Are Ruling-Class Feminists Out to Kill 99% Solidarity?

(Note to readers on Blogger: a much more graphically sophisticated version of this blog -- identical text, slightly different headline due to format spacing -- is available at http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/. The TypePad version also includes several portfolios of my photography, much of it previously published, some of it dating back to the 1960s.)

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NORMALLY I AM uncomfortable writing about feminism because, being male, I can never have an insider's appreciation of its dynamics. Moreover I believe the blessing (or curse) of a womb – and with it the implicit responsibility for mothering (or not) – creates in every female a perspective we males might approach intellectually but cannot possibly comprehend emotionally. Hence my usual response to feminism is akin to the respectfully inquisitive silence with which a hopelessly left-brained student might approach a Zen master. I know I will never achieve enlightenment – at least not in this lifetime – though I am unquestionably willing to learn whatever wisdom the master deigns to impart.

But twice this year already, the lily-white exponents of a uniquely USian brand of feminism – the “material girl” ideology so antagonistically antithetical to feminism's socialist roots I am compelled to label it “Ayn Rand Feminism” – have sunk their incipiently fascist fangs into progressive people and causes, first by public repudiation of reproductive-rights heroine Sandra Fluke  in retaliation for her progressive economic views, now more recently by denouncing the hacker-collective Anonymous and the women's-equality collective UltraViolet as “white-knight vigilantes” for their courageous defense of rape victims. Thus the Ayn Rand feminists have begun to brandish their fealty to the Ruling Class much as the Teabag Party asserts its lockstep adoration of the One Percent, which means these particular feminists are now – like any other organ of capitalist governance – a legitimate target of socialist criticism regardless of the critic's gender.

What therefore follows is a much-enlarged version of a commentary I posted two weeks ago on Reader Supported News in response to a startling piece of gender-war invective entitled “Brad Pitt's New Movie on the Steubenville Rape Case Has the Wrong Protagonist,” the text cited in the second of the above links. By Tara Culp-Ressler, it offers an updated version of the old gender-warrior doctrine that no man should ever be allowed to help the women's movement lest his good deeds reinforce not only his (despicable) male ego but strengthen the shackles of patriarchy as well – and that any woman who disagrees is a hopeless reactionary, part of the problem rather than the solution.

I ran afoul of that uniquely white-bourgeois dogma nearly 40 years ago, when I was an investigative reporter, and its resurrection renews a sense of shame that prompts me to reveal now a fact I should have disclosed then. Here is the whole story:

An assertively Christian hospital that served a large and populous suburb of a major city refused to treat rape victims lest the association with sex and violence taint its godly image. Despite the fact an executive of the local rape-relief organization was my lover, I got the story not from her but because in those days I had the best cop sources in the area, probably in the entire state, and the cops complained to me about the hospital after one of their fellow officers ran afoul of its atrocious policy while seeking emergency-room care for an especially distraught rape victim. The cops, who in that era still believed their job was to protect and serve the citizenry rather than to serve the One Percent as its army of occupation, were genuinely furious. Several officers correctly likened the hospital's coldly enforced anti-rape-victim policy to psychologically re-assaulting the victim. After my usual telephone-and-shoe-leather effort unearthed an extended pattern of such abuses, I confronted the perpetrators and wrote my report, a blistering story that ran atop Page One.

But to my lingering shame, I omitted from follow-up stories how the local rape-relief group had known of the problem for years but had deliberately kept it secret – apparently for two reasons: they hoped to get sole credit for negotiating a solution, and they feared some (male) “do-gooders” might discover the problem, forcefully solve it (exactly as the cops and I did), and thereby – or so these gender-warriors reasoned – perpetuate male supremacy. In other words, the white, petit bourgeois feminists who ran the rape-relief organization believed it was better for rape victims to be denied proper care at their local Christian hospital (and thus be forced to travel as much as 50 crow-miles to a secular hospital), than for anyone other than the feminist movement – and better yet this specific rape-relief organization – to get credit for solving the problem.

Again to my shame, I half-assedly rationalized my act of self-censorship by telling myself my inside knowledge of the group's operations and policies was off-the-record information. Now nearly five decades after the fact and with the unforgiving, pre-graveyard clarity of old age, I confess my rationalization was total bullshit. The truth is I suppressed that vital detail merely to sustain my relationship with the rape-relief executive; I was living with her in her own house, and the alternative would have been instant homelessness. In any other circumstances, such a deliberate cover-up of atrocities would have either been in my lead or in my second and third grafs. Given a time machine to go back to the where and when, here is how I would write the story now:

Rape victims in Gastropoda County are thrice victimized – first by the rapist, then by Gastropoda Christian Hospital, finally by the very rape-relief organization that claims to be the victims' advocate and protector.

These circumstances came to light after police sources described the chilling ouster of a distraught rape victim from the GCH emergency room two weeks ago. Subsequent investigation brought to light at least a half dozen other such incidents.

Now GCH executives reluctantly admit it bars rape victims from its emergency room and has forcibly ejected the few who have managed to get past its gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, Gastropoda County Rape Relief officials just-as-reluctantly admitted they've known about the problem for years but have kept it secret. They claim the secrecy was essential to what they describe as an “ongoing” effort to negotiate with hospital management to change its anti-rape-victim policy.

But no such negotiations, spokespersons for both organizations concede, have ever taken place.

Moreover, the hospital's executive director insists he and his managerial colleagues were never asked to undertake such talks.

The hospital's longstanding opposition to treating rape victims – which inside sources say grows out of its owners' fear any association with sex and violence will besmirch the institution's image of “Christian godliness” – is confirmed by records in...

(The anonymity with which I am now cloaking this report is in response to three facts: [1]-my clips of the original story, and therefore my ability to confirm its published details, were destroyed by the same fire that in 1983 obliterated all my life's work, and I cannot replace the clips as the newspaper's morgue of bound copies did not survive corporate bankruptcy in the mid-1980s, nor – for reasons I am unable to determine (especially since it was the local paper of record) – were its editions ever microfilmed by the local library; [2]-the hospital long ago changed hands and is now under secular ownership; [3]-the sources and perpetrators are either retired, dead or otherwise unable to defend themselves.)

Significantly, my lover had made it clear she was uncomfortable with the story from the moment I told her what I was working on. But we never had time to discuss the details of her discomfort. Hence I did not foresee her anger, much less its intensity. When I with my bottle of celebratory wine arrived at our dwelling the night after the story broke, I expected a joyful and exuberant welcome – at the very least a thank-you embrace and a “well done” in recognition of the quality of the work. Instead I was greeted with an unprecedented outpouring of anger and contempt. My reporting, she said, had damn near gotten her fired; some of the members of her board of directors accused her of using her relationship with me to foster publication of the story, thereby perpetuating the sex-for-favors dynamic of patriarchy; others condemned her for allowing a male to “invade” a realm of advocacy they believed should be exclusively female – never mind at least 10 percent of all rape victims are male; still others insisted she should have clandestinely pressured my editor and even my publisher to reassign the story to a woman. When the board voted on her proposed firing, she said, the termination motion failed by only one vote.

To say I was shocked is an understatement, but mostly I was enraged by the indifference to victims that to me had suddenly emerged as the common stance of everyone but the cops and had therefore become the core issue of the entire story. Finally I responded accordingly: “You of all people know how good a reporter I am; you know I'd have found out about it even if you and I had never met – and what I should do now, what I fucking-A-tweet would do right this minute if our circumstances were different, is write a new story revealing everything you told me tonight.” What I did not say, not only because it was too painfully embarrassing for me to verbalize but because both of us clearly knew it already, is that she could goddamn well thank her lucky stars I was living in her house, which meant there was no way I could write the rest of the story without condemning myself to instant eviction. Needless to say, the confrontation killed the relationship, though the process of breaking up would consume another month or two. It also tossed a huge bucket of cold water on my journalistic pride.

Nevertheless the story made a helluva big wave – big enough the hospital's management was forced to reverse their anti-rape-victim policy literally hours after the paper hit the street. They were also forced to pay for their emergency-room personnel to get the medical and psychological training necessary to provide proper care for rape victims of both genders. As ashamed as I am of my act of self-censorship, I remain fiercely proud of what my story accomplished.

(I should note here that journalism of that era – at least as it used to be practiced on a good many local newspapers here in the pre-global-economy United States – was mostly a Working-Class calling. It drew from blue-collar families the same sorts of aggressively bright kids who might otherwise have gone into the cops or the priesthood or maybe the military. Sometimes it even enabled a declassé proletarian like myself to actually better people's lives, which to me was always its biggest attraction.)

Apropos the malice directed at males accused of poaching in political or conceptual territory certain feminists believe should be theirs alone, that hospital story was not my first encounter with it. A few years earlier, when I was an undergraduate, it hamstrung a major research project of mine, part of the work that would become the forever-lost book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which was destroyed with all its research notes and most of its photography in the 1983 fire. “Dancer,” an investigative reporter's 24-year probe of the origins and significance of the '60s Countercultural Rebellion, concluded the rebels were resurrecting a modern variant of the ancient matriarchal or at least pre-patriarchal consciousness. My findings were based on the Counterculture's music, poetry, journalism, ritual, social structures, economics and the expression of its values in environmentalism, feminism, the back-to-the-land movement and the neo-pagan renaissance. (It is an aside, but the Jungian Edward Whitmont reached a similar conclusion from very different data. But Whitmont's work, unlike my own, was carefully apolitical and therefore achieved significant publication, for which see The Return of the Goddess, Crossroad: 1982.)

While working on “Dancer,” I had foolishly imagined, exactly as I had while putting together the hospital story, that feminists would applaud my disclosures. After all, the pioneers in the “Dancer”-relevant fields of folklore and myth were themselves males. But by the early '70s, the gender-war feminists believed they had appropriated these realms as their own, and they defended their conquests with the passive-aggressive nastiness and backstabbing that characterizes academic ferocity whether male or female. Meanwhile the males associated with my project, an undergraduate thesis, seemed to regard me as a traitor to my gender. Hence though I got enough credit for the research and writing to win my bachelor's degree, my thesis itself was rejected.

And now, decades later, Culp-Ressler has resurrected the same hateful doctrine of gender-exclusivity not just to belittle Anonymous and its breathtakingly courageous defiance of draconian prison terms, but to denounce UltraViolet, which unlike its (white bourgeois) sister organizations defends oppressed women without (ironically) discriminating on the basis of caste, ethnicity or the presence of male allies.

In this same context, the Emily's List endorsement of “fiscal conservatism” – a euphemism for the genocidal savagery of Ayn Rand economics – is typical of the feminism spawned by capitalist co-optation and redirection of the USian second-wave feminist movement. (See again the first of the above links.) Because Second Wave Feminism was a daughter of the New Left of the 1960s, its dominant vision was overwhelmingly petit bourgeois and often fiercely anti-intellectual; therefore, despite its “women's liberation” label and its use of socialist rhetoric, it was frequently hostile not just to the historical truth of class struggle,  but to any analysis based on the revolutionary traditions of socialism and Marxism. Stripped of socialist armor, it was therefore easy prey for infiltrators and agents provocateur. That's why the USian feminism of the so-called “mainstream” remains indifferent to the outsourcing of jobs and downsizing of paychecks characteristic of the capitalist (Ayn Rand) moral imbecility that subjugates the USian 99 Percent. It does not acknowledge the fact that for a Working-Class woman, the loss of health insurance inflicted by global-economy outsourcing is often the total loss of reproductive freedom, an ugly reality carefully suppressed by Emily's List and the (Free Trade) Democrats in general. Nor – despite Big Lies to the contrary – is there any guarantee of rescue from the theocratic Christian effort to prohibit Obamacare from providing any 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 unabashed support of capitalism itself, particularly as exemplified by the all the women who define themselves as “anti-union progressives.”

Could it then be a coincidence such divisiveness reappears just as we in the USian Imperial Homeland seem to be making genuine progress toward proletarian solidarity? Surely not, as every available indication points to the Ruling Class mustering all its resources to suppress what it fears is looming revolution. This mustering includes not only the obvious efforts – for example the attempt by the Democratic Party to co-opt (and thereby betray) Socialist Alternative's demand for a $15-per-hour minimum wage – but the newly exposed program under which secret-police agents accompany the military into overseas combat (for which see “Outside Agitation Elsewhere” below). Obviously, such a program has only one objective: to ensure the agents are kill-hardened enough to reliably follow orders when they are commanded to exterminate suspected revolutionaries at home. In this oppressive context, I am not surprised by the anti-99 Percent treachery of the feminism discussed above. In truth it is an old story, so old we should expect nothing else from a movement that was in too-large measure co-opted by the One Percent  from about 1970 onward, with the result its exclusion of impoverished women and women of color has long been infamous.

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Outside Agitation Elsewhere: The big news is the ongoing neo-Nazification of the United States, the result of capitalism maturing into fascism, thereby not only fulfilling the predictions of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin but validating Marxism itself. (Aside: what the founders of Marxism called “imperialism,” we today know as fascism or Nazism.) Here are two links, with brief expositions of outside agitation on each of the comment threads: “Now We Know What's Being Done in Our Name,” in which Esquire's Charles Pierce writes about the leaked torture-memo scandal,  and “FBI Agents Were Deployed in Hundreds of JSOC Raids Conducted in Iraq & Afghanistan,” which describes how the USian equivalent of the Okhrana (or maybe the Gestapo) is being trained to suppress  the inevitable uprising against capitalism that is bound to occur here in the post-American-Dream wastelands.

LB/13 April 2014

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Unabated Climate Change:1%'s Final Solution for 99%?

(Note to readers on Blogger: a much more graphically sophisticated version of this blog -- identical text, slightly different headline due to format spacing -- is available at http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/. The TypePad version also includes several portfolios of my photography, much of it previously published, some of it dating back to the 1960s.)

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(Editorial note: I've omitted the usual “Outside Agitation Elsewhere” feature because I think the following disclosures, which are even more damning than I anticipated, should be presented without distraction.)

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IS CLIMATE CHANGE to be the One Percent's doomsday weapon – the Final Solution by which it hopes to exterminate most of the 99 Percent and thereby win, forever, the class-war that now rages with intensifying fury everywhere on this planet?

Consider the evidence. The global aristocracy's continuing refusal to ameliorate the apocalyptic impact of climate change – were that refusal a singular phenomenon – could be dismissed (as it often is) as nothing more than unfortunate coincidence. It could be, as so many people assume, an ultimate (and ultimately deadly) example of what happens when political ineptitude interacts with man-over-Nature arrogance and general human folly. But when you add the murderous consequences of deliberate policies and policy-decisions – austerity; the proliferation of genetically modified and therefore toxic foods; unprovoked wars of aggression as in Vietnam and the Middle East; the abandonment of disaster-stricken populations as in post-earthquake Haiti, post-tsunami Southeast Asia, post-Katrina New Orleans and post-Sandy New York City – what emerges is a far more ominous likelihood.

Is there, then, behind the locked oaken doors of some palatial Ruling Class mansion – or more likely intimately connected via an invisible network of indecipherable electronic signals – a secret cabal of global oligarchs who dictate such policies? Is it their homicidal purpose to methodically worsen the human condition until the entire global Working Class is starved, sickened, shot and otherwise terrorized to eternal submission? Is it their intent to emerge as all-powerful übermenschen from their climate-controlled, nuclear-bomb-proof bunkers, thence to reorder the world in accordance with the morally imbecilic principles set out by Ayn Rand in her fictional diatribes on the themes of Mein Kampf?

Evaluate the damning evidence for yourself:

Most of us recognize U.S. Ruling-Class academics Paul and Anne Ehrlich  as the popularizers of the present-day arguments for forcible population control. But too few of us recognize how closely some of the Ehrlichs' proposals duplicate the policies of Adolf Hitler and his colleagues.  Nor is it common knowledge Der Führer modeled his genocidal seizures of lebensraum  on the U.S. doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”  and its methodical extermination of First Nations peoples.  Most of us flinch at the admission such atrocities remain as “American” (that is, USian), as the proverbial apple pie. Yet the formerly top-secret U.S. “National Security Study Memorandum 200”  implicitly endorses population control by whatever means are necessary to ensure the prosperity of the USian imperial future:

“The U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries...Whether through government action, labor conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbance, the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized. Although population pressure is obviously not the only factor involved, these types of frustrations are much less likely under conditions of slow or zero population growth...In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.” (Emphasis added.)

Youth in particular are targeted by this 1974 document: “The young people, who are in much higher proportions in many LDCs (less developed countries), are likely to be more volatile, unstable, prone to extremes, alienation and violence than an older population. These young people can more readily be persuaded to attack the legal institutions of the government or real property of the 'establishment,' 'imperialists,' multinational corporations, or other-often foreign-influences blamed for their troubles...” (Emphasis added.)

Beneath all such theorizing are the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian doctrines that claim most of us in the 99 Percent are genetically programmed to mindlessly over-breed until we exceed our environment's capability to keep us fed. Barring the intervention of humanitarian aid – which Malthus and his present-day disciples vehemently oppose – we will then in our frenzies exterminate ourselves by self-inflicted famine, disease and violence.

Unfortunately, the only sustainable counter-arguments to Malthusianism are based on Marxism, which – given the realities of capitalist governance – means they are deliberately marginalized, often censored and generally unavailable to the global masses.

Though I was already aware of anti-Malthusian reasoning – chiefly that Malthusian doctrines are so mean-spirited in their support of the capitalist status quo, they ignore the ameliorative potentials of science, industry and mass movements – it took me several hours of research to ferret out sources appropriate for citation on OAN.

Early in the quest I found John Bellamy Foster's “Malthus' Essay on Population at Age 200: a Marxian View,” an informative, historically detailed and refreshingly thought-provoking study available here, albeit with a caution it is hardly material for quick-and-casual reading over lunch or coffee.

But eventually I discovered “The Population Issue: Marx vs. Malthus,” by Martha E. Gimenez, which is both brief and compellingly well-written. Its essence is a quietly dire warning:  “as long as population control remains the main or only concern of the various international and national organizations which in one way or another are trying to foster economic development in underdeveloped societies, their action will only consolidate the economic backwardness they are avowedly aiming to solve.”

But what if perpetuating that economic backwardness in the developing world – not to mention re-imposing it on the industrialized world via austerity – is precisely the Ruling Class intent?

What if the One Percent's long-range plan is to destroy all allegedly “surplus humans” – especially those of us who are elderly or disabled or chronically unemployed or otherwise unexploitable for maximum profit – in order to clear the way for imposition of a new, Ayn Rand World Order?

Far-fetched? Not at all; that is precisely what Rand advocates in Atlas Shrugged.

Nor it is coincidence the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian credo closely parallels the Ayn Rand dogma by which the global economy is ever-more-openly ruled. The latter – the assumption our species is divided into a few innovators whose lives should be preserved at all cost and legions of parasites who should be abandoned to die if not actively exterminated – is indeed the logical extension of the former. Hitler's concepts of übermenschen and lebensraum, derivatives of the Nazi concept of geopolitik, were merely German-nationalist variants  of the same basic ideology. Its modern-day version is the U.S. geopolitical policy of global domination, complete with all its genocidal consequences.

To quote an axiom that supposedly originated from the intense and thorough training given Soviet intelligence operatives but is probably as old as espionage itself, “once is accident, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” “Accident” might be the paralysis that blocks, now obviously forever, any ameliorative action on what should properly be labeled terminal climate change. “Coincidence” might be the climate-change failures combined with the abandonment of disaster-stricken populations. But when you factor in all the rest – austerity, the mass poisoning inflicted by genetically modified foods, the now-permanent regime of unprovoked wars – the conclusion of “Enemy Action” becomes ever-more undeniable.

As I have said so many times before, such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

LB/6 April 2014

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Censorship on the USian Left: Is Truthout Now in Pre-Election, Anything-to-Protect-the-Democrats Mode?

UNTIL LAST WEEK I had – past tense – a long and pleasant relationship with the website Truthout. As a former member of the American Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO, I applauded its decision to grant its employees guild representation, and as a former news editor and editor-in-chief, I am both impressed and moved by the unique facts-with-feelings reportorial style of Maya Schenwar, who is Truthout's executive director and probably its best writer as well. I had posted on the site's comment threads for many years, and only one of my comments had ever been suppressed – that by Truthout's comment-server Discus, which does not allow posters to link to their own blogs unless the blogs themselves have achieved the status of mainstream journalism. And Discus did let me repost the material as soon as I had removed the link.

But last week Truthout – not Discus (as the message that suddenly appeared on my post maybe five minutes after I had uploaded it made clear) – deleted the following:

The huge flaw in Obamacare is that it creates the illusion of insurance – precisely what it was intended to do – while imposing a structure of co-payments  and deductibles that are prohibitively expensive. Daily Kos provides a good basic explanation of how it works. 

If you're a member of the One Percent or the petit bourgeoisie, those co-pays and deductibles are of no concern even if you choose the least expensive plan. But if you're unemployed, or chronically impoverished, or disabled, you may well be worse off than before: forced by law to buy insurance from the for-profit insurance barons, but prohibited by co-pays and deductibles from ever actually getting health care. Indeed I know several younger people who are so afflicted – not surprising since by any reasonable standard, half the U.S. population is now impoverished.

 

Here, of course, is the truly obscene windfall profit Obama handed his insurance-barony benefactors: not just the all the new policy-holders, but all the policy-holders who will never be able to afford to use their insurance: pure profit for the profiteers, exactly as our closet-Republican president obviously promised them.

Medicare is a similar scam. If one is well off, Medicare is wonderful. The co-pays are 20 percent, the deductible is $1,000 per year. But if one is destitute, as I have been since 2009, Medicare is a nightmare of deprivation unless one (A) supplements it with what used to be called Medicare Plus (an LBJ idea made real by the Clinton Administration, then seized by Bush, restructured and renamed Medicare Advantage, with the advantage going to the for-profit insurors at the expense of non-profits); and (B) is willing to endure the loss of freedom and dignity attendant on becoming an oppressed subject of the welfare system  in return for Medicaid supplements.

(Yes, contrary to one of the bigger of the many Affordable Care Act Big Lies, Medicaid IS welfare, with all the restrictions and humiliations attendant thereupon.  And for those of us us who are elderly, it is not even a grant. It is instead a loan that will be repaid by the seizure of our meager estates – including all our personal property [books, tools, etc.] – after we're dead.) 

The common policy-thread through all this is retention of the Ayn-Rand/healthcare-as-a-privilege-of-wealth savagery that is the defining characteristic of the U.S. system. Go to a civilized country, there are no co-pays or deductibles.  But – note again the example of Medicare – we'll never see anything that humanitarian here even under a public-option plan, which we'll never be allowed anyway: not as long as the Citizens United decision remains in force – and the only way that will be overturned is by revolution.

The censored comment was my response to another poster, who asked me to clarify my stance on the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. The question's context was a discussion prompted by a Thom Hartmann exposé entitled “Is Rick Scott Guilty of Murder?” In it, Hartmann revealed how the Florida governor's refusal to allow a federally funded expansion of Medicaid had seemingly killed a young woman by denying her the care that might have sustained her life.

My original remarks had focused neither on Scott nor the dead woman but on the austerity policies that are being inflicted on us by both halves of the One Party of Two Names:

The purpose of austerity – no matter whether blatantly imposed by Republicans or stealthily imposed by Democrats – is genocide: specifically the extermination of those of us who are poor, chronically unemployed, disabled, elderly or otherwise unexploitable for maximum capitalist profit.

Yes, it is an outrage Charlene Dill was murdered by denial of health care. But she was slain not just by Republican policies in Florida. She was also killed by the endlessly more damning fact that – thanks to Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer and Democrat treachery in general – the United States remains the only industrialized nation on this planet in which health care is a privilege of wealth rather than a human right.

Nor is that too harsh a judgment. Obama and the Democrats promised us public-option health insurance. But they were lying. Once their deceptions had won them the White House and control of both houses of Congress, their (premeditated) treachery insured the savagery of health care as a privilege of wealth is now eternally locked into place. It is – and will be for as long as the USian Empire survives – now sustained by Obama's permanent elimination of all public-option alternatives, which has indentured us forever to the for-profit insurance barons. So much for "change we can believe in" – the biggest Big Lie of USian presidential history.

In this context, the most bitter truth of Charlotte Dill's death is that it is merely (another) deadly example of capitalism in action. It is a microcosm of Bhopal, of Bangladesh, of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 123 woman and 23 men on this very day 103 years ago.

The lesson taught us by Charlotte Dill – if we but had the courage to heed it – is the same lesson we should have been taught by the unspeakable sound of human bodies hitting the pavement of Washington Place below the Asch Building in Manhattan on the afternoon of 25 March 1911. Until we eliminate capitalism – which is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue (literally the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever set forth) – such atrocities will continue unabated.

As Neil Young so memorably said to honor Allison Krause,  who was yet another of capitalism's victims, "what if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?"

Later, when my accurate summary of Obamacare's most damning truths was deleted, I again addressed the poster who had asked me to clarify my position:

I responded to your question politely, truthfully and in some detail, but Truthout suppressed it. (No, not Discus; the notice specifically said Truthout.) Apparently – with the Republicans heading for a landslide victory in November (not that it will make life in the USian Imperial Homeland that much worse) – Truthout is now in do-anything-to-protect-the-Democrats mode, even unto suppressing unpleasant truths about the Affordable Care Act. Obviously I have become persona non grata here, so this will be my last post on this website. Indeed I'm not even sure you'll be allowed to see this. But if you are, and you're curious about what was censored, Google my name, then after next Monday you can read it in my blog. 

Yes, Truthout allowed that post to live – as if its censors were quite proud of how they had helped the Democratic Party in its ongoing campaign to suppress the ugly truths about the unprecedented rip-off sarcastically known as Obamacare.

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Outside Agitation Outside the Notebook: Because today is my 74th birthday and the sun is shining – a rare phenomenon in the coastal Pacific Northwest at this time of year – I am not going to spend my usual 10 or 15 hours assembling this week's column. Instead I am going to merely post the headlines of and links to the reports on which I commented, plus of course the main comments themselves. These, with the notable exception of the next item, all focus on a common theme: Obama the Orator's ongoing shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, the results of which include the Ukrainian Crisis and its threat of World War III, the government's self-imposed disadvantage in Hobby-Lobby case (which greatly bolsters the probability it will further abolish women's reproductive rights), and the regime of unprecedented censorship and secrecy by which We the People are now afflicted.

Indeed it seems Obama intends to spend his second term giving us all the finger. His fuck-you, break-all-promises policies ever-more-defiantly serve his Ruling Class masters. His treachery is wrecking the Democratic Party and inflaming white racism into an unprecedented barrier against minority aspirations. He's ensuring not just Republican dominance for years to come, but the irreversible transmogrification of the United States into a fascist (and almost certainly neo-Nazi) empire, the de facto Fourth Reich. In other words, he's doing exactly what the One Percenters hired him to do.

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“Kent State Truth Tribunal Addresses the United Nations Human Rights Committee”  Laurel Krause, sister of the murdered Allison Krause, reports on ongoing efforts to expose government secrets about the Kent State Massacre, which occurred on 4 May 1970. Via the comment thread, I give Ms. Krause what may be new and useful data:

There is one Kent State mystery that suggests the shooting was planned in advance.

I know of this because The Jersey Journal (Jersey City, N.J.), for which I was then the investigative reporter, published nine editions a day in that era. The last of these rolled a few minutes after Wall Street closed at 4 p.m. EDT. 

But all we had out of Ohio in that Monday afternoon's Market Final was a page-one bulletin the National Guard had fired on and wounded several students.

Across the river in Manhattan, where I lived, the final of The New York Post, the City's last remaining p.m., had no more than we at the JJ did.

The next day, because the shootings had occurred at 12:24 p.m. EDT, I asked why we missed the story. Our telegraph editor said the wire services – AP, UPI – hadn't moved anything more detailed than what we ran.

More curious than ever, I queried a UPI friend, who told me, “Ma Bell pulled the plug on everything in Ohio at about five minutes after 12.”

(I should explain here, for those unfamiliar with 1970s technology, that wire-service dispatches were transmitted over lines leased from AT&T and managed by the regional Bell systems.)

If it is true the Ohio wire-service connections were shut down just before the shootings – and I have no reason to doubt what my friend told me – this would suggest a conspiracy already in place, perhaps a scheme to terrorize the anti-war movement with an example of dead and wounded students.

*****

“It's Time to Put America First” Thom Hartmann decries the obscenity of lightning-fast, no-debate enactment of $1 billion in loans and $100 million in direct aid to Ukraine by the same Congress that killed unemployment compensation for 2 million USians and slashed food stamps for 1.7 million more. Vexed as always by Hartmann's refusal to acknowledge such savagery as nothing more than capitalism in action, I focus on economic reality:

Actually, the difference between the Ukrainian and USian Working Classes – why Ukrainia gets money and USia gets more austerity – should be obvious to anyone who is not a die-hard supporter of capitalism.

The Ukrainians – all but their oligarchs desperately impoverished – are therefore easily exploitable for maximum profit.

Not only that, Ukraine's industrial potential is enormous. It is the breadbasket of Europe – the most vast, most productive agricultural land on the entire continent – and it now effectively belongs to USian imperial agrobusiness. It will thus be farmed by minimum-wage laborers. And since the new Ukrainian government includes declared fascists, its agriculture will no doubt use slave labor too. The profits to the oligarchs and their new USian overlords will be near-infinite. 

Ukrainia also contains significant natural resources, including major fossil fuel deposits. And because of its post-coup chaos, there are no environmental regulations to stop or even slow the rape of the land – which again means maximum profit for the One Percent,  total subjugation of the Ukrainian Working Class.

Contrast this to the USian Imperial Homeland: it is but a husk of its former self. Its natural resources have been been bled dry by the One Percent, its industry has all been outsourced, its Working Class has been methodically disempowered by union-busting. We the People have mostly been reduced to hopeless poverty and are now being slowly exterminated by deliberately genocidal cutbacks in social services.  In short, the USian homeland no longer has any of the ingredients of a functioning economy. This means the so-called American Dream is dead; it also means there will never, ever be an USian economic rebirth. 

But the USian Homeland still has a charade of constitutional democracy, and – in a few places – still has some semblance of genuinely representative local government. Thus the One Percenters' hands remain much more tied here than in Ukrainia. 

By contrast, Ukrainia is now ruled by a cabal that includes many declared neo-Nazis in significant positions of power. This means – exactly as happened in Germany during the 1930s – Ukrainia will soon be ruled by an exclusively neo-Nazi government. In its inevitable imposition of a torture-state, it will soon be indistinguishable from Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile. It will thus become a major element in the USian Empire's 21st Century plan of global conquest – another slave-state in the USian Empire's de facto Fourth Reich. 

That summarizes the main reasons the USian Empire instantly invests money in Ukrainia even as it continues to inflict ever-worsening genocidal poverty on its own people.

We the People are being  cast away, discarded as if we were worn-out machinery. We are literally a surplus workforce, deemed useless and abandoned because we are no longer exploitable for significant profit.  Such are the consequences of capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever espoused.

As more and more of us recognize what is happening and awaken to the core truth our deepening misery is the quintessence of capitalism –  the fulfillment of all Marxist predictions about capitalism (and therefore the ultimate validation of the entire Marxist analysis) – we by our numbers and our intensifying anger will become ever more dangerous to the One Percenters.

What then will be their response? Will it be the same as that of tyrants throughout history? If so, they  will start a major war – a war big enough to exterminate the surplus Working Class population and  ruinous enough to enable the Ruling Class to abolish, forever, any last remnants of constitutional democracy. And by their continued provocation of Putin, it seems they are trying to start just such a war.

At the very least, it seems the One Percenters have convinced themselves the bloody lessons taught Darius, the Mongols, Bonaparte and Hitler no longer apply. At the very worst, their obscene, live-it-up-now-and-fuck-tomorrow arrogance – a subset of the same capitalist greed that fosters their morally imbecilic indifference to the impending environmental apocalypse – has rendered them equally indifferent to the fact such a war would be the death of our species.

Russia – with a long history of having some of the most astute and farsighted intelligence analysts on the planet – is obviously aware of all these factors. (Note that one should never underestimate Russian intelligence capabilities: One example of Russian skill is the Sepoy Mutiny of 1858, engineered by Tsarist agents, which forever stopped British Empire aggression into the underbelly of the Russian Empire. Another example is the devastatingly effective spy-saboteur-and-resistance network the Nazis eternally cursed as "the Red Orchestra," which GRU established during the late 1920s and early 1930s in anticipation of the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. [See The Red Orchestra, V.E. Tarrant, John Wiley & Sons Inc.: 1995])

With those sorts of analytical capabilities backing him up, it becomes obvious why Putin is responding as he is.

That's why I'm terrified the Ukrainian Crisis is the beginning of World War III – a war in which the  USian Empire suicidally underestimates the indomitable Russian will to “fight to the death.”

***

What many people don't know is in 510 BCE, Darius disastrously invaded Scythia, which the ancient Greeks defined as roughly equivalent to modern Black-Sea Russia, the Crimea and the Ukraine. Nevertheless the true Scythia was probably much larger, perhaps as large as the old Russian Empire, since archaeology suggests a significant Scythian presence nearly as far west as modern-day Germany and as far east as China.  DNA evidence meanwhile substantiates certain folk tales that claim Scythian origins for the Celts. Like the Celts, the Scythians were an equestrian people, and their horse-archers, at least 20 percent of whom were women – were with their long-range recurve bows considered the most formidable light cavalry of their time.

But Darius was deterred neither by the vastness of the Steppe nor by the Scythians' fierce reputation, and he marched his massive army – the era's largest and best equipped – deep into Scythia. To make a long story short, the Scythians did as the Russians have so successfully done: they retreated and retreated and retreated – then closed the door behind Darius and savaged the Persians until they fled in ever-increasing panic. (For those interested in the details, see Herodotus, The Histories, in any complete translation.) 

Nor have the Russians – many of whom themselves bear Scythian genes – forgotten this chapter of their Motherland's history: the Budenovka, for which Google, the pointed hat worn by the Red Cavalry during the Russian Civil War, was consciously patterned after the pointed hats of the Scythian horse archers, thereby implicitly linking the revolutionaries with ancient Russia. 

 

Presumably we all know what happened to the Mongols -- the mounds of their skulls the medieval Russians made as monuments at the sites of Mongol defeats – as we know the fates of Bonaparte and Hitler.

As to “Svyashchennaya Voyna” (“Sacred War”), do not be misled by the Soviet flag motif of the YouTube video I posted above. I chose that specifically for its English translation of the lyrics. The song remains popular in Russia today, and often highlights the widely attended performances of the Russian Army Chorus and Dance Troupe, the successor to the world-famous Red Army Chorus and Dance Troupe. 

       

*****

“Obama's Preposterous Defense of the Iraq War” Reliably caustic Charles Pierce of Esquire describes with appropriate venom how Obama, in his efforts to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin, has reversed his “wrong-war-in-the-wrong-place” stance against the unprovoked U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now – in another classic example of his Orator-to-Betrayer shape-shift, Obama has a become a staunch defender of the entire operation. This – no surprise to me – means he's now implicitly siding with the entire band of Bush League perpetrators, that gang of war criminals he has carefully protected since the first minute of his presidency. My response was surely predictable, but I think it's worth reprinting nonetheless:

Obviously the world has learned to recognize Obama the Orator as not just Barack the Betrayer but Barack the Belligerent – and Barack the Big Liar as well.

The dire question is whether – now the president's true persona is known – he will try in some way to do to the world what he is already doing to the United States, savaging the 99 Percent with ever-more-brazenly fascist policies.

(Note his proposals of more cuts to Medicare and new obstructions to disability insurance. Note too how he is tacitly backing Hobby Lobby in its war against women's reproductive rights, or how – like the devotee of shock-doctrine capitalism he is – he is using the shock of the bed-bug plague to repeal tenant rights in public housing, thereby making the housing easier to sell to profiteers.)

Yup: vote for a Democrat, get a sneaky, maliciously dishonest hard-right Republican – such is life under the One Party of Two Names.

What Obama is doing stateside is bad enough.

As to what he might do to Russia, be afraid; be very afraid.

*****

“The Danger of False Narrative” Robert Perry continues his superb Ukraine-Crisis reporting and analysis by noting how the USian propaganda machine deluged us with Big Lies to justify the war against Iraq and is now fabricating the same sort of Josef Goebbels narrative to gin up fear and loathing against Putin and Russia. I seize the opportunity to describe a couple of seemingly-revalidated suspicions:

Apropos observed reality, the appearance of Nazi, Confederate and Ku Klux Klan flags in conjunction with the Ukrainian coup (for which see the “Confederate battle flag” link within Mr. Parry's text), tends to confirm two suppositions many old-time Leftists accepted as ugly truths:

(1)- The existence of a secret organization – originally part of the Nazi German government, but since World War II either within the US government or facilitated by it – that aids and coordinates the imposition of fascism everywhere. (Its long-term purpose is the subjugation of all the world's peoples into a single, global fascist empire.)

(2)- Clandestine but pivotal support within the US government for the Klan and other such fascist, racist, misogynist and/or neo-Nazi organizations. (Given how the US government crushed the Communist Party, the various socialist parties and the Occupy Movement, the fact the Klan and its kindred are still functional is indisputable proof they are tacitly supported by the U.S. government and its capitalist masters.)

Why does the US foster and support fascism? Because fascism is the mature form of capitalism – that is, capitalism expanded into capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else.

In this context, the Obama Administration is not just a false-flag operation; it is false-faced as well.

*****

“Women Justices Rock the Hobby Lobby Argument”  Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker applauds how the Supreme Court's three female justices obviously support women's reproductive rights – of course they do – but then buries his lead: “Notably, the Obama Administration chose not to contest Hobby Lobby’s assertion that use of an I.U.D. was tantamount to abortion.”

My rim-rat reflexes as good as they were 44 years ago, when I was a news editor or sat a telegraph desk, I put the most important element of Toobin's story up where it belongs:

In other words, the president tacitly supports Hobby Lobby, and has hamstrung his solicitor general accordingly.

Then I elaborate:

Apparently the president is not only a closet Republican but a closet Christian theocrat as well. Note his dramatic expansion of Bush's Faith Based Initiatives, which trumps the Constitution by using federal funding to punish non-believers. (Google “faith based initiatives obama,” no quotation marks.)

This means the president is also a closet misogynist – a tacit supporter of the effort by Christian fanatics to force women back into Biblical subjugation. Once again we see Obama the Orator shape-shifting into his true persona: Barack the Betrayer.

As if that were not dismaying enough, there is also the fact the advocates of theocracy are malevolently powerful and obscenely well funded. The One Percenters lavish money on Abrahamic theocracy whether Christian, Islamic or Judaic.

Why? Because the Abrahamic dogmas of divine-right management and prosperity as divine reward ensure the perpetuity of capitalism.

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are thus hugely courageous to defy such might. Let us hope the Supreme Court includes two equally brave male justices.

 

Important development in a related story: Hobby Lobby's anti-birth-control lawsuit is part of the vast and irresistibly well-funded Christian effort to impose theocracy and Biblical Law – the Christian equivalent of Sharia – on the United States. Another part of the same well-coordinated campaign is the Vatican's sneaky effort to abolish women's reproductive rights by leveraged buyouts of formerly secular regional hospitals, after which the ecclesiastical authorities ban birth control, abortions, assisted suicide and even termination of life support in cases of medically hopeless disease or injury. The result – exactly as the Christians intend – is tantamount to the imposition of theocracy on entire hospital service areas. Hence the relevance of “Washington State Case Study: A Difficult Miscarriage Made Worse by Hospital's Religious Restrictions on Care,” a newly published Huffington Post reprint of a profoundly disturbing academic report  that describes the medical horrors – torture, actually – inflicted on a woman by the Roman Catholic hospital that is the only care provider in the region where the victim lives. I did not comment on the report – HuffPo banished me years ago for my uncontrite socialism – but I nevertheless link it via OAN because it is a vital and revealing microcosm of the broader Hobby Lobby issues.

*****

“Barack Obama: The Least Transparent President in History”  Amy Goodman's report is perfectly summarized by its head, on which I could not possibly improve. My response perfectly summarizes the last six years of our political history:

 

As Obama the Orator, the president preached "hope" and "change we can believe in" and shamelessly exploited the African-American progressive tradition to leverage himself into office.

Meanwhile the Republicans ensured his victories by terrifying us with their McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan assault guns.

Yes, that's how the system works: the good-cop/bad-cop routine – with all of us as the prisoners.

Bill Moyers tells us it's all a charade, and the evidence ever-more-powerfully confirms it.

If Moyers is correct – and I'm sure he is – our so-called “free elections” are merely dramas carefully scripted by the One Percent and played out by actors chosen from One Party of Two Names. USian politics is as false as professional wrestling, the political sound and fury meaningless save as yardsticks of deception and preludes to (ever-intensified) oppression. 

 

Such is the context of Obama the Orator's (obviously premeditated) shift into Barack the Betrayer.

His presidency is not only the least transparent; it is also founded on the biggest Big Lies in presidential history. He has probably discredited the Democratic Party beyond repair. Given USian racism, he has undoubtedly obstructed equality for people of color. He is probably fostering more “why-bother” non-voters than any politician in US history.

And when he leaves office, his Ruling Class masters will lavish him with obscene wealth and prestige to reward him for all the damage he's done.

LB/30 March 2014

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