As in Ferguson, So Throughout the USian Empire

THE ATROCITIES COMMITTED by federally militarized local police in Ferguson, Missouri  and in a Wal-Mart store  near Dayton, Ohio tell us the operational truth about today's Imperial United States. That's because – in terms of the causative factors – there is no difference between the wanton murders of two men of color by trigger-happy white cops and George Bush's wanton invasion of Iraq or Barack Obama's equally wonton war-making in Ukraine.  Might now officially makes right, the charade of democracy be damned, and woe be unto those who – even accidentally – neglect all the demeaning protocols of submission.

In the overseas regions of the USian Empire, in places like South Vietnam or Pinochet's Chile or the USian conquests in the Middle East, nonconformity or disobedience has always meant imprisonment and torture and death. In these relatively distant realms, capitalism's credo of infinite greed as ultimate virtue has always demanded the moral imbecility of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else. Meanwhile we here in the USian homeland were inadvertently protected by Soviet and Chinese Marxism, which forced capitalism to conceal its greedy malevolence behind the humanitarian facade of representative democracy. But now capitalism has no rivals. It no longer bothers to hide its relentless savagery. Even here at home, it is maturing into its inevitable final form, which is a new and infinitely more diabolical form of fascism. And We the People – capitalism's newest colonial victims – are becoming ever more angry and rebellious.

In response, the local police are ever more federalized and militarized. In the eyes of our masters, We the People are nobodies, üntermenschen, non-persons, no different from the people of Radda'  or Odessa.  Now, as it always was in the overseas USian colonies, so it is here at home – no matter how stubbornly some of us may deny what is being done to us and why.

Because African Americans have a proud history of rebelliousness  that predates the Civil Rights Movement by 429 years, they are invariably the authorities' first targets,  the first demographic group from within which the Ruling Class extracts its most brutal examples: Michael Brown gunned down in Ferguson and his body obscenely displayed for the next four hours; John Crawford III slain in the Dayton suburb of Beavercreek, Ohio merely because he was a black man who decided to buy a BB-gun. And who knows how many others have been unjustifiably shot  by police? A bitter truth: such statistics aren't kept because the Ruling Class doesn't care – or doesn't want us to know. Just as, for example, the atrocities at Baghdad were covered up until they were leaked by Chelsea Manning.  And let us not forget her fate: guilty of embarrassing the imperial military machine, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

As I have noted before, any one of us – especially those of us who have darker skins – could be Michael Brown or John Crawford III. And any one of us who dares expose the reality of capitalist governance could be another Chelsea Manning. In which context note again the fate of Gary Webb.

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The connection between white Christianity and Caucasian racism has long been evident in the southern colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan: “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Now a carefully researched report by historian Randall Balmer in Politico reveals how the rise of the so-called Religious Right was fueled not by abortion but by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that denied tax-exempt status to racially segregated Christian schools.  As Amanda Marcotte puts it in a more recent commentary in Slate, “Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized conservative Christians.” And their leaders were so eager to ally themselves with the Republicans, they “blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon.” Men of god perpetrating a Big Lie? You betcha; it happens all the time. Read Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008).

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I cannot conclude these observations about the broader significance of the deaths of Michael Brown and John Crawford III without pointing out the apparent hypocrisy of the USian (pseudo) Left as demonstrated by how it is  ignoring the latter atrocity.  Thus far, only a socialist publication has covered Crawford's murder and its aftermath in any real depth. (Another account, focused on Ohio's post-shooting activism, is here.)  Note too how the text of a newly circulated petition to the Obama administration, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense makes no mention of the Ohio incident: “In the wake of Ferguson, we must secure a positive transformation in nationwide policing. Join us in calling on the executive branch of the federal government to take definitive steps to protect civil and human rights in every community by setting a higher standard of policing, strengthening accountability mechanisms, investing in strengthening economic infrastructure (employment, education, healthcare), and securing critical reforms to end abusive, militarized, and biased policing targeting Black and brown communities.”

The Nation magazine, which is one of the petition's sponsors, emailed please-sign requests a week ago, the point here being the timing: the document obviously post-dates by nearly two months the clarification of the initially distorted circumstances of the Ohio shooing. The petition's other sponsors are: Advancement Project, Center for Popular Democracy, ColorofChange.org, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, RH Reality Check, RootsAction and Working Families.

While I am not familiar with the views of all these groups, I know most of them are fanatical opponents of the Second Amendment  and equally fanatical supporters of forcible civilian disarmament. I have experienced firsthand the hateful hysteria of such people. They claim mere legal possession of a firearm is “an act of violence,” and they damn all gun owners as “Nazis” and “wanna-be killers.” Hence it is not difficult for me to imagine the anti-gun frenzy of a debate that might have banished from the petition any citation of the Beavercreek outrage – never mind its circumstances are far more egregious than those of the Ferguson incident. Therefore I am forced to ask: is the fact Crawford apparently wanted to buy a BB gun the reason the petition ignores his tragic slaying? Obviously I don't know – but I think the absence of Beavercreek from the text is significant, and if I were a gambling man, I'd bet the BB gun is the reason.

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Which reminds me: apropos the claim that civilians with small arms are powerless against modern weapons, note how tragically under-equipped Kurdish women are said to be defeating the rabid minions of the newest caliphate.  (Historical reference: the last aggressive caliphate was the creation of the Mahdi in Khartoum. Though most of my comrades on the Left will denounce as heresy what I am about to say next, I'll say it anyway: where is Lord Kitchener now that we need him?)

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The Washington Post, as reliable a propaganda outlet for the USian Ruling Class as der Voelkischer Beobachter was for the ruling elite of Nazi Germany, nevertheless sometimes publishes enlightening material. Such is “Wages should be growing faster, but they're not. Here's why.” The head is self-explanatory.  The money quote – no pun – tells the whole story. “Raising pay is simply not part of the business model of American employers. They will not do so until they’re absolutely forced to by a labor market that’s much tighter than what we’ve got today.” In Marxian terms, this means the proletariat – We the People – will be imprisoned in wretchedness by the One Percent until we unite, rise up and cast off our chains. Two other news reports provide variations on the same theme: “Scott Walker says $7.25 an hour is a living wage,” here,  and “Amid Soaring Profits, Walmart to Cut Off 30,000 Workers From Health Insurance,” here.  Lastly, since USian colleges and universities are ever more subservient to capitalism, it's no surprise they also reflect capitalism's incipient racism, as revealed in “Applying to College With a Criminal Record.” Such is our lot in a system governed by the credo of infinite greed as ultimate virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species ever set forth.

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Two of this week's reports on the USian approach to policing are unusually informative, which is why I list them here as recommended reading. “FBI and Shattering of Students for a Democratic Society” describes how the USian secret police destroy dissent – an important disclosure for any present-day dissident, particularly those who chronically underestimate the cunning of the capitalist authorities. In the Imperial United States of today as in pre-revolutionary Imperial Russia, Leon Trotsky's dictum remains an absolute truth: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.” Then there's “Asset Seizures Fuel Police Spending,” a Washington Post investigative report that is probably intended to distract us  from the inconceivable sums of money by which the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security are training, equipping and federalizing the local police as a surrogate army of occupation in the homeland colonies. But the WaPo piece contains vital information: it tells us why the cops love the so-called war on drugs, and another reason the fascists love municipal budget-cuts, which guarantee local-police insistence on (obscenely profitable) drug prohibition will intensify rather than diminish.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere: I posted on only three comment threads last week. “Secretly Buying Access to a Governor,” a New York Times editorial reprinted by Reader Supported News, prompted me to hope it “is the opening volley in a no-quarter war by the (few) humanitarian-minded members of the Ruling Class against its now-dominant faction, the morally imbecilic disciples of Ayn Rand who are maliciously reducing all the rest of us to slaves.” I agreed with “Obama Hates the Press,” pointing out the president is “so shamelessly obvious in his transformation from Obama the ('change we can believe in') Orator to Barack the ('worse than Richard Nixon') Betrayer, even the stenographic Ruling Class media cannot avoid reporting his lies and deceptions.” My remark triggered a predictable flury of thumbs down  from Democratic Party operatives. They are out in force during these last weeks before what – largely because of public anger over presidential betrayals – looms to be their worst mid-term election loss in years. And “Scientists Discover World's Oceans Warming Faster Than Predicted” prompted a bitter eulogy to our planet and our species: 

We're doomed – and because we've been in denial so long, it's now far too late to do anything about it.

Given the fact the inertial momentum of all matter is toward consciousness, our failure is unequivocal proof of the lack thereof – which is precisely why our extinction as a species is now guaranteed.

The great irony is the source of our extinction – fossil fuel – is the putrefied remains of other failed species. This is especially true of petroleum, which is literally the liquid putrescence of dinosaurs.

Thus the carrion of one age of failed species ensures the failure of another age and species, an equation in which there is surely a lesson, though perhaps only in karma, specifically the now obviously irremediable curse we have inflicted on ourselves by basing an entire economy on a form of grave-robbing.

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Another major element in our impending extinction is no doubt our species' astounding propensity for hatred. It is an inclination so venomously dominant, it suggests that instead of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, we should be renamed Homo Sapiens Odibilis – “human, thinking and hateful.”

Yes, very rarely we seem to beat the hate mongers, as in Jacksonville, Florida's Duval County, where a nationwide petition campaign has forced a local board of education to rename the Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, which die-hard segregationists had defiantly named to honor the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. 

But these victories over hatred are always more apparent than real. A name change is just that – it does nothing to alter internal psychological reality. 

Meanwhile, racism, sexism, ageism – indeed every form of hate-mongering imaginable – is given new and unprecedented malevolence by the unfettered anonymity provided by the Internet.  And given the abusive realities of global patriarchy, it is not surprising “The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women” shows a preponderance of the Internet's victims are females.  (Thanks to my friend Katelyn Driskill for bringing this profoundly disturbing report to my attention.)

But it seems to me the real issue transcends – without diminishing – the focused victimization of any single group of people. What is evident here is synergistic hatred of a hitherto-unimaginable magnitude, the expression of a formerly suppressed hatefulness that seizes upon new technology to intensify and metastasize its malice, seemingly to infinity. But why now, when – ironically and paradoxically – we need cooperative solidarity more desperately than at any other time in our species' history? Is patriarchy and its ultimate expression as capitalism that self-destructive? Could it be that hatred of our fellow humans – especially the hatred of the life-bearing gender who mothers us into being and without whom we would all perish – is but a subset of our now-undeniable (and now undeniably suicidal) hatred of the environment? Is this the real, hitherto unacknowledged barrier that fatally obstructs all our efforts to cope with terminal climate change? Perhaps the New Agers were right after all – that there could be no healing of our environment until our psychological selves were healed. But who – or what – could have accomplished such a feat? And what does that tell us about our species' fitness for survival?

LB/6-12 October 2014

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Capitalism Requires an Endless Succession of Big Lies

CAPITALISM, OF NECESSITY, requires constant use of the Big Lie.  That's because, when capitalism is reduced to its lowest common denominator, it is ultimately moral imbecility – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. The same is true of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – and for the same reason. Neither capitalism nor capitalist governance can exploit its victims without a perpetual smokescreen of lies and evasions to conceal its quintessential savagery.

While the lies of our capitalist masters are typically blatant – for example President Obama's knowingly false assertions the Russians are to blame for the Ukraine Crisis  – sometimes their deceptions are more subtle. One example is the methodical destruction of the career and ultimately the life of the journalist Gary Webb,  detailed by Robert Parry in “The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up.” Another is the lie-by-omission at the core of the Democratic Party's pre-election effort to make us forget how Democrats joined hands with Republicans to try to slash our already inadequate Social Security stipends. Thus a recent Truthout piece, “The GOP Social Security Deception Game Is On - Here's How to Fight Back,” dutifully disseminates the propaganda the Democrats desperately hope will enable them to retain control of the U.S. Senate. Its story-line is the Big Lie that Democrats are eternal fighters for the Working Class, and with Sen. Elizabeth Warren  arguing the case, it's an easy lie to believe – especially for those of us foolish enough to still have faith in the possibility of obtaining redress from our hopelessly corrupted political system.

But lest we forget the truth – which Truthout does reliably publish save when the its election-year fealty to the Democratic Party overrides its journalistic ethics – here is an AlterNet report, “Sell-Out Alert: 9 Democrats Already Caving to GOP On Social Security Cuts,” to remind us what really happened.  As it says, “...the biggest Democrat of all – and the one not drawing a line in the sand but possibly leading a historic sellout – is President Obama.” In other words, Barack the Betrayer strikes again, targeting Medicare as well as Social Security – and now he's got Sen. Warren, the alleged defender of the 99 Percent, to cover for him. Equally ironic is the role Washington state Sen. Patty Murray – a Democrat who likes to brag about her feminist credentials – played in proposing cuts which (see below) would have been especially devastating to women.

For those who still doubt the Democratic and Republican parties are nothing more than deceptively named factions of a single party of plutocrats, there's the fact 43 of the 55 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus voted just last February to help President Obama impose an $8.5 billion food-stamp cut.  Note the Democratic numbers: 43 of 55 is 78 percent. And when you eliminate the two independents and count only the actual Democrats, you have 43 of 53 or 81 percent – which gives us the real percentage of Democratic politicians who are indistinguishable from their Republican counterparts in hatred and contempt for us, We the People of the 99 Percent. As Washington state Senator Maria Cantwell put it (scroll down the linked text), “it's time that we move forward” – never mind the vast majority of the cutback's victims are women and children. 

Cantwell is considered one of the Democrats' leading liberals and feminists. But it is her Marie Antoinette indifference to the deliberately genocidal consequences of radically downsizing the food-stamp program that underscores another of the Democrats' Big Lies – their now obviously false claim they can at least be counted on to protect the wellbeing of women.  It was Democratic President Jimmy Carter's signature  on the Hyde Amendment that robbed lower-income women of their abortion rights. It was Democratic President Bill Clinton's expansion of free trade  that took away so many jobs – and so many health-insurance policies – that were the sole sources of reproductive choice for working women who were not independently wealthy. (Rich women, Ruling Class women, always have reproductive freedom; it's one of the innumerable privileges the plutocrats are ensured by their obscene wealth.) More recently it was Obama the Orator's initial shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer – the irremediable betrayal that forever defined Usian health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right – that opened the door to Hobby Lobby  and all the other looming theocratic restrictions on abortion and contraception. And don't forget the deadly damage  the Democrats' proposed Social Security and Medicare cuts would have done to women.

What, therefore, will change if the Republicans – as expected – win a majority of seats in the Senate? Not much; arcane, pro-plutocracy Senate rules already give the Republicans de facto control,  so all that will happen is the nation's march toward overt fascism and Christian theocracy and its simultaneous descent to the total wretchedness of de facto slavery for the 99 Percent will merely accelerate a bit. Besides – just as the Social Security and food-stamp issues demonstrate – the only real difference between the two parties is rhetoric. The Republicans are already unapologetic Christofascists. The Democrats meanwhile have become breathtakingly skilled at hiding their fascism behind legislative sleight-of-hand and election-time declarations of humanitarian principles in which they no longer believe. The latter have therefore become Big Lies in their own right: the classic example is Obama's 2008 campaign slogan: “change we can believe in.”

The bitter truth is we are governed by one Ruling Class party of two names. Thus government at every level in the United States, federal, state and local, is by, for and of the capitalists, with the rest of us – despite the Big Lie of “democracy” – methodically excluded.  But when oh when will we awaken to the awful truth?

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As I said above, Truthout can be counted on to tell the truth about anything save the Democratic Party. Hence the relevance of two unusually insightful reports that explain exactly how capitalism works. One, which describes how New York City perfected a mode of zero-tolerance policing that helps force lower-income people out of neighborhoods targeted for gentrification,  is entitled “Policing for Wealth.” The other – a timely essay on how private charity preserves capitalism  and thereby facilitates its oppression of lower-income people – is headlined “The Charitable Society or 'How to Avoid the Poor and Perpetuate the Wealth Gap.” It's money quote – no pun intended – lays bare a perfect example of the systemic dishonesty essential to capitalism's survival: “...corporate charity becomes a kind of self-rewarding capitalist enterprise because it is able both to maximize profit through tax breaks, and subtly cement capitalist economic, social and political policies that reflect the interests of the super-rich – from monopolization to privatization of public goods and institutions. So, it turns out that much of the giving involved here is not giving for the sake of promoting the common welfare, but philanthropy for private profit and corporate self-interest at the expense of long-term public good” (italics as in original).

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At various times I have pissed off many of my more politically naive comrades in the USian Left by proclaiming that the so-called “revolution of the 1960s” never happened. Yes, it was a potentially revolutionary time – so much so Soviet intelligence scrutinized the era's people and events in a meticulous search for revolutionary potential. But the Soviet analysts, who (let us not forget) were themselves professional revolutionaries, concluded that only the USian minority communities had the requisite combination of grievances, leadership, anger and determination. And even these qualities, the analysts found, were nullified by the communities' relative smallness and the exclusionary bigotry of the Caucasian majority. The rebellious whites were meanwhile dismissed as mostly bourgeois faddists who had merely seized upon revolutionary rhetoric as a means of rationalizing ultimately selfish demands. Hence no Soviet advisers were ever dispatched. The analysis, by the Committee for State Security, Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or KGB, came to light after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. By then, the accuracy and indeed the prescience of the analysts' work had been confirmed by how quickly anti-war dissent and a plethora of other seemingly “revolutionary” activities were terminated by the end of the military draft in 1972. Hence my “no revolution” argument is – at least in a limited sense – validated by world-class experts.

Not all whites, of course, were faddists. Many were in fact genuine revolutionaries. But their revolution – manifest in feminism, environmentalism, the back-to-the-land movement, the alternative press, the resurrection of paganism and most of all in music and art – was no more or less than what the late Walter Bowart called it in a conversation with me in 1967, “a revolution in consciousness” rather than in political or socioeconomic terms. This was the revolution I described in the forever lost work “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which argued on the basis of a 24-year collection of evidence that the epicenteral rebellion of the 1960s was the first wave of a spontaneous global uprising against patriarchy.  (As many of you know already, “Dancer” was destroyed by fire just as it seemed destined for mainstream publication.) But other relics of that era fortunately live on, albeit sometimes only in the contents of academic papers. One of these is a carefully researched, tautly reasoned, competently written masters-degree thesis, a brief history of the feminist back-to-the-land movement,  “Country Women: Back-to-the-Land Feminism and Radical Feminist Praxis in the Women's Liberation Movement,” that despite its somewhat awkward title is useful far beyond the realm of women's studies. It contains the most complete back-to-the-land-movement bibliography I have yet encountered. Not withstanding its singular focus, it provides what is probably our best-ever portrait of the attitudes and yearnings that brought the entire back-to-the-land movement, feminist or otherwise, into being.

In this latter context, perhaps my own back-to-the-land piece, a prose elegy to an ill-fated commune,  is again relevant.

Unfortunately our understanding of the era in question remains limited by the label – “the '60s” – which the Ruling Class insists we use to describe it. But it was not merely the phenomenon of a single decade. A more accurate chronology would mark its beginning with two events in 1955. One was Rosa Parks'  infinitely courageous protest against Southern segregation; the other was Allen Ginsberg's completion of the epic poem Howl.  What followed those two seemingly disparate events was an astounding symbiosis of political and aesthetic rebelliousness that not only gave birth to a half-dozen identifiable movements – civil rights, anti-war, feminist, environmentalist, back-to-the-land, alternative press – but evolved its own signature musical and artistic forms. It also legitimized quests in realms of hitherto-forbidden spirituality including Buddhism, First Nations wisdom and goddess-centered paganism. The associated metaphysical rebellion – particularly the evolution of modern Wicca  – was especially important in adding spiritual dimensions to feminism and environmentalism.

However, from the bourgeois (and therefore culturally dominant) perspective of Caucasian university students, the era's significant rebelliousness was mostly political and is assumed to have begun with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement,  which seemed to end triumphantly and thereby raised false hopes that would eventually be forever shattered as the capitalists fought back with a slow but inexorable vengeance, turning the United States into an electronic concentration camp  and relentlessly shackling the population in the same sort of economic and political slavery that has always characterized the lives of USian minorities. Now, 50 years later, Barbara Garson, who was one of the original FSM activists, poignantly wonders what the hell happened: “Who Really Won the Battle of Berkeley.” As if in reply, an analysis by Marlene Dixon, another activist of the era, provides the best explanation  I have yet read, never mind “The Rise and Demise of Women's Liberation: A Class Analysis”was written in 1977. Dixon argues – correctly I believe – the era's political and economic revolutionary potential was nullified by widespread refusal to acknowledge the reality of class warfare and by wholesale rejection of ideology and ideological discipline – all of which failings were legacies of the reflexive anti-intellectuality drilled into the nation by the sweeping anti-Leftist purges that followed World War II. While Dixon's work focuses on Women's Liberation, it is, like much feminist writing, a microcosmic portrait of the internal conflicts that characterized the entire spectrum of the era's political movements.

As to when the era ended, that too remains in dispute. But if I were to select an arbitrary date, I'd pick 4 November 1980, national election day, when fully 55 percent of the post-World-War-II baby-boom generation  voted their bourgeois, white-racist values and elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Thus the same generation that opposed the Vietnam War and claimed to be “revolutionary” later set the United States on the counter-revolutionary path to overt fascism along which it has relentlessly marched ever since. Hence, as it turns out, the aforementioned Soviet analysis was not nearly negative enough. Too many of the bourgeois whites who claimed to be revolutionaries were not just faddists; they were also fascists at heart – a perplexing condition indeed until you factor in the soaring popularity of Ayn Rand's work, particularly Atlas Shrugged,  which, when it was published in 1957, even conservative reviewers damned as a fictionalization of Hitler's Mein Kampf. But  Atlas Shrugged's  promoters claim it sold an average of 73,400 copies per year during the 1980s and now, they say, it sells at an annual rate nearly 4.1 times that. If these figures are accurate, what they tell us is there is no likelihood at all of diverting the already global USian Empire from its ever-more-obvious goal of becoming the de facto Fourth Reich. Exactly as history demonstrates, what is fascism but the mature form of capitalism?

Nor is there any rational likelihood of a movement arising to somehow ameliorate capitalism's ever-escalating brutality. Quoth one of its victims, the activist Cicely McMillan, speaking via a recent interview by Anna Lekas Miller entitled “On Being a Woman Inside and Outside of the Criminal Justice System”: “I don’t see a movement coming unless it is led by women, cross-class, cross-culture, cross-race. I think this has got to be a highly collaborative movement. I think women are the only ones who have been socialized with a certain experience to be able to do that. If we can work on behalf of women, on behalf of families, on behalf of communities collaboratively then we will see a movement of the 99 Percent, and the only way we will get at that is through the inter-workings of the people who are the community leaders and those are still women.” McMillan is obviously correct. As Vladimir Lenin noted in 1918,  “the experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much women take part in it.”

As to what really happened to the USian revolutionary potential, whether from 1955 through 1980 or now, it seems neither Garson nor Dixon – nor for that matter McMillan – are familiar with the works of Sun Tzu.  Hence they each overlook the simple fact even the most competent of the nation's would-be revolutionaries committed the always-fatal sin of underestimating the enemy. They failed to recognize the USian Imperial Ruling Class is the most all-powerful, most malevolently cunning ruling class in human history. The Occupy Movement, in which McMillan played a key role, was undone by the same failure. Thus were squandered what were undoubtedly our species' last opportunities to escape the slave-world horrors of capitalism matured to fascism – the aforementioned electronic concentration-camp. More to the point, the rebelliousness associated with the '60s was also probably our last chance to avoid self-inflicted extinction. Already the Ruling Class is moving to ensure a fully indoctrinated, relentlessly ecocidal fascist future: Atlas Shrugged is now required reading in many of the nation's colleges universities. Other Ayn Rand diatribes have been required reading in USian high schools and middle schools since the mid-1960s. Josef Goebbels – who sought to achieve universal German readership for Mein Kampf – is no doubt smirking in his grave. 

 

Meanwhile the terrifying totality of the secret-police operations by which we are already oppressed becomes ever more evident thanks to a few die-hard journalists and civil libertarians – daring men and women who will undoubtedly be among the first persons disappeared when the Ruling Class decides it's had enough dissent and protest and orders the Last Roundup. The following is from “Police Sign Gag Order Before Getting FBI Spy Equipment,” a MuckRock report:“Advanced cell phone tracking devices known as StingRays allow police nationwide to home in on suspects or to log individuals present at a given location. But before acquiring a StingRay, state and local police must sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI, documents released last week reveal. The document released by the Tacoma Police Department is heavily redacted — four of its six pages are completely blacked out — but two unredacted paragraphs confirm the FBI’s intimate involvement with StingRay deployment.”

Yes, dear readers, that's the same Tacoma in which I now reside.

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For those of us who recognize the course toward overt fascism the U.S. has been steering since 22 November 1963 – and for those who do not, a superb primer is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (James W. Douglass; Orbis Books: 2008) – it is no accident an unprecedented campaign for forcible civilian disarmament has emerged just as the 99 percent has begun awakening to the fact the American Dream is dead beyond resurrection. With the nation's socioeconomic conditions in a permanent nosedive  and even members of the Ruling Class now openly predicting revolution,  the forcible disarmament of the civilian population is merely another (logical) element on the Ruling Class list of measures to ensure we will never escape the electronic concentration camp in which we are already imprisoned. (Yes, it's true a hunting rifle is no defense against a tank or a drone. But a hunting rifle can surely be used to acquire weapons that are – which is why, for example, Hitler began disarming his opponents as soon as he took power.)

However, the USian Ruling Class – bolstered by its mastery of psychology and its manipulative subsets in marketing and behavior modification – is infinitely more sophisticated in its application of the techniques of oppression than ever the Nazis were. That's why, here in the land of the Second Amendment, forcible disarmament is invariably cloaked with a Big Lie, always in the form of deceptions, often by censorship as well. Thus the enormous relevance of a censorship-defying report  by Charles E. Cobb, “Guns and the Southern Freedom Struggle: What’s Missing When We Teach About Nonviolence.” Cobb, a former field secretary in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is the author of This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). As I said on the comment thread when CommonDreams, which is often painfully politically correct, dared circulate the aforementioned text:

Thank you for publishing Mr. Cobb's oh-so-relevant report. Especially thank you for  having the incredible (and incredibly rare) courage  to defy the venomous, maliciously dishonest and sometimes violent hatefulness of the forcible disarmament cult -- the hysterically anti-gun fanatics who, in clandestine alliance with the One Percent, are reducing us all to compulsory pacifism and mandatory victimhood. (Yes, there really are some of us on the Left – far more than the forcible-disarmament cultists dare admit – who support the Second Amendment in its broadest interpretations. And Mr. Cobb's report illustrates one of the reasons why.) 

     

Soon afterward, perhaps fearful of being outdone by one of its rivals, Truthout published a report that refutes one of the forcible-disarmament movement's most oft-repeated Big Lies.  Entitled “Fact-Checking Feinstein on the Assault Weapons Ban,” it notes how throughout the 10 years since the federal assault-weapons ban expired, its originator, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), continues to claim the ban reduced crime and saved lives. “But gun violence experts,” the report states, “say the exact opposite.” In other words, Feinstein – like most of her colleagues in the forcible disarmament movement – knowingly lies.

The proponents of anti-gunowner Initiative 594 in Washington state are using the same tactics. They bill their initiative as a “simple” measure to tighten the restrictions that presumably keep felons and dangerously mentally ill persons from acquiring firearms. But its oppressively complex, turgidly written text is laden with prohibitions intended to criminalize many legal and commonplace uses  of shotguns, rifles and handguns – including shared usage amongst family members. And it is being promoted by some of the slickest anti-gun propaganda  I have yet witnessed. Once again, just as the late Watergate felon John Ehrlichman acknowledged in his 1974 testimony, it seems Washington state is being used as a national proving ground  for techniques of oppression.

 

Nationally the ultimate firearms-related question would now seem to be whether the Left is at long last awakening to the need for an armed Working Class to discourage capitalist savagery. Locally the question is whether the I-594 proponents' Big Lie tactics will prevail in a state the electorate of which – albeit nominally progressive – is nevertheless noted for its skepticism toward any measures that expand the authority of government. The answers will undoubtedly be vital in shaping our national future.

LB/27 September-5 October 2014

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Health Update: Recovering But Still Zombified by Cipro

THE ANTIBIOTIC CIPROFLOXACIN, every bit as unpleasant as they say it is -- nearly as debilitating as chemotherapy -- has gooned me out to the extent that only now, three days after finishing the course of medication, am I even beginning to be able to again purposefully focus my (alleged) mind. I began work on a a blog post Sunday afternoon, then discovered it required much more research than I had anticipated and am thus aground until I can find the data I need. Combine that with the fact that though I was a card-catalogue whiz, I'll never be any good at Internet research -- I despise it for the same reason I despised the childhood game Simon Says (if you don't word your query exactly correctly, you get bupkes) -- and it will be late today or maybe even tomorrow  before I get this new essay written.  Meanwhile, my repeated apologies; I'll be back in print as soon as I am...well, back in print.

LB/29 September 2014

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No Blog: Sick with Infected Kidney but Recovering

Laid low by an infected kidney and its accompanying fever, which peaked at 103.2 degrees (Fahrenheit), I am now recovering thanks to the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin. (Yes, cipro  is as unpleasant as they say, nearly as debilitating as chemotherapy, and if you're unlucky, it can cripple you with ruptured tendons.) Hence I'm not blogging this week; not doing much of anything, in fact, save sleeping. My apologies; I'll be back as soon as I am able.

LB/21 September 2014

Ferguson Is Everywhere, and We Are All Michael Brown

THE WHITE RULING CLASS in Ferguson, Missouri is obviously terrified by the anger of the town's African-American majority population – hence the rush toward reforms  reported in useful detail by The New York Times two days ago.

The PollyAnna liberals, of course, will soon be hailing the reforms as a great triumph, the silver lining in the storm-dark clouds of Michael Brown's death and the still darker portends of the local police fulfilling the purpose for which they have been federalized and militarized – to serve as capitalism's army of occupation in the USian Empire's domestic colonies. But nothing will change save the gradual banishment of that conquered-territory image,  which must be suppressed because it (correctly) tells us our overlords think Iraq, Afghanistan and the imperial homeland are tactically and strategically interchangeable.  That's why, within weeks if not days, a team of obscenely salaried Josef Goebbels wanna-bees will be revising our recollections of what really happened so that eventually Ferguson fits the official Horatio Alger version  of U.S. history. And do not doubt they will succeed. The USian Ruling Class manages the most diabolically sophisticated tyranny in all human time, and its propagandists are the most effective truth-benders ever: note how they have already revised the story of Martin Luther King Jr. to remove the “r” from his call to revolution.

No doubt the propagandists will do with Ferguson as they have done with the life and death of Rev. King – they'll afix a smiley face to it. Picture a smiley face replacing the Roman execution order atop a medically accurate representation of Jesus' crucifixion agonies, or (like the Arbeit Macht Frei above the main gate at Auschwitz), hung at the entrance to Guantanamo: in either instance, complete with its slogan – “have a happy day” – and you'll understand the ultimate grotesquerie of this approach. Its historical context is especially telling: the smiley face emerged at the height of the Vietnam War, as if it were an admonition to capitalism's victims: “have a happy day” (or else).

Yes that is the precisely sort of predator nation in which we now live, as the dismantling of the New Deal,  the nullification of the Civil Rights Movement,  the defeat of feminism  and the terrifying triumphs of the lavishly funded theocratic counter-revolution  prove beyond all argument. “Reform” in this context is fraud – its sole purpose is deception, an illusion of “change” that does nothing more than temporarily cloak the savagery of capitalism, which is so malevolent it can no more be “reformed” than cancer.

But this time the marks know the score. The Ferguson residents who dismiss the reform effort as a scam  are undoubtedly correct. The black community, like all other USian minority communities, has learned from bitter experience that anything the Ruling Class gives, the Ruling Class can just as quickly take back – and no doubt will. Blacks know what too many of the rest of us still refuse to learn: the federalized, militarized police and their conversion into capitalism's army of occupation in the homeland colonies means Ferguson is Everywhere U.S.A. just as Michael Brown is all of us – every 99 Percenter regardless of race or gender or age.

Sometimes, rather than offer bogus reforms, the Ruling Class merely lies, a response at which the president is an obvious master. Hence Obama the Orator's 2008 campaign slogan, “change we can believe in” – possibly the most glaring Big Lie in U.S. political history – and his post-electoral transformation to Barack the Betrayer. Now in the latter persona he is again showing his true Republican selfhood by helping Pennsylvania privatize Medicaid, which – exactly as intended – will significantly worsen the plight of the state's poor, no doubt in some cases fatally, all the while enabling the One Percent to turn a handsome profit on the resultant misery.

Since Obama's absolute fealty to the Ayn Rand principles of capitalism is so obvious, I would also question the promises by the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Ferguson and an even more obvious atrocity in Louisiana, where a black man who'd been arrested, searched and shackled with his hands behind his back and locked into a police car then supposedly produced a concealed handgun and fatally shot himself.

The president has also called for a “review” of his own police federalization-and-militarization policies. (Yes, the process of turning the police into storm troopers was begun under Bush II, but like the nullification of the Bill of Rights, Obama has continued it with a vengeance.) Probably all the “review” means is the imposition of new measures to cover up the ongoing conversion of the police into a new Schutzstaffel.  We the People are becoming more rebellious, and the One Percenters, who worry the imperial war machine might not reliably kill U.S. citizens, are becoming terrified. Hence here in the United States the aristocracy turns to the police, exactly as the aristocrats did in Tsarist Russia, which gives “serve and protect” a new and decidedly more Ayn Randish meaning.

Hence too what I would anticipate from these investigations is nothing more than dramatic pronouncements in the characteristic Obama style: compelling rhetorical flourishes that when carefully analyzed say exactly nothing and change even less. Bear in mind too it's an election year: that means Obama's required to (seemingly) pander to the Democratic base. Never mind all the sensible Democrats (of which, long ago, I was one) have already figured out the party labels are meaningless – that we're governed by one Ruling Class party of two names, and that the only meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the former are fascists and brag about it while the latter are every bit as fascist but try to hide it behind a smokescreen of lies.

As many of you know I was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 was jailed on related charges in Knoxville, Tennessee. Reasoning from the eye-opening lessons I learned then and during the subsequent 18 months I remained in the South, I have selected a three more follow-up stories that seem to me to capture the essence of Ferguson's importance – and more importantly stress the fact Ferguson is (as I said above, and as cannot be said too many times) Everywhere U.S.A. One of these texts is a Popular Resistance.org piece that makes the point the killing of Michael Brown and other young black men is part of the nationwide class war,  “massive disinvestment in urban neighborhoods and unconscionable levels of joblessness and economic underdevelopment.” Another is an Associated Press dispatch Reader Supported News rescued from the Orwell hole: it says the Ferguson resistance is inspiring a nationwide resistance movement –  which is precisely what the Ruling Class doesn't want us to know. Lastly, also from the previous week – I now feel I should apologize for having been so caught up in the personal angst of viewing newsprint copies of my fire-destroyed photography – a Truthout exclusive examines the clash between “peacekeepers” and activists that is a vital part of the Ferguson backstory.  It is actually a new twist to an old conflict: in my day, the “peacekeepers” were called Uncle Toms.

Finally here are three more stories that fall into the “as-if-there-were-any-remaining-doubts” category.

The first reveals the extent to which the so-called Main Stream Media (MSM) has become the government's propaganda apparatus,  a perfectly logical evolution given the fact government at all USian levels is now a de facto subsidiary of Wall Street. In other words, government and business have merged, producing the ever-more-obvious reality of “capitalist governance” – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – what earlier generations knew as fascism.

Next, in the second report, we have another revelation of the forceable imposition of Christian theocracy on the military.  Undoubtedly (though the text doesn't say it), this is a desperate effort by the Ruling Class to use the Prosperity Gospel  in an attempt to bolster the political reliability of the troops. Will the theocrats succeed? Will biblical law replace remnants of our constitution? Margaret Atwood  surely thinks so – and having lived in the South, which is already a functional theocracy, I tend to agree.

Lastly, an anti-Michael Brown website provides a new yardstick by which to measure the magnitude of USian racism  – one of the many reasons I believe we are not far from the emergence of an USian Nazism that will target racial, sexual, political and spiritual minorities here in the bourgeoning Fourth Reich much as they were targeted in the Third Reich. But here it will no doubt be under the aegis of a smiley face, perhaps even with clowns to comfort the children before they are gassed: “have a happy day.”

LB/14 September 2014

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