Another Inspection Again Wrenches My Life

I CAN'T OBJECT to the idea behind the federally mandated quarterly inspections of the individual dwelling units in any lower-income senior housing complex that was built with even a tiny percentage of public funds. Officially the purpose is to make certain the facilities are fully functional – that the plumbing, exhaust fans, alarm systems and electric ranges are all operational.

(I should note here we seniors are forbidden gas cooking, which means that 10 years after encountering my first electric range, I still can't successfully cook even the most simple meals. Indeed I despise electric ranges, which as far as I am concerned are worthless for anything save boiling water or heating soup. With a gas flame, you can see what you're doing; with electricity, you can only guess, which in my case means everything has to be burned on the outside to make sure it is not raw in the middle. But that is another issue for another time.)

Unofficially, the purpose of the quarterly inspections is to monitor the mental health of the occupants: detection of an unkempt or dirty apartment that might indicate the onset of Alzheimer's, hoarding that might endanger an occupant or create fire hazards for an entire complex, that sort of thing.

 

Nevertheless and in reality I resent these intrusions more than anything that fate and bureaucratic tyranny has ever dealt me. This is not just because of the violation of my privacy; the medical truth is that each inspection literally steals six or seven days from my life. Four of these days are taken by the preparatory cleanup, which for me – because of my arthritic spine, shoulders, left wrist and right knee – is an excruciatingly painful ordeal of dusting, vacuuming, mopping and, finally, on the morning of the inspection, neatening my bed into semi-military, Suzi-homemaker presentableness. This is in fact the most agonizing chore of all, which due to its hurtful extremes of bending and reaching takes me at least 30 minutes and sometimes half again that, the very reason I do it as seldom as possible. The remainder of the stolen time – the post-inspection hours of inspection day plus one or two days afterward – is required for recovery, most of it in my newly made bed.

But I have not verbalized these objections – at least not emphatically – until now, when the combination of the surprise state inspection inflicted on us at the end of last month and the upcoming regular inspection Tuesday is stealing 12 whole days from my life. (The interval between the first inspection and the second was just long enough all the cleaning had to be repeated.) The result – because the time-theft occurs at a peak of volunteer obligations (this blog; the monthly newsletter I produce for my fellow tenants; work for the organizing committee of 15 Now Tacoma; public relations for a friend who is a playwrite and musician) – is I am more frantically jammed up and therefore more jaggedly stressed than I have been at any time in memory, including the many years I worked at two and sometimes three jobs.

Another very big part of the problem is the wrenching time-theft imposed by my dependence on Pierce Transit. PT's bus service was only marginally adequate in 2009, the year my car died, and now after five years of anti-transit-user downsizing, it has been shrunken by least 70 percent. The transit authority bureaucracy will no longer disclose the actual size of the cuts, but the result is unquestionably the worst bus service I have ever seen anywhere in the urban U.S. Indeed there was more frequent bus service – far more frequent – provided by Knoxville Transit Lines in Knoxville, Tennessee during the 1950s. (For example, KTL buses ran until 1 a.m.; most PT buses cease operations at 9 p.m., some as early as 5 p.m. – and Knoxville in 1954 had half the population of Tacoma in 2014.) Bottom line, because of the bus service here – or rather the abysmal lack thereof – an errand that took me maybe 45 minutes when I had an automobile can now take up to an entire day.

 

I was of course prepared for the interruption inflicted by this month's quarterly inspection, but the additional seven days stolen by the surprise state inspection was the proverbial straw that broke the metaphorical camel's back. Such are the punishments capitalism maliciously inflicts on those of us it exploited into inescapable poverty.

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because so much time during these past few weeks has been stolen by inspections, OAN again gets shortchanged; again no real essay, and only five Internet posts during the past seven days:

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote about the mix of theocratic Christianity and Hard Right populism that enabled a Teabagger to beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor last week. But “David Brat: Free-Market Purist, Ayn Rand Devotee” said nothing about the campaign's historical precedent, and I responded accordingly:

What we are witnessing in David Brat – and mark my word (because you read it here first) – is the combination of strategy, tactics and rhetoric that will leverage the USian Homeland's final transition to unabashed neo-Nazism.

Doubt me? Read William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Simon and Schuster: 1959, 1960, 1987, 1988, 1990).

It's by studying Shirer we see what we might aptly dub the "Bratley Method" is precisely how the Nazis sold themselves and their programs to the seemingly ultra-civilized German people as Germany suffered from the devastation inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression.

***

Yes (Rise and Fall) is long, but it's vividly written, and its well worth the effort. For me it was the perfect sea-cruise book, and I had lots of time to read it – on the troopship returning from Korea, the U.S.N.S. Sultan, which in 1962 made the passage from Inchon to Oakland Army Terminal in about three weeks. For me, that was the blessed passage of return to civilian life after the three-year, Regular-Army active-duty portion of a six-year enlistment. (The remainder was in the reserves, but – luck of the draw or blessing of the Goddess – I was not recalled for Vietnam.) And of course I've reviewed Rise and Fall many times, as it's been part of my library ever since.

******

Alan Pyke exposed another atrocity of USian governance  in “Impoverished Mother Dies in Jail Cell Over Unpaid Fines for Her Kids Missing School.” I noted how it exemplifies capitalism in action:

What this Dickensian tragedy tells us is that in the merciless new world of the former United States – a realm transmogrified into the de facto Fourth Reich – any one of us who is not part of the Ruling Class could suffer the fate of Eileen DeNino

Indeed the death of Eileen DeNino – and the deaths of so many others like her, always from the denial of basic human needs that now under the savagery of Ayn Rand economics have become privileges of wealth – makes me think perhaps the Hans Christian Anderson story of the “Little Match Girl” is replacing the Horatio Alger tales as the epic that properly symbolizes our present and future. (Indeed, recast in a 21st Century setting by cinematographer Filip Matevski's 12-minute film, it becomes just that.)

Apropos which, perhaps (an anti DeNino poster) would say the Match Girl too "refused to help herself" when, as in Matevski's work, the child chose to spend the night in the freezing cold rather than submit to sexual abuse, or – as in the older versions of the story – refused to go home to be beaten by her father.

Meanwhile let us all mourn Eileen DeNino, a mother dead in debtor's prison, another victim of capitalism's New World Order.

******

Trevor Timm of Guardian UK revealed another of the dark and menacing secrets of Obamanoid tyranny in “The US Government Doesn't Want You to Know How the Cops Are Tracking You.” I pointed out an even darker truth:

It is a great irony the wanna-be Nazis of the Confederate-Flag/Swastika-Banner Hard Right – the Christians who claim the U.S. Constitution gives them the right to persecute non-believers; the white racists who believe their god gives them dominion over non-whites; the misogynists who think all women are sluts at heart – were the first to caricature Obama as another Hitler.

Perhaps it was just one of those oddball examples of accidental prophecy from a wildly incongruous source.

More likely it was a case of psychological projection, the mechanism of recognition embodied in a taunt once commonplace on Southern schoolyards: “it takes one to know one.”

However it came about, its terrifying truth becomes more evident every day. Barack Obama is worse than Bush, even worse than Nixon. He is the first genuine tyrant to hold the office of President of the United States, and by his embrace of the modalities of tyranny, he is methodically transforming this nation and its empire into the de facto Fourth Reich.

But the greatest irony of all is how it is his own race – more than any other group of us who, because we are lower-income people, are being scapegoated into equivalents of Nazi Germany's Jews – that is already bearing the brunt of this looming new holocaust in which federalized local police are trained and equipped to function as the new Gestapo.

******

Charles E. Cobb Jr. discussed his forthcoming book, which boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis.” Reader Supported News titled Cobb's important essay “Guns Made Civil Rights Possible: Breaking Down the Myth of Nonviolent Change,” but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted the actual title of the book, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). Then my comment-thread response got right to the point:

A similar volume, Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense (University of North Carolina Press: 2004), was marginalized by the same zero-tolerance codas of political correctness with which the U.S. Left fanatically suppresses all positive references to firearms.

Meanwhile, with the Working Class more in jeopardy than ever, the USian Left's signature effort to impose forcible civilian disarmament – i.e., mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood – is surely amongst the greatest ironies of human history.

Contrary to its claims, pacifism cannot succeed without the threat of violence. The British surrendered to Gandhi's pacifism only because it was backed by the potential of armed revolution organized by the Soviet Union. The same is true of Rev. King's nonviolence.

Indeed all the humanitarian gains of the 20th Century – unions, labor rights, civil rights, safety-net programs – were wrested from the capitalists only by the Soviet threat. That's why, now the U.S.S.R. is dead, capitalism is methodically abolishing all those concessions.

But with the USian Left embracing pacifism and thus functioning as the chief spokesperson for the One Percent's effort to disarm the 99 Percent, these bitter truths are now also tabooed.

***

It was the armed Anglo-Saxon and Cymru yeomanry with their deadly longbows – the massed repetitive firepower of which was not equaled until the invention of the machine gun – that eventually brought the invading Norman kings (of England) to heel. Nevertheless it took what amounted to 300 years of intermittent civil war, some of which is immortalized in the epic of Robin Hood.

Though it is another truth suppressed by political correctness, the most important historical difference between Britain and the continental nations originated from Roman forcible disarmament of conquered peoples. Universal throughout the imperial mainland, it was for a number of reasons never successful in the province of Britannia. Hence even before the Anglo-Saxon conquest, the British peasantry was always at least minimally armed, which is why the remnants of what we know today as "democracy" were never totally exterminated there, seeds that began thriving in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

******

Juan Cole wrote a piece on the criminality of the Iraq War,  but “Blair-Bush & Iraq: It’s Not Just the Quagmire But the Lawbreaking & Deception” ignored what may be the most important aspects of the story:

(1)-That it was the perfect distraction from the questions about 9/11 that were then gathering momentum;

(2)-That, apart from Turkey (which is now hopelessly lapsing back into Islamic theocracy), Iran was the only genuinely secular society Islamic culture has ever produced. Thus its destruction brought about the immediate re-imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy, whether Sunni or Shiite, with all its misogynistic savagery. This is an obvious victory for the One Percenters whose intent is to make capitalism safe by imposing Abrahamic theocracy – Jewish in Israel, Christian or Islamic everywhere else – on the entire world.

I keep hoping maybe next week won't be so grim, but then I remember we're all residents of a dying planet – a world we ourselves are killing. 

LB/15 June 2014

-30-

“Seattle Process”: a Tool for Savaging the Working Class

TO UNDERSTAND HOW Seattle's campaign for a $15 minimum wage was stabbed in the back – how “15 Now” became “15 Maybe Someday” – it is essential to first understand a perversion of democracy called “the Seattle Process” which, for brevity's sake, we'll hereinafter call “TSP.”

TSP is occasionally lauded as representative democracy at its best, but it is more often damned  as endless debate that results in permanent “indecision” or – on the rare occasions it actually achieves consensus – an approach that succeeds only by inflicting “exhaustion” on the participating groups and individuals.

Probably the most glaring example of TSP legacy is the wretched state of public transport  in Seattle and the metropolitan area on the eastern shore of Puget Sound, the so-called Pugetopolis, which includes Tacoma and Olympia to the south and Everett and Bellingham to the north.

In terms of mass transit, the entire region is nearly a half-century behind Portland, Oregon, which is its southern just-across-the-Columbia-River neighbor. And – not only in transit but in terms of all public services and humanitarianism in general – Pugetopolis is at least a century behind its nearby northern neighbor, European-minded Vancouver in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

While Pugetopolis seemingly dithered – “seemingly” because behind the dithering was a carefully scripted Ruling Class campaign to torpedo mass transit – Portland applied for and received federal funding that, by today's miserly standards, seems astonishingly generous. 

The money was available to U.S. municipalities through the Urban Mass Transit Administration, part of President John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Such were the halcyon years before UMTA – and indeed nearly all federal support for local transit – was killed forever by President Ronald Reagan and his Ayn-Rand-minded successors, all of them, whether Republican or Democrat, the obedient servants of Big Oil and Big Automotive.

On its surface, TSP appears to be nothing more than a local example of self-destructive indecisiveness, and indeed that is how it is invariably portrayed by its mainstream critics, who point to the seemingly endless debates and neighborhood-versus-neighborhood/whites-versus-minorities squabbling that – once Seattle-area light-rail construction was finally approved by voters in 1996 – delayed it another 10 years.

But if you look at these results using the tools of objective analysis – that is, if you analyze the results in terms of class struggle (or in parlance of old-time investigative reporters, “who got rewarded and who got fucked”) – then it becomes obvious TSP is yet another of the deceptive weapons the One Percenters use to perpetuate their power and ensure the rest of us remain forever below the salt.

Again taking the example of mass transit, the (mostly-unacknowledged) fact is the Pugetopolis Ruling Class has vehemently opposed it since it became an issue – mainly because adequate mass transit (think of New York City, Chicago or Boston), is one of the major factors that determine whether an area is attractive to lower-income people. Washington state has long been deliberately gentrified by any number of policies – the nation's most viciously regressive tax structure is one; the closure of wilderness access roads to all but equestrians and bicyclists is another – and the aristocracy clearly intends to keep it that way.

Not surprisingly, Seattle Ruling Class opposition to adequate mass transit became most obvious when the availability of the requisite public funding was at an all-time high – that is, during the late 1960s. Emerging via the the editorial pages and news columns of The Seattle Times, the opposition was soon mainstreamed by a nasty grassroots whisper campaign that played on xenophobic fears the subway and light-rail system proposed by Forward Thrust would destroy forever the region's cherished but cleverly undefined “Pacific Northwest lifestyle.”

These whispers inflamed the bigotry characteristic of the city's Northern European majority, claiming subways would turn Seattle into “another Jew York” and attract “criminal” minorities to prey on the (white) citizenry. The outcome, which included a de facto 26-year moratorium on rail transit, is a particularly telling example of how the USian Working Class is convinced to vote against its own interests.

It is also significant for the likelihood – raised by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman's testimony Washington state is often used as a proving-ground by the Ruling Class to test and refine methods of oppression – the anti-transit campaign was a rat-lab experiment in voter manipulation. (My apology for the fact I cannot link to this testimony; all published references to it have seemingly vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Meanwhile, assuming Ehrlichman's admission was truthful, the strategy and tactics remain devastatingly effective. (See again the “wretched state” link above.) Note how the implicitly racist meme “transit is welfare” convinced voters in the Pierce Transit service area to viciously downsize their own barely adequate system – never mind most of Pierce Transit's ridership comes from the seaport city of Tacoma, where half the population is definitively lower income and nearly half of the approximately 36,000 daily bus riders have no other means of transportation.  (In its new policy of pandering to relatively wealthy suburbanites – mostly rabid Republicans who despise all lower-income people as “parasites” – Pierce Transit has purged from its website anything its newly favored riders might denounce as “sob-story” data. Thus the link is to OAN and ridership numbers PT released in 2012.)

But the point is not the Pugetopolis transit crisis per se. The point is acknowledging what the Seattle Process really is: a pseudo-democratic mechanism of negation and disempowerment that serves the One Percent and – exactly as intended – savages the rest of us.

Which is precisely what happened to Seattle's fight for a $15 minimum wage – how it was transmogrified from “15 Now” to “15 Maybe Someday.”

Before I continue, I need to stress two important facts. One is I am speaking here only for myself. Yes I am a member of the 15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee, but the views expressed here are my own, only my own, and most assuredly not those of the group. Two – the second fact – is I have no inside knowledge of what obtained behind the scenes in Seattle. My one reliable inside-Seattle source is long dead. My divorcement from all things Seattle is permanent and so poisoned by its native-born residents' notorious hostility to outlanders,  it is unlikely I would visit there even if invited. Therefore the information I have comes only from the same sources available to us all.

That said, why I view the fate of 15 Now Seattle as a loss rather than a win – indeed a devastating loss – is my application of Marxian principles of objective analysis: specifically that any loss for the Working Class is a victory for the Ruling Class, and, by extension, that any victory for the Working Class is a defeat for the Ruling Class.

“Working Class” as used here is an accurately descriptive synonym for the 99 Percent – those of us who, whether our jobs are mental or physical, must work if we are to survive. “Ruling Class” in this context includes not only the One Percent – the aristocrats who own the United States and regard all the rest of us as real or potential slaves – but the cadre of military officers, police commanders, politicians and bureaucrats who serve the One Percenters by obedience to their orders in compliance with the Führerprinzip   that rules USian capitalism and capitalist governance just as it ruled German Nazism and Nazi Germany.

***

In the early days of Seattle's fight for a minimum wage, the 15 Now Seattle organization was, whether intentionally or not, virtually indistinguishable from Socialist Kshama Sawant's astoundingly successful campaign for a city council seat. Sawant is an outspoken member of Socialist Alternative, and she campaigned as such.

For those unfamiliar with present-day USian politics, Socialist Alternative is a Marxian party that like the Socialist Workers Party acknowledges Marxism's enormous debt to Leon Trotsky. But unlike SWP, which publishes the informative and often provocative Socialist Worker but otherwise functions as little more than a debating society, SA embodies the “think globally/act locally” strategy that emerged from the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Its 15 Now campaign, which is spreading throughout the U.S. and is embraced by growing numbers of workers employed by U.S. Big Business abroad, is a textbook example of the global/local approach.

The Ruling Class response to Sawant's victory has been the co-optation effort she anticipated in her city council victory speech  (relevant videotape begins at 11:35 minutes). But it was first evidenced, as I noted last January, “by subtle changes in Obamanoid rhetoric” that indicated the electoral triumph of a revolutionary socialist was already frightening the capitalist Ruling Class back into aspects of its former, Soviet-era pretense of humanitarianism.

Seven months later the Seattle City Council unanimously approved a $15 minimum wage ordnance that transformed “15 Now” into what some 15 Now supporters elsewhere have sarcastically dubbed “15 Eventually.” A caustic statement on the Portland, Oregon 15 Now website, edited here only for brevity, tells the whole story: 

Even while we should acknowledge and celebrate this accomplishment there are so many problems with the deal in Seattle that declarations of victory seem somewhat premature and have left many people feeling justifiably deflated.

• Corporations that make billions of dollars in annual profits don’t need years to phase in. While it is true that under this deal the minimum wage for many of Seattle’s low wage workers will rise to $11 per hour in less than one year, the fact is that large corporations can afford to pay $15 now, but they are not paying $15 for a few years.
• Tip credits and health care credits actually reduce workers’ real wages that can be used to buy food and pay rent. Even if eventually phased out, these credits mean that at first there are likely to be some workers who actually see a decrease in their monthly net pay.
• Lower “training wages” could encourage companies to move to a model of short-term temporary labor in order to take advantage of the lower short-term rate of pay, especially among large, low- wage-paying corporations that already have high employee turnover.
• The sub-minimum wage for teenagers fails to help the many teens in Seattle who work not for extra spending money, but because their family needs the income extra income to help pay the rent and the bills.
• Categorizing businesses with up to 500 employees as “small” for the purpose of the phase in schedule is ludicrous.

So while those of us within the $15 Now movement who have worked hard justifiably want to celebrate the accomplishment of getting a large city like Seattle to pass a bill for $15, we also need to be open and honest about the fact that the workers of Seattle themselves are not getting $15 Now, they are getting $15 Eventually, in about a decade. While we allow ourselves a moment to celebrate what we have accomplished so far, we also need to make certain we recognize the fact that even in Seattle, and certainly in the rest of the country, the Fight for $15 is far from over.

Predictably, Seattle's mainstream media – which is really Ruling Class Media (i.e., capitalist propaganda) – celebrated the reduction of 15 Now to 15 Eventually – or as I prefer to call it, (because Big Business is already moving to reverse the city council's decision), “15 Maybe Someday.”

Meanwhile Crosscut columnist Knute Berger proclaimed the nullification of 15 Now a significant victory for “incrementalism,” noting how the associated maneuvers “put out the potential fire of a populist rebellion.”

“As left-wingnutty as Seattle is sometimes caricatured,” wrote Berger, “it's still a town of business, big and small...Our capitalistic roots are strong and deep; radical activism has occasionally surged, but rarely gained power. Labor may score an occasional strategic victory, but workers never really run the show (ask Boeing's machinists).”

And since Berger proved the point with which this essay began – that Seattle Process is merely an especially devious method to ensure the Working Class remains disempowered – I'll also give him the last word. Applauding how 15 Now became 15 Pie-in-the-Sky, Berger called it “an example of Seattle process...”

I rest my case.

******

In Case You Missed It/Outside Agitation Elsewhere

Because this was the first week of the month with all its snail-paced bus-errands and those vexations multiplied to the Nth power by a couple of emotionally wrenching household disasters – the sorts of undeserved misery that prompt me to sing my own personal variant of the Doxology (“Curse god from whom all misery flows/ curse him ye victims here below”) – I had little time for reading my daily deluge of email, much less for posting comments on other websites. Nevertheless I did manage a few forays into Internet Land.

Hence when The Guardian reported on the burgeoning Department of Veterans Affairs scandal,  “White House Fights to Restore Veterans' Trust: 'It's Not Going to Be Quick or Easy',” I was quick to point out the easy back-story the Ruling Class Media dare not report:

The veterans' health-care scandal is a microcosm of the national health-care scandal, which can be explained in five words: the One Percent's genocidal greed. The One Percenters and the politicians and bureaucrats who serve them don't give a damn for the wellbeing of anyone outside the obscenely pampered Ruling Class. The result for ailing veterans is there is never enough money to give them the care they need. The result for the rest of us is health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. Both are functions of Ruling Class miserliness. “Why bother to treat the poor,” the aristocrats sneer. “The poor are always sick, and they die accordingly. Besides, their lives are worthless...”

This is not hyperbole. A prominent Ayn Rander – a Marie Antoinette political theorist whose fortunes are rising as the United States becomes ever more like pre-guillotine France – publicly made such statements a couple of months ago. (Sorry I don't have time to ferret out her identity.)

And though the politicians and bureaucrats are doing everything in their power to cover it up, and though the veterans' organizations are too compromised to ever acknowledge these sorts of atrocities are intrinsic to capitalism, it is the Ruling Class hatred and contempt for the Working Class – that and nothing else – that is measured in the resultant deaths.

My only other contribution this miserable week was on the comment thread of a disturbing report on the rise of neo-Nazism in Greece,  “SS Songs and Antisemitism: The Week Golden Dawn Turned Openly Nazi”:

Three points:

(1)-Note that Golden Dawn attracts "ever-growing numbers of the middle class." That's because, in times of economic crisis, modern history proves the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie), will ALWAYS turn to fascism. (It's only members of the proletariat and peasantry who turn Left.)

(2)-That's why, when the One Percent decides its time to impose capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the workers (in other words unabashed fascism) – it's the middle class that's targeted for discomfiture and the poor who are scapegoated and targeted for extermination.

(3)-Greece did NOT “give birth” to democracy. It coined the word that describes the mode of governance that had been characteristic of all human society until the advent of patriarchy. (A state of being is not named when it is the norm; it is named only after it has become rare enough to require description.) Moreover, if Robert Graves' hypotheses are correct, the real Greek contribution was imposing democratic process on patriarchy – which may (though I'm increasingly doubtful), yet rescue our species not only from patriarchy but from patriarchy's direct descendants, capitalism, fascism and Nazism.

***

And this in response to another poster on the same thread:

You are, jsluka, partially correct. But what you describe as "mass support from 'workers'" was typically induced by terror: unabashed extermination of Marxians and indeed all representatives of any Left alternatives in Germany, Italy and Spain; the less violent but more permanently psychologically damaging purge of Leftists and intellectuals in the postwar United States; Pinochet's extermination of class-conscious workers in Chile, etc. ad nauseum.

In terms of innate tendencies – and I erred in my failure to make this clear, for which I apologize – I believe what I said obtains: the petit bourgeoisie turn right, the peasantry and proletariat turn Left. 

Again as a generalization, this is because for the petit bourgeoisie, who have no identity beyond their possessions, the destruction of the status quo is the loss of everything. But for proletarians and peasants, who have far more flexible identities, the destruction of the status quo may actually mean relief from oppression.

And yes, the USian Homeland does indeed have peasants and proletarians. The former are mostly agricultural workers – near-slaves, actually – while the latter are mostly the legions of minimum-wage workers employed by Big Business.

LB/8 June 2014

-30-

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

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