How Charleston Exemplifies Our Imperial Malignancy

ASK YOURSELF WHAT the Charleston atrocity  has in common with the Vietnam War,  and you've got yourself the intellectual equivalent of a two-base hit.

Ask yourself what Charleston has in common with austerity,  with Ferguson and Baltimore  or with the ever-escalating savagery of the Gestapo-minded federal police  and the murderous brutality of their federally militarized local counterparts,  and you're rounding third base.

Ask yourself what Charleston and these other atrocities have in common with the the Trans-Pacific Partnership  and its implicitly genocidal war of austerity  against the U.S. and global 99 Percent, you've belted an out-of-the-park homer.

How, your critics will demand, could you possibly reach such an “unthinkable” conclusion about the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

First you probably noted, as we all did, the murderous bigotry underlying the statement attributed to suspected Charleston Terrorist Dylann Roof – “I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go” – “go” in this instance being synonymous with “die.”

Next maybe it dawns on you that “you have to go” was precisely the message in the slaying of Medgar Evers, in the church bombing  that killed Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair, and in the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy three months later. It was repeated ad nauseam in the years of political murders that followed: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner;  Malcolm X; Viola Liuzzo;  Martin Luther King Jr.; Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy; Fred Hampton;  the white kids gunned down by Ohio National Guard troops at Kent State  (Allison B. Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer); the black kids gunned down by white Mississippi cops at Jackson State  (Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green); and let us not forget the labor-movement martyr Karen Silkwood. 

Lastly maybe you realize the same übermenschen bigotry and arrogance and morally imbecilic indifference that killed all these people also explains why the One Percent is ramming TPP down our collective throats no matter the devastation it will inflict on nearly everyone else.

The One Percenters are utterly indifferent to the fact at least 62 percent of us  already opposed TPP and its fast-track coup last year, long before the associated controversy reached its present magnitude. And they're no doubt ecstatic over TPP's consequences – particularly that it will kill tens of thousands of us, possibly millions – in slow-motion executions inflicted by joblessness, loss of health care, increases in prescription-drug prices  and increased doses of (already genocidal) austerity in general.

“We have to do it,” say the One Percenters and their political vassals. 

What they dare not express – at least outside their posh boardrooms and luxuriant private clubs – is the reasoning their policies make undeniable.

Remember that under capitalism, greed is elevated to the ultimate virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever uttered. Remember too the sole purpose of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Atop that,  the One Percenters and their politicians believe there are too many of us 99 Percenters. They believe our needs are draining their bank accounts and diminishing their assets. They want those of us who are most obviously no longer exploitable for profit – that is, those of us who are elderly and/or disabled and/or chronically impoverished – to be exterminated first. That's why they're slashing the services -- food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, even Social Security-- on which our lives depend.

But since death camps are no longer fashionable, we're to be killed by austerity instead.

See it now? As it is in Charleston, so it is throughout the USian Empire, the de facto Fourth Reich.

*** *** ***

Sanders Calls Charleston What It Is: Racist Terrorism

The only non-opportunistic and therefore genuinely humanitarian statement issued by a U.S. politician in the wake of the Charleston atrocity was from Sen. Bernie Sanders, a declared socialist running as a Democrat for the U.S. presidency. 

I reproduce its full text here because its unpretentiousness and its laudable  absence of inflammatory rhetoric makes it so unlike the utterances of those politicians who are trying to co-opt the murders to bolster a favored cause.

Sanders seems to speak directly from his heart:

What transpired in Charleston, South Carolina last night was not just a tragedy, it was an act of terror.

Nine of our fellow Americans were murdered while praying in a historic church because of the color of their skin. This senseless violence fills me with outrage, disgust, and a deep, deep sadness.

This hateful killing is a horrific reminder that, while we have made important progress in civil rights for all of our people, we are far from eradicating racism.

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is one that has been attacked, burned, and rebuilt throughout its 200 year history. While their community mourns now, they will rebuild, and they will emerge stronger than before.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and their congregation. But we can add our actions to our prayers. The families and the community that have been hurt so very badly by this brutality need our help. Let us stand with them in their time of mourning.

You can help by making a donation to the Emanuel AME Church community today.

*** *** ***

Obama: It's Not Terrorism or Racism, It's Guns

(I began the following in response to a Reuters report republished by Reader Supported News. The report tells us President Obama is citing the Charleston murders not to engender a dialogue on USian racism but to bolster his campaign for forcible disarmament of the U.S. 99 Percent.) 

DESPITE THE ESCALATING campaigns of denial and distraction, let us not forget white racism is the sole cause of the Charleston atrocity and all other atrocities like it.

Post-Katrina polling shows about 75 percent of the nation's whites claimed they believed there was “no racism” in the government's deliberately genocidal (non) response – an obvious falsehood or self-deception only a racist could utter.

But addressing U.S. racism forthrightly would require public examination of the nation's (alleged) conscience, which in turn would require acknowledging the genocide committed against First Nations peoples, against African slaves and even now against their African-American descendants.

Because  our species has presumably progressed a bit since the days of Nazi Germany, all but the most racist whites generally closet their bigotry. In fact it's internationally embarrassing. That's why U.S. racism is allowed out only when it serves today's (equally genocidal) Ruling Class austerity agenda, typically as opposition to anything labeled "welfare," even health care, education, mass transit.

But now – with the Ruling Class so terrified of revolution it is hoarding ammunition – the refusal to confront racism has become psychological warfare. Note how the Ruling Class is trying to convince us it was Guns and the Second Amendment – not racism – that caused the Charleston atrocity.

What a clever Big Lie. How diabolically Machiavellian. Anything to further the total disarmament of the Working Class lest it unify in rebellion.

Not that I'm surprised by Obama's spin-doctoring. The One Percent's skyrocketing fear of economically provoked insurrection is increasingly obvious. 

Meanwhile, Reader Supported News – which does a vital and praiseworthy job of seeing to it we're kept abreast of what truly obtains – is in dire need of life-sustaining contributions. Any financially generous OAN readers please take note.

*** *** ***

In Seattle Area, Racism Means Bad Mass Transit

(Smiley-faced prose by Leonard Garfield in Crosscut, an eclectic, variable-quality Seattle on-line daily, prompted me to pen yet another diatribe denouncing the bigotry that fuels the Puget Sound region's self-destructive hostility to adequate mass transit.) 

GARFIELD'S PIECE IS PollyAnna propaganda/ lipstick-on-a-pig boosterism at its worst.

Yes, Seattle's long-ago accomplishments in the realm of public transport were very real.

But they are reduced to meaninglessness by the region's present-day hatred and contempt for those of us who are genuinely transit-dependent.

Goaded by a combination of "we-don-wanna-be-like-New-York" xenophobia intensified by racism and Ayn Rand socioeconomic bigotry, local voters have ensured the region's mass transit is at least a half-century behind its counterparts elsewhere in this (notoriously anti-transit) nation.

And now these voters are making it obvious – repeatedly obvious – they intend to keep it backward forever.

Given the electorate's haughty claim to environmental enlightenment, its anti-transit-user politics are astonishingly hypocritical – undoubtedly the most breathtaking example of political hypocrisy to be found anywhere in today's United States.

Hypocritical too is the not-unrelated anti-union malice that so frequently lurks behind the region's deliberately deceptive "progressive" facade. Local unions embrace mass transit, local voters reject it.

Indeed, the hypocrisies of Pugetopolis “progressives” remind me of the hypocrisies of old-time Southern Democrats: speak the New Deal language, walk the Ku Klux walk.

No doubt that's why some call this realm "Mississippi on Puget Sound."

However “progressive” its electorate might seem at first glance, its lack of adequate transit, its regressive tax structure and its worst-in-the-nation hostility to tenant rights proves it is reflexively fascist at heart.

Above all else it is aggressively white/bourgeois and relentlessly self-identified with the One Percent – with transit (or rather the maliciously sustained lack thereof) – employed as a gatekeeper to lock out "undesirables."

Which – obviously – includes anybody who can't afford to own and operate an automobile.

Here though is where Garfield's core hypothesis is absolutely correct. Puget Sound's (anti-transit-user) past, which includes widespread condemnation of mass transit as a form of "welfare,” will undoubtedly define its (anti-transit-user) future.

*** *** ***

Russia Vows Retaliation if U.S. Aggression Continues

(In keeping with this week's theme – that TPP and Charleston are kindred outrages – here is what I wrote after I recognized the news in the above headline as official U.S. policy toward anyone it regards as a threat to capitalist governance: “You're trying to take over our country...you have to die.”)

AS I HAVE been saying for at least three years now, the U.S. has become – both domestically and abroad – the de facto Fourth Reich.

Its foreign policy is the 21st Century equivalent of Hitler's: world conquest, the total subjugation of all peoples in capitalist slavery, the methodical albeit slow-motion extermination of those of us who for what ever reason are not exploitable for profit.

And just as a poster screen-named Dongi said on the news report's comment thread, the U.S. psyche has been taken over by “some sort of collective force” demanding wars of global conquest. (Precisely the same thing happened in Nazi Germany.)

That said, thank you, A_Har, for the video link.  It is not just informative; it also gives us a glimpse of the vast superiority of Russian intellectuals over the Moron Nation dunderheads who are bullying the world in an extinction-level conflict, thermonuclear jocks versus thermonuclear chess masters.

In fact U.S. foreign policy views the world as a U.S. school yard in macrocosm. The bullies rule. Boiling over with envious hatred, they ruthlessly attack and try to subjugate their intellectual superiors. But the school officials refuse to intervene because such might-makes-right savagery is the core truth of “the American Way.”

Sometimes though the victims retaliate...and in this instance they have intercontinental ballistic missiles. 

*** *** ***

Understanding Media (with apologies to McLuhan)

(A pointed but nevertheless inadequately damning Thom Hartmann column on what's wrong with mainstream media prompted me to offer my own somewhat more uncensored view. In keeping with our Charleston/TPP/Global-Conquest theme, I note that “exceptionalism” is most often a code-word for “white supremacy.”)

U.S. MASS MEDIA is what it is – a privatized version of Josef Goebbels' Nazi German Ministry of Propaganda – because it is owned by the same people who own the two major political parties and the federal, state and local government.

Whether labeled Ruling Class or One Percent, this cabal of capitalist aristocrats has the same absolute power formerly possessed by Adolf Hitler. They are the tyrants who not only rule us but shape our consciousness by their ever-more-total control of information.

Nor is there much hope for improvement. The triumphant imperial trade coalition – which defies the will of the U.S. electorate in its effort to  further slash wages, send still more jobs abroad and gleefully fling millions more U.S. workers into inescapable poverty – did everything in its power to serve the One Percent by blatantly destroying the last remnants of the American experiment in representative democracy and the so-called “American Dream.”

The One Percent's long-term, global goal is replacing the policy-making functions of local, state and national governments with zero-tolerance edicts handed down by dictatorially empowered boards of corporate managers. Under this system, the only purpose of traditional “government” is to maintain the goon squads of police and soldiers essential to enforce the corporate decrees.

For a prophetic view of existence beneath the boots of the resultant global imperium, look at the wretched conditions that prevailed in the coal towns of Appalachia, where the mine owners also owned everything else – houses, stores, schools, clinics – and every person as well.

As part of its march toward the global corporate imperium, the One Percent's more immediate goal is the reduction of the United States to fascist oligarchy – actually a uniquely USian form of Nazism in which the corporate cabal has replaced the individual despot, with the mandatory ideology a combination of (implicitly white) exceptionalism, Christian intolerance and Ayn Rand socioeconomic savagery. And – yes – exceptionalism with its implication of divine-right rule is indeed the 21st Century version of the Nazis' concept of übermenschen or Master Race.

Despite the implicit whiteness of exceptionalism, it is no accident the present U.S. figurehead is Barack the Betrayer, who makes no secret of being the tyrannical cabal's most cravenly obedient servant thus far. Indeed it is the Betrayer who personifies the One Percent's strategy and tactics. He is not just the most malicious liar ever to occupy the presidency, but in truth a hard-Right Republican who used his membership in the Democratic Party and his own skin color as false flags to scam the U.S. electorate into imagining he might provide desperately sought relief from the succession of One Percent vassals who have lorded it over us since the coup of 22 November 1963.

The One Percenters need the U.S. not for its (now-surplus) workforce or its (irremediably poisoned) agricultural lands, but rather for the cannon-fodder enlistments compelled by its otherwise-inescapable poverty and the goon-squad function of its imperial war machine.

Mass media's role in this era of unprecedented deception is merely to provide its imprimatur, thereby giving whichever Big Lie whatever appearance of truth the One Percent demanded.

As Goebbels repeatedly affirmed to Hitler, taking control of policy is only half the victory essential to total dictatorship. Full victory is achieved only when policy and the public mind are each controled with identical absolutism – precisely what happened in Germany after 1933, precisely what has happened here in the United States in the aftermath of 22 November 1963, the subsequent decade of political murders. and the Reichstag Firer of 9/11 – a slow-motion coup that gathers speed and momentum as it approaches its terminal events.

Which, by the way, explains the death-blow to representative democracy dealt by the anti-worker trade vote of 18 June. The national mobilization against fast-track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership made it clear a vast majority of the voters – I have seen figures ranging from 55 percent to 80 percent – oppose so-called "free trade." But, exactly as I predicted would happen, Congress dropped any and all pretense of representing anyone but the One Percenters, and even here in Moron Nation, such a brutal slap-in-the-face cannot be portrayed as anything other than what it was.

This means the era of charade democracy is over, and the era of unapologetic tyranny is upon us.

But I wonder how U.S. mass media – the world's first fully privatized government propaganda machine – will play the story. Will they try to explain it as yet another manifestation of how 9/11 "changed everything"? Or will they merely try to flush it down the Orwell hole?

*** *** ***

“Defining Issue" Is Whether Our Species Survives

(Thom Hartmann agrees with the International Monetary Fund's surprise conclusion that  “the defining issue of our time” is inequality  and argues accordingly. I usually agree with Hartmann, but this time he and the IMF are both dead wrong.)

ACTUALLY THE “DEFINING issue of our time” is whether life as we know it – including our own species – will survive capitalism.

As evidenced by our capitalist masters' escalating efforts to provoke an extinction-level war with Russia and their ongoing refusal to act against terminal climate change, they have already concluded we are a dead species on a dying planet.

Indeed it is an Occam's Razor moment of the most terrible sort: no other hypothesis explains the totality of Ruling Class behaviors, including the no-tomorrow savagery of their run-amok greed –  a global orgy of exploitation, oppression, contractual theft and outright armed robbery with no precedent in human experience.

That said, such an uncharacteristically humanitarian conclusion from the International Monetary Fund, which is one of capitalism's chief economic executioners, indicates the Ruling Class is finally awakening to the fact the global proletariat – even broken as it is by the One Percent's imperial omnipotence – is not so subjugated as to plod submissively into the grave.

And it makes no difference whether the genocidal intent is obvious (as when the killing is done by soldiers and police), or whether it is disguised by rhetoric (as when the mechanism of murder is euphemized as "austerity").

Obviously the real message of the IMF study is that the Ruling Class is becoming terrified.

Ninety-eight years ago, faced by the same sort of hopeless inequality and abject powerlessness that has been inflicted on us all by the One Percent of today, the Russian people rose up in a revolution that truly changed the world. Though that revolution was later betrayed and undone, its triumphs remain part of Russia's collective consciousness, the wellsprings of a yearning as profoundly heartfelt as Dark Age Britain's folk- remembrance of Arthur and their desperate longing for the rescue-from-chaos they symbolized as “the return of the king.”

Foolishly we regard our overlords as stupid, and in so doing we commit what to Sun Tzu was the warrior's ultimate and ultimately fatal error: we underestimate our enemy. We fail to acknowledge the horrid truth the One Percent is brilliant – diabolically so – and in its Machiavellian wisdom it no doubt recognizes that as the Russians once rose to fling off the shackles and hangman's-knots of capitalism, so might they rise up again.

And if it is not too late for our species – if it is not the ultimate absurdity of revolution by a doomed species on a ruined planet – this time the revolution might go as global as the malevolence of capitalism has already gone. 

If our species survives – or maybe as the very fulcrum of our survival – that is surely the legacy of the inequality thrust on us by capitalism. That is its teachable essence.

And because the Russians have already learned that lesson so well they were able, for a time, to teach it to the rest of the world, that is perhaps why the One Percent in the person of the United States government is now trying to provoke a war with Russia: anything to maintain capitalism's imperial power, anything to perpetuate its signature inequality, anything – even the dying gasp of one triumphant Kochroach to another,”we had to destroy the planet to save it.”

(With Solstice Greetings to all: may our species live to see the Sun turn North again.)

LB/21 June 2015

-30-

Anti-Black Slander from the Democratic Party?

THE OLDEST QUARREL inside the Left is undoubtedly the fight between pacifists and those who believe humanitarian reforms can be wrest from the capitalist Ruling Class only by violence or credible threats thereof. 

Events in Ferguson  re-heated the dispute to a simmer, but Baltimore  brought it to a rolling boil, and last week it bubbled onto the pages of mainstream media. 

Yet that's only half the story. The other half is that one writer, Jonathan Chait of the aggressively upscale New York Magazine, is using the discussion to slyly blame U.S. African Americans  for the downfall of the Democratic Party.

Thus, in Chait's obliquely presented view, black rebelliousness is responsible for the party's reduction to the me-too fascism that has characterized Democratic foreign policy since the ascendance of Lyndon Baines Johnson to the presidency, and defined its domestic policy since President Jimmy Carter's theocratic signature  enshrined the Republican war against women as federal policy. 

Meanwhile the appearance of the violence-versus-nonviolence debate in mainstream publications is, I believe, of profound political and historical significance. It is unlike anything I have seen during the nearly 60 years I have been a professional writer, editor and/or photographer. Nor have I heard of its like occurring anytime during the 75 years I've been living this lifetime. 

Moreover – and let us not forget this all-important point – Chait and the writers he cites all represent the Ruling Class regardless of the political disguises assumed by their publishers. Thus it is arguable the widespread coverage suddenly being given this issue is the most accurate yardstick yet of Ruling Class fears that Working Class anger in the U.S. is approaching the ignition-point of revolution. 

That's why Chait's opening graf, which builds a pro-violence argument he soon demolishes with volleys of academic research, is worth quoting in totality, especially for its links: 

The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon . “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox's German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.” In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson  asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds to answer her own question in the negative.

But then three paragraphs later Chait not only refutes the writers he cited. He also reaches a conclusion I would expect to find – albeit stated in more obviously racist terms – only in an avowedly Rightist journal:

The 1960s saw two overlapping waves of protest: nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations, and urban rioting. The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson swept every region of the country except the South running a liberal, pro-civil-rights campaign; in 1968, Richard Nixon won a narrower victory on the basis of social backlash.

Because I (of course) do not read New York Magazine, I owe Margaret Flowers and her excellent on-line daily Popular Resistance a salute of thanks for making Chait's “Riots and Social Change” available to a proletarian such as I. PR routinely does a damn fine job of bringing to Working Class attention important stories we 99 Percenters would otherwise be denied by the nation's various mechanisms of de facto censorship, but this time Flowers outdid herself.

All of which is prefatory to what I said on the associated comment thread. But it is more than just another en passant response. It is important for two reasons: it addresses the revisionist history by which the Ruling Class increasingly beclouds what happened within the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It also – or so I hope – alerts a few significantly placed people to a new Democratic Big Lie as potentially malicious as the “welfare queen” Big Lie the Democrats borrowed from the Republicans to justify enactment of genocidal “welfare reforms” in 1995.

(My apology for the fact there are a few repetitions between the explanatory grafs above and those below. The repetitions are unavoidable because I have reprinted my original comment word-for-word.)

Let us not forget that as a writer for aggressively upscale New York Magazine, Mr. Chait's perspective is necessarily that of the Ruling Class.

Hence the subtle but nevertheless implicit race-bating and victim-blaming in his statement that "The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order."

The truth, however, is quite different. The New Deal coalition was not "crack(ed) open" by the Republican Party but rather by the Democrats themselves.

President Lyndon Johnson's 180-degree turn in foreign policy immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led directly to the Southeast Asian (aka "Vietnam") War.

In turn -- and exactly as the Ruling Class intended -- the war destroyed the Working Class solidarity that had created and sustained the New Deal. The war divided the U.S. Working Class -- what today we would call the 99 Percent -- into two venomously hostile camps: the sneeringly contemptuous draft-exempt elite and the equally embittered draft-bait, cannon-fodder majority of those of us who (because we lacked the money and influence to bribe our way out of the draft), had no choice but to serve.

Contrary to the implications of Mr. Chait's remark -- a clever falsehood that seems designed to protect white Ruling Class Democrats by blaming blacks for the party's troubles -- all the significant non-racial divisions in present-day U.S. politics date from that history-changing Vietnam-era divide.

As to racist hate-mongering by the Republicans, that indeed occurred, but again contrary to Mr. Chait's disingenuous claim, the class warfare implicit in the Vietnam draft had already destroyed the New Deal.

Vietnam had also -- because of the tacitly genocidal U.S. policy of sending a preponderance of African-American combat troops to fight its colonial wars -- radically inflamed the long-simmering racial injustices that underlay the riots.

The Republican Party, which since the 1920s has been the primary vessel of U.S. fascism, predictably pounced with malicious glee on the resultant white fear. Obviously -- at least in retrospect -- this too was precisely as the Ruling Class intended.

Subsequent U.S. history makes it equally obvious what happened next. The Ruling Class deftly expanded Vietnam's divisiveness by manipulating it into a plethora of profoundly emotional clashes over firearms, jobs, unions, welfare, immigration, education, abortion, sexuality, Christian supremacy and ultimately the prevalent definitions of patriotism and what it means to be a U.S. citizen.

Again exactly as the Ruling Class intends, the resultant hostilities -- perpetuated as they are by a media machine more psychologically effective than even Josef Goebbels might have imagined -- destroy any future possibility of ever again restoring 99 Percent solidarity.

(Disclosure: I am not a Vietnam veteran but am a Vietnam-era vet: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1965, three years active duty, overseas service in Korea 1961-1962, honorably discharged after completion of three-year reserve obligation).

LB/8-14 June 2015

-30-

First the Bad News, Then the Amusements

THIS WEEK'S COLUMN is mostly a collection of confessions, observations, quotes and memos originally written on scrap paper or in my wallet-sized index-card notebook, the latter a thoughtful gift from my second wife Adrienne, to whom again thanks.

But before I share these always random, occasionally lewd and sometimes humorous jottings, here as stark reminders of the time and place in which we live (and therefore in fulfillment of OAN's journalistic obligation) are links to a few stories that typify the deteriorating human condition and the sorry state of our nation and our world.

As always in these darkest of years of our species' 200,000-year history, the applicable acronym is SNAFU. A linguistic relic of World War Twice, it stands for “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.”

The week's most unsurprising but nevertheless vital news was another study that has confirmed the U.S. experiment in representative democracy is dead – that we 99 Percenters are now the ever-more-enslaved subjects of an increasingly tyrannical capitalist oligarchy. Meanwhile a separate poll confirms we the people are moving ever closer to the flash-point of rising up angry. Both reports were covered by Thom Hartmann in a single story. 

I did not have time to comment on Hartmann's work because my entire week was consumed by first-of-the-month chores. With an automobile I'd have accomplished these tasks in less than a single day. But because I no longer have a car and am thereby dependent on the “welfare” provided by mass transit,  what formerly took me about five hours by automobile now takes five days by bus.

The methodical reduction of mass transit  in the Puget Sound region and elsewhere throughout the United States exemplifies the increasingly obvious refusal of the One Percent to attempt even minimal amelioration  of terminal climate change – another factor in the 99 Percent's increasing rebelliousness.

Meanwhile the climate disasters described by Amy Goodman's too-cautious academic guests give us additional glimpses of the death-dealing future  our species will probably not survive. Such is capitalism's deadly curse upon ourselves, our descendants and our planet.

How the Ruling Class will respond if we dare foment effective resistance is already well known, exemplified not just by the crushing of the Occupy Movement,  but by the extermination-and-disruption campaign with which local cops and federal secret police destroyed the Black Panthers  during the 1960s and 1970s.

Obviously the de facto Fourth Reich is nothing new.

As Bill Quigley reports for Reader Supported News, already “2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one in every 35 adults. We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people inside are poor and black. Here are 40 reasons why.” 

Lastly, there's One Percent's Final Solution, “we had to destroy the village to save it.” First applied in Vietnam, the destruction-is-salvation approach now jeopardizing us globally, as events in Ukraine take another step toward World War III: “we had to destroy the planet to save it.”

(Yes, dear readers, just as you might have surmised, the doctrine of destruction as salvation is derived from the dogmas of Abrahamic religion. Note the Biblical flood, the fates of Sodom and Gomorrah, and most especially the nauseating rationale for burning heretics  at the stake.)

The only remaining question is when will SNAFU become FUBAR, the Vietnam War's acronym for “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.”

 *** *** ***

NOW THE PROMISED randomness:

Assuming reasonably long lives, it seems that as we age toward the grave, we become ever more brutally honest with ourselves. That's when we discover savoring our memories of love is a helluva lot more rewarding than remembering our professional triumphs. (Scribbled on the back of a grocery list while waiting in a Fred Meyer checkout line, probably in 2010.)

*

FiboNazi numbers: mathematical data the Nazis (whether followers of Hitler, Ayn Rand or both), publish to support the Big Lies that conceal the ruinous and often deadly consequences of their policies. (Sometime in 2014, with apologies to Leonardo Fibonacci.)

*

The greatest barrier to combating the U.S. plague of moral imbecility is the lack of a suitably magnetic role model. (Jotted on an index-card sometime in 2009, no doubt prompted by my dawning realization Barack Obama was the most calculatedly malicious liar ever to hold the presidency.)

*

Tacoma – a place where people pick their noses in public. (Undated, probably 2012.)

*

The lessor of two evils: a man or woman forced by poverty to lease a pair of demon-haunted rooms in a vampire-infested slum. (Undated.)

*

Social documentary photography and photojournalism in general is ultimately about expressing human emotion as visual geometry and the choreography of light and darkness. That's probably why those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families so often make the best photojournalists. Normally in patriarchal culture, only women are taught to read and heed the nuances of nonverbal language, but in the hurtful and potentially deadly miasma of familial dysfunction, that skill is vital for survival regardless of one's gender. (Undated, probably 2010.)

*

For a girl-child or a woman, any patriarchal family is definitively dysfunctional. (An epiphany while typing the above, 7 June 2015.)

*

“You're not allowed to be yourself, so you try to be someone else, even if you gotta go schizo to do it.” (Said by a bus rider as he disembarked at a Pierce County mental hospital, 30 June 2012.)

 

*

“Another goddamn public-disclosure document written in the incomprehensibly turgid language Ruling Class academics use to ensure their work remains obscure.” (Undated, probably 2011, the identity of the document in question irrelevant because the judgment is so broadly applicable.)

*

Metro Gnome – an invisible creature who lurks on Seattle buses, making its presence known by chronic disruption of schedules. (Undated.)

*

We must make peace with Mother Nature lest she make war with us. (Undated).

*

Old men who become enchanted by music often do so because it is only way they will ever again hear a beautiful woman murmur in their ears. (24 August 2013.)

*

In the old days, before the media monopolies took over, daily newspaper newsrooms were refuges for bright and rebellious people from the Working Class and the declassé, and we who became journalists did so with the proud and certain knowledge our reporting could improve the human condition.

Now though the only people allowed to report the news are the pampered sons and daughters of the Ruling Class – those who feel it their duty to protect the status quo – that is, if they ever pass beyond self-obsession to consider duty at all. (Undated, probably 2011 after reading an especially biased report on the Occupy Movement.)

*

“All the adolescent boys of my generation had Circle-J races – sitting in a circle in the woods or a barn or someplace jacking off. The object was to see who could orgasm the fastest, who could shoot their load the furthest and who could produce the most come. Ever since I heard of that, I've wondered if it's why so many men have premature ejaculations.” (Anonymous female elder c. 2014.)

*

“Her boyfriend bought her a cell phone. Now he's jealous. He thinks she loves the phone more than she loves him.” (Conversation between two teenage girls on a bus, 28 July 2013.)

*

“Apropos brevity, nothing is more minimalist than a blank page.” (Note to another writer, context forgotten, 2012.)

*

Transit therapy – riding the bus all day and talking to one's self or to imaginary companions – that's our new national mental-health program. (13 September 2013)

*

If we are all how the Deity experiences herself, why are so many of us so metaphysically challenged? (During a bus ride; undated.)

*

We each combat sordidness in our own way. (April 2015.)

*

I can think of no better conclusion for this column than a heartfelt thank-you note to Thais Smedley, another of the women who so profoundly influenced my life.

In popular fiction one's initiation into manhood typically begins with the loss of one's virginity, often to an older woman. But I had lost my virginity five years earlier to a girl my own age, and the initiation you granted me that unforgettable summer afternoon in 1959 – you with your white blouse and white shorts and your wondrous mane of raven hair – was to intellectual manhood instead.

You invited me into the cool of your light and airy basement apartment there on 12th Street by the University of Tennessee, you graciously opened a can of Campbell's beef vegetable soup, heated it, poured it into a bowl and indicated I should eat it all. Obviously I was hungry. In fact I was too impoverished to afford even the 50-cent lunch in the student center, and somehow you sensed my need but were not offended by it, and we talked as I wolfed down the soup and for a few minutes afterward. Then you gave me a forbidden book, saying you thought its contents might speak to my mind and spirit, and you gently sent me on my way.

The book was Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, and – just as you suspected – it began a process that changed my life, giving me a glimpse of the true power of language and helping break my writing free of the journalistic constraints I would eventually recognize as an especially insidious form of censorship. (From notes on scrap paper, December 2011, after awakening from a dream about the real-life episode described herein.)

Now in my 75th year, I dearly hope you, Thais, will somehow see this message and know the depth of gratitude with which I have always remembered our brief encounter. Thank you, Thais; for just a moment you embodied the Muse. Thank you indeed. I wish you the very best one's advancing years can offer: sustained health and deepening contentment with the life you lived.

LB/1-7 June 2015

-30-