Electronic Surveillance Is the End of All Human Potential

The personal computer: despite its apparent homeyness, an electronic ball and chain. A picture made while I was adjusting the focus on my M2 Leica. Kodak BW400CN, no other data; colorization and posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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(A conceptual prelude to this essay appeared as my contribution to the comment thread of Truthout's republication  of Chris Hedges' “The Sparks of Rebellion,” 30 September 2013.)

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PREDICTABLY, NO ONE DARES articulate the three most bitter truths revealed by Edward Snowden's courageous disclosures about the National Security Agency and its total surveillance state. Firstly, Snowden's revelations make it clear the political revolution that was allegedly to have been facilitated by computers and other digital technologies was never more than delusion. Secondly, he has laid bare the fact the United States of America is no longer anything like yesteryear's “sweet land of liberty” – that it is instead the most aggressively merciless empire in human history, potentially as murderous at home as it already is abroad. Thirdly – and this is by far the most painful truth of all – there is no longer any doubt we are now and forever stripped naked by the relentlessly probing electronic fingers of the state. We have been robbed of the privacy that was the wellspring of not just our personal freedom but of all human aspirations, and it is now becoming ever more obvious there is not one fucking thing any or all of us can do to regain what has been stolen from us. It is literally as if we have been conquered by some alien race of super-tyrants from outer space.

Our stunned silence in the face of this self-inflicted and most likely fatal turning-point in our species' evolutionary history – the fact it obliterates any and all possibility for the sorts of individual innovation that has hitherto been our collective salvation – is attributable to the Moron Nation ignorance fostered by the censorship and disinformation necessary to perpetuate capitalism, with capitalism here defined as I always define it – infinite greed elevated to ultimate virtue. Thus we have been conditioned to adopt the self-defeating belief liberty is not an inherent human right protected by law but is merely a privilege awarded only by possession of certain products, specifically computers, cell phones and other devices of information technology.

Now though we are discovering these instruments we were falsely taught were the epitome of liberation are instead the cornerstone devices of the total-surveillance state and are therefore mechanisms of self-enslavement. Our resultant mental paralysis is yet another proof of our cradle-to-grave conditioning in a society cunningly restructured into a global Skinner Box, the notorious rat-race prison beloved of the behavior-modification psychologists whose incipiently fascist theories underly so much of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Whether we admit it or not – and most of us cannot stand the pain of such honesty -- we are reduced to the terrorized consciousness of laboratory animals for whom certain maneuvers previously brought rewards and an illusion of security but now yield only painful electric shocks.

Meanwhile the absolute refusal of mass media to acknowledge what obtains is merely another example of the obscene selfishness that is capitalism in action. Computer sales alone generated revenue of $85.5 billion in 2011,  the last year for which complete data is available, with sales of wireless devices adding another $169.8 billion.  The combined totals, $255.3 billion, amount to 15 percent of 2011's retail and wholesale gross domesticproduct. In other words, our induced compulsion to squander skyrocketing sums of money on our own ever-more-inescapable electronic shackles generates an income vast enough to bribe every paycheck journalist in the nation and yet allow for the unimaginably lavish profits demanded by our One Percent overlords.

Perhaps in part because I am a grandson of Amos R. Bliss, the Canadian engineer who in 1901 invented theautomotive dynamo  and thereby made possible the motorcar as we know it, I know something about the research and contemplation that precedes creativity whether practical or artistic. I therefore recognize how the bottomless pathos of our now-eternal nakedness is the death of all such effort. From now hence, the omnipresence of the total surveillance state denies us the privacy essential to human initiative and guarantees our ingenuity can be realized only within the vindictively conformist and therefore relentlessly oppressive limits of the corporate hierarchy.

We already know the results. An earlier example was the zomboid stultification of the Medieval schoolmen, imprisoned by doctrines that, on pain of being burned alive, allowed no metaphysical speculation beyond how many angels might occupy the head of a pin. Today we have the corporate and governmental aristocracies similarly straitjacketed by the dogma of ever-expanding profit and thereby denied the measures that might (yet) save our species from extinction and our planet from reduction to a cockroach-infested midden. Tomorrow, thanks to the electronic rapists of the NSA and how they have violated even our contemplative space, we are allowed no creativity whatsoever.

That fictional production-line art factory in which each sweaty member of a minimum-wage workforce uniformed in smocks and berets repetitively applies a single one-color brush-stroke to each canvas as it speeds past on a conveyor belt may be more prophecy than fantasy. Go to school; study art; indenture yourself for life with student loans; don the black beret and white polyester smock of Picasso Products or the blue beret and gray denim smock of Matisse Manufacturing -- that or paint yourself an artsy placard saying “will work for food”: it's the new American Dream. 

Surely it is no coincidence the U.S. government with all its spies and assassins and surveillance technology and weapons from which there is now no sanctuary anywhere on this planet is the exact duplicate of the all-seeing, endlessly vengeful, infinitely sadistic god of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Republican Party, from its inception the voice of the financial and industrial One Percent, now officially claims the U.S. as a Christian empire, “one nation under god,” which of course means all the enemies of that god – Nature, women, a long litany of “deviants” that includes gays, lesbians, transsexuals, bisexuals, unbelievers, nonconformists and of course writers and artists – are now (or soon will be) enemies of the state. In the previous century, such tyrannies were sometimes overthrown by revolutions, witness the events in Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba. But now, given the eternal invincibility guaranteed the government by its technology, our only hope of liberation is the death-dealing paradox of Mother Nature's apocalyptic rage against the very infrastructures upon which our lives depend.

Nevertheless I still hear many people, and not all of them young, who in their abyssal ignorance of realpolitik fantasize some basement-bound hacker – the modern equivalent of the attic-dwelling anarchist – will cobble together a digital device capable of defeating the machines by which we are oppressed and enslaved. Obviously this is the newest most delusional manifestation of the clinical condition known as magical thinking – believing in something that is simply not possible. To repeat what I noted above, such invention demands privacy, and that is precisely what we are no longer allowed, nor will we ever be allowed such privacy again. It also demands vast sums of capital – the imperial necessity that underlies our staggeringly huge military research budgets – and most of all what it requires is access to supportive technology of a caliber no revolution-minded hacktivist could ever possibly afford. Thus the evil genius of the One Percent in making access to such knowledge and facilities dependent on education so impossibly expensive it is available only to the trust-funded spawn of the corporate aristocracy or to those willing to indenture themselves for life – in either case the ultimate guarantee of political reliability under capitalist governance.

I have argued earlier variants of these points since the personal computer craze began in the late 1970s, when the earliest forms of digital technology were fervently embraced by the nation's (pretend) Left – bourgeois elitists who were too anti-intellectual to comprehend class struggle and too slothful for the hard work of organizing but had enough disposable income to decorate their homes with electro-baubles by Hewlett-Packard, Radio Shack, Apple and a half dozen other manufactures. The owners of these new machines instantly proclaimed possession of a computer an essential demonstration of one's revolutionary zeal. They defined the virtual way as the only true path to “people's revolution” – ironically the very sort of uprising their other activities, such as spiking trees to maim or kill forest workers, proved they secretly but profoundly (and hypocritically) feared. Most of all they sneered whenever I pointed out to them that any medium dependent on public utilities or corporate and government communications networks was only “free” until some bureaucrat or executive felt threatened enough to flip the master-switch and turn it off. And – of course – they haughtily dismissed those of us who did not own computers (typically because we could not afford them), as hopelessly reactionary.

Hence, eerily like the ever-formidable Russian intelligence operatives who recognized a mechanicaltypewriter can never be hacked,  I long ago chose to retain the 1935 Royal Standard I now routinely use for addressing envelopes or filling out forms and as my writing machine during power outages. I likewise kept the 1940s vintage Royal Portable that has accompanied me on various journeys since I was in my late 20s and now lives in semi-retirement under my desk. But my lingering fondness for typewriters was dictated by economics rather than foresight. I had no computer at all until 1999, and that was a used machine given me by a dear friend. Even I – a proud cynic all my adult life – did not recognize the ultimate capitalist scam of disguising electronic shackles as vital personal and household tools and thereby convincing us to build, with our own hard-earned money, the digital slave pens in which we are now inescapably imprisoned.

Now though thanks to Edward Snowden and thanks even more to Audre Lorde, a woman about whom I unfortunately remained in total ignorance until only days ago, I at long last have far better words to describe the ultimate truth of our electronic circumstances. Indeed they are Ms. Lorde's own words,  written in 1984 as the title of an essay, and I cannot possibly improve on them: “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.”

LB/13 October 2013

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Nightmare: Government Shutdown Reductio Ad Absurdum

“Premonitions”: a sandwich made of Hare Krishna dancers in Tompkins Square Patk and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in Central Park c. 1967, the moon added with my editor's punch in Seattle c. 1974. Tri-X, other data lost. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1976 and 2012. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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RECOGNIZABLY PROPHETIC DREAMS come to me very rarely, no more than a dozen times in all my 73 years, and thus far they have foretold only personal disasters, occurrences of no significance to anyone but myself or maybe a few other members of my relentlessly dysfunctional family. 

A few of these events were relatively minor vexations that at the time of their occurrence seemed bottomlessly horrific, like the vengefully inflicted delays by which my birthmother ensured I missed an end-of-summer passenger train and was fretfully tardy in returning to my academic-year residence in the home of my father and stepmother and even more anxious about my entrance to the bully-dominated jungle of a southern public high school – itself a profoundly disturbing transition after four years in the carefully regulated sanctuary of Roman Catholic parochial education. 

Some episodes in which my nightmares came true were a bit more problematical, like Vietnam-Era G.I. Bill education checks inexplicably delayed so long the resultant poverty nearly flung me into homelessness, which happened three times in 1971 and once in 1972. 

Another incident, of which I dreamed at least twice beforehand, was irremediably injurious: it was a Godzilla-versus-Bambi car crash at 4:30 p.m. on a rainy 23 September 1978, when one of Washington state's obscenely coddled habitually criminal drunken drivers slammed his huge 442 Oldsmobile into my tiny new Honda Civic and inflicted the spinal injuries that now in old age have reduced me to a cripple.

(For the record, “obscenely coddled” contains not one scintilla of hyperbole. The moral imbecile at the wheel of the monster Oldsmobile had been arrested 19 times on charges of driving while intoxicated, but the arrests were all dismissed or reduced to meaninglessness, a fit prelude to his 20th offense, when he crippled me, destroyed my little car and reportedly rang the Breathalyzer bell with a near-record blood-alcohol score of point-32. But the associated charges, which included assaulting an officer, also were thrown out, and this obviously well-connected Chug-a-Lug Charley continued his potentially deadly spree of defiantly dipsomaniacal motoring until only a few years ago, when terminal liver failure rather than a blind [drunk?] judiciary at last took him permanently off our streets and highways.) 

Nor could I have foreseen my encounter with this malicious sociopath clearly enough to avoid it. Unfortunately for my prospects as a professional seer, I never recognize my dreams as prophetic until they are confirmed by subsequent events. There are never any of those Biblical jazz angels whose trumpet riffs are alleged to signify prophecy; neither is there – as would surely be more appropriate in my case – a Celtic or perhaps Scythian priestess with Jecsa Hoop's  astonishingly evocative voice chanting of “Havoc in Heaven” or singing of a woman with “hair of fire and skin of snow” as if to warn me I am about to bear witness to my own future. 

Having duly acknowledged the relevant metaphysical handicaps, I will now try to write coherently of the dream that, five nights ago, scared me into palpitations of such intensity I thought for a moment I was having a heart attack. Then of course I remembered the Yoga by which I had held my deteriorating spinal injuries at bay for nearly three decades – that is, until the exercises themselves became impossibly painful – and there in my bed of post-frightmare cold-sweat nightfullness I soon managed to deep-breathe my pulse back to normal. 

Yet the content of the dream continues to haunt my waking hours, which tells me the only way I can exorcise its chilling grasp is by revealing it. Hence I describe it here as best as I can reconstruct its curious sequence of images, not because I suspect it might be prophetic – in fact I pray it is not – but rather because I hope full disclosure will be fully healing. 

I've also no doubt the dream expresses something of the awful anxiety the now undeniably total corruption of the U.S. political system and both its parties is inflicting on all of us – particularly on those of us who are dependent on the government for survival, as for example are all Social Security and Medicare recipients. We are afraid because we know cutbacks to these programs will literally kill us, and these days – given that the Republican and Democratic party labels are themselves Big Lies and that we are in fact ruled ever more despotically by one party of two names – our fears are rational, constant and mercilessly relentless.

Thus in this dream I am logically as I am now, old and crippled though still as journalistically capable as ever. But in its surrealism I am also again the investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal as I was in 1969 and 1970, when I scooped the world on the heroin-addiction epidemic inflicted on the U.S. by the Vietnam War, only to be robbed of proper credit for my greatest story ever by some back-shop patriot's vindictive removal of my byline and the resultant unrestrained glory-hogging by The New York Times the following morning. 

Jersey Journal Managing Editor August Lockwood has been dead since 1997, yet now in the dream he is again my boss. With his omnipresent corner-of-the-mouth cigar he looks exactly as he did when I was one of his star reporters, and just as he might have done in real life, he has assigned me to track down and interview a Jersey City man who supposedly knows the details of President Richard Nixon's plan to suspend the 1972 elections.

Perhaps significantly, this Nixon aspect is based on an obscure but damning truth. By Christmas 1969, a few Washington D.C. insiders were credibly claiming Nixon had commissioned the Rand Corporation to prepare the rationale for just such a coup, and their allegations were courageously exposed by the Newhouse News Service, another property of The JJ's parent corporation, which gives these parts of the dream even more logical cohesion.

But then as so often happens in dreamtime, the meaning of “now” shifts without warning or advance notice and it is suddenly 1 October 2013. I am still on assignment, still working for the resurrected Gus Lockwood, still at my battered oaken desk, still banging out my copy on a Royal Standard mechanical typewriter in The Journal's smoke-filled newsroom, and my reportorial thought process is still subconsciously punctuated by the suck-bang of the pneumatic tubes that carried copy to the composing room, but the Nixon story has morphed into an elaborate conspiracy by which the Democrats and Republicans and their Wall Street masters are scheming to end all pretense of constitutional governance. 

These politicians have gridlocked Congress behind a charade of controversy and shut down the government, and now they intend to hurl the nation into internationally ruinous default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. The stock market has plunged to an all-time low and the resultant chaos already includes breathtakingly violent rioting by desperate people who are condemned to death by the end of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and every other federal socioeconomic-assistance program. 

Meanwhile the same sources who had defied federal secrecy to reveal the Vietnam Era heroin-addiction scandal have returned from their own graves and retirement homes and are restored to the bodies they occupied in 1970, and now in my dream they are telling me the entire shutdown crisis is the deliberately scripted prelude to a military takeover intended to be at least as bloody as the 1973 Chilean murder-and-torture coup that was engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency to protect USian imperial business interests and capitalism in general. The military, these sources say, will impose the fascist dictatorship the One Percent has sought since the failure of the Bankers' Plot in 1934. And one source has finally squirreled away the top secret documents to prove it.

The purloined papers indicate the dreamland junta will immediately transfer power to a national board of directors chosen from the chief executives of the most profitable USian corporations. The formerly elected politicians whose deceptions facilitated the coup will be rewarded with lifetime appointments as local managers who carry out the board's decrees. The board's absolute and unchallengeable authority will be explained to the USian citizenry as vital to the defense of corporate personhood against angry parasites turned domestic terrorists – seniors, disabled people, welfare recipients, all the “takers not makers” officially despised in accordance with Ayn Rand doctrine.

"At last" – or so the nation's most expensive advertising campaign will announce as soon as the coup is complete – “we're running government as a business.” 

Now in the dream I recognize my story is shaping up to be one helluva fine exposé, and in the old days before the news monopolies turned USian journalism into Randite propaganda, I already know it would have earned me a sure Pulitzer. But it is still 2013; even in dreamtime  I must convince the presumably immortal Gus to defy the invisible censors if the scoop is ever to see the light of day. 

But when I gather my notes and unhook my cane from a slightly open desk drawer and lurch up from my swivel chair to go tell Gus what I've unearthed and plead the case for its full disclosure, The JJ's busy East Coast newsroom is suddenly an empty but familiar Pacific Northwest newspaper office with a torn and faded “Tired of the Same Old Shit” poster on its far wall, a defiant bit of Manhattan outrageousness the politically correct staffers of this particular publication would never have tolerated in actuality.  

What has happened is I've been dream-teleported into an abandoned and thoroughly trashed version of the ramshackle space in the faded-brick-and-crumbling-plaster, Klondike gold-rush-era building from which a self-consciously countrified but environmentally competent alternative journal called Northwest Passage was published in Bellingham's Fairhaven District during the height of the Back-to-the-Land Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I am utterly alone. There is no one else in this structure save the fearsomely malevolent ghosts I know are lurking in its darker corners and behind its closed doors and at the ends of its oppressively lightless corridors. I have been in this place during other dream odysseys and have learned from experience my magick is not strong enough to protect me from these ectoplasmic predators. 

In self-protective revulsion I hurredly limp outside, but now the entire physical environment has changed. The building is no longer a nightmare variant of the Good Earth Community Center, which was a countercultural meeting hall and a crash-pad for itinerant hippies as well as a food co-op and the editorial home of the Passage. Instead it has become the ominous remnant of a three-storey Georgian mansion amidst a Blair Witch Project forest, toxically gnarly versions of the deciduous trees common to New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, oak and ash and sycamore and willow, their branches stripped bare by winter, the overwhelming sense of desolation eerily intensified by occasional white pine or blue spruce grown uncomfortably like exclamation points of silent screams. 

Then beyond the ruin I see a river, thick and murky and steaming with pollution, and amidst the barren willows on its further bank is a squad of soldiers – present-day U.S. soldiers with their Darth Vader assault rifles and camouflage uniforms and Nazi-like helmets – and now the soldiers are shooting at me and their bullets are cracking past my head and smacking into the building and gouging the surrounding trees and I am fleeing, hobbling as fast as I can through damply matted piles of brown leaves and across cold slippery patches of dirty snow ever deeper into the forest and my arthritic knees hurt and now I am too old and too tired and too winded to go any further and my fear gives way to terrible sadness and I wake up gasping for breath and grateful to have been rescued by wakefulness from torture and death.

Thank Goddess or god or fate or karma or randomness or entropy or the divine self or whatever higher power you choose, it was only a nightmare. I hope.

LB/6 October 2014 

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Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer: How and Why?

“BUDGETS ARE MORAL DOCUMENTS: What do we value as a nation?” A hitherto unpublished picture of a don't-slash-the-safety-net demonstration by Associated Ministries of Tacoma amidst a November 2011 downpour, the placard as relevant now as then. Pentax K1000 (my bad-weather camera), 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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(Note: an earlier, more hastily written version of this essay appeared on the comment thread of Thom Hartmann's blog.) 

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MAINTAINING THE BIG LIE of U.S. democracy requires thousands of perpetrators, but none are more vital than the stenographic journalists of the so-called “mainstream media.” Without these political prestidigitators and their verbal sleight-of-hand, the Machiavellian treachery of USian politicians would soon be apparent to all. But the One Percent's well-paid scribes falsely portray the Democratic and Republican parties as ideological enemies, when in fact the unity of the two groups is proven by their unanimous or near-unanimous votes on any measure that worsens our socioeconomic wretchedness, expands the terrifying oppressiveness of the total-surveillance police-state or otherwise nullifies our constitutionally guaranteed rights to resist capitalism's re-imposition of serfdom and slavery. The mainstream media's pseudo-Left is especially despicable in this context; we turn to it in a desperate quest for advocacy and information but instead are deluged with deftly woven illusions of two-party governance that behind the patter of allegedly “progressive” buzzwords are ultimately no less intellectually crippling than the dreck disseminated by the mainstream Right.

The hideous truth – available only through alternative media (and then only rarely) – is that we USians of the 99 Percent are tyrannized by one party of two names, a single, wholly-owned instrument of the One Percent that has perfected the old good-cop/bad-cop routine as the ultimate means of disguising a despotism as implacably authoritarian as anything ever decreed by der Führer from the Wolfsschanze. But even alternative media, with the understanding of its reporters, commentators and editors so often limited by Ruling Class success at suppressing the historical truth of class warfare, seems unable or unwilling to tell the real story. No paycheck-dependent journalist dares acknowledge the obvious – that the One Percent has decided there are too many of us who are no longer exploitable for maximum profit, that we are therefore to be run through the Darwinian ordeals of a Skinnerian rat maze until most of us drop dead – especially those of us who are old enough to remember when the United States truly was (assuming you were white) a “sweet land of liberty.” Thus even after decades of genocidal cruelties, too many of us remain oblivious to the murderous purpose that underlies the elimination of food stamps and the slashing of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or anything else that might have helped lower-income people stay alive.

My instinct when I think of how abysmally ignorant we are is to reflect on the savage anti-intellectuality that has tragically become the defining characteristic of our national mentality. If I could use my father's library to transcend the horrors of my own childhood (even unto recognizing him as a great teacher despite his psychological rejection of me as a worthy son), others from far more blessed circumstances could surely do no less. Then in a rage I begin to hammer out yet another denunciation of the mental demographic I long ago began condemning as Moron Nation. But one of the three women to whom I regularly turn for conscience and consciousness-raising invariably reminds me that while the 99 Percent is undeniably broken, it was allowed no choice in the matter. The breakage came from without, methodically imposed by parallel conditioning in workplace, classroom and media, a brainwashing more relentlessly total than anything Josef Goebbels might have imagined even in his most pornographic fantasies, a numbing of mind and spirit I escaped perhaps only as a result of a paradoxical combination of cynicism and desperate open-mindedness, the blessing wrought by the repetitive psychological trauma inflicted by my malevolently dysfunctional family.

That said, one of the less publicly acknowledged realities of old age is the time devoted to intense and brutally honest introspection, an extended form of the sort of self-evaluation a practicing Catholic would no doubt recognize as pre-confessional examination of conscience. In geezerhood, of course, it is obviously a preparation for death, which is the last of Nature's own seven sacraments (the others are conception, birth, orgasm, love, vocation and parenthood). Its scope is therefore as broad as one's own life experience, which in my case includes a passion for political activism that dates to the 1957-1958 academic year, when as a senior in high school I participated in a series of Sputnik-inspired public debates contrasting USian versus Soviet philosophies of education. (I was of course an advocate for the latter, which in truth was not merely Soviet but classically European, the classroom as a realm of genuine learning as opposed to a matrix for producing the “well adjusted” drones essential for maximum economic exploitability.)

Which brings me to the duplicity of President Barack Obama. Though I twice voted for him as the less-evil alternative, I now wish I had followed my conscience and cast my ballots for third-party candidates, perhaps Greens (though I have grave hesitations about their hostility to organized labor) or more likely Socialist Workers (never mind I am sometimes troubled by their Marxian fundamentalism). In any case I believe the truth of Obama's personhood is perfectly pictured in the unprecedented dishonesty of the slogan "change we can believe in," which has since been revealed as the biggest Big Lie in U.S. political history. I am now convinced Obama's sole purpose is to amass sufficient riches to protect himself and his family from the unspeakable horrors of our inescapably dystopian future, and I believe his quest for wealth is made all the more urgent by the conscious knowledge that his race – so useful in perpetrating the deceptions that won him the presidency – will never allow him or his family entry to the implacably white-supremacist One Percent or even the equally racist USian Ruling Class, here defined as not just the One Percent, but also their politicians and their institutional servants – bureaucrats, lawyers, academics, stenographic journalists, police and military officers, etc.

An even harsher portrait of Obama is provided by his innumerable lies and betrayals, the brazenness of his conduct a strong suggestion he governs from a position of contempt and hatred for the entire 99 Percent. Given how badly African-Americans are hurt by his policies,  it seems too he is an equal-opportunity hater, despising all Working Class folk regardless of our race. In this sense he is indistinguishable from the Ayn Rand capitalists he so diligently emulates. Even his intent appears to be definitively capitalistic – to reduce us all to the fear, wretchedness and unrelenting despair that define the lowest levels of the USian underclass. Thus he has allowed himself to become a genuine Manchurian candidate – not, of course, from the real Manchuria but rather from the Manchuria known as Wall Street – for which he is no doubt being handsomely  rewarded in terms of the riches with which he seeks to buy long-range protection for his family.

His more Machiavellian intentions, no doubt dictated to him by his One Percent masters, seem to be twofold. One is discrediting the Democratic Party, tainting it for several generations as the party of liars and betrayers, thereby ensuring the Republican Party – the real voice of the One Percent – achieves unchallenged rule. The other is cleverly discrediting or rather nullifying all the achievements and aspirations of blacks, an exceptionally diabolical application of the classic capitalist/fascist strategy of neutralizing revolutionary leadership by any means possible. Particularly since the U.S. Civil War, African-Americans have been a key part of what little genuinely revolutionary leadership the USian people have managed to produce, and in the era of the Civil Rights/Anti-Poverty/Anti-Vietnam War movements, they were the only such leadership that seemed capable of uniting the 99 Percent to the point of building solidarity across racial boundaries. Indeed, no other USian minority has ever demonstrated that capability.  Fearing the emergence of another generation of effective African-American leadership, the One Percent will use any means possible to ensure it does not happen again.

There's no doubt such efforts are already underway. The commercial co-optation of hip-hop is perhaps the most obvious part of the effort to strangle at birth any resurrection of black revolutionary leadership potential. The re-segregation of public schools and the emergence of the prison-industrial complex are identically motivated. From the perspective of the One Percent, each of these modes of oppression bear the tactical and strategic advantages of also generating enormous profits.  The role now being played by the president in his transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer would, in this context,  be nothing more than a logical expansion of the One Percent's offensive. Remember this nation remains so irremediably racist the entire African-American community is invariably judged by the dishonorable or criminal conduct of its individual members.

Damning as it is, this is the only rational conclusion Obama's record to-date allows. And the fact no paycheck journalist dares point out what is so overwhelmingly obvious tells us all we need to know about the terrible reality of our subjugation.

LB/29 September 2013

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Betrayal, Genocide and the Quest for a New Vocabulary

“TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO HAVE A REVOLUTION”: another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma photos, this from an informational demonstration in October 2011. Pentax MX, SMCP-M 100mm f/2.8, Fujucolor 800. Exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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IT'S A RARE occasion when the comments I write for other websites are so topically apt I can use them here with minimal editing and no introductory paragraphs. But it seems this week I hit the trifecta, with posts about the Obama Administration's apparently methodical betrayal of the New Orleans African-American community, austerity as a euphemism for genocide, and our desperate need for a new vocabulary of revolutionary socialism.

The result, its separate parts identified by subheads, is an essay detailing major aspects of the tyranny that now shapes our daily lives. Yet despite its grim portrait of our increasing subjugation, it uncharacteristically ends on a distinctly positive note. But its positivity is not the imbecility of hope, the slavish yearning for progressive change begrudgingly handed down from above, the junkfood Antoinette cupcakes occasionally doled out by corrupt, tyrannical politicians who represent only the One Percent. It is rather a curiously compelling intuition of consensus oh-so-slowly being born at the grassroots level, a vision as much libertarian and Gaian as it is paradoxically Marxian, a coalescence thus far so subtle it remains beyond our normal perception even as it promises to grow, in time, powerful enough to shake the United States and its global empire as nothing has shaken the world since the Soviet Revolution of 1917. 

Katrina Murder Cops Freed: Deliberate Prosecutorial Misconduct? 

 

We must ask ourselves whether the Obama Justice Department – especially given the racial implications of the Katrina murders – knowingly conducted a prosecution so deliberately flawed it would have to be overturned. 

In other words, is the reversal of the New Orleans convictions yet another result of the signature Obamanoid strategy of publicly supporting progressive change while secretly working for its antithesis?

The question is legitimized by Obama the Orator's many shape-shifts into Barack the Betrayer – for example how he clamored for restoration of constitutional governance even as he nullified the Bill of Rights by imposition of total surveillance. His repeated concealment of reactionary purposes behind Big Lies of progressive intent provides a strategic parallel that suggests the prosecutorial misconduct may have been carefully scripted precisely to void the verdicts. 

The outrageous magnitude of the misconduct – as if it were designed to be so extreme even judicial dullards could not overlook it – surely underscores its suspiciousness.

As to the beneficiary of such Chicago-type treachery, it would of course be the One Percent Obama so obediently serves – the white aristocrats who are ruthlessly gentrifying New Orleans and thus have a huge stake in terrorizing its black population.

How ironic – yet how typical of Obama's conduct in so many other matters – if the nation's first African-American president were to emerge as the Ku Klux Klan's strongest ally in the White House since Warren Harding or Calvin Coolidge.

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Slay the Safety Net/Kill the Poor: But None Dare Call It Genocide

 

The food-stamp cutbacks are part of a much larger bipartisan war against lower income people, which the Republicans and the Democrats alike know will kill many of its victims and which is intended to do just that.

These killings include approximately 45,000 persons who are murdered each year by denial of health care which -- in civilized nations -- is considered a human right. But the death toll goes far beyond that dismal demographic. Were the body-count expanded to include those slain by joblessness, bankruptcy, foreclosure, evictions, welfare cutbacks and homelessness, plus all those driven to suicide by these same conditions, the annual slayings would number in the hundreds of thousands. 

And these deaths are not accidental. They are the deliberate means by which capitalism rids itself of those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed or otherwise no longer exploitable for profit.

The politicians, who serve only the One Percent, are well aware of what is being done. But the charade of democracy enables them to perpetuate their cunningly engineered system of  homicide by abandonment -- and thereby to exterminate us without the public embarrassment of death camps.

 

Yet no mainstream journalist -- including the reporters and commentators of the mainstream Left -- dares call this ongoing atrocity what it truly is: genocide. 

*****

We Need a New Vocabulary of Class Struggle and Public Morality 

 

While I heartily applaud Professor Richard D. Wolff's quest for more accurate functional definitions of capitalism and socialism, we also need a new terminology with which to clarify the resultant societal conditions, particularly the historical truth of class warfare. But more than that, what we need -- what we most desperately need -- is a vocabulary that acknowledges the ultimate morality of socialism versus the ultimate moral imbecility of capitalism.

These three categories of re-definition -- functional, societal and moral -- are already underway, and not merely by Professor Wolff's laudable efforts. The one great contribution of the Occupy Movement to this process was its resurrection of class struggle, the defining reality of capitalism that -- in the United States -- is hidden from all but the most astute observers. But even Occupy's long-overdue replacement of the soporific terms "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" (or "Ruling Class" and "Working Class") with the more energizing "One Percent" and "99 Percent" has not sufficed to awaken the woefully dumbed-down USian masses. As a fellow Occupy activist so memorably said to me in late 2011, "the 99 Percent is broken." Thus the most vital struggle of our time -- indeed the most pivotal conflict of our species' history -- remains disguised as academic esoterica. Occupy began redefining economics as politics, but until the political becomes personal, the clash over humanity's future (or indeed whether we have any future at all), will remain marginalized -- in the cunningly blindered eye of the USian public, hardly more relevant than Medieval schoolmen debating how many angels might fit on the head of a pin. 

How then do we redefine the political to make it personal? 

The method -- small-group consciousness-raising -- was perfected by feminists in the middle 1960s. Though the USian branch of second-wave feminism was later co-opted by the forces of capitalism, its original ideological framework was socialism. Thus feminist grievances were initially shaped by the contrasts between socialist humanitarianism and capitalist savagery. The Occupy Movement made a similar attempt to articulate grievances. But it did so in the self-defeating context of the rabid anti-intellectualism that has become the defining characteristic of how the USian 99 Percent has been (deliberately) broken. To shout for example "stop foreclosure" is not the same as correctly asserting "foreclosure is malicious victimization by moral imbeciles called capitalists." But without formal ideological reference (or at the very least an implicitly ideological analysis), the latter statement is impossible to make with sufficient authority to overcome decades of capitalism's victim-blaming Big Lies. Predictably, the Occupy effort thus disintegrated -- mostly due to the Ayn Rand contempt and hatefulness with which anti-union "progressives" regard organized labor and working-class peoples in general. More to the point, Occupy's failure at consciousness-raising demonstrates the failures of the movement's (white/bourgeois) majority, not the method itself. To make the personal political, we must therefore follow the example set by second-wave feminism before its co-optation. We must answer, both implicitly and explicitly, the core question of USian consciousness: "what's in it for me?"

Though various polls indicate an extremely high level of USian disgust with public morality, those same polls paradoxically rank morality as amongst the least important considerations in shaping national political views. (See for example http://www.gallup.com/poll/154715/americans-negativity-moral-values-inches-back.aspx.) But the cleverly induced disconnects between the deliberately oppressive state of the national economy, the degree of one's personal wretchedness and the lack of national morality can be overcome by restatement of economic issues in moral terms. Thus I urge resurrection of an old but enduring socialist slogan: "from each of us according to our ability, to each of us according to our needs." I also urge us to coin new, forceful truthful definitions of both socialism and capitalism. Accordingly, I offer my own re-definition of capitalism, one I have regularly used here in Outside Agitator's Notebook and in other Internet posts since 2009: 

Capitalism: infinite selfishness elevated to maximum virtue.

Alternatively: 

Capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

 

This accurately defines capitalism in terms of what it demands of its adherents. A somewhat more detailed definition follows:

Capitalism: the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever dared assert.

 

The unchallengeable authority of these words -- the manner in which they hoist capitalism by its own petard -- is that they are merely a slight paraphrasing of capitalism as defined by Ayn Rand, Wall Street's messiah of moral imbecility. 

Which leads directly to a description of what was always the norm in the colonial domains of capitalism but has now become the new paradigm of USian homeland governance as well: 

Capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percenters; seductive rewards for the politicians, professionals, technicians and thugs who serve them; merciless subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

 

Such is the tyranny that now defines our lives. Hence I pray others will contemplate these definitions as a starting point for a new dialogue and improve on them or in any case disseminate them as part of the vocabulary of a new socialist revolution. Though this revolution has yet to tell us its name, its approach is undeniable. It is already recognizable as a hybrid of Gaian feminism, Marxism, democratic practice and libertarian localism -- a healing and redemptive ideological pragmatism that is gradually giving birth to a new solidarity. It is evolving despite the One Percent's imposition of the total-surveillance police-state and seizure of the technologies we mistakenly believed would facilitate our liberation. It is only a matter of time until someone articulates it in a manifesto so urgently compelling we are at last mobilized to rise up and save ourselves, our children and our planet. 

LB/22 September 2013 

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Beware the Christian Fanatics: Are You Their Next Target?

“RAM”: more Tacoma graffiti from the newly rediscovered work I did in 2009. Of course I cannot state with any certainty the artist's intent, but the trinity of monster, phallic serpent and human appears to be mostly an expression of anger and disgust at life itself. Leica M4, Voigtlander f/1.7 35mm Ultron, Kodak 800 color negative film, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.  Click on picture to view it full size.

*

THE FRIGHTENING SUCCESS of the stealth campaign by Christian fanatics to abolish the reproductive and deathbed rights of Washington state citizens  shows us just how devastatingly effective such extra-legal measures can be. Now even Group Health – the Puget Sound-area health care cooperative that was formerly a national leader in the fight for women's reproductive freedom – has retreated from its hitherto uncompromising stance on access to abortion and end-of-life choices. Not only have its agreements with Catholic hospitals severely restricted its members' options (for which see the OAN essay linked above), it has also omitted abortion coverage from its Obamacare programs. 
 
Meanwhile the Roman Catholic Church has already bought or acquired policy-making control of approximately half the state's hospitals, thereby imposing de facto bans on abortion and legally assisted suicide in all the associated service areas. Never mind the bans are brazen defiance of the will of the people, the voters who legalized abortion and approved death with dignity as an alternative for those who are terminally ill. The church fathers have learned, no doubt from the One Percent, how to use the institutional structures of capitalism to make the ballot box irrelevant and reduce the Constitution to executive toilet paper
. 

As if that were not scary enough, two ultra-conservative legislators – one a Protestant, the other a Catholic – are sponsoring a bill that would make it legal for Christian doctors, pharmacists and business owners to persecute nonbelievers  by denying birth control to women and refusing to provide care and services to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people.

Sen. Adam Kline (D-Seattle), who has emerged as the chief opponent of the measure, Senate Bill 3090,  warns its passage would also enable medical professionals and merchants who belong to white-supremacist Christian sects to withhold medical care, prescription drugs and many other services from African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations peoples and non-whites in general.  Even the Ku Klux Klan – known throughout the South as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” (and reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be active in Kirkland and Yakima) – could claim religious protection for its bigotry.

The bill's sponsors are Sen. Mike Padden (R-Spokane) and Sen. Steve O'Ban (R-Tacoma). Padden's credentials are summarized on his state Senate web site, with additional details on Google. O'Ban's political biography is likewise available from the Senate,  with a more inclusive portrait on the left-leaning Washblog site.

Political insiders assure me SB 3090 has no chance of passage during the 2013-2014 legislative session. But the mere fact of its introduction proves again the relentless intent of the Christian fanatics, who have traded their denominational antagonisms for the solidarity of a formidable political-action cult. Instead of battling one another, its members whether Protestant or Catholic now wage war against human sexuality. Ecclesiastical attorneys are meanwhile reinterpreting “freedom of religion” to include the alleged “right” of the faithful to discriminate against non-believers, with SB 3090 one of many kindred measures nationwide. In every instance, the goal of such legislation is to further the imposition of Christian theocracy on the United States.

The associated electoral strategy and tactics are exemplified in the state of Washington by John Connelly's 2012 campaign for a Tacoma state Senate seat. Unsuccessful despite his all-time-record spending, it provides a rare glimpse of the fanatics' organizational structure,  which not only transcends denominational boundaries but encompasses both major political parties as well. Though Connelly ran as a Democrat, it should be noted that particular label is often meaningless and not infrequently a deliberate deception, a confusing reality exemplified by the president's stunning shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer. Had Connelly won, it was feared he'd side with the Republicans against marriage equality and reproductive freedom.

What else was at stake is demonstrated by how two other conservative Democrats betrayed their constituents and enabled a state Senate coup that gave the Republicans control of the entire Legislature. 

In all probability the Republican takeover was scripted well before the 2012 election. And Connelly's record-breaking expenditures suggest he desperately wanted to be part of it. But even without the Tacoman's participation, the coup has paralyzed state government. (“Coup” is the label I correctly affixed to this cunning overthrow of representative democracy weeks before any of the state's other journalists dared so much as whisper the word, for which scroll down to the linked story's comment thread.)

Predictably, the paralysis has had dire consequences, especially for women and mass-transit users. The former were treated as if their demands for guaranteed inclusion of birth control in employer-provided health insurance marked them as sluts; the latter – myself included – are routinely damned as parasites who are dependent on the “welfare” provided by minimal bus service and pathetically undersized rail operations. 

If the situation in Washington state seems familiar, that's because an eerily similar affliction paralyzes the federal government. The result is unbreakable gridlock save when congressional Democrats and Republicans join hands in unanimous or near-unanimous votes to (further) nullify the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution. It's no longer Democrats versus Republicans. It's now the One Party of Two Names versus the entire 99 Percent. And that One Party is methodically imposing the new paradigm of USian governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

But why has Washington, of all the allegedly “progressive” coastal states, been singled out for theocratic transformation? Wouldn't the forces of Christian fanaticism be more successful if they continued their efforts in openly theocratic jurisdictions like Texas  or North Dakatoa?

 

Obviously, locale alone is not the answer. Wherever one might be in the United States, the imposition of despotism via the marketplace is actually quite easy. This is because there is no economic democracy anywhere in the nation. Big Business – which generously finances the drive toward theocracy as its favored means of guaranteeing a maximally submissive workforce – has nearly absolute power. Its lawyers have manipulated the laws to deny anyone who is on business property – particularly in workplaces and shopping malls – the liberties theoretically guaranteed by the Constitution. And private property rights generally trump all others, particularly when the property owner is an all-powerful corporation. Though abortion is at present a constitutional right, business enterprises (including non-profits) cannot be forced to provide it. 

Also, as proven by Washington's oft-demonstrated 45-year hostility to mass transit,  the state's voters hide a decidedly hypocritical preference for the savagery of Ayn Rand economics beneath their claims of “progressive” political sensibilities. Perhaps – recognizing how quickly one sort of bigotry can be morphed into another – the Christian fanatics believe they can gradually expand Washington's hatred of transit users into a more general hatefulness. That vindictive hope would surely explain the misogyny, homophobia and racism now evident in SB 3090. In any case, it's clear the state is again functioning as a test-lab for the One Percent's strategies and tactics of oppression.

Meanwhile the magnitude of the fanatical Christian threat to health care throughout the United States is revealed in the coverage given it on 12 May by The New York Times and by the website Think Progress the next day.  (These stories appeared less than three weeks after the Outside Agitator's Notebook report published on 25 April and linked in this essay's lead paragraph. It was not the first time OAN with its small but international readership has seemingly influenced coverage of U.S. domestic conflicts.) Nevertheless, the USian mainstream media refuses to acknowledge the theocratic threat as such. It's as if the editors and reporters believe they can eliminate the fanatical Christian onslaught merely by tabooing any mention of its long-range intent. The taboo is apparent whether in Ruling Class publications like NYT or pseudo-leftist Internet journals like TP. Meanwhile the anti-theocratic warnings by Chris Hedges, Jeff Sharlet and several other notably credible authors go unheeded, putting all humanity at risk.

For those who foolishly continue to doubt we are in deadly peril, I can only suggest they remember the direction taken by Rome after Constantine decreed Christianity its state religion. In its day, Rome ruled the greatest empire of the ongoing patriarchal age, just as the United States rules that age's greatest empire ever.  Now imagine the USian empire becoming the modern counterpart of post-Constantine Rome, like Romani imperii post Constantinum, a fanatical Christian theocracy maintained by the most powerful military machine of its time and, again like that Rome, believing itself divinely tasked to impose a new world order, commanding its subjects to bow down to the cross of Jesus or die. I can already hear the One-President-Under-God declaring his fulfillment of biblical prophecy: “brethren in Christ, it is with heavy heart I come before you to announce we have to nuke this planet to save our souls from the Devil.”

LB/15 September 2013

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