Why I Was Gone So Long; Apology to Readers; U.S. Escalation in Ukraine; Protesters as 'Enemy Forces'

A NUMBER OF people have asked me why I withdrew so suddenly from the blogosphere last December and why I have been mostly absent since then, not only posting nothing significant in this space but making only minimal contributions to websites I formerly frequented daily.

As with so many things human, the answer is complicated. It has at least three parts.

The first of these, the fulcrum upon which fate leveraged everything that followed, was as I said at the time “a conjunction of obligations and disasters.” 

My obligations were to write, photograph, edit and produce the monthly newsletter that serves the community of elderly and disabled people in which I reside, and – at the same time –to help a friend with a suddenly essential project that had to be completed by 31 December.

The initial disaster was the death of my computer's printer, chiefly because I cannot edit my own writing effectively on a monitor. I'm not sure what the problem is that causes me to miss so many errors when I try to edit on-screen, but I am certain it has to do with only seeing a small part of the text at one time and also with being dyslexic.

Hence I if I am to write for OAN (or for any other medium in which it is imperative I not look like an illiterate idiot, a muddle-headed moron or a geezer doddering into dotage), I need the printer to provide me text I can edit in the traditional copy-desk manner, green visor, pica stick and all. I mark the corrections on the paper. Then – like an old-time Linotype operator (one of the many categories of highly skilled workers who were flung into permanent joblessness by that electronic scab known as the computer) – I type the changes into the virtual text.

As I do so I hope desperately I do not make other errors – for example the dyslexic but comically literal “fucendate” (from “fecundate”), or the arthritic-fingered blunder that turns “working press” into “wormking press.”

(I leave it to you readers to decide the Freudian appropriateness of “wormking press” as it applies to the so-called “mainstream media” of the United States. Suffice it to say that in historical truth it is our species' first wholly privatized Ruling Class propaganda machine, a microcosm of the larger socioeconomic triumphs achieved in the U.S. by Ayn Rand, Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels.

Remember too – especially in the context of the warning to never eat yellow snow – how this “main stream” functions to facilitate the trickle-down economics in which we are all...well, er, drowning.)

Returning to the circumstances of my departure, I had intended, as noted in December, to resume blogging after the first of the year.

By then, thanks to the continuing generosity of Adrienne, who was my second wife and is now amongst my dearest friends, I had a new printer – the highly rated Hewlett-Packard Envy 5530.

But the new printer crashed my old computer, forcing me to undertake a project I had long dreaded: replacing my old familiar machine with the new, substantially more powerful but totally alien Samsung NP355E5C Adrienne had given me the previous Christmas.

I had not started using the new computer – in fact I had not even unpacked it – because I knew from past experience the process of changing computers would probably keep me off-line for at least a month. And I wanted to re-start OAN before my absence cost me too many more readers.

Fate, however, had other plans. The old computer could not be resurrected without the expenditure of far more money than I had. Nurds here in Bill Gates land charge as much as $265 per hour, and what the old computer needed – a near-doubling of its random access memory plus upgrading from an Ubuntu 10.10 operating system to the present Ubuntu 12-whatever – would take many many many more hours than one.

That was the bad news. The worse news was the crash had obliterated my e-mail address book, which I have since been able to only partially reconstruct.

The most devastating news of all was that Samsung and Microshaft had cut a maliciously monopolistic deal that made it impossible to reconfigure the new laptop to run Ubuntu, which I had come to love for its clarity, simplicity, intuitive protocols and a friendly discussion board to help compu-ignoramuses like myself navigate its Nurdly esoterica.

Thus I had to learn Microshaft Windows 8.1, which after running anything Ubuntu was like being told the only allowable route to Portland, Oregon was via New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago and Hungry Horse, Montana rather than by the direct route 143 miles (230 kilometers) south from Tacoma on Interstate 5.

Finally, near the end of March and with the help of two computer-savvy friends and an auxiliary keyboard, I was able to run the Microshafted Samsung without having to call for help every 15 minutes.

But on my 75th birthday – literally just as I was writing the preceding paragraph – yet another crisis arose.

For the past six months, the faceless, mostly nameless executives who lord it over the apartment complex in which I'm a tenant have been harassing us with threats of a one-or-two-day temporary eviction, ostensibly so the entire building can be renovated in the shortest time possible.

The temporary evictions, we are told, are non-negotiable.

But the executives refuse to tell us when these evictions will occur – only that we will have 48 hours notice to prepare, which of course means we should box up our belongings now and then live as denizens of storage lockers until management deigns to act.

Needless to say, the dislocations we are suffering as a result are in some respects worse than the life-disruptions of a full-fledged move to a new address. At least with an address-change, there's a known schedule, presumably with reasonable time for planning, packing and unpacking.

What in landlord-speak is dismissed as a minor inconvenience is for us a debacle. Add in that we're all either old and/or disabled, many of us both, some genuinely fragile, and the stress and anxiety inflicted by the temporary-eviction threats ramps up into the stroke-and-heart-attack zone.

Moreover the fact the need for such haste has never been explained combines with the fact the neighborhood is a known gentrification target to evoke strong suspicions we are being not-so-subtly encouraged to move elsewhere.

Then on my birthday – happy birthday from Jesus – we were hit with the written threat of a $75-per-month rent increase and its unexpressed but implicit and abjectly terrifying threat of instant homelessness.

Hence, acting both as the volunteer founder and editor of the apartment-complex newsletter and in my own defense, I consulted with a local lawyer. On his advice, I wrote, assembled and filed a 51-page formal complaint complete with 11 pages of narrative and 40 pages of documentation.

Though there is no effective tenant-protection apparatus in Washington state – tenants here have probably fewer rights under state and local law than anywhere else in the U.S. – the fact this particular apartment complex was at least partly financed with federal funds means we may have some rights under federal law.

Or so the lawyer said. Hence the complaint – which took me 16 gruelingly long 14-hour days to prepare – was mailed to U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer (Democrat/Washington state) on 13 April.

Truly I have not worked so hard since I was a full-time investigative reporter. Worse, it was the first time I had written about anything so damnably complex since I quit tobacco, 20 years ago this coming 23 September. I was not even one day into the project when I began to fear I could not finish the work without starting smoking again. Indeed I became so fearful of yielding to nicotine seduction I enrolled in a quit-smoking program offered by Group Health Cooperative, which is my Medicare (health care) provider and in which I am a voting member.

My problem, as regular readers of OAN know, is that I am dyslexic.  In days of yore, when I was a member of the working press, my two-and-one-half-pack-per-day cigarette addiction was a key part of my compensatory mechanism.

The nicotine one imbibes by smoking is a potent neurotransmitter, and one of its deadly benefits – the oxymoron is deliberate – is that it temporarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction. It thereby evokes an instantaneous clarity of expression that now without nicotine often takes me hours – and sometimes literally days – to achieve.

In the instance of the complaint to Congressman Kilmer, it took me a total of 224 hours – the equivalent of 6.4 35-hour workweeks compressed into 16 days – to write a seven-sentence summary and a 5,000-word, 10-part report and then to assemble the supportive documents. In the old days, as a smoker, I'd have done the writing in maybe three days max and – working no more than my usual seven-hour days – had the entire project finished within a week.

But at last the complaint is now done and mailed.

Will our Democratic Congressman defend us? Or will he act upon his de facto Republican, military-industrial-complex ideology and throw us under the proverbial bus?

Surely we shall soon know the answer.

The question is legitimate. Not only are we lower-income people. Because we are elderly and/or disabled, we are truly surplus – no longer supportable for profit.

And now finally – for the first time since last December – I actually have the time and energy and inclination to again start doing this blog right.

***

IT OCCURRED TO me last night because of an “I-hope-you-keep-writing” note sent by a reader with the seemingly Eastern European name of Marija (as in the late Marija Gimbutas), that perhaps the explanation for OAN's readership in Ukraine and Russia was its regular linkage to the accurate Consortium News reports of events therein.

Consortium News and Reader Supported News,  a separate website that often republishes the Consortium reports, are the only indigenous U.S. sources that dare reveal how the USian Empire has imposed and is now defending its newest Nazi puppet state.

These websites also report how ethnic Russians are resisting the U.S./Nazi onslaught with the same breathtaking courage as defined the Soviet partizanska during World War II, which for the peoples of the U.S.S.R. was indeed what it is called in Russia even now: “the Great Patriotic War against Fascism.”

Could it be that due to electronic censorship by the U.S./Nazi regime in Kiev, OAN was one of the few reliably available sources of those Consortium and RSN reports? 

Obviously I don't know. But the suspicion alone is enough to fill me with guilt for my nearly four-month absence.

Hence my profuse apology if my personal problems made it more difficult for 

Ukrainians and Russians to get those reports. Providing the relevant links is a purpose – indeed an obligation – I will damn well take seriously in the future.

***

YET ANOTHER REASON I withdrew – maybe the most important reason of all – I confess in a letter to a colleague here in Tacoma:

During our recent telephone conversation my explanation of why I so suddenly dropped out of sight was less than articulate. Like most men I find it extremely difficult to talk about my own emotions, but unlike many men I do possess some small skill at writing about such things. Hence this hopefully more informative (and therefore more honest) explanation:

As you no doubt know from your work, as we approach our personal graveyards we often become brutally honest with ourselves. Though I have been in that general mode for several years, my brush with death via kidney infection and incipient septicemia last fall radically intensified the attendant process of self-evaluation.

When I was maybe 12 or 13, and without really giving it much thought,  I adopted a Boy Scout rule  – "always leave the campsite in better condition than you found it" – as the  motivating principle of my life. For many years my choice was scarcely conscious, and I am only now realizing the extent to which it nevertheless ruled my most important decisions: how, for example, it prompted me to choose journalism and journalistic activism as my primary career. 

But sitting one day last fall in Group Health hooked up to intravenous Cipro I had the darkest, most wrenching epiphany of my life: I realized that every cause to which I had committed time, energy and passion – including causes for which I sometimes willingly risked my life – has either failed or was later defeated.  

Organized Labor is dead beyond any hope of resurrection. Today's U.S. is every bit as racist as it was in the Jim Crow era. Women's reproductive rights are being reduced to pre-Roe-v-Wade levels (and in most states have already been abolished entirely). Vietnam taught us nothing. The alternative press is no more (its electronic ghost is but a flash-in-the-pan), and the mainstream press has been corrupted into the most diabolically effective Josef Goebbels propaganda apparatus our species has ever known. Meanwhile the Environmental Movement  is so impotent in the face of Christo-capitalist ecocide, it can do nothing to protect us from becoming a doomed species on a dying planet.

 

The mental list continued,  etc. ad nauseam for the entire two hours I was in the clinic that day and continues to haunt me – with the additional weight of shame for yielding to despair – to this very minute.  

In other words, though I participated in probably 60 years of efforts to leave the campsite of this nation and this planet in better shape than it was, every one of those efforts failed abysmally.

Why then, I asked myself, should I squander the final years of my life fighting for causes that either have no possibility of ever winning or that – even if they might seem to achieve small victories – are certain to be undone by the now-unavoidable extinction of our species? (The newest projections of terminal climate change say we will have rendered our planet uninhabitable by mammalian life – and ourselves extinct – within a hundred years.)

Obviously I am still debating this most vexing of all personal questions, which is why I remain unable to commit to anything much beyond the demands of living day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute. Factor in the growing probability of a thermonuclear apocalypse resulting from U.S. provocations of Russia in the Ukraine and I often feel as if I am living, albeit in slow motion, the script of Nevil Shute's On the Beach.  I therefore hope – because your friendship means a lot to me – you will forgive my angst-ridden retreat.

 

(It is so foolishly easy, even thrust ever deeper as we are into the de facto concentration camp Ayn Rand economics and total surveillance is making of the USian homeland, to forget that others have it infinitely worse, that for beleaguered people elsewhere, as in the eastern Ukraine, yielding to despair is possible only if one is willing to submit to immediate extermination. I understand this, not the least because of the violently dangerous wretchedness of my childhood. Hence my oft repeated statement that in times such as these, survival is itself an act of revolutionary defiance. Hence too my hope I have sufficient strength I do not falter again.)

***

  
BUT THE WEIGHT of despair is nevertheless undeniable. We are facing a magnitude of oppression that is unique in our species' experience. And if we are to survive it – which grows less likely every day – it will require evolution of an entirely new set of strategies and tactics.

This was the main point of my response to “Three Reasons Why the United States Is Broken, Bloated and Bleeding,” a Truthout piece in which Pierce Nahigyan posits the astonishingly arrogant, absurdly pompous argument all we need do to cure the nation's ills is “have a serious conversation about the big idea: What we want the United States to be”  – as if that alone would save our species from itself.

Needless to say, my retort was blistering. 

Here is an excerpt, edited and condensed from four separate posts:

Alas, it is far too late to have “a serious conversation about the Big Idea."

Indeed it has been too late since the Eleven Years of Political Murders (22 November 1963 to 13 November 1974), and the slayings of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Sen. Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, Phillip Gibbs, James Green and Karen Silkwood.

Everything that has happened since then, the Patriot Act and the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act included, has been nothing more than what the military calls a "mopping-up operation," the consolidation of victory, albeit performed in slow motion lest Moron Nation awaken to what obtains.

Though the Occupy Movement was in fact an awakening, it was predictably crushed. (For those of literary inclinations, our situation is identical to that described in the Harry Turtledove short story called "The Last Article," for which Google.

As a result there are now only two sorts of people in the United States.

There are those like Mr. Nahigyan, who believe we are still allowed significantly effective remnants of our former freedom and political power, but who thus by their breathtaking ignorance prove themselves to be utter fools if not victims of clinical delusion.

Then there are those like Chris Hedges or myself who know enough history to understand the USian Empire's technological supremacy means its de facto Fourth Reich is forever – that is, until capitalist savagery and/or the resultant nuclear war and/or environmental ruin reduces our species to extinction.

Nor will the oft-promised “technological solutions” ever save us. Murphy's Law is absolute reality. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And scientists with their breathtakingly selfish arrogance are Murphy's most devastating facilitators, witness Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island etc.

Though it is considered heresy to say so, Rev. King's statement that the arc of the universe moves toward justice is meanwhile proven to be the biggest Big Lie of all time. In fact the reverse is true. The few interludes of "justice" in human history are but fleeting sparks in an infinity of darkness -- and the frequency and duration of those sparks are in inverse proportion to technological development.

The more advanced the technology, the less it tolerates individual liberty.

Technology's ultimate function is thus proven by its consequences: it is to grant our overlords ever-more-godlike powers and simultaneously reduce ourselves to ever-more-abject powerlessness.

Besides which there is the fact the notion of revolution is rendered meaningless when it arises amongst a dying species on a dying planet.

Most of us also fail to understand how revolutions succeed. The Germanic risings against Rome succeeded because they were part of a continent-wide onslaught that denied Rome any possibility of assistance from without. Likewise Islam, again part of a continent-wide onslaught that denied large parts of post-Roman Europe and finally Byzantium -- Constantinople -- any possibility of outside reinforcement. But in the modern world -- as the Marxians themselves concluded -- such widespread risings are impossible. Hence all revolutions have four requirements. These are: (1)-ideological solidarity; (2)-leadership and organizational discipline; (3)-access to, and know-how to use, extant military technology; (4)-the intervention (or at least the clandestine assistance) of a major power. In today's world, no revolution can succeed without all four of these prerequisites in place.

The movements that in the 20th Century dismantled the British Empire would not have succeeded without Soviet and/or Chinese assistance. Gandhi's pacifism was backed by the Red Army and its threat of violent revolution. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1858 would never have occurred without the agitation of Tsarist intelligence operatives. The American Revolution of 1776 could not have succeeded without French assistance and intervention. Nor would the Russian Revolution of 1917 have succeeded without the clandestine help of Imperial Germany.

But evolution of the requisite pre-revolutionary conditions is impossible today and will remain so for as long as present-day surveillance technology and weaponry exist. Thanks to that technology, the USian Empire's total control of the world's economy is also total control of the world's peoples.

Domestically, the truly savage anti-intellectuality in which we have all been conditioned since World War II means that no ideological solidarity is possible beyond that organized by the Ruling Class: note the emergence of the Tea Party and then of Occupy (of which I was part). Contrast the two, and note why one has gone on to become an incipient Nazi Party, while the other is dead beyond resurrection, torn apart as much by forces within as it was crushed from without.

Conditions abroad are even more hopeless: the instant the global surveillance apparatus detects effective resistance, the Central Intelligence Agency sends in its death squads (for the newest example of which see the Ukraine reports below). Or take Venezuela: without the Soviet Union to back it up, its progressive government is no more sustainable than the proverbial snowball in hell. And there, of course, you have it: with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the co-optation of China, any realistic hope for humanitarian revolution or even humanitarian reform anywhere on this planet died forever.

Those who doubt this should remember the New Deal happened only after the U.S. Ruling Class was terrified into concessions by the prospect of a U.S. Communist revolution backed by the Red Army.

Any Ruling Class responds only to force, and this is more true of the Capitalist Ruling Class than of any of its historical counterparts – for what is capitalism but infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue?

Thus without the sort of leverage the USSR provided – even if there were not the nullifying issue of a dying species on a dying planet – humanitarian change is impossible. Thus too the unspeakable reality of the present: the darkest, most hopeless epoch in all human experience.

But our individual and collective powerlessness does not prohibit (and may in fact encourage), small-scale community efforts to improve the immediate circumstances of our lives. For example, an environmentalist friend and comrade in Maine has reduced her mass-movement involvements and refocused her efforts into teaching organic gardening methods to individuals and grassroots organizations.. As she puts it, We the People are so totally disempowered, all we activists can do now is work to help our neighbors transcend the present and looming adversities and thus live better lives.

The essence of such efforts is embodied the Zen/Taoist phrase "nothing special." Anything beyond that is grandiose if not delusional. But ironically it is from reconfiguring the ordinary – the "nothing special" – that true community is born, thereby transcending (and at least potentially nullifying) the divisions hitherto inflicted by ideological, ethnic, racial or sexual differences. Thus – when you think about it -- there is no greater, more effective antidote to capitalism than true community.

(My apology to the family of Allison Krause for misspelling her name in the on-line version of this commentary, which is corrected above.)

***

EMPHATICALLY RECOMMENDED READING: “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust”: on the 70th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the U.S. puppet neo-Nazi government in Kiev honored the Ukrainian fascists  who helped the German invaders exterminate the region's Jews.

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports, the text also documents the (predictable) emergence in Ukraine of neo-Nazi death squads. They are (unsurprisingly) similar to the death squads the Central Intelligence Agency trained and operated elsewhere  throughout capitalism's New World Order, the de facto Fourth Reich.

Also emphatically recommended is the Al Jazeera America/ Agence France-Presse report the U.S. has already sent at least 300 paratroopers  into Ukraine to help Kiev bolster its death-squad governance.

As I noted in the comment thread, “This invasion of Ukraine is from the Russian perspective as great a threat as Soviet missiles in Cuba were to the U.S. in 1962. Indeed it is arguable the U.S. has just made World War III inevitable.”

In that same comment thread – somewhat revised for publication here – is my speculation on why the U.S. Ruling Class so fanatically despises the Russians, it would rather blow up the world than coexist with them – never mind the Russians our are natural allies in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

I have long assumed this anti-Russian hostility is a response to the fact the Russian people, in the person of the Red Army, beat back the capitalist powers' attempt to reconquer Russia  immediately after the revolutions of 1917. Even now, 24 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party remains the second largest party in the Russian Federation. This means the Communists could again become Russia's ruling majority, the mere thought of which is sufficient to terrify our plutocratic overlords into the suicidal madness of thermonuclear war-mongering.

Another toxic spasm of the U.S. Ruling Class hatred for Russia is no doubt evoked by the fact that – more than any other country (and at a cost of about 45 million people killed) – it was Russia in the form of the Soviet Union that saved the world from German Nazism. As proven by the Bankers Plot of 1934,  the Ruling Class wanted the Nazis to win.  But for the plot's failure, the U.S. would have been the fourth and ultimately dominant Axis power.

But now – given the neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi taints metastasizing through the nation (most noticeably in how the federally militarized police are murdering African-Americans, but also in radically intensified misogyny, the growing popularity of genocide euphemized as “austerity” and of course in the 2010 and 2014 election results ) – maybe the real reason the Ruling Class hates Russia dates back to the U.S. Civil War.

Had it not been for Imperial Russia's support of the Union  – note the Russian fleets in New York  and San Francisco c. 1863 – Britain and France would have recognized the Confederacy, entered the war on its side and probably facilitated a Confederate victory. But not even the two empires together dared confront a fully mobilized Russia.

The resultant U.S.-Russian alliance was subsequently immortalized by Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Bleak are our shores with the blasts of December, Fettered and chill is the rivulet’s flow; Thrilling and warm are the hearts that remember Who was our friend when the world was our foe. Fires of the North in eternal communion, Blend your broad flashes with evening’s bright star; God bless the Empire that loves the Great Union Strength to her people! Long life to the Czar! [15]

As I know from firsthand experience, the Ruling Class aristocrats have long and vindictive memories. Could it be they're still enraged at the Russians for helping Lincoln end slavery?

*

GLENN GREENWALD'S EXPOSÉ on the deceptive propaganda peddled by NBC  via the Richard Engel kidnapping tells a story that is, just as its headline says, “More Troubling Than Brian Williams Scandal.” 

But it also gave me an opportunity to write a concise summary of how the USian Ruling Class has actually outdone Josef Goebbels. It has followed Goebbels' rules for propagandizing a people so effectively, they reflexively reject any unofficial narratives. It has done so by designing and imposing the world's first fully privatized governmental propaganda machine.

What follows is a slightly revised variant of the comment-thread original: 

The ugly truth behind NBC's behavior in the Engel case is found in the fact so-called "mainstream media" is owned by the same cabal of plutocrats who own and control government at every U.S. level.

This means "mainstream media" is nothing more than a fully privatized, obscenely profitable government propaganda apparatus: same owners, same bosses, same goals of world conquest as those who own and control the government. In other words, just as government has been reduced to the executive-action agency of the Ruling Class, so has mass media been reduced to its mouthpiece.

This is not only fascism as defined by Benito Mussolini; it is in fact the ultimate, most perfected form of fascism, in which governance itself is a profit center – not just in "mainstream media" as state propagandists, but as in the prison-industrial complex, for-profit schools, etc. ad nauseam.

Meanwhile the "mainstream media's" deceptions about Iran are identical in magnitude and purpose to the German deceptions about Poland, authored by Josef Goebbels, that started World War II.

What we have here in the U.S. is not just fascism, but when you add in the master-race implications of U.S. "exceptionalism ," is in fact a new form of Nazism.

And let us not forget that fascism and Nazism are direct derivatives of capitalism. In fact they are capitalism's final, mature forms -- the only destinations allowed by capitalism's core value, the Ayn Rand precept of infinite greed as ultimate virtue.

Whether the goal is lebensraum and slaves or maximum profit by other means of exploitation, capitalism's corpse-littered pathway is identical and identically evil.

*

FINALLY THERE IS this: National Guard troops called out to suppress anti-racism protests in Ferguson, Missouri considered the protesters “enemy forces,”  never mind the demonstrations were – as one discussion-thread contributor aptly put it, “American Citizens exercising their First Amendment right to 'petition the Government for redress of grievances.'”

To which I replied: “Ferguson or Ukraine, it's the same war: on one side, the capitalist New Order, the de facto Fourth Reich. On the other side, all the rest of us, We the People of the World.“

LB/12-19 April 2015 

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Blocked by Computer Problems, Terrified by Ukraine Crisis

MY APOLOGY TO EVERYONE for my prolonged silence. December was a cruel month, and January, damnit, has been no better. My desktop computer died just as I finally found my way out of the miasma of self-inflicted obligations I described on 7 December, my last entry here until now.

The computer's death was no surprise. A gift-horse into whose mouth I should have looked very carefully, it was a notably troublesome machine from day one, and it had been seriously ill for the past two years.

All that kept me from going mad with the resultant anxiety was the virtual life-preserver given me by Adrienne, my (still) dearly beloved second wife (to whom again thanks), who bought me a Samsung laptop Christmas before last.

While the presence of the laptop was as soothing as a bedtime backrub, my fear and loathing of alien technology -- that is, of anything that cannot be repaired or maintained with hand-tools,  a can of WD-40 and a roll of duct tape -- kept the little machine in its original packaging until the dying desktop's final electronic spasm. 

And then of course I discovered that learning all this new stuff -- Microshaft's Windows 8 versus the Ubuntu  (Linux) to which I had grown fondly accustomed -- was a hard-school detour through ignorance and vexation, a rite of passage in which I am now at the equivalent of kindergarten passing into first grade. 

If I live -- and I believe the prognosis is good -- I should be back and posting regularly to Outside Agitator's Notebook by next weekend. 

Meanwhile, apropos the Ukraine crisis,  here is a link to a vital report by Robert Parry on the relentlessly escalating U.S. imperialist aggression that could literally trigger the end of the world as we know it -- and quite possibly the end of our species as well.

Addendum 11:20 p.m.:

I seem to have been banished by Robert Parry from his ConsortiumNews website,  forever prohibited from ever again commenting thereon.  This is a surprise as I have only posted there a few times, often with applause from other posters, and have never been involved in any on-site disputes or other such unpleasantness. 

Here then is what I would have said in response to Parry's report had I not been electronically gagged:

Just as (another poster) observed, the culture-war issues implicit in Putin's curiously self-defeating persecution of Pussy Riot and Russian homosexuals have been parlayed by the U.S. government's privatized propaganda apparatus into a clever ploy to silence even the most steadfast opponents of U.S. imperialist aggression. Add that to the methodically conditioned U.S. ignorance of history plus the ever-more-inflamed manifest-destiny fanaticism evident in the sweeping Republican victory in last November's elections, and the probability of an apocalyptic outcome is overwhelming. Josef Goebbels would be proud.

That said, two points come to mind immediately:

Those who rule the U.S. today are most likely the descendants of the Bankers Plot conspirators of 1934, who sought to oust President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, impose fascist dictatorship and so join Washington D.C. to the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in its quest for a global empire. Berlin's primary ambition in those days was the conquest of Russia and the enslavement of its people. Given present-day events in Ukraine, I cannot but wonder if this same ambition was passed on to the present generation of U.S. Rulers by the Bankers Plot conspirators and their Nazi collaborators.

If this is indeed the case -- if the U.S. aggression in Ukraine is fostered by those influences and the boost they surely received via the influx of Nazi war criminals after 1945 -- then all that can save us from Armageddon is a sudden Ruling Class awakening to the indisputable fact the womb of Mother Russia is also the tomb of empires. That is the lesson learned by Darius the Great, the Mongols, Bonaparte, Hitler and a long litany of lesser would-be conquerors including the Teutonic Knights and the Victorian-era British, the latter of whom discovered in the Sepoy Mutiny the then-inconceivably long reach of Russian intelligence capabilities.

It should be noted too that Hitler's Germans believed themselves to be this planet's “master race,” an earlier expression of the divine-right-to-rule doctrine that is now resurrected as U.S. “exceptionalism.”

Let us therefore fervently hope We the People are not to be the next students of what invariably happens when the Bear Mother is goaded in her own den – especially since this goading, with its potential employment of thermonuclear weapons, could destroy our species and most other life forms as well.

It's a helluva grim way to begin OAN's new year, but for those of us in the 99 Percent, that's the nature of life (and death) under capitalism. As depressing as Parry's report is -- and as pissed off as I am at being banished from his website --  I nevertheless urge you all to read his text and disseminate it as widely as you possibly can. 

LB/24 January 2015

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No Blog This Week Due to Conflicting Obligations

A conjunction of obligations and disasters -- the deadline schedule of the monthly newsletter I write, edit and publish for the housing complex in which I live; the death of my computer's printer, which radically complicates and thereby at least quadruples production time of the newsletter; plus a friend's need for emergency assistance with a project that must be completed by the end of this month -- has denied me the opportunity to blog this week. In addition to the friend's emergency, which is imposed by the sudden illness of a colleague upon which his project was dependent, there's also the preparation required for the quarterly inspection of my premises next week. In other words, I am hopelessly jammed up, and the resultant demands on my time and energy will shut down OAN for at least two weeks and probably for the remainder of the month. My apologies to all, and my best wishes to all for a joyful holiday season.  

LB/7 December 2014

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Exclusive: A Black Woman's Perspective on Ferguson

(Editor's note: The following – one of the most thought-provoking commentaries on Ferguson I have yet read – is excerpted by permission from an exchange of e-mails between myself and a fellow writer I met in 2010 during a National Writers Union non-fiction workshop. Besides being a dear friend and a respected colleague, she is what might be termed “a true American”: her ancestry includes African, First Nations and Caucasian peoples and exemplifies the genetic melting-pot the American continents have been for at least the past 25,000 years. She was born in a small southern town, and though she appears white, her birth certificate defines her as “Negro” – a reality that gives her a unique perspective on life in the United States. So does her personal history: she spent a summer driving across the southeast, worked and camped in every section of the nation, and lived in apartments and houses in the suburbs and the hearts of four U.S. metropolitan areas as well as on a farm. For professional reasons, she prefers to remain anonymous. [LB/30 November 2014])

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THE ONE THING I haven't seen or heard in all the Ferguson coverage is a comparison of the present-day policing of U.S. minorities with the strategy and tactics used against the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – specifically from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 through the Haymarket Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.

Militarization of law enforcement (then via the National Guard and the Pinkerton Agency), the ever-present possibility of provocateurs and the law-enforcement organizations' protection of the rights of the establishment over those of the individual – all are similar to what is happening to folks of color now, whether in Ferguson or on our southern border.

Then as now, the conflicts are about labor – though the pivotal elements tend to be obscured by the fact labor rights no longer threaten our economic establishment. With the advent of containerization, just-in-time production and stocking, and very speedy transport, the unionized jobs have gone – either overseas or to the "right-to-work" states – the outsourcing helped by various tax breaks.

But something had to be done with the remaining workers. Oh, we can start a new industry! Besides the military-industrial (and Congressional) complex, we now have the prison-industrial-Congressional complex. Like the 19th Century practice of giving away land and tax benefits to railroads, we now have 21st Century giveaways to private, for-profit prisons, and we can even guarantee them a certain number of prisoners – or detainees in the case of Immigration Detention Centers.

The reason we haven't heard such comparisons being made is there is no longer a Labor Radio or a newspaper sponsored by labor. There aren't even any labor programs on air or columns in the press any more. And without constant publicity, labor unions, corrupt or clean, begin to fade.

During the civil rights era, reporters and editors, even for the top newspapers and networks, earned middle class incomes. Newspaper workers lived in the neighborhoods where the average Joe lived. Now they earn enough money not to have to live with the hoi polloi. This only increases their lack of understanding of the real story.

At the heart of the Ferguson conflict is economics and education. Typically due to the tax breaks granted corporations (see above), there isn't enough money to fully fund good schools with good teachers for all students. In addition, few state governments are empowered to do more than minimally contribute to public school (K-12) funding. In most states, the critical budget decisions are made by local school districts. That's because most of the money spent in a given district is generated – mostly from real estate taxes – within that district. Thus the impoverished districts stay poor and the rich ones get richer.  And yes, I agree that teachers' unions have fostered some of the malaise in our schools, but that really didn't start until desegregation – until white teachers felt they had to fend off what they regarded as encroachment by "new" (often African-American) teachers.

Once upon a time, our land-grant colleges were supposed to be for workers' families. Now they, and community colleges (which used to be free to students in their service area), are beyond the reach of today's lower income families: a year at Washington State University costs about $28,176 a year for tuition, books, fees, room and board, transportation, and miscellaneous expenses. Tacoma Community College charges $109.59 per credit hour, plus fees, books, etc.

But even if a college education were free, the good jobs have been leaving the nation at least since the Reagan years. I watched a factory that was making tools for the auto industry get shipped piecemeal to Korea in 1982-1984. It went from 50-plus people per shift, three shifts a day, seven days a week, shutting down only on Christmas, to zero people in two years. None of those middle-aged men were retained by the company. Likewise, Boeing is slowly moving its work from the Seattle area to non-union states from Kansas to South Carolina.

And even if we reform the education system, where are the jobs? As in Egypt, Tunisia, Italy, and Spain – where are the jobs that would give these kids a purpose?

To speak to the particulars of Darren Wilson versus Michael Brown, a one-inch differential in height should not have cowed Officer Wilson so much he immediately pulled his gun. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't kick his door open as Mike Brown got close enough. Anyone behind the steering wheel of a car is at a definite disadvantage when it comes to getting a nightstick or pepper spray as opposed to a firearm that's on his hip. For both men, the final 90 seconds probably ran on pure adrenalin. But the outcome was determined the moment Brown reached inside Wilson's car.

Yes, I do believe Wilson was terrified. Lots of people are afraid of large people, and large people depend on that fear to get their own way. Wilson probably had used his height to keep from having to pull his gun before. This time, his opponent was bigger than he was – certainly heavier though not much taller. And Wilson's testimony reflects that.

Should he have been terrified? I don't think so. I think his training and fitness level should have overcome that. Wilson might be in excellent shape for a Ferguson cop, but he spends his days in a squad car, not being a physically active teenager. He needs to up his fitness profile and his awareness quotient. People caught off-guard as he was are generally used to terrorizing other people by their mere presence.

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Memoir: How We the People Gave Birth to Moron Nation

MANY PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY the younger folks I've come to know through recent political activism, tell me I'm being grossly unfair when I denounce the United States as Moron Nation.

But most of these critics weren't alive in 1957 and 1958, when We the People responded to the breathtaking Soviet triumph of Sputnik I.

Misleadingly, a new, post-Sputnik order seemed manifest in U.S. government policy. We would now focus on becoming genuinely educated. The result, the Ruling Class assured us, would be an era of capitalist technological brilliance in which the U.S. would perpetuate its world domination.

The government thus enacted the National Defense Education Act with loans and grants to encourage studies in mathematics, science and engineering. The high-school guidance-counselors – this was in those halcyon days before students were routinely drugged into submission – began dutifully pushing their charges in the requisite academic and military directions.

But at the grass-roots levels, the citizens were consciously choosing to become the nyekulturiny subjects of a realm now deservedly notorious for its savage anti-intellectuality and pridefully brandished ignorance.

Nor – despite the decades of disinformation that have (deliberately?) obscured what obtained – was this mandate for ignorance imposed from above.

It was instead truly the people's choice, a spontaneous choice made at the grassroots level by millions of citizens and expressed by thousands of local school boards.

That's why it is not a choice you will ever read about in the history books. But I was there, a part of the process by which the choice was made, which is why now when challenged I can report what truly happened.

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From the perspective of U.S. high-school students, the Soviet Union's orbiting of Sputnik I on 4 October 1957 provided two unique opportunities.

One was for planned disruptions in study halls, a “beep, beep, beep” sound that mimicked the satellite's radio transmissions. In study-hall mode, it started with a single “beep” by one person at one side of the room, continued through its width via a human chain of beepers and ended at the other side, as if the little orbiter were passing overhead. Sometimes – depending on the size and configuration of the particular study hall (most were in auditoriums) – the disruptive sounds of bogus passage were uttered down the room's long access or even on a diagonal, typically the hypotenuse of the space as divided into two right triangles. But usually it was via linear progression across the study hall's width. And however it was perpetrated, it was invariably accompanied by exclamations of outrage from the teachers who were serving as proctors and giggles from the students – especially from the girls impressed by outlaw-minded boys' abilities to mouth the satellite sound without being caught and punished.

The other, more enduring opportunity Sputnik provided was participation in a serious national debate about pedagogy – specifically the U.S. versus the Soviet Union in their approaches to education.

As defined by school officials, the U. S. approach was to use school as a socialization facility to produce “well-adjusted” (that is, obediently conformist) graduates who would function profitably in capitalist society.

The contrasting Soviet approach – which is really the European approach (though few dared defy the omnipresent anti-Communist censors to say so) – was to immerse all students in grade-appropriate summations of the intellectual legacy of human experience and allow each student to pursue those inputs to the appropriate level of intensity and competence.

Again as claimed by school officials, the U.S. approach was “democratic” in that it (allegedly) treated everyone as equals through 12th grade. Regardless of one's interests or abilities, everyone was exposed to the same (deliberately mediocre) curricula. Thus in the public schools of Tennessee and Michigan, which I attended from fall 1954 through Spring 1958, the future carpenter, iron-worker or precision machinist had to pass the same two years of mathematics, three years of history and four years of English literature as the college-bound future scientist, professor, lawyer or journalist.

The end result was a one-size-fits-all diploma that, even when I was a teenager, seemed profoundly unfair. Why should a future machinist be required to labor away at studies of literature (save from genuine interest and therefore as an elective)? And why should a future academic be alienated to despair by mandatory study of literature so expurgated, diluted and Reader's Digest-ed to chaste respectability, the “Classic Comics” versions were certainly more entertaining and probably more informative as well?

One-size-fits-all high-school diploma requirements similar to those in Tennessee and Michigan – albeit with minor variations in electives and access to preliminary military training programs via the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) – were standard throughout the United States.

The so-called “Soviet” system, however – never mind it was producing 10th graders whose knowledge and understanding of the world was equal to that of many U.S. college graduates – was damned by my local public-school officials as “dictatorial” and “elitist.” Your life in such a regimen, or so the officials argued, was not your own; it was irremediably shaped and controlled by someone else. Your fate was not determined by your own free will but by a series of aptitude tests that defined the courses you studied and thus in turn determined whether you went to college or vocational school.

Yet selecting one's proper studies by aptitude testing – or so it seemed to my 17-year-old self (exactly as it does to my 74-year-old self today) – was infinitely more fair (and therefore infinitely more productive) than oppressing all students with low-grade materials that would be frustratingly irrelevant to some and infuriatingly alienating to others.

But the purpose of U.S. public education – forcible production of “well-adjusted” (i.e., submissive and malleable) citizens for the corporate state – was surely fulfilled by the adjustments its mediocrity necessitated. The future machinist went away disgruntled, feeling vaguely inferior and thereby already conditioned for exploitation by future bosses. The “normal” student did the required (mediocre) work without question and was typically rewarded with high grades, the dynamic of mediocrity so acquired thence to be duplicated throughout life, particularly in relationships with imperious bosses whether matrimonial or industrial. Meanwhile the brightest of us – kids like myself – became beatniks by default. We turned away in utter boredom, found solace in defiant sex and illegal booze and secret rowdiness and reluctantly set aside 15 cents from our cherished cigarette money for the relevant Classic Comic whenever we needed to pass a high-school English test.

A passage in a book entitled The Struggle for Control of Public Education and subtitled Market Ideology vs. Democratic Values (Michael Engel, Temple University Press: 2000) states the grass-roots pedagogic conflict very well on page 23: “While American school children were learning how to get along with their peers or bake a cherry pie, so the explanation went, Soviet children were being steeped in the hard sciences and mathematics needed to win the technological race that had become the centerpiece of the Cold War.” The quote, which Engel properly attributes, is from another work on education that's well worth reading, Herbert M. Kliebard's The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (Psychology Press: 2004).

Unfortunately neither of these books was ever allowed into the USian cultural mainstream. Each is (deliberately) censored by price – as high as $74 per volume. 

My teen-age involvement in this pedagogy fight was as a member of the first graduating class (1958) at Knox County, Tennessee's Holston High School. It began when Assistant Principal Edith J. Fewell asked me to participate in a Parent-Teacher Association-sponsored study, its title something like, “Which Is Better: U.S. Or Soviet Education.”

I was invited to join the discussion because, much to my own astonishment, I had become something of a Holston notable. A paid stringer for The Knoxville Journal and a photographer, mostly unpaid, for the school yearbook, my quest for news had quickly earned me the nickname “Scoop.” But the biggest exclamation-point of recognition came from my role as founder, managing editor and photographer of the new school's student newspaper.

Though I founded and organized the publication single-handedly, I had (significantly) understood the southern caste system well enough to recognize that I – the “Yankee” son of a “Yankee carpetbagger” (and therefore a subspecies of “white trash”) – would never be accepted as the paper's editor-in-chief. Thus I assured the properly southern, properly aristocratic Brenda Clement she would never be plagued with any real responsibilities or other demands on her already busy schedule if she were editor-in-chief and so maneuvered her onto the masthead in that role. It was that self-effacing ploy – complete with its he-who-knows-his-place submissiveness – that earned me not just the respect of my peers (who later voted me “boy most likely to succeed”), but also the approval of the school authorities.

Hence I was on the stage as a key speaker when the pedagogy discussion culminated maybe six months later in a debate before a standing-room-only audience of students, teachers and PTA parents in the Holston High School auditorium. 

I remember little of the actual debate save that I spoke as I felt: that the European aka “Soviet” approach to public education was infinitely superior to the U.S. approach because the former was intended to produce an informed and thoughtful citizenry just as the latter was intended to produce reflexively submissive drones. But I dared not use such phrases as “reflexively submissive drones” lest I reveal that beneath my views on education was already a healthy hatred and contempt and – yes – fear of capitalism. So conditioned in reflexive “Americanism” was I (and so conditioned are we all), I could not fully verbalize such thoughts – never mind the Marxian teachings in my father's household – until I was in my 70s and began recognizing capitalism as “infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue”: the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth, and more to the point, the deliberate and knowing choice of moral imbecility as one's personal ethos. Therefore in 1957 I argued in euphemisms, terms I am vaguely thankful are lost to memory.

But I will never forget that Dorothy Merritt, my English, speech and drama teacher – the only one of my high school teachers I genuinely respected – told me I had spoken “very convincingly.”

Not that it mattered. To the thunderous applause of the audience, the U.S. approach to education with its “well adjusted” product was proclaimed the hands-down victor. And as I would read in Scholastic Magazine  or some other such publication soon afterward, the same debate – with the same disheartening results – was occurring throughout the nation.

I think that was when I began to grasp the full magnitude of just how truly homeless I am in my own homeland. Which, save for my years in Manhattan – a place that was for me precisely as James Baldwin described it, Another Country – has been and remains amongst the core truths of my life.

Fifty-six years later, the result of our collective embrace of stupidity is undoubtedly amongst the greatest tragedies of human history: the fact we the people of the United States of America, when faced with the most pivotal choice of our lives, decided c. 1957-1958 we preferred the alienated and/or apathetic and/or bigoted and/or frightened and always, always, always vindictively anti-intellectual, cravenly submissive ignorance of Moron Nation to the informed activism required by a functional constitutional democracy.

That – our decision to become Moron Nation – is what leaves us unable to grasp the genocidal magnitude of the death-dealing inequality capitalism is forcing on us. It is what enabled the murder of the American Dream and facilitated the nullification of our constitution. It has killed the Democratic Party beyond hope of resurrection, the story I broke first  now confirmed again by still another timidly expressed half-requiem – this one for the nation as well.  It is what keeps us too opiated by celebrity, Abrahamic fanaticism and prescription drugs to see how Barack the Betrayer has again fucked us all by including in his otherwise-welcome immigration-reform executive-order 400,000 visas for high-tech scabs – his union-busting, worker-impoverishing payback to Bill Gates and the silicon aristocracy for their obscenely huge campaign contributions. It is what keeps Moron Nation indifferent to what some of us know is coming next – that Gates and his cronies, the counts of computerdom and the earls of electronic gadgetry (and exactly as AFL/CIO Chief Richard Trumka fears), will unleash these scabs to further reduce U.S. high-tech wages, now to the same ruinous graveyard-filling rock-bottom poverty that already defines life for the vast USian Working Class majority.

It is the nightmare reality perfectly expressed by an old black man in a wheelchair on the Pierce Transit Number 1 bus last week: “they got them young people so plugged in, they cain't even see what goin' on around 'em.” Such is Moron Nation, now and forever – that is, until the extinction of our species, which thanks to our national stupidity is looming ever closer by the day, perhaps even by the hour.

 

LB/16-23 November 2014

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