Senate Measure Would Nullify Bill of Rights, Give Military National Police Powers; Washington State Pioneers Vicious New Tactic in Welfare Bureaucrats' War on Poor

Avowedly non-violent demonstrators such as these -- men and women willing to brave heavy winter rain to picket at the doorway of the building housing U.S. Senator Patty Murray's office in Tacoma --  are frightening the capitalist Ruling Class into desperate measures. Not only do the plutocrats regard such activism as alarming; they also fear disclosures, as on the placard above, of the intimate connection between capitalism and Nazism -- how the latter is merely the logical outgrowth of the former. Thus the oppressive anti-Bill of Rights proposal under contemplation by the Senate (see below) is a predictable Ruling Class response to the nation's rising tide of Working Class anger. (This is another of the 72 pictures I made during the 16 November picketing: FujiFilm 800, 135mm F/2.5 Takumar, Pentax K-1000. Click image  to see it full size.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. 

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Emergency Action: Help Stop Congress from Nullifying Bill of Rights

U.S. SENATORS OF both parties are secretly ramrodding a bill through Congress that would give the military the functions of a national police force and allow for the indefinite detention of US citizens – apparently the newest Ruling Class response to the revolutionary impulses incipient in Occupy Wall Street and its local movements nationwide. 

According to an emergency call for action issued by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Senate will vote Monday or Tuesday on a bill redirecting U.S. military resources to acts of aggression against American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield - including people in the United States itself.

“Senators need to hear from you,” says the ACLU letter, “on whether you think your front yard is part of a 'battlefield' and if any president can send the military anywhere in the world to imprison civilians without charge or trial...The power is so broad that even US citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.” (Please note the first sentence of this paragraph includes an active link to enable readers to contact their senators via the ACLU website.)

The provisions for worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial are included in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday.

Exemplifying the Big Lie of U.S. democracy – how the Democrats and Republicans are actually united in a single party sworn to defend Ruling Class interests – the bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) and approved in a closed-door committee meeting.

Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), expressed deep concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during a recent Republican debate, says the ACLU document.

DISCLOSURE: Though a member of the ACLU for a substantial part of my adult life, I permanently canceled my membership after the organization wantonly betrayed not just the U.S. Constitution but all underlying principles of representative democracy by its judicial support for the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court verdict that gave the capitalist Ruling Class unlimited financial power to dictate U.S. political affairs. The court's decision is rightfully damned as the death of the American Experiment in governance. ACLU's amicus curiae brief endorsing the Citizens United lawsuit (and thus the court's decision) proves beyond argument the group is merely another Ruling Class front, an organizational Father Gapon that functions ultimately to vent the anger of the 99 Percent, thereby obstructing the emergence of proletarian consciousness. Nevertheless ACLU's emergency-action bulletins are of some use, particularly to circumvent the ever-more-aggressive censorship of Ruling Class media. Hence the link above: please use it. 

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Wrongful Cutoffs: Welfare Bureaucrats' Newest Tactic in War on Poor

I RECENTLY LEARNED via U.S. mail the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services has striped me of $130.70 per month in Medicare stipends. Though these are federal funds, they are overseen by state bureaucrats, malevolent drones who falsely charge I refused to comply with their 15 November deadline for eligibility recertification.

Nor am I alone. Thousands – more likely tens of thousands – of elderly, disabled and otherwise chronically impoverished people are receiving the same notices: anguish-generating paper announcing death-dealing cutbacks based on the same bogus charges of noncompliance.

Never mind I mailed the bureaucrats their seven pages of mandatory paperwork on 31 October, DSHS has now reduced my monthly Social Security retirement-pension from a barely survivable $1161 to an impossible $1030.30, the cuts effective the last day of this month.

The terror this inflicts is unimaginable to anyone who has not experienced it.

Nor have I any alternatives. Thanks entirely to the tyrannosauric nature of Bush/Obama capitalism, Social Security has been my sole source of money since early 2009, when I suffered an income loss of nearly 70 percent inflicted by the permanent demise of the journalism market.

And now the welfare bureaucrats have slashed my income another 11 percent – just enough to condemn me to death. I probably won't die immediately – though the associated anxiety has already triggered two episodes of atrial fibrillation – but eventually the malicious denial of life-sustaining medical stipends will prove as deadly as Elizabeth Bathory's knife, whether I am killed by the resultant obstruction of access to clinical care, or by the cutoff of affordable prescription drugs, or by both atrocities combined.

In any case – whether for me or untold thousands of other victims – it is the socioeconomic equivalent of being cast adrift on a terminally-shrinking iceberg.

The best guess is our massive ouster from life-sustaining programs is yet another scheme by the self-serving welfare bureaucrats to save millions of dollars and thus preserve their jobs – in this instance by temporarily dumping us from the assistance rolls, then restoring the stipends to those of us who manage to survive the (deliberately) inflicted fear and other associated stresses long enough to file formal appeals.

I can't say I'm surprised; the self-protective malice of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services – its policy of saving its jobs by savaging its victims – is already legendary. DSHS is at least as notorious for such measures as any other welfare bureaucracy in the United States.

In this context note again the obscenity of how all these bureaucrats feathered their own nests between 1970 and 1990. They increased administrative costs by 5,390 percent even as they slashed stipends and services for desperately impoverished women, children and men – especially men – by 66 percent.

And no, that 5,390 percent is not a typo. It's proven by The Statistical Abstract of the United States, the final word on the nation's socioeconomic and demographic data.

Here's another telling figure from Statistical Abstract. In 1970, 87.7 percent of the nation's federal and state welfare expenditures went to stipends and services for poor people, while the remainder, 12.3 percent, paid administrative expenses. By 1990, aid to the poor had been downsized to 24.5 percent of the total, with the remaining 75.5 percent going to the bureaucrats, most of it for radically expanded payrolls.

A longtime friend – and “friend” in my lexicon has a very specific meaning, not a casual synonym for an “acquaintance” but instead the mental and spiritual equivalent of a brother or sister – tells me I'm being too harsh on the bureaucrats, that they are after all part of the Working Class, the oppressed proletariat, the 99 Percent. He thus urges me to refocus my anger on the One Percent, the capitalist aristocracy the bureaucrats serve so faithfully.

He is usually correct in such matters, often enough he functions as my closest advisor in matters of conscience.

But the forgiving approach he urges – absolutely proper in every other socioeconomic context I can imagine – does not apply to the U.S. welfare bureaucracy.

Look again at the above statistics: the 20-year period from 1970 through 1990 was mostly one of relative abundance for government programs. Never during that period were the welfare bureaucrats operating in accordance with today's Ruling Class mandate to exterminate all non-profitable peoples by denying us life-sustaining food, shelter, medical care and prescription drugs.

Instead the bureaucrats imposed their transformation of the welfare system purely on their own initiative. Again note the 66 percent reduction in stipends, the 5,390 percent increase in administrative costs and above all else the decades of its occurrence.

For this reason I take the U.S. welfare bureaucracy is the ultimate example of how the entire Working Class has been conditioned to accept the core ethos of capitalism: infinite greed redefined as ultimate virtue (and thus the implicit rejection of every code of morality or ethics humanity ever uttered).

As I have written before – and it cannot be said too many times – it is this conditioning that challenges us whenever, in today's struggles, we encounter the me-first/fuck-you values of the Ruling Class amongst Working Class people who – at least in their subconscious minds – should know better.

But the welfare bureaucrats have no such excuse. Since the late 1970s, the primary function of a welfare bureaucrat is not to provide stipends and services but rather to find reasons for withholding them. And the bureaucrats embraced these roles as gatekeepers long before the Ruling Class began publicly claiming capitalism could not afford the social-safety net.

Years before the plutocracy decreed that those of us who are impoverished would be abandoned by the state – that we would either have to find some way to make ourselves exploitable for capitalist profit or we would be left to die – the welfare bureaucrats were willfully facilitating our extermination by neglect. And though the welfare bureaucrats can now claim they are “just following orders” in waging deadly war on elderly, disabled and chronically impoverished people, in the early years of their war against the poor – the '70s through 1990 – they can offer no such rationale.

What we have here is thus a classic teachable moment, a lesson in the new U.S. paradigm of genocide, genocide without gas chambers, genocide as perpetrated by an ironically named “welfare” system, genocide enclosed by the invisible barbed wire of gleefully sadistic bureaucratic tyranny, genocide inconceivable to those who have not experienced its reality firsthand – the welfare system as a vast invisible concentration camp in which the chief executives function as Adolf Eichmanns and the case workers serve as equivalents of Ilse Koch, their paychecks sustained by agonies heartlessly inflicted on the poor – we the 99 Percent – much as Ilse's lampshades were made of the skins of the Nazis' victims.

And no the Ilse Koch analogy is not too extreme: whether you are methodically murdered in a gas chamber or are deliberately slain by the malicious withholding of medical care, you are equally dead – equally a victim of genocide.

Which – again the teachable moment – brings into painfully sharp focus why the U.S. Working Class boils over with such hatred and contempt for government: the very emotions the Republicans cleverly muster into votes, most notably the landslide of 2010.

The more the economy is downsized, the more of us are flung into poverty. The more impoverished we become, the more we are forced into dependence on the smirking tyrants of the welfare bureaucracy. The more we are tyrannized  – and this too is how the welfare bureaucracy serves the One Percent – the more  we are duped into hating government itself. The more we despise government  – the more intense our rage and desperation  – the more likely  we are to vote   for the 21st Century American equivalent of the Nazi Party.

LB/23 November 2011.

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    Pictures and essays published in Outside Agitator's Notebook prior to 1 August 2011 remain available at lorenbliss.typepad.com.

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Occupy Tacoma: Portraits of a Non-Violent Revolution (3)

Ignoring monsoonal rain, a few Occupy Tacoma stalwarts picketed outside the building that houses Sen. Patty Murray's local office. Murray, a Democrat, was co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, known as the "Supercommittee" for the dictatorial budget powers given it by President Barack Obama and Congress. OT members feared Murray would repeat the typical Democrat tactic of surrendering to Republican demands and thereby facilitating additional economic savagery by the nation's capitalist rulers.  Just as this OT picket's placard indicates, Occupy Wall Street and its daughters nationwide are  rejecting generations of Big Lies and at last awakening to the fact capitalism is the enemy of democracy.

     

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Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Click on each image to view it full-size. (One-time use rights available.)

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Because Murray's Tacoma office is typically closed and almost never staffed -- scarcely more than a voice-mail facility -- Occupy Tacoma pickets were taken by surprise when Kristine' M. Reeves, South Sound Regional Director of Murray's staff, showed up. Top: Reeves, in black coat with white scarf, is confronted by OT activists Francesca Carreras-Velez, left, and Joy Bonney, holding a sign listing OT's demands.  Approved by the group's General Assembly, the demands include exempting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits and education funds from further cutbacks and enactment of the so-called Robin Hood tax on capitalist financial transactions. Second picture: Carreras-Velez continues the discussion with Reeves while Bonney fetches printed copies of the demands. Third: OT pickets surround the two as the dialogue continues, intense but peaceful.  Significantly --  especially to those who argue there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans (that both are parties of the Ruling Class) -- Murray's office is in the same building with the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, a powerful lobbying organization for local capitalists. Bottom:  Reeves contemplates what she has heard. Note the obvious psychological distance between Reeves and the OT activists. (A complete list of the demands, seven in all, is available on the group's website, occupytacoma.org.) Below: views of the pickets during the five rainswept hours before Reeves' arrival.  

Visual Thinking: These Pictures Pretty Much Speak for Themselves

There's really not much need be added to the above text, and in any case the (user-hostile) Blogger system is already throwing tantrums over the additional pictures -- the reason it's taken me three hours of increasing  rage and frustration to complete this post -- as six images seems to be about the limit of  the server, which I now recognize as implicitly anti-photography and anti-photograper. Such is survival after banishment from TypePad. Tech data: FujiFilm 800, 28mm F/2.8 SMCP and 135mm f/2.5  Takumar, Pentax K-1000. (I left the MXs at home because Murray is a federal official, hence the risk of arrest and camera confiscation by the Homeland Security gesta...er, police.) These pictures were made on 16 November.

LB/24 November 2011

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    Pictures and essays published in Outside Agitator's Notebook prior to 1 August 2011 remain available at lorenbliss.typepad.com.
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Occupy Tacoma: Portraits of a Non-Violent Revolution (2)

Occupy Tacoma visited the city's McKinley Hill neighborhood with an informational march on 4 November. All demonstrations of this sort help bypass the near-total news embargo imposed by Ruling Class Media, but this event was especially notable for its thought-provoking signs. Meanwhile the prevalence of anti-Wall-Mart placards underscored both a boiling local controversy (for details see below) and the great extent to which the Occupation is supported by organized labor.

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Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Click on each image to view it full-size. (One-time use rights available.)

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"I Can't Afford to Bribe a Congressman" describes the worsening  plight of 99 percent of the U.S. population. The invitation to the Tea Party reflects the Occupation Movement's big-tent nature, focusing on expression of grievances rather than preachments of ideology. "Turn Off The News" calls on people to wean themselves from the Ruling Class propaganda machine, which either ignores the Occupation or besmirches it with negative sensationalism. "Your Bank Is On Welfare" echoes the Occupation's signature chant: "Banks Got Bailed Out/We Got Sold Out." But the slogan in the picture next to the bottom, "Occupy Your Mind," is surely the most thought-provoking text of all. Because the demonstration remained peacefully uneventful even when it picketed a local branch of U.S.Bank, which is part of the national banking monopoly, the smiling faces in the last frame -- at a brief pause near the completion of the 1.7 mile march -- seemed to my out-of-retirement photo-editor's eye to be the perfect ending for this chapter of the Occupy Tacoma story.

     

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Visual Thinking: of McKinley Hill, Wal-Mart, Tacoma Politics, the Occupy Movement and Tech Data 

MCKINLEY HILL has a curious history. When I lived there during my first stay in Tacoma, 1978 through 1982, it was a notably safe Working-Class neighborhood, kept crime-free by the resident motorcycle club in much the same way Manhattan's Little Italy was so effectively policed by the Wise Guys from Cosa Nostra.

But sometime during the middle or late '80s – I don't know the details because I was back home in New York City – a new municipal regime in Tacoma ran the bikers out of town. In the aftermath, McKinley Hill fell prey to the street gangs that increasingly provide the sole familial structure available to capitalism's throw-away children. The gangs finance themselves by dealing drugs – all-too-often the only living-wage work available to youths who because of color or caste are from birth entrapped in the capitalists' slave-pens.

Meanwhile the McKinley Hill neighborhood itself – portrayed in Ruling Class Media as the bloody battleground of Asian, African-American, Hispanic and First Nations turf-warriors – justifiably acquired a singularly bad reputation. Some said it was the most dangerous neighborhood on the entire West Coast.

Others, people who have moved there more recently and participated in McKinley Hill's courageous neighborhood reclamation campaigns, assert quite forcefully the era of gang-warfare there has been ended, that the district is again quite safe – as surely it seemed to be during the 4 November event pictured above. Not only were there no adverse incidents; many residents applauded the demonstrators. Some even joined the march.

More than a few of the newcomers to the demonstration were Tacomans furious about the latest Wal-Mart outrage: a breathtakingly successful stealth campaign in which Elks Club officers were used as pawns – whether wittingly or not remains undetermined – to seemingly befuddle city officials into approving the mega-store's sneaky invasion of an old and mostly-residential neighborhood miles away from Mc Kinley Hill.

The people of the afflicted district, who had mistakenly believed Tacoma city government still represented them and not the tyrannical One Percent, feel utterly betrayed and are understandably furious. They legitimately fear that Wal-Mart, with its notoriously anti-social customer base and its street-clogging increase in vehicular traffic, will reduce the neighborhood to yet another example of the slummy, trash-littered environments one so often encounters near the perimeters of downscale shopping centers.

Such is capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – its consequences the predictable product of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, a hearty fuck-you to all the rest of us. Hence the red-and-white placards, “Tacomans United Against Wal-Mart” that -- proudly emblazoned with the “bug” proclaiming a union-made print job – debuted at the McKinley Hill demonstration. Hence too another of the (nearly countless) reasons there's an Occupy Tacoma...with a big sister named Occupy Wall Street.

As always in these post-Leica times, my working cameras are Pentaxes, a pair of reconditioned MXs, the model I used during the late 1970s and with which I am (again) falling in love. The medium is FujiFilm 800. The first and last images were made with the 135mm f/2.5 Takumar, the others with the 100mm f/2.8 SMCP.

LB/15 November 2011

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(Pictures and text published in Outside Agitator's Notebook prior to 1 August 2011 are available via TypePad at lorenbliss.typepad.com.)

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On the Occupation Movement and Why as a Non-Smoker I Should Never Presume I Can Write; Two Promised Pieces from the Occupy Tacoma Website; Continuity of Blog; Additional Notes on 'Portraits of a Non-Violent Revolution'

Of Occupy Tacoma: maybe – especially colorized – another candidate for iconography. Click on image to view it full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

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FRANCES FOX PIVEN, professor of political science and sociology at the City University of New York, has written a brief, accurate but unfortunately incomplete history of the capitalists' ongoing war against the U.S. poor. Despite its omissions, for examples of which see below, Ms. Piven's well-researched essay should be read by anyone who seeks to understand the socioeconomic oppression that fuels Occupy Wall Street and its local expressions.

Entitled “The War Against the Poor and Occupy Wall Street,” it first appeared on TomDispatch.com and was further disseminated by Common Dreams, where I responded with a long and carefully thought-out critique.

Alas my critique of Ms. Piven's work was potentially discredited by the fact I misspelled her name in second and subsequent references, the sort of infinitely mortifying dyslexic error that has ruinously plagued me since medical problems forced me to quit smoking tobacco 16 years ago – four months after I wrote the investigative report on welfare statistics referenced below – a project I would never dare attempt as a non-smoker. Nicotine, a potent neurotransmitter, temporarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction. Without nicotine, my writing skill is effectively nullified – hence my always deep and impassioned preference for photography has become even more compelling since I gave up cigarettes. Indeed one of the most bitter lessons of my post-smoking years is that I cannot trust my (formerly reliable) writing ability unless I am able to have my work scanned by a competent editor. But no such editor was available today, and by the time I discovered how dyslexia had (again) ambushed me and (again) made me look like an idiot, it was too late to correct the error because Common Dreams had closed my post to revisions. My deepest apology to Ms. Piven.

The text below is a corrected and slightly expanded version of what originally appeared.

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Ms. Piven's data is superb as far as it goes, but she fails to acknowledge how the nation's welfare bureaucrats thrive at the expense of the poor, for example by increasing administrative outlays 5,390 percent (not a typo) even as they slashed stipends and services by 66 percent.

The 5,390 percent increase in administrative expenses and the attendant 66 percent downsizing of stipends and services are revealed by The Statistical Abstract of the United States, the ultimate authority for data about federal and state governmental operations. The changes occurred over 20 years, from 1970 to 1990, the latter the last year for which complete state-level statistics were available when I, then a journalist of some three decades experience, exposed this atrocity via a 1995 Internet story.

In 1970, 87.7 percent of the nation's federal and state welfare expenditures went to stipends and services for the poor, while the remainder, 12.3 percent, paid administrative expenses. By 1990, aid to the poor had been downsized to 24.5 percent of the total, with the remaining 75.5 percent going to the bureaucrats, most of it for radically expanded payrolls.

These findings – all from Statistical Abstract, show how the appointed guardians of the poor became predatory parasites instead.

Not only that: the bureaucrats willingly collaborated with Ruling Class politicians, academics and media celebrities to create the viciously racist Big Lie of the “welfare queen” archetype – some African-American single mother falsely but universally scapegoated as the personification of runaway welfare costs.

But the statistics reveal the real “welfare queens” are the bureaucrats themselves – present tense because the same shenanigans that facilitated their bounteous 5,390 percent increase in administrative expenses are routinely employed today.

For example, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services formerly conducted recipient-eligibility reviews once each year. Now it imposes them quarterly, using the (wholly unnecessary) 300 percent increase in paperwork to justify retaining a maximum number of employees.

Meanwhile it ousts thousands of people from its assistance rolls, inflicting starvation and death by neglect and abandonment.

Thus capitalism rids itself of those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed or otherwise no longer exploitable for profit.

Whether imposed on recipients of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or welfare per se, social-service cutbacks are literally the U.S. version of genocide, a policy all the more cunning for its lack of barbed wire and death camps.

But not only do these policies provide us with a singularly teachable moment; the associated revelations are among the most terrible truths about the United States.

What imprisons us in Wall Street's slave-pens is the notion infinite greed is maximum virtue. This is the core principle of capitalism. Popularized by Ayn Rand, it is drummed into us until we accept it without question – never mind it refutes every standard of ethics or morality our species has ever uttered.

As a result, capitalism's savage ethos is now as prevalent in the workplace as in the boardroom. From the country-club to the corner tavern, from the executive suite to the shop floor, our national ideology is a relentless me-first/fuck-you selfishness.

Hence the prevalence of the class-traitors formerly called “Reagan Democrats,” the ultimate perpetrators of the ruinous decline in union membership that dis-empowered the U.S. Working Class. Hence too the number of welfare bureaucrats – lowliest clerks included – who happily function as what has been aptly labeled “little Eichmanns.”

As Ms. Piven implies, many New Yorkers – probably a majority – are appalled by the hatefulness and sadism of the war against the poor. But as James Baldwin said 53 years ago, the City truly is "Another Country." Out in here in America, where gentrification has forced me into permanent exile from my beloved Manhattan, the masses cheer, applaud – and vote the fuhrers who command the "little Eichmanns" back into office.

Though such voters are part of the 99 percent, they are conditioned to imagine themselves part of the One Percent. And until they develop a proletarian identity – until they stop identifying with the oppressor – they will never evolve the solidarity essential to what Ms. Piven calls “moral economy.”

Indeed it is the 99 percent's belief in infinite greed as ultimate virtue that facilitates capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

A variant of the same problem – assumptions and reactions tantamount to identification with the oppressor – threatens the U.S. Occupation Movement itself, especially in those locales where it escapes the corrective influence fostered by New York City's uniquely diverse but essentially European intellectual culture.

Contrary to Ms. Piven's optimism, there is grave danger that – once beyond the City and its self-correcting acumen – the Occupation will repeat the errors which nullified the revolutionary potential of the 1960s: that it will remain stubbornly bourgeois, cliquishly shunning the more obvious victims of capitalism.

Though I have been a working journalist most of my adult life, I am also now at age 71 amongst the hopelessly impoverished, and I write (when I am impassioned enough to dare risk dyslexic mortifications like the one above) and photograph (when I can afford the film and processing) from the perspective of an avowedly angry proletarian.

Thus I'm painfully aware how often the self-proclaimed, implicitly self-congratulatory “progressives” – however vehemently they may seem to defend the demographic abstractions they so tellingly label “the poor” and “the homeless” – nevertheless reject us as persons. Their habitual use of the prefatory article – the unemployed, the evicted – denotes a truly unbridgeable chasm, as if the revolution were somehow their own private social club.

Not surprisingly, such “progressives” make no secret of the extent to which they are repelled by our chronic inability to purchase the knowledge and technology required for participation in the Internet and other electronic media. Thus, even on Occupied ground, our poverty remains an inescapable repugnance, one of the unforgivable sins against the capitalist mentality in which we've all been so thoroughly conditioned.

But probably our worst offense – no doubt the ultimate cause of our pariahdom – is the extent to which the emotions that boil beneath our grievances violate the white bourgeoisie's zero-tolerance taboo against anger. Never mind this is the very taboo – so carefully induced by the Ruling Class as its ultimate psychological fail-safe – that now functions as the chief instrument of our oppression, the padlock to the shackles that guarantee our continued enslavement.

Nor – though I applaud the accuracy (as far as it goes) of Ms. Piven's description of the struggle – can I accept her implicit endorsement of reform. The history of the past 70 years – not just the destruction of the New Deal but the methodical murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Karen Silkwood and indeed every other effective reformer – proves reform is impossible.

The body-count alone leaves no doubt capitalism is in fact the greatest evil the human species has ever unleashed. It is terminal cancer not just of our body politic but of our entire planet. And until it is eliminated accordingly, every one of us is at deadly risk.

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Promised Piece Nr. 1: Occupy Wall Street's Neva Bridge Moment

(Originally published on the Occupy Tacoma website.)

Once we know the story, a profoundly heartening moment Sunday in Manhattan and an equally astounding event 94 years ago in Russia are eerily similar:

On 8 March 1917 – 23 February by the old Tsarist calendar and in either case International Women's Day –  some 5,000 women of the Lesnoy Textile Works boiled into the streets of Petrograd in a strike against the firing of their Bolshevik sisters who had been helping them organize a union. 

As the women marched through the war-starved industrial neighborhoods and toward the center of the city and the Tsar's Winter Palace, they chanted "Klyeb! Myr!" (Bread! Peace!).

Soon they were joined by thousands more, a huge outpouring of men who had been locked out of the nearby Tupulov Machine Works, then a growing mass of soldiers' wives,  shopkeepers, typists, soldiers home on leave from World War I. 

By now numbering at least 50,000, the demonstrators reached the bridges across the Neva River but were met there by police, formations of Cossacks with drawn sabers and lines of infantry with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets.

The demonstrators paused, unsure what to do next. It was bitterly cold; the Neva was solid ice. Toes and fingers ached. The Cossacks' horses were restless, chomping their bits and stomping their iron-shod hooves on the cobblestones, breath steaming in the frozen air.  

At two of the bridges, the marchers turned away. Then, at a third bridge, something happened.  A young woman stepped forward and pled with the troops to let the demonstrators pass; a man – perhaps a soldier on leave – argued that to fire on women and girls was to fire on Mother Russia herself. Stories differ wildly as to what was said and who said it; nobody was taking notes. But the Cossacks refused orders to charge, the soldiers refused orders to fire. The police-line drew back. The marchers strode across the bridge, onto the Nevskiy Prospekt and into the center of Petrograd.  

The rest is history.

This video, made in New York City on Sunday, recorded what is perhaps our own Neva Bridge moment:            

http://www.youtube.com/user/BklynJHandy

Verily, it is as Peter Gabriel foretold:

You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flame begins to catch
The wind will blow it higher...

(18 October 2011)

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Promised Piece Nr. 2: Why I Got Involved with the Occupation

(Written at the request of Stacy Emerson, one of the Occupy Tacoma organizers. It was among first texts to appear on the OT website.)

I got involved because the war against Medicare and Medicaid murders us by deliberate abandonment and kills us by neglect and is therefore a form of genocide.

I got involved because the war against affordable health care is a war against our human right to the means of survival.

I got involved because the war against public transit is a war against our human right to travel to work and to the store and to visit our friends and families.

I got involved because the war against public education and public libraries is a war against our human right to knowledge.

I got involved because the war against firefighters and police and military veterans is a war against our human right to safety.

I got involved because the war against Social Security is an assault by already-rich thieves trying to steal the nest egg I earned by my own labor.

I got involved because the war against unions is war against everything that was good about the United States.

I got involved because the great affliction of our world is war by the greedy One Percent against everyone else.

I got involved because I am 71 years old and sick of being cast away despite the fact I have many useful skills honed in a lifetime of work.

Mostly I got involved because I am damn tired of how our We-the-People Constitution – the Constitution I swore as a young soldier to protect – is routinely betrayed by governance that protects the One Percent and savages the rest of us as if we were but slaves.

(5 October 2011)

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Continuity: Where to Find My Pre-Blogspot Pictures and Essays

When I began this blog in 2009, it was on the server TypePad, with free space provided under what its then-owners called “the Journalist Bail-Out Program,” a gift to the U.S. journalists – 85 percent of the total media workforce – who had been permanently stripped of our jobs. The idea was that via on-line publication, at least some of us might by electronic magic somehow preserve our careers.

Though I had no such delusions – despite ongoing freelance assignments, my career was destroyed beyond any hope of repair by the bottomless hatred and fear with which U.S. employers react to mental illness – in my case the clinical depression that followed obliteration of my life's work by a mysterious fire in 1983.

Nevertheless and for obvious reasons I leapt at TypePad's opportunity, particularly to (again) display the few photographs that had been in my working portfolio and thus survived the fire.

But last spring TypePad was absorbed by a global advertising agency, and last summer I was summarily ousted – locked out from the server without notice or explanation, this in obvious retaliation for my ever-more-vehemently anti-capitalist politics.

Even so, my work on TypePad gathered sufficient readership to remain available. You can find it at lorenbliss.typepad.com.

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Visual Thinking: More Notes on 'Portrait of a Nonviolent Revolution'

Obviously the one photograph above is part of a body of new work about Occupy Tacoma. The remainder of the pictures are ready for posting, but I am withholding them for a few more days so the above writing won't distract from the imagery and vice-versa.

The photo published here today is an outtake from a mini-essay about another of Occupy Tacoma's informational demonstrations in lower-income neighborhoods. I set it apart from the essay because – though I like the deliberately out-of-focus face against the sea of sharply-focused protest placards I caught with the 135mm f/2.5 Takumar on my Pentax MX – the image seemed to add nothing to the story told by the other frames I selected.

Perhaps though, as noted in the caption, by reducing it to black-and-white and adding colorization I can make of it an icon. But what do I know? (According to some I'm just an uppity geezer with an ancient camera, man and machine equally obsolete.)  As usual, the medium is FujiFilm 800.

LB/13 November 2011

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Occupy Tacoma: Portraits of a Non-Violent Revolution (1)

Two Tacoma women in the Pacific Northwest autumnal rain, their home-made placard proclaiming the strength  and solidarity of a movement that now spans the globe.

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Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Click on each image to view it full-size. 

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Three views of Occupation Park -- officially Pugnetti Park -- the downtown Tacoma tract that has been home to Occupy Tacoma since 15 October. Center: the park fronts on Pacific Avenue, Tacoma's equivalent of Main Street. Informational picketing there continues from dawn to dusk, with motorists and passers-by overwhelmingly supportive.  Bottom: a General Assembly meeting, the mode of participatory democracy pioneered by Occupy Wall Street.         

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Demonstrators gathered in a drizzle and marched in rain that became a deluge, weather typical of autumn on the Pacific Northwest coast. This was the first of Occupy Tacoma's neighborhood-information marches, part of the group's ongoing effort to bypass a near-total news embargo imposed by Ruling Class media. The demonstration, on 21 October, focused on the dominantly African-American Hilltop neighborhood, which runs the length of a high ridge overlooking Commencement Bay, Tacoma's busy seaport. 

     

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Visual Thinking: Gratitude, Reflections and Tech Data

Thanks entirely to a woman whose screen-name is the new Katney and who has become my teacher on the Blogger discussion boards, I am finally able to post the remainder of the best images from the three takes (72 exposures) I shot of the Occupy Tacoma story between 19 and 22 October. (This same work is circulated internationally via Reader Supported News, for which see “Select Your Occupation” and scroll down to “Tacoma, Washington.”) 

Beyond that, I find I have surprisingly little to say.  Now that I am actually working again (never mind the fact the capitalist economy dictates I may never be paid for my efforts) – now that I am again running film through cameras, am again embracing the infinite sensuality of light, am (albeit in my shambling and geezerly way), once more dancing the photographer's dance – I suppose my verbal acumen is again reduced to what I prefer it to be, something shared mostly with a lover or with intimate friends, above all else in an environment where I need not fear the mortification of dyslexic error.

Though perhaps I am simply so filled with gratitude for this opportunity – this rebirth of revolutionary spirit I thought forever dead, this chance to do once more the sort of photojournalism I never in my wildest dreams imagined I would do again – that I am truly speechless. Hence, given my history – given the great loss I suffered in the 1983 fire (nearly all my photographs and writing and, worse, the almost-finished book of pictures and text "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer"), given the ruinous depression that followed, and now given this astounding gift yes late in life but nevertheless so compelling – I cannot but also pay tribute to the Muse, for which purpose there is no poet on this Earth better than Robert Graves:

Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,

Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.

The camera – I only carried one – was a Pentax MX, with SMCP f/2.8 lenses of 28mm and 100mm. The night photo, the 28mm lens wide open, was hand-held at 1/4 second; the result surprised and delighted me because I previously believed no SLR could be successfully hand-held at such slow shutter speeds. The medium was FujiFilm 800, which I have come to prefer because it records so faithfully the hauntingly blue-shifted Pacific Northwest light.

It seems I am again a smith, sculpting choreographies in alchemical silver.

Obviously this is a work in progress.

LB/8 November 2011

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Synergy: of Occupy Tacoma, a Group Health Seminar, Fr. William J. Bischel and an Episode of Personal Revolution

Fr. William J. Bischel SJ, center, an often-imprisoned practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience, has been with Occupy Tacoma's quest for socioeconomic justice since its beginning. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. (Click on image to see it full size.)

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THANKS TO THE curious synergy of Occupy Tacoma, a Group Health workshop entitled “Living Well with Chronic Conditions” and Fr. William J. Bichsel SJ, on 21 October 2011 I experienced a genuinely life-changing epiphany. But to explain what obtained in the wake of that rainy Friday and how it came about, it's necessary I back into the story, working from society to self and thus from the political to the personal.

Long and painfully aware of the overwhelming negativity with which capitalism teaches us to despise ourselves whenever we become nonprofitable, I assumed my knowledge was the best possible defense against this mind-numbing, soul-killing brand of psychological warfare. But it turned out my awareness was far less effective than I thought it was.

As I discovered, it seems I am as vulnerable as any other low-income person – senior, disabled or chronically unemployed – to the self-destructive messages with which capitalism deluges us when our Ruling Class masters deem us no longer exploitable for profit.

Though the form of these messages varies in accordance with the targets at whom they are aimed, the content is invariably the same: the zero-tolerance mandate to somehow elevate ourselves by our proverbial bootstraps (no matter our economic feet were amputated long ago), or subtle hints we must dutifully end our own lives – in either case sparing ourselves the odium of becoming parasites while relieving society of the burden of our alleged laziness.

That the term “suicide” goes unspoken in such declamations merely proves how effectively the message is reinforced by advertising, the core medium of the most viciously social-Darwinist society in the industrial world. Advertising is the goad that forces us to run the rat maze, its motivational impetus traceable to our first encounters with playground bullies, schoolhouse tyrants and boringly pedantic teachers in classes designed not to stimulate but to subjugate.

Within the resultant (definitively capitalist) context of lockstep conformity, we are all challenged to prove our usefulness – to prove it every minute of every day – but for those of us who have lived long enough to become elderly, there are additional and often increasingly difficult requirements. We must constantly prove our physical and mental abilities, and – more importantly – we must demonstrate our relevance: all this as capitalism tries to drown us in a quagmire of rejection that is equal parts terror and contempt.

The source of the contempt is obvious: it is capitalism's malicious dismissal of anyone who is neither rich nor famous. The terror's origin is more complex: our society's uniquely bottomless fear of death – the unspeakable horror of eternal damnation taught us from birth by infinitely sadistic Christianity – this compounded with capitalism's induced fear of personal failure and its carefully acculturated fear of the Other: specifically anyone whose being or ideology might suggest alternatives to capitalism and capitalist tyranny.

While the Ruling Class has always been hostile to seniors (as it is to all groups it rejects as unprofitable), in recent years it has expanded its definition of Other to include native-born U.S. citizens – any of us much past our 50th year. This is because the United States in which we spent our formative years is so alien to the United States today, our age marks us as potentially dangerous agitators – men and women who remember when liberty, though always definitively White and therefore sorely limited, was nevertheless infinitely more than Bush-Obama political theater and Big Lie slogans.

Surely it is no coincidence – now we can truthfully say of today's United States “this is not the country I was born in” – the label “elderly” is redefined, no longer just synonymous with “useless” but now a condition definitively bad, even shameful, with an accompanying burden of self-doubt (and often self-hatred) that assures our submissive silence as we are segregated into ghettos called “senior centers” and “senior housing.”

And though I knew all this – though it was the core theme of the commissioned book upon which I labored from 2006 through 2008 (the manuscript ironically entitled “Proof of Relevance” but now doomed to eternal obscurity by a bratty estate war between the subject's adopted children) – my knowledge was not sufficient to protect me from absorbing capitalism's core message I had turned not just useless but hopelessly enfeebled the moment I lived past retirement age.

Admittedly I am physically disabled, officially so, crippled by steady deterioration of spinal injuries inflicted on me 33 years ago by one of Washington state's notoriously coddled habitual drunken drivers, crippled too by a no-cartilage knee inflamed by arthritis, with both disabilities radically worsened by the seemingly inescapable obesity that has burdened me since I quit smoking 16 years ago, and those maladies intensified by high blood pressure and heart problems.

But until I began seeing myself as genuinely “old” and (therefore) truly “useless,” my core self-concept remained one of strength not weakness: my internal dialogues were about how I might prevail, not about how I might surrender.

Enter Group Health – the Puget Sound health care cooperative of which I am a voting member – and its “Living Well with Chronic Conditions” workshop, the underlying theme of which duplicates (and therefore resurrects) that of my former internal dialogues, the how-might-I-prevail paradigm that was mine before capitalism taught me to think of myself as “old and useless.”

Also enter, by whatever astounding synchronicity so often seems to govern my life, first Occupy Wall Street and then Occupy Tacoma: each another variant on the how-might-I-prevail paradigm, albeit this time in definitive collectivity: We the People, and How Shall We Prevail and above all else Solidarity.

Partly because I long ago recognized activism as the best analgesic (a point I have made repeatedly in the three Group Health workshop meetings I have had time to attend), though mostly because I see in OWS and OT the revolutionary democracy to which I (and my father before me) were so fervently committed, I gave myself over to OT as best I could, predictably via its Media Work Group.

Thus began my re-education: specifically the process of learning the difference between genuine physical limitations and the imaginary limitations imposed by capitalism.

At first I believed I could not participate in demonstrations. Then, because I somehow overcame my fear of collapsing in exhaustion midway through a three-mile march (or worse the public mortification of falling prey to heart problems and so disrupting the entire event), I marched and chanted, but dared not carry the added weight of even a single camera. Not surprisingly, I was soon filled with bitterness and self-pity at the sight of young photographers doing exactly what I used to do: the ineffably passionate Dance of the Photographers, for which see last week's essay.

A few nights later during a General Assembly meeting at Occupation Park, where OT maintains its 24-hour presence in downtown Tacoma and coexists in genuine harmony with police and passers-by, I encountered Fr. Bischel. 

I knew him of old, from one of those interludes in my life I tried to be a practicing Catholic but concluded, as always, I am far too damaged to find spiritual sustenance in any organized religion. I had no idea he was in the park. I merely suggested him as the best possible local resource on the politics of non-violence, only to hear his laughing voice say “Loren is my campaign manager” and to discover amidst my own surprise (and a great deal of gentle chuckling) he was standing directly behind me.

Fr. Bischel – Bix to his friends and colleagues – had been sleeping in the park each night, lending OT his formidable presence as an internationally renown, often imprisoned practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience. 

Now I wanted to photograph him there or in some other OT environment, not the least because Bix is 86 years old and I recognize him as a true Bodhisattva, embodiment of the wisdom of I Ching, particularly the First Hexagram, Ch'ien (the Creative), Nine in the Fifth Place: “Thus the sage rises, and all creatures follow him with their eyes.”

But to follow him with my own eyes I would have to attend Friday's demonstration. Hence again the vital practice of asking myself how might I prevail. I'd take one camera (a Pentax MX); two lenses (100mm and 28mm SMCPs); a pocket full of Fujicolor 800; a Vietnam-era GI poncho to protect my equipment from the rain; an Ace bandage for my knee; my cane; and – to lighten the load – an 8-ounce flask of water rather than 32 ounces in my 1945-vintage GI canteen.

That image above is Bix with two of his friends as seen through the 100mm lens.

I made a total of 48 pictures of the demonstration – literally a demo in a deluge – of which at least five are worth showing, with one more probably as much a portfolio piece as the portrait of Bix. But the Blogger software for posting portfolios is not just difficult but user-unfriendly, with instructions so vague its operation requires at least the knowledge of a professional Nurd, and – techno-moron that I am – I dread the requisite hours (and quite possibly days) of technological hassle and unavoidable public embarrassment necessary to figure out how to make it work.

Meanwhile though I have indeed prevailed, at least to the extent of learning how to continue working in the medium I love the most.

And hobbling nearly five miles for OT – about two miles last Friday – has clearly exorcised my compulsion to define myself as a cripple.

Such is personal revolution, especially as implied by my oft-repeated statement “in these times, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance.”

Hence I offer this picture and text in thanks and gratitude to my colleagues in the Living Well seminar, to my comrades in OT, to Fr. Bischel and of course to the Muse herself.

LB/25 October 2011

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