Capitalism as Death: Bald Tires, Ebola, Ferguson, Malicious Disenfranchisement of Minority Voters

CAPITALISM'S INNATE MURDEROUSNESS is manifest everywhere we look.

We see it in the Ebola epidemic and in how the Obama Administration's decision to permanently define health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right has already spread Ebola to two nurses here in the United States. We witness that same wanton lethality in the escalating atrocities committed by federalized, militarized police against blacks and other minority people. The same deadly dynamic t underlies the methodical disenfranchisement of college students and minorities and lower-income people in general. The fewer anti-capitalist voters, the more of us the capitalists can exploit, work to death or otherwise murder with impunity.

And last Wednesday, the furtively hidden poverty that is a consequence of capitalism's morally imbecilic restructuring of the USian domestic economy literally came within a telephone-pole's thickness of killing me.

I had been shopping for a few mid-month essentials and was walking along the sidewalk to the bus stop on the northeast corner of Tacoma's Pacific Avenue South at South 72nd Street. It was 5:15 p.m. on 15 October, unseasonably very warm, terminal-climate-change muggy and drizzling in what is already by far the most uncomfortably hot autumn ever recorded in the Pacific Northwest. I was traveling via this seaport town's vindictively downsized  public transport because I am loathe to inconvenience my vehicle-owning friends with unnecessary requests for rides; my own carefully maintained V6 Ford Tempo died at 260,000 miles in mid-2009, the same year capitalism's deliberate contraction to a wage-slave economy cost me nearly 70 percent of my annual income, which in turn decreed I will never again in this lifetime have enough money to own an automobile.

Hence the bus, and hence my near-death encounter with a newish bright-yellow Jeep Wrangler that was meticulously polished and cared-for in every superficial way but was nevertheless running on – and skidding wildly toward me on – four utterly bald tires. I heard it before I saw it – the terrifying sound of a speeding vehicle out of control on wet pavement. My reactions are said to be unusually quick for a person of my 74 years, but by the time I had turned my head toward the threat, the jeep had already slammed into the telephone pole that saved my life. The collision, no more than 10 feet away, was as startling as an unexpected artillery round. I hardly felt its shrapnel, a matching yellow “KC Daylighter” headlight cover flung by the impact as it brushed its sinister happy-face smile across the backs of my legs. My exclamation was not thankful but outraged: “Jesus fucking Christ!” 

An elderly, half-toothless woman ran from the entrance to an adjacent store to make sure I was ok; I suspect she feared that, given my obvious age, the momentary terror evoked by the accident might trigger a heart attack. I reassured her. She returned to her shopping.

But the driver of the jeep would not so much as acknowledge my presence. A dark-haired, slightly plump but attractive 30-something white woman in a baggy gray sweat-suit, she had turned the corner from 72nd Street onto Pacific, obviously in a hurry to get somewhere and going way too fast for conditions, and the combination of her defiantly bald tires and the pavement's slick emulsion of oil and drizzle turned her intended 90-degree turn into a 180 degree skid and transformed her jeep into a potentially deadly projectile that, but for the pole, would have bounced up over the curb and onto the sidewalk and into my body and over it no doubt either crushing me to death under its oversized and (say again) bald tires or smashing me into a vegetable or, infinitely worse, a hopeless cripple fully aware of my irremediable wretchedness yet physically unable to end my life. (This is not hyperbole; I have seen, as a newspaper reporter, how human flesh is ground to raw hamburger when a vehicle crushes a pedestrian against pavement.) Thus there is no question in my mind that, had I not been saved by the telephone pole, my death would have been the best possible outcome of our encounter.

Meanwhile the jeep's driver continued to behave as if I were invisible. Nor was I surprised. Her demeanor was the typically hostile reaction of a Puget Sound-area motorist to a pedestrian. It was also a commonplace local expression of class warfare. In this oppressively auto-centric society, pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users – people who by definition seem to lack motor vehicles – are assumed to be absolute failures, worthless bums, parasites, the ultimate dregs of society (note again the material linked under “vindictively downsized”). Especially when mass transit is a subject of public debate, those of us who ride the buses are often the targets of insults shouted by passing drivers: if you're elderly, it's “hurry up and die, you fucking bum,” or if you're younger, it's the more commonplace “get a job – and get a car.” And there at the bus stop on Wednesday 15 October not only was I obviously a pedestrian and a bus-rider; I was also obviously old, obviously burdened with my purchases – and therefore, given the no-doubt bigoted, probably suburbanite perspective of Ms. Bald Tires, I was likely a homeless bum and undoubtedly a non-person, someone to whom a respectable citizen would never speak, someone to be ignored at all times and in every circumstance, one of those Others the Ayn Randers would happily exterminate.

Now, because Ms. Baldies and her smashed-nose jeep were blocking rush hour traffic, I figured the cops would be there within minutes, particularly since a passing motorist shouted out he had called 911 to get the woman help. But instead of the cops, an elderly male Good Samaritan in a pickup truck pulled up behind her, climbed out and helped her tie down the ruptured hood and otherwise get her damaged vehicle mobile again. Their interaction was perplexing. Sometimes they seemed to be strangers. At other times they seemed oddly comfortable with one another. But there is no doubt his assistance, which after maybe only 10 minutes enabled her to flee, saved her from a ticket. She'd have been charged with defective equipment at least, and probably reckless driving as well. Though it was not until she fled the scene of the accident I saw the condition of her tires and understood why and how she had lost control of the jeep that might have killed me. As for the cops, strangely enough they never showed. 

Riding a typically herky-jerky bus and halfway home, I suddenly understood what a telling lesson the jeep incident had taught me about USian capitalist reality. The woman or more likely her husband bought the jeep. Then one or both of them was thrown out of work by capitalism's downsizing and outsourcing of jobs to cheaper labor overseas. Rather than admit their circumstances – rather than acknowledge their victimhood to others and build a solidarity of resistance – they hid in shame, carefully washing and waxing their jeep and otherwise doing everything in their power to conceal the poverty proven by the bald tires, trusting the rugged treads on the sides of those flagrantly unsafe tires to hide the total absence of tread where the rubber meets the road. It is a genuine microcosm of capitalism in action: not just how capitalism victimizes all of us, but how most of the victims have been brainwashed to such fretfully conformist what-will-the-neighbors-think helplessness, they will never find within themselves the honesty – much less the courage – necessary to rise up against their masters.

A teachable moment indeed – that is, if it really was an accident...

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Something to remember: as a student of history, I am of course aware that any ideology or system of government, however emphatically humanitarian its stated ideals, can be corrupted into an apparatus that serves its Ruling Class an the expense of everyone else. But only capitalism – its morally imbecilic credo spelled out by Ayn Rand – brazenly elevates infinite greed to maximum virtue, thereby publicly rejecting every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. And only capitalist governance openly declares, as in the Powell Memo,  that its sole purpose is providing absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class while totally subjugating all the rest of us.

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I began this week's OAN by mentioning Ebola because that is mostly all I have written about for the past seven days.

Admittedly, the Ebola crisis had remained at the periphery of my consciousness until two detailed reports brought it into sharp focus as yet another capitalist atrocity. The first of these texts was “Assassination' of Public Health Systems Driving Ebola Crisis,” a cutting-edge exposé published by Common Dreams that documents how capitalist greed – chiefly the downsizing and privatization of public health facilities – has inflicted this out-of-control epidemic on all of us.  The second article, “Ebola In The US: Story Of A Broken Healthcare System,”is an anthology of damning revelations  collected by Dr. Margaret Flowers MD and published by the ever-more-informative website PopularResistance.org. Its most important disclosure is that Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas sent the now-dead Ebola victim home with minimal treatment – and thereby jeopardized us all – because “he was a man of color with no health insurance and no means to pay.”

Capitalism is thus threatening us with a disease for which there is no known cure – not because science cannot find a cure, but because there is no profit in developing cures for diseases that (hitherto) afflicted only woefully impoverished Third World peoples. Ebola is 70 percent fatal, and now as a direct consequence of capitalist greed, the deadly virus may be loose in the United States. Worse, an Obama-specific expression of that greed, the so-called Affordable Care Act – its title nearly as grotesque a Big Lie as “change we can believe in” – forever defines U.S. health care as a privilege of wealth. Meanwhile, capitalism has reduced fully half the nation  to lower-income status. This means the prohibitive fees required by ACA's no-treatment-without-advance-payment policy will force even some of the most desperately sick people to avoid care and spread disease. (Or if they seek care as paupers, they'll be rejected as unprofitable, precisely as the late Thomas Eric Duncan was by Dallas Presbyterian in its telling display of Christian charity.) And yes, that health-care-only-as-a-privilege-of-wealth definition truly is “forever” because the windfall profits from mandatory insurance are sufficient to fund the perpetual bribery of every politician in the nation, thereby ensuring the system imposed on us by the insurance barons and the prescription drug lords through Barack the Betrayer's treachery is eternally immunized against humanitarian reform.

While I did not comment on “Ebola in the US” – Popular Resistance threads do not encourage any sort of extended dialogue – I commented at length on “Assassination of Public Health Systems”:

Wake up, people. The Ebola epidemic is intensifying exactly what the neoliberal social model is intended to do: facilitate the genocidal extermination of all Third World peoples and all lower-income peoples everywhere else in the world. That's why the virus is being allowed to run amok – to eliminate all of us the One Percent regards as surplus workers.

Never forget: the entire planet is now ruled by capitalists – people for whom, by definition, infinite greed is maximum virtue – that is, the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. Our Ayn Rand-minded overlords are thus truly moral imbeciles by choice – literally the personification of incarnate evil. And their policies – such as the methodical destruction of public health facilities and social-services in general – are shaped accordingly.

In response to a poster who poignantly hoped my analysis was wrong, I wrote:

Unfortunately, no other analysis suffices to explain what is being done to us.

Obviously it is no coincidence that just as medical scientists started warning us of the inevitability of deadly disease spread worldwide by the global transport network, the One Percent – the capitalist Ruling Class – began methodically destroying the public health and social service facilities that would have enabled us to cope with any such outbreak.

In this context, once we recognize the true nature of capitalism – that it is literally the greatest evil ever unleashed on this planet – all the rest becomes obvious. Final-stage capitalism is behaving exactly as Marxian analysis predicted, maturing into fascism at home and world-conquest imperialism abroad.

Just as importantly, the capitalists themselves – in the ultimate expression of the Shock Doctrine – are seizing upon the looming environmental apocalypse to restructure global governance into an electronically policed, drone-enforced, zero-tolerance tyranny akin to that of Hitler's Third Reich but infinitely worsened by modern technology.

Doubt me? It's already happening. Look at the methodical killing of blacks in the United States, the drone-massacred wedding parties in Afghanistan and the U.S. military's gleeful machine gunning of civilians in Baghdad. The United States is already the de facto Fourth Reich.

The capitalists' ultimate motive is of course their own survival – maintaining their present-day, obscenely lavish lifestyle by stealing from all the rest of us, forcing us into a wretchedness that can scarcely be imagined. To accomplish this, they're restructuring global governance into a system that is half neo-feudalism (with the corporations in place of the medieval baronies), half Nazi-style terrorism to keep us – the 99 Percent – in total subjugation.

Part of that terrorism is the elimination of surplus workers. The Nazis did it in death camps, but those have become unfashionable. Hence – at least until now – the main Ruling Class methods have been less than obvious, chiefly low-intensity genocide by elimination or reduction of the social safety net. (In this context, the primary function of Obamacare is to perpetuate and enforce the U.S. modality of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. Those too poor to pay are abandoned to die. Again, it's already happening.)

But now the One Percent have the Ebola virus on their side, and their destruction of public health and social services are having exactly the effect they intended. The long-term result will be a world reshaped into the global equivalent of an antebellum plantation. The One Percent will be absolute masters and we – those of us who survive – will be their slaves.

Could anything alter this terrible prognosis? Yes: a global socialist revolution. But there is neither the uniform ideology nor the discipline – much less the solidarity of popular will – necessary for such an event. In which context remember that, since the advent of patriarchy about five thousand years ago, democracy has never been more than a very occasional, very brief, very faint spark in the timeline of our history. The norm has not just been tyranny – it is tyranny infinitely worsened by every technological advance. Thus the past shows us our real future – if indeed our species survives at all.

And in response to a skeptic I wrote:

Three points in rebuttal:

(1)-The malice you deny is overwhelmingly evident in the works of Ayn Rand, which show us the core doctrine of capitalism – infinite greed as ultimate virtue – and are in fact a fictionalization of the principles set out in Hitler's Mein Kampf. These principles include the glorification of the übermenschen (the One Percent), the condemnation of the üntermenschen (the 99 Percent), and the implicit demand we 99 Percenters be exterminated for our own good. The train wreck scene in Atlas Shrugged is in fact an endorsement of genocide.

(2)-Rand's murderous (and consciously, deliberately immoral) ideology is now openly declared the ideology both of capitalism and of the Republican Party. Though closeted, it is also the ideology of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by their collaboration with the Republicans in attacking the social safety net.

(3)-To label the One Percent “stupid” and to otherwise dismiss their conscious, deliberate, Ayn Randian espousal of moral imbecility is to make the strategically and tactically suicidal mistake of under-estimating the enemy. It also provides the official propagandists with a convenient “they didn't know any better” defense for the capitalists' deliberate embrace of policies and practices our species defines as evil. Were the capitalists motivated by “stupidity,” they would not own half the planet's wealth and possess the capability of tyrannizing all of us. Nor would the capitalists have developed the technologies of death and oppression that give them powers earlier generations deemed divine – powers that in the real world of today give our overlords true (and probably eternal) omnipotence.

Another skeptic cited past decades of humanitarian aid to Africa as an argument against neoliberal genocidal intent. I responded with a brief history lesson:

Government programs often have inertial momentum. Note for example how Great Society programs continued almost into the Reagan era despite the staunch anti-social-services positions of the Nixon, Ford and Carter regimes.

 

I do not know how to assign a date for the total conquest of the planet by Ayn Rand economists. But I do know that in 1955 (and well into the 1980s at least), the occidental governmental consensus toward Africa, though capitalist/imperialist, included a facade of humanitarian concessions to obstruct the professional revolutionaries of the Soviet Union and (then-genuinely-Communist) China.

Now, with the Soviet Union gone and China totally co-opted by Wall Street, there is no need for any such deception, which is why capitalism now openly displays its true savagery without fear of any consequences.

Further researching the Ebola crisis, I found several informative links on Global Research, the website of the Center for Research on Globalization, a Left-leaning international think tank headquartered in Montreal. These include:

“World Health Organization Says Ebola Cases Could Reach 10,000 Per Week,” here. 

 “U.S. is Responsible for the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Liberian Scientist,” here. 

“Instead of Appointing a Medical Expert, Obama Appoints a Lobbyist as Ebola Czar,” here. 

And a general primer on the Josef Goebbels/Big Lie factor, “US Propaganda: How Corporate America Manipulates the American Public Into Unwitting Support for Corporate Fascism,” here.

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Meanwhile on an Ebola-related Reader Supported News thread, my denunciation of the pathetically unfunny “comedian” Andy Borowitz   garnered not just a record-number of 59 thumbs-down but a couple of nasty accusations of cowardice as well. This and the general tone of the thread suggests RSN's present-day readership is notably more Democratic Party-orthodox than it was even a few months ago – which perhaps explains why RSN in these pre-election weeks seems ever more desperate for sustaining donations. By contrast, my remarks on Common Dreams, where in the past I was often jeered by doctrinaire Democrats and obvious agent-provocateurs, brought me a record 67 clicks of approval and no disapproving clicks at all. (Could it be the Democrats are running a clandestine site-destroying operation, trying to oust genuine Leftists by deluging us with disheartening Democratic disdain, thereby discouraging the donors who would otherwise keep the site alive? Hmm...wonder if the same tactic was being employed, obviously unsuccessfully, against Common Dreams? Obviously too, the Lev Bronstein rule applies: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”) In any case, here is what I wrote on RSN that provoked so much ire:

I find Mr. Borowitz's “humor” sophomoric at best, buffoonish at worst, grotesquely “American” at all times. But to belittle our fears of this looming Ebola epidemic – which government has been deliberately rendered powerless to combat – is like jeering at our legitimate terror of ending up crippled (as one of my sisters did), or dying in an iron lung (as a neighbor child did) during the Polio epidemics of my boyhood years. 

Then I took on a poster who implied the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital nurses had infected themselves:

The two nurses who are now facing death in Dallas did not “slime (themselves) in an infected person's body fluids.” This fact tells us two things:

Either (A), the supposedly 100-percent-safe protective apparatus touted by for-profit medicine is as defective as most other capitalist products; or (B), the government is lying to us (what else is new?) about the communicability of the virus.

Then there's possibility (C): that both (A) and (B) are true.

The one absolute truth – given we know with 100 percent certainty the government routinely lies to us – is that we don't know what the truth is.

Worse, given that our major media is no more than a privatized government propaganda apparatus, its mode of operations guarantees we will never find out...until it's too late.

(Exactly, by the way, as in Iraq, Afghanistan and “change we can believe in.”)

Disclosure: At age 74, I am hardly subject to panic at the prospect of yet another mode of death, though I will admit I am not enchanted by the possibility of drowning in my own blood, which is how Ebola kills most of its victims.

But I do fear for all those who have not yet lived their lives – especially since I do not believe the U.S. government (run as it is by, for and of the One Percent) – has the capability of containing the epidemic. 

In which context note Obama's “czar”: a Josef Goebbels-type propagandist – which tells us all we need to know about government intent. 

Finally I realized the entire dialogue was not so much a defense of Borowitz as of the underlying capitalist ideology that defines USian health care:

What astounds me about this thread is the majority of posters who are implicitly defending for-profit doctors, for-profit health care and access to care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. 

As I have observed throughout my adult life, scratch a U.S. citizen – even a self-proclaimed "progressive" – and you'll most often find a fascist. 

No wonder real health-care reform – that is, single-payer public-option health care – was dead on arrival, never really part of the Big Lie of “change we can believe in.”

And that – another example of how capitalism kills – is the point of the entire Ebola story.

But, precisely as this thread demonstrates, any sort of genuinely humanitarian socialist consciousness is forever beyond the (sorely limited) capabilities of the (infinitely selfish) USian mind. 

And when one of the very few supportive posters gently chided me for not mentioning Cuban socialism and how its doctors and nurses are the primary effort against Ebola in Africa, I responded accordingly:

Consider those Cuban doctors now praised.

Cuban socialism has in fact done more for health care in Latin America and the Third World than all the capitalist intrusions combined. A good source on this subject is here.

Meanwhile the best the USian Empire can do is send troops (Why? To euthanize the victims?) and appoint a Josef Goebbels-type propagandist (instead of an MD) as its Ebola "czar."

With a propagandist as “czar,” it's obvious the USian anti-Ebola campaign will be a microcosm of capitalism itself – that is, a Big Lie to cover a miasma of deception, exploitation, (unnecessary) death and (obscene) profiteering.

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What is carefully avoided by the Southern Poverty Law Center report entitled “How Cliven Bundy Defeated the US Government” is there is only one logical conclusion to be drawn from the government's apparent "inability" to prosecute the armed Right.  It is that our political overlords are so terrified of the revolutionary fervor now building on the Left – particularly the advent of various forms of eco-Marxism – they are making secret alliance with the armed Right to bolster the defenses of capitalism. Relentlessly logical though it is, it is also clearly too disturbing for the forcibly optimistic, perpetually happy-faced, “have a nice day” USian mentality.

Meanwhile, as I noted on the associated RSN comment thread, capitalism is in fact fulfilling all the predictions of Marxian analysis by (inevitably) maturing into fascism. That the USian Empire is thus becoming the de facto Fourth Reich is further indicated by the refusal of the so-called "Justice" Department to intervene in the burgeoning atrocities  committed by federally militarized police at Ferguson and elsewhere.

The national direction is obvious. As we the people awaken to the Big Lie of USian "democracy," the Ruling Class moves ever closer to unabashed fascism, perhaps even – in the escalating murder and imprisonment of minorities – to an USian variant of Nazism. Likely in anticipation of the eventual, no doubt inevitable USian de jure criminalization of already de facto criminalized minority status and/or lower income status, the Ukrainian Nazis are already rioting for official public recognition.  And how bitterly ironic the key Judas-goat in this entire process of subjugation and enslavement is himself an African-American.

LB/13-19 October 2014

-30-

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).

******

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.

******

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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