Loren Bliss: Outside Agitator's Notebook

I'm Fine – Kept from Posting by an Unexpectedly Time-Consuming Project

Nikki Weatherhead with her thought-provoking Occupy Tacoma sign. Photograph and posterization by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

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ESPECIALLY IN THE WAKE of the deadly and ruinous ice-storm that swept through the southern Puget Sound region earlier this week, several of you have questioned why I haven't posted here for nearly two weeks.

Actually the answer is quite simple: I'm at work on a piece of writing that is taking much longer than I anticipated. Hence the relevance of the image above: that's precisely what I'm doing – occupying my mind.

Presumably then – a stipulation always essential when one is nearly 72 years old and not in the best of health – I'll be back in a few more days.

Meanwhile I'm fine, though the storm destroyed the beautiful stand of cedars that shielded my windows from predatory eyes and protected my apartment from the scorching glare off the adjacent concrete parking lot and its mass of heat-reflector vehicles, which means that summers here will henceforth be hellish indeed. Apartments so exposed become ovens, with interior temperatures exceeding 100F even with outside temperatures seldom above the mid-80s.

Not only will there be this intolerable and potentially deadly oppression by reflected heat; the fact I'll now have to keep my venetian blinds closed 24/7 to project against the ever-searching eyes of street criminals means my window fan will be useless for cooling this apartment after dark; venetian blinds block airflow as effectively as solid walls – and the cost of air conditioning equipment plus a prohibitively expensive surcharge for the additional electricity denies me that option forever.

Such is the “terminal” in what in scientific truth should be labeled “terminal climate change,” but which – in a typical act of Orwellian malice – the Ruling Class renamed “global warming,” no doubt both to obscure the impending horror of its extreme weather and to impose maximum conceptual paralysis on the associated debate.

LB/21 January 2012

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NDAA, Forcible Disarmament of Medical Marijuana Patients, New Censorship Schemes Highlight U.S. Transition to Unabashed Fascism

OCCUPY TACOMA MARCHERS, 4 November 2011: because we can't afford to bribe the politicians, peaceful protest is our last remaining option.  Photograph  by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

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Jungians believe dreams are sometimes prophetic messages from our collective subconscious – hence for example the otherwise inexplicable nightmares reported by Carl Jung's earliest therapands, which today are understood as warnings of the previously unimaginable horrors that characterized the 20th Century.

It is in this context I glumly report that now since the President has finalized his transition from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer by signing away our constitutional rights via the National Defense Authorization Act, I have thrice dreamt of being arrested without charge or trial and hauled off to lifetime internment merely because I am an outspoken opponent of capitalism.

This is significant because I have never had such dreams before, not ever – this despite a lifetime of risky political activism including false arrest and attempts on my life by the Ku Klux Klan in retaliation for my journalistic involvement with the Civil Rights Movement c. 1963-1965.

Nor am I alone in these new and disturbing nightmares. A friend describes having similar dreams, and I cannot but wonder how many others are likewise afflicted.

Which – if the Jungian hypothesis is accurate – suggests the proverbial road ahead is a very hard road indeed.

Not that the road behind us has been all that much easier.

If indeed there is any long-term human tomorrow – a prospect made increasingly doubtful by the capitalists' ecocidal greed – future historians will undoubtedly select 22 November 1963 as the true date for the death of the American Dream and the murder of its underlying experiment in constitutional democracy.

That date – the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy – will live in infamy far longer than 7 December 1941, when Imperial Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. For Pearl Harbor was merely a lost battle, the opening fight in a victorious war, while the assassination of President Kennedy was a coup, a conquest, the death of a nation.

Its hideous truth, that we are a people conquered and reduced to slavery, is the now-undeniable message-thread that ties together all the atrocities of the following years: murder and mayhem inflicted by needless wars – Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, 9/11, Iraq again, Afghanistan again; the murders of Malcolm X, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy; the murders at Kent State and Jackson State; the murders of Fred Hampton and Karen Silkwood and the suspected murders of Paul Wellstone and John F. Kennedy Jr.; the torture-murders committed by Augusto Pinochet and all the other dictators supported by Wall Street and therefore bankrolled and protected by the U.S. government; now finally the horrors of capitalism brought home and imposed on us by the murder of the U.S. economy, downsizing and outsourcing and foreclosure and the deliberately murderous destruction of government services; and now too at home as abroad the psychological and often physical murder of capitalism's innumerable victims, our minds killed by deliberately shrunken schools and maliciously untruthful media, our bodies slain by the methodical denial of medical care or the inescapable horrors of post-industrial poverty and/or post-eviction homelessness – this unprecedented plague of murder and murderousness for profit the defining characteristic of our era.

All of these consequences of 22 November 1963 are either spelled out or implied in JFK and the Unspeakable, subtitled Why He Died and Why It Matters as if in apt anticipation of Warren Commission objections arising from the useful idiots of Moron Nation.

Written by the avowedly pacifist author James W. Douglass (Orbis Books, 2008), JFK and the Unspeakable employs the classic technique of investigative reporting, following the money and power to show us who got ruined and who got paid off. It is not conspiranoid dreck but hard-edged historical analysis, available online for $14.28 or $9.99 as a Kindle download.

Yet despite its ready availability JFK and the Unspeakable remains obscure, marketed mostly by word of mouth, the victim of methodical marginalization by a Ruling Class Media blackout unlike anything I have ever seen, a campaign of silence so relentless it confirms all our terrible suspicions about the reality of censorship here in the alleged “land of the free.”

Not that we should be surprised. Ours has been the original realm of the Big Lie for many more than my nearly 72 years. Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels made no secret of the fact he learned his techniques from Madison Avenue. A few even say Goebbels learned his techniques on Madison Avenue, a story I would love to report, though I have never been able to find confirmation Goebbels actually worked in a U.S. advertising agency.

In any case it is only fair to point out the Nazi war criminals absorbed by the U.S. government after World War II added nothing new to the Big Lie arsenal but merely brought the technique back home.

The truth of the Big Lie's homecoming is underscored by the postwar Big Lie that blames the Soviets for originating the tactic of “disinformation” – a long-standing U.S. claim accepted with typically ignorant submissiveness here in Moron Nation despite the ironically contrary fact the Russian word for disinformation is dezinformatsiya, a term obviously of English-language origin.

Nor does the post-war welcome given the Nazis by the U.S. Ruling Class surprise any of us who understand that beyond all the deceptive euphemisms of academic economics, capitalism is merely infinite greed exalted as maximum virtue, just as capitalist governance can only mean absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us: in other words, fascism. Or as Il Duce himself defined it, absolute rule by the corporate One Percent.

Thus we recognize fascism and its still-more-sadistic twin Nazism as capitalism's ultimate form – Wall Street's only logical evolutionary fulfillment – which in turn enables us to know World War II for what it truly was: a war between rival factions of capitalists: the jackboot-and-deathcamp-capitalists who ran Italy, Germany and Japan versus the velvet-glove capitalists who ruled the United States, Great Britain and France.

Thus too the far more accurate Soviet name for World War II, “the Great Patriotic War against Fascism,” which from the viewpoint of the 170 nationalities of the Soviet Union it most assuredly was.

All of which is prefatory to the four reports linked below, each vital if belated New Years reading. The first report tells us the Obama Administration has quietly and without public announcement decreed any firearms owner who uses medical marijuana is guilty of a felony punishable by ten years in prison. The second, from the Electronic Freedom Foundation and forwarded to me by a reader, exposes the U.S. campaign to censor Twitter. The next two look at the National Defense Authorization Act and its role in facilitating the (inevitable) progression of the United States from the velvet-gloved fascism of the World War II era and my boyhood years (1940-1958) to the bare-knuckled truncheon-and-Tazer fascism of today. In which context the semioticians amongst us will also note the Nazi-style helmets the U.S., its allies (and many domestic police departments) adopted after the Vietnam Era.

Once again, the medium is the message.

Yes, that frightening sound you hear at the edge of your mind may well be an 80-year-old echo of snare drums.

And just because the U.S. military doesn't goose-step (yet) is no guarantee it isn't already dominated by fascists – especially now that Barack the Betrayer has given it full-fledged Gestapo powers by signing NDAA.

Indeed the one unanswered question is whether the military can delegate its new authority to mercenary organizations like Xe, aka Blackwater, already infamous for its presence during the forcible disarmament of New Orleans after Katrina – so much for the notion the (Ruling Class) GOPorkers are any different from the (Ruling Class) DemocRats in opposition to a citizenry armed for self-defense.

In this instance the GOPigs are merely the better liars. Just ask the citizens of Lousiana.

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Feds Impose Mandatory Pacifism, Compulsory Victimhood on Medical Marijuana Users

I read Rightist websites because they're sometimes sources of information the (pseudo) Left here in Moron Nation maliciously suppresses.

That was how I discovered the following – a stunning report the Obamanoid Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has administratively decreed  obtaining a medical marijuana prescription forcibly disarms you forever, no exemptions, no appeal. I found this information when I was searching the admittedly hard-Right Gun Owners of America website to refresh my memory on the attempted disarmament of New Orleans and its environs, an atrocity on which GOA alone provided adequate reporting.

“With the stroke of a pen, the U.S. Justice Department has just subjected hundreds of thousands of Americans to a lifetime gun ban,” says the GOA report, by John Velleco of NewsWithViews.com.

“In an open letter to all licensed firearms dealers, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) unilaterally decided that any person who is prescribed marijuana for medical purposes is prohibited from possessing a firearm,” the report continues.

“That means over 300,000 people in the states that allow medical marijuana suddenly cannot buy or possess a gun. Oh yeah, and for the many who already own firearms, watch out. They are now felons and could be subject to lengthy prison terms of up to ten years.”

Because many states deny all rights of self-defense to anyone who is prohibited firearms ownership, the BATFE's decree is exactly as my headline states: mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood for medical marijuana users.

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U.S. Officials, Ruling Class Politicians Seek to Censor Twitter

A new disclosure by the Electronic Frontier Foundation forwarded to me by a reader describes federal efforts to censor Twitter.

The report – alarming in its own right – acquires additional significance given last fall's test of cell-phone censorship in San Francisco, for which see “San Francisco's BART Turns Off Cell Phones to Suppress Protests” (Outside Agitator's Notebook, 14 August 2011). Together these episodes provide additional proof of the national transition that's moving us ever closer to a stars-and-stripes variant of Nazism.

“EFF has witnessed a growing number of calls in recent weeks for Twitter to ban certain accounts of alleged terrorists,” the report says.

“In a December 14th article in The New York Times, anonymous U.S. officials claimed they 'may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close' a Twitter account associated with the militant Somali group Al-Shabaab. A week later, The Telegraph reported that Sen. Joe Lieberman contacted Twitter to remove two 'propaganda' accounts allegedly run by the Taliban. More recently, an Israeli law firm threatened to sue Twitter if they did not remove accounts run by Hezbollah.”

“Twitter,” EFF concludes, “is right to resist.  If the U.S. were to pressure Twitter to censor tweets by organizations it opposes, even those on the terrorist lists, it would join the ranks of countries like India, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Syria, Uzbekistan, all of which have censored online speech in the name of 'national security.'”

The only quibble I have with the EFF report is that in the United States – as for example the BART incident and real but difficult-to-document ousters from Facebook – online speech is already being censored. Nevertheless EFF is our one effective guardian of online First Amendment rights, which means it should have not just our universal applause but donations from anyone who still has any discretionary income.

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Naomi Wolf Says NDAA Could Foster Military Coup, Arrest of President and Congress

The newly imposed National Defense Appropriations Act, specifically its Amendment 1031, allows the military to round up U.S. citizens without formal charges and detain us without trial literally for the rest of our lives, presumably in Guantanamo-like concentration camps or worse.

But author/journalist Naomi Wolf points out another atrocity the rest of us missed – that it also facilitates a military coup. She originally published her analysis on December 12, 2011, but it took on new relevance when Barack the Betrayer hid behind the holiday media blackout to quietly sign the bill during his Hawaii vacation – literally as if he were engineering his own overthrow. Hence Reader Supported News thoughtfully resurrected Ms. Wolf's text.  

Congress and the President, she wrote, “may have supported this bill because - although it's hard to believe - they think the military will only arrest active members of Al Qaida; or maybe, less naively, they believe that 'at most', low-level dissenting figures, activists, or troublesome protesters might be subjected to military arrest. But they are forgetting something critical: history shows that those who signed this bill will soon be subject to arrest themselves.”

“The moment this bill becomes law,” she explained, “the power roles will reverse: Congress will no longer be directing and in charge of the military: rather, the military will be directing and in charge of individual Congressional leaders, as well as in charge of everyone else - as any Parliamentarian in any society who handed this power over to the military can attest.”

“Perhaps Congress assumes that it will always only be 'they' who are targeted for arrest and military detention,” Ms. Wolf speculated. “But sadly, parliamentary leaders are the first to face pressure, threats, arrest and even violence when the military obtains the power to make civilian arrests and hold civilians in military facilities without due process.”

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Citing 2012 Parallels to 1932, a British Journalist Asks If the Future Is Fascism

“The dawn of a new year is usually a time of hope and ambition, of dreams for the future and thoughts of a better life. But,” wrote Dominic Sandbrook of The Daily Mail, “it is a long time since many of us looked forward to the new year with such anxiety, even dread...For the most chilling parallel, though, we should look back exactly 80 years, to the cold wintry days when 1931 gave way to 1932.”

Redistributed by Reader Supported News, Sandbrook's piece laments “there seems little point in looking across the Atlantic for inspiration. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover, beleaguered by rising unemployment and tumbling ratings, flailed and floundered towards election defeat...Barack Obama cuts a similarly impotent, indecisive and isolationist figure. The difference is that in 1932, one of the greatest statesmen of the century, the Democratic politician Franklin D. Roosevelt, was waiting in the wings.”

“Today, American voters looking for alternatives are confronted only with a bizarre gaggle of has-beens, inadequates and weirdos, otherwise known as the Republican presidential field. And to anybody who cares about the future of the Western world, the prospect of President Ron Paul or President Newt Gingrich is frankly spine-chilling.”

Not that Mitt Romney is any less frightening – especially now that Barack the Betrayer has signed NDAA, thereby ensuring Romney or any other U.S. president will never again be more than a tool of the military – and of course the military-industrial complex.

Happy New Year!

LB/9 January 2012

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Fight over West Coast Port Shutdown Rekindles Vietnam Era Class Conflict, Threatens U.S. Labor's Solidarity with Occupy Movement

AN OCCUPY TACOMA activist during informational picketing and leafleting on 12 December  at the main roadway entrance to the Tacoma, Washington port facilities. Port workers -- unhappy with Occupy Oakland's efforts to close West Coast seaports in defiance of union contracts -- were nearly  unanimous in their horn-honking applause for Occupy Tacoma's refusal to participate in the closure campaign. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. 

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Divide et Impera again: Anti-Union 'Progressives' vs. Organized Labor

Whether by tactical brilliance or dumb accident, Occupy Tacoma has dodged a bullet – actually an ideological artillery barrage – that is blasting a huge gap between organized labor and the Occupy Movement on the West Coast.

The barrage has been launched by an Occupy Movement faction that claims to be “pro-worker,” but by its hostility to collective bargaining agreements is as effectively anti-union as any band of Teabaggers.

Originating in Oakland (California), this faction – notably intolerant of other viewpoints – now dominates most of the West Coast seaport cities, with Tacoma among the very few exceptions.

While Occupy Oakland was giving collective bargaining the finger by demanding a 12 December shut-down of all West Coast seaports – an action that would have violated any number of labor contracts – Occupy Tacoma's General Assembly followed the advice of its union members and voted instead for informational picketing at the main entrance to the Tacoma shipping terminals.

Ostensibly OT's decision was based on the fact the Oakland faction's corporate targets are not present in the Tacoma seaport. But the strength of organized labor was surely a factor: Washington state has the third highest per capita union membership in the U.S., 19.8 percent, and union membership in Tacoma, which in addition to being a major seaport has managed to retain a small but relatively healthy industrial base, is said to rank third amongst the nation's cities.

Oakland's supporters claim to be “progressives.” But they spout the same anti-union rhetoric uttered by the Green Party or the staunchly capitalist MoveOn.org branch of the Democratic Party. The union-bashing content of such rhetoric is indistinguishable from that spewed by the traditional enemies of economic democracy, but the “progressive” disguise of its sources makes it far more insidious.

Not surprisingly, the antagonism between pro-union and anti-union Occupiers is often fierce and contentious, as in the heated debate that preceded the 7 December GA vote.

Thus on the 12th about a dozen supporters of the Oakland faction stormed out of Tacoma's Occupation Park to join the port-closure effort in Seattle, which was unsuccessful but culminated in several arrests.

The validity of the accompanying charges of police brutality – typical at all such events in Seattle – is underscored by recent U.S. Department of Justice findings that confirm the institutional savagery of the city's police force.

Unfortunately the arrests whether in Seattle or any other seaport city obscure the fact the core issue in the port closure controversy is not police brutality but class struggle – specifically how the One Percent, the Ruling Class, has already divided the 99 Percent, the Working Class, into mutually hostile factions.

In this instance the divider is the arrogant refusal of the Oakland group to recognize the elected leadership of two unions – the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters – and the unions' jurisdiction in matters relative to the West Coast ports.

Contrary to the anti-union propaganda disseminated by some Occupiers, the power of ILUW and Teamster locals to strike – a requirement if the ports were to be closed – is severely restricted by contract. The same collective bargaining agreements also typically prohibit unions from recognizing unsanctioned picket lines.

Those who denounced the two unions for refusing to endorse the proposed closure were seemingly indifferent to the fact violations of such contracts are typically punished by hefty fines.

Most likely the port-closure advocates were from such comfortably bourgeois backgrounds they were simply ignorant of labor law and unionism in general. But it's also possible some were agent provocateurs, infiltrators planted by the Ruling Class to destroy Occupy Movement solidarity.

In any case the growing size of the Oakland faction has turned what began as a local squabble into an increasingly bitter controversy that could jeopardize vital labor/Occupy partnership throughout the nation.

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At the root of Oakland's stance are a pair of well-documented beliefs unique to the United States and particularly prevalent on its West Coast.

One of these is a perverse notion of anarchy as an ultimate form of permissiveness, a viewpoint not derived from Bakunin or any other advocate of utopian anarchy as the most humanitarian form of governance, but rather from Ayn Rand and her doctrine of predatory selfishness as the highest virtue – the formal basis of capitalism's credo of infinite greed as maximum good.

The other belief, which begins at the Appalachian divide and intensifies as one goes westward, is contempt for what is generally termed “East Coast intellectual bullshit” – an ethos of essentially European values and principles that include strategic and tactical mindfulness and the discipline required to maintain worker/veteran/student solidarity.

Not surprisingly, this is precisely the solidarity that remains characteristic of Occupy Wall Street and its more faithful daughters. These include Occupy Tacoma, in which union members remain influential enough to have rescued OT from the anti-union juggernaut that – despite its superficially pro-worker rhetoric – became so evident on 12 December.

Again we see the influence of local union strength on local Occupations: New York state has the highest per capita union membership in the United States, 24.3 percent, with NYC's top amongst the nation's cities.

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Union sources say the Oakland faction's defiance has provoked anger far beyond ILWU and Teamster ranks, driving a wedge between the entire labor movement and nearly all the Occupation groups on the West Coast.

Sadly what is occurring is the re-inflammation of the socioeconomic differences by which the One Percent divided us – the 99 Percent – into mutually hostile camps during the Vietnam Era.

The elitist scorn expressed by the Oakland faction's effort to position itself as superior to the ILWU and the Teamsters in the port-closure matter is ultimately no different from the arrogance of those bourgeois Caucasian liberals who tried to take over leadership of the African-American Civil Rights Movement during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Another manifestation of this same arrogance – which is by definition an expression of identifying with and supporting the oppressor – occurred when the draft-exempt academic elite of the Vietnam Era positioned themselves as morally superior to those of us whose economic circumstances left us no choice but to serve in the military.

As in each of these historical instances, the resultant divisiveness served the One Percent by severely weakening our 99 Percent solidarity.

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The lessons here are many, each vital to the Occupy Movement's success.

Of greatest importance is to note how quickly cultural differences – for example the West Coast's xenophobic disdain for what it considers “East Coast attitudes” – can be manipulated into toxic barriers to solidarity. The antidote is making reinforcement of 99 Percent solidarity the central consideration in every action – precisely the principle Occupy Oakland ignores.

Equally significant is the divisive potential of socioeconomic differences: blue collar, pink collar, white collar. Men and women from non-union white-collar and pink-collar backgrounds have long been conditioned to believe they are innately superior to those of us from blue-collar and union backgrounds.

But this is another Big Lie that cleverly protects the One Percent by fostering divisions amongst the rest of us. If we are to achieve genuine solidarity, we in the 99 Percent must grow beyond such prejudices. Growth includes but is not limited to learning to defer to union leadership in such matters as port closures. Unions are after all among the last remaining vestiges of our constitutional democracy.

I realize that for some – especially those reared on capitalist notions of white-collar job-superiority – the required process of letting-go is a difficult and even terrifying prospect. It is made harder still by the fact we in the U.S. 99 Percent have all been conditioned to live our lives by Ayn Rand's heartless principles: “me first (fuck you).”

But revolution is never easy. And the alternative – another triumph of the One Percent (exactly as the One Percent triumphed over all but two of the rebellions of the 20th Century) – is infinitely worse.

LB/18-31 December 2011

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Because I have been invited back to Typepad (lorenbliss.typepad.com), this essay appears simultaneously on Typepad and on BlogSpot. After the New Year, I will again post on Typepad exclusively, and eventually the Outside Agitator's Notebook material that appeared on Blogspot (August-December 2011) will be transferred to Typepad. Meanwhile, thank you for your faithful readership...and to all of you the most fulfilling New Year imaginable.

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EXTRA: Debt Ceiling 'Deal' Shoves Poor Folks Under Capitalist Bus

THE ALLEGED “DEAL” coming out of Washington D.C. is a proposal – not a law – but Teabagger acceptance of its contents will prove the measure's lethal malice toward lower-income peoples, especially those of us dependent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

While the specifics of the so-called “deal” will be withheld from us until congressional debate begins tomorrow, it is already obvious the proposal's central feature is successful collaboration amongst Barack the Betrayer, the GOPorkers and the DemocRats to forever protect the Ruling Class from tax increases.

The consequences – which will include perpetually high unemployment and the permanent end of any meaningful socioeconomic safety net – will be the most devastating blow ever struck the U.S. Working Class.

I wrote a more detailed analysis of these results for the breaking-news thread of The News Tribune of Tacoma, the Ruling Class daily published near where I live. TNT limits comments to 400 words, and I carefully limited my text to very slightly more than half that, 225 words to be precise. But when I tried to post my remarks, they were instantly deleted...

Here, with an uplifted finger of defiance to TNT's censors, is what I wrote:

Five points:

(1)-There is no deal until the Teabag cult – the neo-Confederates who have perfected the art of holding the nation hostage in their campaign to effectively destroy the federal government as we've known it since 1865 – stop their maliciously purposeful obstructionism in the House;

(2)- What most of us fail to understand is the extent to which the Teabag cultists blame the federal government for everything they despise about the modern age: integration, allegedly "godless" schools, the rights of labor, minorities and  women;

(3)-If the proposal is enacted, it will destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,  inflicting intentionally murderous poverty on all lower-income people – an unprecedentedly merciless blow to those of us who are seniors, disabled, chronically unemployed;

(4)-If the proposal is enacted, its absolute bans on tax increases and additional federal spending mean there will never be a federal jobs programs, without which unemployment will remain at present levels, with all the associated burdens on the Working Class including the continued destruction of unions; 

(5)-The bottom line on this proposal is that it provides ultimate proof there is no effective difference between Republicans and Democrats, with both parties collaborating to guarantee the wealthy they will never again have to pay their fair share of the costs of governance.

In short, we the people have been thrown under the socioeconomic bus. 

LB/31 July 2011

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Teabagger Hatred of Government Escalates Debt-Ceiling Crisis into Vengeful Effort to Overturn Civil War Victory, Destroy Modern Nation; Peak Oil Explains Ruling Class Greed; Gregoire's Popularity Hits Bottom

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011 (details in “Visuals” below).

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NULLE BASTARDO CARBURENDUM

What we are witnessing in the carefully manufactured debt-ceiling crisis has arguably escalated into the final battle of the Civil War – and the United States is in grave danger of losing.

That this is so becomes evident when we review how the crisis evolved.

Cunningly scripted by a collaboration of capitalists, habitual liars and professional betrayers, its original purpose was twofold.

It was to provide an effectively rebuttal-proof rationale for looting the Social Security trust, ending Medicare, shutting down Medicaid and abolishing the remainder of the socioeconomic safety net. The abrupt termination of these programs would then give capitalism its long-sought Final Solution to the problems of poverty and unemployment, killing millions of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished and therefore unprofitable.

Our deaths would be inflicted not in gas chambers but by Ayn Rand policies of terminal abandonment and lethal neglect. This would spare the capitalists the odium of extermination camps even as they positioned us to be blamed by Ruling Class propagandists for whatever so-called “bad choices” allegedly led to our demise.

But like a military offensive in which the attackers become so frenzied they rage far beyond their intended objective, the crisis has exploded into a deliberate assault on the United States itself. It has become a vengeance-fight, still intended to obliterate the safety net and now also aimed at destroying the federal government and shattering the federal union.

To see how this happened – to see how modern class warfare expanded into an effort to undo the Confederate surrender at Appomattox – we need to review the modern history of the Republican Party.

Prior to 1964, the GOP had long been the primary instrument of unrestricted capitalism. Hence – to maximize capitalist opportunities for predatory profit – the Republicans have traditionally espoused the seemingly schizoid dogma of an imperially-strong military fielded by a federal government that is otherwise effectively powerless.

Hence too the present-day GOP fixation on “deregulation” and “privatization”: in the Republican Utopia, the sole function of the federal government would be that of a goon squad – the army, navy, marines, air force and national police serving the plutocrats much as Murder Incorporated served the Mafia dons of the 1930s.

But since 1964 – as a direct result of the maliciously racist "Southern Strategy" the GOP adopted in the wake of the Civil Rights Act – the party has transformed itself into a kind of neo-Confederate coalition whose goals go far beyond Grover Norquist's stated purpose of shrinking the federal government so small it can be drowned in a bathtub.

The Southern Strategy, originally undertaken as a politically expedient means of mobilizing anti-integration whites, has created a present-day Republican leadership dominated by remnants of the old Confederate aristocracy. Its factional strength is now sufficiently reinforced by the distinctly Ku-Klux-Klanish Teabagger cult to overpower the more conventionally profit-minded Republican plutocracy of Wall Street and Big Business in general.

Though the GOP has long been a bastion of white racist hatefulness, misogynistic fury and fundamentalist Christian rage, since the advent of the Teabaggers it has mobilized angry whites, whether South or North, in a manner unseen since the heyday of the Klan during the 1920s. And the 2010 elections – the bitter fruit of Barack Obama's stunning betrayals of the Democratic Party rank-and-file – have given the Teabaggers enough control over Republican votes in Congress to block any reasonable debt-ceiling solution.

As a result the United States is now threatened with disaster of a magnitude the original Confederates could scarcely have imagined.

Why the Republicans would knowingly wreck the ship of state – why they would gleefully destroy the nation they claim to love – is not obvious unless one has witnessed firsthand the hatred and contempt with which ultra-conservative whites whether patrician or plebeian view the federal government.

Indeed the hard-Right Southerners and their ideological counterparts elsewhere blame the federal government for literally everything they damn as the afflictions of the modern era.

The bitterness of these people is so toxic it is impossible to portray. Not even the most horrific photographs of the charred and twisted victims of our national epidemic of lynchings suffice to convey the magnitude of the associated hatred.

And the federal government has thus become its target. Though Rightists traditionally condemn the government as a tyrant – the perpetrator of racial integration, “godless” schools and abortion, the defender of women's rights, minorities and labor unions – they now also curse it as the spawn of the devil himself, the serpent in the American Eden.

From this malignant perspective, the deadly consequences of default are welcomed as retribution long overdue and applauded as divine vengeance. Never mind the havoc that would be wrought by cessation of federal payments; never mind history proves unpaid armies quickly turn to banditry and rebellion.

The Teabaggers love it. They see the battle in Congress as Armageddon; they hear the voice of their Christian god speaking through the recalcitrance of his allegedly “chosen” politicians; they believe the crisis is the prophesied apocalypse.

But in truth it is more like die Götterdämmerung – a Twilight of the Gods, the final days of the American experiment in constitutional governance. For default would do far more than murder safety-net dependents, trash the federal government's credit rating and destroy our national credibility.

It would render the federal union nonfunctional, thereby effectively shattering it.

This in turn would force each state to become as financially self-reliant as it can – asserting its political independence to do whatever is within its means to protect its population from the atrocities inflicted by default. The magnitude of the disaster would thereby nullify the federal constitution, quickly reducing it to meaninglessness.

Think of the chaos of post-Katrina New Orleans on a nationwide scale – but with no end in sight. Or, more appropriately, think of the South as it was 1865, ruined by war and starving in defeat. Default would impose comparable hardship on the entire United States in a matter of days or weeks.

Which is the precisely the revenge the Southern aristocracy has been seeking since Appomattox, precisely the Southern vengeance the Republican Party has inflicted on us by its Southern Strategy.

Meanwhile it is increasingly obvious Barack the Betrayer lacks the willingness and skill to avert the debacle.

The irony of the nation's first Black president presiding over the destruction of the system of government that rescued African-Americans from slavery is almost too painful to bear.

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I posted a preliminary, much abbreviated version of the foregoing as comment Nr. 73 on the Paul Krugman/New York Times comment thread here (free registration may be required for access): http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/krugman-the-centrist-cop-out.html?_r=1

*****

DIALOGUES

Common Dreams ran a detailed report on peak oil that is perhaps the most clearly written and therefore informative piece on the topic I've yet read. Knowing the mostly unrecognized relevance of peak oil to the debt-ceiling crisis and class-struggle in general, I wrote the following response:

The reality of peak oil explains the world-wide increase in capitalist greed and savagery, especially the imposition of the classic form of capitalist tyranny on the United States. The Ruling Class intends to preserve its lifestyle no matter what – to maintain its obscene comforts even as the rest of us die from sickness and starvation.

Hence its paradigm of governance, long established elsewhere but new to the U.S.: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

Eventually, when the oil runs out, the Ruling Class will simply re-impose slavery, using forced human labor to provide the energy formerly provided by petroleum.

The advent of what I call Moron Nation – the methodical conditioning of the U.S. population for maximum submissiveness – is a key part of that process. Indeed the U.S. is functioning as the capitalists' primary laboratory – their foremost behaviorist rat-maze – for the slave-planet to come.

Meanwhile the ultimate question facing the global Working Class – every one of us not part of the capitalist aristocracy – is the pivotal either-or of our species entire history: what sort of future do we want?

There are only two choices.

One is ongoing surrender to capitalism, with its inevitable transition back to a slave economy.

The other is socialism – from each according to ability, to each according to need – with hardships and benefits shared alike.

Yes the Ruling Class has the technologies of oppression.

But we in the Working Class have the numbers.

Which side are you on?

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/07/26-0

***

The Stand, the superb online daily published by the Washington State Labor Council, reported last week Gov. Christine Gregoire's stunning revelation of her Inner GOPorker – her defiant betrayal of lower-income Washingtonians to protect the obscenely rich aristocracy from tax increases – has made her the second most unpopular governor in the United States. I commented accordingly:

Like Barack the Betrayer, Christine the Cruel is teaching us there's no real difference between Democrats and Republicans – that each is just a faction of the single Ruling Class Party.

Time for labor to organize a real Working Families Party: tax the rich; full employment at fair wages; Medicare for all; affordable education; protection for those of us elderly, disabled or otherwise needy; jail for the criminal capitalists.

http://www.thestand.org/2011/07/gregoire-among-least-popular-governors-in-u-s/

*****

VISUALS

Though I generally scorn un-peopled photographs as meaningless – yes I admit to having made many of them (primarily as exercises in visual geometry that typically result in nothing more substantive than journalistic clichés or greeting-card pretties) – such a scene sometimes calls out as compellingly as any human voice.

So it was with the above graffito, scrawled in black crayon on an out-of-the way portion of a midtown Tacoma wall.

It sent me on a 15-minute bus-trip home for a Pentax, all the while worrying the defiantly revolutionary message would be cleaned away or painted over before I returned. Pondering focal lengths and framings en route, by the time I got home I had chosen my ancient but astonishingly sharp Tokina 70-210mm f/4-5.6 zoom as the best option, so with that lens mounted on a trusty K-1000 body loaded with Kodak 400 color negative film, I hastened along the quarter-mile of sidewalk back to the bus stop, caught a return bus and – with the Tokina's focal length at approximately 180mm – documented the first such expression of political anger I have ever seen locally.

Does this mean I dare imagine myself called back to serious photography?

Hardly; even after a partially satisfactory conclusion to the devastating crisis of which I wrote on 17 July, the I Ching warns such a conclusion is disastrous: “The ridgepole sags to the breaking point: misfortune” followed by “Oppression: there is no water in the lake.” In any case – no doubt the reason the oracular lake is now dry – the waters of anguish have seemingly damaged the adjacent bridge beyond any possibility of repair.

But my graffito moment does mean I am rethinking the everyday utility of my Pentaxes, which formerly I scorned as utterly unsuitable for social-documentary work or much of anything else save use as platforms for long lenses. Perhaps for this reason I will begin carrying a camera again – never mind there is no place in the United States more sociologically and judicially hostile to street-photography than Washington state.

Besides, while my Leicas were thug-magnets and thus required maximum surreptitiousness, the robbers – who know the fence-value of everything to the nearest penny – regard the Pentaxes as geriatric junk, worthless relics we old people feebly clutch as mementos of our sorely missed youths.

Which is the cheapest theft insurance there is.

LB/30 July 2011

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EXTRA: President Obama's Neville Chamberlain Moment

WHAT EVERY COMMENTATOR seems to have missed thus far is that Obama and his cronies have once more conned Moron Nation – this time by talking the voters into crashing the congressional communications system with demands for undefined "compromise."

My apology for calling my formerly award-winning inner news-editor out of involuntary retirement, but no one I've read or watched – neither the pros still employed at The New York Times and MSNBC, nor the other blacklisted journalists like myself exiled to various Leftist websites – has picked up on this aspect of the Obama-speech story.

(A full text of the speech – unavoidably preceded by a breathtakingly obnoxious United Technologies promo – is linked  here: http://www.nationaljournal.com/the-complete-text-of-president-obama-s-and-speaker-boehner-s-national-addresses-20110725)

Were I writing the story, my lead would say that by mobilizing a public clamor for blank-check compromise, Barack the Betrayer is once again serving as the most compellingly eloquent front-man ever employed by the U.S. Ruling Class.

Thus by the president's truly unprecedented Machiavellian cunning are capitalism's RepublicRat minions positioned to impose on us the silent genocide of death-dealing cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Such is Wall Street's Final Solution to the problems of poverty and unemployment.

Indeed the only truly apt historical analogy is to Munich in 1938 – Neville Chamberlain's betrayal of Europe falsely disguised as compromise for "peace in our time"; Obama's betrayal of the U.S.Working-Class similarly camouflaged as compromise "for a government that lives within its means."

Those who still believe in prayer should pray my analysis wrong.

(I posted an earlier less developed version of these comments on the FireDogLake website, linked here:http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/07/25/obama-finally-asks-americans-to-organize-for-compromise-and-austerity/#comments )

LB/25 July 2011

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Notes – Musical and Otherwise – on a Strange Saturday of Somber Synchronicities; Defiant Dialogues of Disappointment from a Nation Betrayed; A Climactic Fusion of Words, Rhythms and Potential

=========

NULLE BASTARDO CARBURENDUM

Nature deplores a void, sometimes mercifully so.

With my surrender to photographic accursedness – a lifetime of bad-karma disasters ranging from the fire through various ripoffs – purposeful photography is now seemingly gone forever from my life. This means much of the time I hitherto filled with visual thinking has become an emptiness of mirrors that reflect only dwindling light, the mental equivalent of some darkening hollow randomly spanned by firefly sparks of passing thought and the echoes of ambient music.

I sit at my desk; I lose myself watching a city-fat squirrel, acrobatic master of the cedars adjacent my living-room window. I struggle to think in words not pictures; I work at seining phrases from the Sargasso Sea of my dyslexic mind. (What I will write for Sunday's blog?) The clock above my bookshelves ticks ominously: my resident Metro Gnome, forever marking the artificial rhythm of urban life. (With which new atrocity shall I lead “Nulle Bastardo Carburendum”?) The exhaust fan drones softly in my bedroom. (What of the past week's Internet writing should I include in “Dialogues”?)

The television, tuned to a cable music station, interjects an instrumental version of an old and profoundly moving song of rebellion. First it distracts me from the unfolding epic of treachery and betrayal that is our national requiem. Then quite uncharacteristically it prompts my mind to sing its chorus:

Glory O, glory O, to the bold Fenian men.

And I cannot but wonder: will there be a Resistance to capitalism as there was to the tyrannies that preceded it? If there is, will the future honor its heroines and heroes? Will the future sing such songs as the present now sings to honor the freedom-fighters of our past?

Glory O, glory O, to the bold Fenian men.

Alas I have forgotten the rest of the words; it has been long years since I was a singer. I go to the Internet to remember. There I find work by a group called Omnia, a YouTube video that magically transforms my entire afternoon and evening.

Omnia not only sings and plays the best rendition of this song I have ever heard; the accompanying illustrations glow with the same exquisitely haunting Celtic light that enchanted me at first sight and bound me ever after to the Pacific Northwest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMGCs4qbmHA

But who is this Omnia and why have I never heard of them until now?

To learn more, I chose another of their songs from the YouTube catalogue. Because it is called “The Elven Lover,” I anticipate a variant of English ballad called “The Daemon Lover,” about a legendary seducer named James Harris:

What hills, what hills are those my love
Those hills so dark and low
Those are the hills of hell my love
Where you and I must go...

I click on “The Elven Lover.” What I hear astounds me. It is the quaintly tender song many of us know as “Scarborough Fair,” but Omnia sings the real words, which I'll warrant most of us have never heard:

Tell her to plow it with a dandelion sword
parsley sage rosemary and thyme
and sow the fields with spirits unborn
if she would be a true-love of mine...

Tell her to find me when the Banshee sings
parsely sage rosemary and thyme
then fly to me on angel's wings
and she will be a true-love of mine.

(Those of us familiar with such things will instantly recognize the song's breathtakingly ancient pagan origins: as a lay of calendar and plant magic, a dialogue between a poet – a bard – and the Goddess as Muse.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNajUkcGr9M&feature=related

There is also this, for those of us willing to acknowledge our kinship with wolves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq_VeUMtyzU&feature=related

Then this, “Mabon” or “She is dying,” the pagan name for the autumnal equinox, by far the most poignant of the turning points of the year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7osoZZsRk&feature=related

And finally a piece called “Bran” leaves me with the almost eerie sense Omnia, thousands of miles and an ocean's breadth away (and despite the fact its members are at least three decades younger than I), shares many of my own insights about the present-day relevance of Celtic mythology. Bran is Bendegeid Vron, a tree-god, the only male divinity with whom I have ever felt an iota of closeness. His totems are the red alder and Raven, both of which are as abundant in the Pacific Northwest as they were in ancient Britain. He is a savior, a Bronze-Age incarnation of the dying god, the once-and-future king, a son of the Goddess and a pre-Christian Messiah to the Brythons. His story, contained in the Mabinogeon and beautifully fictionalized by Evangeline Walton in The Children of Llyr, is an epic of tragic heroism, and because it does not deny the sacredness of sexual love, I find it infinitely more meaningful than the tale of the misogynistic anti-sex Jesus.

To the best of my knowledge – and I pay close attention to such things – Omnia is the only musical group to have ever granted Bran any recognition, all the more astonishing given his sacred wood was anciently made into whistles and Pan-pipes, which means today he would be hailed as Lord of Flautists and Woodwinds had we retained our ancestors' pagan sensibilities. Omnia's composition is haunting: it calls to mind the Birds of Rhiannon, who are pivotal in the Bran epic and whose song is said to be the most exquisite music in the universe; its flutes and drums bring back a cherished scene from my youth, women dancing naked in a moonlit meadow,  their upflung arms and arched backs and swirling hair resurrecting choreographies unseen since the sack of Knossos; its power is that of some troutly river, clean and clear and cleansing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed3rUaJIrfc&feature=related

So went the remainder of the afternoon, all of it given over to exploring the works of Omnia and discovering to my huge vexation most of their work cannot be purchased in the United States – with the two available CDs effectively censored by prohibitive pricing. Obviously someone somewhere thinks Omnia's visions are too dangerous for Moron Nation audiences.

Then, because it was among the Omnia selections, I discovered a group called Faun, also European, not just akin to Omnia in form and content but creators of the most unabashedly pagan music I have ever heard, echoes of the lost age of matriarchy, the forbidden geopolitical reality of all human history save the last maybe 4000 years:

No man shall scratch runes
Not being able to use them well;
Many a man is misled
by dark forces...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgGIOZiVCVU&feature=related

An approximate translation of the words (the language is not given but I'm guessing it's some variant of Old Norse) is here:

http://lyricstranslate.com/en/egil-saga-egil-sega.html

And here's a video Faun made to tell the story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oYmc9WTdSs&feature=related

Meanwhile the drumbeat and the chanting is evocative beyond description. It makes me think of where the Counterculture might have gone musically, had we not been interdicted by the Ruling Class. Where indeed we were going, witness Tim Buckley's immortal tribute to the Muse:

Tell me a lie I'll cry for you
Tell me of sin and I'll laugh
Tell me of all the pain you've had
I'll never smile again.

*****

DIALOGUES

Mention of the Ruling Class brings us back to grim reality. Common Dreams has a piece that despite the weasel-wording of compulsive liberal and chronic Obamanoid John Nichols says all that need be said: Barack the Betrayer is negotiating a deal with Republicans that will savage those of us dependent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. I respond by suggesting two terrible possibilities that would explain the present impasse.

One is that the Ruling Class has intended for a long while to force the government into default and crash the global economy. As in every economic collapse, it would give those with real money a huge boost in power, in this instance a means of leveraging a buy-back of U.S. debt from China. It would also provide an easy way to exterminate a huge number of “unprofitables” – people in my socioeconomic circumstances – without suffering the international embarrassment of death camps.

The second possibility is that the Betrayer – who seems to lie more glibly than any politician in my lifetime – never intended to be more than a one-term president: that he will finish the job Wall Street hired to do, then – when it is clear his unpopularity gives him no chance for re-election – decline to run for a second term.

If these events come to pass, please remember where you read of them first.

Meanwhile here is the full text of my Common Dreams commentary:

What if the intention of the capitalist Ruling Class is to force the United States into default, thereby crashing the global economy -- and enabling the capitalists to use their unfathomably huge cash surplus to buy back the U.S. debt from China?

It's not as far fetched as it sounds.

The New York Times reported yesterday (21 July) that "hedge funds are stockpiling cash so they can buy up United States debt if other investors flee." Which offers a plausible explanation for why the tycoons of Wall Street (and Big Business in general) – though awash in cash – refuse to invest in Main Street jobs.

If this is indeed the corporate aristocracy's intention, the investor-flight triggered by default could clear the way for the United States government literally becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of the for-profit financial powers.

Meanwhile there's no question the unprecedented cash surplus provides the capability.

Combine capability with intention, and we have an explanation why Congress -- which has dropped all pretense of representing Main Street Americans -- seems determined to inflict default no matter what.

Is there really a fight over the deficit? Or is what we are witnessing merely another charade as described by Bill Moyers? (For the Moyers hypothesis -- that nothing is left of our constitutional democracy but theatrical concealment of tyranny -- see http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html)

And what of Barack the Betrayer, who now stands revealed as determined to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (and thus to exterminate millions of elderly, disabled and chronically impoverished people)?

What if he accomplishes his goal – which (we can no longer doubt) is the total destruction of the New Deal socioeconomic safety net – and then smugly announces he will not run again? What if his entire 2012 candidacy is yet another Big Lie.

After all, in a single term Barack the Betrayer will have given the Ruling Class everything it wanted. He will have utterly destroyed the America President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created to head off a Communist revolution. The nation in which my generation came of age and grew to maturity will but a fading memory.

We are already being tyrannized by the same sort of capitalist governance that hitherto was characteristic only of the Third World: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us. Indeed this is the New Paradigm of government at every level – local, state and federal.

Is this in fact the “change” Wall Street hired the Betrayer to impose?

As default grows ever closer – as those of us who are elderly or disabled or hopelessly impoverished now live in growing terror of being murdered by loss of our Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid – it appears ever more likely the answer to this dreadful question is “yes”: that the Betrayer is simply doing the job he was paid to do.

If he then resigns (as that earlier betrayer Lyndon Baines Johnson did over Vietnam), Barack the Betrayer will pay no penalty at all. And his party of 'Rats will thus be freed to claim the Obama presidency was all a great mistake.

Is Moron Nation truly that gullible? Just ask Madison Avenue: “Burning coal fights global warming five ways.”

As always under capitalism, it's ultimately about multiplication of profit and elimination of the unprofitable...no matter who is killed or otherwise victimized by the process.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07

(A much shorter version of my comment appeared in The New York Times of 21 July; it is comment number 250 on the thread linked here, for which free registration may be required: http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/business/economy/wall-st-makes-fallback-plans-for-debt-crisis.html?sort=oldest&offset=11)

***

Two friends and I were among the approximately 2700 volunteers who visited local congressional and senatorial offices throughout the United States last Tuesday as part of Jane Hamsher's FireDogLake campaign to protect Social Security and Medicare. The following is excerpted from my after-action report:

Three of us tried to visit the Tacoma office of Sen. Patty Murray (D/WA), which much to our surprise was not just closed but apparently was never intended as anything more than politically expedient deception: the illusion of a local address.

We also visited the Tacoma offices of Rep. Norm Dicks (D/WA) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D/WA), where we spoke with staffers and left signed copies of a letter based on Jane Hamsher's "Sample Script.”

Murray's office is apparently nothing more than a mail-drop and a voicemail service – no evidence of staffing. Nevertheless, following posted instructions, we slipped our letters beneath the locked door.

The visits to Dicks and Cantwell were low-keyed and uneventful, though Dicks' people were already employing the newest Big Lie – "strengthen Social Security" – to cover the proposed savaging of stipends.

Nevertheless the staffers with whom we spoke – an elderly African-American man at Cantwell's place and two younger white men at Dicks' – were polite and respectful.

They also assured us our written statements would be passed on to their respective bosses.

Had there been more advance notice, we no doubt could have mustered a substantially greater number of participants.

Our letter – each of us gave the staffers a signed copy – stated “I will not vote for you if you support any plan to cut Social Security or Medicare benefits.”

The FDL link is here:

 http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/

 ***

The other major Internet discussion in which I participated last week was a lively, mostly intelligent exploration of one of the myriad ways our dreadful “health care” system victimizes those of us who are dependent on for-profit insurance. Here is my main contribution:

Ms. Poole describes perfectly the predatory function of the capitalist "health-insurance" scam – the for-profit death-panels from which (thanks to Barack the Betrayer and the ReplicRats) – there is no longer any rational hope of escape.

What we have instead, cleverly disguised as "health care," is a system of socioeconomic cleansing without death camps – already a documented 40,000 women, children and men knowingly killed every year by denial of insurance and insurance claims.

Factor in the impending destruction of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the number of slain will skyrocket. It's the new paradigm of capitalist governance in the United States: extermination for anyone who is elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed or otherwise deemed no longer profitable – that is, no longer exploitable for profit.

But none dare call it genocide...much less admit it's an ultimate revelation of what capitalism is really about.

http://crosscut.com/2011/07/21/health-medicine/21108/Private-health-insurance--Press-1-to-be-denied.-Otherwise,-hang-up./?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5f68c245b1-crosscut_daily_email_7_21_20117_21_2011&utm_medium=email

*****

Blessings, like spells and litanies, are governed by the Rule of Threes. Hence to close – and perhaps to wash away some our sadness at the death of our republic – here is another selection from Omnia's work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDTnegJvB3I&feature=related

And two more from Faun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mty9TEmdfc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URmxPVtlDhk&feature=related

I do not doubt this is the music of the future. It is the music of the forest and the water-meadow and the tall stones beyond. It is not dependent on internal-combustion engines or cell-phones.

Nor can I forget how the bold minstrels of the Middle Ages kept our pagan legacy alive throughout the Burning Times and all the other years of theocratic darkness. Such wisdom is older than oppression.  Quoth the I Ching: “Thus one learns the sayings of antiquity and the deeds of the past, strengthening one's character thereby.”

LB/24 July 2011

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Obama Dumps Warren, Backtracks on DADT; Teachers Give Labor the Finger, Endorse Its Betrayer; Congress Wrecks High-Speed Trains; TV Ad Beats Dems in 2012; Right-Wing Conspiracy Exposed; Gun Scam Portends Forcible Disarmament; Crisis Ends Photo Efforts

Another redesign – this one forced on me by the most bitter circumstances imaginable – in which my life (and therefore the form and content of this blog) are each altered forever.

*

NULLE BASTARDO CARBURENDUM

Barack the Betrayer: is he the newest incarnation of the Trojan Horse, a hard-Right Republican disguised as an African-American Democrat? Is he a “Manchurian Candidate” positioned not by some foreign power but by domestic capitalists, part of their conspiracy to destroy the last vestiges of the social contract and the few remnants of constitutional democracy? Or is he merely the worst president in U.S. history?

Whatever he is, he has betrayed us again...twice, each time giving the GOPorkers a major victory. He sacked consumer-protection advocate Elizabeth Warren, and he effectively reversed himself on Don't Ask/Don't Tell.

The story about the ill-served Ms. Warren was suppressed until the weekend, no doubt in the Obamanoid hope it would go unnoticed. It was broken by Bloomberg News, first disseminated more widely via Reader Supported News, then covered by Politico and The New York Times. The relevant links – Times access may require free registration – are here:

http://www.readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/6629-bloomberg-reports-obama-eliminates-elizabeth-warren

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/59206.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/business/former-ohio-attorney-general-picked-to-lead-consumer-agency.html?hp

Ms. Warren's no-doubt-involuntary endorsement of Obama's new choice notwithstanding, the fix is clearly in.

Consumer protection? Not under the new paradigm of Moron Nation governance: absolute power and limitless profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

Meanwhile the Betrayer's reversal on DADT, though reported Thursday evening by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, prompted stony silence amongst most other Ruling Class media and lots of weasel-worded protect-Obama confusion on the alleged Left. Here, ironically from Ruling Class Media, is the best report I could find:

“A federal appeals court in San Francisco ordered the military to temporarily continue the controversial policy in an order late Friday, the court's response to a request from President Barack Obama's administration.”

http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/article_f95abec0-040b-5818-b761-30112c20578d.html

***

While organized labor in general is ever-more-hostile to the Betrayer and his party – a growing number of union people are calling openly for independence from the DemocRats and more than a few have begun seeking the defiant formation of an actual socialist-labor party – the National Education Association has chosen the opposite alternative.

It has decided submission to the new paradigm of capitalist governance is the best option for teachers and has thereby given real unions the proverbial finger.

Yep, that's right. Despite the unprecedented DemoPublican downsizing of the nation's public schools, the NEA has endorsed Obama for re-election in 2012:

http://www.truth-out.org/national-education-association-flunks-crucial-test/1310156594

In my years as a news editor (1967-1970), teachers still vehemently denied they were union members. Indeed they angrily telephoned desk editors and penned vitriolic protest-letters any time a reporter referred to the NEA or one of its local affiliates as a union.

“We're not a union,” the educators snarled. “We're a professional association. And we demand a retraction...”

Now – given the war against unionized public employees – it appears NEA is once again, as during the 1960s, not a union.

Nope, it's a scab organization instead.

So much for Working Class solidarity.

***

Thom Hartmann reports yet another outrageous take-back inflicted on us by the Ruling Class:

“Say goodbye to high-speed rail. $1.5 billion in high-speed rail construction projects – and the jobs that go along with them – have been cut off by Republicans in Congress who want to divert that money to flood relief in the Midwest instead.”

http://www.truth-out.org/news-thom-hartmann-republicans-cut-money-high-speed-rail-and-more/1310486740

What Hartmann fails to report is how the Betrayer and the DemocRats – by their complicit silence – are enabling the GOPorkers' opportunistic train wreck.

***

Here – a television ad in which the Republicans criticize all the ObamacRat betrayals – is the most damning example yet of why the DemocRats will lose next year's elections:

http://my.firedoglake.com/booradley/2011/07/12/no-more-blank-check-ads-from-the-grandma-can-eat-more-catfood-party/

Contrary to the report linked above, the ad is running in many venues across the U.S. including Washington state, where I saw it last week on MSNBC and where there is no immediately pending vote. An internal link to the ad itself is included in the linked article.

As one who once professionally evaluated advertising – as some of you know I am a former editor-in-chief of the late Art Direction magazine – I am surely qualified to evaluate this particular piece of work.

And in the context of today's political climate, it is – script and video alike – the most effective one-minute political spot I've ever seen.

*****

DIALOGUES

The Nation magazine and the Common Dreams website scooped the world on the terrifying reality of what Hillary Clinton once described as the “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Yes folks it's real – as real as the Nazis' plans for world conquest – and the political blitzkrieg it has unleashed has thus far proven unstoppable.

In the ensuing on-line discussion, a few Common Dreams readers persisted in the self-defeating Leftist portrayal of capitalists as ignorant brutes and bumbling buffoons.

Such stereotyping breaks a primary rule of war: never underestimate the enemy.

Meanwhile too many Leftists dare not acknowledge the capitalists are the most diabolically clever conspirators in human history. A few self-proclaimed Leftists still deliberately close their eyes to the predatory nature of capitalism. Some also remain utterly innocent of socialist theory:

It was to these – especially the last group – I addressed the following:

If you were to look at capitalism from the perspective of its victims -- millions of First Nations people; millions of war casualties; millions more tortured and murdered in Nazi concentration camps and by Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet and their ilk; Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of lynching victims; Joe Hill, Karen Silkwood and all the other murdered labor activists; now today in the United States the thousands of people exterminated by denial of health care and the millions more (myself among them) who will be slain when genocide-by-default terminates our Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- you'd see the effects of capitalism are far worse.

Then there's the matter of doctrine:

Capitalism is the ultimate reversal of morality: the elevation of infinite greed to the height of virtue, of limitless selfishness to maximum good, precisely as Ayn Rand decrees.

Communism is the ultimate restoration of the virtues that have kept our species alive for 100,000 years: from each according to their ability; to each according to their need.

Capitalism not only traffics in Evil – the Evil of our species' darkest impulses – it now does so openly, defiantly, even gloatingly: exactly as capitalism did under Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Pinochet.

Communism at least renders lip-service to the Good: the well-being of even the the most vulnerable among us and the economic as well as political democracy essential to achieve it.

Capitalism tells us we're creatures of greed desperately clawing toward ever-greater fulfillment of selfishness.

Communism asks us who we are, and what therefore is our species' quest? Is it merely for profit, as the capitalists maintain? Or do we seek the individual and collective improvement of our species, our world?

Capitalism claims perfection – not just economic perfection but theological perfection: the doctrinal will-of-god endorsement of the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

Communism admits imperfection; there is no denying it has fallen too readily to local conditions, whether the dark undertow of Russian history or U.S.-evoked savagery of a war-ruined Cambodia.

Thus Communism is clearly a work-in-progress: which means it is up to us to reshape it in accordance with the lessons of its past.

And – despite its flaws – the historical record proves only Communism offers sufficient discipline to defeat Capitalism, which is increasingly manifest Evil: the deliberate, premeditated Evil of genocide, ecocide and quite possibly the matricidal death of Mother Earth.

Don't take my word for it; see for yourself; be courageous enough to begin the struggle against generations of capitalist brainwashing. Here's the link to the basic document of Marxism, The Communist Manifesto:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

(That's right, you don't even need to buy the book. It's available free on line -- at least for now.)

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/07/13-8#comment-1875436

***

Common Dreams also last week ran a somewhat limited report on the scandal escalating around Project Gunrunner/Operation Fast and Furious, in which federal officials engineered the sale of firearms to Mexican drug lords.

Until now mostly covered only by Rightist media, the feds' unraveling scheme – its real motive yet unknown – facilitated drug-lord purchase of the guns used in several murders.

Among the slain are two U.S. border guards, Immigration & Customs Enforcement Agent Jamie Zapata and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Because Common Dreams readers include many Leftists who support the Second Amendment, I added the following to the associated discussion thread:

The two druglord-murdered border-guards at the heart of this scandal will no doubt soon be "re-positioned" (an advertising term) as martyrs in the Obama Administration's efforts to nullify the Second Amendment...and Moron Nation is of such predictably short memory, the re-positioning will no doubt succeed.

Why now?

To repeat something I have predicted since the magnitude of Barack the Betrayer's Machiavellian cunning became obvious, he will use "gun control" -- in truth forcible civilian disarmament (essentially mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood) -- to prop up his rapidly collapsing 2012 re-election campaign.

Obama will thus demand a New York City-type gun ban be imposed on the entire nation, and via some backroom deal promoted as a "great compromise," enough Congressional Republicans will support it to make certain it becomes law.

The result will probably be confiscation of all handguns, all semi-automatic rifles or shotguns, all pump-action rifles or shotguns and most likely all sporterized former military arms too: for example, your great-grandfather's 1903 Springfield that since the 1940s has been configured as a deer rifle.

Licenses for possession will be required even for BB-guns and archery equipment. Again following present-day New York City law, no firearms (or any other weapons) will be allowed anyone who has ever seen a mental-health professional -- even for self-improvement therapy or grief-counseling. Likewise anyone with a history of involvement in Leftist politics.

And -- no -- this is not gun-nut paranoia; these are precisely the measures in effect in New York City now -- measures the anti-gun fanatics have been demanding nationwide for at least a half-century.

Undoubtedly the lockstep legions of liberal and pseudo-Leftist dupes will eagerly drink the cool-aide: "well at least Obama got the guns off the street."

The capitalists -- who because of their own escalating savagery are ever more fearful of revolution (and therefore ever more terrified of an armed electorate) -- will thus achieve another vital goal in their march toward Ayn Rand totalitarianism, the ultimate form of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class; total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/14-13#comment-1875414

*****

VISUALS

Normally this would have been the opening department in this space, not an explanatory and concluding item as it is here today. But it's so positioned because a terminal blow from fate, karma, a (sadistically hateful) deity or the malicious recurrence of the worst ill fortune imaginable – take your pick – has ended forever my ability to find joy in doing photography.

This means “Visuals” may not ever be published here again and will certainly no longer appear with any regularity.

My photographic efforts have always seemingly been hexed. The ruinous fire of 1983 that destroyed my life's work just as it was apparently on the brink of major publication – the fire that inflicted such permanently devastating clinical depression – this is but the worst of an endless litany of photography-related disasters so numerous they are inexplicable save as inconceivably bad lack or actual accursedness.

These other malevolent blows from fate include presumably reliable cameras that injuriously malfunctioned at critical moments; stolen work and stolen equipment; gallery shows canceled without explanation; and jobs enigmatically terminated before they were to begin.

But the ultimate curse is how my credit-line was mysteriously omitted from literally every photograph that might have advanced my career. These omissions happened not once, not twice, but each time my work appeared in major publications: Newsweek, Paris Match, The New York Times, Newsday, etc. ad nauseum.

Professional astrologers tell me my birth chart is afflicted in a way that forever denies me the professional recognition I need and deserve. Though I am not a devout believer in astrology, neither am I a total skeptic; my basic stance toward it is much the same as the open-minded agnosticism with which I view religion and spirituality.

What gives the astrologers' claims undeniable credence is the fact my journalism career was plagued by the same wrenching pattern of obstructions, especially major-story bylines granted by editors but eerily “lost” by back-shop personnel.

I endured the disappointing obstructions to my journalism career because I knew that, as a dyslexic, my potential for success with words was impossibly limited. A Viking Press editor told me in 1969 that though I was often an inspired reporter, I was at best a “mediocre” writer.

But that same editor told me she regarded me as a genuinely great photographer. So did many others.

Therefore, as if I were crafting my own moronic illustration of the imbecility of hope, I soldiered on, telling myself surely my luck would change, that surely my quest for greatness would eventually succeed.

Now though it is obvious it never will. Not only am I 71 years old; I am suddenly without suitable cameras – or any rational hope of ever having suitable cameras again.

And this latest blow is the proverbial last straw.

Though it has already inflicted an enormity of damage, I am withholding the details in the (probably idiotic) hope the perpetrators may yet relent. Nor – for the same reason – have I yet denounced the perpetrators to the proper authorities.

Even so, I am done with photography. As much as it was my deepest creative passion, my most profound source of aesthetic pleasure, the associated misfortunes always made it also a source of unspeakable anguish.

Talent and determination and passion as mechanisms of torture: ultimate proof god (if indeed there is a god) is the ultimate sadist.

But now the passion and pleasure are obliterated. Now there is naught but pain – the hurt of betrayal and the agony of ruin.

Hence I can't do photography anymore. I am finished. I cannot bear the sure knowledge – proven by 59 years of unspeakably bitter experience – that whatever I do, however well I do it (and especially if it's exceptionally well done), it will always be destroyed by some unforeseen, impossible-to-anticipate, impossible-to-avoid disaster inflicted from without by circumstances utterly beyond my control.

Always.

Fuck it. Fuck it all. Most especially fuck god and his malicious sadism.

LB/17 July 2011

-30-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barack Betrays Us Again; Convicts Toil as Slaves; Bachmann Pledges Theocracy; Brzezinski Warns of 'Civil Unrest'; Motorists Attack Bicyclist; Pitt (Finally) Denounces Obama; Rainbow Family Promises 'Magic'

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.

*

VISUALS

Yes you've seen the black-and-white original of this photo before, but the ever-more-glaring extent to which we are being ruined by Barack the Betrayer's treacherous turnabouts – most recently against Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – has transformed the significance of the image just as surely as coloration and posterization have altered its psychodynamics.

When I made the picture in 1984, I saw it as a unique opportunity to photograph the meaning of Reaganism – given Ronnie's Hollywood origins the biting irony of “California Flowers” was too compelling to ignore – but Obama is making it an icon of life under capitalism.

It now represents not just the circumstances of a dreadfully afflicted minority but the doom the capitalists are methodically inflicting on every one of us who is not part of the murderously greedy Ruling Class aristocracy. The homeless man sleeping in a Manhattan garbage pile is now Everyman, Everywoman and – yes – Everychild: every one of us who is targeted for genocidal banishment because we are elderly, disabled or chronically impoverished and therefore no longer exploitable for profit.

I tinted the image red for the same reason the traditional banners of socialism are always red: to remind us capitalism is invariably murder and to thus commemorate the blood of the capitalists' innumerable victims. (Nikon FM, 50 mm f/2 Nikkor, Tri-X at 800 in Diafine.)

*****

NULLE BASTARDO CARBURENDUM

Just as a few other Cassandras and I have been saying at least since the Christofascist Rick Warren was chosen to read the invocation at President Obama's inaugural, we have not only elected a conservative Republican cunningly disguised as an African-American Democrat, we have inflicted on ourselves the greatest political betrayal in American history.

(Yes of course I know Cassandra was a woman – specifically the woman to whom none listened when she warned the Trojans of the ruinous treachery concealed in the huge sculpted gift-horse left them by the Achaean Greeks – but in the face of the Trojan Horse named Barack, the gender of the messenger hardly matters.)

Though I always hoped we'd be proven wrong, there's no longer any doubt Barack the Betrayer's purpose and function is to forever discredit the Democratic Party. But that's not all; Obama's inevitable inflammation of white-racist skepticism is suppressing any possibility an effective Left-radicalism might again emerge from the African-American community as it did during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Obama is thereby doing precisely what Wall Street paid him to do: he is facilitating the “permanent Republican majority” so beloved of the capitalist aristocracy: in other words, pure Ayn Rand capitalist governance -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us. Such is the real “change we can believe in.”

Indeed no other conclusion is possible. No other conclusion fulfills the requirements of objective analysis, the Occam's Razor rule of parsimony, the mandate to solve all the unknowns in the Obamanoid equation.

Thus in retrospect it is no surprise how in 2008 Ruling Class Media presented us with an impossible choice: the candidate of “hope” and “change” versus the terrifying von Hindenburg/Hitler combination of an elderly war hero and an implacable female führer embodied in the McCain/Palin candidacy.

Like the obedience-trained lab-rats we are, we (predictably) chose the perfect Oreo. We are now – in the form of Barack the Betrayer's ever-more-undeniable war against the Working Class and anybody who is elderly, disabled or chronically impoverished – being force-fed the white fascist candy within.

***

Of all the mass-circulation scribes, Glenn Greenwald probably says it best:

“When I first began writing about politics in late 2005, the standard liberal blogosphere critique – one I naively believed back then – was that Democrats were capitulating so continuously to the Bush agenda because they 'lacked spine' and were inept political strategists: i.e., they found those policies so very offensive but were simply unwilling or unable to resist them.  It became apparent to me that this was little more than a self-soothing conceit: Democrats continuously voted for Bush policies because they were either indifferent to their enactment or actively supported them, and were owned and controlled by the same factions as the GOP.”

“Now, Democratic commentators – mostly the President's most hardened loyalists – continue to invoke this "he's-weak-and-inept" excuse for Obama, but the evidence is far too abundant to sustain it any longer...

“I think (Paul) Krugman's "personal" explanation – that Obama is far more comfortable with 'neo-liberal centrists' (i.e., corporatists) than with actual liberals – is basically true (Frank Rich put it this way:  'For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys').  But it's also about ideology, conviction, and self-interest: Obama both believes in the corporatist agenda he embraces and assesses it to be in his political interest to be associated with it.  If it means 'painful' entitlement cuts for ordinary Americans at a time of massive unemployment, economic anxiety and exploding wealth inequality, so be it.”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/07-12

In other words, the Republicans function as a noise machine to provide the Democrats the cover of plausible denial. Which means Obama's message to all of us here in the capitalist darkness can be summarized in only two words: “fuck you.”

***

Meanwhile Jane Hamsher explains how Barack's betrayals serve the Ruling Class by eliminating the last vestiges of the American experiment in constitutional democracy:

“What we’re watching is the death of the Democratic Party.  Or, at least the Democratic Party as most of us have known it.  The one that has taken its identity in the modern era from FDR and the New Deal, from Keynesianism and the social safety net.  Despite any of its other shortcomings (and they are myriad), the Democratic Party has stood as a symbol for commitment to these principles.   As recently as 2006, Democrats retook the House in a surprise wave election because the public feared that George Bush would destroy Social Security, and they trusted the Democrats over Republicans to secure it.  Just like George Bush, Obama now wants to 'save' Social Security….by giving those who want to burn it to the ground the the very thing they’ve wanted for decades.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/08-3

***

Alex Seitz-Wald of Think Progress gives us, via Wisconsin, a depressing glimpse of the corporate-plantation, slave-economy into which Massa Obama is herding us all:

“Prisoners are now taking up jobs that used to be held by unionized workers in some parts of the state...

Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.”

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/07/06/261319/scott-walker-prison-labor/

***

Newscaster Thom Hartmann breaks a major story:

“Michele Bachmann committed herself to ruling America like a theocracy...The radical right-wing religious organization in Iowa known as FAMiLY Leader – pressed Republican presidential candidates to sign a petition rejecting homosexuality and promoting other things important to religious fanatics...    And Michele Bachmann became the first Republican candidate to ink her name to the petition.   Don’t underestimate the power of Michele Bachmann – she’s in it to win it – and has a lot of money and a lot of support.  Goodbye democracy – hello theocracy?” 

http://www.truth-out.org/news-thom-hartmann-michele-bachmann-committed-herself-rule-america-theocracy-and-more/1310139464

Regular readers of Outside Agitator's Notebook are familiar with the hand-in-glove relationship between capitalism and Christianity, established first in the de facto theocracy of the post-Civil War South, where the church and the Ku Klux Klan, the latter colloquially known as “the Saturday night men's bible-study class,” function as brain police and death squad respectively, serving the Ruling Class by keeping out unions and otherwise destroying Working Class solidarity. Perfected in the former Confederacy, theocratic governance is now being imposed on the remainder of the United States.

The underlying motive for the imposition of theocracy is found in what used to be labeled industrial psychology. The misogyny and unrelieved sexual frustration demanded by all the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam (and especially by the latter two) – is a huge boon to profiteering: energies forbidden sexual expression are sublimated into mindless trinket materialism, frantic workplace productivity and envious, theocracy-sustaining violence against nonconformists.

Capitalism is therefore literally Christian economics, precisely as described by Max Weber (for which see The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). Capitalism fulfills the biblical mandates to conquer and enslave presumptively subhuman “heathens” and ruthlessly exploit the planet's resources. Wealth and poverty are thus defined as manifestations of god's will: rewards for the godly übermenschen, punishment for the sinful üntermenschen. (I use the German terms because these same mandates are the core principles of fascism and Nazism.) Likewise hierarchy: one's boss is thus no less a divinely appointed ruler than the divine-right kings of old.

***

Hartmann also gives us a glimpse of why kill-hardened combat troops – regulars and mercenaries alike – are now routinely garrisoned in our homeland:

“In a television interview...former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that the growing wealth imbalance in America – now reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression – could lead to civil unrest.  We have a society in which 400 Americans own more wealth that 150 million other Americans.   We have a society in which 50 percent of all the children in America will depend on food stamps at some point in their life before they are 18 – and among African American children that number is 90 percent.  We no longer live in a just society - and if Brzezinski is right - turbulent times could be ahead for America.”  

http://www.truth-out.org/news-thom-hartmann-brzezinski-warns-wealth-gap-may-lead-uprsing-us-streets/1310053502

***** 

DIALOGUES

The News-Tribune of Tacoma ran a disturbing report of young motorists attacking and severely injuring a 71-year-old bicyclist. Here is my response to the story's discussion thread:

As an elderly, obviously crippled pedestrian -- knee and spinal injuries force me to hobble with a cane -- I am all too well aware the hatred and contempt exhibited by the scum who attacked the 71-year-old bicyclist is becoming the norm, at least here in the autocentric Pacific Northwest.

Indeed the bitter truth of the matter is we elderly are increasingly seen as prey, whether by the thugs who attack us on the streets or the tycoons and DemoPublican politicians who want to exterminate us by eliminating our Social Security and Medicare.  

Motorists are by far the most nastily aggressive bullies. I am confronted almost daily by drivers who not only refuse to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks but curse us for the "offense" of merely trying to cross a street.

But I see it on the buses too -- the sullenly sneering youth who refuse to relinquish seats theoretically reserved for elderly and disabled people -- and I hear it in the supermarket check-out lines  (comments such as "why don't they just hurry up and die") when some elderly shopper,  fingers stiff with (untreated) arthritis, has difficulty withdrawing money from a wallet, writing a check or operating a card-reader to pay for purchases.

Meanwhile the tycoons and politicians who rule us encourage such atrocities by reducing elderly, disabled and otherwise impoverished people to hate-objects, blaming us all for the troubles capitalist greed is inflicting on the United States.

 http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/07/07/1735676/puyallup-people-in-car-seriously.html

***

The next day a discussion on the follow-up story provided what I sensed was a teachable moment:

There's no doubt, just as I noted yesterday, that hatred of presumptively lower-income people (especially those of us who are obviously elderly and/or disabled) is increasing dramatically.

This is a direct response to the DemoPublican Big Lie that we and not the true criminals – the robber-barons of Wall Street and the tyrannical tycoons of Big Business – are the perpetrating beneficiaries of the economic contraction that has destroyed the American Dream forever.

But notably vicious autocentric aggression has been a characteristic response of Washington state motorists to pedestrians, bicyclists and transit-users since long before the Great Recession.

Indeed I was repeatedly shocked by it after I moved to Washington state in 1970. 

First there was the hit-and-run murder of a young woman struck from behind by a pickup truck as she bicycled on Chuckanut Drive near Bellingham c. 1971; next there was the unprovoked  attack I witnessed in Seattle in 1972 (an enraged motorist hurling curses and bottles at a bicyclist, then veering into him and forcing him into a curb-collision that hurled him over his handlebars); and finally there were my own multiple encounters with breathtakingly hateful Seattle motorists, cumulatively so terrifying they ended my bicycling  forever.

Nor was I a bike neophyte; for years I had bicycled all over Manhattan on a three-speed Raleigh, and never once – not even in rush-hour traffic – had I encountered anything remotely like the malicious violence with which Washington state motorists refuse to share our streets and roads.

Undoubtedly there's a strong relationship between this autocentric hatefulness and the fact the Puget Sound region has the worst urban-area public transport in the United States, at least 40 years behind every comparable metropolis and (now with the economy permanently downsized) no possibility of ever catching up.

The region's abysmal anti-transit voting record  – five of seven proposals defeated in 43 years – is thus of a kind with the assaults on pedestrians and bicyclists: an undeclared war against any alternatives to enslavement by Big Oil and Big Automotive, a classic example of slaves so in love with their slavery they will literally attack their liberators.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/07/07/1736872/rider-recalls-little-after-car.html

***

Earlier today I posted the following to an interesting discussion-thread accompanying William Rivers Pitt's breakthrough piece on Truthout, but I cannot guarantee the reliability of the link because the entire site now crashes my computer every time I try to access it. In any case my comment mostly reiterates what the other Cassandras and I have been saying at least since early 2009:

I'm delighted to see Mr. Pitt and his ideological kindred finally and at long last waking up to what I realized the moment President Obama named the Christofascist Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation.

Because an inaugural invocation is the liturgical equivalent of a keynote address at a political convention, it is therefore a harbinger of all that follows. Thus Barack the Betrayer served notice of his war against Working Class America and the nation's poor, elderly and disabled people.

Analyzing the Betrayer's conduct, it is obvious his treachery is not just purposeful but an expression of truly Machiavellian cunning. Clearly, Obama was put in place by the Ruling Class to permanently discredit the Democratic Party and the minorities he – and the party itself – were hitherto assumed to represent.

Thereby the Betrayer ensures not just the permanent Republican majority sought by the robber barons of Wall Street and the tyrannical tycoons of Big Business, but an electorate so enraged it will predictably embrace the theocratic fascism of the world's first female fuhrer, a Sarah Palin or a Michelle Bachmann.

Such is "change we can believe in" in a de facto one-party state. This is why – ultimate proof of the imbecility of hope – whenever we vote for a Democrat, we get a Republican instead. Such is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

And make no mistake: cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will kill people. Moreover – because its victims are targeted by income (and therefore class and/or ethnicity) – it is in fact genocide.

I have been voicing these arguments via Outside Agitator's Notebook almost since Rick Warren flung down the gauntlet to announce the greatest betrayal in U.S. political history.

All the while I had fervently, even desperately hoped to be proven wrong. Now I know my hope too was naught but imbecility. At least though we are awakening to the extent of our powerlessness – the first step toward effective resistance.

http://www.truth-out.org/looming-betrayal/1310137478

*****

MISCELLANY

The following dispatch, picked up by The News Tribune from the Vancouver, Wash. Columbian, another McClatchy property, is almost comic relief:

“GIFFORD PINCHOT NATIONAL FOREST, Wash. — With a rolled-up lavender yoga mat in her left hand and a can of cold chili in her right, Kalea 'Cake' Holden departed the forest she called home the past week.”

“If not for the need to make money and a desire to attend the upcoming Oregon Country Fair, the 18-year-old Seattle resident said Thursday morning she could have stayed at the Rainbow Family Gathering in Skookum Meadows 'forever.'

“'Just because we're leaving the forest doesn't mean we're leaving the circle,' she assured after eating a scoop of cold chili. 'We'll bring the magic with us.'”

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/07/08/1737626/rainbow-family-packs-up-after.html

So mote it be.

LB/9 July 2011

-30-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Default = Genocide, Big Profit for Cantor; Industrial World's Most Oppressed Workers; DemocRats as GOPigs; Sneaky Medicaid Cuts; Obama vs. Social Security; New Yorkers Trash Beck; Robert Parry Blames Working Class; Crows Now Dominate Eagles-an Omen?

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011 (click on image to view it full-frame).

*

VISUALS

The I Ching, humanity's oldest book of oracular wisdom, says restraint often leads to refinement, that limitation prompts examination “of virtue and correct conduct.”

Perhaps that is what is happening here. The restraints and limitations of which I complained so bitterly last week – the compulsory isolation in which we elderly are ghettoized (no doubt to prevent our recollections of a far less tyrannical United States from subverting the present Moron Nation coda of hopeless submission to capitalist exploitation); the viciously Christian “dirty old man” bigotry that now forever denies me nude models; the fact cameras are thug magnets and seniors are prey – all this forces me, exactly as I said last week, to rely on the manipulation of old work for new images. But maybe that is not entirely bad: maybe it is a kind of resuscitation. Thus the above: the first sandwich I ever made (late 1968 or early 1969) now perhaps given new life by the computer, specifically the techniques of colorization and posterization.

The notion of combining the two images – an early graffiti picture (“Tuch and the Manikin People,” 1966 or 1967) with the nude portrait of a friend I had made during the same years – came to me completely by surprise. It was at the end of a lengthy darkroom session fulfilling a big print order from a longtime social-documentary client; I remember I was whiling away the hour it took the prints to wash, that I was sitting at my desk idly shuffling through a stack of my work prints when I saw what amounted to a mental vision of the two photos merged as in double exposure. I was so taken by this particular Muse-gift I darted back into the darkroom to make it real, and after some experimentation to get the exposure time right, I had the original black-and-white version of the picture above.

It was only many months later, after I had made several additional sandwiches, I began to understand what I was doing; the initial impulses had been purely visual, utterly devoid of words whether conceptual description or any other mental captions. But finally someone – probably Adrienne – pointed out how my sandwiches articulated what had come to me in Central Park during the Easter Be-In, 30 March 1967 (which also happened to be my 27th birthday): realization the Countercultures's “Revolution in Consciousness” (the apt phrase coined by the late Walter Bowart), was nothing less than spontaneous resurrection of the mindset associated with humanity's oldest deity, the Great Goddess or Divine Mother. Hence the title of that first series of sandwiches: “Emergence.”

Like the negatives that produced the image, the associated technical data was lost in the 1983 fire. All I can say for certain is the film was Tri-X. That and the fact I'd appreciate if you posted your reactions to this new (and I believe somewhat stronger) variant on an old theme.

*****

NULLE BASTARDO CARBURENDUM

As we celebrate the Fourth of July – the 236th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – I wonder how many people realize the United States is the only nation on today's earth so unspeakably vicious as to threaten elderly and disabled people with the de facto genocide of terminating the Social Security and Medicare stipends upon which we depend for shelter and medicine.

Yes, genocide – deliberately inflicted extermination – and you read it here first because no other journalist dares say it.

Such is the death that will undoubtedly result if the Republicans succeed in their malicious effort to tank the U.S. and global economies and thus (further) discredit President Barack Obama, who is either the nation's most inept chief executive or, as Barack the Betrayer, the most successfully manipulative politician in human history.

In either case the impending federal default – the result of Republican obstructionism (deliberately?) enabled by Democrat betrayals – will indeed cut off Social Security and Medicare: every government spokesperson has already told us that.

What the spokespeople dare not tell us – not yet anyway – is that Social Security and Medicare cutoffs will not only fling tens of thousands of us – more likely millions of us – into homelessness; it will also deny us health care, including access to life-sustaining prescription drugs.

As a direct result, untold numbers of us will die: literally murdered by the politicians whose sole allegiance is to the capitalist pigs – the dark lords of Big Business and the robber barons of Wall Street – those anti-Americans who have banished the American dream and subverted the American experiment in constitutional governance.

Surely the Republicans know this; surely the Democrats knew this would happen when their betrayals reanimated the Republican Party and so enabled the 2010 GOP landslide.

What though will happen when the military-pay and welfare-check cutoffs hit home? Will the military revolt? Will the ghettos rise up? Or will we all submit in sullen silence?

Perhaps that's why the U.S. government now employs the largest mercenary force in human history – a private army that presumably would continue to get paid (and therefore continue to follow orders) even with the government in default.

In any case – recognizing as I do an essential practice of capitalism is ridding its world of anything unprofitable (a principle that includes not just ventures and machines but all of us who are no longer exploitable for profit) – I cannot doubt the genocide-effect is every bit as intentional as the Nazi death camps. For what is Nazism but capitalism carried to its logical extreme?

Meanwhile, as we await the unspeakable horrors of default, the stress this is imposing is itself lethal, especially amongst people in my age group. The growing fear is palpable; the unthinkable is now at hand. Such is the awful truth of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, subjugation and death for all the rest of us.

As Churchill said on the eve of the Battle of Britain: “only a miracle can save us now.”

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/26/988997/-Budget-Deficit-Hysteria:-

***

More outrageous still – in fact quite possibly the most vicious act of anti-Americanism perpetrated by any politician in memory – is the fact the leading Republican budget negotiator is literally betting on default: investing in a stock that will skyrocket once the government is unable to pay its bills.

Salon exposes Rep. Eric Cantor's GOPorker malevolence in a story linked here via the AFL/CIO website:

http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/06/29/will-rep-cantor-rake-in-massive-windfall-if-government-defaults/

(Though Salon requires registration, the link provided by the AFL/CIO will get you directly to the report.)

***

As if the socioeconomic horrors of default were not sufficient proof what the United States has become, now there is statistical confirmation we are the most oppressed people in the industrial world.

Not only does U.S. capitalism miser out the worst, most prohibitively expensive “health care”; our slavemaster bosses also work us much harder. An In These Times report picked up by Common Dreams summarizes the ugly details:

“The massive layoffs of the Great Recession have vastly increased the workloads of those still working...the average American worker clocked 1,804 hours of work in 2006, the highest in the world...three full-time weeks more per year than the average British workers, six more weeks than the average French worker, and nine more weeks than the average German worker.“

“Before Corporate America’s big wave of unionbusting – under which union sympathizers are routinely fired (31,358 in 2005 alone) and unionized plants are especially targeted for closing – labor was powerful enough to establish a decent level of leisure time. Nonunion firms carefully copied the standards in union facilities as a means of remaining non-union. But with unionization now diminished to just under 12 percent of the total workforce, unions are no longer a sufficient force to negotiate a standard for their members that will then become the norm for nonunion firms as well.

“U.S. law doesn't mandate any level of guaranteed vacation days. In fact, it doesn’t even guarantee you a half-hour lunch break, which is provided (or not) at the employer‘s whim...The U.S. is the only advanced nation that does not legislate a minimum number of days of vacation.”

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/29-3

***

The DemocRats – cap “R” to denote closet Republicans – continue to serve the capitalists by enabling the Republicans' tyrannical agenda. Here in addition to DemocRat complicity in the impending default are two especially outrageous examples:

“The White House stated yesterday the President is taking repealing the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires off the table.  Which leaves mostly spending cuts targeting working families still on the table.  Looks like...America's oligarchs win again.”

http://www.truth-out.org/news-thom-hartmann-supreme-court-decision-favors-big-money-politics-and-more/1309282627

***

Barack the Betrayer strikes again: while Medicaid advocates have been fighting Republican proposals to cut the program, they’re just waking up to the threat of a sneaky cutback proposed by the Obama administration:

“It’s an idea to change the way federal matching funds work and save money in the process — and it would probably do it by shifting costs to the states. If that happens...the states will just pass on the cuts to providers and, ultimately, the patients.”

“In the budget blueprint unveiled in April, President Barack Obama proposed adjusting the way federal matching funds paid to the states are calculated for Medicaid and its companion, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Sources close to the administration tell Politico that White House officials have been trying to develop the idea into a version that could become part of a deal in the ongoing deficit reduction talks.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57976.html

***

The Betrayer is also (again) joining Republicans in the capitalists' war against Social Security:

“President Obama on Wednesday reiterated his push to extend an existing payroll tax holiday through 2012 – a move denounced by liberal Democrats who fear the reduction in revenues will undermine Social Security. 'I think that it makes perfect sense for us to take a look at, can we extend the payroll tax, for example, an additional year,' Obama said during a lengthy press conference at the White House.”

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/169077-ignoring-liberal-dems-obama-endorses-longer-payroll-tax-holiday

***

The public trashing of the fascist demagogue Glenn Beck in Manhattan's Bryant Park bolsters my fiercely sustained pride in being a born New Yorker, even exiled as I am by the City's gentrification:

http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/71-71/6442-glenn-beck-exaggerates-attack-in-new-york

(Site is being jammed and link may be difficult to open.)

*****

DIALOGUES

I had little to add to Internet discussions this week. My one contribution was to the Common Dreams thread engendered by a Robert Parry piece, “How Greed Destroys America”:

Mr. Parry's summation of U.S. economic history is accurate as far as it goes, but he leaves out three important facts -- and his omissions reveal that despite his apparently progressive stance, he writes from a hopelessly (and uselessly) bourgeois Ruling Class perspective.

Indeed he even echoes the implicitly fascist elitism of Ayn Rand by denouncing us -- the Working Class (which in today's economy is anyone who is not part of the ruling 1 percent) -- as as the perpetrators of our own victimhood. Whether through racism, fear, ignorance or some combination of these factors, the vast majority of us -- at least according to Mr. Parry -- "position (our) own necks under the boots of corporate masters."

The three facts he cleverly omits in his anti-Working-Class screed are these:

(1)-that the outcome of the 2010 election (and the near-certainty of a Republican landslide in 2012) are the direct result of breathtaking, historically unprecedented betrayals of the popular will by President Obama and the Democrats in general;

(2)-that the reforms enacted by the administrations of Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt were not prompted by sudden conversions to humanitarian beliefs but were instead compelled by the truly bottomless Ruling Class terror of Communist revolution;

(3)-that with the death of the Soviet Union, the Ruling Class no longer has any fear of Communism and is therefore free to express its infinitely greedy, infinitely malevolent selfhood.

Here too is the reason the Democrats have so brazenly (and so ruinously) betrayed their Working Class constituents. As Bill Moyers points out, U.S. democracy has long been a charade in which one party functions as a noise machine to conceal the treachery and malfeasance of the other. (See particularly http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html) But now with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics destroyed, the capitalist ruling class no longer has any need to conceal its agenda of tyrannical greed: hence capitalist governance in the U.S. is becoming indistinguishable from capitalist governance anywhere else in the world: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

While it is surely true the U.S.S.R. never lived up to its claim to be a "workers' paradise," it is equally true the U.S. has never lived up to its claims of "liberty and justice for all." But the U.S.S.R. -- with its global network of professional revolutionary agitators -- was undeniably a facilitator of progressive change: this in direct contrast to the U.S. history of supporting an endless succession of fascist dictators. Thus despite its many flaws the Soviet Union was the sole protector of Working Class interests everywhere on Earth.

But Mr. Parry omits all these vital facts, no doubt because he fears the direction it might take us were he to acknowledge them -- particularly the lesson implicit in the history of Communism: that capitalism is evil of such unprecedented magnitude, only the most disciplined organized resistance can ever prevail against it.

Meanwhile as Mr. Parry remains intellectually imprisoned by his identification with the oppressors -- the capitalists and capitalism in general -- he seeks to reinforce our own imprisonment as well. Thus he neither tells us anything we don't already know, nor does he dare suggest we the explore one proven way out from under the capitalist jackboot.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/28-12#comment-1865901

*****

MISCELLANY

Remember, as you read the following, that ravens (which as Corvus are often mis-identified as “big crows”), are a sacred bird, both to the Pacific Northwest Coastal tribes and to the ancient peoples of Britain. To the Salish folk, Raven is the Changer, the Light-Bringer who singed his feathers permanently black by stealing fire from the gods and fetching light into the world; to the proto-Celts – the goddess-worshipers who built Avebury Circle and Stonehenge – Raven was a totem bird, the avian personification of Bendegeid Vron, Bran the Blessed, the divine son who is god of eloquence, of music and poetry, and who is lord of the winds. The Eiru, the people of prehistoric Ireland, regarded Raven as the prime familiar of the Morrigan, the midnight-haired goddess of war and fate.

Such believers despite their ethnicity would thus see an omen of great significance in Puget Sound's newly emergent supremacy of crow over eagle:

“A few years ago a murder of crows mobbing an eagle was a novel spectacle in Seattle. It’s still spectacular, but it’s hardly novel now. Bald eagles are the comeback poster kids of conservation; 50 years after DDT and hunters nearly extirpated them from the Lower 48, more than a thousand roost around Puget Sound and this state’s other waterways. Their nemesis now is not homo sapiens but the crows that have meanwhile multiplied by the tens of thousands, thriving in the jumbled, disturbed landscapes we create.”

“Some days it’s hard not to think this is the crows’ city and we just live in it, so cockily do they preside over our backyards and roadsides. Like Pashtuns and Sicilians, they’re famously loyal to their clans and fierce toward their foes, whose ranks include anyone they think has tried to menace their nests or offspring.”

http://crosscut.com/blog/crosscut/20385/When-crows-become-eagles/?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c6cce4a3fe-Crosscut_daily_email_6_30_20116_30_2011&utm_medium=email

Indeed I am reminded of the very optimistic prophecy contained in Taliesin's “Cad Goddeu” (“Battle of the Trees”), here as translated by Robert Graves:

The tops of the beech trees
Have sprouted of late
Are changed and renewed
From their withered state...

LB/3 July 2011

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On Limitations; Nurses vs. Capitalist Pigs; More Convicts = More Profits; Cell-Phone Camera Censor; Weiner-Wag Hides Fukushima Apocalypse; “Shoot the Slut” Misogyny; Washington Coal War; Self-Radar for Blind

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011

*

VISUALS

I have started making sandwiches again, searching older pictures for material since new sandwich-suitable work has become impossible to produce. The savage isolation of elderly people characteristic of capitalism combines with the puritanical malice implicit in the “dirty old man” archetype to guarantee I will never again have access to nude models.

At the same time I am also prohibited from doing street photography. Firstly there is the disturbing fact all but the cheapest or most obviously obsolete cameras are thug magnets. Secondly there is the far uglier truth any elderly person in any U.S. city is increasingly seen as nothing more than prey. Lastly there is the self-inflicted curse of my bad decision-making skills: the fact I am doomed to spend my remaining years in the one U.S. jurisdiction in which street photography is effectively illegal: photograph anyone in Washington state without their express permission – even someone in a public place – and you're fair game for a nastily punitive invasion-of-privacy lawsuit. Nor – as the Washington Post-owned Everett Herald learned to its astonishment in the late 1970s – is a press card any protection. Even if you're a staff photographer shooting a legitimate assignment, you'll still lose in court.

Years ago I'd be chanting that immortal line by which Bob Dylan underscored the reality expressed so well by James Baldwin in his title Another Country, which Manhattan genuinely is (or at least was during the years I knew it). Dylan merely put it to music: “I'm goin back to New York City; I do believe I've had enough.”

Yes I've sung that song before. Trouble is now I'm too old, too crippled by chronic ailments, too impoverished in mind and body and soul. Too unprofitable – that is, too old to be exploitable for profit. Such is life – and death – under capitalism: naught but remnants from which to make art; sandwiches made from leftovers. 

Hence the above image combines a commissioned portrait of lovers I made during the middle 1970s with a photograph of intertwined trees I made last fall. The portrait, in black and white (M2 Leica; 35mm Summicron; Tri-X at 320) was among the workprints I had taken with me back to the City in 1983 and thus survived the fire; the trees (Rolleiflex F; Kodak 400 color-negative portrait film) I photographed merely on a hunch: “maybe I can use this image...”

A couple months later I scanned the two pictures together and then – to combat the tonal clash between color and black-and-white – electronically deleted the color and electronically sepia toned the result. (It sounds a lot easier than it was; the process was one of discovery by trial and error and took most of a weekend.)

Meanwhile I photograph much less than I'd like (what little I do is never more than volunteer work) and I write much more than I am comfortable with: surely there is no greater contradiction in terms than “dyslexic writer” – probably no endeavor more absurd, either. Thus my abilities slowly die of frustration.

*****

NULLE BASTARDO CARBURENDUM

News of yet another significant anti-capitalist rally was suppressed by Ruling Class Media last week, when approximately 1000 red-clad Registered Nurses and their supporters marched on Wall Street chanting, “Wall Street got bailed out/we got sold out.”

The demonstration, on 22 June, was covered extensively by its sponsor, National Nurses United, with text and (fairly dramatic) photographs on its website:

http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/blog/entry/nurses-take-on-wall-street1/

There is semiotic significance here too: note (again, as at Madison) the return of red as the color of protest, defiance and resistance.

Sadly red's original symbolism has mostly been purged from our conscious minds – until the deliberate (and deliberately confusing) co-optation of red by the U.S. Ruling Class and its Republican storm troopers, red always represented the blood of slain workers – but it appears the memory lingers at least subconsciously.

Perhaps soon we will again see red banners raised in rightful anger.

***

A study by the Justice Policy Institute not only proves mass arrests mean bigger slave-labor profits for the Prison Industrial Complex but reveals that PIC lobbyists are busy bribing politicians to ensure a steadily increasing supply of convicts: that is, slaves.

Some of the biggest names in the private prison slave industry have given $835,514 to federal candidates since 2000 and a stunning $6,092,331 to state politicians in the last five elections cycles, the report says.

“A lot of it is focused on the state level because a lot of the people in prison are in state facilities,” said Paul Aston, an author of the report.

“With most states and the federal government operating under record deficits and decreasing budgets, private prison companies have a growing desire to establish influential connections with policymakers, with two goals: pitching private prisons as a lower cost alternative to building or maintaining state facilities; and fighting policies that might reduce the use of incarceration.”

The report also points to the revolving door between the private prison companies and the government agencies that control their financing.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/24-2

In other words, the politicians now have a double incentive to put us all in concentration camps: not just to silence us, but to increase – via capitalism – the already obscene flow of bribery money into their pockets and bank accounts.

Which is yet another example of the paradigm of capitalist governance newly imposed on the United States as it is converted into the aristocracy's United Estates: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

***

A Ruling Class Media report late last week revealed Apple is developing the technology to suppress the use of cell-phone cameras:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2004233/Apple-files-patent-block-iPhone-users-filming-live-events-smartphone.html?ak_proof=1

As electronic freedom advocates quickly grasped, this would give the Ruling Class and its representatives in government unlimited ability to block cell-phone camera users from recording atrocities.

As I commented on the associated Common Dreams thread:

At last an undeniable and memorably vivid demonstration of the Big Lies of Internet "freedom" and its potential for "revolution."

As I have been saying for years, any medium that can be suppressed merely by the flick of a switch offers neither freedom nor revolutionary potential.

Indeed the primary function of the computer and its associated technologies is to further enslave us: tens of millions of jobs abolished forever, the advent of surveillance technologies of which the Nazis could only dream. Why else would the Ruling Class have so enthusiastically embraced it?

As I myself can attest, in the fields of journalism, publishing and graphic arts alone, the advent of the computer reduced employment by as much as 75 percent: a single newspaper reporter now, thanks to computers, does all the work formerly done by at least five people: copy editor, linotype operator, engraver, stereotyper, proof reader: all these jobs gone forever, the workers typically flung into permanent under-employment or unemployment, their skills and careers sacrificed on the altar of capitalist greed.

Meanwhile by our consumeroid acceptance of not just computers but every other associated gew-gaw we have imposed on ourselves a surveillance network that enables the government and/or the Ruling Class to not only monitor us 24/7 but -- literally by the aforementioned flick -- render us deaf, mute, blind and therefore utterly powerless.

Somewhere in Hell, Heinrich Himmler is surely cackling with glee.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/22-8

(Originally intended for “Dialogues” but posted instead in “Nulle Bastardo” because of its informational significance: a story apparently not covered by any other news outlet.)

***

While Ruling Class Media has been distracting Moron Nation with reports of DemocRat Weiner-wagging, GOPorker presidential squabbling and Bristol Palin's chastity, we (unlike the rest of the industrial world) have been methodically denied reports on the apocalyptic events at Fukushima.

Meanwhile – even as Germany and Italy prove their definitively greater degrees of self-protective civilization by preparing to minimize and eventually abolish their nuclear power facilities – U.S. politicians continue to spout the Big Lie nukes are the safest, most environmentally sound form of electrical generation available to us.

Via Common Dreams, here is a vital and – yes – terrifying report by Anne Landman of PR Watch:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/24-0

Given our craven submissiveness – which labels our sullen refusal to acknowledge our utter powerlessness as ultimate forms of self-deception or hypocrisy – it is increasingly evident we are the industrial world's most methodically oppressed population.

*****

DIALOGUES

Dominated as it is by capitalism – not to mention a subtle Ayn Rand undercurrent of socioeconomic exclusionism – U.S. feminism remains uniquely and stubbornly in denial about the vicious reality of class struggle. Alas the blogger Amanda Marcotte is no exception, though that does not make her analysis of Moron Nation's newly emergent war against female sexuality and its murderous “shoot the slut” mentality any less alarming.

The facts and associated atrocities are as she reports them: “it's not just the nearly 1000 bills in state legislatures aimed at punishing or controlling female sexuality by depriging women of access to birth control and abortion...(it's the fact) female celebrities whose only 'sin' seems to be having spent the night at a man’s house are photographed and mocked, as if their behavior fell way outside of social norms.” Ms. Marcotte's failure is to set these trends in context by showing how misogyny is an (essential) expression of capitalism, a revelation she is still too bourgeois – too much identified with the Ruling Class – to dare make.

Hence my commentary on her essay:

Like most of the alleged U.S. "Leftists," Ms. Marcotte not only rejects the historical truth of class struggle but also denies the huge importance of religion in shaping and controlling human consciousness. Thus she fails to recognize the conditions by which she is legitimately outraged are infinitely more ominous than just "a cultural bout of misogyny."

What is happening in today's United States – the real motive behind the Ruling Class war against female sexuality – is nothing less than the methodical imposition of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

A key element in the subjugation process is the re-imposition of Christian theocracy: a draconian conditioning-for-submissiveness in which the suppression of female sexuality plays a vital role – this because (precisely as America's capitalist psychological warfare experts learned from their Nazi tutors after World War II) – the shortest path to total control of a conquered population is through its mothers and wives.

Were Ms. Marcotte schooled in class-struggle, she would recognize instantly the extent to which we in the the U.S. Working Class – all of us who are not part of the tiny but all-powerful ruling aristocracy -- are effectively a conquered population. We have lost the class war; we as a class have no representatives in government at any level. And now – given the plethora of studies proving that devout Christians make the "best" (that is, most submissively obedient, dependably anti-union) employees and servants – the victors are imposing Christianity with all its traditionally misogynistic horrors.

The Ruling Class war on female sexuality meanwhile serves two purposes. Firstly, the same studies that prove the superior exploitability of Christians also prove a close relationship between compulsively high productivity and the sexual frustrations associated with the Judaeo/Christian/Islamic hatred of sex and sexuality: the more sexually obstructed the employee, the more likely the employee will substitute productivity and acquisitiveness for sex. Secondly, the more sexually frustrated a woman is – again as proven by multiple studies in what was formerly termed "industrial psychology" -- the more likely it is she will turn to Christian fanaticism or its Judaic or Islamic counterpart.

Beneath this – all of it stark proof we underestimate the diabolical cunning of the Ruling Class at our own greatest peril – is the historical fact the anger of women is most often the spark that ignites revolution. Demonstrations by the women of Paris in 1789 began the French Revolution. And it was the unimaginably heroic women of the Lesnoy Textile Works who boiled into the streets of Petrograd on 8 March 1917 to defy the Tsar's soldiers, Cossacks and Okhrana (secret police) agents, thereby triggering the Russian Revolution.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/13-3

***

Politics has never been far beneath the surface of the simmering debate over building a new deep-water shipping terminal north of Bellingham to export coal to China, but events last week brought the community's divisions to a boil, prompting me to comment as follows:

Interesting as this controversy may be to sociologists or journalists, it is just another example of the ultimate American Big Lie: the ongoing illusion of democratic process by which the Ruling Class deceives the gullible – that is, most of us – into believing we have some control over the circumstances of our lives.

Having spent about half my boyhood and most of the earliest years of my journalism career in Appalachia – where coal is not just king but tyrant – I recognize the politics of this matter all too well. The coal companies have absolute power: whatever they want they get, whether by payoffs, thuggery or some combination of both. Thus the irremediably post-apocalyptic conditions in so much of West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and East Tennessee: no matter how diligently the people might work to preserve their environments – and contrary to certain nastily smug bigots, Appalachian folk fight damn hard for the mountains they love – the coal operators always win.

The Evergreen State coal port and its environmentally ruinous increase in Big Business toxicity (locomotive exhaust, coal dust, the maximum-filth emissions of idling automotive engines in the colossal traffic jams inflicted by the hourly passage of mile-long trains) – all this was irrevocably imposed on us long before it was publicly announced. The Ruling Class had met in some walnut-paneled sanctuary of greed to decree Washington state would be despoiled from Spokane west to Vancouver and thence north to Bellingham. It was, as always, entirely about profit: the public be damned. We the victims might be allowed a few years of <i>pro forma</i> tantrums – protests doomed before conception – but there was never any doubt the port would be built.

As to Bellingham's unexpressed but obvious hope intervention by state officials might provide some environmental sanity to ameliorate an environmentally insane decision, it seems Mayor Dan Pike is unaware of the accolade President Obama recently paid Gov. Gregoire, applauding her as “a fierce advocate for American businesses.” That obviously answers the question posed not just by the mayor but by an old-time anthem of the coal-field unions, a song aptly titled “Which Side Are You On?”

While I can't blame Mr. Pike for his naivety – reports of the Obama/Gregoire quote were limited mostly to the labor press, and Bellingham's so-called “Leftists” (never mind their allegedly “progressive” views) tend to be as venomously anti-union as any Ku Klux Klanner – the mayor's apparent optimism is nevertheless quite moving. Somehow it reminds me of boyhood conversations I had with barefoot urchins, hard-eyed boys and stark-faced girls compelled to gather spilled lumps of winter coal along the Louisville-Nashville tracks to provide their mothers sufficient fuel to cook their suppers and perhaps breakfasts too, the every-afternoon going-home-from-school chore of begrimed and ragged children who yet dared imagine Santa Claus might bring joy to the weathered clapboard shacks in which they and their families dwelt. Indeed Mayor Pike's cause is no less hopeless: from Barack the Betrayer to Christine the Cruel, the Democrats are dropping all pretense of being anything but Republicans in disguise – final proof the coal port will be rammed down our throats here just as union-busting and strip-mining was jammed down the throats of Appalachians.

It cannot be said too often that such is merely capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation, genocidal poverty and environmental ruin for all the rest of us.

http://crosscut.com/2011/06/17/environment/21030/Coal-port-proposal-drives-a-big-green-wedge-into-Bellingham-politics--/?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=398bc4c6e2-Crosscut_daily_email_6_17_20116_17_2011&utm_medium=email

*****

MISCELLANY

In recent decades, a number of blind people have developed a bat-like method of determining their surroundings using tongue clicks. Following recent success in Berlin, the technique – which was originated by a blind man named David Kish in the United States – could become more widespread in Germany. Some even use "flash sonar" to ride bikes and go hiking in the mountains.

An interesting, compelling, profoundly optimistic report from der Spiegel for which free registration may be required:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,768868,00.html

The text and pictures leave me with two profoundly troubling questions: why must we so often go far outside our borders for stories such as these, and why – given such renewed evidence of our native ingenuity – are we so maliciously oppressed by the politicians and the capitalists these tyrants represent?

LB/25 June 2011

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