Racial Hatred Implicit in USian Total Surveillance State

An iconic, oft-published image I increasingly regard as a lament for the United States. The woman, a student at Western Washington State College, was a participant in an anti-war demonstration. Nikon F, 105 f/2.5 Nikkor, Tri-X at 800 in D-76, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1971. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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RACE HATRED SUSTAINED by unlimited police power was one of the defining characteristics of Nazi Germany, but is it now also a core principle in the new, post-Constitutional paradigm of U.S. governance? 

That's the underlying implication of Reuters' bold revelation an elite Drug Enforcement Administration unit routinely receives National Security Agency intercepts and reports from other intelligence agencies it then relays to state and local police departments throughout the nation. The DEA unit, says Reuters, is called the Special Operations Division or SOD and is partnered with the Department of Homeland Security.

Researched and written by investigative reporters John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke, the Reuters exposé says the cops who receive the information are under strict orders to keep its source secret – “not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.” It adds that “federal agents are trained to 'recreate' the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.” 

A second Reuters report further details how the government is using spy tactics to nullify the Constitutional rights of suspects and defendants in a broader spectrum of ordinary criminal cases. 

Because the prosecutions disclosed in the initial Reuters report are all apparently drug-related, they are of especially grave concern to minority advocates, who cite compelling statistical evidence  the so-called “war on drugs” is in fact a war against African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations peoples and indeed all other non-whites in the United States. 

The racial element in this story – which the carefully self-censured U.S. corporate media monopoly has yet to acknowledge – arises from the government's hugely disproportionate arrest and imprisonment of non-whites.  Whether in percentages or in raw numbers, the U.S. imprisons more of its people than any other nation. But the selectivity of its penal harshness is disclosed by the fact the vast majority of convicts are from nonwhite minorities. Though only 27.6 percent of the USian population is non-white (2010 census data), 67.6 percent of the nation's male convicts, and 50.7 percent of its female convicts, are nonwhite (see material linked immediately above). 

While minority advocates assert these statistics prove the racism the U.S. officially denies, the One Percent's fear of revolution is undoubtedly another major element in the targeting of minorities. Hitherto top-secret files of the KGB – Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security – revealed after the collapse of the Soviet Union its analysts had carefully evaluated the USian rebellions of the 1960s and concluded only the minority communities possessed any genuine revolutionary potential. Though the U.S. and Canadian news reports of these disclosures have seemingly vanished from public access, they nevertheless might explain why the intelligence agencies are using the rationale of the drug war to focus on minorities, particularly after the emergence of the Department of Homeland Security as the de facto USian secret police.

Lastly of course is the profit motive – the unapologetic savagery of for-profit prisons  as capitalism inevitably morphs into Ayn Rand fascism. “(T)he increasing overincarceration of people of color,” says the American Civil Liberties Union, “rakes in billions of dollars a year for (Corrections Corporation of America) and other for-profit prison companies.” In other words, the intelligence agencies are now aiding the increasingly privatized criminal justice system in its unacknowledged mission to ensure white supremacy and simultaneously add to the already obscene riches of the One Percent. 

But the dire implications of USian surveillance operations go far beyond matters of race. They are legitimately frightening to any and all dissidents everywhere in the nation. What is portrayed by the newest revelations is a power-mad government intent on imposing a 21st Century version of a Nazi or Stalinist police state. Given the Obama Administration's relentless campaign to forcibly disarm the civilian population, Second Amendment advocates are now especially wary of being unconstitutionally targeted. Under the new paradigm of USian governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – all such fears are undeniably rational.

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Another element in the tsunami of tyranny that is sweeping away USian freedom is the rat-out-your-colleague program by which the government is indoctrinating its employees in how to achieve job security by spying on one another. While capitalism has always encouraged workplace paranoia and the associated back-stabbing, out-ratting and brown-nosing as a means of destroying or preventing worker solidarity, one of the (former) attractions of government employment was the relative absence of such pressures. But this new effort by the Obama Administration will make government employees as mutually distrustful as their private-sector counterparts, thereby facilitating the union-busting the Republicans openly demand and most Democrats secretly support – which may, beneath its national security disguise, be the program's primary purpose. 

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A comment by which I responded to a piece about John Kiriakou, the former Central Intelligence Agency officer who dared reveal the unconstitutional USian torture program and is now imprisoned as a result,  gets right to it: 

Government IS the enemy. Who put Mr. Kiriakou in jail? Who reads all our mail? Who monitors our lives every minute of every day? Who provides the goon squads that enforce the corporate will? Who falsely pledges to protect our freedom then damns us all to inescapable slavery?

 

This, alas, is the one point upon which the conservatives are now proven to have been truly prophetic -- and if we could but grant them that, perhaps then we could begin to build a Left/Right solidarity sufficient to salvage our liberty.

 

LB/11 August 2013

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Snowden's Disclosures Could Spark Real USian Solidarity

“Tea Partiers: You Should Be Here Too,” another of my Occupy Tacoma pictures, this one originally published by Reader Supported News. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

 
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(NOTE: Changes in the circumstances of my life – a welcome increase in activities unrelated to this blog – mandate I now make Sundays or early Monday mornings the time of my weekly posting. Please accept my apology for any resultant inconvenience.)

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EDWARD SNOWDEN'S GREAT GIFT to us, We the People of the United States, is the dawning realization our love for what used to be “our” country transcends the divisiveness that denies us the solidarity we need if we are to prevail against the One Percent. The Ruling Class is thus trembling, possibly as never before in my 73-year lifetime. Little by slow, more and more of us – even some of the most pampered politicians – are awakening to the personal dangers implicit in the hideous truth our government has been captured by a cabal of morally imbecilic plutocrats whose greed is infinite, whose potential for tyranny knows no limits and whose imperial ambitions have no earthly boundaries.

But it remains to be seen whether this fledgling coalition of patriots can thrive and mature. President Obama is already demonstrating his slithery skill at backstabbing  those who oppose his worse-than-Nixon despotism,  and far too many Democrats have abandoned their pretense of progressive values in nauseatingly hypocritical efforts to remain faithful to their leader and the total-surveillance police-state he has created. It is exactly as if they were fascists in some lockstep cult of personality, and Obama's title were führer rather than chief executive. 

Yet in this newly emergent, post-Snowden context, it seems there are nearly as many of us, myself among them, who would willingly sidestep our instinctive distrust of Ron Paul and even refrain from expressing our contempt for the Teabag faction, if only it would help form a united front for the restoration of constitutional governance. Such face-to-face, human-to-human political re-integration would probably be good medicine for us all. Though it would undoubtedly be revolutionary, it probably would not result in revolution per se, because it might go revolution one better and make it unnecessary. 

Nor is Snowden's protection by Russia without its own (obscure) pro-democracy precedent. It was Mother Russia, in the person of Tsar Alexander II with the might of the Russian Imperial Navy's Baltic and Far Eastern fleets, that saved the federal Union  by protecting our coasts from British, French and Confederate attack during the Civil War. (My profound thanks to my late father, Donald R. Bliss [1910-1971], more learned in history than anyone I have ever known, who when I was age 10 or 11 and in fifth grade studying the Civil War, revealed to me the long-suppressed facts of these nation-preserving events.) 

Could it be that, by granting Snowden temporary asylum, Vladimir Putin, Russian president and de facto Tsar, has given the restoration of USian constitutional democracy the international protection it needs to succeed? If this is indeed what obtains, if Putin thus empowers Snowden and his disclosures, the irony – and some would say the karmic or poetic justice – would be profound, establishing a subtle parallel between the events of 1861-1865 and 2013. Meanwhile, the Josef Goebbels clones of the corporate propaganda media not withstanding, Russia already helps the United States in a surprising number of ways, as reported by Juan Cole. 

Yes, the Russians are clearly acting in their own interests – but so was France in the events of 1775-1783. 

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Unfortunately the odds of forming a united front of patriots for the restoration of constitutional governance are considerably diminished by two large groups within the body politic. 

One of these is the growing cult of Christian theocrats, about which I sound the alarm as often as I can and usually in detail I hope is genuinely frightening. (If you're reading this via TypePad, click on “Archives,” then click on “Religion.” If you're on Blogger, it's more of a pain because you have to do it year by year: look under “Blog Archives,” click on a year, wait for for the search-engine blank to appear at the upper left corner of the page, then type in “theocracy” without quotation marks.) In any case, suffice it to say these “born again” followers of Jesus jeopardize us all. They are defined by their fanatical opposition to sexual freedom, female personhood, science, the primacy of Nature and anything remotely resembling political or economic democracy. They are as uncompromisingly hateful, particularly toward women, as any member of the Taliban.

The other obstacle to patriotic solidarity is the dominant majority within the USian Left, the demonstrably self-defeating, hopelessly white-bourgeois, Ayn-Rand-tainted arrogance of which continues to astound me, even though by now – having watched it destroy the Occupy Movement  – I should expect no better. Never mind its characteristic loathing of intellectuals, union members and blue-collar people, its ignorant rejection of class-struggle or any other formalized ideology or analysis, and its unthinking acceptance of Randite elitism long ago reduced it to nothing more than a pseudo-Left. Loud and petulant enough to shout down any attempt to re-form the genuine Left that was fatally weakened by the post-World-War-II purges  and slain by the class conflicts exacerbated by the Vietnam War,  its primary political contribution is sustainment of the angry divisiveness that protects the Ruling Class by discouraging solidarity amongst the 99 Percent. Thus, hiding its Randite instincts behind its progressive rhetoric, this pseudo-Left routinely wages vocal and sometimes violent warfare against loggers, commercial fishers, oilfield riggers, long-haul truck-drivers, mass transport workers  and anyone else whose job or lack thereof is deemed politically “incorrect,” which of course includes nearly all of us whose annual income damns us as “the poor.” Note how the prefatory article isolates us – the homeless, the elderly, the disabled, the minorities – the better to facilitate the genocide-by-abandonment  President “Slick Willie” Clinton peddled as welfare reform and the cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid Barack the Betrayer continues to defiantly tout as a grand bargain.

Admittedly, my attitudes toward the pseudo-Left, which used to call itself the "New Left," are profoundly influenced by the late Jack Newfield. It's a tragedy his superb Village Voice reporting on the death of the New Deal coalition has apparently never been made available on-line. But it was through those stories of the late 1960s and early 1970s I acquired the tools to recognize the escalation of class warfare that, as I entered old age, would bring about the wholly dire half-fulfillment of my own father's oft-repeated prophecy: “the time will come when things in this country get so bad, the Red Army will be welcomed as an army of liberation.” Throughout the years after 1973 and everywhere in the nation, the costs of living had skyrocketed as wages stagnated or declined. But my editors demanded I remain silent. The closest I ever came to reporting what was really happening was a piece headlined “New York Creativity: An Uncertain Future.” Published in the August 1986 issue of Art Direction magazine – the last edition for which I myself was editor-in-chief – the report's boldface summary denounced “greedy landlords” for “jeopardizing the city's position on the cutting edge.” The text elaborated: “(T)he economics of New York living are becoming increasingly inhospitable...The situation in the photo district has become so critical that many established photographers have added their voices to a growing demand for commercial rent control...Village Voice writer Erika Munk predicted (three months earlier) that 'without a drastic change of direction, Manhattan will be finished as America's creative center'” – as in fact it has been.

But it is not just capitalist economics that killed the American Dream and overthrew the USian experiment in constitutional democracy. It was also the breathtaking stupidity of the pseudo-Left. As a press officer for an Office of Economic Opportunity program in 1971 – apart from the Army, the only government job I ever had – I remember all too well how the snooty condescension of the (white bourgeois) feminists doomed their efforts to organize welfare mothers, how the pampered collegians then damned all women on welfare as “hopelessly reactionary,” vowed to infiltrate the welfare bureaucracy and thereby make feminist consciousness-raising a mandatory prerequisite for receiving stipends and services. Of a kind with the draft-exempt academic elite who yet despise those of us who served in the Vietnam Era military, these sorority-house radicals soon joined with their male counterparts to foment the still-raging campaign for forcible civilian disarmament – the imposition of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that is one of the many forms of USian class warfare.

A decade later, the impending bankruptcy of a newspaper flung me jobless into the Reagan Recession and a hunt for employment that by 1982 had turned me into a commercial fisher – engineer/deckhand aboard a 96-foot purse seiner. Thus at age 42 a mostly benevolent fate allowed me to experience firsthand not only the quiet ecstasies and high-pucker-factor hazards of working at sea but the darker truths of USian blue-collar economics, realities about which I had hitherto only written from afar. One such sociological encounter, with a trust-funded student from Western Washington University's Huxley College of Environmental Studies, was particularly enlightening. The student, who could not see beyond the grease-stains on my engine-room jeans and therefore had no idea who or what I might be, presumptuously lectured me on the new paradigm of ecological economics: “you people,” he said, “are going to have to learn to live with less.” It was the same übermenschen mentality that in its most extreme form calls for spiking trees and threatening the lives and livelihoods of loggers – the sneering pomposity that, beginning in the Vietnam Era, has driven most  blue-collar men and women into the manipulative arms of the Republican Party.

Nevertheless I had thought the collapse of the Occupy Movement, which in large measure was the byproduct of college-age Caucasians who proudly label themselves as “progressives” but are as anti-intellectual as the late Sen. Joe McCarthy and as anti-union as the late Ayn Rand, had perhaps taught these pseudo-Leftists to at least partially muzzle their self-contradictory haughtiness. Not so, as Laura Gottesdiener demonstrated by implicitly dismissing all white victims of foreclosure as somehow magically immune to its heartbreaking, gut-wrenching horrors. “(T)he difficulties white America has faced during the foreclosure crisis,” she wrote, “don't compare with what Wall Street and the banks have inflicted, physically and psychologically, on African American neighborhoods.” In other words, despite the story's misleadingly inclusive headline (“Backyard Shock Doctrine: Wall Street's Destruction Comes Home”), Gottesdiener, herself Caucasian, says white folks just don't feel the pain.

As I (unpopularly) replied in the associated comment thread, “by defining foreclosure and eviction as a racial problem, she guarantees the indifference if not the overt hostility of the white majority – the approximately 75 percent of the USian Caucasians who are definitively racist.” Hence I feel she owes her readers a triple apology: to foreclosed, evicted and homeless whites for minimizing their misery; to foreclosed and evicted Blacks for marginalizing their sufferings by setting them apart from other class-war victims; and to the entire 99 Percent for re-inflaming the racial obstacles to solidarity.

To get a clearer picture of what Gottesdiener did wrong, it is useful to compare her above-linked prose with a new essay written by Chris Hedges.  Gottesdiener's research was seemingly detailed and in considerable depth, but she mis-assembled her facts into a lament for African Americans that simultaneously (and not very subtly) demonizes whites and thereby furthers the Ruling Class purpose of sustaining maximum 99 Percent divisiveness. Hedges meanwhile assembled similar and equally credible facts that, because of his reportorial thoughtfulness, does not minimize the significance of race but nevertheless becomes a lamentation for us all. Precisely because of its portrait of the universal suffering imposed by capitalism's transformation into Ayn Rand fascism, it furthers the evolution of 99 Percent solidarity.

Perhaps the difference between Gottesdiener on one hand and Hedges and myself on the other is a difference in backgrounds. Though Hedges is as famous as I am obscure, he is, as I am, a declared libertarian socialist, an unapologetic intellectual and a journalist of several decades' experience. Gottesdiener meanwhile labels herself a “freelance journalist” and declares herself “an organizer with Occupy Wall Street” – the latter a decidedly curious description, since I as an early activist in Occupy Tacoma know the entire Occupy Movement has been effectively dead since the spring of 2012. Moreover, since it was through Occupy I met some of the indescribably bitter adolescent children of white families who had been thrown out of work, foreclosed and evicted into homelessness – the kids themselves coalesced into an unspeakably angry subculture that will either form the core of a genuinely revolutionary movement or destroy itself in criminality – I am doubly perplexed by how she could be so dismissive of the associated trauma.

LB/4 August 2013

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Lose Right to Know, Lose All Hope of Liberty and Justice

“JERM/I Hate Whithe People!” Another addition to my extended essay on graffiti, I photographed this Tacoma scene in early 2008, then rediscovered it just two days ago while exploring “Old Data,” a hard-drive full of material a helpful Nurd acquaintance was kind enough to salvage from the ruins of a computer crash later that same year. Kodacolor 800, Pentax MX with 28mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, exposure not recorded; posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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LIBERTY DEMANDS THE free and unfettered exchange of information, a truth most of us recognize so instinctively we seldom consider it in detail. Though freedom of information is amongst the most simple of principles, it is also one of the most profound, for without it, there cannot be informed discussion and debate, and without such exchanges of ideas, there can be neither democratic process nor justice. Therefore to measure whether liberty in the United States is real or bogus, we need only ask ourselves how easy – or difficult – it is for us to stay informed about the people and events that determine whether we live in relative comfort or in the fear and wretchedness that increasingly defines USian reality for all save the privileged One Percent. Remember too this standard is applicable to every aspect of our lives – including those socioeconomic matters over which we as workers are now, by capitalism's final maturation into Ayn Rand fascism, prohibited from exerting any influence at all. But what we are focusing on today is not economics per se; it is the prerequisite of an informed public to the achievement and maintenance of what we label “democracy.” And since we already know there is no longer any freedom of information at the federal level – witness President Obama's imposition of the total-surveillance state and his unprecedented war on whistleblowers and the working press – we are looking instead at parallel examples from other USian realms. 

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Until 2009, when I received my last newspaper paycheck, I nearly always had the advantage of a ringside seat in the local and state arenas of politics and government, and even when I was not officially a member of the working press, my reputation gave me comparable access. I had a good long run with the media world's gift of super-citizenship: I became a professional journalist in November 1956, the beginning of the last third of my 16th year, when The Grand Rapids Herald hired me as both a copy-boy and a sports stringer, and its American Newspaper Guild local issued me my first union card, two milestones in which I took enormous pride. For most of the decades thereafter, staying informed was generally no more difficult than observing events and interviewing the participants. The techniques are essentially the same whether you're covering sports or reporting on public affairs. I debuted at the latter in 1958, the initial fulfillment of one of the goals that had been mine since my decision at age 14 to become what in those days was called a newsman. My first political story was a detailed report on that year's local elections, the facts gathered during an all-nighter in the vote-counting room at the Knox County Courthouse, an assignment that produced a half-dozen double-spaced typewritten takes for The Fountain Citizen, a prosperous weekly that served a sprawling, relatively populous but unincorporated suburb immediately north of Knoxville. It took me another five years, three of which were consumed by a Regular Army enlistment, to achieve my paramount goal – that is, to break into investigative reporting. My debut was published by The Oak Ridger in 1963 – Managing Editor Dick Smyser had assigned me to ferret out the facts behind a flare-up of gun violence in the East Tennessee coal fields – and I quickly learned that, just as I had imagined, here was journalism at its most demanding, particularly when you had to work under-cover or organize clandestine meetings in out-of-the-way locales to protect your sources. But even amidst my scariest and most challenging investigation, for The Jersey Journal in 1970 – a double-barreled exposé of the heroin-addiction epidemic inflicted on the United States by the Vietnam War and the federal government's desperate efforts to keep it secret – I never thought much about my right to know or my readers' right to learn the truth as best as I could report it. Like most of my colleagues, I merely took those rights for granted.

In other words, shielded as I was by my press card, I was pampered, probably blinded and perhaps even spoiled rotten by what I now know was, just as I said above, super-citizenship: an ivory-tower view of USian governance. As I am finding out in the Average-Joe status to which I have at last been reduced by official (albeit only partial) retirement, I have no de facto right to know anything, despite de jure assurances to the contrary. Public disclosure and transparency laws are thus meaningless – unless of course you can afford lawyers to enforce compliance. But I lack the requisite wealth, which means the only real right I have is to badger politicians and bureaucrats and other sorts of officials with emails and telephone calls they in turn are free to ignore at will. Unlike a daily or even weekly newspaper, this blog, with its national and international readership that numbers only in the upper hundreds, is insufficiently influential to compel even the basic courtesy of “no comment” responses. And “compel” is the appropriate verb: under the new paradigm of USian governance – unlimited profit and absolute power for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – the politicians and bureaucrats serve only the One Percent, which means they now respond to any of us in the 99 Percent only if and when they are forced to do so. Thus their responses are either brazen lies (Obama's “change we can believe in”), Ayn Rand sneering (Romney's “47 percent who...believe that government has a responsibility to care for them”) or unapologetic violence, relentless onslaughts with truncheons, pepper gas and rubber bullets by the legions of federally militarized police that, in obedience to orders  from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, mercilessly crushed the Occupy Movement. I doubt I need point out the brutality of the assaults indicates the authorities' intent was to forever suppress any further USian capability of organized dissent – much as Tsar Nicholas II sought to do on the original Bloody Sunday,  8 January 1905.

Obviously – a bitter lesson learned too late – I should have paid more attention to all those angry 99 Percenters who, particularly after 22 November 1963, repeatedly warned me that if you're an Average Joe or an Average Lisa, the politicians just tell you to fuck off. Stupidly, I always dismissed such protestations as hyperbole born of willful ignorance – mostly refusal to learn how the system works. But now, in official retirement, I'm an Average Joe myself. I'm the one who's being told to fuck off – though never in such honest words of course – and now I see it was I who did not know the system. 

Which is all by way of preface to explaining why the controversial story I promised last week remains unreported. The politicians and their collaborators in a certain local non-governmental organization apparently know I sense incipient class-betrayal in their otherwise inexplicable refusal to discuss a proposal for mandatory paid sick leave that, were it to become law, would dramatically improve the quality of life for every woman, man and child within the Tacoma city limits. Now – never mind my long and award-winning history in local journalism – they won't answer my emails or telephone calls about the seemingly endless delays that, probably just as planned, are quietly drowning the proposal in a sea of forgetfulness. This non-response is a new development – a new experience for me, too – though it may also be retaliation for my revelations of the hatefulness behind the local war on transit.  Whatever, it portends the doom of the sick-leave proposal itself, which is a direct challenge to the anti-worker principles of Ayn Rand governance. Thus we can confidently assume it won't ever be formalized as a city ordinance, much less enacted. In turn this means the main question facing the NGO leaders is how to present their failure as success, while the politicians have to calculate how to disguise their obedient service to the One Percent as democracy in action. 

Such is life in this Pacific Northwest seaport city of 200,000 people, where – despite the notorious anti-transit-user bigotry of the voters and elected officials – the local bus system may yet survive another year.  Meanwhile, the non-response to my inquiries tells me I'm now just like every other USian citizen who is not part of the Ruling Class, which means I'm viewed by the capitalists and their politicians and bureaucrats as an enemy of the(ir) (e)state. 

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Apropos the intimate relationship between censorship and injustice, I do not understand why so many USian feminists steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the terrible and escalating danger of Christian theocracy in the United States. It is a definitively subversive threat that is lavishly funded by the One Percent. Its menace is credibly documented, including in several links below. Its rationale – that theocracy is most profitable means of achieving a slave-minded workforce – is well known. It's innate malevolence – particularly to women – is frighteningly portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale, a superb novel by Margaret Atwood that is arguably the feminist equivalent of George Orwell's 1984. In the real world, theocracy's Skinner-box prototype is the USian South, where the Ku Klux Klan functioned as the Christian equivalent of the Islamic “morality police” – precisely the reason the Klan is colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Theocracy's financial efficiency is proven there too: note the region's conditioned hostility to labor unions, its viciously substandard pay scales and its abysmal levels of educational achievement. Indeed, corporate executives rule the southern workplace by what amounts to divine right; throughout the South, to defy your boss is literally to defy god almighty. The attendant fear of eternal damnation – subconsciously the most terrifying prospect ever inflicted on the human mind – silences any who might demand living wages. It also dumbs down all but the most scholarship-oriented youths, who seem to require religious dispensation or other forms of protection by the aristocracy merely to advance beyond the level of high-school pregnancy. And now, with the theocratic South's Christian misogyny metastasizing throughout the United States, women in fully 87 percent of the nation's counties are already denied local access to abortion.  Then why – with the basic right of women to control their very selfhood at such grave risk – do so many USian feminists aid and abet the imposition of theocracy by refusing to speak out against it? 

My guess is these feminists' suppression of their own voices is mandated by a combination of factors. One is the extent to which the USian feminist movement has been captured by the Democratic Party, itself an eager albeit far less publicized participant in the theocratic blitzkrieg, for which again see below. A second factor is so-called political “correctness.” To acknowledge the murderous threat of Christian theocracy is to confront the blood-drenched, anti-woman, anti-Nature horror that is Abrahamic theocracy in general, which includes the Hebrew theocracies of the Old Testament era, the new Judaic theocracy that is now overtaking Israel, the 1700-year reign of Christian theocracy in Roman and post-Roman Europe, and the Islamic theocracy that has ruled the Middle East since the late 600s. But the USian Left is not only in ignorant denial of the relevant history; it cannot abide any admission the aircraft-hijackers of 9/11 – regardless of what else might have been done to intensify the Reichstag-Fire impact of their atrocities – clearly believed they were heroes in the resumption of Islam's 1400-year war against Western Civilization. Were USia's self-proclaimed Leftists to admit the reality of that war, which is unequivocally proven by the very history they reject as irrelevant, they would be forced to set aside their (patently false) conception of Islamic terrorists as “liberation fighters.” Instead the terrorists would be recognized as what they are – murderous religious fanatics, the equivalent of Ku Klux Klansmen whose fanaticism is so extreme, it has prompted them to adopt suicide tactics. Hence, if USian feminism is to maintain its alliance with other Left-minded groups, many feminists seem to feel they have no alternative but to say nothing about theocratic encroachment – no matter the very specific hazard all forms of Abrahamic theocracy present to women's intellectual, sexual and reproductive freedoms. A third factor in this ongoing campaign of self-censorship is probably the arrogant indifference of many USian feminists toward religion in general, which they dismiss as irrelevant superstition – never mind that by their dismissal, they blind themselves to what innumerable polls prove remains the primary ideological force in USian life. In this context, it is relevant to note that author Atwood is a Canadian and therefore (presumably) free of the pressures for lockstep ideological conformity that characterize the entire USian political spectrum. All that said, because my own access to feminist perspectives is clearly limited by my gender, I yearn for someone with the honesty and courage of a Joreen Freeman  to address just why it is so many USian feminists are so loathe to publicly denounce the near-limitless peril the encroachment of theocracy imposes on women – and on all the rest of us as well. Thus my response to “Why the Relentless Assault on Abortion Rights in the U.S.?,” a glib but profoundly misleading piece  by the journalist and historian Ruth Rosen:

Why the relentless assault on women's sexual freedom in the United States? Unfortunately Ms. Rosen neither states the question correctly nor answers it truthfully. The answer, of course, is the One Percent has decided zero-tolerance Christian theocracy is the most profitable (and therefore most expeditious) way of controlling the 99 Percent – all the rest of us. And the vital first step in imposing Abrahamic theocracy of any kind – Christian, Islamic, Jewish – is the re-enslavement of women. (As for why women are the specific prime target, note the psychological and semiotic messages implicit in the fact that – whenever Abrahamic orthodoxy is rejected or transcended – Liberty is always portrayed as female.)

 

Those who doubt the theocratic threat are urged to visit the website Theocracy Watch, which – due to its lockstep allegiance to the Democratic Party, unfortunately suppresses the under-publicized involvement of leading Democrats, among them Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, in the ever-escalating push toward theocracy. (Jeff Sharlet reveals how Clinton “fights side-by-side with [Sen. Sam] Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it.” See The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, p. 275.) Meanwhile Obama is forever willing to surrender women's reproductive rights  even as he shows his true theocratic colors  by radically expanding President George Bush's program of “faith-based initiatives,” thereby providing federal funds to religious social-service agencies that routinely discriminate on the basis of belief. Obama's betrayals, like Clinton's, are facilitated by Democrat hypocrisy – the Democrats' reflexive, often fanatical support of policies they would fiercely oppose if advocated or imposed by Republicans.

 

Two other sources are also especially useful in tracking the theocratic threat. These are Americans United for Separation of Church and State  and Merger Watch. The activities of the former, chiefly lawsuits against the more blatant incursions of Christian theocracy, are well known. The latter group, which is documenting the Roman Catholic Church's newest assault against women's rights – the malevolently cunning tactic of buying up health care organizations and terminating women's sexual freedom by imposing the church's zero-tolerance prohibitions – has mostly been ignored by so-called "mainstream media." Obviously the One Percent does not want women recognizing and mustering against the church's new, market-based approach to re-imposing total misogyny. Nevertheless, women in the state of Washington, where the church already owns and/or controls at least half of all health-care providers, have begun to react. 
 

In any case, as long as Democratic apologists and other clandestine defenders of Abrahamic misogyny continue to deliberately suppress information about the real nature of the theocratic threat, we all remain at huge and terrible risk – though none more so than women.

 

*****

 

Oh how I miss the complimentary tickets that came with being a member of the working press. Nevertheless, thanks to the financial beneficence of a dear friend, earlier this week I was able to watch a documentary film entitled The War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State. Thought-provoking and informative, I recommend it to anyone who can find a way to see it, which may be difficult, as too many major theaters seem loathe to screen it. But here in Tacoma, the film's showing was facilitated by the bravery of the people who own and manage The Grand Cinema, a feisty independent movie-house that dares feature art films in a notably nyekulturniy town and, best of all, is only a short walk from my dwelling-place. But the film is also a bit disappointing. An unsparing report of military personnel slain, maimed or endangered in the name of profit and lives ruined by government oppression, it nevertheless ends on a janglingly inappropriate upbeat note, as if Director Robert Greenwald believes we've all been so brainwashed by the cult of positive thinking – picture a Smiley Face atop a mound of corpses (“Have a Happy Day”) – even bad news needs be given a Walt Disney ending to make it palatable to the USian consciousness. Though in fairness to Greenwald, I should point out the Whistleblowers footage was already in the can when the worst possible news broke – that here in the United States of George-Bush-cum-Barack-Obama and the One Party of Two Names,  there is no longer either a free press nor even much of a pretense of liberty. Our last remaining illusions of freedom have been dispelled by Edward Snowden's courageous disclosures of the relentlessly totalitarian nature of the USian state security apparatus, which is obviously aimed more at us, the increasingly alienated 99 Percent, than it is intended to counter any threat from abroad: once again, welcome to the Fourth Reich. Though now we know just how awful things truly are, there's a (tiny) chance we might begin to formulate adequate strategy and tactics of resistance. 

But the reflexive denial of our ever-more-hopeless circumstances continues unabated. During the apres-flick discussion, somebody predictably quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1964 statement that “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Alas, my admiration for the martyred King does not change the fact his observation, which has a long and illustrious genealogy dating at least back to 1810,  is nevertheless a blatant falsehood. The hideous truth of human history – at least human history since the fall of Knossos marked the ultimate triumph of patriarchy – is that justice, which cannot be achieved without liberty, is but a willow-the-wisp, a haunting, ephemeral, poignantly brief glimmer of conceptual light amidst a seemingly endless midnight of savagery. Yes, there have been moments of liberty, of justice as defined by democratic and quasi-democratic states, but the associated freedoms were mostly limited to a chosen few and in every case, including our own, were eventually swept away by the tides of tyranny that characterize the human norm. Thus our species' scant few attempts at building just societies are dwarfed by seeming endless millennia of despotism. Don't take my word for it; measure it yourselves: the centuries of oppression predominate by a ratio of at least 20 to one. And now – as proven by the ever-intensifying intrusion of Obama's zero-tolerance surveillance state – the darkness of injustice and enslavement is descending once again, quite possibly to imprison us until our species' self-imposed extinction marks the end of time itself. And there is scant hope for rescue or amelioration. Though the arc of the universe is indeed long – a span we can now measure by the same technologies that guarantee our enslavement – it bends not toward justice but toward ever-more-total subjugation. 

LB/26-28 July 2013 

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Working on a Long Story: This Week's Essay Very Short

"Stop Corporate Abuse of Democracy; Tax the Rich": Yet another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma pictures, as relevant now as in November 2011. Pentax MX, 100 mm SMCP-M f/2.8, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

 

*

MY BLOGGING TIME this week was taken up by old-fashioned reportorial work – chasing a story via the telephone and the Internet. On Wednesday I thought I had it pretty well in hand, so well I was beginning to write parts of it in my head. But then yesterday I discovered what I thought I knew was mostly wrong – that not only was I ignorant, but I had a helluva lot more to learn before the story would be ready to write. 

Meanwhile here are links to three pieces by other writers I strongly urge you to read:
The first is old news – how the Occupy Movement was suppressed by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security through its command and control of federally militarized local police departments. But the report is worth reading again in the context of the most recent disclosures  about the total surveillance that now defines us all – the entire 99 Percent – as enemies of the global USian empire and all its corporate states.

Link number three is to a vital and closely related report from Europe – Former President Carter's admission there is no longer any “functioning democracy” anywhere in the United States.  That Carter's remarks were available only in a major German newspaper (and not only carefully excluded from its English-language editions but suppressed by all USian mainstream media), is more proof of the informational iron curtain that is being drawn down around the U.S. as it moves ever closer to becoming the genuine Fourth Reich, thereby fulfilling the dreams of the Nazi war criminals the federal government and its capitalist overlords embraced in 1945. 

LB/20 July 2013

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Total Surveillance: Absolute Proof We the People Are Nothing More Than Lab Rats in a Capitalist Skinner Box

Another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, the woman's placard as apt now as in October 2011, when her smile reflected the joy and optimism that was all too soon crushed by USian governments at all levels. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013 (Click on image to view it full size.)

*

 

(Note: Vital medical procedures consumed so much of my time during the past seven days, this essay is again unavoidably late, and I again apologize for my tardiness. But the news is good. Contrary to what was first suspected, my eyes are free of glaucoma. Moreover, the latest surgical techniques bypass unrelated conditions that would have prohibited cataract surgery. Thus my eyesight – and therefore my ability to photograph – can be surgically restored, for which I am grateful beyond words.)

 

***

THE TOTAL-SURVEILLANCE STATE is undoubtedly the most terrifying governmental application of modern technology that has yet been revealed to us. Its terror exceeds that of thermonuclear weapons or nuclear melt-downs, which we can always convince ourselves will only be inflicted elsewhere upon others. Unlike The Bomb, which save in Hiroshima or Nagasaki has not yet been dropped, or the homicidal reactor, which – at least so far as we're allowed to know – has run amok only at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima – the total-surveillance state murders us all by killing our ability to think and speak freely. It thereby makes us less-than-human. In other words, it reverses evolution, reducing us to the mind-crushed state of slaves or prisoners. And as we grasp what it does to us in the context of the additional fear generated by organized assaults against specific groups and individuals  – women; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamp recipients; organized labor; members of the working press; photographers whether professional or amateur; any other social critics whose disclosures or protests dare expose the unapologetic savagery of the new paradigm of USian governance – it should already be provoking massive, nationwide anger. The very concept of what it meant to be “American” has not only been ruthlessly violated but maliciously abandoned, as if the government itself has officially torn down our flag, burned it, urinated on the ashes and stomped them into filth. Might there then soon be the same public outpouring of humanistic, patriotic rage as followed the sinking of the Lusitania, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the massacre of innocents symbolized by the numbers 9/11? Apparently not. The vast majority of the USian people are sullenly silent – and in all probability will remain so.

Yet what is inflicted upon us is not, of course, really a new paradigm of governance at all, and that – especially the associated guilt – may be one of the reasons we are thus far so submissive. To the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, to the subjects of the colonial empire the United States seized from Spain, sought to expand into Asiatic Russia  and imposed elsewhere including Africa and other parts of Asia, the sadism and brutality that now characterizes USian governance of its homeland is an old and ugly story. All that has changed is such imperial malevolence has now become the domestic policy of the dominant political parties (or, more correctly, the One Ruling Class Party of Two Names), which means it is now enforced by the entire federal government (especially by the secret-police apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security), as well as by all the state and local governments. But it has always been the policy of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department and the various other overseas extensions of the USian empire whether official (as in Vietnam), capitalist (as at Bhopal and Bangladesh) or mercenary  (as in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans). It also means we of the USian 99 Percent are now potentially no better off than the Iraqis or even the First Nations people our ancestors genocidally displaced – perhaps the true meaning of Barack Obama's “change we can believe in.”  The only difference is we have yet to suffer our own Trail of Tears,  our own Wounded Knee. But we can be certain of one thing: equal horrors – or probably events far more horrible – are looming, and they are not on a comfortably distant horizon, which means they will occur within many of our own lifetimes. For that is the hideous truth of the total-surveillance state: it has no other purpose  than to facilitate maximum zero-tolerance tyranny. And the fact we have not already taken to the streets in massive resistance suggests we have already been conditioned to the reflexive submissiveness required of a conquered people.

However there is one flame-bright exception to this dismaying acceptance of what seems ever more likely to be our unavoidable reduction to permanent serfdom and slavery: a growing number of USian women, whose liberation movements I once believed might at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles, are again rising up angry. More than any other force within the 99 Percent – certainly more than we males whose identities are occupational rather than biological and have therefore been hopelessly shattered by permanent unemployment – these women seem closest to recognizing that the United States has been cunningly turned into the human equivalent of a Skinner Box. Though they have yet to connect the proverbial dots, I have no doubt they will soon understand how the dramatic increase in oppression – the atrocities summarized above – exemplifies the new Ruling Class methodology of forceful behavior modification even as the all-seeing god's-eye of total-surveillance enables the overseers to monitor and refine their techniques with a speed and efficiency hitherto imagined only by villains of the same Ted Bundy arrogance that characterized Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet and let us not forget our own Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. In this repugnant context – especially given that history shows the grievances of women are often the hinge-issues in successful revolutions, the methodical assaults on women's hard-won sexual freedom – the avowedly misogynistic political efforts  and the growing epidemic of physical attacks combined with the institutionalized protection of the attackers  – reveal how the Ruling Class views the suppression of female independence as the key to the abolition of liberty and justice for all. Damning enough in its own right, the revelation is underscored by the associated treachery of the Obama Administration, typical Obama the Orator ploys of eloquently endorsing women's demands while Barack the Betrayer sneakily back-stabs  the very measures he falsely claims to support. The common denominator in all these outrages – just as the would-be victims themselves proclaim – is a concerted effort to force women and girls back into the de facto slavery demanded by patriarchy, explicitly by its Abrahamic religious offspring (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), implicitly by its economic fulfillment in capitalism's final transformation to fascism. Every time a woman is imprisoned by the (very rational) fear she will not only be raped but her assailant will be officially protected, the intended behavior modification has achieved its goal. Factor in the similar barriers and prohibitions inflicted on social critics, journalists, photographers, labor activists, anyone else of either gender who might be inclined to resist the blitzkrieg by which Ayn Rand fascism is conquering the United States, and our portrait of a nation ruled like a Skinnerian rat-maze is complete and undeniable. B. F. Skinner himself stated in 1972 what is obviously the key precept of USian governance today: "The issue is to improve the way in which (humanity) is controlled." To which women are responding with increasingly public defiance.  The question, of course, is what they will do when the state confronts them with the same combination of economic retaliation bolstered by truncheon-and-pepper-gas barbarism that has already hammered us men into submission.

*** 

Nevertheless it is by viewing the war against women as a carefully scripted campaign of behavior-modification we gain our most sharply focused picture of capitalism's thrust toward Christian theocracy as its primary modality for controlling the USian 99 Percent. But the Left is as powerless as the Right to combat it. The secular and/or libertarian Right is of course nullified by the fact the imposition of theocracy is a major objective of the Right's capitalist financiers. The Left however is paralyzed by its own insistence on political “correctness,” in this instance its refusal to recognize Islam's history of imposing its own brand of theocracy – including the most virulent forms of misogyny characteristic of human societies today – wherever it ascends to power. To denounce theocracy is therefore – at least obliquely – to denounce Islam, something the doctrinaire Left and even the pseudo-Left cannot bear to do. Though it is something of an aside, no doubt the associated taboos explain why Socialist Worker refused to publish the following letter, my response to its (above-linked) report on how President Obama backstabbed women even on the hitherto (seemingly) long-settled issue of access to contraception: 

While Ms. Schulte's reporting on how President Obama enabled the Religious Right to gain the tactical and strategic high ground in the reproductive-rights struggle is the best such work I have seen anywhere, it nevertheless omits a vital fact: the extent to which (even) Democratic Party politicians are (clandestinely) committed to the imposition of Christian theocracy on the United States.

 

Though it is fashionable for socialists of all sorts to underestimate the importance of Christianity (and Abrahamic religion generally) in USian life, a majority of at least 63 percent of the U.S. population is already fundamentalist as defined by belief in the Bible as "literally true" (see http://legacy.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Bible.htm), which itself indicates a looming danger to secular governance. Combine that with capitalism's historical preference for zero-tolerance theocracy as the most efficient means of ensuring a submissive, slave-minded Working Class, and the probable motive behind Obama's serial betrayals of reproductive freedom come into sharp and terrifying focus.

 

As for documentation of the Democrats' clandestine role in the imposition of theocracy, one source is especially useful. This is Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, (HarperCollins: 2008), which exposes Hillary Clinton's behind-the-scenes collaboration with Sam Brownback "for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it" (pg. 275). The same sort of "tunneling" is precisely what was accomplished by the Obama “compromise” that added to the USian definition of religious liberty the alleged “right” of believers to impose their doctrines on non-believers, as for example in the case of Christian pharmacists who arbitrarily deny contraception to unmarried women. Given the president's oft-demonstrated Machiavellian skill, this staggering blow to church-state separation is clearly no accident.

 

Another excellent albeit more generalized book on the threat of theocracy is Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Simon & Schuster: 2006). But in most of the United States, the danger is already reality. The Bible Belt South has been a de facto theocracy since the Civil War: note the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan – “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” – which denotes its function as a Christian equivalent of the lslamic Morality Police. And – as proven by worsening restrictions on contraception and the near-total destruction of abortion facilities – the remainder of the midlands are not far behind. It is a risk we ignore at our own huge peril – a dire hazard that indeed we have already ignored far too long.

 

***

 

It is perhaps worthwhile to note at this point that beyond history's seemingly endless series of isms, there are only two alternative forms of human governance. One alternative is tyranny: rule by a dictator, or dictators, whether overt (as in Nazi Germany or the theocracy of Iran), or from behind various pseudo-democratic facades (as in today's United States). The other alternative is liberty – the never-fully realized theory embodied in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.” During my elementary-school days, 1946 through 1951, all third graders not only learned to recite the Preamble from memory, but to give simple examples of its meaning, a requirement long ago repealed as dangerous to capitalism and deleterious to its objectives. But the Preamble is not as unique as we USians were typically taught, back in those halcyon days when fledgling minds were still entrusted with libertarian ideals. Similar sentiments are expressed somewhat more bluntly in the concluding lines of The Communist Manifesto: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite!” Thus the greatest fear of the USian Ruling Class has always been that Communism (or some other form of socialism) would prevail here – a perfect fit with the purposes and principles of “we the people” as elicited by the Preamble and the Constitution itself. But in the Skinner Box United States, monitored as it is by total surveillance, all such potential is obliterated forever. 

The limitless tyranny of the total-surveillance state is, perhaps ironically, the final result of the so-called “revolution” brought about by computers, which have given the global Ruling Class the godlike omnipotence it has consciously sought for at least two thousand years. The computer is thus irrefutable proof of the One Percent's defining purpose – the unspeakable lust for the zero-tolerance subjugation and total enslavement of all the rest of us, which it is now after 20 centuries of effort achieving via technologies against which there is no effective defense save re-adoption of seemingly obsolete machinery.  Meanwhile the popularization of the computer is the result of the most elaborate snake-oil scam in human history. It and its offshoots are peddled to the public as the apex of modern necessity even as society is methodically restructured to make all such gadgets essential – and damn those who cannot afford to keep up. Yet all the while, and from the very beginning, the profits so amassed are focused on perfecting the computer as the ultimate weapon of oppression. Nor could this story have ended in any other way; the computer as we know it grew not from humanitarian objectives but from the profiteering instincts of the capitalists  and the deadly necessities of modern warfare.  Indeed the computer and the manner in which it was thrust upon us is an object lesson in pure capitalism – the moral imbecility of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, and therefore the closest approximation to absolute Evil our species has yet evoked. The computer, given its vital role in creation of the global slave state, is perhaps capitalism's most definitive product. It is surely capitalism's most pivotal tool. For without the computer, the Ruling Class would never have been able to shrink all human society to a Skinner Box, with ourselves reduced to nothing more than laboratory rats in the One Percent's frantic, apocalypse-driven quest for wealth and power. 

LB/13-14 July 2013 

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