OAN: Some Thoughts on Content and Direction

I'VE RECOVERED FROM the frantic and painful preparation for last week's surprise apartment inspection – one of the punishments inflicted on seniors and disabled people impoverished enough to qualify for publicly funded housing. Nor was I amongst the unfortunate 20 percent whose dwellings were chosen at random for de facto warrantless searches by state bureaucrats. But the aftermath of the mandatory house-cleaning left me abed for a couple of days while the grade-6-to-7 arthritis pain in my back, shoulders and right knee dwindled to its omnipresent norm, typically a grade 2 on the 1-to-10 medical-discomfort scale.

Because my gender exempts me from the agony of childbirth, I have two grade-10 pain significators. One is the legacy of a tooth that in 1969 became simultaneously impacted and abscessed at the beginning of what turned into the longest four-day holiday-weekend in human history. The other is the (literally) bite-a-hole-in-my-pillow-to-keep-from-screaming interlude that followed a radical meniscectomy in 1978 – the removal of all the cartilage from my right knee. The anesthesia wore off quite suddenly, and all at once I hurt so badly, it took me several eternities to focus enough to invoke the Nurse-Angel of Narcotic Salvation, though once I found the magic buzzer, she immediately blessed me with a syringe full of morphine.

But all that is something of an aside. The point here is my two post-inspection-recovery days of what-do-I-wanna-be-when-I-grow-up contemplation was mostly spent pondering whether to take OAN daily or continue it as as a weekly. Given my age, in either case it will undoubtedly remain my final expression of a truth I have known since The Grand Rapids Herald hired me as a copyboy and sports stringer shortly before my 16th Christmas – that real journalism is a 24/7 way of life rather than a 35-hour-per-week job.

If I were to take OAN daily, it would mean posting material as events warrant and as frequently as my schedule permits. The idea was (and remains) powerfully attractive. But finally – with a bit of help from the I Ching (Wilhelm/Baynes translation, Princeton University Press: 1967) – I realized, somewhat bitterly I admit, I lack sufficient time, which is the prime requirement for daily blogging. Too many hours of my life are stolen by geriatric medical appointments and household-errands turned to day-long bus-odysseys because I can no longer afford an automobile but live in the most anti-mass-transit seaport in the entire anti-mass-transit United States.

Thus OAN will continue as before, its contents posted both here (thanks again to my benefactors at Typepad) and on my secondary website at Blogger.  Save for the fact I am going to spend more time covering local events – albeit always in a global context – its contents will be mostly unchanged. “In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere” will present its anthologies of recommended reading, including my often-sarcastic comments of course. And OAN's weekly single-topic columns, written by myself or by an occasional guest author, will focus as always on personal perspectives about major issues:   

• USian warmongering and the One Percent's escalating efforts at global conquest;
• The intensifying class war and the increasing savagery of capitalism;
• The stealthy but relentless imposition of Christian theocracy on the USian homeland;
• The bipartisan Big Lies that protect the Obamacare profiteers and victimize the rest of us;
• The unprecedented surveillance that sustains Ayn Rand plutocracy – the newest form of fascism – by clamping high-tech slave-collars around all our necks;
• The shock-doctrine schemes of the One Percenters, who are leveraging terminal climate change into a neo-Nazi restructuring of human society, ensuring their survival by enslaving or exterminating everyone else;
• Other such topics as they arise.

As before, these columns will include examples of how, in an economy and political system based on exploitation and oppression, the personal is always political, just as, for the same reasons, the political is always personal. Here though I hope to make a subtle change in approach, focusing less on the reality of our abject powerlessness – which I think we are at last beginning to acknowledge – and more on overcoming the challenges we face merely to survive.

 

Such is life and death amongst the 99 Percent in the United States of America, the former “sweet land of liberty” that capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent; total subjugation for all the rest of us – has transformed into the most unapologetically vicious nation in the industrial world.

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

I seldom write about 9/11 simply because in my view there is nothing worthwhile to be said about this great atrocity unless one starts by acknowledging how it marks the end, forever, of constitutional governance in the United States. But I was intrigued by William Boardman's Reader Supported News piece, “Museum World Trade Center Evidence: No Plane Hit Pentagon?” And eventually I added my own remarks to its predictably contentious comment-thread:

What matters most about 9/11 is the use to which it has been put.

Just as the Reichstag Fire enabled Hitler to nullify the Weimar constitution and turn Germany into a Nazi dictatorship, so did 9/11 enable the One Percent and their political servants to nullify the U.S. Constitution and turn the United States into a plutocratic dictatorship.

In other words, just as the Reichstag Fire was the birth of the Third Reich, so was 9/11 the birth of the de facto Fourth Reich, the zero-tolerance global empire of the USian plutocracy.

Moreover, just as the truth of the Reichstag Fire is lost due to Nazi secrecy, so is the truth of 9/11 lost by USian secrecy. In either case, public knowledge of what truly happened will never be allowed.

But the debate is allowed because it serves two purposes. It distracts us from the use of 9/11 – the permanent nullification of our constitution (and our reduction to powerlessness thereby) – and it helps preserve the Big Lie of USian democracy.

Indeed, the fact the debate is tolerated tells us it can never unearth the truth. Were it otherwise, it would be suppressed as quickly and violently as the Occupy Movement was suppressed.

Given the influence of Nazi war criminals on the U.S. government after World War II, the Reichstag-Fire pattern is itself suggestive. So is the fact the Department of Homeland Security structurally duplicates the dread SS Reichssicherheitshauptamt.

***

My next comment on the thread was a response to a poster who seems to regard the quest for “9/11 truth” as the most important endeavor in human history:

While I surely agree “a great deal...has already come out,” the same can be said of the assassinations – JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK – that were the gateway to the road that ended at 9/11.

Again taking the Reichstag Fire example, Soviet intelligence (and the worldwide Communist Party) knew the truth within hours – that the Nazis set the fire and framed the halfwitted Marinus van der Lubbe and the Communists for the crime – but the official German version was never refuted, even after the war.

Much the same is true of 9/11: no matter how much contrary evidence is ferreted out, the official version will remain unchanged until the USian Empire is no more – which, given the givens – will probably not occur until our species itself is extinct.

To believe otherwise is to be in denial about not only about our own powerlessness but about the absolute determination of those who oppress us.

 

***

Later I elaborated:

To paraphrase Thomas Paine, these are indeed times that try our souls, infinitely more so than in 1776, when we had a seemingly endless future, while today the core truth of our lives is that we live on a dying planet.

 

In this context I see my own duty as mandated by the genocidal malevolence of the One Percent, which is transforming the survival of the 99 Percent into revolutionary defiance. My obligation is to aid that survival as best I can -- never mind I'm a crippled, impoverished old man.

That's why I give several hours each week to 15 Now Tacoma, the purpose of which is to make workers' lives a bit less wretched. It's why I edit and produce two journals, a local tenants' newsletter and (this) internationally read blog.

 

For the record, since early 2005 I have assumed 9/11 was either a Reichstag-Fire re-run or was deliberately allowed to happen.

After all, Nazi war criminals were the primary tactical and strategic influence in the postwar USian Empire, and false-flag aggression – Google “Operation Himmler” (no quotes) – was a standard Nazi tactic.

Given the morally imbecilic nature of capitalism, such atrocities are inevitable – and the tyranny of capitalist governance leaves us powerless to avenge them.

Hence I do not waste my time on causes – like the hunt for 9/11 truth – that offer no hope of easing the fear and misery in which we 99 Percenters increasingly live.

******

Cynic though I am, I was nevertheless taken aback when Reuters reported the notoriously brutal Seattle Police were filing a federal lawsuit to uphold their alleged right to maximum brutality.   Thus my contribution to the comment thread of “Seattle Police File Federal Lawsuit Over 'Use of Force' Policy”:

The fact the Seattle cops would file such a lawsuit – in essence demanding the right to inflict unlimited police brutality and generally behave as an army of occupation in a conquered land – tends to confirm what I have long suspected:

That the national epidemic of police brutality is the product of of very explicit post-9/11 federal policy and directives.

 

The (obviously intentional) result is a homeland in which the sole function of the police is to serve and protect the One Percent by savaging all the rest of us, just as the (imperial) military serves and protects the One Percent in exactly the same murderous manner abroad.

More specifically, because all local police units have been federalized and federally militarized, the Seattle lawsuit is essentially an appeal up the chain of command for judicial support – rather like the president obtaining judicial support for his alleged right to issue imperial death warrants.

 

Indeed, to understand this lawsuit any other way is to be in denial about what the United States has become, no longer the "sweet land of liberty" but rather the de facto Fourth Reich.

******

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports on the Ukraine blaming “neocons” for President Obama's warmongering  provoked me to reluctantly criticize a journalist whose bravery is beyond reproach and whose reporting is flawless save for his apparent inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the unprecedented magnitude of the chief executive's self-protective deceptiveness.

 

Hence on the comment-thread of “How Neocons Constrain Obama's Message,” I penned the following rejoinder:

The only flaw in Mr. Parry's courageous reporting is his assumption President Obama is himself a victim of neocon conspiracies.

The truth, made obvious by the president's shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, is that Barack Obama is ideologically a white Republican. His African/American heritage was never more than a prop by which the One Percent sought to bolster the Big Lie of U.S. “democracy.”

Indeed, apart from the color of his skin, Obama's implicitly fascist politics are indistinguishable from those of any other U.S. president, Republican or Democrat, for whom the One Percent has purchased the office since the coup of 22 November 1963.

But like President Johnson, whose clandestine purpose was obviously to provoke the Vietnam-related class-war that destroyed the New Deal Coalition and thereby thrust the nation permanently to the right, Obama too is obviously a dual-purpose president. That purpose is revealed by how domestic racists are parlaying his betrayals into re-segregationist bigotry that says minorities are untrustworthy.

Because minorities were the nation's only source of genuine radicalism, the suppression of their voices is another rightward thrust – this time all the way to a Fourth Reich of unabashed Ayn Rand fascism.

Thus do the One Percenters achieve the goal their fathers and grandfathers sought via the Bankers' Plot, which would have made the U.S. the leading partner in the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo axis.

 

***

As to (Mr. Parry's) often subtle but nevertheless implicitly apologetic portrayal of Barack the Betrayer as a victim of neocon manipulation, that unfortunate meme – probably the result of an understandable reluctance to admit the unprecedented magnitude of the president's deceptions – is evident throughout Mr. Parry's otherwise superb reporting.

 

Because I voted for Obama twice – the first time because I believed his Big Lie of “change we can believe in,” the second time because I was (just as the One Percent intended), terrified by the Romney-Ryan assault gun – I can surely understand the reluctance to acknowledge we are now ruled by a president who is truly more ill-intentioned, and infinitely more authoritarian, than Richard Milhous Nixon.

Indeed, Obama is undoubtedly the most brazenly dishonest and effectively tyrannical politician ever to inhabit the White House. Think “change we can believe in,” total surveillance, the war against undocumented immigrants and the relentless persecution of whistle-blowers.

And until we acknowledge Obama is indeed an obedient servant of the One Percent (and therefore a white Republican in disguise) – until we admit how he conned us and how it facilitates the permanent end of USian democracy – we will remain imprisoned in the very darkness Mr. Parry is otherwise working so diligently and courageously to overcome.

******

Carl Gibson, reporting for Reader Supported News, wrote a scathing denunciation of how capitalism has perverted the USian justice system – zero-tolerance prosecution of minorities, lifetime imprisonment for nonviolent offenders, perpetual above-the-law immunity and billion-dollar bonuses for the most malevolently greedy robber barons in human history. But in the end, “Our Fraudulent Two-Tiered Justice System” was just another call for reforms we now know will never be allowed, and I responded accordingly:

I was applauding Mr. Gibson's reportage, especially his description of the USian criminal injustice system as "two-tiered," which is absolutely correct.

 

But then I read his concluding paragraph and realized he is just another reformer – that his outrage is rendered meaningless by his deluded belief in the integrity of the USian electoral process and in the Big Lie of USian "democracy" in general.

Which, when you analyze his rhetoric, means he's blaming us – we the people – for oppression that was maliciously imposed on us by the One Percent and that under present conditions is hopelessly beyond our capability to abolish or even ameliorate.

That's because the oppression Mr. Gibson so rightfully deplores – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – is endemic to capitalism. Indeed it is the quintessence of capitalism's inevitable transition to fascism. 

And until we recognize the true extent of our powerlessness – until we acknowledge that capitalism by its predatory nature deliberately and methodically renders the 99 Percent as powerless as the masses of Tsarist Russia were before the revolutions of 1917 – we will remain enslaved.

******

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports on the Ukraine Crisis describes how its outcome is seemingly a huge loss for U.S. interests. But on second thought, it seems to me “The State Department's Ukraine Fiasco” was written from the (clearly obsolete) perspective the U.S. wants world peace and socioeconomic stability – this opposed to the chaos that furthers the USian Empire's goals of maximum profiteering, shock-doctrine global conquest and endless war to kill off the 99 Percent and justify ever-more-tyrannical oppression in the homeland. Therefore:

Mr. Parry's closing statement is indisputably true – there is no way the Ukraine Crisis has served U.S. national interests – but only if "national interests" are defined as what we the people need for our wellbeing.

More to the point, the interests of the neocons are always antithetical to our own. That's because the neocons' interests are those of their One Percent masters, whose goals are maximum short-term profits rather than long-term political stability.

From this perspective it is apparent the Ukraine Crisis is serving the One Percent's interests exactly as intended. The increasing military tensions are already boosting profits for military industries, while the socioeconomic chaos in Ukraine itself provides yet another opportunity for the imposition of shock-doctrine capitalism, which – as under Pinochet in Chile – means absolute power and unlimited profit for the rulers, total subjugation for everyone else.

 

Moreover, the manufactured need for vastly increased U.S. military expenditures provides the One Percent and their servants in both parties with a perfect rationale for further slashing social services including Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Psychological preparation for these genocidal cutbacks is undoubtedly the purpose behind the otherwise inexplicable hate-Russia media campaign.

Such is the realpolitik of plutocracy – actually sociopathocracy (rule by moral imbeciles) – that defines today's United States.

***

In response to another poster's question, I wrote:

The “problem with Obama” is he is a white Republican in disguise, and now that he does not have to scam us into voting for him again, he is ever-more-defiantly revealing his true self.

(Yeah, I'm one of those useful idiots who voted for him twice. First time because I stupidly let myself be conned by his Big Lie of "change we can believe in," second time because the One Percent's Romney-Ryan assault-gun did just what it was intended to do and terrified me into voting for him again.)

***

And as I said to an anti-Parry poster on the same thread:

(For you to) liken the National Endowment for Democracy to Amnesty International is rather akin to likening Reinhard Heydrich to Albert Schweitzer. And that calls into question (your) entire analysis, particularly since the only Ukrianian "human rights" NED cares about are those of the One Percenters and their anointed oligarchs.

******

As if in follow-up to my own ongoing coverage of the war against mass transit in Pugetopolis,  the Olympia-Tacoma-Seattle-Bellingham metropolis on the eastern shore of Washington state's Puget Sound, Seattle's on-line daily Crosscut published a disheartening update of the worsening transit crisis.

 

For me, the usefulness of Bill Lucia's report, “No silver bullets among last ditch efforts to stave off bus service cuts,” extended beyond its factual content, which gave me a rare opportunity to contrast the (seemingly) humanitarian concerns of Seattle politicians with the Ayn-Rand/Marie-Antoinette attitudes of the politicians who rule Tacoma and Pierce County:

From the perspective of Tacoma – specifically its local politicians' chilly indifference to the ruinous impact of Pierce Transit's wrenching cutbacks on the transit-dependent urban population – the role of Seattle and King County politicians in the fight to preserve Metro Transit bus service is laudable and exemplary.

Indeed, until now, and with the notable exception of Kshama Sawant and her election to office, I never imagined I would find myself admiring anything about Seattle or any of its residents. That's because, to me, Seattlites will always be the most relentlessly vicious xenophobes I have ever encountered anywhere at any time. That includes my years in the South as an involuntary court-decreed school-year dependent of my father and stepmother, 1950-1956 and 1957-1958, then later, after three years of military service, as an outspokenly pro-civil-rights journalist, 1962-1965, including the summer of 1963 as a civil-rights activist.

Yes, the Ku Klux Klan tried to kill me – three times in fact – but other Southerners were faithful friends, and two Southerners were long-term lovers. By contrast, my four years in Seattle were the loneliest of my life; Seattleites were without exception relentlessly hostile, constantly damning me as “a fucking New York intellectual,” repeatedly telling me I should “go back where (I) belong,” and their vindictive Seattle-Freeze tactics, which included nasty notes, slashed tires, physical assault, the kidnapping of a dog and even defiant thefts of published and unpublished works, eventually ran me out of town.

 

I left Seattle in 1976, and I will never return. But I remained in the Pacific Northwest – the back-country trout fishing was too good to abandon – and now I must confess I have at last encountered one thing (apart from the election of Ms. Sawant) that is compellingly positive about Seattle. At least some of its politicians actually represent – or at least pretend to represent – the people like myself who can no longer afford automobiles and who are therefore utterly dependent on mass transit.

The irony, of course, is that fully half the population of Tacoma – where the politicians have never lifted so much as the proverbial finger to preserve Pierce Transit service – is officially lower income, and a substantial percentage, as I remember about 25 percent of the city's approximately 100,000 lower-income residents, have no other means of transportation. (The no-option-save-buses figure is deftly concealed by the local bureaucracy, but it is available via a bit of research, and I apologize for the fact I do not have time to ferret it out today.)

More to the point, the refusal of the local politicians to protect the bus service vital to our survival proves that, in Tacoma and Pierce County, we lower-income people have no political representation at all. Not only is there the politicians' total indifference to the consequences of PT downsizing. Now – as if to clear up any misunderstanding about whose side the politicians are on – these same politicos, Democrats and Republicans alike, have approved PT's shift to a new policy of penalizing pro-transit Tacomans by withholding intra-city service even as service to the (notably wealthier) anti-transit suburbs is radically expanded. The contempt and hatefulness in the message this new policy sends the urban poor is unmistakable.

Hence – much as it grieves me to admit it – for purposes of transit, and more generally for politicians who will at least publicly acknowledge the existence of lower-income people and the pressing reality of our needs, anyone who like myself is now a member of the urban underclass is probably better off living in Seattle.

Such was the output of a week in which – theoretically speaking – I had no time to write. I guess it's true: journalism is like organized crime – you never get to retire. And never want to, either...

LB/1 June 2014

-30-

Agitation Cancelled by Washington State Bureaucrats

WASHINGTON STATE HOUSING bureaucrats have canceled this week's OAN post – and quite possibly next week's too – by slapping the 52-unit senior housing complex in which I live with a surprise inspection. This temporarily shuts down OAN because the time required for the pre-inspection cleanup leaves me no time for anything else.

The inspection, in which our apartments will be invaded by judgmental strangers, is an expression of capitalism's malice toward anyone who is so poor we have to live in housing complexes the construction of which were partially financed by state and federal money.

We are already forced to suffer inspection of our premises four times a year, in March, June, September and December. But at least the quarterly inspections are conducted by the local building manager, a rational and often helpful human being I've known for many years and trust accordingly, while this surprise inspection will be conducted by zero-tolerance state housing officials – who like the cops and the welfare bureaucrats can always find ways to violate our civil rights without fear of effective redress.

Moreover, because I am a cripple, standard housecleaning routines are excruciatingly painful. I am officially disabled by spinal damage inflicted on me in 1978 by one of Washington state's obscenely coddled, defiantly habitual drunken drivers – a well-connected moral imbecile who at the time of our encounter had been arrested 19 times for DWI but still had a valid drivers license and had not spent a single day in jail. The injuries he dealt me immediately ended my ability to trout fish in the back country, then deteriorated slowly but steadily. For the past two decades the deterioration and the associated pains have been radically worsened by osteoarthritis.

Though I keep my premises as clean and orderly as I am able, the physical limits on my ability to perform standard housekeeping chores – particularly dusting, vacuuming and mopping – means it takes me four days to prepare for any one of these inspections. I need at least six hours to dust all the exposed surfaces in my apartment, which include nearly 600 cubic feet of books and bookshelves, and by the time I am finished with all the necessary bending, reaching and stooping, I am so exhausted by the pain, I am incapable of further physical exertion until I have had a night's sleep.

Vacuuming the carpets and rugs takes another six hours – again the delay is arthritic discomfort, and again the hurtful exhaustion halts further efforts until the next day. Then I kill another day cleaning and mopping the bathroom, which also takes about six hours, and a fourth day doing likewise in kitchen.

Last, the most truly agonizing chore of all, is the 15 or 20 minutes it takes me to make my bed the morning of the inspection.

After this, my arthritis is so inflamed, I am usually laid up for most if not all of the remainder of the week, while my sore joints return to their normal 24/7 level of relentless low-grade pain, typically about a 2 on the medical profession's 1-to-10 discomfort scale.

The surprise state inspection, which is scheduled for 28 May, thus inflicts an additional four days of agony and thereby steals yet another week from my life, which means my Memorial Day will be indeed be memorable, not for any positive reason but for the curse-god-from-whom-all-misery-flows suffering and stress of preparation. Then in the middle of June, I'll have to do all these painful chores all over again for the regular June inspection – four more days of arthritic misery and at least the remainder of the week to recover.

My anger and outrage at this surprise inspection are therefore huge. And they are entirely justified, because – as I noted above – these inspections are deliberate acts of oppression, methodically inflicted punishments by which capitalism deliberately savages those of who are poor.

Save for the emotional release of writing this text, the stress of the surprise inspection would no doubt be ramrodding my blood pressure to potentially fatal heights.

Such is the reality of old age in the USian homeland, infinitely worsened by the de facto Christian theocracy of the United States, the drug policy of which is derived from the biblical doctrine of “redemptive suffering” – specifically the federal government's deliberately sadistic denial of any prescription pain-killers strong enough and in sufficient quantities to banish the agonies of millions like myself.

The worst part, of course, is my nagging fear the inspection will be – in compliance with never-rescinded Homeland Security directives – a de facto warrantless search, perhaps culminating in a post-inspection telephone call to one of the innumerable secret-police agencies: “this old man is obviously a real Red he has a whole library full of books on the Soviet Union.” Yeah, it's getting like the '50s again – read the links – and though I've been on the government watch-list for many many years, I'd rather not have my life further complicated by some self-righteous state bureauc-rat's goading of the neo-Gestapo.

Which is why – sorry – there's no real OAN essay this week. Nor – maybe – any next week either.

LB/25 May 2014

-30-

Reflections on Despair and Hope; Ukraine Crisis Anthology; Hitler Lives: How U.S. Funds and Facilitates Re-Nazifaction; Obama's Choice of Bigot for Federal Judgeship Is Another of His Ever-More-Defiant Betrayals

DANCING IN THE RAIN – A child whose parents were attending the $15 Now rally on 3 May at People's Park in Tacoma celebrates her own private May Day festivities. She was joined immediately afterwards by two other kids who also danced in the rain, but by then I was out of film. The rally was part of an ongoing national campaign to raise the local, state and federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Click on image to view it full size. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2014.)

*

TO ACKNOWLEDGE DESPAIR is not the same as surrendering to it. The above photograph is implicitly and explicitly hopeful. It refutes those obnoxious disciples of compulsory positive thinking who self-righteously nag me with their dogmatic diatribes – who falsely denounce acknowledgment of despair as aid and comfort to the subjugators of our nation and the rapists of our land. The mere fact I can make such a photograph proves the PollyAnnas of both genders are idiots or hypocrites or pathological deniers and are in every instance beneath contempt because they, like the propagandists of the One Percent, would blind us to our true circumstances. Yet until we understand just how hopeless those circumstances are, we will never evolve the means to transcend our hopelessness.

Despite how children such as the rain dancer bear witness to the necessity of hope, in this time and place I have every right and reason to despair. I watch the relentless imposition of fascism and fascist governance that characterizes modern U.S. history, definitively since 22 November 1963  and arguably since 12 April 1945.  I threw away the New York Times potential of my journalism career when I went to jail for the Civil Rights Movement in 1963. Yet now 51 years later I witness the widespread re-emergence of the same racial bigotry I had foolishly believed might be permanently exorcised from U.S. society. My willing sacrifice – which later denied me my life's most promising job with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and therefore an opportunity for Canadian citizenship as well – was utterly pointless. Bigots, I know now, are truly ineducable; they cannot be reformed; yet their bigotry must somehow be culled from our species' mentality lest it embroil us in ever-more-suicidal extremes.  

But the deepest most wrenching source of my despair is the U.S. emergence of a new, carefully manufactured, neo-Nazi-intense hatred of lower income people. It is literally as if we the elderly and disabled and chronically unemployed and yes too all our children and grandchildren are being pre-positioned to be, in this beastly Fourth Reich that now slouches toward its official birth, the methodically scapegoated victims the Jews were in the Third Reich. Ayn Rand, who gave capitalism its modern equivalent of Mein Kampf, called openly for our extermination, and because death camps are not yet again fashionable, her genocidal policies are everywhere imposed as “austerity” and already whole families go hungry as a result.

So of course I despair. No knowledgeable person, no sane person, could possibly do otherwise.

Yet, perhaps paradoxically, it is despair that denies me the ability to surrender. 

And it is my inability to surrender that prompts me to make photographs like the one above.

I have reached a point wherein I would rather write of almost anything but politics. Sometimes I think I would even go back to the stultifying boredom of covering sporting events as I did in my youth to earn my passage into real journalism. I would especially prefer to write of the startling and sometimes poignant humanity I so often witness while riding mass transit, or to share the many inspiring dog stories I learned in my years as a reporter and collect even now in the company of other dog lovers.

Most of all I would rather say fuck it and go fishing, spend the best hours of my final years losing my self in the back-country satori of clear and troutly water and the Zen of working the slow green depths of some wild river with a seven-foot ultra-light-action rod and a Number 1 Mepps spinner and that uniquely wordless anticipation that wells up like invisible mist from the recognizable habitats of big cutthroats and lunker-size native rainbows.

But even in the wilderness, despair invariably intervenes like a sudden invasion of a dozen cast-off beer cans borne into a supposedly pristine canyon by a swift and allegedly unspoiled current. Damnit, I love this nation for its former potential and I love this land for the exquisiteness that is being ripped and gouged away in the name of profit and – fool that I am – some small part of me believes both the nation and the land can yet be restored. My despair is therefore the despair of an exile or a refugee, and it compels me to fight on in the only ways I can: by writing about the very politics I have come to deplore; by occasionally making icons of hope such as the photograph above, by serving such causes – for example the quest for a $15 minimum wage – as my geriatric disabilities yet allow, and most of all by acknowledging that in such times as these, survival itself is an act of revolutionary defiance.

And if neither nation nor land can be restored, at least the future – if indeed our species has any future at all – may know a few of us in this o-so-stealthily inflicted miasma of Moron Nation remained conscious of what was being done and how we were being methodically disempowered and enslaved.

******

In Case You Missed It, the fact there is no breaking news this week from Ukraine is good news, perhaps the best news of all. Recommended (the first report is from Reader Supported News, the others from Consortium News), are the following: “Secret Cable Reveals Russia Warned US in 2008 Meddling in Ukraine Could Split Country,” here; “How NATO Jabs Russia on Ukraine,” here;  “Cold Water on the Neo-Cold War Hysteria,” here; “Ethnic Russians Are People Too,” here. and “Ukraine's Dueling Elections,” here.

Vital backgrounders on how the U.S. finances global re-Nazification – as relevant to the Ukraine Crisis as it is to present-day Latin American politics – are “How Wall Street Bailed Out the Nazis,” here; “Hitler's Shadow Reaches toward Today,” here; and a der Spiegel exclusive, “Nazi Veterans Created Illegal Army,” here. 

******

Again this month President Obama has shown his true (white/Republican/Christofascist) colors, this time by nominating Michael Boggs, a self-described “conservative Christian” who is notably anti-woman and anti-gay, for a lifetime federal judgeship.

The White House announcement immediately generated on-line opposition including a petition  by the usually staunchly pro-Obama People for the American Way. Then Ian Millhiser's ThinkProgress exposé, “Obama Judicial Nominee Ran Anti-Gay Political Campaign Touting His 'Conservative Christian Values,'” revealed additional details of Boggs' politics, provoking no reaction at all from the ever-more-defiantly Republican Obama but doubtlessly evoking cheers and klapping maybe even a celebratory kross-burning or two from Ku Kluxers throughout Georgia and elsewhere in the former Klanfederacy.

An outraged poster on the Millhiser comment-thread bitterly noted Senate Democrats now must either vote against a Democratic president's judicial choice  or approve a nominee “who might as well have been chosen by the Tea Party.”

“How,” the poster asked, “did we get to this pathetic point?”

I answered with a burst of Outside Agitation:

(1)-The U.S. experiment in representative democracy ended 22 November 1963. Ever afterward, the nation is increasingly ruled by One Party of Two Names.

(2)-The collapse of the Soviet Union and the permanent co-optation of China remove all global restraints to capitalist savagery. Capitalism accelerates its inevitable transformation to fascism and thence to economic neo-Nazism (genocide against all “non-profitable” elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished people in accordance with Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf).

(3)-The two pseudo-parties within the One (Ruling Class) Party of Two Names become distinguishable only by rhetoric. The Republicans are overtly fascist; the Democrats are equally fascist but hide their fascism behind Big Lies, e.g. “change we can believe in.”

(4)-Now, with the 99 percent ever more afflicted by capitalist predation and therefore ever more rebellious, the Ruling Class abandons bipartisanship and the slow-boiled-frog imposition of fascism and adopts ever-harsher measures, e.g., total surveillance, the National Defense Appropriations Act of 2012 and its nullification of the Bill of Rights.

(5)-Obama reveals his true (white/Republican/Christofascist) political identity: first the Rick Warren appointment, now Boggs, also killing net neutrality, single-payer/public option, Employee Free Choice, etc. ad nauseam.

In the context of all Barack the Betrayer's other about-faces and back-stabbings, the Boggs nomination should eliminate any lingering doubts the president was in fact a Manchurian candidate – the ultimate false-flag operative thoroughly trained in the arts of deception by his One Percent masters, then imposed on us via those Manchurias known as Wall Street and mainstream media.

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Photo data: The film is Kodak Professional BW400CN (black-and-white for development by C41 color processing machinery), its kill date 12/2010. This was the remnant of a much larger lot of film I used on a commissioned job c. 2006-2008, and I had kept the last two rolls in my refrigerator ever since. Kodak rated the film's SAE (ISO) at 400, which I found to be correct for indoor work, though its daylight speed is closer to 600. The camera was one of my ancient Pentax MXs, the lens an equally geriatric 70mm-210mm f/4 Tokina zoom at maximum (210mm) extension. Exposure was 1/250th of a second at f/5.6.

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Back to the beginning: do I really believe there is still any hope? Not so much. In fact what I believe is “the imbecility of hope,” which parodies the phrase coined by our false-flag president, who has intensified our hopelessness to infinity by proving himself to be the most brazen liar in U.S. political history. Hope seems imbecilic because I know the four historical prerequisites of change – none of which appear to be achievable in today's United States. Hope seems especially imbecilic when I think of someone like Cecily McMillan spending seven years in prison and know – because it is the dirty business of a journalist to know such things – it will destroy her no matter how strong and brave her resistance. But occasionally – as when I photographed that child dancing so joyfully in the rain – it seems to me we have no choice but to be hopeful...even if it's only the hope of learning to live well despite chronic hopelessness.

LB/18 May 2014

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U. S. Supreme Court OKs More Theocracy; Defiant Workers Mobilize Nationally for $15 Minimum Wage

FR. WILLIAM BICHSEL S.J., the 87-year-old radical Roman Catholic priest who has been repeatedly jailed by USian Empire authorities in retaliation for his support of world peace, urges $15 Now activists to persevere in their nonviolent efforts despite the intensification of capitalist opposition. For details, see “$15 Now Tacoma Rallies in Downpour,” below. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2014; click on image to view it full size.)

*

AT FIRST GLANCE, the two statements in the above headline may seem unrelated, perhaps even two halves of a perplexing non sequitur. 

But on further reflection we see they are opposite sides of the same proverbial coin, just as Fr. Bichsel – Bix to his friends and comrades – represents an ancient but revolutionary interpretation of Christianity that is the antithesis of the authoritarian, pro-capitalist dogmas espoused by the theocrats and their enablers.

Prompted by the oppressive example of how Christian theocracy polices the former Confederacy, the One Percent and the Ruling Class in general have long been major financiers and facilitators of the campaign to impose Biblical Law on the USian homeland – this as the most successful means of suppressing anti-capitalist dissent. And just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court hastened the national march toward a Christian state and state Christianity, ruling that government-sponsored public prayers can now be addressed exclusively to Jesus.

The court also effectively said anyone who is offended by such theological discrimination can go to hell.

Meanwhile, the $15 Now movement – which was begun by Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative to counteract the selfsame capitalist savagery the expansion of Christian theocracy is intended to justify and preserve – has exploded across the USian homeland and is catching fire even in overseas realms of the USian global empire.

In the context of this growing rebellion, the Supreme Court's decree becomes doubly significant. It's obvious intent is to back the nation further away from the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, thereby thrusting us closer to the Taliban-like Biblical-Law dictatorship long sought by the lavishly funded Christian fanatics. But its clandestine purpose – note the court's obvious anti-democracy bias – is clearly to bolster the white Christian prosperity-gospel prohibitions against organized labor, especially any notion the USian Working Class deserves better pay and conditions.

Exemplifying these restrictions, white Christian fanaticism in the South has long been a formidable barrier to unionization, also to women's rights, racial or sexual equality and intellectual freedom in general. The white Southern workforce is conditioned from birth to believe bosses and aristocrats are god's chosen representatives and that disobeying or even questioning their orders is therefore a sin. Observing the results in a century-long succession of debacles like the recent defeat of the United Auto Workers union at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant, the One Percenters have concluded Abrahamic theocracy is capitalism's best friend. That's why USian policy invariably favors Christian theocracy in the homeland and various other forms of theocracy throughout the empire, Judaic in Israel, Islamic in the remainder of the Middle East.

Thus the implacably pro-plutocracy Supreme Court overturned a longstanding judicial precedent that required public prayer to be non-sectarian, referencing a deity only in the most generic terms. The former policy, as explained to The Washington Post by George Washington University Law Professor Ira Lupu (see the “exclusively to Jesus” link above) was intended to make public prayer mutually acceptable to the followers of all three Abrahamic religions, and to render it at least not gravely objectionable to Buddhists, Wiccans, First Nations traditionalists and any others including agnostics or atheists.

The widespread imposition of prayer to open public meetings and other governmental proceedings including public school ceremonies and sporting events was begun about the same time the phrase “under God” was added to the national pledge of allegiance.  (See also Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Harper: 2008; pgs. 195-204, especially pgs. 198-199.) As critics have been pointing out ever since, the addition of that phrase to the pledge in 1954 was the declaration that formally set the nation on its present-day course toward theocracy.

And now, thanks to the court's newest religious ruling, it is legal to flaunt Christianity as if it were the one state-approved religion, thereby theologically spitting in the faces of all non-Christians.

Those of us who are offended by the references to Jesus or to the Christians' triune god of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, says the court, can simply “leave the room” – never mind such public acts of dissent will, in many parts of the USian interior, surely invite a visit from the Ku Klux Klan or some other vigilante group.

Nor, as I can personally attest, are such realms limited to the South, where the Klan functions much like the dread Islamic morality police and is therefore colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Parts of Whatcom County, Washington – the northernmost county in the lower 48 states – are similarly “policed” by JesuNazi vigilantes.

Earlier OAN reports documenting the escalating threat of Christian theocracy are here,  here  and here.  Other relevant reports on the the court's new endorsement of Christian supremacy are here and here.  Another oppressive aspect of USian Christian theocracy – the purity ball, a public ritual in which young girls are forced to pledge to their fathers they'll be totally chaste until they give themselves to men in male-supremacist marriage – is covered here.

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Conditions in Ukraine continue to deteriorate into warfare as neo-Nazi stormtroopers, now part of Kiev's “national guard,” repeatedly assault enclaves of pro-Russian separatists. Meanwhile the putsch regime in Kiev is being advised by USian Empire secret agents, much as the Saigon regime was advised during the early stages of the Vietnam War. Given the givens, I can only hope the USian drive for global domination, which in this instance is tantamount to goading a mother bear in her own den, does not trigger World War III. Here, In Case You Missed It, is an anthology of last week's most telling dispatches:

“Putting the Ukraine Crisis in Context,” a Consortium News analysis by William Blum and “What Obama Can Do to Save Ukraine” by Robert Parry are probably the most vital of these reports. The former reveals additional historical and geopolitical details of how USian aggression precipitated the crisis. The latter implies President Obama has lost control of his administration, a chilling likelihood further detailed by “Putin's Subtle Message to Obama,” another of Parry's superb reports.  The remainder, “Burning Ukraine's Protestors Alive,” also by Parry, and “Odessa Atrocity Erupts in Peaceful City and No One Wonders Why?,” by William Boardman for Reader Supported News, portray the neo-Nazi horrors that have begun to characterize the crisis.

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More Indications the President Is Secretly a White Republican: Momentarily displaying his former Obama the Orator persona and his now obviously bogus promise of “change we can believe in,” the Janus-faced USian president (sort of) condemned skyrocketing income inequality but then demonstrated his true Barack the Betrayer values by honoring Wal-Mart as a leader in the fight for environmental sustainability – a claim that is  a huge exaggeration  if not an outright Big Lie. Though Obama's Wal-Mart endorsement has already generated an angry petition campaign, his heartfelt fondness for the nation's most anti-union employer is proven by his appointment of former Wal-Mart Foundation President Sylvia Mathews Burwell to head the Department of Health and Human Services, for which see the “huge exaggeration” link above. The appointment indicates the petition will be ignored – if not passed on to the various secret police agencies to fulfill the Father Gapon function  of identifying any and all opponents of capitalism and capitalist governance.

Meanwhile the prospect of federal health and welfare programs administered by a Wal-Mart executive makes perfect and terrifying sense in the context of a president who slashed food stamps, killed single-payer/public-option health care, sandbagged the Employee Free Choice Act and just issued yet another gag-order directive that (again) proves his promise of “governmental transparency” was just another Big Lie.

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An analysis by Crosscut, the Seattle on-line daily, “How the Metro Transit vote ran into a deep ditch,” says the resounding defeat of the recent mass-transit sustainment-measure was inflicted by “alienated suburban voters... (expressing a mindset) that cannot simply be attributed to anti-transit sentiments.” The piece, published on Friday 9 May, is written as if it were a response to my OAN column of Sunday 4 May, “Exclusive: How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies the Global Class War,” which cites the “transit is welfare” meme and defines anti-transit activism as part of the One Percent's war against any government service that benefits the 99 Percent. The comment thread associated with “deep ditch” gives me an opportunity for Outside Agitation Elsewhere: I argue at length the real cause of the defeat is a suburban shift to the Hard Right – a change also manifest in the (permanent) Republican takeover of the Washington State Senate – never mind the fact Seattle's PollyAnna progressives are loathe to recognize its reality.

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Thom Hartmann asks, “Are Banksters responsible for autism?” He then praises various measures by individual members of Congress, bills that – if ever enacted – might indeed ease the nation's inconceivably oppressive student debt. But I recognize all of these efforts will never become law and are therefore nothing more than maliciously deceptive Big Lies, intended to opiate increasingly angry students into believing relief might actually be forthcoming:

Lifetime enslavement by student debt will never be eliminated in the U.S. precisely because the One Percent views it as a primary method of suppressing student activism – which is precisely the motive behind the policies that created the indebtedness.

Indeed, the rationale for targeting students and academics – academe damned as "the single most dynamic source" of anti-capitalist resistance – is the primary topic of the infamous Powell Memo of 1971,  which is widely considered the original operations plan for the imposition of zero-tolerance Ayn Rand fascism on the USian homeland. (The memo is reprinted in full here.)

Meanwhile Sen. Elizabeth Warren's interest-reduction measure, like Mr. Hartmann's notion of  a jubilee of student-debt abolition, are nothing more than pie-in-the-sky manifestations of the imbecility of hope.  Neither Sen. Warren's mildly ameliorative bill nor any other genuinely humanitarian measure will ever again be enacted by the U.S. Congress simply because the Republican majority in the House has been gerrymandered into permanence.

This means de facto Republican control of the U.S. government is literally forever. It will not end – it cannot be ended – until the entire system is overthrown or the nation itself is toppled, most likely by the looming environmental apocalypse, at which point the entire student debt issue becomes moot. 

Until then – precisely as the diabolically clever, inconceivably powerful  One Percent intend – impossible-to-enact initiatives Ms. Warren and her ilk will perpetuate the Big Lie of USian representative democracy even as we of the peasantry and proletariat, students and professors included,  are driven ever deeper into slavery.

***

Another Hartmann piece, “Austerity 'savings' are built on 'blood money,'” details how austerity kills. I emphatically agree:

As I say almost every week in OAN, "austerity" is nothing more than a euphemism for genocide: the deliberate extermination of the Working Class. albeit without the odium of death camps.  Such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. In other words, fascism.

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Different Strokes from Different Folks: I got at least three thumbs-up clicks on the Reader Supported News comment thread of “The Bundy Ranch Militia Is Wearing Out Its Welcome,” Sara Morrison's 5 May report on the aftermath of the now-infamous retreat of federal officers from vigilantes gathered to protect an anti-government scofflaw. But when I posted an abbreviated but pointedly relevant form of the same speculation on the RSN thread of “Disturbing New Pictures of the Arrest of Cecily McMillan,” Michelle Dean's text of 7 May that accompanies Stacy Lanyon's photos of the incident, I got nine thumbs down.

Here is what won three thumbs-up on the “Bundy Ranch” thread:

The probable significance of the government's alleged retreat is at least as terrifying as Barack the Betrayer's National Defense Appropriations Act and its Supreme-Court-approved repeal of the Bill of Rights.

 

The alleged retreat may be an act of accommodation and alliance rather than an act of surrender. If so, it is directly analogous to Obama's appointment of the Christofascist Rick Warren to give the 2009 inaugural invocation. Just as Rev. Warren's appointment gave the Biblical Law theocrats the clandestine kiss of Obamanoid acceptance and encouragement, so too might the regime's departure from the Bundy Ranch communicate acceptance and encouragement to the burgeoning USian neo-Nazi movement and its storm-trooper “militia.”

Like the Rev. Warren appointment, the withdrawal could be a telling indication of how the Obama Regime sees our future – a scenario in which opposition from the Left becomes so overpowering, the government can defend itself only by open alliance with the extreme Right – exactly as occurred in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic.

This is the likelihood that links the gestures to Rev. Warren and the storm troopers with NDAA, the slaying of the Bill of Rights and the total-surveillance apparatus of the emergent USian secret-police state. As others have noted, were the Bundy Ranch defenders from Occupy, by now they would all be dead or disappeared.

All of which suggests the crude and repugnant portrayal of Obama as a second Hitler may have been eerily prophetic.

And here is what got nine thumbs-down – two days later and still with no militia arrests – on the “Disturbing New Pictures” thread:

The obvious conclusion (to be drawn from the contrast between the government's ongoing tolerance of the armed Bundy Ranch militia and the persecution of unarmed and nonviolent Occupy Movement activists) is the Obama Regime is tacitly siding with the militia – no doubt because because its long-range fascist agenda is so bottomlessly malevolent, the regime and its One Percent masters believe it will need all the help it can get – vigilante militia, Ku Klux Klan, American Nazi Party, armed Tea Baggers, whatever – to suppress the additional Leftist resistance that's bound to arise. That's why a terrifying example is being made of Ms. McMillan – same reason the regime is trying so hard to start World War III in Ukraine.

Why the big difference in the Rule of Thumbs? I've no idea, particularly since my other comments on the “Pictures” thread – a discussion of the photos themselves – drew clicks of approval. Perhaps on that thread, the Obama-can-do-no-wrong disciples – of whom there remain far too many on the USian Left – were out in force.

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$15 Now Tacoma Rallies in Downpour: Especially during the Pacific Northwest Coast's rainy season, which lasts nearly nine months, the increasingly painful arthritis in my spine and shoulders often dissuades me from photographing. Though back in the day I comfortably carried three cameras, typically two M Leicas around my neck and a single-lens reflex off my right shoulder, now even one camera around my neck quickly becomes uncomfortable. And the combined weight of two cameras – as I was using to shoot the $15 Now Tacoma rally on 3 May – has left me hurting ever since, with a stiff nagging soreness in my upper back, neck and right shoulder I haven't yet managed to wriggle out from under.

Nevertheless the effort was worth it, both for the rally itself, which despite the rain drew about 100 persons, and for the work it produced, more of which – including digital camera and cellphone imagery by other photographers, is on the $15 Now Tacoma Facebook page.  Never mind the weather – I shelter my cameras with an old GI poncho – it was damn nice to be out photographing again, and the fact the event produced two pictures I'd have considered portfolio pieces back in those thrilling days of yesteryear more than compensates for the aftermath of lingering geriatric discomfort. The two pix are the portrait of Father Bix above (which perhaps because I recognize him as a genuine saint reminds me of an old-time holy card), plus a lucky grabshot, also in black-and-white, of a rally-visitor's kid joyfully running across the rainy meadow of Tacoma's People's Park, for which see the Facebook link.

(Disclosure: I am a member of the $15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee and in that capacity was also manning an informational table at the rally.)

Photo data: Pentax MX, Tokina f/4 70-210mm zoom (mostly at 210mm and f/5.6), Sigma f/4 35-70mm zoom (mostly at 35mm and f/5.6), Fujicolor 800 and Kodak Professional BW400CN, the latter the last two rolls of a batch I'd stored in my refrigerator since 2008. One MX body contained the color, the other MX the B/W, and I switched the lenses back and forth as necessary. Exposing about 50 24-exposure rolls of the BW400CN for a commissioned story c. 2006-2008, I had discovered its actual daylight ASA is closer to 600, and I set the meters accordingly. Yes, even after years of shooting color, I still see better in chiaroscuro.

LB/11 May 2014

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