despised the poor as “lazy,” wanted to privatize all government services and advocated nuke-em-till-they-glow imperialism, you voted for Sen. Barry Goldwater.

Since then, while carefully disguising herself as a feminist, Hillary has clandestinely joined the effort by Christian fanatics to impose the savage misogyny of biblical-law theocracy on the United States. (See Jeff Sharlet, The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Harper: 2008], pages 272-277.)

In other words, beneath her cloak of Big Lies, Hillary is still that Goldwater Girl – still Hillary the Heartless, still burning with desire the United States be the Fourth Reich at home and abroad.

(The above originated as my response to “Hillary Clinton Joins Republicans in Call for War,”  by David Clark Scott of The Christian Science Monitor, reprinted by RSN.)

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THE NAMING CONTEST for the new water taxis that serve Seattle/King County prompted Crosscut columnist Knute Berger to suggest a rewriting of Washington state political history that's almost as outrageously revisionist as Hillary's efforts to present herself as a feminist.

Berger proposed one of the environmentally protective taxis be named after the late Dixy Lee Ray, the notorious anti-environmentalist who, from 1977 through 1981, was the state's first female governor. Thus “A water taxi named 'Dixy'?”; thus too my unsparing response, substantially revised for reprinting here:

As an alumnus of Gov. Ray's enemies list – 'twas I who scooped the world on her practice of using tax dollars to provide chauffeur-driven limousines for her department heads – I have to question the appropriateness of naming anything but a leaky nuclear-waste dump after such a brazenly anti-environmental politician.

I also have to believe columnist Berger writes in jest.

  

Dixy's automotive ostentation, which defiantly reversed the sensible state energy-conservation policies instituted by Gov. Dan Evans following Big Oil's 1973 price-coup, gave us not only the Ayn-Randish arrogance of the Welfare Limo but the fuelish absurdity of the Ecology Limo as well.

Both these gas-guzzlers were operated by liveried drivers, complete with visored caps.

My story, “Dixy's Honchos Get Bigger, Greedier Cars,” broke on Page One, 1 May 1977 in the old Sunday-Wednesday-Friday Federal Way News. It went statewide and national via United Press International, for which I was a longtime stringer, and it made the front section of The New York Times.

The accompanying art, which I got by sneaking into the state garage, ran only in FWN. It was a photo of the Welfare Limo, the Department of Social and Health Services logo like a royal coat-of-arms on its doors, the vehicle's pretentious length deliberately emphasized by the 24mm Nikkor on my Nikon F.

But the most significant element of Gov. Ray's administration was not so easily photographed. It was Dixy's sneering celebration of how – by running as a Democrat but governing as a John Bircher – she had duped a nominally Democratic electorate into voting for a female Barry Goldwater.

Hers was a false-flag campaign as brazen as the president's shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer – for which (given Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's testimony about Washington state as a proving-ground for techniques of oppression), it may have been a test-run.

Note too the parallel use of disguise: Dixy, like Hillary decades later, was presented to the public as a feminist Democrat, just as Obama was presented as an African-American Democrat, each in truth so far Right the epithet “fascist” is almost an understatement.

I remember now some of my press-corps colleagues – and some Democratic Party insiders too – joked that Dixy was “Nixon's Revenge.” Looking back, I cannot but suspect they were right.

By the way, if you read the linked piece, Berger errs in referring to Gov. Ray as “Madam Nuke.” Amongst her opponents throughout Washington state, her colloquial moniker was “Madam Atom,” memorable both for its easy alliteration and its portent of glow-in-the-dark disaster. “Madam Nuke” was used only by journalists, self included, who were jealous someone else had come up with the title “Madam Atom.”

More to the water-taxi point, if Sen. Warren Magnuson had not employed political sleight-of-hand to keep Dixy from turning Puget Sound into an international petroleum port, our homeland sea might now be too befouled for any vessels save supertankers.

Hence if we must name a taxi to immortalize someone notorious, even D.B. Cooper  – who robbed a public conveyance but did no damage to the environment – would seem to be a better choice.

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(The following was born as my response to Crosscut's publication of a notably nasty film review entitled “Too much? A movie gives us an inside view of poverty” and was only slightly revised.) 

UNFORTUNATELY I HAVE not seen the film Rich Hill, and unless it comes to Tacoma via The Grand Cinema, there is probably no way I will ever be able to see it. Yet it sounds as if it is a genuine work of art, both for its documentary value and for the veracity of the candid moments recorded by its filmmakers. Assuming this is true, it is an achievement that would surely be honored by critics just about anywhere else on this planet – especially in the cultural epicenters of New York, Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg.

But here in the aesthetic backwater of Pugetopolis, Rich Hill is damned by local critic Rustin Thompson for what he implies are serial intrusions born of what he belittles as “artistic whims.” The film's unflinching view of the inescapable poverty that now characterizes reality for half the U.S. population – a triumph of reportage that elsewhere would be lauded amongst the picture's greatest strengths – is the very quality that prompts Thompson to denounce it as “making a case for the ennobling value of squalor.”

Actually – again with the stipulation I have not seen the film – what Thompson seems to be expressing in his notably negative review is probably just another variant of what I have learned from bitter experience is the Puget Sound region's often violent hostility toward social-documentary photographers and the images we produce.

The basis of this prejudice – I have encountered its like nowhere else in the United States (not even in the [allegedly] far-less-civilized South) – is no doubt the same provincial small-mindedness that defines how people born in Seattle and its environs relate to those of us from elsewhere. It seems the rampant xenophobia that underlies the Seattle Freeze – this locale's well-documented antagonism to outsiders – readily expands into the spurious notion any un-posed photograph of the human condition is invariably a malicious invasion of the subject's privacy.

In its most extreme form – as a quietly fanatical dogma commonplace amongst the members of the local Ansel Adams cult – this patently reactionary rejection of social-documentary imagery is bolstered by a sneering conviction that photography of the human condition is nothing more than a waste of time and material – a medium with no artistic value whatsoever. In the eyes of these chillingly heartless elitists, human subjects and the struggles of oppressed peoples are reduced to meaninglessness in comparison to the grandeur of un-peopled nature.

Obviously Thompson does not go nearly so far in his rejection of Rich Hill. Indeed he admits “(t)he filmmakers' hearts are in the right place.” But – to me at least – his review nevertheless bears (and bares) an undeniable taint of Seattle's aesthetic toxicity, so much so it seems a perfect example of the Seattle Freeze transformed into the pretense of art criticism.

 

There is also in Thompson's text the bias one would expect of a cinematographer who earns a living making propaganda films for charities: that is, he condemns Rich Hill for avoiding “any suggestion of how these boys could get help, or any larger picture of the endemic issues faced by the community as a whole.” In other words, there was no uplifting sales pitch at the end of the film – no pretense a viewer's contribution might make things better – to relieve the guilt and emotional depression evoked by the subjects' circumstances.

From my perspective, that notable lack of PollyAnna deception may underscore what might be Rich Hill's two most revealing truths: that as capitalism inevitably morphs into fascism, the poverty of its subjects is inescapable; and that our species' only hope lies in a revolutionary ideology no present-day U.S. theater would dare screen.

(DISCLOSURE: though most of my lifetime income came from writing and editing, it was photography that produced most of the fame-and-glory aspects of my resumé. My picture credits start with Paris-Match and Newsweek; I was the social documentarian for Manhattan's Beth Israel Hospital [1967-1970], for which I focused on the people and neighborhoods served by its free clinics; was the founding photographer [1974-1976] of The Seattle Sun; taught photography during the later '70s and early 1980s at Western Washington University's [Seattle] Center for Urban Studies and at Tacoma Community College; am officially retired but retain a working familiarity with film and cameras. A consummate street photographer during my Manhattan years [1965-1970; 1983-1986], my first few weeks in Seattle (1972) taught me that attempting street photography here is as dangerous as trying to photograph the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee.)

LB/17 August 2014

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Taking This Week Off -- and Maybe Next Week Also

Dear Readers...

The demands on my time for the last several weeks have been more intense than I could have imagined. 

Though in theory I am officially retired,  the premises inspections of May and June; a rash of computer troubles; cataract surgery in both eyes;  the abysmal local bus service that imprisons me in my own residence if I am to fulfill post-cataract-surgery eyedrop-protocols;  publication of a monthly newsletter for my fellow tenants; involvement with the $15 minimum-wage campaign; the demands of this blog;  all of it has combined to keep me more busy -- and feeling increasingly more jammed up -- than ever in my life. 

Indeed I am busier than I was even as an impoverished undergraduate at the University of Tennessee c. 1959,  carrying a full course load, working three jobs (one full-time, two part-time), merely to buy my books and pay my tuition -- after which my enlistment for three years active duty in the U.S. Army was like an extended vacation. 

Lastly there's my increasing discomfort with what I am told may be the longest most relentless heat wave in Tacoma history. Though I've no problem with this new and seemingly endless succession of daytime temperatures in the high 80s,  the failure to cool off at night -- a new phenomenon in this region -- makes restful sleep impossible without air conditioning, and my increasing exhaustion is becoming decidedly wearisome. 

All of these factors contribute to my decision to take a week off from OAN -- maybe even two weeks. 

Meanwhile my most profound thanks to you for your continuing readership. My sense of you out there, literally on all the continents of this sorely troubled planet, reinforces my belief that in this era, we the oppressed should never forget that under deliberately genocidal capitalism, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance.  

Oh yes, the cataract surgery was apparently successful. I now have 20/20 vision in both eyes and, as I said last week after only the right-eye surgery was complete, I am rediscovering the exquisite sensuality of seeing.  

Back Soon,
Loren Bliss
3 August 2014 

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Activism and Renewed Vision at Age 74; 12 Revealing Reports and Essays on U.S. Fascism and Theocracy

PROUD AND ANGRY: A member of the 15 Now Tacoma organizing committee, I spent a bit more than an hour Sunday collecting signatures on our petition to the Tacoma City Council demanding the minimum wage inside this municipality be raised to $15 per hour.

In that brief span of time – never mind I am 74 years old and visibly crippled – I filled two petition-pages, front and back, with a total of 48 signatures complete with addresses and contact information.

The venue was very much in 15 Now's advantage – an annual celebration of Tacoma's diverse ethnicity, a food-and-music festival in a large and pleasant city park near my dwelling, and I should have brought many more than two of our petition-sheets with me, but alas I did not. It was my first time working alone as a signature-gatherer, and I had foolishly under-estimated the campaign's popularity.

Meanwhile, “15 Now” is becoming a slogan of the increasingly radicalized Working Class, not just in Washington state but throughout the U.S. imperial homeland, and minimum-wage data tells why.

Here, where the minimum wage is set by the legislature, it is $9.32 an hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. But neither provide a so-called living wage, the sum required for self-support without reliance on food stamps and other subsidies  the ever-more-unabashedly Ayn-Rand-fascist federal and state governments are relentlessly slashing or eliminating entirely.

(Note: the above-linked wage and cost-of-living data is not current. In one place the source-website says it's data is from the year 2010; in another it says it was updated in 2012. Thanks to bureaucratic lag – the increasing reluctance of U.S. governance to acknowledge how bad things truly are – these are the last full years available. However, the site is nevertheless useful as it does show the relationship between minimum wage and living wage.)

Had the federal minimum wage kept pace with inflation – that is, were the capitalists and their political servants not gleefully lining their own pockets by savaging workers and working families – the federal minimum wage would be $23 per hour.

Combine that with the fact at least half the population of Tacoma is lower income – 60 percent of the children in Tacoma schools are on free or reduced-price lunches  – and it becomes easy to understand why it took me only 75 minutes to gather all those signatures.

Despite my error in not bringing more petition-pages to the park, I am fiercely proud of my effort today. I frankly had no idea I could be continuously on my feet without serious discomfort for anything approaching that span of time and distance, equivalent to walking about three miles.

I was also reveling in the exquisiteness of my new eyesight, 20/20 in my right eye due to cataract surgery, its result a re-familiarization with the sensuality of seeing that is tantamount to discovery of a fountain of youth – an experience I would be denied had I not applied for, and gotten, a special medical-expense grant.

At the same time, I am again forced to confront the fact the United States of America – once a nation of which I was proud to be a citizen – is again expanding at every level its traditional economic hostility toward people of color.  But now it has gone much further. It has become the enemy of all working peoples everywhere, at home and abroad, regardless of our race and ethnicity.

It is from this perspective – pride in what I did today, pride in the fact I am able to remain defiantly active, anger in what this nation has become – I devote my Sundays to writing this blog.

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On the Rise of Theocracy and Fascism in Obama's U.S.

Here is an analysis that reveals the connections beneath five seemingly unrelated reports:

“Right-Wing Militias Are Thriving - and the Media Won't Talk About It.” Nor is the Obama Regime protecting us against the depredations of these latter-day storm troopers.

The report's most revealing passage is frightening indeed:

“The problem is much more one of inter-agency coordination, leadership and simple recognition of the widespread threat of right-wing violence—a failure epitomized by the Obama administration’s knee-jerk disavowal of a Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism, leaked to right-wing media in April 2009. As Potok noted, this disavowal came despite two basic facts: first, that a similar report on the virtually nonexistent radical left had been issued six months earlier, and second, the fact the report itself was “a fair, sober and prescient analysis of what was going on.” In fact “virtually everything that was written in that report came to pass in one way or another. But it’s not just the government that’s been caught flat-footed. The media’s sensationalist approach obscured as much or more than it revealed...”

AlterNet's Paul Rosenberg, who wrote this otherwise excellent summary of material from the Southern Poverty Law Center, nevertheless failed in two significant ways.

He seems to regard the government's inactivity and the media's dissemination of disinformation as separate phenomena – never mind the fact governance and mass media in today's U.S. are each wholly owned subsidiaries of the One Percent. In other words, it appears the militia are – no doubt in anticipation of their future function as defenders of capitalism – definitively under Ruling Class protection.

And – though Rosenberg does report the intimate connections between the new storm troopers, the imperial war machine and Christian fanaticism – he fails to place these disturbing facts in the context of the much larger, lavishly financed, increasingly successful effort to impose biblical-law theocracy  on the United States.

Predictably, here too the U.S. government demonstrates its servitude to the One Percent. There's the Hobby Lobby case – which is turning out to be the Dred Scott decision not just for women but for the entire U.S. 99 Percent.  There's also President Obama's dramatic increase in funding for religion-based social-services that notoriously discriminate against non-believers.

Most of all there's the story implicit in “US Air Force Prepares to Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of Fundamentalist Christians Proselytizing War.” which details the forcible conversion of the imperial war machine into an onward-Christian-soldiers force of heretic hunters and infidel eliminators. These modern-day Crusaders are tasked with converting the world,  not at swords-point as in the previous Dark Age, but with cluster-bombs, napalm, depleted-uranium munitions, torture, deliberate collateral damage and other such technologies and tactics suitable to the new Dark Age in which we are befallen.

Here's the report's key paragraph:

“Look, let's just call it what it is. 'Spiritual rape' perpetrated by 'fundamentalist Christian religious predators' is how we at the civil rights organization I lead — the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF)— describe the profound sense of vicious, personal violation that is being mercilessly inflicted upon tens of thousands of our MRFF military clients, 96% of whom are practicing Christians themselves. Forced religious indoctrination, mandatory prayer sessions, active, abusive measures towards the promotion of one or another fundamentalist Christian sect, the shaming and savaging of freethinking, atheist, and agnostic service members – these barbaric tactics define the monstrous modus operandi of the Christian dominionist hegemony that lies as a cancerous plague metastasizing briskly across the whole of the Air Force and the U.S. Military.”

Another aspect of the theocracy issue – made so by the bottomless hatred of women that defines all Abrahamic fanatics whether Judaic, Christian or Muslim – is obliquely covered by “What I Learned Growing Up in the South as a Feminist, and the Problems With Today's Feminist Movement.” An essay by Lynn Stuart Parramore on the present-day plight of feminism, its most noteworthy paragraph promises much but delivers little:

“Part of this I blame on the Democratic Party, which often embraces a superficial 'hooray for women!' attitude while kicking women, particularly those at the lower rungs of the economic ladder, under the bus. Too often, mainstream moderate women's organizations seem to be class-blind and oblivious (or even hostile) to the need to confront economic structures that oppress both women and men.”

Too bad Parramore did not detail how the Democratic Party, beneath its never-ending Big Lie of progressive politics, proves itself to be as bad (if not actually worse), than the Republicans in effective hostility to women. How many millions of women have been robbed of their reproductive freedom – forever – by the loss of their jobs, and therefore the loss of their health insurance, as the direct result of Democrat “free trade” policies?

And now how many women who desperately hoped Obamacare would restore those freedoms are now suffering the cruelty of Hobby Lobby – the permanent, theocratic destruction of their hopes via Obamacare, the now-officially unconstitutional legislation presumably written and approved by the president whose first claim to fame was as a Harvard Law School constitutional scholar. 

Given the innumerable shape-shifts from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer that prove the president to be the most brazenly dishonest occupant of the White House ever, who can doubt the Hobby-Lobby outcome – the denial of free contraception to untold numbers of women – was intended from the very beginning?

The last two reports in this anthology, “Elderly Veteran Arrested For Asking County Officials To Speak Louder,” here and “We're Arresting Poor Mothers for Our Own Failures,” here, each illustrate the ever-more-zero-tolerance police-state malevolence that now increasingly afflicts the (increasingly Christian, hence increasingly brutal) imperial homeland.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere (in Case You Missed It)

 

“Obama Administration Eyes Significant Direct Involvement in Ukrainian Civil War,” Reader Supported News' republication of a terrifying New York Times report of looming escalation on behalf the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine War, sparked an unusually vitriolic comment thread, to which I added my own analysis:

Don't let the quibbling...obscure the terrifying fact escalations of this sort are bound to trigger World War III.

Because Russia is not North Vietnam – because Russia has a genuinely global military capability – U.S. intervention on behalf the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine can only lead to thermonuclear holocaust.

 

Remember too the sole purpose of the U.S. government (and therefore of the CIA or any of its agencies whether foreign or domestic), is the advancement and perpetuation of U.S. capitalism and its global empire, the de facto Fourth Reich. This role it now fulfills perfectly.

Capitalism today has only three goals, all subsets of its mandate for absolute power and unlimited profit. These goals are: (1)-total control of global resources; (2)-extermination of surplus populations (that is, of all workers and working families rendered unnecessary by automation); (3)-reduction of the remaining workers to de facto slavery.

These goals are evident wherever there is a U.S. presence – Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, New Orleans, Ukraine – anywhere the empire exerts itself.

That's because the U.S. government is capitalism personified: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, the rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth – moral imbecility writ into foreign and domestic policy.

Later on the same thread a poster screen-named “geraldom” seemingly tried to lead three of us into criminal statements:  “So what you, lorenbliss, and dsepeczi are basically saying (bottomline) is that Putin should surrender control of Russia to the U.S. in order to avoid igniting a hot-war and certain destruction of all life on earth.”

To which I responded:

The maliciously provocative nature of this false assertion – a statement to which nearly any rational response would be actionable by the secret police as treason – makes me wonder for whom geraldom is working.

 

Never forget Lev Bronstein's axiom: “in any gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”

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“Fear and Retaliation at the VA” exposes vindictive management within the Department of Veterans Affairs  – a grim reality no different from the oppressive management that characterizes the entire Obamanoid bureaucracy and indeed governmental bureaucracy throughout the United States. The excellent report, by Lydia Dennett of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), was reprinted by Popular Resistance.org, a website that is always worth reading. On the comment thread I pointed out how bureaucratic malevolence whether internal or external is one of the ways capitalist governance ensures itself against socialism:

As I said on Outside Agitator's Notebook...a few weeks ago, the problems with VA health care are a microcosm of the problems with U.S. health care in general –  (scroll down), an analysis that, whether coincidentally or not, was repeated by Paul Krugman  10 days later.

But these problems are also what is wrong with all government bureaucracies – federal, state and local – that are responsible for providing services to the Working Class people of the United States.

The ultimate source of these problems is class warfare – the fact that managers (who presume themselves to be part of the Ruling Class elite), are indifferent if not outright hostile to the needs of the people they are theoretically responsible for serving.

This hostility is a logical byproduct of extent to which the U.S. population – particularly the college-educated elite – have been trained in (indeed brainwashed in), the morally imbecilic credo of Ayn Rand.

Hence the attitude in the bureaucracies from the top down is essentially the same as on Wall Street: infinite greed as ultimate virtue – the conscious and deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

As a consequence, management is focused not on serving the people but on maximizing earnings while minimizing personal effort. Moreover, the same attitude applies, in varying degrees, at all levels of bureaucracy.

The result is one of the many ways the One Percent perpetuates the popular hatred of government that perpetuates hostility to socialism. It is also yet another dimension of the methodical reduction of the 99 Percent to abject serfdom.

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“Coal exports from Bellingham could ramp up rapidly” reveals that railroad tracks are already being upgraded to carry billions of tons of coal to a proposed new international port near Bellingham, Washington. But Crosscut's usually skillful reporter Floyd McKay sidesteps entirely the obvious implication of the new construction – that the proverbial fix is already in, and the coal port will be built regardless of local opposition. I commented accordingly:

Anyone who doubts the Bellingham coal port is not already a done deal need only note how BNSF is upgrading the relevant rail lines.

The upgrading proves the associated political process – environmental-impact statements included – is nothing more than another charade of the sort that now exemplifies the Big Lie of U.S. democracy.

Under the new paradigm of U.S. governance, anything the capitalists want, the capitalists get – no matter how many will suffer or die as a consequence.

 

Were the fix not already in, the railroad would not be spending the money to bolster its tracks to support increased traffic.

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“The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist,” by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux, of The Intercept, reports the ugly details of how easily a political activist* can be damned forever as a public enemy.  I damn the government in response:

 

By these standards, anyone who exercises the First Amendment right to protest can be labeled a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer – and that is obviously the government's intent.

Participate in a demonstration wherein a few secret-police thugs trash a building to create an excuse for mass arrest, you're on the list – your life destroyed forever unless you manage to escape to political asylum somewhere else.

What this makes clear is that Obama will not be content until all of us in the 99 Percent regardless of ethnicity or gender are reduced to the endless fear and total subjugation that was originally the wretched lot of minorities in the Ku Klux Klanfederacy whether south or north.

Indeed, that very kind of terror-state (so akin to Tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany), seems to be the Obamanoid model for good governance.

And in Obama's wanton and willful embrace of tyranny – never mind the clamor of deliberate lies and misinformed protests by DUDs (Democrats Uttering Denials) – the Republicans can no longer be blamed as initiators.

Once again, in his transition from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, the president proves himself to be infinitely more tyrannical than Richard Milhous Nixon ever dreamed of being.

_________

*Under the Obama Regime, this applies only to activists on the Left. Those on the Right – even those advocating violence against the government – are clearly exempt. See “Right-Wing Militias Are Thriving,” above. 

******

“How Anonymous Cops Online Are Reacting to the Death of Eric Garner” gives us an insider's glimpse of the savagery characteristic of capitalist governance. My response gets right to the point:

Envision these remarks as part of a dialogue amongst soldiers in an army of occupation inside a conquered nation and you have at last glimpsed the core truth of life in the imperial USian homeland.

******

“Federal Appeals Court Deals Blow to Obamacare” is a Washington Post report that discloses what I suspect is yet another deliberate betrayal of lower-income people maliciously built into the so-called Affordable Care Act.  Thus my comment:

It ain't just “the Republicans.”

The Affordable Care Act was written by Democrats – or more specifically by insurance-monopoly lawyers empowered by Democrats.

Which means this newest “failure” – actually another example of Obama the Orator shape-shifting into Barack the Betrayer – was intended from the very beginning.

Why?

Because Obama is the quintessential capitalist. Because he is the biggest Big Liar ever to occupy the White House. Because he rules by capitalism's credo of Ayn Rand moral imbecility: infinite greed as maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

Mostly because it's yet another truncheon with which to beat the Working Class into submission.

The victims of mandatory Obamacare – the people who cannot afford insurance without government subsidies – will be ruined by bankruptcies, foreclosures, families flung into permanent homelessness.

Meanwhile – with the subsidy money diverted to more profitable forms of corporate welfare – there'll be even bigger payoffs for Obama's One Percent masters.

Wake up, people. It's capitalism in action: absolute power and infinite profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Later, in response to a hostile poster, I added this:

I'm well aware of Obamacare's Republican origins.

So let's be honest about who inflicted it on the people of the United States. (It was Barack the Betrayer and the Democratic Party).

Also let's be honest about why it was inflicted on us.

(It pays off the health care cartel and the prescription drug lords with the most obscene windfall profits in their obscene-profit histories.)

(Plus – let us not forget this all-important point – Obamacare perpetuates forever the definitive USian policy of health care as a privilege of wealth.)

Lastly, let's be honest about why the Republicans pretend to oppose it.

(Opposing anything with a “Democratic” label is the Republicans' predetermined, carefully scripted role in maintaining the Big Lie of USian "representative democracy" – their function in the One Party of Two Names.)

Wake up, people. There is no democracy here. There is only the tyranny of the One Percent – camouflaged by charades performed by its wholly owned servants in government at every level.

 

And my next retort was unapologetically antagonistic:

I see by the negative numbers I'm getting, there's a bunch of DUDs – Democrats Uttering Denials – on this thread. Hmmmm...must be an election year, as the defenders of the indefensible are again out in force, trying once more to sell us their Big Lie of “change we can believe in” – never mind our reality is exactly as Audre Lorde said: “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”

Likewise my concluding comment, though its animosity was directed at the Democratic Party and not at the poster to whom I was responding:

...Wyden sounds like a male clone of the Patty Murray/Maria Cantwell duet here in the state of Wishywash.

 

But that's the sort of marionette mediocrity we get – Democrat or Republican it matters not – now that the Soviet Union is no longer around to scare the capitalists into a pretense of humanitarianism.

******

“No, Obama Has Not Failed” is a short essay by Charles Pierce of Esquire, republished by RSN, that disputes the growing conviction on the Left the president is “an incompetent, a sellout, or an incompetent sellout.”

 

My response is equally blunt:

Obama is also the best president the Bankers Plot conspirators ever had.

(These never-prosecuted criminals of 1934 wanted an officially fascist United States as part of a Rome/Berlin/Tokyo/Washington D.C. Axis and Hitler's New Order, a four-part global empire that was the conceptual forerunner of Bush's New World Order, the neocons' American Century and the Democrats' Global Economy.)

Indeed I would not be the least surprised if in the privacy of his own smugness, Obama already thinks of himself as “Imperator Mundi”– emperor of the world – not just POTUS but IMPOTUS.

LB/27 July 2014

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