Our Worst Enemy Is Our Cult of Closed-Minded Optimism

Just as the dark undertow of Russian history drowned the bright promise of Soviet democracy, so now the revolutionary potential of the Occupy Movement, which hopes to resurrect itself on May Day, is being smothered by the Polly Anna conditioning to which we in the U.S. 99 Percent have been subjected since birth.

Of course it is not just Occupy that is so afflicted. It is our entire nation. We persist in telling ourselves lies about how good things are – how bright is our future, how great is our potential, how fortunate we are to have been born Americans – when by every statistical measurement the United States has become the most oppressive nation in the industrial world.

At least though events have now begun to disclose our true philosophical heritage – capitalist hucksterism as personified by Dale Carnegie's tactics of manipulation, Ayn Rand's gospel of maximum greed as ultimate virtue and – let us not forget – Norman Vincent Peale's self-obsessed Christianity of “positive thinking,” as if the Roman imperial death-warrant on the old crucifix were now replaced by a Smiley Face: “have a happy day,” never mind the twisted agonies of the alleged Messiah or the oppressed minions for whom he supposedly died.

The resultant attitude – an aggressive, cultoid optimism reinforced by the same lock-box closed-mindedness that defines the zealotry of fundamentalist Christians, Muslims and Jews – has become the dominant trait of the U.S. citizenry. It transcends all class distinctions. It imposes submission in welfare lines (“this is America I might win big”) as effectively as it fuels greed on Wall Street (“this is America mine for the looting”). Indeed it is the quintessence of the Moron Nation psyche. But its Disneyland notion of happiness turns quickly to hostility, anger and even violence whenever it is confronted by criticism, questions or legitimate differences of opinion.

And the Occupy Movement – as I learned during my involvement with Occupy Tacoma – is no exception. One of OT's original participants, I repeatedly urged during general-assembly efforts to formulate a local statement of purpose that OT recognize its function as a vehicle for articulating the grievances of the 99 Percent. Typically the first step in organizing a union, the formalized voicing of grievances could also begin a local, national and finally international process by which we might evolve an effective ideology of resistance to capitalism. Obvious as all this seemed, my proposal was resoundingly denounced by a number of OTers who, for reasons they never made clear, apparently found it profoundly threatening. Soon afterward I was ever more excluded from OT activities. Hence my eventual realization I can serve the broader cause of Occupy far better as a supportive albeit independent observer – in other words as a journalist – than as one of its activists.

Hence too the relevance of a book-review/author-interview by Michael Busch that was published a couple of weeks ago in Truthout. Busch wrote that Chris Faraone's new book on Occupy Wall Street, 99 Nights With the 99 Percent, presents “a broadly rendered portrait of a national movement” that accurately depicts all its “diversity, beauty and self-contradiction.” Among those contradictions, as Faraone himself noted during the interview, is the same “you're either with us or against us” rejection of criticism that seemed refreshingly absent from OT at its beginning but later became increasingly oppressive, whether at general assemblies or on the OT website.

As I said on the associated comment thread:

Mr. Busch's most important disclosure reveals the extent to which reflexive Ayn Rand values – values in which most of us have been conditioned since birth – yet lurk beneath Occupy's rhetorical radicalism:

“And finally, the observation I keep coming back to - which is obvious, but we rarely talk about it - is that the problems the camps had to confront - homelessness, drug addiction - are not new problems as anyone who has lived in a city can tell you...And not surprisingly, the reaction from a lot of people was 'yuck, go back to where you came from.'”

A textbook example of identification with the oppressor, the “yuck” reflex reflects an attitude that – if uncorrected by self-criticism – will be Occupy's undoing. For the camps did indeed become magnets for chronically homeless mental patients, drug addicts and alcoholics. And the response of the occupiers themselves was too often immediate revulsion and subsequent retreat.

In Occupy Tacoma, which I served via its Media Workgroup, there were persistent reports social-service people were telling the street-dwelling drunks, junkies and psychotics our Occupation Park was the best place in town to get free food and shelter. Whether these referrals came from state welfare bureaucrats or elsewhere could never be determined.

But the long-term impact was the destruction of the camp, certainly slower than by the police violence employed elsewhere on the West Coast, but nevertheless as inevitable. Which suggests the problem may not have been accidental but was instead an experiment in the tactical use of afflicted populations as a weapons of disruption.

There's no doubt the associated chaos prevented Occupiers from building solidarity with another far more vital group of homeless people – bitterly angry, formerly middle-class youth whose parents have been thrown out of work, then foreclosed and evicted. It is precisely this sort of experience with oppression that combines with ideological discipline to produces a formidably effective activist. But the potential of newly homeless people was nullified by the disruptions inflicted by the chronically homeless.

Meanwhile the presence of so many junkies, drunks and psychotics was pounced upon by Ruling Class Media to slander the entire Occupy Movement as nothing more than a rebellion by petulant and often demented misfits.

The lesson should be obvious. To the extent Occupiers remain entrapped by the undertow of bourgeois values, the afflicted-populations tactic will obviously succeed – with far less expense to the One Percent than the brute force utilized elsewhere.

But I doubt the lesson will be learned. As I can personally attest, the “rarely-talk-about-it” response was in truth a rigidly enforced taboo, resulting even in the censorship of my own Occupy Tacoma reports by one of Truthout's rival news services. Thus – to the entire movement's possibly terminal loss – the requisite self-criticism will probably never take place.

As if that were not disheartening enough, there was an even worse example of Occupy's penchant for PollyAnna self-delusion evident in an obnoxiously self-congratulatory piece by Douglas Schoen that Reader Supported News published yesterday morning: 

“(I)t is becoming increasingly clear that Occupy Wall Street (OWS)—while less visibly active in recent months following clashes with the police, infighting, and eviction from its flagship encampment in New York’s Zuccotti Park last November—is nonetheless seizing control of the political debate in America this election year.”

“Occupy Wall Street’s rhetorical dominance of Democratic messaging,” the advertorial essay continues, “fulfills one of the clear goals its followers articulated last October, when my firm, Douglas E. Schoen, LLC, conducted a survey of OWS protesters. At that time, a clear plurality (35 percent) of the Occupy Wall Street protesters interviewed said their top goal was for Occupy Wall Street to move the Democratic Party distinctly and boldly left.”

To which – accompanied by the virtual jeers and hisses of many RSN readers – I responded with a harsh dose of reality:

Mr. Schoen's claim – that Occupy is "seizing control" of the 2012 political debate – is not just a shameless advertisement for his business. It is also utter nonsense.

Worse, it typifies our crippling penchant for self-deception.

As we learned from Obama the Orator's transformation into Barack the Betrayer, the U.S. political debate is meaninglessness. Note how "change we can believe in" became the biggest Big Lie in our national history.

Indeed the only discernible impact Occupy is having on U.S. politics is giving the One Percent a rationale for expanding the Gestapo powers of its Department of Homeland Security. Without Occupy, it's probable the abolish-the-constitution sections of the National Defense Authorization Act and Trespass Act would not have been demanded of Congress.

That's not Occupy “seizing control.” That's the One Percent “seizing” the means to crush us.

Note too how these laws received nearly unanimous approval – undeniable proof the two parties are in truth one.

Also – were Occupy influencing U.S. politics – the Buffett Rule would not have been filibustered to death. Had it passed, Mr. Schoen's claim might have a solid foundation. But unless such change takes place, to assert Occupy is “seizing control” is no more than delusional self-indulgence.

Which – precisely as Sun Tzu noted 2600 years ago – is the most fatal mistake such a movement can make.

*****

VIPRs on Buses Prove Oppressive Truth Denied by Occupy Optimists

The true extent to which Occupy is “seizing control” of our national politics is glaringly reflected by a report first broadcast by the superb English language news service of Russia Today (RT.com/USA), then published by RSN.

The Transportation Security Administration, say RT and RSN, is morphing into the national transit police, harassing even riders of local buses with stop-and-frisk intrusions.

“No surprise, really,” the RSN story adds. As soon Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano “established groping in airports,” she “expressed her desire to expand TSA jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit. In the past year, TSA's snakelike VIPR (Visual Intermodal Prevention and Response) teams have been slithering into more and more bus and train stations - and even running checkpoints on highways - never in response to actual threats, but apparently more in an attempt to live up to the inspirational motto displayed at the TSA's air marshal training center since the agency's inception: 'Dominate. Intimidate. Control.'”

Given how the VIPRs who were frisking bus riders in Houston, Texas last week were reportedly accompanied by drug-sniffing dogs, it seems another purpose behind TSA's expanded reach is to seize more slaves for the for-profit prison system.

Which prompted my response:

“Dominate. Intimidate. Control.” That says it all, the appropriate dicta not of dutiful cops who protect and serve but rather of concentration-camp guards and Gestapo agents.

But I doubt even the Gestapo was so bluntly outspoken – “Dominate-Intimidate-Control” – about its tyrannical purpose.

Hence, precisely as the dicta imply, we witness the transformation of TSA from airport guards to national transit police, soon from national transit police to national police and thence to recreation of the original Geheime Staatspolizei.

Somewhere in Hell, Heydrich, Himmler and Hitler are all smiling. Meanwhile here on Earth it's “Dominate-Intimidate-Control”: welcome to the Fourth Reich.

Later in response to another poster I added:

More to the point, what does the "Dominate-Intimidate-Control" paradigm tell us about our future?

In bitter truth it proves beyond a scintilla of doubt that "recovery" (whether of our jobs or our constitutional rights – is the ultimate Big Lie. Instead what the One Percent has in store for us is national enslavement, for details of which see “Prison Labor as the Past and Future of American 'Free-Market' Capitalism.” 

And capitalism it is – infinite greed as maximum virtue (as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be) – its smirking masters enabled by ever-more-savage capitalist governance: absolute power and infinite profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

For how else but by exploitation of "human capital" – the enslavement of us all – will the capitalists maintain their obscenely lavish lifestyle in a time of dwindling natural resources and a planet raped to increasing rebellion against human survival?

*****

Deluded Washingtonians Think Republicans Might Be Better 

 

As I said in this week's lead item, it's not just Occupy that suffers from self-destructive optimism. A report in The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, describes a consequence of the idiotic delusion a Republican governor might somehow prove more humanitarian than the state's Democrats who – though no different from the GOPorkers in unspeakable cruelty to impoverished and disabled people – have nevertheless steadfastly protected women's reproductive freedom and defended gay rights.  

Here's the story:

“Washington's gubernatorial race is the third hottest in the nation, according to national political news site Politico. The site led off its latest rankings with an unrhetorical question about Democrat Jay Inslee's campaign: 'Can it possibly be successful with such an unwelcoming reception from the local media?'”

The Evergreen State press corps, never the brightest bauble on the money-tree of Ruling Class Media, is curiously convinced Inslee will lose the gubernatorial election to Republican Rob McKenna, who is not just an anti-health-care-reform state attorney-general but is already weasel-wording on women's rights.

As I wrote in response:

Ruling Class Media supports McKenna because that's what it is: Ruling Class Media, hence Republican, hence fascist.

 

The question is whether Washington voters understand that McKenna (or any other Republican) in the governor's mansion will turn our state into Wisconsin, Ohio and Arizona: war against workers, JesuNazi Jihad against women, genocide by abandonment against anyone elderly, disabled or chronically impoverished.

 

This is not speculation; it's proven fact. The new GOPorker gubernatorial tactic is to run as a moderate Rightist, then rule like Wisconsin's Scott Walker, channeling Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy and of course occasionally even der Führer himself.

 

Perhaps though it's the will of the electorate to impose the will of the One Percent: turn Olympia into another Madison and the entire state into another Arizona, where all wombs now belong to that divine sadist the Christians hail as their god.

 

You'd think Washingtonian women, at least, would have better sense.

 

But maybe the ideology of Ayn Rand has poisoned politics here as hopelessly as it has amongst the DemocRats in general – note the prevalence of anti-union “progressives.” Note too the Ayn Rand influence within the U.S. feminist movement and the subsequent triumph of its unique ideology: capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – as maximum "liberation" as well.

 

It's a terrifying likelihood, especially for somebody like me, old, crippled and permanently impoverished by the One Percent's malicious contractions of the economy.

And likelihood it is: look how the state's voters have already bought the Big Lie “mass transit is welfare” and would rather terminate public transport – anything to torment the poor – than pay tiny sales tax increases of two or three pennies on a ten dollar bill.

 

Admittedly the DemocRats are hardly a utopian alternative. There's no denying the lessons taught us by Barack the Betrayer and Christine the Cruel. But at least Inslee (might) spare us the imposition of Christian theocracy so characteristic of Republican rule.

 

Sure a McKenna Regime could wake people up. But by then it will be too late – especially for all of us elderly and disabled people he and his fellow GOPigs will have deliberately murdered by cutting off our Medicaid and food stamp stipends: genocide – the elimination of unprofitable humans – without the international embarrassment of death camps.

*****

National Fat Epidemic: Illness as Enslavement, Health as Liberation 

 

Phil Rockstroh, a New York City poet and essayist to whom I'm going to pay more attention, has spelled out what is probably the ultimate illness-as-metaphor hypothesis:

“The corporate food industry wrought epidemic of obesity in the U.S. is a microcosmic representation of a global-wide system of macro-imperialism...As the one percent has acquired their grotesquely bloated assets, large segments of the American middle and laboring classes have acquired larger and larger amounts of excess body fat. As corporate executives have sweetened their salaries with limitless perks and multimillion dollar bonuses, their workforce has sucked down copious portions of high fructose-based soft drinks and obesity-engendered disease has increased accordingly...Addiction to fattening food speaks of our inner emptiness; so called Reality Television relates to our hunger for social engagement and communion; the images that haunt the corporate state media hologram attract us because we long for the images that rise from the soul.”

I presume Rockstroh understands, as I do, not all obesity comes from willful overeating.

That said, I know precisely of what he speaks, and why he describes it with such disgust. I ride the bus each week with young single-mothers, women who were probably once beautiful, whose eyes have become opaque with hopelessness, whose bodies are not just swollen from compulsive eating but are morbidly, suicidally, grotesquely fat – literally circus obese.

These mothers, who are invariably White, spitefully hog the scanty bus space nominally reserved for cripples like myself. They often glare hatefully at those of us who are elderly and genuinely disabled, especially if we happen to be of a minority race, and they always defy the transit authority regulations that require them to fold their giant perambulators, which are invariably filled with Wal-Mart hoards of potato chips and other eat-yourself-to-death convenience foods, even as their infants, some only months old, already bear the mortal taint of caloric excess.

Such parenting disgusts me, not the least because my own post-smoking weight gain is largely the legacy of a vindictive mother who force-fed me into a repulsively fat child – this her ultimate vengeance against my father, against me and against anyone born with a penis. Though I shed this burden of blubber very quickly after I started smoking (spring 1955, age 15), the fact my mother's curse is literally inescapable became apparent two weeks after my first day as a true non-smoker, 23 September 1995. It was then, 7 October, I discovered I had already gained 12 pounds – never mind my food intake had remained unchanged. (I should weigh 160 and in fact weighed 158 when I began the ten-year battle against nicotine addiction that culminated with my last cigarette the day before 1995's autumnal equinox.) But my post-smoking weight, the personification of ugly, has gone as high as 265, nominally varying between 225 and 245 – in any case completely beyond any known means of control.

Though no less contemptible than the fat of compulsive overeating, weight-gain of this sort is assuredly not a defense against existential angst. Indeed it intensifies such misery, all the more so because its source, the long-term metabolic chaos inflicted by the excruciatingly endless process of nicotine withdrawal (already nearly 17 years) and intensified by my age (72), defines it as an inescapable loathsomeness I will bear into the grave.

Yet I cannot but pity these transit-tyrannizing mothers the dread emptiness against which they blanket themselves with bloat. I am sorry for them even when – as happens so often – they subject us to their own microcosmic version of the venomous disregard with which the macrocosmic capitalists routinely savage us all, forcing those of us who are elderly and/or legitimately disabled out of our allegedly reserved seats and into the awkward painfully sardined devil-take-the-hindmost hurly-burly of a standing-room-only rush-hour bus.

My pity is no doubt intensified by the fact I recognize morbid obesity as genocide – conveniently self-inflicted of course – another of the diabolical tactics by which the One Percent rid their United Estates of surplus workers. Why else the war against health-care reform? Denied access to medical sustainment, the obese will perish all the more quickly. Again I reflected on my personal slogan: in these times, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance. Then I wrote the following, hoping Rockstroh himself would read it:

Were it still the '80s – were Mr. Rockstroh another regular at the Lion's Head, and were we to converse in another of those memorable dialogues so characteristic of that long-ago and still lamented realm three steps down from Christopher Street – I would ask him only one question.

I would ask if he too feels himself forced by the ever-more dire circumstances of our ever-more-enslaved species on this ever-more gang-raped planet to acknowledge our only salvation lies in an as-yet-unformulated hybrid of Jefferson, Marx and the Gaia Hypothesis.

But I cannot fault his “Hungry Ghosts.” It seems to thrust us in the very direction I dare name: Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx and an underlying ethos formally absent from the Earth since the sack of Knossos – seemingly triple heresy whether from Jeffersonian, Marxian or Gaian viewpoints, yet (ironically) each the only possible facilitator of the others.

Meanwhile and however one reads its multi-leveled meaning, “Ghosts” is also quite possibly the best piece of writing – “best” in its painterly use of language – Common Dreams has ever published.

I merely wish Mr. Rockstroh's prose were a bit more Hemingwayesque, the better to catapult his life-preserving vision – “a resonate relationship with the world at large” – to more of those slave-ship castaways who have been seduced by the siren-song of trinket materialism and are now drowning in the predatory seas of Moron Nation.

Not that I have any right to criticize: I have too many times indulged myself with the complexities and potential of Faulknerian sentence-structure rather than discipline my prose into the easy-to-comprehend Ernest-ness rightfully demanded by every editor at every publication that ever paid me wages: “ El Sordo was making his fight on a hilltop.”

The quote – its nine words a perfect who-what-when-where-why daily-newspaper lead – is the opening line of a now-forbidden Hemingway short story, “The Fight on the Hilltop,” a heart-rending portrait of those who courageously resisted the fascists in Spain.

Juxtaposed with Mr. Rockstroh's work, it illustrates the writers' dilemma, especially in the unprecedented circumstances of now. For whom do we write? Do we write only for our Muse – or at least for those who might become our lovers? Or do we write for those we would never let into our dwellings, much less invite into the naked-soul intimacies of our beds?

Alas to make a revolution we must learn do the latter.

LB/29 April 2012

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Solar Flares Could Fry Reactor Safeties, Nuke Us Dead

Truthout has published a genuinely scary special report on a hitherto-undisclosed risk implicit in nuclear reactors. Entitled “Four Hundred Chernobyls: Solar Flares, Electromagnetic Pulses and Nuclear Armageddon,” it should be required reading for every anti-nuclear activist on the planet. 

Alas, it probably won't be. Truthout's relatively limited readership combines with a by-permission-only restriction on additional dissemination that seemingly guarantees the report's vital revelations will remain under-publicized.

Nevertheless – invoking “fair use” – I offer the following quote from the report's text:

“In the past 152 years, Earth has been struck by roughly 100 solar storms, causing significant geomagnetic disturbances (GMD), two of which were powerful enough to rank as "extreme GMDs." If an extreme GMD of such magnitude were to occur today, in all likelihood, it would initiate a chain of events leading to catastrophic failures at the vast majority of our world's nuclear reactors, similar to but over 100 times worse than, the disasters at both Chernobyl and Fukushima.”

Meanwhile a more recent report circulated via Reader Supported News warns us the Fukushima debacle is infinitely worse than we are being told – that it could literally become an extinction-level event: 

“Japanese diplomat Akio Matsumura...warned that the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant may ultimately turn into an event capable of extinguishing all life on Earth.”

Perhaps because I have witnessed firsthand the nightmare fragility of our astonishingly presumptuous technology, I felt no need to add to the discussion threads generated by these glow-in-the-dark warnings of our suicidal nuclear folly. Besides, what came to mind after I read “Four Hundred Chernobyls” would have required I first apologize for paraphrasing T.S. Eliot and then explain to the illiterates why the apology was due:

This is how world ends: not with a bang but a shimmer.

*****

Case Study: Bribery Suppresses Innovation, Loots Our Pocketbooks

A courageous investigative-reporting service called United Republic, which does an exceptionally good job of showing how capitalism and tyranny are synonymous, recently published an exposé entitled “Corruption Responsible for 80 Percent of Your Cell Phone Bill.”

The report reveals why U.S. cell phone service – frustratingly bad and oppressively expensive – will probably remain so forever. It also provides a superb example – one of the best I have yet seen – of how (real) capitalism operates through capitalist governance to destroy the innovation and competition (theoretical) capitalism claims as the cornerstone of its alleged success. Thus we learn how (real) capitalism reduces (theoretical) capitalism to a Big Lie, a scam in which the One Percent always prosper and the rest of us are invariably ripped off.

“Last year,” says the report, “a new company called Lightsquared promised an innovative business model that would dramatically lower cell phone costs and improve the quality of service, threatening the incumbent phone operators like AT&T and Verizon...The phone industry swung into motion, not by offering better products and services, but by going to Washington to ensure that its new competitor could be killed by its political friends...”

“And how much does this cost you?  Take your phone bill, and cut it by 80%.  That’s how much you should be paying.  You see, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, people in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland pay on average less than $130 a year for cell phone service.  Americans pay $635.85 a year.  That $500 a year difference...(is) the cost of corruption...the return on (the phone monopolies') campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.”

Because the report is complete unto itself, I added nothing to its comment thread. But that thread is of at least clinical interest: note the vehement, even fanatical denials characteristic of the disciples of capitalism, an ideology so evil it requires compulsive lying merely to function.

*****

Stealth Theocracy: Tennessee Would Let Teachers Be Preachers

A Ruling Class Media report picked up by Reader Supported News informs us the Tennessee legislature has overwhelmingly approved a law that would allow fanatical Christians who are also public school teachers to preach in their classrooms against climate change and evolution.

The bill's opponents argue the measure gives legal protection to the state's many teachers – probably a significant majority – who would abandon science and in its place teach fundamentalist doctrine that rejects evolution and either denies the reality of climate change or describes it as divine punishment inflicted on humanity and Nature by the Christians' sadistic god.

As I said on the comment thread: 

Having had the extreme misfortune to have spent three of my four public high school years in Tennessee, I know the state's K-12 "education" system is dominated by Bible-thumpers.

These are not just the "church twice on Sunday and once in the middle of the week" fundamentalists of country-music fame. They are raging fanatics who regard the separation of church and state as a hateful imposition by "the Yankee tyrants" who won the Civil War. Thus too "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class," the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan.

Given these realities, what the legislature has enacted is a de facto ban on the teaching of evolution and climate change, a new, stealth version of the anti-evolution law that made the state infamous. 

Which reminds me of something a fellow New Yorker said when he returned from a visit to the land of the Scopes Monkey Trial: “I'd rather be a peasant in Brooklyn than a king in Tennessee.”

And where is Clarence Darrow now that we so desperately need him?

*****

In Transit: the Long Ago Origin of OAN's Newest Feature

“In Transit” is what its name implies: anecdotes – most humorous, some poignant, a few troubling – collected during rides on public transport. The material will mostly be new, appearing here whenever events warrant, but the idea to collect and write such vignettes is one of my older professional impulses. It came to me back in the Stone Age 1960s, when I was a young journalist in Manhattan and often rode the train to visit a then-lover in Asheville. For various reasons, mainly the long-since-remedied absence of a local airfield capable of accommodating jets, the trip to North Carolina's unpublicized bohemian enclave took (only) 12 hours by rail: you boarded at the original Penn Station, switched to a Southern Railroad express train in Washington, D.C., then switched again to an over-mountain local at Greensboro. Compared to an air-odyssey of about 26 hours with at least three and maybe four changes of planes, it was a comfortable, relatively quick trip.
 

The Pennsylvania Railroad train – I believe it was the Congressional Limited – departed at 5:30 p.m. It was powered by a GGI, a piece of functional sculpture, probably the finest and surely now the most legendary type of electric locomotive ever built.

On the Southern (the train known as The Southerner), we sped over the route immortalized by “The Wreck of the Old 97,” and my first time on that leg of the trip I was a bit surprised to realize I was singing the lyrics in my head: “it's a long long road from Monroe to Danville and she's lined on a three mile grade.” Later when I mentioned it to my lover, herself a folk singer of considerable skill, she laughed and said “Well, what did you expect? It's a real song.” She meant in her southern verbal shorthand the song was powerful because of its basis in historical fact – the crash of a speeding mail-train that killed 11 railroaders and severely injured nine others. She also meant my proximity to the accident's locale and my general Celtic sensitivity to such things had probably opened me to some subtle residue of the Old 97's gory denouement.

Riding the over-mountain local – a combination of coaches and freight cars called the Asheville Special – was also a novel experience. As I remember, we left Greensboro at 3 a.m. and arrived in Asheville four hours later. As we were pulling out of the station, the conductor passed out menus: eggs, bacon, sausage, fried grits, sliced tomatoes, toast, pancakes and syrup, biscuits and gravy, coffee, tea, milk. The train stopped briefly at High Point so he could radio the orders ahead to a trackside café – don't remember whether it was at Statesville or Hickory – where we halted just long enough to pick up the hot food in covered, cafeteria-style trays that, emptied, would be dropped off on the return trip. (I always ordered eggs over easy, bacon, grits, tomatoes, toast, coffee – and yes it was always delicious.) Then as we ate our breakfasts the train continued westward into the mountains, eventually passing another place of railroad legend and song: Swannanoa Tunnel, built by convicts, nearly all of them Blacks, at the cost of uncounted deaths: the estimates vary from 120 to 400 men killed.

(If you link to the video, note how the the singer subtly identifies himself as a ghost, implying he was one of the many slain by the frequent cave-ins that plagued the tunnel's construction. “I'm goin back to Swannanoa Tunnel,” he sings, “cause that's my home.” Note too how the melody of the opening words echoes the incomparable wail of a steam locomotive's whistle, a haunting, heart-rending wellspring-of-the-blues sound known to nearly all my generation but now, like some phantom train dwindling into eternal night, sadly ever more distant from collective memory.)

The gray-haired conductor on the over-mountain local lamented the loss of steam engines more eloquently than anyone I've ever met. He had been with the railroad his entire worklife, “nigh onto 50 year,” and as a younger man he'd been a steam locomotive engineer. “Them engines were alive,” he said, his blue eyes alight with recollected joy. “Fireman gets yore firebox right an ye find the sweet spot on yore throttle, that stack she'll talk to ye.” For a telepathic instant I was with him in his cab, heard not just the harsh edgy rhythm of the exhaust but the entire symphony of hiss and roar and clank and rumble, felt the throbbing tempo of the locomotive and the heat of its cindery breath. Far ahead is a grade crossing. Now for an instant the engineer is a denim-overalled virtuoso, his solo a long minor-keyed riff in white steam notation. Then he waves from the cab window to a few children walking the red clay road home from school, my boyhood self amongst them. Finally he's beyond our vision, a soot-begrimed shepherd of human lives and cargo, his smoke-wreathed passage a momentary epic of fire and thunder and the song of the banshee, dwindling, gone. “Aint nothin like it anymore,” he said. “Damn diesels jes machines, no life in em at all.”
 

On one of my trips south a talkative, ostentatiously effeminate young man hopped aboard just as we were leaving Manhattan, announced to everyone within earshot he was bound for Asheville, then explained how his concern for a sick friend there was forcing him to “abandon civilization” for “at least a week among the cross-burning barbarians.” Though at first his sarcastic monologue about the South was genuinely funny, by the time we crossed the Potomac River into Virginia it had become wearying, even potentially offensive, so much so a few of us were concerned he might provoke some die-hard Southron to real violence. As we rolled into Asheville, he began pacing back and forth the length of the car, seemingly anxious about where he might exit the train. Finally he asked the conductor: “Which end do we get off?”

The old railroad man – who several times in the interest of maintaining peace had asked the outspoken passenger to please keep his prejudices to himself – glared in combined perplexity and disgust, then answered in a classic Southern Appalachian basso: “Well, either end I reckon. By god they both stop.”

LB/19 April 2012

-30-

Did 'Limits to Growth' Incite Capitalist Tyranny, Greed?

(Thanks to Mary Plante for help with this story's Internet research.)

Was the One Percent's ongoing frenzy of tyranny and greed triggered by a hitherto-unsuspected and possibly accidental perpetrator?

It's a whodunit that begins in 1970 with a Club of Rome research project conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the results of which were revealed two years later in The Limits to Growth. 

Controversial even before its publication, Limits is a 205-page exposé of our species' imprisonment in the expanding bubble of capitalism's demand for ever-increasing profit. It defines the present mode of capitalist “growth” as not just unsustainable but deadly. It offers several environmentally centered alternatives – each within a capitalist context – by which to achieve healthy, relatively egalitarian and above all sustainable human societies. It's conclusion is grim: if the bubble continues to swell, when it bursts – as eventually it must – life as we've known it will end forever.

But this prediction violates one of our nation's most rigidly enforced taboos; it confirms, albeit in apolitical terminology, a core truth of Marxian economics: that capitalism will eventually self-destruct, killing untold millions as it implodes. Capitalists and their hirelings in Ruling Class Media and academia thus predictably denounced Limits as “doomsday” negativity. Despite widespread rebuttals by environmentalists, the unusually toxic clamor of rejection eventually succeeded: the book was marginalized as lunatic-fringe prophecy, and the fickle public soon forgot its urgent message.

Now though it appears the trashing of Limits may have been an especially clever Big Lie. The One Percent may have clandestinely adopted its projections as the basis for their own long-range planning, then publicly attacked it to hide their true purpose and intent – a classic example of disinformation and misdirection. Here's the evidence:

The year following the start of the Limits project, Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote for his colleagues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the (formerly) super-secret Powell Memo, the Mein Kampf of modern capitalism.But what prompted the memo? Had Powell been alerted that Limits – despite its carefully phrasing – would give capitalism's opponents statistical confirmation of their arguments?

Soon afterward, no doubt as a reward for writing the memo, Powell was appointed by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court. There Powell laid the groundwork for corporate personhood,  the legal doctrine that has annulled our constitution, destroyed our representative democracy and reduced most of us to embittered subjects of an increasingly despotic plutocracy.

Less than two years after the Powell appointment, the newly re-elected Nixon issued his then-astounding declaration of war on the 99 Percent, vilifying us as spoiled, pampered ingrates, proclaiming his second-term policies would be designed to inflict maximum hardship on us all. Even William Randolph Hearst Jr., the interviewer, friend and political ally to whom Nixon disclosed his intent, said in print he was shocked by the President's outspoken harshness.

Not surprisingly, the historically damning text of the interview – Page One in every Hearst newspaper of the day (early 1973) – has seemingly been suppressed. My own clipping of the original article was lost, with all my files and most of my life's work, in the 1983 fire. My many efforts to obtain a replacement copy of Hearst's report – efforts that included letters to librarians at two of his newspapers – have been unsuccessful.

(Memo to the Working Press: a diligent investigative reporter with sufficient resources could probably find many more connections between the Limits project, the Powell Memo and Nixon's anti-99 Percent proclamation. A good starting point would be the MIT Trustees roster. Scan it for anyone who was amongst Powell's friends and associates and thus might have informed him of Limits and its anti-capitalist implications.  Bear in mind the lesson of the well-documented friendship between the arch-conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater and the genuinely liberal President John Fitzgerald Kennedy: that within the One Percent, political labels are ultimately meaningless – that One Percenters are united by their common Ruling Class economic interests far more than they are divided by the charades of partisan politics.)

Meanwhile consider what has been done to us since 1973. Capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and murderous poverty for everyone else – is now the defining reality of life in the United States. At the same time a growing body of evidence suggests the conclusions of Limits are frighteningly accurate. The bubble concept is proven beyond dispute: note the ongoing atrocities inflicted by the collapse of the housing market. That's a mere prelude – if Limits is correct – to the global disaster that looms.

Such a debacle, said to be only about 18 years away, would inflict unprecedented starvation, sickness and death – particularly in combination with terminal climate change.

Nevertheless even the newer Limits data has remained obscure, suppressed – as the original work eventually was – by a relentless, Powell-type deluge of antagonism. A recent sequel (The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update; Earthscan: 2004), is scarcely known outside academia. But now, as Common Dreams tells us, the projections of both the original Limits and its Update are reaffirmed by yet another study, this reported in the current issue of Smithsonian magazine. Perhaps Limits will at long last attain its deserved place as one of the most pivotal works in human history.

In any case the fact such studies continue – impossible without Ruling Class approval and financing – is still more evidence in support of a connection linking Limits and the Powell Memo to capitalism's methodical destruction of our quality of life. Indeed the environmentalist focus of Limits may itself be camouflage. Perhaps from the very beginning (and surely unbeknownst to its researchers and authors), its core purpose was that of an in-depth intelligence estimate, a detailed analysis of long-term threats to the One Percent's dominance. The likelihood of such a disguised purpose – the closely guarded secret of few executives and trustees – is underscored by MIT's extensive involvement with the U.S. military-industrial complex and the Club of Rome's relationship with the global monopolies.

Whether the book's urgent plea for environmental sanity expressed its authors' heartfelt intent or was merely eyewash, present-day conditions make it clear the One Percent chose long ago to reject the Limits alternatives and instead embraced the Ayn Rand option: business as usual, the 99 Percent and the world in which we live be damned. Capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – has become the planetary version of terminal cancer. What the Ruling Class is doing to us – the slaying of our American Dream and the termination of our American Experiment in constitutional democracy – is obviously far worse than just a proverbial rough spot on our national highway.

Contrary to the Big Lies disseminated by politicians and Ruling Class Media, the losses of our liberty and livelihood are not the temporary consequences of “war on terror” or “recession.” The associated restrictions are intended to last forever – and they probably will. Such is the real “change we can believe in”: the scheming that began with the Powell Memo, its purpose to ensure Ruling Class wealth and power survive – invariably at our expense, no matter the cost in death and suffering, no matter the magnitude of the impending environmental and economic disasters.

That's why – despite the fact we outnumber the oppressor 99 to 1 – our feeble efforts at resistance are already being crushed: witness the unprovoked attacks on the Occupy Movement. Despite our protests, those of us who are not useful as slaves will soon be cast into fatal impoverishment; the abandonment has already begun. This is the malevolent purpose that unites the downsizing of the economy, the destruction of the social-safety net, the attacks on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the war against women, the methodical elimination of our constitutional rights. The horrors of post-earthquake Haiti and post-Katrina New Orleans are previews of the misery to which the One Percent is condemning us.

Nor is the obviously genocidal intent of present-day capitalist policy anything new. Its 19th Century equivalent – disabled, sick or otherwise unprofitable slaves flung overboard during the mid-Atlantic passage – created a sea of death so genetically memorable it's even now infamous for its people-hungry sharks.

When we view today's United States in the context of the Powell Memo and the Limits project, we see a long-range cause-and-effect sequence that cannot be denied. We see too how we woefully underestimated the determination and Machiavellian cunning of the One Percent. We realize there will be no restoration of our constitutional rights, no economic recovery, no relief from debt slavery unless We the People – we the 99 Percent – mobilize in sufficient numbers to compel the necessary changes.

But the One Percent has already adopted a policy of brute-force attacks against nonviolent protesters. These tactics combine with the invincible terror-weapons in the Ruling Class arsenal of oppression to nearly eliminate our likelihood for success. Never in our species' history has such absolute power been possessed by so few. Peaceful resistance – already an expression of great courage – is fast becoming our sole opportunity to experience freedom.

(Copyright Loren Bliss 13 April 2012. Permission to reproduce is granted, conditional upon crediting the author and linking to Outside Agitator's Notebook.)

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