U.S. Reinforces Black Sea Naval Squadron: Coincidence, or Another Deliberate Escalation in the Ukrainian Crisis?

WAR FEARS ARE again intensifying as the United States puts additional pressure on Russia by reinforcing a U.S. naval squadron in the Black Sea. The squadron, now reportedly of three vessels, is said to include a Marine expeditionary unit, a newly added guided missile destroyer (USS Truxton), a guided missile frigate (USS Taylor) and an amphibious-operations command ship (USS Mount Whitney). An accompanying submarine escort, if any, would typically be unannounced, its existence most likely classified Top Secret.

While U.S. Navy sources claim the frigate and the command ship were dispatched to render aid if terrorists attacked the Winter Olympics at Siochi,  Robert Parry's ongoing disclosures of USian sponsorship and funding of the Ukrainan neo-Nazi coup  suggests the squadron was more likely pre-positioned in the Black Sea to provide support for the new regime in Kiev.

Though I respect Parry's work, I reject his (perhaps obligatory) suggestion Obama has lost control of his government to a neocon cabal. As I said on the associated comment thread, “the pre-inaugural immediacy of (the president's) transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer tells us he was the neocons' Manchurian Candidate (actually the Neoconian Candidate) from day one – that his 2008 “change we can believe in” campaign was the biggest Big Lie ever fed the U.S. electorate. Now it seems to me just as likely Obama is again demonstrating his signature deviousness, painting himself as the good guy, no doubt in hope of salvaging the 2014 elections, which as of now are a looming Republican landslide – not because of GOP popularity, but because of the bottomless, throw-the-bastards-out unpopularity of the treacherous Democrats. Meanwhile the “my advisors did it” excuse is as old as politics itself...” 

Whether ordered by the president or by his ever-more-openly aggressive cabinet and general staff, the naval squadron's reinforced presence undoubtedly intensifies the perceived magnitude of the Ukrainian coup's challenge to Russia's centuries-old policy of maintaining a warm-water seaport – that is, one not closed by winter ice – with year-round access to the Mediterranean and the world's oceans. The port in question (see map accessible via the link in the first paragraph) is Sevastopol,  in the now-contested Crimea. Despite Russia's huge land mass – she is by far the largest country in the world – Sevastopol is her only warm-water port. Not only is it headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet; it is of growing commercial importance and a favorite summer resort for Eastern Europeans.

Because the United States has so many warm-water ports, there is no possibility of a directly analogous threat – nothing as legitimately alarming to the U.S. as the Ukrainian coup is legitimately alarming to Russia. But a coup installing a hostile government in Mexico, perhaps backed by the People's Republic of China and threatening reconquista of California, would surely be regarded as equally provocative, particularly given the naval and port facilities at San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Such a hypothetical scenario should thus help clarify why Russia is so troubled by the Ukrainian situation. (My apologies to overseas readers for these brief lessons in third-grade geography and sixth-grade world history, but we USian Empire subjects are so oppressed by deliberately imposed ignorance, I felt the review was essential.) 

Meanwhile, USian mass media remains notably silent on the geopolitics of the Ukrainian Crisis – so much so the apparent censorship, by which Josef Goebbels would be delighted, seems not only methodical but maliciously warmongering. That's why we should be profoundly thankful to Parry on the Left and Patrick Buchanan on the Right. Parry's work has provided most of the source material for my commentaries, and Buchanan's debunking of Hillary Clinton's outrageous denunciation of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a latter-day “Hitler”  is compelling in its own right, particularly for its wealth of historical information. 

As to Hillary herself, I have long assumed she is a female George Bush in Democratic disguise – far more intelligent than Bush of course, probably even brighter than his ideological successor Obama, but with the same I-wanna-be-Emperor-of-the-World complex that now seems to be the defining quality of presidents and presidential candidates from both the Democrat and Republican factions of the one Ruling Class Party. Hence my (slightly edited) comment on Parry's alarming report of the “'we-hate-Putin' hysteria”  being ginned up throughout the USian Homeland:

The ugly truth about Hillary, who is not only a neocon but a Christian theocrat, is revealed by Jeff Sharlet on pgs. 272-277 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). Sharlet reports Hillary secretly collaborates with the notorious Sam Brownback and his fanatical ilk to impose Biblical Law by “tunneling beneath” the constitutional wall between church and state.

That said, Hillary's Hitler analogy is clinically interesting because it is a classic psychological projection of the USian Empire's “American Century” agenda of global conquest. In this context, the so-called military “withdrawal” cited by a poster below is a Big Lie because it never voluntarily occurs until conquest has ensured the triumph of capitalism and its enslavement of the indigenous population.

Thus, just as Putin notes, the USian Empire has assumed the role of international aggressor that characterized the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. Indeed, had the Bankers Plot of 1934 succeeded in ousting President Roosevelt, the U.S. would have been the fourth Axis partner.

Thus too the genocidal (and therefore definitively neo-fascist) social-service cuts now sponsored by both ruling parties – actually one party of two names. Cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation etc. are undoubtedly intended to kill those of us who no longer exploitable for profit. Killing by neglect rather than in death camps merely avoids the odium of the latter.

 

Could this – the fact a major war would exterminate vast numbers of workers rendered permanently jobless by the for-profit downsizing of the USian Homeland economy – be another reason the empire has so radically escalated its warmongering? Before you answer, remember the One Percenters, who include Hillary and her ilk, all assume they will be protected by their own posh, heavily fortified bunkers – that their obscene wealth will thus keep them safe from bombs, radioactive fallout, disease, famine and all the other horrors of thermonuclear war. We on the other hand will be abandoned – just as the African-American residents of New Orleans were abandoned after Katrina – to live or die as fate and happenstance decree.

 

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Insurance-Company Atrocities in Obamacare: an Anthology of Horrors

Truthout's William Rivers Pitt – a man I often scorn for his refusal to admit that disciplined socialism is the only adequate response to capitalism's ever-intensifying savagery – has written a Pulitzer-class exposé of what Barack the Betrayer enabled when he killed public-option health care and thus indentured the entire U.S. population to the vampires of the for-profit insurance mafia. Entitled “Worse than the Mob: the Insurance Industry Is Organized Crime,” his detailed and heart-wrenching report of the devastating injuries Obamacare inflicted on his wife will of course win no USian journalism award nor ever be published in any mainstream USian journal. Hence – though I did not comment on its associated thread because there was nothing I could say beyond an emphatic “please read this” that in context would have been redundant – I am linking it here.  It is well done, a work of which Pitt and his publishers should damn well be proud, as fine a piece of truth-telling as I have witnessed in this lifetime. 

***

Outside Agitation on Other Websites: a busy week – the usual first-of-the-month chores drawn out by the fact I am too poor to own an automobile but reside amongst voters who despise mass-transit users in a region that officially disdains mass transit – with my time squandered accordingly on herky-jerky buses. Nevertheless...

 

“Lets Make Capitalism a Dirty Word”  Carl Gibson of Reader Supported News details the hardships capitalism maliciously inflicts on the 99 Percent and triggers an interesting discussion-thread to which I contribute three posts. The first repeats statements I've made many times: “All defenders of capitalism are either deluded or dishonest. Precisely as defined by its messiah Ayn Rand, capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the rejection, with malice aforethought, of every humanitarian precept our species has ever articulated. It is therefore, as proven by its anti-humanitarian and anti-environmental depredations, the closest approximation to absolute evil yet manifest on Earth...(that's why) capitalism's momentum is always toward ever-more-vicious tyranny.” The second refutes a poster who seemed to idolize Hitler and Nazism. The third, refuting a capitalist disciple, poster notes an increasingly obvious truth about all such discussion threads: “Interesting how class war manifests even here on this website: the obvious division between those (few) who have profited via capitalism and therefore defend it, versus the masses, we the now-permanently impoverished proletarians and peasants who are capitalism's victims and angrily seek its replacement.” 

***

“Four Ways to Evolve Beyond Capitalism”  Alas, Gibson's sequel to the above piece carefully avoids any mention of socialism, a failure that, to my mind, discredits him. In fact it suggests he is yet another apologist for the status quo and possibly a clandestine operative for the (increasingly desperate) Democratic Party. I respond accordingly (the comment slightly revised for posting here): “A growing third party already exists, and precisely as Mr. Gibson suggests, it is 'building power first at the local and county level.' It is called Socialist Alternative. It has defeated huge odds to elect Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council, and it is increasingly active in many other U.S. cities. Its website is here. By its cutting-edge leadership in the campaign for a $15-per-hour minimum wage, SA is already a huge factor at the national level. It has scared Obama into trying to restore the Democratic Party's humanitarian image and has even frightened a few Democrats into joining its '$15 Now' campaign.” 

LB/9 March 2014 

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Challenging Russia in Ukraine Could Trigger World War III

I FEAR KIEV could become – like Sarajevo of the century past – an international flashpoint. Just as the Slavic minority in Sarajevo despised the city's Austro-Hungarian overlords, so is the Russian minority in Kiev afraid of the allegedly neo-Nazi rulers of the Ukraine.  And given the new regime's alleged USian sponsors, the jeopardy in which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry puts himself and world peace by his visit to Kiev  could therefore be extreme. Let us prayerfully hope 4 March 2014 does not acquire infamy comparable to – or possibly far worse than – 28 June 1914.

Even the politically moderate European press – though it flinches from calling the new Ukranian government neo-Nazi – is alarmed by the hard-Right Svoboda party. “(A)nti-Semitism,” says a der Spiegel report,  “is part of the extremist party's platform; until 2004, they called themselves the Social-National Party of Ukraine in an intentional reference to Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party. Just last summer, a prominent leader of party youth was distributing texts from (material) Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels translated into Ukrainian. Without the nationalists' tight organization, the revolt on Maidan Square would long since have collapsed.” The more Left-leaning Guardian now reports Svoboda appointees control the new government's most powerful ministries.  To those who are familiar with the combination of means by which Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party took over the Weimar Republic, Svoboda's swiftly rising power is justifiably frightening.

As I presciently said last Monday (24 February) on a Reader Supported News comment thread, Russia – especially given its experiences during World War II – will not tolerate  the presence of a fascist state, USian surrogate or not, on its western frontier. Hence I cited three reasons this could start World War III:

(1)-Nazism has an ugly history in the Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler's Wehrmacht, then gleefully aided the SS in rounding up, deporting and killing Jews. This history imposes huge obstacles to the present-day Ukrainian quest for national identity.

(2)-Russia's strategic interest is threefold. Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe – as vital to the Russian economy as the grain fields of the Middle West are to the U.S.; it is an invasion route to the Russian interior, hence vital to the defense strategies of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and today's Russian Federation. It controls access to the Black Sea, an objective of Russian and Soviet policy since the time of the earliest Tsars.

(3)-The USian Empire's apperent Ukranian strategy is a variant of Hitler's plans for eastward conquest. Its purpose seems to be imposition of a militarily friendly neo-Nazi state on Russia's frontier, for-profit seizure of Ukrainian agricultural and natural resources and obstruction of Russian Black Sea access.

To imagine Russia will tolerate this de facto invasion is to imagine the U.S. would tolerate foreign conquest of its Middle Western states. This time the neocons, with their dreams of a global Fourth Reich, may have made the same mistake their secret hero Hitler made: they have goaded the Bear in his own den.

In other words, the events in Ukraine embody what the Russians perceive as a direct threat to Rodina – their beloved Motherland. For a hypothetical parallel, imagine Mexico taken over by a coup organized by the People's Republic of China. How would the USian Empire react?

But that's only one reason this looming confrontation scares me more than the Cuban Missile Crisis did. There is also a glaring difference between the quality of U.S. leadership in 1962 and today, specifically in the caliber of the presidents. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was popular, respected and already assured of his role in history. Barack Hussein Obama is unpopular, scorned as vehemently by the Left as by the Right. A few days ago his disapproval-rate polled as high as 56 percent, an omen of sure defeat for his Democratic Party in the fall congressional elections. At the very least, Obama remains a president in search of a positive legacy. And his increasingly authoritarian demeanor – manifest in unrestricted drone warfare,  extra-judicial presidential death warrants  and ever more aggressive foreign policy  – suggests he intends that legacy to be akin to Octavian's, who declared himself the first Roman emperor.

Apropos the Cuban Missile Crisis, when its story broke in 1962, I was only days out of the Regular Army. I had served the three active-duty years of my six-year enlistment, more than half of that in Korea, but I was obligated for three more years in the reserves. The troop transport in which I returned stateside with some 3,500 other soldiers, the U.S.N.S. Sultan,  was shadowed from Hawaii nearly to San Francisco Bay by a Soviet submarine, no doubt as part of the Cuban preliminaries. Had the crisis led to war while we were at sea, we'd no doubt have been torpedoed and sunk. And had the war begun after I was a civilian, I'd have been yanked back into uniform minutes after the first shot was fired. I knew that, and as a 22-year-old man with a 19-year-old wife and my first full-time job in journalism, a sportswriter for The Knoxville Journal, I was understandably worried. Given the grotesque realities of nuclear warfare, I was also gravely concerned for the wellbeing of my wife and other family members, especially those in and around Knoxville, Tennessee – a critical target due to its proximity to Oak Ridge. 

But I trusted President Kennedy. I thought of him as “our” president, even “my” president despite the fact I had not been old enough to vote in the 1960 election. He was a president who had campaigned honestly and whom We the People had rightfully elected to office.

Now though as I approach my 74^th birthday, I have no such trust in our leaders, least of all President Obama. He lied his way into office by promising “change we can believe in.” He shape-shifted from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer and immediately escalated George Bush's war against the Constitution. He betrayed his supporters in organized labor and in the movement for single-payer/public-option health care. He declared genocidal war on lower-income peoples of all ages by slashing food stamps, downsizing Medicare and attempting to cut Social Security. He is not my president, he is not “our” president (unless you are part of the One Percent or its corps of factotums), and it is most assuredly not We the People whose interests he serves.

Indeed I cannot but wonder if he seeks to provoke a war merely to boost his popularity and silence his critics, either by herding us into concentration camps or by unleashing his death squads with the extra-judicial extermination warrants he claims the right to issue at will.

At the very least – or so says Robert Perry in “Neocons and the Ukranian Coup,” the piece on which I posted the comments boldfaced above – he's abdicated control of the government (or more likely knowingly granted it) to a neo-conservative (i.e., neo-fascist) cabal that has been the real power behind the Oval Office at least since the Reagan years. “American neocons,” says Perry, “helped destabilize Ukraine and engineer the overthrow of its elected government, a 'regime change'...(with) neo-Nazi militias at the forefront.” (The link to Perry's analysis, also in the lead-in to the boldfaced paragraphs, is repeated here for readers' convenience.)

***

My original intention this week was to post comment-thread contributions as I usually do – that is, by summarizing the article and my Outside Agitator's response. But now I think the threat of war makes my comments on two of these threads relevant in their entirety. Hence the following, which the sharp-eyed reader will note is ever-so-slightly edited from the original texts:

“The 'Deep State' - How Much Does It Explain?” Mike Lofgren of Moyers and Company writes at length on what he calls the “Deep State,” portraying it as “a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state...out of control and unconstrained... (the perpetrator of) deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war.” I reply that from a socialist perspective, the term “deep state” is nothing more than another deliberately anti-Marxist euphemism to avoid such terms as “Ruling Class,” “capitalist aristocracy,” “the bourgeoisie” or “the One Percent.”

The behavior of the “deep state” is therefore typical of all ruling classes.

But the power of the “deep state” has no counterpart in human history. It is literally omnipotent, made so by a combination of three factors. The first of these is technology, which gives it capabilities hitherto accorded only gods – and only the most sadistic gods at that. The second factor is the ethos by which it is driven: capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate, typically malicious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated. The third is the new Mein Kampf by which the One Percent rules, Ayn Rand's expansion of economic theory into a formal doctrine of statehood, governance and intention: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

(A fourth factor that previously constrained even the most tyrannical states – the need to placate the masses – has been rendered irrelevant by weaponry that makes resistance not only futile but suicidal. We the people, we the 99 Percent, we the peasants and proletarians who do all the work – we no longer matter save in terms of our exploitability for profit. We are already prisoners, inescapably trapped in electronic slave pens.)

For the first time in our collective experience, our species has been subdued by conquerors so evil – that is, so hostile to human liberty and planetary life – the only metaphors to adequately describe their vileness come from mythology, religion and science fiction. Indeed they are the quintessence of evil; their triumph is the equivalent of conquest by demons or demonic creatures from outer space. And only a very few of our best writers – Chris Hedges, for example – have awakened to the bottomless horror of their moral imbecility.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lofgren's plea for a leader – someone with the “serene self-confidence” to lead us in rebellion – is nothing less than a call for voluntary human sacrifice, for yet another victim to walk the fatal paths of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. All were potentially such leaders. Each was murdered – decades before the state followed the pattern set by Hitler's Third Reich and publicly claimed, as it does now, the right to slaughter at will. Today our only certainty is that any true defender of freedom who arises to genuine leadership will be slain by the ever-eager assassins commanded by the One Percent.

What then, as Vladimir Lenin asked so presciently in 1902, is to be done? I have no satisfactory answer. Nor, seemingly, does anyone else. Hedges suggests our only recourse is the turning to art and spirituality that has been the opiate of slaves since the advent of slavery. History – specifically the fact there is no earthly precedent for the obscene might and toxic darkness of that which oppresses us today – tells me he is probably right, that we have no other alternatives.

As I ponder this unspeakable dismal future I remember a chant of the Cheyenne Ghost Dance – “the white man's god has forsaken him, let us go and look for our Mother.” My genes -- Scythian, Celtic, Norse, Iroquoian, others of which I know not – urge me to embrace the life and consciousness reasserted by the Gaia Hypothesis, to prepare myself for her vengeance on those who would knowingly destroy her. I do not imagine many of us will survive her fury. I am thankful I am old.

*

Later a poster on the same thread questioned my understanding of Hedges' stance. I replied by citing the Hedges essay entitled “A Time for Sublime Madness.” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_time_for_sublime_madness_20130120 In it he says, “To endure what lies ahead we will have to harness the human imagination,” which he then defines as both art and religion, with strong emphasis on the latter. (“Art” as used here includes not just visual work but music, poetry, dance, etc.)

What makes this particular Hedges essay so significant – it appeared on 20 January 2013 – is it is to my knowledge the first time he has acknowledged the true totality of our powerlessness. In so doing, he cites how other powerless groups sustained themselves. “It was the human imagination,” he wrote, “that permitted African-Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow era to transcend their physical condition. It was the human imagination that sustained Sitting Bull and Black Elk as their land was seized and their cultures were broken. And it was the human imagination that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to retain the power of the sacred. It is the imagination that makes possible transcendence.”

Unfortunately – as we see in the de facto Christofascist theocracy of the USian South (and in the increasingly theocratic midlands as well) – religious imagination typically functions as opiate rather than agitation. This is true even in the case of non-Abrahamic religions. Note for example the stridently apolitical, even anti-political stance taken by so many Wiccans, who in every other sense are acutely aware of what is happening both politically and environmentally, yet cling to the New Age nonsense that collective transformation is impossible unless it is preceded by personal transformation.

To further clarify, while I believe Hedges is correct – that  “imagination” is our only recourse (simply because the genocidal technological superiority of the Ruling Class will not be defeated until it is overthrown by Gaian apocalypse) – I also regard it as a dreadful admission of defeat. Apart from the truly savage USian compulsion to religious conformity (which afflicts neo-Pagans as much as the Christofascists and the JesuNazis), our imagination has been withered to nonexistence by the slave mentality methodically imposed by the nation's public schools. One cannot make – or even comprehend – truly meaningful art when one's creative instincts have been deliberately starved to death by aesthetic ignorance. Thus we are robbed – perhaps permanently (because the only culture that can arise from ignorance is a culture of ignorance) – of even the one sanctuary Hedges suggested we might have left. Such is the totality of Evil by which we are now ruled. 

       

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“Our Military: Fighting to Keep Its Culture of Abuse” Sarah L. Blum of Truthout reports on how the sexual and psychological abuse of women within the U.S. military not only continues unabated but – based on new statistics – is intensifying every year. I point out what I consider a major failure by mass media, the fact no widely published writer dares reveal the intimate connection between rape and the Christian fanaticism that now dominates the U.S. officer corps.

In the fanatical Christian worldview, which incidentally is shared by all Abrahamic fundamentalists, women are the (innately evil) daughters of Eve. As punishment for their alleged sinfulness, they are not only to be subservient to men, they are to be imprisoned in the homes of their fathers and husbands, their duties limited to housekeeping and child-rearing. Rape – the atrocity itself and the chain-of-command's diligent protection of the rapists -- is therefore part of “god's divine plan” to re-subjugate the entire female gender: that is, to drive women out of the military and out of the workforce in general and eventually “put woman back in her divinely ordained place.”

The troubling fact this horror-story is not being covered despite the abundant topical evidence -- the persecution of non-believers at the Air Force Academy, less-well-publicized reports of similar outrages at the other service academies, theocratic pronouncements by various general officers, major publications of at least four books discussing the theocratic threat to constitutional governance etc. ad nauseam – suggests even alternative mainstream media is now subject to theocratic censorship.

If this is not so -- if the Christian theocrats are not already so powerful they are muffling even allegedly alternative media -- then why is this story being suppressed?

(I ask not merely as a regular reader but as formerly award-winning print journalist, mostly a newspaper reporter, retired after a career spanning a half-century. Given only the publicly available sources, I could put together a basic report -- “Rape and the Christianization of the U.S. Military” -- in no more than a week. With time to cultivate inside sources and otherwise properly investigate the matter, a competent reporter could easily produce a Pulitzer-class story in two or three months.)

That this story has not already been broken is the most damning indictment yet of our allegedly "free" press.

*

In response to another poster on the “Culture of Abuse” thread, I point out I have written many times of rape and the Christianization of the military: access the TypePad edition of OAN, go to archives, then type in "theocracy" (no quotation marks).

For the record, the four books cited above are: The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet, Harper: 2008); American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges, Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.: 2006); American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Kevin Phillips, Viking: 2006); The Age of American Unreason, especially Chapter 8 (Susan Jacoby, Pantheon Books: 2008).

The best of these is Sharlet's work. Phillips' text is interesting because he is a conservative but nevertheless is appalled by the theocratic threat, while Jacoby's work is a general exposé on the Moron Nation (as I sometimes call it) that has resulted from capitalism's methodical “moronation” (my term for “dumbing down”) of the national mentality. 

Other reliable sources on the theocratic threat include Americans United for Separation of Church and State; Theocracy Watch; Catholic Watch and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. AU's role is explained by its name. Theocracy Watch is an encyclopaedic source on the effort to impose Biblical Law on the United States, but in its fealty to the Democratic Party is blind to the Democrats' pro-theocracy efforts, for example Hillary Clinton's secret, pro-Biblical-Law  collaboration with Sam Brownback as exposed on pages 272-277 of Sharlet's book. Catholic Watch monitors the efforts by the Roman Catholic Church to buy up all U.S. health-care facilities and thereby impose total bans on contraception and legally assisted suicide, while the Military Religious Freedom Foundation fights the forcible Christianization of the armed forces. 

I think there are two reasons the predatory nature of Christianity is suppressed by publications on the USian Left. The first is elitist arrogance, which since the 1960s has been the Left's downfall, in this instance the assumption religion is irrelevant (never mind the fact the U.S. is the most fanatically religious nation in the industrial world). The second reason is political correctness: to acknowledge Christian fanaticism is to acknowledge the fanaticism of Abrahamic religion in general, which of necessity would include acknowledgement of Islamic fanaticism – which political correctness forbids – and acknowledgement of Jewish fanaticism as well.  

That said, the last and best word of this week's column comes from a dear friend's reaction to the Ukraine crisis (and Goddess grant her foresight is better than mine): “I don't think we'll get into a land war with Russia over some peninsula in the the Black Sea – strategic to others, but not to us – and I'm very sick of our continuing to clean up the messes created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the imperial ambitions of Europe!”

LB/2 March 2014

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Class Struggle: the Forbidden Secret of USian Savagery

SOMETIMES SEVERAL TOPICS mesh into a single essay, a process to which I alluded, though only en passant, as I was writing and assembling last week's OAN. But that meshing was slap-in-the-face obvious this week, as Internet reporting on governmentally sanctioned persecution by Christian theocrats at the U.S. Air Force Academy shared indicative synchronicity with five other topics. These were the release of some new data on the forcible impoverishment of the 99 Percent; the smashing of a unionization campaign in the de facto Christian theocracy of the South; the methodical falsification of U.S. history (specifically about the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon's treason and President Johnson's humanitarianism); the judicial approval of religious profiling by the ever-more-ubiquitous secret police, and a provocative review of poetry as a medium for speaking truth to power, which Reader Supported News thoughtfully picked up from The New Yorker.

What ties all these pieces together is the fact they are each – even the poetry review – about class struggle. Though we USians are conditioned to reject class struggle – even to deny its existence – its reality becomes obvious whenever you focus on the increasingly unapologetic, might-makes-right savagery of capitalism. That's because what is called capitalism is at its Ayn Rand core nothing more complex than infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever established. Its individual, clinical state is called moral imbecility or sociopathy. When it's metastasized from economic theory into a defining national philosophy, as it has in the United States, what you get is capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – another name for which is fascism. 

The class-struggle common denominator of these stories is provided by new economic-inequality data,  for which a tip of the green visor to an extremely useful email newsletter, PopularResistance.Org Daily Digest. The data, assembled by the Economic Policy Institute, show a key aspect of how we in the 99 Percent are methodically impoverished: “Between 1979 and 2007...the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 18.9 percent. Simultaneously, the average income of the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much—by 200.5 percent.” 

EPI then addresses the discrepancy state-by-state. The worst states – the realms of capitalism so malevolent the One Percenters allowed us no increase in average incomes – are Nevada, Wyoming, Michigan and Alaska. The 15 next worst, where the One Percenters made off with from half to 84 percent of all income growth between 1979 and 2007, are Arizona (where the richest of the rich grabbed 84.2 percent of all income growth); Oregon (81.8 percent); New Mexico (72.6 percent); Hawaii (70.9 percent); Florida (68.9 percent); New York (67.6 percent); Illinois (64.9 percent); Connecticut (63.9 percent); California (62.4 percent); Washington (59.1 percent); Texas (55.3 percent); Montana (55.2 percent); Utah (54.1 percent); South Carolina (54.0 percent); and West Virginia (53.3 percent). 

Another Popular Resistance dispatch – a photo essay on the homeless camps  that have become a signature presence in the USian woodlands – exemplifies the real-world consequences of the EPI data. (The suppression of these communities, which earlier generations knew as Hoovervilles, is amongst the primary reasons for the endemic closures of formerly public lands throughout the United States.) Ben Marcin's pictures of individual dwellings at these sites are well-composed, so much so they vividly portray the eerie, almost tangible sense of tragedy and banishment that haunts all such locales. Though that is part of the story's strength, I must nevertheless as a photographer and former photo editor fault the work for its failure to include the people who built and inhabited these wretched domiciles. But its publication in the same edition of PRODD as the EPI report is laudable – another wake-up call demanding we recognize the forbidden truth of class-struggle. 

Likewise the conclusion of the EPI report: “Policy choices and cultural forces have combined to put downward pressure on the wages and incomes of most Americans even as their productivity has risen...In the next decade, something must give. Either America must accept that the American Dream of widespread economic mobility is dead, or new policies must emerge that will begin to restore broadly shared prosperity.” 

Meanwhile the One Percenters' choice of alternatives – zero-tolerance fascism – is already obvious in the politicians' embrace of “austerity” at every level of USian governance, federal, state and local. Hence the class-struggle relevance that binds the following texts and comment-thread responses into a single OAN entry. 

***

“How the Union Was Defeated at Volkswagen”  Kevin Drawbaugh and Nick Carey of Reuters byline an obviously-censored report that nevertheless manages to suggest the behind-the-scenes, beyond-the-workplace coordination that defeated the United Automobile Workers effort to unionize a Volkswagen plant in East Tennessee. The defeat is all the more revealing because VW's (German) management, which believes workers do have rights, welcomed the union's presence. But the wire-service dispatch, though detailed, says nothing about the anti-union fanaticism of the local white churches, to which I can attest because I lived in Tennessee for a miserable 13 years. Such theocratic malevolence is often enforced by the Ku Klux Klan – colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Hence my contribution to the comment thread: We on the Left need to “recognize the role Christianity plays -- Godzilla huge and King Kong strong -- in keeping the South anti-union. The so-called 'Prosperity Gospel,' which originated in the fundamentalist South but is now the doctrinal mainstay of Christianity throughout the USian homeland, holds that wealth and power are meted out by the Christians' god to reward godly men. An extension of the same doctrine decrees the manager is god's anointed representative in the workplace. Managerial right is thus divine right – the same entitlement formerly accorded kings. Thus too any disobedience is deadly sin -- and from this perspective, there is no greater sin than unionism. (Moreover) this is all part of 'a cultural/ideological war that extends far beyond the workplace.' It reaches into the bedroom via bans on abortion and birth control; into the schools via bans on teaching scientific truth; and into the military via the forcible Christianization imposed on the officer corps. It is nothing less than an organized campaign to replace the constitution with Biblical Law, the Christian equivalent of Sharia, and it has already conquered the federal government, for which see The Family: the Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power: (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008)” 

Ralph Nader's later, much more revealing report on how East Tennessee and Ayn Rand ideology defeated the UAW is here. But even Nader, a skilled and insightful researcher, missed the Caucasian pulpit-pounding that, sure as sunrise, hammered home the Christian  god's commandment “to put them uppety workers back in thar rightful place.” 

***

“Judge Tosses Muslim Spying Suit Against NYPD, Blames Reporters”  Dan Froomkin of First Look reports in detail on a ruling by the U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., that voids the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom, blames the press for the associated controversy and grants USian secret police the right to monitor religious practices. Remembering how Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic judiciary cleared the way for Hitler, I supportively answer another poster on the story's comment thread by saying, “what is being done to us is infinitely worse than 'blow(s)' to our civil liberties. To understand the magnitude and objective of the One Percent's assault on the rule of law, and why the Democrats are as instrumental as the Republicans in subverting the Constitution, the best source is probably The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (William L. Shirer; Simon & Shuster: 1959). Apropos the total corruption of the U.S. judiciary, the parallels described in the section entitled 'Justice in the Third Reich,' pgs. 268-274 (1981 edition), are especially damning. 'The law was what (the Leader) said it was...with the power to do to death whomever he pleased.' Sound familiar? Welcome to the Fourth Reich.” 

I regret I did not comment on why the court decision is so personally disturbing: because I remember how the authorities in East Tennessee – including officials at the University of Tennessee – persecuted Unitarians during the 1950s, and how the First Amendment was ultimately our only defense. 

Now in the looming Christian theocracy of the USian Empire, I can easily envision the secret police whether local, state or federal again assigned to monitor the political conformity and even doctrinal orthodoxy not just of Muslims (as in the Newark case), but of all people – especially those in sects officially viewed as “suspicious,” as Unitarians were during the era of the postwar purges, as all non-Christians, agnostics, atheists and even non-fundamentalist Christians are today.

 

***

“Lying to Survive at the Air Force Academy: An Open Letter to Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson”  Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation shares a letter he received that bitterly protests the Christian theocracy imposed upon the U.S. officer corps. I point out that “In the de facto Fourth Reich of today's USian Empire, the Christian church in its more savagely fundamentalist cults is becoming the equivalent of the Nazi Party in the Third Reich of Hitler's Germany...In which context recall the inscription around the swastikas on German military uniform belts: Gott Mit Uns -- 'god with us,' thereby granting Christian sanction even to the Holocaust.”

***

“Does Nixon's 'Treason' Boost LBJ's Legacy” Robert Parry of Consortium News reports on the oft-ignored fact President Nixon's treason prolonged the Vietnam War, adding at least 20,000 U.S. military people and perhaps a million Vietnamese men, women and children to the death toll. As a result, President Johnson's domestic humanitarianism is “overshadowed” to the point it is nearly forgotten. My answer notes what should be obvious: “Methodical censorship of historical facts that rehabilitate President Johnson's image is understandable when viewed from the perspective of class struggle. The benefits of LBJ's generosity toward the 99 Percent were very real. These included giant strides toward redefining USian health care and adequate transport as civil rights rather than privileges of wealth; equally significant steps toward ameliorating the socioeconomic disadvantages that keep lower-income peoples imprisoned in poverty; and, as a result, strong reinforcement of the New Deal/anti-Ayn-Rand notion of the United States as a genuine land of opportunity. Were LBJ to be historically rehabilitated, these aspects of his policies -- humanitarianism that is truly revolutionary in the context of the Ayn Rand fascism that rules the USian Empire today -- would be brought to the forefront.”

(Which is not, say again NOT, to  suggest LBJ's conspiratorial role in turning a little war into a big war -- and thereby handing his One Percent masters untold profits -- should ever be forgiven.) 

***

“Misremembering America's Wars, 2003-2053” Nick Turse of TomDispatch describes an ultra-high-tech 2053 in which government propaganda is the only so-called truth. He then uses this improbable fiction to legitimately criticize the Big Lie “history” of the USian Empire's wars now being disseminated by the military. While I applaud his critique, I am so vexed by its underlying PollyAnna notion of progress, I focus mostly on that: “Mr. Turse's high-tech 2053 will exist, if at all, only in the privileged quarters of the One Percent and its factotums, the politicians and bureaucrats whose job is to perpetuate capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total wretchedness for all the rest of us. The One Percenters and their enablers will live in guarded and gated compounds. As for us, think not of Star Trek but of Les Miserables; picture not houses and apartments but the sordidness and stench of slave pens and homeless camps...That will be the real 2053.” Another poster rejects the likelihood of slave pens; I say “slave pens -- specifically for-profit prisons -- are already a key part of the USian Empire's Ayn Rand economy.” 

(And this was before I had seen Marcin's photographs of homeless camps – which are so vivid you can almost smell them, exactly as I have smelled them in parts of the Cascade Mountains back country before it was closed to public access.) 

***

“Can Atrocity Be the Subject Matter of Poetry?” Robyn Creswell in The New Yorker reviews Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu, editors; W.W. Norton: 2014). 

Creswell gets the title wrong but raises compelling questions about the relationship between politics and art. As a socialist, I of course believe the two are inseparable, that what Robert Graves describes as “one story and one story only” cannot be told without reference to the elements of class-struggle that are evident even in our most ancient myths. But Creswell – a man of obvious Ruling Class privilege no doubt schooled in the capitalist dogmas that dismiss class struggle as delusion and proclaim art and politics to be like Kipling's East and West, “never the twain shall meet” – damns the anthology for its very democracy: “(t)he editors’ decision to include the voices of heroic liberalism...means there is too much verse that is, by all conventional criteria – vividness of language, ability to surprise, techniques of rhyme and rhythm – very bad.” His review -- despite its begrudging nod to editor Wu and many other critics of the socioeconomically exclusive, academically cloistered narcissism so much USian poetry has become since the 1960s -- is perhaps then an exposition of the selfsame exclusiveness. But that insight comes to me only now, after a much more careful reading. My original comment was written in delight at finding a poetry review – any poetry review – on RSN. My intent was mostly to thank RSN Founder/Editor Marc Ash for running it and to express my hope it represents another expansion of the site's already eclectically gratifying content. I also applauded a fellow comment-thread poster “for reminding us of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and 'Babiyy Yar,' which was later set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his wrenchingly powerful 13th Symphony, subtitled with same name in a slightly different spelling, Babi Yar." 

I cannot listen to Babi Yar without getting tears in my eyes, and I doubt anyone who is fully human can. It achieved enormous popularity in the allegedly brainwashed Soviet Union, but here in the allegedly free world of USian homeland, Babi Yar died in the oblivion of public indifference – one of the many reasons the Soviet citizenry often jeered us as nyekulturniy. Other great works, including virtually all of the formerly recognized occidental classics, have similarly perished. That's because the One Percent uses censorship as a weapon of class struggle. And censorship thus employed takes many forms. There is censorship by denunciation, as in Craswell's review. There is censorship by obscurity, imposed by the fact so many USians never lose the intellectual gag reflex with which our public schools condition us to reject art and literature, thus to ensure we carefully avoid the near occasion of enchantment by aesthetic agitators. There is censorship by price, as the anthology in question lists at $29.95, more than most of us in the 99 Percent can afford for anything beyond the necessities of our household budgets: food, clothing, transport, doctors, medicine, shelter. And now there's censorship by suppression (as against Edward Snowden or as implicitly demanded by the Federal District Court in Newark), plus of course censorship by the Big Lie, as in the falsified histories of the empire's wars. But let us not despair: our understanding of class struggle – in this instance the One Percent's escalating efforts to ensure we proletarians and peasants remain forever impoverished, powerless and ignorant –  now melds a plague of seemingly unrelated oppressions into a single, potentially revolutionary summation of grievances.

LB/23 February 2014 

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Notes on Betrayals Personal and Political, Old and New

(Edited 18/2/2014 to clean up the debris of writing in haste to avoid the pangs of painful memories.)

I APOLOGIZE FOR the tardiness of this post. The activities of “retirement” that included two days of volunteer editorial work plus responding to a wealth of relevant material on other websites seemed to have left me no time for the weekly contemplation, research and writing that usually keynotes this space. Instead I planned to note in passing how my compulsion to outside agitate on other sites had generated a total of eight posts in four days, which is probably a personal record for Internet contributions. I would then write a few sentences on the common concerns – deliberate disinformation, co-optation and political betrayal (mostly the latter) – that bind these eight posts into a topical anthology and headline it accordingly.

But – such is the undeniable (white, gray and sometimes black) magick of writing – what I intended wasn't at all what happened.

After I boasted of my eight-post output, I sat smiling at the fact I was fairly sure it's a high-water mark I haven't approached since the good old days when I was often summoned to stand in as a rewrite-man on The Jersey Journal (1969-1970), where I was a reportorial top gun, a presumably up-and-coming young journalist who was not only appreciated and respected by my employers but also well-liked by most of my colleagues.

Now I fondly remembered the uniquely welcoming smell of paper, machine-oil, tobacco-smoke and ink that characterized all big-city newsrooms of that era. I remembered the staccato of typewriters and the faster more assertive riffs of wire-service teletypes punctuated in random counterpoint by bulletin bells and ringing telephones and the suck-bang of the pneumatic tubes that carried skillfully edited copy to the composing room where with equal skill it was set in type cast from molten lead. I remembered too the self-assured expression of my own editorial talents that always seemed bolstered by this atonal but profoundly energizing symphony as it rose to its crescendo at our main deadline, straight-up noon for the big makeover we called the North Lift. And now as I contemplated these memories, I realized they had been rendered poignant by the sepia-toning that characterizes history and the quietude imposed by distance – that they were shaping themselves into a spontaneous eulogy to a breed of journalist and a rewarding intensity of life and work and commitment that is no more, and I began to write how good I felt about having been part of all that.

Next much to my surprise it came to me I had set my all-time story-production record not during good times at The JJ, but during the bad old days I was a reporter and sometimes photographer for The Federal Way News, from the fall of 1976 through the first half of 1981.

Such is the blessing – and the curse – of writing. To write is to remember, and sometimes, even amidst pleasant memories, it is to suddenly and unexpectedly recall painful, hitherto-suppressed details: in this case all the reasons why I have no fond memories of the The Federal Way News, none whatsoever. It was there I was paid the lowest wages of my career and evaluated not for the quality of my work but for whether I met a weekly word-quota and whether my personality meshed with the personalities of the other (disgruntled) occupants of the editorial hive, which mostly it didn't, not the least because I cannot respect people who flee from their own intellectual potential or cringe in terror and/or rat you out to management if you so much as whisper the word “union.” At first – remembering all this wretchedness here and now 33 years after the fact – I was merely taken aback. But then the rest of the details rose to haunt me like vengeful ghosts, and I was overwhelmed by hurt and anger.

Unlike The JJ, where we were proud of what we did and for whom we did it and proud too we were represented by the Hudson County Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO, The FWN was a journalistic sweatshop and was infamous as such throughout Washington state and maybe the entire Pacific Northwest. You never knew whether you were meeting the word-quota because it was deliberately kept secret – a sadistic albeit diabolically effective means of ensuring the subjugation of the staff. But that wasn't its only deficiency. As I was warned over drinks one night by a friendly editor at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, FWN had such a bad reputation for suppressing stories to placate advertisers, even if you won a Pulitzer there, you probably wouldn't get any credit for it because of where you'd been working. “You wanna get back in the game,” he said, “you gotta get out of Federal Way and onto a real newspaper first.”

I wrote some significant and award-winning stories at FWN – exposés that changed local policies, won me a place on Gov. Dixy Lee Ray's enemies list and in one instance beat a sneaky Christian effort to close gay and singles bars – but all that really mattered to the bosses was whether the text was long enough to fill spaces between the advertisements. Not only did my writing suffer a ruinous lack of discipline resulting from FWN's operational shibboleth of longer is (always) better; my mental health was wounded too. Vicious, relentless bullying by the psychological thug who was FWN's glaringly talentless editor for most of my five years there was the most painfully wrenching workplace experience of my entire life.

Though I would not let myself admit it until now, his constant derision and belittlement had weakened me to the point I was unable to muster the emotional strength necessary to find a better job, much less return to the East Coast where I belonged. His undeserved but relentless antagonism was also, because of my own history, an especially wounding form of betrayal. Bullied and abused as a child, I had turned to journalism as a sanctuary, a realm wherein I could be myself and  demonstrate my true strengths without fear of ridicule or assault, and so it had been on every publication for which I had worked in New York City, New Jersey, Michigan and even during most of the years I worked in the South. But my experience at FWN soon became a nightmare, and a source of nightmares, and so it remained until the editor was fired.

Eventually, maybe a year later at the beginning of the downsizing that preceded the paper's bankruptcy, I got the boot too. At least I was laid off rather than fired, which meant I could collect unemployment compensation.

As for my alleged colleagues, they were obviously glad to see me leave. None attended my going-away party, a small gathering hosted by a few non-newspaper people, mostly cops who had come to know me as the one local reporter they could trust to get the facts right and never burn a clandestine source. Despite the nagging uncertainties of joblessness amidst the recession Reagan and his cronies imposed to begin the reduction of everybody's wages, I cashed my last FWN paycheck with feelings of joy I imagine are akin to those of a man newly freed from a hard-time prison. But by then it was too late for any rapid recovery; so damaged was I, it took a season as engineer/deckhand on the Caroline, a 96-foot salmon-seiner out of Bellingham's Squalicum Harbor, to even begin to rebuild my self-confidence, for which my eternal gratitude to Skipper Andy Zanchi.

Indeed this is the first time I have been able to write of my circumstances at The Federal Way News. In fact it is the first time I have even spoken of these circumstances save in denials voiced to my long-ago lover who (though she was two decades my junior), was nevertheless perceptive enough to recognize in me the symptoms of a victimization I could not bear to admit to myself. Perhaps my inability to confront the associated issues was one of the underlying reasons we broke apart. In any case she was a notably kind young woman who unintentionally took my heart with her when she left. But perhaps some good came out of those dismal FWN years too; perhaps that's why I'm yet so sensitive to the betrayals now routinely inflicted on us by politicians, bureaucrats and alleged advocates.

* 

(Note: The Federal Way News for which I worked from 1976 through 1981 no longer exists. Originally a weekly shopper, its management had intended to make it a daily newspaper – the promise that [foolishly] diverted me from a ticket-in-my-pocket return to New York City. Though the paper subsequently achieved thrice-weekly publication and at one point seemed sure to go daily – the pie-in-the-sky by which I rationalized enduring the editor's psychological brutality – FWN nevertheless went bankrupt during the 1980s. It was then bought by The Seattle Times and shut down. The present Federal Way News, a weekly, has no organizational connection to the former publication by the same name.)

*** 

“Our Movement Must Desegregate, or We'll Lose”  Carl Gibson of Reader Supported News fumbles for euphemisms to enable his otherwise accurate reporting of how Ayn-Rand-minded Emily's List “feminists” betrayed Rush-Limbaugh-target Sandra Fluke and how her betrayal is a teachable moment. I sharply criticize the opacity of Gibson's language: “his chosen words are clearly intended to avoid the implicitly Marxist terms 'ideological solidarity' and 'ideological discipline' – both of which are necessities the USian Left self-destructively rejects.”  Then I commend his insight – and refute a comment-poster's absurd claim the Democratic Party might foster such solidarity and discipline. “The Democrats,” I explain, “who maliciously conceal their fascist zealotry beneath progressive slogans – are the primary deceiver in USian politics. By contrast, the Republicans have been a vessel of USian fascism since the 1920s and, now as then, make no secret of it. Thus the de facto one-party rule that defines USian governance...(Thus too) Emily's List's endorsement of 'fiscal conservatism' – another euphemism for economic savagery – is typical of the Ayn Rand feminism spawned by capitalist co-optation of the USian feminist movement. As the loss of jobs and income that subjugates the USian 99 Percent, women are denied reproductive freedom by the loss of health insurance, a fact deliberately ignored by Emily's List and the Democrats in general. Nor – despite Big Lies to the contrary – does Obamacare provide a satisfactory alternative. Meanwhile, Rand herself has become an USian feminist heroine, which explains not just the Emily's List stance, but bourgeois white USian feminism's tacit approval of capitalist malevolence.”

***

“The Empowerment Elite Claims Feminism” Jessica Valenti, the founder of the compellingly radical website Feministing, exposes a new effort to neutralize feminism. I reply that TEDWomen, the target of Valenti's reporting,  is undoubtedly (yet another) effort by the One Percent – the diabolical cunning of which we underestimate at our own peril – to co-opt the one radical movement that, despite all the odds against it, has nevertheless forced (some) amelioration on the ever-more-openly savage Ayn Rand capitalism that governs the United States. In this context, the lily-white, bourgeois nature of TED and TEDWomen should surprise no one: it is merely a reflection of the ethnicity of the USian Ruling Class and the bigotry therein...“As to TED's taboo on discussing reproductive freedom, this is a strong indication the organization is a clandestine collaborator with the forces of Christian theocracy -- the most obscenely well-funded, relentlessly fanatical subversives in USian history. (Apropos which, note the secret collaboration between Hillary Clinton and Sam Brownback, exposed by Jeff Sharlet in The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, [Harper: 2008], pgs. 272-277.)”

***

“Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-Lite?” Robert Parry of Consortium News lays bear some ugly truths that suggest the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is no more a “change we can believe in” than President Obama was. I point out she's “infinitely worse than 'neocon-light' or even neocon-heavy,” again citing Sharlet's report she's a clandestine theocrat, secretly collaborating with Brownback and others of his ilk to impose biblical law on the United States. Her specialty, says Sharlet, is deceptive legislation “dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunnelling beneath it.” The same strategy of stealthy oppression is enabling the Roman Catholic Church to ban birth control, abortion and end-of-life choices by buying up U.S. health care facilities,  already a crisis in Washington state.

***

“Quit Talking About Equal Pay and Do Something”  Elizabeth Schulte of Socialist Worker explores how President Obama talks progressive change but then does nothing to make it happen and often actually sabotages the effort. She speculates the same presidential tactic will betray the struggle to close the wage gap that allows women only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. In the associated comment thread I note this sort of treachery is in fact the president's defining characteristic. Forever Janus-faced, he presents himself as Obama the Orator, pledging “change we can believe in.” But then he invariably shifts to Barack the Betrayer – “his true imperial self” – and he allows no changes save those that define, advance and perpetuate capitalist governance. A subsequent comment by another poster prompts me to list seven ways Obama has done more harm than any other president in my lifetime, which began in 1940. 

***

“Reagan's 'Liberal' Son Takes on Ted Cruz” Elias Isquith of Salon discuses another debate over Republican obstructionism. I say the purpose of all such debates is to normalize austerity – “a genteel euphemism for genocidal cutbacks by which the One Percent intend to kill off all of us they consider 'surplus workers' – that is, any of us (elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed) who are no longer exploitable for profit...The Republicans, I add, “are capitalism's trail-breakers, as in their proposed $40 billion cut in food stamps. The Democrats are capitalism's facilitators, as in the 'compromise' food-stamp cutback of $8.7 billion. It's rule by One Party of Two Names – the Capitalist Party – and we the people are the victims.

***

“House Democrats Call for Discharge Petitions!” Thom Hartmann reports the House Democrats are planning a new ploy to move legislation obstructed by the Republicans. I respond: “What is obvious here --what makes me grin with glee -- is how mere mention of 'revolutionary socialism' (as by Councilwoman Kshama Sawant in Seattle) has terrified the Democratic Party into a  pretense of returning to New Deal values. That – and the fact it proves beyond argument socialism is anything but 'dead' or 'irrelevant' – is the real story behind these discharge petitions, though you'll never read it in so-called 'mainstream' (i.e., Ruling Class) media.” 

***

“Distorting Russia: How the American media misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine”   Stephen F. Cohen reports via The Nation on the disinformation and outright lies USian “mainstream” (Ruling Class) media is disseminating about Russia. I suggest the real reason U.S. media is spewing anti-Russian propaganda is the fact the second largest political organization in today's Russia is the Communist Party. My comment then triggers a long series of exchanges on the comment thread, for which it's necessary to scroll way, way down. 

***  

“Will US Civil Liberties Survive the Occupy Trial?”  Chase Madar of the Guardian questions whether the USian homeland's ever-more-restricted freedom to peaceably assemble will survive the trial of an Occupy activist who was savaged by New York City cops. The resultant comment thread is taken over and hogged by a Christian apologist for fascism, but I try to bring it back to one of Madar's most vital points: that the USian incarceration rate now exceeds even those of the former Soviet Union and East Germany. I point out the only valid incarceration-rate comparison is between the Third Reich of Nazi Germany and the de facto Fourth Reich of the United States – and even then, including the Nazi concentration camps – Internet data suggests the USian rate is worse. Though my let's-get-back-on-topic post wins ten reader thumbs-up, my effort is to no avail: the Christian continues to demonstrate Christian love by shouting down everyone else. 

LB/16 February 2014

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