When the Political Becomes Personal: an Epiphany

WHEN DISASTER STRIKES, I instinctively think of myself as being utterly and irremediably alone. I view myself as not just on my own in the context of the immediate crisis – as rising or falling solely on the basis of my own (severely limited) resources, but also as being cast off, banished, abandoned, alone in such a profound and absolute sense, I dare not ask for help lest it trigger my immediate, emphatic and quite possibly violent rejection as an unwanted burden. I remember encountering, about the time I was nine years old, the concept of being marooned – that is, transported to some desolately uninhabited isle in a dangerously tropical latitude and left there to live or die however fate might decree – a circumstance the emotional and material horrors of which I instantly understood and with which I fully emphasized, seemingly with every cell in my body. Such was the character of my childhood, a span of years the chief lesson of which was that any admission of neediness invariably invited retribution, the greater the need, the more severe the reprisal. I was, to put it bluntly, a thoroughly despised child – the legacy of which (as the events of the past week made clear) – I had not fully transcended even at age 74.

Even at the best of times, my relationship with computers is defined by an undertow of extreme anxiety. Not only is the computer the prime exemplar of invasive alien technology – an artifact of the morally imbecilic Otherworld of capitalism, where infinite greed is ultimate virtue and the tyranny of the One Percent over all the rest of us is reckoned a divinely ordained right – it is also the electronic scab that destroyed the realm of print journalism, which in the pre-computer era I assumed would always be my professional home. The computer abolished six of every seven newspaper jobs – copy editor, typographer, photo-engraver, compositor, proof-reader and stereotyper – and it piled all their duties on the reporters, reducing us all to miserably overworked, wretchedly underpaid clerks whose sole function is to fill the spaces between the advertisements with whatever drivel comes most readily to hand. Worse, the computer also permanently disempowered us; its downsizing of the workforce destroyed our unions, without which we are no better off, in terms of influence over working conditions and compensation, than the most abjectly submissive antebellum slaves owned by the most sneeringly sadistic masters. So – yes – not only do I fear computers. I also despise them.

 

My fear of these accursed machines has two components. One is the ruinous cost of repair and replacement, and with it all the self-contempt capitalism imposes on one's psyche when one is a financial failure. The other is the sure knowledge a single accidental keystroke can destroy hours, days, weeks, even years of work. As a consequence, each time I write something, each time I digitize a photograph, I relive the sheer horror that followed the loss of all my life's work in the 1983 fire and – because of my dyslexic penchant for fucking up even the most simple procedures  – I am again awash in the self-hatred that is an inevitable component of dyslexia. Plus all these factors are multiplied to the Nth power by the sure knowledge should anything go seriously wrong with my computer, repair and replacement is unquestionably beyond the inescapable limits forever imposed on my life by my fiscal inadequacies – the fact that, in capitalist terms (which are the terms now forced on every one of us from the moment we are born), I am a loser, a worthless piece of shit, white trash, a bum.

The great irony implicit in all this – or, if you will, the sadistic joke played on me by a malevolent god – is that the computer, this alien machine I so despise, has been made utterly indispensable to my self-fulfillment. Writing, especially now that arthritic crippling has radically reduced my ability to photograph, is as essential to my psychological survival as breathing is to its physical counterpart. But the easy world into which I was born, an implicitly democratic realm wherein the only tools one needed for writing were pen and paper, or at the most an (indestructible) mechanical typewriter and a ream of foolscap, is no more. It has been replaced by the fiscally malevolent, implicitly hierarchical, zero-tolerance world typified by the computer: a realm in which even the formerly free-for-the-taking potential of self-expression has been turned into a profit center, with the result those of us for whom such expression is vital now must live – unless we are genuinely wealthy – in constant terror we will be silenced by poverty, which in this new world is the most effective censor of all. Thus the computer – this accursed machine on which my psychological survival is hopelessly dependent – is also the instrument that forces me, literally every day and like nothing else ever in my personal history, into intimate interaction with the miasma of neurotic negativity that underlies my operational consciousness.

When this computer went bad last week – when it began crashing just as I was attempting to finish my volunteer production of a monthly newsletter 50 other persons had come to depend on for information and entertainment – I first struggled for several hours to solve the problem. I am its founder, editor, primary writer and chief photographer. In these roles I also do all the infinitely tedious work formerly done by mechanical department employees: typesetters, compositors, photo engravers, stereotypers and all the others whose jobs have been abolished by the computer. But my computer knowledge is woefully inadequate – I have neither the money nor, in all probability, the remaining years of life to earn the degree in computer science essential to achieve the level of competence I increasingly seem to require – and so all my efforts failed. My word-processing system, it seemed, was dead. So were three other voluntary editorial projects. Nor would I, so silenced, be of any further use to 15 Now Tacoma. I had fallen into the abyss of hopelessness that is the defining characteristic of today's inescapable poverty.

In that state I wrote two notes:

I'm sorry to inform you my computer's word processing system crashed last night and cannot be revived. This kills the July newsletter and – depending on repair cost – it may kill the newsletter entirely...I am so very sorry to have let everyone down this way. As poor as I am, I should never have made the newsletter commitment to begin with, for I should have anticipated that equipment failure would eventually terminate my ability to produce it.

My deepest apologies,

Loren Bliss

The second, to some of my comrades on the 15 Now Tacoma Organizing Committee, said much the same thing, albeit in more detail:

My word processing system is dead beyond resurrection, which essentially ends life as I knew it until such time as I can afford the hundreds of dollars it will take to get it repaired or replaced – if indeed I will ever be able to afford it at all. 

The system crashed last night as i was finishing the monthly newsletter I produce for the apartment complex in which I live, destroying the newsletter and inflicting on me the odium of unfulfilled commitments to my neighbors with all the associated loss of credibility.

This also ends for the foreseeable future my ability to do anything of real value for anyone else, either  for 15 Now or via my blog, and it probably kills the latter as readership once lost through atrophy is never regained. 

The crash is total, which is to say my entire document file is effectively obliterated as any attempt to access anything in it crashes the entire WP system. 

Yes I have another computer, a new laptop generously given to me by my second wife based on our mistaken understanding it would be compatible with this custom-made desktop machine, a gift  I have been running since 2009.  But it turns out such compatibility  – like so much else in my life – is forever  beyond my financial reach.  Hence the laptop is effectively useless, not just because of systemic incompatibility imposed by  Microshaft monopolization policies, but also because of the  fact that – since computers to me truly are alien technology -- it would take me at least three months to become even marginally competent with a new system.

For the computer cognoscenti amongst you, the desktop operating system is Ubuntu, with Open Office Writer word processing and Gimp photo software. The laptop is Microsoft – Microsoft 8 as I recall – and (or so I am authoritatively told) Microsoft 8  is designed so that it cannot be used with any open source software without the intervention of a professional Nurd, which is of course prohibitively expensive. 

So there was no way to retrieve data from my desktop machine and download it onto the laptop even before the desktop WP system crashed -- and now of course everything on the desktop is beyond recovery, irretrievable because of my inability to pay the horrendous costs of salvaging it.  Worse, Microshaft 8 mandates purchasing Microsoft Office and – if one needs photo software – also buying PhotoShop, either of which are forever beyond my financial capabilities.

Plus of course there is also Microshaft's notorious vulnerability to viruses and malware.

In short I am not only shut down but reduced to utter uselessness.

Moreover this comes at the worst possible time in my life. I am scheduled for cataract surgery on the 15th and again on the 29th, and though the surgery is actually relatively minor, the associated medication regimen is a full-time commitment that demands rigidly scheduling my life for the next approximately four weeks, shackled to an  alarm clock set to ring every four hours. 

Because I do not have an automobile, this puts me in the odious and frankly terrifying position of being utterly dependent on other people for all vital errands because the uncertainty of the local transit system could interrupt the medication schedule with dire results. 

This same medication schedule combined with my lack of an automobile plus  post-operative 30-day limitations on lifting anything heavier than 15 pounds also prevents me from being able to schlep the desktop computer around in search of a repair facility that will not rip me off – with a likelihood of success, even under the very best of conditions, probably  about equal to that of finding an honest used car salesman.

While I certainly am and will presumably remain capable of walking from my dwelling to the Methodist church for 15 Now meetings, I see no point in my attendance because without the machinery required for writing and editing, I am of no use to the group (or anyone else including my neighbors in this apartment complex), and I would therefore be nothing but a body presumptuously occupying space but contributing nothing.  Thus very regretfully I am going to have to drop out of 15 Now (and to divorce myself from all my other former activities too) until such time as the eye-surgery protocols are complete and these other matters are resolved. 

When that happens – or more truthfully (because of the financial prohibitions that could well mean my lack of a WP system is permanent), IF that happens – I  will of course happily rejoin the 15 Now community.

Sorrowfully,
Loren Bliss 

 

Note that nowhere in these despairing letters did I ask for assistance from any of the people to whom they were addressed. So conditioned was I by my childhood, it never occurred to me to ask – and had it done so, I simply wouldn't have dared. Automatically – and as I now realize, with implicit unfairness to my friends, colleagues and comrades – I assumed no such help would be forthcoming. Again I was trapped by the bitter lessons of my childhood: my repeatedly proven belief any request of such magnitude would trigger not just a contemptuous refusal but severe reprisals as well. Beneath that emotional quagmire was a residual layer of reflexive terror as compelling as any whip-wielding overseer in its mandate for silence. Meanwhile, in sheer panic, I kept wrestling with the computer problem, trying desperately to find some way to save at least the newsletter text, an effort that culminated in an exhausting series of all-nighters – three in four days (with never more than two hours of sleep at any one time) – a relentless drive fueled by rage, frustration and a sense of karmic obstruction more infuriating than anything in memory.

Finally I forced myself to ask a computer-wise friend named Pat Fletcher for help, but the conversation quickly deteriorated into an argument. Seemingly the clash was fostered by my inability to speak Nurdish – that is, to clearly explain what was happening, what remedies I had attempted and what I had already learned would not solve the problem. But knowing what I know now, I cannot doubt our differences were at least equally fueled by the silent inertial momentum of my childhood conditioning. In any case, when I managed to salvage the newsletter text – the result of the third overnight effort, a quest prompted by a hunch and culminating in a lucky accident (I cannot possibly explain what I did, nor could I ever do it again) – Pat became the true savior of the entire project by rounding up its separate pieces and herding them into printable form. As a result of her work, the newsletter was published and distributed this morning. Thank you Pat.

 

Meanwhile five fellow organizing-committee members – Max Hyland, Katelyn Driskill, Alan OldStudent, Terry Fuller and Sarah Morken – had responded to my letter of disgruntlement. That anyone bothered to reply was itself a surprise; I had intended to vanish until the computer problem was solved, felt I should explain my impending disappearance, and anticipated nothing more than silence in response. But here within hours – in one instance within minutes – were their emails offering useful advice and urging me to persevere. Max went even further, and now thanks to a four-hour effort on his part, I have a new word-processing system plus new-found friendships with him and his partner Katelyn cemented by our mutual discovery we can talk of politics and history and art and personal experience until the proverbial wee hours and – best of all – do so with the blessed bohemian intensity that characterized the most memorable interactions of my years in Manhattan. Thank you Alan and Terry and Sarah. And thank you most of all Max and Katelyn: indeed you remind me of my late and long-ago SWP friends from Chelsea: Joe Bevando and Marilyn Werstler, with whom I traveled to Washington D.C. in the politically uncertain days after the Kent State and Jackson State massacres, there to demonstrate against Nixon, the Vietnam War and capitalist atrocities in general.

But none of this came into focus until this morning, after I finally managed to get something approaching a full night's sleep. I awoke realizing the events following the initial computer crash, which occurred around 8:30 Thursday evening (10 July 2014), had somehow flushed a negative paradigm from my subconscious, a process eerily parallel to how Max purged the corrupted WP system from my computer. All I knew in my first moments of wakefulness was a collection of words, “epiphany” and “the political as personal,” but I arose vowing to pull into the sharpest possible focus whatever it was they might symbolize. The above text is the result. Now though I realize I had already been on epiphany's brink when I posted my “sandbagged” message last night: “a classic example of the reality embodied in the line 'I get by with a little help from my friends'...expressions both of friendship and Working Class solidarity...” But a note to Pat this morning said it all: “I had no idea I am held in such high regard by my comrades in 15 Now. I am stunned, moved beyond my ability to express it.  In Seattle, even as the founding photographer of The Sun, I was always despised as an Outlander; here (in Tacoma) I am not just welcomed but valued, much as I was when here c. 1978-1982,  much as I always was in Manhattan and NJ.”

Obviously the neurotic reflexes associated with such a longstanding paradigm as described above do not vanish overnight. But at least I have finally learned how to ask for help when I need it.

Hence I will say it one more time: thank you Pat, Max, Katelyn, Alan, Sarah and Terry.

* * * * * *

Outside Agitation Elsewhere: (In Case You Missed It)

The Hobby Lobby decision, which I am coming to realize is the anti-woman equivalent of the anti-African American Dred Scott decision  (see also below), continues to provoke a perplexing combination of futile gestures (e.g., the doomed effort to ameliorate it with legislation rendered impossible by a permanently deadlocked Congress), and boiling anger further intensified by the growing understanding of its ruinous impact.

Not only does Hobby Lobby undermine the rights of women and minorities; it also opens, as never before in U.S. judicial history, the door to the imposition of Christian theocracy – just as its obediently misogynistic, dutifully anti-democratic Roman Catholic signatories clearly intend.

(Which prompts an impertinent question that is dark indeed: could it be President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's avowed and oft-proven defiance of Vatican rule was yet another of the motives that prompted his assassination?)

Thus when Al Jazeera America reported on the latest misogynistic atrocities  inflicted by Justice Scalia and his surrogate Inquisition, “Court Expands Reach of Hobby Lobby on Eve of Holiday Weekend,” I posted a pair of angry comments to the discussion thread. The first was pro forma:

There's no “maybe” about it: that's exactly what's happening, though the perpetrators are Christian clergymen, not mullahs.

Meanwhile, a few of us – Chris Hedges, Nat Hentoff, Jeff Sharlet, Susan Jacoby, Kevin Phillips and myself – have been warning for years about the encroachment of theocracy.

Having encountered Christianity's hatefulness in rural Washington and the South (where the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan is “the Saturday night men's Bible-study class”), I damn the theocrats as “Christofascists” and “JesuNazis.”

Too extreme? Hardly; I know from experience that is precisely what they are.

But we are the Cassandras of our era. Our words are belittled as sensationalism, rejected as paranoia.

The secular public is too smugly self-absorbed to awaken to the threat.

 

Shackled by political correctness, the Left dares not acknowledge the growing might of Christian fanaticism. That would require acknowledging both the stranglehold Christianity has on the U.S. masses and the parallel menaces of radical Islam and theocratic Judaism.

The moderate churches, mosques and temples are gagged by ecumenicism. That's why they do not speak out against the threat.

And the two major parties were long ago taken over by the fanatics. Read Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008).

Now, like some reincarnation of the Inquisition, the Supreme Court is pouncing.

* * *

My second contribution to the “Court Expands” thread is a short piece of which I will remain proud at least for the rest of my life:

 

Inspired by #m, may I suggest the following:

SCOTUS MALORUM (court of evil); SCOTUS MENDACEM (court of lies); SCOTUS IGNORANTUM (court of ignorance); SCOTUS HORRIBILIS (court of horror)...and then my favorite:

SCOTUS ASINORUM (court of asses).

This last has true Roman lineage. It is from "pons asinorum, literally 'bridge of asses': a humorous name for the fifth proposition of the first book of Euclid, from the difficulty which beginners or dull-witted persons find in 'getting over' or mastering it." (A Dictionary of Latin Words and Phrases, Oxford University Press: 1998)

Then of course there is Scalia, a disease so awful even medical writers are afraid to describe it, lest the description itself vector the bacteria.

* * * * * *

Now though the work of SCOTUS HORRIBILIS has wreaked so much emotional havoc, the response is deteriorating into terrified giggles of satire and disbelief.  Hence “Scalia's Major Screw-Up: How SCOTUS Just Gave Liberals a Huge Gift.” Hence too my caustic retort:

Ms. Ruden's too-cute assumption, that because of its Hobby Lobby decision, SCOTUS ASINORUM “cannot refuse religious exemptions from selected tax obligations,” belongs in an editor's garbage can.

 

Her pathetic belief the U,S, is still a representative democracy – and her implicit belief in the consistency of judicial principle – is absurd. The U.S. has become a plutocratic empire. The sole function of SCOTUS MALORUM is perpetuating capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

In this context, making light of Hobby Lobby, which for the nation's women is the equivalent of the Dred Scott decision, is like laughing at the convulsions of a lynch-mob victim.

Meanwhile it's easy to imagine the Roberts Court granting “religious exemptions” to the Ku Klux Klan, known throughout the South as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible-Study Class.” But there is no possibility SCOTUS PRO DOCTRINA FIDEI would grant such dispensations to Left-leaning Protestants.

Indeed such a ruling from the Robber Court is even less likely than acquittal by the original Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei – the Inquisition – which tortured suspected heretics until they confessed, then burned them alive in an “Auto da Fey” – a “celebration of faith.”

Besides which, all “religious exemptions” further the cause of theocracy, the One Percent's final solution to Working Class rebelliousness.

* * *

Then there was my response to a hostile poster on the same thread:

Since when is it "defeatist" to demand an unflinchingly realistic appraisal of reality? 

Indeed your accusation and Ms. Ruden's essay each illustrate major aspects of the most savagely counter-revolutionary (and therefore oppressively reactionary) tendency in U.S. society: making light of genuine horror, and denouncing those of us who are unafraid to name its awfulness.

Quoth Sun Tzu: "Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster."

LB/14 July 2014

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Computer Problems Sandbag This Week's Blog Post

A WORD-PROCESSING SYSTEM that would rather crash than communicate used up all the time I would normally have devoted to researching, writing, editing and posting this week's edition of Outside Agitatior's Notebook. It also severely delayed three other editorial projects, kept me away from a vital 15 Now Tacoma activity and was of course emotionally devastating as well. The problem is being solved -- a classic example of the reality embodied in the line "I get by with a little help from my friends"  -- women and men who have earned my most heartfelt thanks. Because of their rescue efforts, which are moving expressions both of friendship and Working Class solidarity, I will be fully operational again within a few hours. Please be patient; I hope to have some text posted as soon as  this Monday evening. Meanwhile my apology to those who accessed this space in anticipation of new material, and my gratitude for your continuing readership.  

LB/13 July 2014

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Did Obama Throw Women under the Hobby Lobby Bus?

WAS OBAMACARE SECRETLY INTENDED to betray women? When you consider the utterly predictable outcome of the United States Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision and its de facto endorsement by President Barack Obama's refusal to employ his executive powers against its sweeping ban on birth control, the possibility becomes too evident to ignore. Indeed it clamors for investigation. Moreover, Obama's long and embittering record of making campaign promises he had no intention of keeping suggests the betrayal may have been part of the Affordable Care Act's hidden agenda from the moment the newly elected president began his closed-door scheming  with the health-insurance-industry executives who actually authored the legislation.

I said nearly as much in response to Abby Ohlheiser's brief and tautly reasoned “Ginsburg's Passionate 35-Page Dessent of Hobby Lobby Decision,” part of my daily email from Reader Supported News. Six days later,my suspicions intensified by many hours of research, what began as an embittered comment-thread remark had become the key passage of this column:

Assuming the correctness of Justice Ginsburg's dissent, the impact of the Hobby Lobby decision is far more devastating than we are being told by mainstream media.

The devastation is inherent in the fact at least 90 percent of U.S. business is “closely held.” 

Hobby Lobby thus allows the imposition of theocratic restrictions on most of the U.S. workplace. Not only does this abolish the reproductive freedom of most of the workforce; it is also a giant step toward replacing constitutional governance with Biblical law – a subversive goal lavishly funded by the One Percent as the ultimate means of subjugating the Working Class.

Meanwhile, imposition of theocracy via the private sector has become a standard Christian tactic. The takeover of the nation's health care facilities by the Roman Catholic Church is already, wherever it occurs, prohibiting access to all forms of contraception.

Financially, Hobby Lobby's main beneficiaries are the insurance barons. By making birth control unobtainable, the ruling further maximizes Affordable Care Act profits. Mandatory insurance generates obscene windfall profits even as prohibitively expensive co-pays and deductibles radically limit the public's ability to actually obtain care. Hobby Lobby furthers this process, minimizing cost by eliminating birth control from ACA coverage.

 

Given the lies and treachery by which we are now ruled, who can doubt this atrocity was carefully scripted in advance?

Though the president's sycophants will loudly denounce any such notion as unthinkable, U.S. history proves otherwise. Legislation at all levels – federal, state and local – is invariably peddled as an essential solution to some pressing crisis. But many such measures are sneakily written to perpetuate the very grievances they falsely claim to redress. By legalistic sleight-of-hand and other devious means – especially alleged “benefits” that on closer inspection turn out to be nonexistent – they defeat the democratic will of the people and impose instead the tyrannical goals and objectives of Ruling Class politicians and bureaucrats. Under the direction of their One Percent masters, these functionaries have honed the strategy and tactics of deliberate deception to sadistic perfection at every level of government – federal, state or local – inside the United States and its possessions.

The associated methodology is obviously a Machiavellian variant of the marketing practices by which the capitalists routinely dupe us into buying defective products. In the marketplace it is infuriating. In its political application – with all its heightened expectation of collective socioeconomic improvement and its subsequent plunge into defeat and disillusionment – it is perhaps the most injurious psychological warfare weapon in the Ruling Class arsenal. Not only does it foster alienation and despair; it subverts democracy and undermines even the hope of democracy by convincing us the entire democratic processes is a sham.

An ultimate example of this sort of deception is the New Deal. By ameliorating the morally imbecilic savagery of capitalism, it co-opted, demobilized and eventually dispersed a definitively revolutionary majority coalition of Communists, other socialists, Progressives and Left Democrats. But it (deliberately) preserved the irresistible power of the One Percent and thereby ensured its own eventual death. It also facilitated – chiefly by temporarily disguising the predatory nature of capitalism – the re-emergence of capitalism's unapologetic malevolence.

Another example is Medicare, which is funded by a combination of payroll taxes and mandatory premiums. It is touted as a European-style program that provides health care to all the nation's citizens age 65 and over and to recipients of Social Security Disability Insurance stipends as well. Though Medicare is widely believed to signal the government's endorsement of the principle that health care is a human right, in truth it does nothing of the kind. It covers only “about 48 percent” of an individual's authorized health-care costs  – far less if the non-reimbursed costs of vision, hearing and dental services are included in the calculations. The remainder, 52 percent of the approved expenses plus the full price of everything else that is not covered – eye glasses, hearing aids, dental care, many other services – comes out of the so-called beneficiary's pocket.

“No part of Medicare,” states the reference linked in the preceding paragraph, “pays for all of a beneficiary's covered medical costs, and many costs are not covered at all.” For the average recipient, the necessary co-payments and deductibles are too often prohibitive.  This means innumerable Medicare recipients, though saddled with the mandatory premiums deducted from their Social Security pensions, are chronically unable to obtain adequate health care. They are locked out of the system by its additional fees. And the little Medicare does cover is under constant attack by Republicans and Democrats alike – one of the many ways the two Ruling Class parties demonstrate their absolute fealty to the One Percenters, who now make no secret of the fact they regard humanitarian expenditures as wasted money. The only people genuinely served by Medicare are thus the wealthy, for whom it is merely another bonus on a seemingly endless list of taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Medicare's functions are therefore actually fourfold. (1)-Medicare rewards the wealthy. (2)-It punishes – and sometimes exterminates – the poor. (3)-It locks into place the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. (The definition's perpetuity is achieved by a system so impossibly complex, no group of citizens can change it without the intervention of politicians and bureaucrats – which means the citizens' efforts are invariably betrayed.) (4)-By its opacity, Medicare enables the U.S. to promulgate the Big Lie – within and without – that it offers some of its citizens a genuine universal health-care program.

Obamacare serves exactly the same functions in precisely the same ways. It is mandatory. The premiums it extracts are providing the health insurance cartel with the largest, most obscene windfall profits in its history – another of the president's innumerable gifts to his Wall Street masters. Yet Obamacare's deductibles and co-pays discourage and/or prohibit most of its alleged beneficiaries from fulfilling their medical needs. Like Medicare, its complexities make it incomprehensible save by politicians and bureaucrats, which further cements into permanence the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of wealth. And, again like Medicare, it enables U.S. propaganda to disseminate another Big Lie intended to disguise the deadly barbarism of its Ayn Rand economics.

Such are the ways of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else. Such too is the unmitigated deception that is the operational context of all U.S. health care.

It is in this same context Obamacare's triumphant claim “being female is no longer a pre-existing condition” emerges as yet another Big Lie. (Readers who are unfamiliar with the for-profit U.S. medical system should note that until the advent of the so-called Affordable Care Act, the health insurance barons charged radically higher premiums  for insuring reproductive-age females.) Obama the Orator repeatedly assured the voters such discrimination would soon be ended. But after he won the presidency, he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer. In that persona, he almost certainly guaranteed the insurance barons they would soon regain their ability to exploit female genitalia as a profit center. Even if he did not, it is beyond belief he and his insurance-cartel henchmen – armed as they were with all their market research and secret-police surveillance data – did not foresee the Hobby Lobby lawsuit or some other action that would yield the same result.

In any case, it is increasingly obvious the Hobby Lobby decision has now permanently rescinded what women regarded as the most compelling aspect of the ACA. As the Associated Press reported the day after the decision – “The Supreme Court has left in place lower court rulings in favor of businesses that object to covering all methods of government-approved contraception...not just the four pregnancy prevention methods and devices that the court considered in its ruling.” Since then, at least 82 more companies have indicated they intend to cancel their employees' birth-control coverage. 

Nor is there any recourse. The fund-raising claims of several women's organizations notwithstanding, Congressional remedies are impossible. The aggressively reactionary, vindictively theocratic Republican majority in the House has been gerrymandered into unbeatable permanence. And as reported above, the president – whose theocratic leanings  are so obvious they are provoking secularist protests – will not grant Hobby Lobby's growing roster of victims any other remedy.

Long term, the Hobby Lobby ruling will probably enable employers and insurers to force nearly all U.S. women to pay out of pocket for their birth control. But these expenses, like Medicare and ACA co-pays and deductibles, will be brutally prohibitive. Capitalism has downsized nearly half the population's paychecks to poverty or lower-income levels.  As Justice Ginsberg noted in her epic dissent, the cost of a single inter-uterine device or IUD “is nearly equivalent to a month's full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage." For women who cannot afford the aristocratic privilege of self-financed contraception, the only alternative is total surrender to misogyny: re-learning to despise their own bodies – to fear their own sensuality, sexuality and fertility – precisely as demanded by Christian doctrine and its regime of mandatory chastity. Theocrats everywhere are gloating. 

All of which again underscores the fact that in the United States, health care is a privilege of wealth and will remain so forever – that is, until the nation as we know it is no more.

The Hobby-Lobby case also demonstrates the ever-more-terrifying likelihood biblical-law Christian theocracy  will eventually replace Constitutional governance in the U.S homeland. Not only has the Supreme Court endorsed Jesus as the national deity; the forcible Christianization of the imperial military machine has already produced legions of troops trained in theocratic surveillance and oppression. The high command is now marching these latter-day Inquisitors and Crusaders into place.

Unfortunately, only a few Cassandra columnists,  of whom I am surely one, dare write constantly and at length about the inherent malevolence of the fanatical U.S. Christians and their schemes for imposing a Christian version of Middle Eastern theocracy (complete with public torture-executions for rebellious women, homosexuals and all other so-called “heretics”). And though we have been exposing these threats for years, our warnings are often belittled or suppressed. The above linked piece by Chris Hedges, for example, was suppressed by every major publication in the nation – never mind his stature as a mainstream writer.

Meanwhile, the ever-more-emboldened theocrats now openly denounce all women who use contraception  as “creatures...who cannot control their libido.” Such malicious slanders resurrect the bigoted dogmas of Abrahamic religion – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – that all women are like the biblical Eve, ruinously sinful, ready recruits for the Devil and therefore a seductive threat  to every devout male. But as Truthout's William Rivers Pitt aptly puts it, the U.S. seemingly remains the “land of the free” – unless you're a woman.

Though Pitt seems to carefully avoid such possibilities, it's impossible to overlook that someday in this increasingly downtrodden nation, women's cumulative anger might light the proverbial fuse. That's what happened in Paris on 14 July 1789, likewise in Petrograd on International Women's Day, 8 March 1917, 23 February by the old Tsarist calendar. The events in Paris – first the city's wives and mothers provoked to riotous rage by impossibly expensive bread, then the storming of the Bastille – are well known, but what obtained in Petrograd has been obscured by distance and anti-Russian propaganda, so I'll tell it once again: the flint-hearted bosses of the massive Lesnoy Textile Works sacked five women for trying to organize a union, and the women's 5,000 workplace sisters boiled into the streets in furious protest. Within just a few hours, their demonstration had exploded into the Russian Revolution.

LB/6 June 2014

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(Note: this week's OAN omited “Agitation Elsewhere” to better focus on the unfolding Hobby Lobby story.)

Three Essays: Is U.S. Socialism Doomed?; Today's U.S. Was Not My Birthplace; Notes On Boudica the Rebel

(Sorry this is so late. Computer troubles -- plus the infuriating fact the Internet's plague of unrestricted advertisement-monitoring software now makes U.S. broadband as slow as dial-up was 15 years ago -- turned production of today's OAN into an exhausting all-nighter.) 

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OCCASIONALLY THE REPORTS I read on other websites prompt me to address in comment threads subjects about which I already intended to write detailed columns here. But last week that happened as never before – not once but three times.

As most of you know, I am an avowed socialist – these days ever-more-strongly influenced by Marx, Engels and Lenin. (No doubt this is the concluding legacy of my involvement with “communists and stuff” that in 1963 convinced my first wife to end our marriage.)

In any case I long ago realized socialism is our only viable alternative if indeed we are to (maybe) save ourselves and our sorely wounded planet.

What attracted me to socialism was its innate humanitarian fairness – from each according to ability/ to each according to need. It was a concept in which I was tutored as a child by my Marxian father, and it became the core of my own ideology after I was jailed in connection with a 1963 civil rights incident –  the same atrocity that ignited my undying taste for the political activism that prompted my first wife's departure.

Prior to 1963, many people including my employers thought I was destined for The New York Times or some comparable journalistic Mount Everest. But my prospects of major newspaper employment died with my arrest in the newsroom of The Knoxville Journal – never mind the false charge of disorderly conduct was quickly dismissed.

Hence for the next 26 years I straddled the divide between lesser mainstream print-media outlets and the alternative press, at the same time participating not just in the Civil Rights Movement but also in the Anti-Vietnam War and Back-to-the-Land movements and even for a time in the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party.

But in 1983, all my life's work – including a book seemingly on the brink of publication, another in progress and a possible third in concept notes – was destroyed by a mysterious fire. The ensuing clinical depression led to an extended clash with a breathtakingly vicious, relentlessly vindictive Washington state welfare bureaucracy. Thwarting forever my three-year struggle to return to work (1987-1990), the bureaucrats maliciously destroyed my life by declaring me permanently unemployable.

Enraged by the end of all my aspirations and embittered by the realization I had been condemned to abjectly inescapable poverty, I allowed my anger to drive me deep into the camp of the Libertarian Conservatives.

But by late 2004, my own humanitarianism had resurfaced, again in socialist form, and I was mortified by my former apostasy.

Now though I was also keenly aware of how easily even those of us with presumably elevated political consciousness can be recruited to fascism by bitterness and rage – especially when such emotions are fully justified, as they were in my case.

Asking myself how I might have avoided such seduction, I realized the only preventative is ideological discipline. Hence the relevance of Marx, Engels and Lenin – not only in my life, but as a general antidote to the ever-more-obvious tyranny of capitalist governance.

It we are to successfully confront capitalism as it matures into unabashed fascism – as Wall Street's global empire imposes its regime of absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – the solidarity evoked by Marxian ideological discipline is an absolute necessity.

But, here in the USian Homeland, does socialism – Marxian or any other kind –have even the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell?

I frankly doubt it. I have been debating with myself for some time whether to write about the diabolical cleverness with which our Ruling Class masters condition us all in Ayn Rand moral imbecility, thus to ensure socialism – or any other form of humanitarianism – will never again jeopardize the One Percent's obscene profits.

The question I asked myself was whether I should regard my thesis as too defeatist and therefore keep silent. Or should I speak my piece, in hope identifying a key Ruling Class tactic will enable us to combat it?

Two essays on the Internet this week made the decision for me. 

One was “Red Cross: How We Spent Sandy Money Is a 'Trade Secret',” here.  My hypothesis – that there will never be a socialist United States unless we can again learn to trust one another – fit naturally on the “Red Cross” comment thread:

The Ayn Rand mindset – moral imbecility for personal gain – poisons USians at every level, from the executive boardrooms, the politicians' mansions and the bureaucratic directorates to the ranks of the lowest level employees and government clerks, in for-profit and non-profit operations alike.

Exactly as (another poster) says, “greed, ignorance and corruption” have become the sole (and soul) defining characteristics of the modern United States.

That's why socialism – though it is the only possible solution to the problems that are destroying our species and our planet – seems forever doomed in the U.S.

 

Socialism requires mutual trust – especially trustworthy leadership. But too many episodes like this breaking Red Cross scandal demonstrate how the nation's relentless Ayn Rand conditioning has (deliberately) created a people for whom infinite greed is maximum virtue (and thus the rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth). 

Thus too neither any leader nor any organization will ever again be regarded as trustworthy. This is how the One Percent ensures its power is absolute and eternal – that is, until our entire species is extinct.

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The second decision-maker was “The United States of Cruelty,” by Charles Pierce of Esquire, here.  Writing about the manifest cruelties of USians – especially the growing hostility to lower-income people – Pierce inevitably prompted a discussion of U.S. complicities in mass murder. My contribution, sufficiently controversial its thumbs-up/thumbs-down counts continue to nullify each other, noted mass murder's origin in Abrahamic religion:

(I)t is at least arguable (mass murder) is the invention of the Abrahamic god, the deity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

“And the Lord our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain...” (Deuteronomy 2: 33-34.)

Moreover, to make certain the faithful understand such genocide is truly the mandate of the Heavenly Führer, his will is repeated as a commandment:

“But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth...” (Deuteronomy 20:16)

Sarcastically parodying biblical style (which too many readers probably didn't get), I hammered out my conclusion:

Behold in these massacres commanded by the Divine Sadist the celestial glories of patriarchy and the amazing grace of Abrahamic governance. Verily, thus does man, ancient and modern, prove he was created in the image of this god of cruelty.

To me the above seems the perfect footnote to a piece on why the USian people will probably never embrace socialism.

As Francesca, a compellingly articulate woman of Occupy Tacoma, so memorably said to me on a rainy winter night three years ago: “the 99 Percent is terribly broken.”

Not only are most 99 Percenters Ayn-Randed to fascist moral imbecility; they're also Bible-thumped to genocidal hatred. And now with the First Nations people nearly exterminated, we their lower-income grandparents and parents and brothers and sisters – we who are elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed – we are undoubtedly next.

Why then do we socialists persist? Because we know resistance is our only remaining taste of freedom – the defining experience, however fleeting, of what it is to be fully human.

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Another Internet story, “JBLM may shelter detained immigrant children,” here (scroll down), prompted me to write a snide retort, and an equally snide rejoinder inspired another long-considered text. First I wrote:

Apropos Joint Base Lewis-McChord: I wonder how many of these imprisoned kids will be "encouraged" to enlist in the imperial war machine?

(Child recruitment age is 17-18. Given the skyrocketing unpopularity of the empire's wars, maybe that's the reason the Defense Department is interested in providing transit camps for child deportees.)

Then a poster screen-named ArthurKing (his real name?) denounced my reference to the imperial war machine as “a degrading, insulting comment toward our men and women in uniform and all those who have previously served.”

And I answered with an essay I might have titled “Today's United States Is Not the U.S. in Which I Was Born”:

Just for the record, Mr. King, I was part of the imperial war machine myself: Regular Army enlistment, active duty 1959-1962, overseas service in Republic of Korea, extended there by the Berlin Crisis of 1961, ETS September '62, honorable discharge from reserves in 1965. In those days we crossed the seas on troop transports: for me it was the USS Mann en route, the USNS Sultan returning.

Had you been amongst those of us who served – which I doubt – surely you would know soldiers are not insulted by truth. You would also know that honor is ultimately a personal matter – which is why, after the guns fall silent and the scalding venom of war has cooled and dried to dust, we recognize there was honor not only amongst ourselves but amongst our enemies as well.

The rest of your profiling is dead wrong too – laughably so in fact. I neither eat pot brownies nor attend drum circles, and – as I have all my life – I recognize the Second Amendment as intended for the ultimate defense of our Constitution.

But that does not change the fact the dear and promising nation from which I enlisted no longer exists.

A nation that was notably democratic if one were white (as indeed I am), but which ranged from not-so-democratic to openly tyrannical if one were a person of color – it was promising precisely because it shone with the potential of extending its radical notions of representative democracy at least to all its citizens and perhaps even to the world.

Then it was dealt a fatal wound on 22 November 1963. After that, it convulsed and twitched through its death-throes during a decade of political murders (Malcolm X; Martin Luther King Jr.; Sen.Robert Kennedy [the last man who could have saved us from ourselves]; Fred Hampton; the dead and permanently crippled at Kent State University and Jackson State College, etc. ad nauseam.

Since then, the ruling cabal of plutocrats and politicians has reduced us to irremediable wretchedness. We the people are powerless. Debt-slavery, foreclosure, eviction, inescapable poverty and homelessness have become our defining economic realities. The Constitution I swore to defend has been deliberately nullified. Its Bill of Rights has been maliciously repealed by the ironically named Patriot Act and the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act. And now the socioeconomic and political tyrannies that formerly defined the lives of its people of color define the conditions endured by nearly all of us.

A working journalist since my 16th year (1956), I was a general-assignment reporter the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered, and more than once I had to wipe the tears from my eyes as I hammered out my assigned segments of our local reaction story and updated them for our extras.

During the years after the president was slain, I watched with horror while events that followed one another “as the night the day,” confirmed our darkest suspicions of what had obtained in that most mournfully infamous moment. (JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters; James E. Douglass, Orbis Books: 2008, presents an incisive analysis of our post-Kennedy history that proves beyond any scintilla of doubt the assassination was indeed a coup.)

Now, because I do so knowing I live in a realm in which the Bill of Rights exists only on paper, I feel a twinge of fear every time I write of the “imperial war machine” or dare state any other political truth. I know that in the new post-constitutional United States – our homeland ruled by the Ayn Rand moral imbecility of capitalist governance (absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy; total subjugation for all the rest of us) – I (or anyone else) can now be disappeared or murdered at the government's whim. (If you doubt this, you are either ignorant or in psycho-neurotic denial.)

But I don't really care. I am 74 years old and increasingly crippled by ever-more-painful osteoarthritis. Given how our nation has been stolen from us – given how its thieves have made it the most relentless predator on our terminally sickened planet – my one remaining hope is I will be dead before these robber-baron plutocrats complete their unspeakably evil, 80-year scheme of global imperialism: the whole world an electronically overseen slave-plantation, its master the de facto Fourth Reich.

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The third comment-thread writing of an essay I had long intended for this space – speculation about Boudica, the Celtic revolutionary – was inspired by Chris Hedges' “The Ghoulish Face of Empire.” here.  The Boudica material, in my mind for years if not decades, emerged slowly:

This is some of Mr. Hedges best writing, and I salute its indictment of the USian Empire's Ayn Rand moral imbecility.

But many Romans feared the end of their imperium had come in 9 CE (AD), when guerrillas under Arminius (aka "Herman the German") massacred 20,000 Roman soldiers in the Teutoburg Forest. (A superb book on this war, which forever changed the map of Europe, is The Battle That Stopped Rome, [Peter S. Wells, W.W. Norton and Co.: 2003]).

Then within living memory was Boudica's Rebellion of 61-62 CE, in which the Romans' public flogging of a Celtic noblewoman and the public rape of her two daughters triggered what would be the bloodiest uprising in all Roman history.

Boudica was perhaps the original exemplar of the aphorism “never underestimate a redhead.” We're told she was a queen of the Iceni, a Celtic tribe from today's Norfolk area. But I suspect she was more likely the Archdruid, the equivalent of a pope, for no leader of a single tribe could have so quickly raised an entire people as she did: her mandate of revolutionary solidarity not only ended ancient feuds but mustered warriors from all Celtic tribes everywhere.

Though these events indeed blunted Roman hubris (and were amongst the reasons the early Christians believed the end of the world was nigh), the imperium survived to murder and vex my Celto-Pictish ancestors for another 414 years. Tragically for us all, the USian Empire is likely to prove just as resilient.

 

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Boudica's Rebellion is in some ways eerily similar to events in Iraq and thus warrants further discussion:

By Boudica's time, the Archdruidship had become a secret office due to Roman persecution of the ancient Celtic religion. Though polytheistic, Celtic belief centered on a variously-named goddess: the “mother of all being” said to have given birth to the universe and all its inhabitants. The religion's age is suggested by the genetically kindred Picts, residents of the isles and highlands of the Scottish north, who seem to have claimed direct descent from the legendary Tuatha de Danann – the “people of the Goddess Danu” whose traditions date to 1800 BCE and are recorded in the Medieval Irish Book of Invasions. 

Throughout the Celtic world, the Druids were pan-tribal leaders who combined the functions of teacher, scholar, scientist, judge and priest. A Druid's education is said to have taken 33 years. Because the Celts reckoned descent through the mother and regarded females as equal to (and in some instances superior to) males, Druids were as likely to be women as men. The resultant admixture of matriarchal theology and tribal democracy gravely threatened the Romans, who in service to their proto-capitalist economy sought to impose patriarchal authority on all imperial domains.

The Celts and Picts, for whom the personal was always political, thus viewed Roman conquest as triple tyranny – spiritual, intellectual, cultural.

 

Thus too the public flogging of Boudica and the public rape of her two daughters, girls of about 12 or 14 years old whose names have seemingly been lost, became to the Celts the ultimate symbol of Roman malevolence.

Two facts bolster my hypothesis Boudica was the Archdruid, as powerful as any ayatollah: 

(1)-Cassius Dio says she wore a tunic of many colors – a sartorial right the Celts reserved only for the the Chief Bard and the Archdruid.

(2)-Boudica's ability to stop feuds and raise warriors from tribes that were formerly hostile to one another (and possibly even from Ireland and the European mainland) demonstrates authority far beyond that of a tribal chief.

In any case she cleverly launched her rebellion when nearly all the strength of the Roman garrison was on the opposite coast laying siege to the Druid sanctuary at Ynys Mon. She attacked the Roman cities of Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium, which her army burned to the ground, killing an estimated 70,000 persons and leaving a dense signature of now-archaeological ash.

Then in a battle that no doubt reinforces today's Bushkin/Obamanoid hubris, she lost, defeated by superior Roman communications and the disciplined technology of the legions. The battle was thus akin to combats between modern-day natives and invading Europeans. Its site remains curiously unknown, as does the fate of Boudica and her daughters, who yet live in the revolutionary legends of the Occident.

Later I added another comment:

The Muse was in this recounting of history and will not let me rest without this addendum. Today, by what is said to have been Boudica's last speech before her final battle – “Let the men live as slaves if they want. I, a woman, would rather die” – Boudica has become not just a revolutionary heroine but an exemplar of the People's War, a symbol of the fighting spirit that made the female partisans and soldiers of the Soviet Union amongst the most feared warriors of modern history. (Doubt me? Google Ludmilla Pavlechenko or Zina Portnova.) Perhaps paradoxically, Boudica is also the neo-pagan equivalent of a saint (if not an embodiment of their Goddess herself). Which suggests the native traditions she defended have never really died. Beyond the borders of Imperium Romanum, amongst the Caledonians on the far side of the Hadrian and Antonine walls and across the water amongst the Eiru, the old ways lived on, and now they reappear, often spontaneously (and therefore sometimes quite eerily), in today's art and music and in many cultures of resistance as well, as if in answer to the very plea Chris Hedges so often articulates for all of us. As is said of others like her, Boudica Lives!

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In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

No doubt the following comment added to my misbehavior quotient on several bad-boy lists maintained by the various USian secret police agencies – though undoubtedly I was on those lists already. (I know for a fact the spooks were tracking me in the '60s – in 1967 they killed my best job offer of this lifetime, from the news department of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – and I'm sure they prod the rubble of my life regularly even now. Or maybe especially now, particularly after my involvement in Occupy.) But as a once-very-dear-but-now-sadly lost friend named Alyce used to say (and I hope she still does), “joke 'em if they can't take a fuck.”

My venue was the president's own attempt to reposition himself as something other than an obedient servant of the One Percent, a propaganda piece entitled “Family-Friendly Workplace Policies Are Not Frills - They're Basic Needs,” here.  To which – yes with accompanying fear (I am no fool) – I typed my reply:

Any time President Barack Obama claims he's helping the Working Class (especially when he says something like “I'll work with anyone – Democrats or Republicans – to increase opportunity for American workers”), it's at least as big a Big Lie as “change we can believe in.”

Indeed his deceptiveness is proven by another story in this very edition of RSN: “A Secret Plan to Close Social Security's Offices and Outsource Its Work.” 

Here is an excerpt:

“Worse, the report also suggests that many of the SSA's critical functions could soon be outsourced to private-sector partners and contractors...The fact that neither the SSA, the Administration, nor the President himself are publicly fighting these brutal cuts is a betrayal of Social Security's promise. That betrayal is made even more acute by the fact that cuts to Social Security's administrative budgets do not help the deficit in any way, since the SSA is fully funded from Social Security's revenues.”

Once again, we see how Obama the Orator shape-shifts into Barack the Betrayer whenever his Wall Street masters snap their fingers – in this instance to sneakily facilitate the looting of our own pensions.

In terms of the bitterness and alienation so inflicted, he is undoubtedly the worst president in U.S. history – and idiot that I am, I voted for him twice.

My additional remarks were in response to other posters:

The one meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the former are brazen Ayn Rand fascists while the latter cover up their moral imbecility with sleight-of-hand maneuvers and the Big Lie of progressive slogans.

The truth is both parties are against the female autonomy represented by Plan B. Apropos which, see for example “It's not Plan B if you can't get it,” also “How the right took over the debate.”

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Contrary to your Obama-the-victim fantasy, the president began his betrayals immediately after he won election, secretly meeting with the health insurance barons, promising he would rig the system so that USian health care would remain forever a privilege of wealth: the primary purpose behind ACA.

(Obamacare's secondary purpose is to enable USian propaganda that says “yes we have national health insurance” even as its co-pays and deductibles are so prohibitively expensive only the rich can afford them. Thus the obscene windfall profit atop the insurors' already obscene profits – all of us now enslaved by the requirement to buy mandatory insurance that the co-pays and deductibles guarantee we can never afford to use.)

Again before taking office, Obama squelched the effort to enact Employee Free Choice.

And he was already plotting to expand the national secret police apparatus to complete the nullification of the Bill of Rights begun by the Bush League.

Meanwhile, guess what – until the 2010 elections, when betrayed progressives voted none-of-the-above by not voting at all -- Obama had a Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress.

So the fantasy he is a victim of Republican intransigence is just that – a fantasy. Or more aptly, a Big Lie to con those who believe in yet another Big Lie – that the U.S. is still a representative democracy.

LB/29 June 2014

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