Obamacare as a Microcosm of What Is Killing Us

THE BIG LIE of the so-called “Affordable Care Act” – an Orwellian name if ever there was one – is already obvious in its prohibitive co-pays.

Moreover – as if there were any remaining doubts – the death of any rational hope  for achieving single-payer/public option health insurance in Vermont underscores what was obviously one of the key purposes behind Obama the Orator's shape-shift to Barack the Betrayer. ACA – “Obamacare” as it is ironically labeled – cares only for ensuring insurance-company profiteering.

Yes, as Vermonters have learned to their embitterment, ACA methodically perpetuates the deliberately genocidal U.S. policy of health care as a privilege of wealth.

And it does so with typical Madison Avenue cunning. In the eyes of those fortunate folks who are neither Obamacare's victims nor its supplicants, it creates the illusion of an actual national health care system. It thereby silences that global chorus of humanitarian critics who were rightfully damning the United States as the only industrial nation on earth which refuses to accept that health care is a basic human right.

Said one U.S. physician in a 2012 protest-letter  to The Wall Street Journal:  “(ACA) will not achieve universal coverage, as it leaves at least 26 million individuals uninsured. It will not make health care affordable to Americans with insurance because of high co-pays and gaps in coverage that leave patients vulnerable to financial ruin in the event of serious illness, and it will not control costs...It denies care in order to increase insurers' bottom line, and it obstructs any serious effort to control costs.”

The law – or rather the absence of humanitarian reform the law locks into place – is also driving an unknown number of U.S. doctors to seek professional asylum elsewhere.

A physician recruiter  quoted by The Star, the newspaper of Windsor, Ont., says that over the past decade at least 105 U.S. doctors have relocated to that city alone.

One of these soon-to-be exiles is Dr. Emily Queenan MD, a family physician in upstate New York. She is moving to Canada  because, as she put it in an Evidence Network piece republished by Truthout, “I'm tired of doing daily battle with the same adversary that my patients face – the private health insurance industry, with its frequent errors in processing claims (the American Medical Association reports that one of every 14 claims submitted to commercial insurers are paid incorrectly); outright denials of payment (about one to five percent); and costly paperwork that consumes about 16 percent of physicians' working time, according to a recent journal study.”

“I've also witnessed the painful and continual shifting of medical costs onto my patients' shoulders through rising co-payments, deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses,” wrote Dr. Queenan. “According to a survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, 66 million – 36 percent of Americans — reported delaying or forgoing needed medical care in 2014 due to cost.”

As I cannot say too often, such is life – and death – under capitalism. For what is capitalism but infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue? What is capitalism but the malicious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth? Just ask the late Ayn Rand, whose fictionalization of Hitler's Mein Kampf polls as second only to The Bible as the most influential book  in the United States.

Given that background – given my horror at the Moron Nation to which my homeland has been reduced – I suppose my response to the Truthout piece was in a sense predictable. But several others made supportive comments. Hence I reproduce it here in totality: 

I commend Dr. Queenan for her courageous decision to embrace civilization by moving to a nation not ruled by Ayn Rand savagery. May she, her family and her future patients all thrive.

That said, her naive belief "the U.S. will get there some day" is a classic example of the futility of hope.

The ultimate fate of any and all efforts to achieve single-payer/public-option health insurance in the U.S. is proven beyond dispute by the (Democrat) gubernatorial treachery that killed – forever – the apparently successful grassroots effort to create such a system in Vermont.

Indeed the lesson of the Vermont debacle sends a terminal message to health insurance reformers everywhere in the U.S.: don't bother trying for single-payer/public-option because even your best most diligent efforts will be defeated in the end by political betrayal.

And so it shall remain until the oligarchy is overthrown or our species renders itself extinct, whichever comes first.

Another poster noted that “Vermont activists haven't given up on seeking Single-Payer.”

True – but only in that some people will never acknowledge the U.S. experiment in representative democracy has failed (or, rather, has been murdered), and that these same people will always continue banging their heads against the proverbial stone wall.

As long as the One Percent owns and rules the U.S. political system – that is, for how ever much longer the United States exists – a public-option/single-payer system will never be allowed.

To imagine otherwise is to ignore the primary purpose of Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer: to prohibit socialism (especially including socialized medicine), and thereby ensure the neo-Nazi savagery of Ayn Rand capitalism is forever. All this, of course, with the additional cover provided by the Republicans accusing the president of being a "socialist."

Such is the diabolical methodology of de facto one-party rule.

In which context note that Obamacare cunningly prohibits the states from initiating public-option/single payer insurance – which would have killed it in Vermont even without the (Democrat) governor's service to his One Percent masters.

The tragic failure of the U.S. Left to understand realpolitik – specifically to acknowledge the extent to which we have already been subjugated and enslaved – defines this Left as being as much a part of Moron Nation as the Right.

Until we admit the magnitude of our powerlessness, we will remain unable to evolve an effective response to it. Which – particularly given the extinction of our species made inevitable by the combination of terminal climate change and the looming thermonuclear war with Russia -- relegates such hope to the realm of nonsense.

Sorry, but that's just the way it is. The hydrogen bomb trumps everything, and even without that, if you understood the true magnitude of the climate-change disaster (even now at its alleged "beginning"), you'd recognize Nature has clearly decided our species is unworthy of survival.

Later, in response to multiple posts, I wrote:

I had not meant to trigger an extended discussion, but it appears I have done just that. Hence this reply is to Ted, PGreen and whomever else might choose to to join in.

Admittedly I write and speak from the cynical perspective of one who has been an activist/journalist (or a journalist/activist) since my late teens in the 1950s. 

During the subsequent 58 years, I have witnessed the defeat of every cause to which I committed time, energy, a brief stay in jail, some bloodshed and a helluva lot of suffering and deprivation. These causes include organized labor (the American Newspaper Guild AFL/CIO); post-Sputnik education reform; the Civil Rights Movement (Knox County Jail, 1963); the anti-Vietnam War Movement; the Back-to-the-Land Movement; the alternative press; the creation of an anti-capitalist Counterculture, and of course the associated defenses of the Bill of Rights.

Every one of these causes has failed. Given the time-span involved – I say again 58 years – these failures cannot be dismissed as short-term or temporary phenomena.

Each failure is in fact symptomatic of the relentless destruction of U.S. liberty begun by the One Percent in response to the close proximity of Communist revolution that evolved during the 1930s. The retaliatory purge – and that is precisely what it is – began literally the day World War II ended and continues even now.

Ideologically speaking, the abject failure of the U.S. Left to combat this aggression is rooted in its rejection of the historical truth of class warfare. Thus it has blinded itself to the nature and lineage of capitalism.

But what marks the U.S. Left as part of Moron Nation is actually a triple failure.

The first failure is failure to understand that capitalism is literally infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – precisely as Ayn Rand states in her fictionalizations of Mein Kampf. the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever set forth.

Failure number two is refusal to recognize that capitalism is the direct descendant both of patriarchy and patriarchal religion. It is therefore the immediate, innately misogynistic ancestor of both fascism and Nazism. In other words, Nazism (whether in its misogynistic anti-Jewish German form or in its misogynistic Christian/exceptionalist U.S. form), is the ultimate form of capitalism. Its savagery is therefore as inevitable as the death of a corn crop after a hard freeze.

In the past, the ostensibly Marxian domains of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Peoples' Republic of China offered enough competition to capitalism, the U.S. One Percent was forced to ameliorate capitalism's most obvious savageries. Now, with the Soviet Union dead and China co-opted by Wall Street, there is no such strategic or even tactical need. Hence capitalism now openly displays its tyrannosauric nature.

Failure number three is the U.S. Left's refusal to recognize the ONLY reason the One Percent yielded to the humanitarian demands of labor, the Republican Progressives and finally the Democrats' New Deal was the One Percenters' abject terror of Communist revolution. (Note that The Communist Manifesto, which from the perspective of the capitalists is the most dangerous document in our species' history, dates from 1848.)

What all this means in terms of any present-day prospects for humanitarian change is that there are none.

History shows us such change has four prerequisites. These are (1)-ideological solidarity; (2)-leadership and organization; (3)-mastery of extant technologies military and civilian; and (4)-the aid, overt, clandestine or both, of a major foreign power.

None of the first three prerequisites exist in the United States today. Our society has been deliberately dumbed down or "moronated" into Moron Nation precisely to rob us, forever, of the requisite intellectual skills and psychological reflexes. Meanwhile the moronation of other realms (which includes the radical Islamization of the Middle East), continues apace.

And with the death of the U.S.S.R. and the co-optation of China, there is no longer any source of revolutionary outside agitation or support or even any effective antidote to capitalist depredation.

Nor will there ever be again. The U.S. will literally destroy the world before it allows any rival nation – with or without a rival ideology – to emerge.

Couple that with the already ruinous apocalypse inflicted by what should properly be labeled "terminal climate change" – for that is exactly what it is – and you have then begun to arrive at a realistic assessment of our present circumstances: literally the darkest, most hopeless epoch in our species' 200,000-year history.

However, this does not mean we should give up. It merely means we should recognize that surely the notion of revolution by a dying species on a dying planet is the ultimate cosmic joke. We should therefore give up the grandiose in exchange for doing the best we can, locally, to better peoples' lives.

(Even at a physically disabled age 75, I still manage to serve my community by producing an informationally vital monthly newsletter and, as its editor, sometimes functioning as an unofficial ombudsman.)

But to attempt anything on any greater scale is merely to court despair.

Though I cling, perhaps foolishly, to the belief that if we can strip off the Norman Vincent Peale blinders with which the One Percent has shackled us – that is, if we can acknowledge the extent to which we have been defeated and conquered – we might yet evolve an effective response.

However, until then we are at best doing nothing more than dancing a 21st Century version of the Ghost Dance.

Meanwhile the same administration that promised us "change we can believe in" now assures us U.S. aggression in Ukraine will not require nuclear weapons. 

LB/17-24 May 2015

-30-

Does the 1% Think We're a Doomed Species on a Dying Planet? (Why Else Would They Behave as They Do?)

(My apology for the tardiness of this week's column. As does the second week of every month, this past week belonged to the editing, writing and production of the eight-page monthly newsletter I prepare for the 51-unit senior housing facility in which I reside. Due to technical challenges, this month's issue required a much more extended effort than usual, which radically diminished the time I could devote to OAN.)

 

***

COULD IT BE our capitalist overlords have secretly acquired incontrovertible proof the struggle against global warming  is already lost? Is that the terrible secret underlying the One Percent's unprecedented orgy of greed ? Is that why their political vassals refuse to unite in a common front against what increasingly looms as the greatest threat to human survival  in our species' 200,000-year  history? 

To understand what prompts me to ask such forbidden questions, it is essential we look with brutal honesty at present-day realpolitik. To do so we must set aside our habits of denial and fantasy and wishful thinking and fear and neediness and despair long enough to acknowledge what actually obtains.

 

Our entire planet has fallen under capitalist control. It is rule so absolute, the capitalists sooner or later always get what they demand, most recently the environmentally suicidal right to drill for oil in the Arctic.

Nor does capitalism tolerate any alternatives to its morally imbecilic ideology of infinite greed as the ultimate human virtue. Capitalism defeated and destroyed the Soviet Union by deluging its people with propaganda intended to inflame their greed and selfishness. The Russian successor state is so weakened, President Obama could in effect spit in the faces of all its people  – maliciously dishonoring the epic heroism of their grandfathers and grandmothers who, at the cost of as many as 43.3 million dead, literally saved the world from Nazi Germany. Capitalism also co-opted the People's Republic of China. And unless its rulers are employing a long-range Sun Tzu strategy, China too is but another satrapy of Wall Street. As a result there is no longer any force on this planet strong enough to compel the capitalists to restrain their limitless savagery.

   

All this happened because the Wall Street One Percent commands the military and economic might of the United States and uses it to seize unprecedented global hegemony. The resultant empire subjugates all the inhabitants of Earth beneath the zero-tolerance mandates of the One Percenters and their political vassals – moral imbeciles whose sole purpose is the fulfillment of their own greed. They are reducing the entire planet to the high-tech version of an antebellum slave plantation. Already they rule the world as their own electronic concentration camp.  They tyrannize every nation on earth. 

In the context of these events, the claim by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” is proven to be the biggest Big Lie of all time. Indeed history – at least history since the advent of patriarchy about 5,000 years ago – teaches us the opposite is true. Interludes of justice are but rare and fleeting sparks in a vast and seemingly endless darkness. Clearly, what “the arc of the moral universe” bends toward is not the collective good of economic democracy and “liberty and justice for all” but the absolute evil of Ayn Rand totalitarianism and its agenda of enslavement for all save the most ruthlessly greedy despots. 

That's why, of all humanity's ever-more-wantonly discarded virtues, justice remains the most elusive. It is routinely betrayed even by those societies which proclaimed the quest for justice as their reason for being. Note the ultimate hypocrisy that underlies both the Preamble to the United States Constitution  (“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice...”) and Article 156 of the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics  (“Justice is administered in the USSR on the principle of the equality of citizens before the law and the court.”) Note how political developments in both nations rendered “justice” not only meaningless, but reduced it to a convenient euphemism for its antithesis.

Though the governments of some nations still try to placate their own populations with gestures of resistance, the horrible truth is that governance itself – governance with all its implicit democratic potential whether realized or not – has been obsoleted by capitalism's mastery of electronic technology. The age of nations and national governance – the age of real or potential human liberty – has ended. The age of corporations  – the age of tyranny beyond our conception  – has begun. Increasingly we are enslaved by the corporate One Percent  – an imperial cabal that has taken the place of old-time despots and to whom technology has given both omnipotence and hitherto-divine powers of surveillance and retaliation. It is so powerful it is now attempting to cast off its political vassals and impose its will directly through its corporate managers – a primary purpose of the Trans-Pacific Partnership  trade agreement.

Moreover, the One Percent's tyranny is quite possibly forever – that is, fated to prevail until our species is extinct. Because it is based entirely on infinite greed, capitalism cannot be reformed: note its destruction of the New Deal  in the U.S. and its imposition of austerity  on Europe. And now – with capitalism protected as it is by impregnable electronic and thermonuclear defenses – it cannot be overthrown. It will prevail until thermonuclear war and/or environmental disaster renders its enabling technologies inoperable and thus reduces its tyrants to impotence. 

Then and only then might humanity throw off the yoke of patriarchy and once again rationally aspire toward the liberty of justice and the justice of liberation.

But now and for all the foreseeable future there is only capitalism and  the intensifying apocalypse  of what is connivingly called “global warming” – a label obviously chosen to maximize confusion, conflict and misunderstanding.

Let us therefore call it by a properly descriptive compound noun. Let us call it what it is: “terminal climate change.” And let us finally and unequivocally recognize that we have brought down the wrath of Mother Nature on ourselves. Now as a result we are cursed to live in the darkest most hopeless epoch of our species' experience and thereby challenged to prove our selves and our species worthy of survival. 

Why then, given that the Wall Street One Percent now controls (or at least leverages) all the leading politicians and therefore lords it over all the governments on this planet, is there not unified action to minimize the terrible impact of the already ruinous climate debacle?

Given how our species has united to combat other global threats, the only logical answer – almost too horrible to contemplate – is that the One Percent knows the battle against terminal climate change is already lost. That here is the real explanation for the global-warming squabbles between the One Percent's Democrat and Republican political vassals at home and among the One Percent's vassal governments abroad. That these quarrels are pseudo-conflicts; that they are part of a diabolically well-crafted charade intended to keep the global population from panicking. That the One Percent fears the reduction of profits that might result from the vengefully suicidal insurrection the kamikaze warfare of World War II suggests might become the last recourse of a doomed species on a dying planet. That sure knowledge of our impending extinction is the real reason the One Percent no longer makes even a pretense of restraining the Manifest Evil of its infinite (and infinitely obscene) greed. 

Perhaps, in the serial-killer mentalities of the capitalist aristocrats, the fulfillment of their greed has become their final competition. That all the One Percenters care about now is who will amass the greatest hoards of gold and pile the highest mounds of corpses, who will die smirking, “fuck you all I am the biggest winner.” 

Could this be true? I hope with every cell of my being it is not. Yet what else could explain all the variables of our circumstances? 

*** *** ***

CONTRAST HOW THE present-day Ruling Class dithers in the face of terminal climate change with how it reacted to the Nazi threat in 1941:

 

This is no time to moralize on the follies of countries and Governments which have allowed themselves to be struck down one by one, when by united action they could have saved themselves and saved the world from this catastrophe...Let us learn the lessons already taught by such cruel experience. Let is redouble our exertions, and strike with united strength while life and power remains.

The speaker was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; the excerpt is from his speech to Parliament just after the Germans had begun their invasion of the Soviet Union. The source is Churchill's six-volume history of The Second World War, volume three, The Grand Alliance, pages 372-373 (Houghton-Mifflin Company, Boston: 1950).

 

I ask again: why – given the far greater magnitude of the terminal-climate-change threat – does the Ruling Class do naught but dither? 

*** *** ***

ASKING THE ABOVE question in slightly different terms, why – if the One Percent did not already regard us as a doomed species on a dying planet – is it not commanding its political vassals to repair the increasingly broken, crumbling and abandoned U.S. infrastructure? 

Just as our overlords routinely spend fortunes to maintain the value, decor and comforts of their palatial mansions, so it would seem they'd also maintain the value and functionality of what is now effectively their own nation – unless of course they regard such expenditures as money squandered on a doomed realm.

Which in turn explains perfectly their breathtaking generosity toward the ever-more-aggressive U.S. military and militarized police apparatus. Not surprisingly, it is already practicing for the proverbial Last Roundup – the mass arrest (and probable extermination) of unthinkably vast numbers of U.S. citizens.

*** *** ***

AGAIN ASKING THE question, why else – if the purpose were not deliberate obfuscation – would our formerly informative mass media behave as it does? Not only has it been reduced to a uniquely privatized version of the propaganda machine that defines any despotism. Far more ominously, it now functions as a psychological warfare apparatus. It's apparent mission is inflicting the intellectual paralyses of maximum confusion on even the most well-informed segments of the population. 

This is a point I had not previously considered – probably because, as a former member of the working press (though I was ousted before it was fully corporatized into its present-day Josef Goebbels form), I was too close to the metaphorical trees to see the proverbial forest. 

But Truthout's Joseph Natoli pulls it into sharp focus.  Here's his most telling passage:

Carrying on such balanced discussion of anything in a society already seriously bent in one direction is just a mockery, and at worse, a front behind which the biases of that society can go on as if they were guided by a rational discourse. This front of a media conducting relentless, penetrating interpretation set on revealing lies and bullshit, set on deconstructing edifices of truth, can only always and only be the truth by which the status quo, bent as it is, perseveres. Our mainstream media coverage is either a chaos of mindless venting, a deluge of "information" whose only gatekeeper is Google's PageRank, the insulated "de-friending" domains of Facebook communication, or the disingenuousness of both balanced and biased reporting. In this way, our communication is in one way or another serving to maintain our inequitable order of things. Our media stand like the Baltimore police as servants of that order, protecting it from exposure, which is what the media are now doing, and from collapse, as what the police are paid to do as they protect and serve.

 

*** *** ***

THE DETERIORATION OF the U.S. infrastructure is not just due to neglect but – in the case of public transport – the result of a deliberate assault on facilities and service.  It is as if the One Percenters were hastening to withdraw their money from an industry they have decided is on the brink of collapse and is therefore no longer worthy of investment.

 

Long-term investment, of course, is precisely what mass transit requires. The One Percent's refusal to invest therein thus suggests the One Percenters believe we have no long-term future for which to prepare.

But a few days ago I set aside this issue as a bit too extreme for a Reader Supported News comment threat. Instead I took it as an opportunity to vent my endless bitterness at being stranded in the city with the worst most miserable mass transit I have ever encountered anywhere in the urban United States.

 

(No, that's not hyperbole. Even in the 1950s, Knoxville, Tennessee, with a population of only about 100,000, had significantly better bus service than Tacoma, a major seaport of 200,000 people, has today.) 

What follows is revised for re-publication here, hence is not italicized: 

There will never be a renaissance of public transport in the United States – and the dismal fate of Pierce Transit, which serves Tacoma and surrounding Pierce County, shows why.

By any measure, the United States has by far the worst public transport in the industrial world. We the people have been so damned ever since the politicians were bought off by the automobile industry. 

The resultant war against Working Class mobility  began in the 1920s, with the closure or downsizing of mass transit to force us into the debt slavery of total dependence on privately owned automobiles. 

While this variant of the class war is commanded from board rooms and legislative chambers, its present-day storm troopers are the majority whites, whose carefully conditioned hatred and contempt of transit-dependent lower-income people perpetuates anti-transit policies whether federal, state or local. The downsizing of Pierce Transit – a 2008-2012 service-reduction approaching 90 percent – is a textbook case. 

The Tacoma/Pierce County Chamber of Commerce is anti-transit, as is the Pierce County Council. So, albeit less obviously, are majorities on the Tacoma City Council and the other municipal governments within the PT service area.

 

Thus all it took to defeat the 2011 and 2012 ballot measures that would have restored and maintained PT service was “transit-is-welfare” hate-mongering by opponents. In other words, it was the voters themselves who sneeringly proclaimed the PT service area the home of the most vindictively anti-transit-user electorate in the nation. 

***

To put Tacoma's transit crisis in somewhat sharper focus:

(1)-Slightly more than half the population of Tacoma is officially lower-income; 18 percent of its households are officially impoverished. Nearly half of PT's regular riders have no other means of transport. 

(2)-The “transit-is-welfare” meme is far too sophisticated to have originated locally. Given the testimony of Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state is a favorite Ruling Class rat-lab for perfecting methods of oppression, the meme's initial use, in 2011, was obviously a test run. Its success then and in 2012 means it will be used wherever the One Percent wants to convince an appropriately bigoted white majority to destroy a local mass transit system.

(3)-Though Washington state is allegedly “progressive,” its policies reveal its fascist heart. It has the most regressive state tax structure in the U.S.; it is the only state in which renters have no tenant-right protections whatsoever; and its electorate is relentlessly edging ever further to the Right. With its government already controlled by a Republican senate, next year's election will in all probability turn it into another Wisconsin. 

(4)-For more detail, see “Exclusive: How a Local Transit Crisis Exemplifies the Global Class War,” here.

(5)-The state has become so inhospitable to lower-income people, I would gladly move elsewhere if I could. Given the food-stamp cuts imposed by our Democrat president  and the absolute certainty both the Republican state senate and the Republican Congress will side with Obama to impose additional, deliberately genocidal cuts in all the programs upon which I am dependent, remaining here may indeed prove fatal. Yet where is there to go? In any case there is no way I can afford to leave. I am simply too impoverished – and probably too physically crippled – to ever move again. I am 75 years old, and (apart from Social Security), all my other income sources – and any potential I might ever again have such earnings – were slain by the capitalist downsizing known as the Great Recession.

 

***

As the fate of Pierce Transit reveals, it not just the lack of political will that is destroying public transportation in the United States. 

Even more than that, it's the morally imbecilic lack of empathy that has become a defining part of the U.S. national character. The U.S. has been thoroughly Ayn Randified – a uniquely USian form of Nazification – which means the harder times get, the more vicious the people become, not toward their oppressors, but toward one another.

 

Save in tiny (and therefore statistically insignificant) demographic enclaves, the cooperative spirit that helped U.S. communities survive the Great Depression has been methodically eradicated. 

The result is Moron Nation, the realm where moronation has eliminated class consciousness – or any other sort of social conscience or consciousness – and where the attitude of the people toward one another is increasingly that of Ted Bundy toward his victims.

 

Which is why the Republicans – who are actually neo-Nazis – are taking over, not just here in Washington state, but everywhere else as well. It's called "meanness," and it's why (precisely as exemplified by transit policy), the U.S. is becoming notorious as the meanest nation in the industrial world.

Alas, history proves that once a population sinks to that reptilian level, humanitarian reform is impossible...unless it is imposed from without by force, as it was on Nazi Germany. 

Once more I ask: what is the purpose of this deliberately induced Ayn Rand malevolence? Do the One Percenters already know terminal climate change means there is nothing left in the U.S. – or anywhere else on this planet – that can be preserved? Are they already chuckling with sadistic glee at how we the people fighting over whatever miserly tokens they let trickle down upon us from their inconceivably fat hoards of money and resources?

 

Whatever the answers to these questions, it is obvious the One Percent is deliberately thrusting our nation – and indeed our entire world – into a maelstrom of insanity. 

Quoth Longfellow's Prometheus:  “Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.” 

LB/11-17 May 2015

-30-

President Obama's Victory Day Rudeness: I Apologize for My Country's Scorn of Living Russians and Soviet Dead

Mothers and daughters became Soviet warriors. (Click image to view it full size.)

*

I AM ASHAMED of how those who rule the Imperial United States and its European satrapies dishonored the millions of Soviet men, women and children who were slain in the epic struggle to save the world from Nazism.

I am ashamed of how we who have never yet suffered comparable invasion  have been taught to belittle the breathtaking sacrifices of those who fought and died to defeat the most obviously sadistic invader our unspeakably savage era has thus far produced. I am ashamed of the politics of xenophobia and greed that demand we disdain fellow humans we should instead hail as heroes and heroines, not just of their own Motherland but of all humanity.

Behind my shame at our overlords' unconscionable bad manners on this particular Victory Day is my far greater shame at how we in the United States have allowed our once-exemplary representative democracy to be reduced to an oligarchy of global oppression and environmental ruination.

I am especially ashamed of how its tyrannies are perpetuated by a white electorate so blinded by racial, socioeconomic and religious hatreds,  it seems idiotic to imagine it will ever stop voting against its own well-being. 

But my country has become so much a police-state, I dare not continue without affirming my shame is the shame of a patriot – that if I did not love my country, I would not so grieve its betrayal. I would not denounce the capitalist One Percent and their political vassals for looting my country into poverty. I would not damn the One Percent's ballot-box disciples for voting my country into ruin merely to inflict suffering on those whose race or ethnicity or gender or sexuality they despise. If I did not love my country, I would not be so appalled by the electronic concentration camp  to which it has been reduced by these betrayers of liberty and their wanton perversions of democratic process.

Nor dare I rationally hope for liberation in what remains of my lifetime. The U.S. Ruling Class is protected by technologies of surveillance and retaliation we can scarcely imagine. Armed with powers earlier generations attributed only to god, it is combining the doctrines of Ayn Rand economics, U.S. exceptionalism and divine-right imperialism into a new and uniquely USian form of Nazism – a Nazism in which absolute power rests not with a single despot but with an infinitely despotic cabal of corporate executives.

The pivotal question of our time, brought into sharp focus by the events in Ukraine, is therefore whether this newest, U.S.-sponsored onslaught of the human penchant for moral imbecility can be brought to bay before its proponents literally nuke the world into a radioactive cinder. 

Yet even if we somehow succeed in building a successful resistance, it may already be too late for our species and this planet as we know it. Indeed it is entirely conceivable some sure but thus far secret knowledge of ourselves as denizens of a dying world is what is fueling the unrelenting greed of the One Percent – a greed so limitless it has no known precedent in human experience.

Is this what is happening? Have the One Percenters been reliably informed their deadly contempt for Nature commanded by the Abrahamic religions has already doomed us? Is the One Percent's intent now merely to see who can collect the most wealth before the too-long-ignored-and-despised Mother Earth sounds the final buzzer? 

Only the darkest and most hopeless of times could produce such otherwise-unthinkable thoughts. And that – the darkest most hopeless time in our species' history – is the time in which we are cursed to live and challenged to do whatever we can to resist the encroaching darkness.

Another dark time, nearly as dark and hopeless as the present, were the months immediately after Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on the Summer Solstice of 1941.

But the Red Army and the Soviet people fought back valiantly, eventually defeating what was then the best trained, most technologically advanced war machine on Earth. 

Let us therefore never forget their victory came at a terrible price – their combined military and civilian deaths now estimated to be as many as 43.3 million. (Yes, this is the same material linked in my second paragraph above. But the source for the 43.3 million figure is the researcher Boris Sokolov, for whom you must scroll far down the text.)

All such numbers are inconceivable unless we restate them in quantities we can envision. 

Picture a man or a woman or a child. Then picture that person dead. Picture a corpse.

If you accept Sokolov's estimate (which I do), picture that corpse multiplied 43.3 million times. Forty-three-point-three million is the present-day population of five cities the size of London. Or five the size of New York City. Or four the size of Moscow. Now try to envision these entire municipalities filled with naught but corpses – decomposing bodies that were once living men, women and children, folks with all the pleasures and pains and ambitions and desires and other emotions you or I or anyone has.

That's what it cost the Soviet Union to save us from the Nazis.

But the most important element in this recitation of grim facts is that the Soviet people prevailed – and that by prevailing they saved us all, every man woman and child now alive – from those earlier forms of fascism and Nazism personified by Mussolini and Hitler. (Yes, Fascist Italy did indeed aid Nazi Germany  in the invasion of the Soviet Union.)

The English-language service of the Russian state television network, RT, celebrates this 70th anniversary of the Soviet triumph with a Victory Day program  so thoughtfully scripted it should be preserved and issued as a DVD. It is a valuable historical document, and if it is available, I will add it to my own personal library. 

RT's coverage gives us the obligatory summaries of the fighting but also offers vital glimpses of social history – stories of the people and how they coped with the stresses of enemy invasion.

It includes a sampling of the often poignant poetry of Russian wartime popular music. It is a musical literature utterly unlike the self-consciously happy-faced, “Boogie-Woogie Bugle-Boy-of-Company-B” trivializations with which we in the wartime U.S. were sedated. But you'll have to wait a bit for all the RT material to load, and then you'll have to scroll down to its last pages.

The songs are each accompanied by translations into English, and two are especially moving. One is called “White Cranes”:  “Sometimes it seems to me each fallen soldier/ That never came back from fields of gore/ In fact did never perish as they told you/ But turned into a crane as white as snow.” The other is “Wait for Me”: “That in the midst of gunfire/ It was your waiting for me/ That saved my life.”

Also especially relevant on this occasion is the 2010 Russian film entitled Brestskaya Krepost – “Brest Fortress” in English – that tells the heartrending stories of some of the soldiers and civilians, among them three women, who fought in the battle that was the Soviet equivalent of our Pearl Harbor and Wake Island battles combined.

Available as a DVD with some versions subtitled in English, it is notably unlike most Hollywood war films in that it neither sanitizes the horrors of the battlefield nor belabors the audience with pro-war propaganda.

The ability of Russian cinematographers to depict horrendous violence without simultaneously glorifying it is a skill that has apparently been carefully denied their U.S. counterparts. But that should surprise no one who understands that in the new imperial U.S. oligarchy, government at every level and all its mainstream informational media (including film producers, textbook publishers and advertising agencies), are owned and controlled by the same self-serving inner circle of voraciously capitalist One Percenters.

Nor is there any doubting the diabolical, Josef-Goebbels-inspired efficacy of the uniquely privatized U.S. government propaganda apparatus that has been spawned by the One Percent's seizure of power. The greed and selfishness the propaganda so successfully evokes was undoubtedly a major if undocumented factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prepared in accordance with state-of-the-art psychological research, its influence is so irresistible, it has already convinced the nominally well-informed people of Western Europe to accept the Big Lie World War II was single-handedly won by the United States. 

This same process of de facto psychological warfare, the relentless dumbing-down I label “moronation,” is what sustains Moron Nation – that portion of the U.S. electorate which is ever more militantly white, theocratically Christian, aggressively reactionary and therefore ever more inclined to embrace a uniquely USian, Ayn Rand version of Nazism. Its emergent ideology is already apparent, not only in the use of “austerity” as a euphemism for calculatedly genocidal elimination of social services, but in a local war against public-transport users I wrote about extensively earlier in this decade.

Now of course the One Percent's (allegedly unofficial) propaganda machine – which in truth is as potent and functionally official as Goebbels' own Ministry of Propaganda – is turning not just its assault weapons but its heaviest Joe McCarthy siege guns on anyone of significance who dares dispute the empire's portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine.

Quoth the ever-reliable Robert Parry via a Consortium News exclusive:

U.S.-taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty has a checkered history that includes hiring Nazi sympathizers as Cold War commentators. Now, one of its current writers has used the platform to bash an American scholar who won’t join Official Washington’s “group think” on Ukraine.

That follows Parry's earlier report detailing how the group-thinkers insist on describing the deadly ramrodding of Ayn Rand capitalist savagery down post-Soviet Russian throats as nothing more than “growing pains” intended “to help (these people) attain a better life.”

Which suggests another presumably unthinkable thought:

Given its context of economic warfare with imperialistic intent, could it be the real reason Obama snubbed the Russian people and their Victory Day celebration is that he cannot agree with what it celebrates?

Remember it was the immediate ancestry of the present-day One Percent that tried via the Bankers Plot of 1934  to join the U.S. to the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

Perhaps then Obama is no different from so many other U.S. politicians in harboring a clandestine, beyond-top-secret commitment to the Nazi resurgence already evident in the Western Ukraine and unquestionably lurking in the Moron Nation shadows of the USian Homeland as well.

After all, what is Nazism – particularly with its profit-expanding policies of slave labor and the extermination of anyone no longer exploitable for profit – but the ultimate form of capitalism?

LB/3-10 May 2015

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Baltimore: the Capitalist Pressure Cooker Blows a Gasket

MAY DAY IN TACOMA – An estimated 200 persons celebrated International Worker's Day with a peaceful demonstration in this seaport city. Participants included the Communist Labor Party, Socialist Alternative, South Sound Jobs with Justice, 15 Now Tacoma, and members of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 120, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 367/21 and Service Employees International Union Local 6. The flag shown above is the banner of the CLP, a new and rapidly evolving group  dedicated to empowering the Working Class. (Photo by Diane M. Knowles; click on image to view it full size.)

 *

BALTIMORE'S MOST IMPORTANT lessons are being methodically obscured by mass media, which predictably portrays peaceful demonstrators as frenzied black thugs threatening to escape their ghettos, invade what the white bourgeois considers the only “Real America” and seduce its darling daughters, the linked illustration chosen because it mocks the secret fear of sexual inadequacy that dwells in the Ku Klux depths of every racist white male's alleged mind. 

But alternative media is meanwhile working overtime to provide us with antidotes to these daily doses of distraction and deception, and from this aged news-hound's admittedly cynical perspective, its small but dedicated cadre of rogue reporters is doing a damn fine job.

Here are three examples of their best work: 

At the top of today's kudos list is the revelation – confirmed by reliable sources and courageously reported by The Real News – that the overkill tactics employed by federally militarized police against blacks in Baltimore and Ferguson and against entire Working-Class neighborhoods in post-bombing Boston are practice-drills in the same sense the Spanish Civil War was the Wehrmacht's dress-rehearsal for World War II. (The relevant discussion begins 14 minutes into TRN's videotape.)

These drills are intended to prepare the cops and the military for efficient collaboration in what radicals of the 1960s used to call “the Big Bust,” the day the Ruling Class drops all pretense of “democracy,” declares the entire Bill of Rights null and void, and orders the Last Roundup of everybody even a hundred-thousandth of an inch Left of the middle as defined by the One Percent. 

And who might be the doctrinal exemplars of this alleged norm? 

The Founders are clearly not among them. But the list undoubtedly includes Ayn Rand, James Dobson, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale and an Adolph Hitler so cleverly disguised by euphemisms, his identity is (deliberately) hidden by the Clausewitzian fog of class warfare. 

Next on today's news-honors roster is (additional) confirmation that here in the de facto Fourth Reich, any humanitarian dissent is now automatically criminalized as “terrorism.” As was the massive imperial secret police apparatus mustered against Occupy, so is it now being mobilized against Black Lives Matter. 

Third on the list is a report that gives us (another) real-time glimpse of the tyrannical future as envisioned by our overlords,  the looming era in which “due process” will be no more than a fond memory. 

As I said on the associated comment thread: 

Mark my word: the suspension of Due Process – including the indefinite detainment in military concentration camps authorized by the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act – will soon be the norm as resistance to the de facto Fourth Reich continues.

Meanwhile, hoping to ensure a maximum number of white voters are provoked to lynch-mob anger just in time for next year's elections, the Republicans – the true voice of the Ruling Class – are already using Baltimore as the foundation for an obviously pre-scripted campaign of racial hate-mongering.

Thanks to Reader Supported News – which because of Editor-in-Chief Marc Ash's eclectic editorial judgment is probably my favorite alternative information source – we now have access to Frank Rich's exposé of a significant escalation in race-baiting. Prepared for the socioeconomically privileged readers of New York Magazine, the piece becomes vital intelligence when presented to more proletarian-minded audiences. 

Its unspoken suggestion is the possibility the nationwide, implicitly genocidal campaign of violence by federally militarized police against U.S. blacks may be part of a much broader One Percent effort to frighten the white majority into voting for unabashed fascism in 2016.

Could local disorders be woven into another national Reichstag-fire-like scare campaign, thus to finalize the systemic transformation from representative democracy to capitalist oligarchy begun by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and so dramatically accelerated by the events of 9/11?

The historically pivotal consequences of President's Kennedy's murder are carefully documented by James W. Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books: 2008). This should be considered required reading for anyone who hopes to understand what is occurring in the United States today. 

As for creation of a new scare-campaign of Reichstag Fire magnitude, the capability unquestionably exists.

 

Mainstream media is owned by the same One Percenters who effectively own U.S. governance at every level. The psychological manipulation skill originally assembled by the advertising agencies of Madison Avenue is part of the mainstream-media package by which we are governed. It is as readily available to the One Percent's military/industrial vassals as it is to the One Percent's politicians. 

Once again, as in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's classic definition of fascism  (scroll down the linked text), the distinction between the public and private sectors is reduced to meaninglessness. 

Moreover, the Pentagon's authority over local police departments provides a perfect mechanism by which to initiate and direct the violence essential to any fear-mongering campaign. The key question is therefore whether the cops are already sufficiently indoctrinated to give such an effort their unquestioning obedience, particularly to no-leak security regulations. 

Some cops – perhaps most in places like Baltimore and Ferguson – obviously are. 

And there is Obama's unprecedented war on leakers to prohibit disclosure. Given the federal-state-local pyramid of command, the requisite documents would all be federal, which means the threat of retribution would be fearsome – all the more so since the life-expectancy of an ex-cop in prison is measurable only in negative numbers. 

Is this what is happening? Are the outbreaks of violence in Baltimore and other such ghetto-realms and the upsurge in hate-mongering part of the One Percent's anticipated Final Solution both to the alleged “problems” posed by racial minorities and the few remnants of democratic process?

 

As an old Soviet intelligence axiom supposedly said, “once is coincidence, twice arouses suspicion, three times is enemy action.” 

Hence my (slightly revised) comments on the “race-baiting” thread: 

Let us not forget the white majority in the United States is indeed viciously racist, whether as demonstrated by Nixon's victory in 1968 or by its malevolent indifference to the abandonment of New Orleans blacks to Katrina. 

Factor that in with simmering anger over Obama the Orator's transformation to Barack the Betrayer – a transformation no doubt calculated by the Ruling Class to further reinforce white racism even on the Left – and the likelihood of a Republican landslide next year looms ever larger.

Given that the Republican Party is simultaneously the voice of the Ruling Class and the vessel of the uniquely USian, uniquely white/Christian brand of Nazism known as "exceptionalism ," the anticipated Republican triumph will no doubt obliterate any remaining pretense of democratic process and political or socioeconomic freedom. 

Indeed it is at least arguable that, from the perspective of the Ruling Class, the primary underlying function of the Obama Administration is clearing the way for the Republican triumph that formally ends, forever, the USian experiment in representative governance. 

Hence the relentless, Ruling-Class-decreed campaign of genocidal violence against blacks by federally militarized police: the "gasoline" intended to provoke riots and thereby ignite a (pivotal) inflammation of white racism... 

The point also needs to be made that an unknown but obviously substantial percentage of the whites who voted for Obama did so not because some cosmic creature had plunked its magic twanger and miraculously cured them of their racism, but rather out of socioeconomic desperation. 

This is particularly true of the legions of Caucasian blue-collar workers who voted for Obama in response to his (now obviously false) pledge to sign the Employee Free Choice Act into law. 

In each instance, 2008 or 2012, the choice was between Obama and candidates pledged to methodically worsen the 99 Percent's already dire straits. And despite the Moron Nation ignorance that prevails beyond the dwindling ranks of workers informed by union political-education programs, the electorate nevertheless (dimly) perceived the Republican threat and voted accordingly – never mind their votes were ultimately rendered meaningless by pre-planned betrayals.

What this boils down to is a cauldron of quietly seething anger that is rationally based on the Orator/Betrayer transformation but is irrationally intensified by the re-emergent racism expressed in the phrase "we gave him (them) a chance, and he (they) fucked us"  – just as this most diabolically Machiavellian of all Ruling Classes so obviously intended.

 

* * *

“DIABOLICALLY MACHIAVELLIAN” IS not hyperbole. Its ugly truth is underscored by yet another report, this one from The New York Times, that tells us the Ruling Class has co-opted nearly everything into its secret police apparatus – maybe even your own trusted shrink.  

The story's headline, “American Psychological Association Secretly Aided CIA Torture,” says it all. Hence on the comment-thread I put the event in its broader historical context:

A competent investigative reporter with an unflinching employer should investigate the extent to which APA is responsible for making Skinnerian psychology, with its innately fascist behavior-modification tyrannies, the overwhelmingly dominant USian psychological methodology.

Significantly, this began at the University of Washington psych department, which in the early 1970s was the only Skinnerian psych department in the entire U.S., but was also by far the most heavily federally funded.

Torture fits perfectly into the Skinnerian scheme as it is the ultimate behavior-modification technique, infinitely more terrifying than death.

If APA was indeed the vector by which Skinnerian psych became dominant, that in turn would indicate it had been co-opted, probably by the CIA, long before it became a collaborator in torture.

In this context, it is also significant that Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman testified that Washington state (the Puget Sound area in particular), is a favorite Ruling Class rat lab for the perfection of techniques and technologies of oppression.

Too bad there is no longer investigative reporting of the depth and quality essential to put all these pieces together, as the resultant scoop would no doubt reveal yet another dimension of how the One Percent has become the most diabolically omnipotent Ruling Class in human history.

 

* * *

WHY MARTIAL LAW might be demanded by the One Percenters and obediently imposed by their political vassals, whether in Baltimore or anywhere else in the United States, is made obvious by the 99 Percent's ever-intensifying grievances. 

As noted in The Real News telecast linked above, the same unending Working Class despair that boiled over in Baltimore may eventually do likewise throughout the nation. 

The sneering, morally imbecilic indifference of the capitalist Ruling Class is already provoking demonstrations, strikes and riots. Despite the violence with which even peaceful dissent is routinely suppressed, Working Class discontent may eventually explode into open rebellion. 

And now, as if to vocalize that same anger, Sen. Bernie Sanders has announced his presidential candidacy. More than any other contemporary politician, he dares speak the language of the oppressed. 

He damned the $7. 25 federal minimum wage  as a “starvation wage” that cannot sustain U.S. families. He denounced so-called “free trade” as an ongoing disaster that has shut down “almost 60,000 factories in our country...since 2001.” 

But Sanders has no chance of winning the White House.

As to what will defeat him, its name – at least in this space – is Moron Nation, where labeling people “socialist” is akin to calling them sons-of-bitches or bastards. The product of 70 years of methodical conditioning, this anti-socialist bias was demonstrated by 60 percent of the respondents  to a recent Pew poll. 

No political campaign ever has undone such brainwashing in a year's time. 

That's why Moron Nation may truly be forever. It is the realm where the oppressed are reduced to such ignorance – and ever afterward imprisoned therein – they always vote against their own economic interests. 

Hence they do not respond to Sanders' long-overdue rhetoric. They are not mobilized by the ongoing disclosures and public acknowledgments of our overlords' viciousness. (Were it otherwise, U.S. censorship would be even more total than that of Nazi Germany.) 

But no formal censorship is necessary here because the denizens of Moron Nation are so self-obsessed they have no social conscience at all. They react only when they themselves are victims. And then – never mind capitalism has just reduced them to helplessness – they blame only themselves. Verily, Ann Rand rules. 

Meanwhile the alternative press works toward the hoped-for moment of Moron Nation's eventual awakening.

That's no doubt what prompted Reporter Deirdre Fulton to scoop the world on the latest Affordable Care Act atrocity – how the insurance barons are cheating women out of free birth control and reproductive health care.

Citing Women's Law Center investigative reports, Fulton revealed that insurance companies across the country are also “violating a slew of other women's health requirements related to maternity care and more.”

What Fulton did not tell us – though it was clearly implied by her report – is the sheer magnitude of the Obamacare problem strongly suggests three damning facts: (A)-the cheating is premeditated; (B)- the president is aware of the violations; but (C)-he has (typically) chosen to protect the lawbreaking capitalists from prosecution. 

Not that I am surprised. 

As I remarked: 

Given the vast sums of corporate money specifically underwriting the war against women (and generally financing the campaign to impose Christian theocracy on the United States), the Women's Law Center findings are hardly surprising.

Moreover, the fact the federal government is doing nothing to enforce these deliberate violations of ACA confirms the closeted misogyny of the Obama Administration first revealed by how he knowingly gave Christian fanatics the upper hand in writing birth-control policy, for which see Elizabeth Schulte's report entitled "How Obama allowed the right to take over the debate," at SocialistWorker.org.

As for Sen. Patty Murray, she is a typical Ayn Rand Democrat, talks like a New Dealer at election time (she's up for re-election in 2016), but reliably votes like a hard-right Republican on economic issues. Hence to expect her to actually remedy the problem would be like expecting the pope to endorse free abortion on demand.

(Note: Despite the fact I have been posting here for at least five years, Common Dreams' new [and newly malicious] management regards me as a "new poster," hence restricts me accordingly, including denying me the right to post links. Hence (1)-my apology for the lack of a link to the Elizabeth Schulte piece cited above [which is otherwise extremely difficult to find]; and (2)-the probability that – given the restrictions so maliciously imposed – I will never trouble myself to post here again.)

 

What makes it difficult to find is how the editors at Socialist Worker – for reasons known only to themselves – keep burying it. Their most recent ploy is to change its title: Now it's merely “How the right took over the debate” and is linked here. 

By the way, the malign influence of religious fanatics  on USian politics is a story older than the Republican Party or for that matter the republic itself. But the most informative work on the topic remains – at least in my opinion – Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). 

However the main point here is that despite investigation by the Women's Law Center and Fulton's bold reporting of its findings, nothing is likely to change.

And with Christian misogyny turned into official policy by a Republican landslide in 2016, the plight of USian women will radically worsen. 

(It was women, remember – the angry women of Petrograd's Lesnoy Textile Works, furious at their bosses for firing five union organizers and fed up with capitalist depredations in general – who started the Russian Revolution.)

* * *

THE BEST ESSAYS on Baltimore's immediate revolutionary significance appeared under Daniel Patrick Welch's byline in Consortium News and in a Morgan Freeman interview RSN picked up from Newsweek. 

Welch gets right to it: 

“The youth of Baltimore are rising and expressing a pent up rage that is centuries in the making. It is not for me to tut-tut and impose my idea of political organization. The Left needs to watch, and learn. Look at who is protecting whom, who is threatening whom, who is siding with whom. Judge the media. Judge the police state. Judge a white supremacist society in all of its tentacles that shape our perception and experience in so many fields. This is the lens through which to understand what’s going on.” 

Freeman is equally outspoken.  “That unrest [in Baltimore] has nothing to do with terrorism at all, except the terrorism we suffer from the police,” he is quoted as saying.

But for most black people, as for a significant number of Leftist whites, there remains the underlying anger, grief and hopelessness inflicted by Obama the Orator's obviously pre-planned shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. That's especially true now, as he ever-more-defiantly reveals the worshipful obedience with which he serves his white One Percent masters and the bottomless contempt with which he views Working Class people of all races. 

Or as Robert Reich put it, discussing why we feel so powerless,  “The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.” 

 

Reich's column prompted, via its comment thread, an angry exchange with a poster screen-named davidr, who refuses to accept that capitalism responds only to vastly superior force, that the sole former epicenter of that force was the Soviet Union, and that its absence is what now gives the capitalists absolute freedom to rule with infinite greed and whatever savagery they think they can get away with. 

Here is the concluding graf of what the poster said: 

We have learned what to do: break up overly concentrated power; diffuse social goods; organize & don't despair. There's no end point, no equipoise of power, just incremental change. But we can do as much in our 40 years as FDR did in his. (Emphasis added.)

Here is what I said in response:

With all due respect, you forget it was the One Percent's absolute terror of the Soviet Union and its Red Army that made the New Deal possible.

Capitalists are definitively Evil. They enact humanitarian reforms only when revolutionary violence or the threat thereof leaves them no other alternative.

But without that threat, the capitalists quickly revert to their true and truly savage moral imbecility, the mindset of a serial killer imposed, a la Ayn Rand, via morally imbecilic governance. 

Thus the New Deal: born to counteract the threat of revolution, slain when the threat itself had been slain. 

That's why the death of the Soviet Union was also the death, forever, of both the American Dream and the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.

 

Davidr answered, belittling my comment with the snide arrogance of a professional pedagogue lecturing the class dunce. My retort was polite but assertive: 

I have never read an essay on history that contains so many correctly stated facts but is yet so radically wrong in its conclusions.

On the eve of FDR's first election, the U.S. was on the brink of a Communist revolution. Even in comparison to the present, the party was the best-organized such group in U.S. history and the third largest ever.

Meanwhile, because of huge popular support for Nazism particularly in the South and southern Middle West, the U.S. was also on the brink of a civil war that would have erupted had the revolution begun. 

The Ruling Class meanwhile was divided. On one side were the One Percenters who had financed the rise of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany and now were financing Nazism here at home. (This is the same Ruling Class cabal that in 1934 plotted with Hitler in the Bankers Plot, the failed Nazi/Wall Street effort to overthrow FDR.) On the other side were the more liberal-minded One Percenters – of whom FDR was one – who like their pro-Nazi peers were terrified of Communism but regarded fascism as...well, unAmerican. 

That FDR prevailed was not a miracle at all when you factor in his election was – largely on orders from Moscow – supported by the most unified Left the U.S. has ever known. 

That said, there is not the space here to correct all your erroneous conclusions. I'm sorry to say if your propagandistic view is the byproduct of what passes for education in today's U.S., we are in deep trouble indeed.

 

My words prompted another dunce-cap diatribe, including a “sic” on my reference to the Bankers Plot. This time I was a bit less restrained: 

To put it in the most simple terms possible: 

Firstly, remember the core function of capitalist ideology: the repositioning of profound evil – specifically infinite greed and selfishness – to the height of virtue. 

Secondly, the Soviet Union – never mind it was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be – offered an apparently humanitarian alternative to capitalism's malevolence. 

By so doing, it forced the capitalists to ameliorate their infinite savagery.

Hence FDR's New Deal, JFK's New Frontier, LBJ's Great Society and the subsequent Democrats until Clinton who merely lip-served New Deal ideology.

Thirdly, the Soviet collapse, in 1991, was literally the death of capitalism's only competitor. (China, via its need for industrialization, had by then already been co-opted by capitalism.)

Lastly, with the world now and forever purged of rival ideologies and systems, the capitalists are again free to indulge the serial-killer moral imbecility of their true selves – this time forever...that is, until capitalist savagery renders our species extinct.

Do you get it now?

Or is this still too complex an argument?

(Grammatical asnide: "Bankers Plot" – no apostrophe – is accepted usage for the same reason "Veterans Administration" or "Drivers License" – again no apostrophes – are accepted usages, though each is technically incorrect.)

 

Yes, dear readers, my “asnide” was deliberate. 

* * *

DESPITE MY PESSIMISM about the likelihood of successful resistance to the imperial tyranny that has subjugated the land I loved and swore to defend, there remains Robert Parry to describe how the empire might destroy itself by its own folly.

And then a retrospective act of penance by one of Parry's colleagues reminds me nothing short of heroism can steer the proverbial ship of state back to a saner, safer course. 

*** *** *** 

MAY DAY is the common name for International Workers Day. It is officially recognized throughout the world. 

Nevertheless, celebrations of it are banned in many places. They are prohibited by capitalist authorities, including in parts of the United States, where it is denounced as a “Communist” holiday. 

May Day and the night before it is also Beltane, which on the old, more ecologically accurate calendar of pre-Christian Europe was the first day of summer. It is celebrated throughout the European continent, where Goddess-centered paganism is now the fastest growing religion. It is likewise celebrated – though not so publicly – in North America. 

As with May Day, celebrations of Beltane are forbidden in many places. They are prohibited by religious authorities and/or political authorities so influenced, including in parts of the U.S., which with its relentless wars against women's reproductive freedom is trending ever-more-officially toward Christian theocracy. 

Here, as a follow-up to this week's cover shot, are more views of May Day's political expressions.

And here, both for inspiration and cosmic balance, are footage and still photographs of how the Scots in Edinburgh celebrate Beltane.  (Hint: many of the photos are stunning – especially the professional work in Getty Images.) 

Given how enraged the capitalists are by all such expressions of freedom – their Ruling Class greed threatened by a labor movement that refuses to die and their vindictive Abrahamic prudery challenged by the resurrection of the Goddess and its threat to the entire patriarchal system – imagine what we might accomplish if the two groups were to unite. 

Imagine too what our overlords might do in retaliation.

In “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” the book that was approaching publication just as it was destroyed by the mysterious fire that in 1983 obliterated all my life's work, I noted the converging views of socialists and peoples of the Goddess and dared suggest such a coalescence might be our evolutionary salvation. 

To some extent, it's already happening. 

For those who wish to learn more about this resurgent paganism in which material being is not just acknowledged as the substance of the stars but is honored as the flesh of the divine, I (again) suggest Barbara Mor's The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (Harper San Francisco: 1991). 

LB/27 April-3 May 2015

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