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Occupy Tacoma pickets at the entrance to the Tacoma seaport facilities on 12 December. Recognizing the need to maintain solidarity with organized labor, OT's General Assembly rejected Occupy Oakland's demand for a union-defying closure of West Coast ports and instead opted for informational picketing in support of port workers. Based on the reaction – honked horns by truckers, applause from longshore personnel – it was not just a hugely popular move but another successful effort to circumvent increasing hostility from Ruling Class Media. Yet civil libertarians fear even such peaceful and obviously benign demonstrators as these could be arrested without warrants or charges and imprisoned indefinitely under the powers granted the government by the Patriot Act and expanded to Gestapo-like oppressiveness by this year's newly enacted National Defense Authorization Act. Click on image to view it full size. (Data: FujiFilm800; Pentax MX, 135mm f/2.5 Takumar.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. |
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'Change We Can Believe In': Gestapo Powers for the U.S. Military
The axe held above our necks by this year's National Defense Authorization Act becomes obvious when we remember the Patriot Act defines domestic terrorism so broadly anyone who participates in a peaceful protest can be arrested as a “terrorist.”
All that's required to make a demonstration “dangerous to human life” is a decision by the authorities to fire rubber bullets or pepper-gas canisters into a crowd of protesters (see “PATRIOT Act,” below). As we learned from the nearly fatal wound inflicted by Oakland cops on Marine Corps veteran and Veterans for Peace activist Scott Olsen recently, any such projectiles are potentially deadly at close range.
Likewise, the Patriot Act's sweeping definition of terrorism enables the government to denounce a labor union or any other activist group as a “terrorist organization” and now, with the concentration-camp authority provided by NDAA, use the military to round up entire union locals or every participant in a protest march.
Moreover the powers granted by NDAA, which will become law within days if not hours, let the military hold such activists indefinitely and without charges or trial.
Even an internationally recognized pacifist – for example Tacoma's Fr. William J. Bischel S.J. (Outside Agitator's Notebook, 25 October 2011) – could be branded a “terrorist” and so disappeared.
As a few of us have been warning since late November, NDAA turns the U.S. armed forces, National Guard included, into a latter-day Gestapo. The military will soon operate throughout the United States and its global empire with much the same powers of arrest, torture, indefinite confinement and murder as the dread Nazi German organization possessed in both the Third Reich and throughout the conquered territories of Grösse Deutschland.
The timing of these unprecedented changes in federal law is surely no coincidence. Due to the now-obviously permanent downsizing of the economy, almost half the U.S. population has been reduced to low-income status or flung into official poverty (see “Census” below). What was once the most optimistic citizenry on the planet has been battered by capitalist greed into a seemingly bottomless state of Third World pessimism.
Public anger is rising fast. Support for the Occupy Movement climbs steadily, 44 percent as of 15 December, with support amongst Democrats at 60 percent (Pew Research Center). And We the People are again looking at alternatives to capitalism. Sales of The Communist Manifesto, for example, are skyrocketing – it's now number two on a Tower Books categorical best-seller list. All of which suggests the nation's revolutionary potential may already be approaching an all-time high.
Predictably, the Ruling Class is terrified. And NDAA, like the Patriot Act, is its response.
The fact the government seeks the tyrannical capabilities these unprecedented measures provide is absolute proof of its intention to use them. The fact these new capabilities have not yet been employed does not diminish the gravity of the threat.
Our few remaining liberties – the remnants of freedom essential to all of us in the 99 Percent whether we are politically active or avowedly apolitical – are in jeopardy as never in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, as an ACLU spokesperson lamented to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on 14 December, NDAA's approval merely passes the associated issues on to the judiciary and eventually to the Supreme Court.
As a result, thousands of women, men and – yes – children, even hundreds of thousands, could be hauled off to military concentration camps long before any judge is allowed to rule on the constitutionality of such wholesale arrests.
And there is no rational hope the Patriot Act/NDAA nullification of the Bill of Rights would be overturned. The Roberts Court – more aptly the Robber Court – is irremediably compromised, reduced to nothing more than a tool of the Ruling Class, a bitter truth proven beyond dispute by the Citizens United decision (for which Google).
In any case the many years it typically takes for lower-court verdicts to wend their way to Chief Justice John Robert's dependably despotic tribunal would be no comfort to anyone who had been disappeared into the Guantanamo savagery of military detention. From what we know of its horrors, all but the strongest would already be dead – or harried to drooling madness – by the time their quests for redress reached Roberts' domain.
Here are several reports confirming the frightening details of what obtains:
An amendment to the military budget authorization nullifies critical rights granted by our Constitution...One provision authorizes the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process is abolished…A second provision mandates military custody for most terrorism suspects. “Congressional Tyranny, White House Surrender,” an analysis by Ralph Nader.
DemocRats and GOPorkers alike collaborated to nullify the Constitution, subjecting U.S. citizens to warrantless arrest and indefinite imprisonment by a military newly armed with national police powers. Includes texts of relevant sections of the NDAA. “Obama Broke His Promise,” an analysis by Jonathan Turley, constitutional lawyer and Georgetown University law professor.
- Ray McGovern, a retired 27 year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, provided the morning intelligence briefing to multiple presidents and security advisers. Now he tells Occupy Washington D.C. he believes the provisions of the NDAA legalizing domestic use of the military as security police and granting it powers of indefinite detention were added because of fear of civil unrest at home. “Is the Use of the Military Designed for the Occupy Movement?” A Truthout report in which the lead, slightly rewritten above, is buried in the fourth paragraph. (May be painfully slow to load because of delays imposed by Truthout's embrace of the Discus comment system.)
Local police admit they've used two unarmed Predator drones lent them by the U.S. Air Force, the most alarming example yet of the federally imposed militarization of local law enforcement agencies. “Police Now Use Predator Drones on Home Front,” a Los Angeles Times report.
Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act (Pub. L. No. 107-52) expanded the definition of terrorism to cover 'domestic,' as opposed to international, terrorism. A person engages in domestic terrorism if they do anything 'dangerous to human life' that is a violation of the criminal laws of a state or the United States, if the act appears to be intended to: (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion...The definition of domestic terrorism is broad enough to encompass the activities of several prominent activist campaigns and organizations.” “How the USA PATRIOT Act Redefines Domestic Terrorism,” an ACLU analysis.
“This confusion about the definition of terrorism comes at a time when the economy is terrible, the domestic government is more unpopular than ever, and there is quite a lot of radical and even revolutionary political agitation going on right here at home. There are people out there - I've met some of them, in both the Occupy and Tea Party movements - who think that the entire American political system needs to be overthrown, or at least reconfigured, in order for progress to be made. It sounds paranoid and nuts to think that those people might be arrested and whisked away to indefinite, lawyerless detention by the military, but...such niceties as American citizenship and the legal tradition of due process seem to be less and less meaningful to the people who run things in America.” “Coming Soon: the Indefinite Detention of American Citizens,” a Rolling Stone report by Matt Taibbi.
As to just how savagely oppressive capitalism truly is, newly released federal data shows nearly half the nation's population is officially impoverished or low income – a finding that depicts a viciously exploited people economically ripe for rebellion. “About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.” “Census: Nearly Half of Americans Are Poor or Low Income,” an Associated Press report.
Though the story was woefully under-reported by the propagandists of the U.S. Ruling Class Media, international rebellion against capitalism has returned home to Russia. Imagine what happens if an Occupy the Kremlin movement now emerges to join with Occupy the World. Imagine how that development – participation in the global Occupy Movement by the nation that gave birth to the world's first corps of professional revolutionaries – would terrify the already frightened One Percent. Here's an early Reuters report on events within the former Soviet Union.
All of which explains another curiously downplayed story, the addition of the commandant of the National Guard to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. equivalent of what in less-euphemistic Europe is called a General Staff, as in Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. If the armed forces are now the de facto national police – complete with Gestapo powers and concentration-camp authority – obviously the most readily accessible source of trained and dependable personnel is the same organization that imposed President Nixon's oppressive malice via the Kent State Massacre of 4 May 1970. (Those too young to remember it, please Google.) Meanwhile here's a PRNewswire report on the NDAA measure that facilitates the Guard's permanent federalization.
Lastly it should surprise no one there are already reports from many sources – all unconfirmed at this writing – that military officers in at least four branches of the service are interrogating subordinates to determine whether they will obey orders to fire on U.S. citizens. The good news is that – according to this account (which is, I say again, UNconfirmed) – all the enlisted soldiers in one National Guard unit, everyone from the top sergeant to the buck privates, not only vowed they'd refuse such orders but laid down their arms in protest.
Disclosures: (1)-I was the first reporter in the United States to heed Ralph Nader's indictment of the automobile industry, though my story about his findings, written in 1964 for The Oak Ridger, went no further than the managing editor's garbage can. This was all the more surprising because my employer, a small daily that served Oak Ridge, Tennessee, had been courageous enough to hire me as a combination sports editor, public affairs reporter and photographer despite my notoriety as a civil rights activist. Moreover the paper was nationally recognized for its journalistic excellence. But the greatest irony of all was that Dick Smyser, the ME who trashed my Nader story, was at the time chairman of the Associated Press Managing Editors Freedom of Information Committee. As for Mr. Nader, though I cannot imagine I would ever vote for him, I nevertheless hold him in the highest regard. He has unfailingly proven himself one of our nation's most trustworthy news sources. Hence my decision to lead this collection of links with his analysis. (2)-I was a member of the ACLU most of my adult life, and it has twice commended me (1978, 1994) for my role in fights to protect the First Amendment. But I permanently canceled my membership to protest the ACLU's supportive role in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2008 Supreme Court case that gave unlimited financial power to the predatory One Percent. By its endorsement of Citizens United, the ACLU publicly rejected the democratic principles it had always claimed to defend and revealed that – behind its camouflage of rhetoric – it exists only to protect and sustain capitalist despotism. Nevertheless – albeit with this clear stipulation of organizational intent – ACLU analyses often remain useful, as indeed they are above. (3)-The preceding report was assembled with the help of several readers, to whom my deepest gratitude.
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'Change We Can Believe In': Pill Ban Gift to Christian Misogynists
Acting through Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the Betrayer-in-Chief has broken yet another election promise, notably his pledge to overturn the Bush Administration's theocratic banishment of scientific considerations from federal policy-making.
And this time the victims of Obama's Christianity are all the nation's women, denied by federal edict a vital means of emergency birth-control.
Such is creeping theocracy, the plague that has afflicted us since the birth of the republic but became obvious when the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, in which context it should be noted that “God” – capital G – is a proper noun, always male, a synonym for Yahweh, Jesus or Allah, the variously named deity of the Abrahamic religions.
In this same context – religious dogma elevated to political mandate – we should also note this deity's First Commandment: “I am the Lord thy God...thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”
In other words, inclusion of “under God” in the pledge implicitly excludes not only all other deities but all of us who decline to recognize God.
Alas those of us who are agnostic (as I am) or atheist or at least secular-minded enough to be indifferent to organized religion fail all too often to recognize how the phrase turns recitation of the pledge onto a ritual of commitment to theocracy.
The resultant threat is both frighteningly real and dreadfully immediate, for which see The Family (Jeff Sharlet), American Theocracy (Kevin Phillips) and American Fascists (Chris Hedges). The danger is many times intensified by the fact the Abrahamic creeds whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic define their adherents as divinely chosen subjects of “the One True Religion.”
Not surprisingly, each of these religions is already infamous for murderous despotism. Much of the Old Testament was spawned by the Israelite penchant for genocidal aggression. The same tendency is manifest in the Christian Inquisition and the run-amok misogyny of the Burning Times. Now the plague of Islamic terrorism adds yet another blood-mark to the Abrahamic religions' relentless Jihad – already 2600 years long – against female independence, sexual freedom, individual liberty and any other surviving remnant of the pagan beliefs that sustained our species through its first one thousand centuries.
Christian hostility to these values is indisputably proven by history. Moreover it is a hostility expressed not just by the ranting of fundamentalist preachers but by the refusal of the mainstream churches to condemn the fundamentalists for their openly tyrannical beliefs.
The Christian mainstream's compliant silence is in fact tacit endorsement of theocracy. The motive for the silence is thus obvious once we realize the extent to which all Christian organizations, fundamentalist or not, profit from the (ever-encroaching) situational theocracies of the “faith-based” education systems and social services with which the U.S. Ruling Class is methodically replacing public schools and other traditional government programs.
In any case the mainstream/fundamentalist distinction hardly matters: polls show about 63 percent of the U.S. population believes the Bible is truth not fiction – literally “the word of God,” caps again as used by believers. Our nation is already definitively fundamentalist, hence too already ripe for the formal imposition of theocracy.
Which is much closer than we realize. Having (involuntarily) spent two-thirds of my boyhood in the South – a de facto theocracy since the post-Civil-War southern aristocracy figured out how to use religion to nullify the socioeconomic and political changes threatened by Reconstruction – I am painfully familiar with what theocracy looks like.
Though Christianity is always as Karl Marx described it – the opiate of the masses – in the South it is also the brain police. It proclaims the Ruling Class – preachers, politicians and above all capitalists – to be the modern-day equivalent of divine-right monarchy, men ordained by God to rule in His name, caps once more as in theocratic invective.
Sin – deadly sin – is thus defined as anything that jeopardizes Ruling Class power and profits. The enjoyment of sexuality is forbidden because what used to be called “industrial psychology” long ago proved that sexual frustration readily sublimates into compulsive productivity and frantic acquisitiveness – in other words, “growth.” Union organizers, civil rights activists, feminists, homosexuals and any others who openly defy “God's holy plan” are not just sinners but heretics. And to punish those heretics who can neither be subjugated nor banished there's the Ku Klux Klan, its colloquial name – not coincidentally – “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.”
Such is theocracy, U.S. Christian style – different from theocracy, Middle Eastern style, mostly in nomenclature only.
Chief amongst its legacies – and again I speak from personal experience – are hypocrisy and guilt, each of such depth as to approach bottomlessness.
The hypocrisy is that of teetotaler-aristocrats, “good Christian men” who proclaim their support for prohibition but patronize criminals – bootleggers – in order to drink in secret, whether behind the doors of mansions or inside the gates of country clubs. It is the hypocrisy of “good Christian legislators” who in the Tennessee of my puberty had raised the age of consent to 21 and yet ravaged teenage girls, smug in the protections granted by aristocratic status. It is the hypocrisy of “good Christian businessmen” who smile their Dale Carnegie smiles as they rob us blind. Sometimes it is the hypocritically hateful sadism of the “good Christian woman” who agitates a lynching.
Most of all it is the unbearable burden of guilt imposed on adolescents of any gender by the Christian hatred of sex and sexuality. It is guilt as retaliation for desire – guilt so omnipresently powerful it reached deeply even into my own decidedly non-Southern, non-religious family. It is guilt so huge that (though I lost my virginity at age 14), my first experience of sex as truly boundless naked-soul pleasure – shameless, eyes-open, lights-on mutual enjoyment of unhurried sensuality and orgasmic ecstasy – would not occur for another 11 years, not until an unabashedly City Woman in a great City far from Knoxville let down her hair, invited me into her bed and shared with me what I now in old age recognize as the most priceless gift life has to offer.
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The following may sound like a non sequitur but bear with me a few sentences and you'll see it isn't.
My last name is English but we Blisses are mostly Celt, a mixture that includes some very old families with perhaps – given our often-perplexing psychic sensibilities – a touch of the blood of the legendary Tuatha de Danaan, “Children of the Goddess Danu.”
Intuition bolstered by studies of archaeology, myth and folklore long ago convinced me our pagan ancestors believed orgasm is our most intense connection with the divine. And even if this is but fantasy – or perhaps genetic memory borne by my oldest blood – the vision yet holds true: as one who in blessed moments of sexual mindfulness has soared on the bright galactic spiral of orgasmic infinity – no doubt the significance of the spirals we see graven on the stones at ancient sacred sites – I cannot possibly question what seems such pure and obvious wisdom.
Admittedly this sort of thinking may appear absurdly mystical in today's world. But until only about 3500 years ago our ancestors lived in a very different kind of society – matriarchy, not woman as dictator (dictatorship is a logical extension of patriarchy), but rather woman as mother of her own children and literally everything else as well: cosmos, stars, sun, moon, planet, ocean, homeland, community, family, life itself.
Archaeology suggests that property, hierarchy and caste as we know it today did not exist during that first 100,000 years of our species' existence. Indeed one very compelling explanation for the eternal seductiveness of Marxism (and socialism in general) is that it would restore for us a working semblance of community as mother, the supportive community we lost with the imposition of patriarchy and the suppression of our tribal impulses toward democracy, often at sword's point and invariably by misogynistic slaughter, whether inflicted at the burning-stake or maintained by denial of reproductive freedom.
All of which is prefatory to understanding why the Abrahamic religions – the ultimate psychodynamic mechanisms of patriarchy – must of necessity despise sexuality, especially female sexuality, and hate not just women but Woman and thus, since all life is female at conception, the totality of nature: Gaia herself, whether the abstract symbol at the core hypothesis of environmentalism or the deity formerly sustained and now resurrected by the liturgies of paganism.
Which leads us to the very epicenter of the ancient war symbolized by the Christian effort to subjugate us in theocracy. The issue is not just the implicit (and often unacknowledged) clash over the gender of the deity; it is the resultant unresolvable conflict between the associated symbioses of ideologies and systems: Gaia-centered (matrilineal if not matriarchal, eco-socialist, democratic, unabashedly orgasmic) versus God-centered (patriarchal, environmentally destructive, exploitative, hierarchal, unabashedly greedy).
Penultimately it's our eternally compelling experience of divinity – orgasm – versus the litanies of prohibition attributed to the chilly abstraction of a divine sadist who perpetually threatens us with the unspeakable horror of eternal damnation – the most terrifying possibility the human mind can conceive – should we dare disobey his edicts.
Ultimately its the ethos of sensuality and love versus the ethos of terror and hatefulness.
Given how the latter has ruled our planet for at least 3500 years, woman in the Christian context – no doubt the Muslim context too – is from birth potentially the perfect revolutionary. Her being is a microcosm of all Nature, of everything patriarchy would destroy or suppress. Her womb contradicts the Abrahamic myth of sexless creation. Her capacity for multiple orgasms – and thus multiple partners – subverts the patriarchal order more effectively than any rhetoric yet uttered. Hence the sexual mutilation of women as inflicted by Islam. Hence too the parallel psycho-sexual mutilation imposed by Christianity, the taboos against female sexual expression, as the in war on reproductive freedom, the war of misogynistic aggression in which Barack the Betrayer's pill-ban is but the latest fundamentalist victory.
LB/17 December 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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