Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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/
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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?”
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.
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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.”
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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
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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
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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
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Uncle mine, your use of 'Cassandra' in this context is amusing only because for many years, before people actually used their own names as email addresses, I went by Kassandra for precisely this reason. I was hearing goose steps when the name of the agency Homeland Security was announced. I knew the WMDs were a lie before Valerie P got outed as CIA, and I cried all night on the first night of shock and awe, and not just because my son was in the military; he was far better off than those in the Army or Marines. I wept with relief when my daughter washed out of Naval basic because of her poor feet, this just a few months before we invaded Iraq, although I don't tell her that because she was disappointed.
(Do not mistake me, I believe the world is better without Saddam in it, but the alleged Christians in politics are out-Machiavelli'ing Machiavelli, albeit not within reach of his brilliance.)
I was, despite my depressing accurate predictions about Republicans, taken in lock, stock and barrel by Barack Obama. What is it that the Who sang? "We won't get fooled again!" Too bad the Who were attributing greater intelligence to most of us than we actually deserve.
Michelle B alone illustrates why I will never go back to Minnesota even though I love the countryside and climate.
The elderly poor combine two of attributes that attract the greatest contempt from those glamourous Haves; they're elderly and they are poor, and therefore provide no profit to those who are profiting from the families losing their homes and their status in the middle class. Welcome, fellow Kassandra, I only wish we were both wrong.
Posted by: Sheare Bliss | 07/11/2011 at 06:26 AM