Loren Bliss: Outside Agitator's Notebook

Capitalism: Thought Control, Foreclosures, Youth War, Facebook Tyranny

Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

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VISUALS

Portrait of a Knoxville woman, 1967. This is one of a series of photographs I made in East Tennesse while visiting there with my wife Adrienne shortly after we were married. The print, on the long-discontinued, forever lamented and never-to-be-equaled DuPont Varilure, is 44 years old; it survived the fire because it was part of my working portfolio. Tri-X at 1200 in Diafine; Canon VT with the 35mm f/2 screw-mount Summicron, other data lost or forgotten.   

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EXTRA: THOUGHTS ON A SPECIAL OCCASION

The hit on Osama bin Laden would seem to have checkmated the Republicans. Thus, finally, there are no political obstacles in the way of President Obama becoming the personification of "change we can believe in" – the president for whom we voted. Will he? I surely hope so, but I gravely doubt it. The obstacles to change are not our pseudo-partisan politics; the barriers are entirely economic – matters of class-struggle actually – the fact Obama, the Democrats and the Republicans are all wholly owned subsidiaries of Wall Street and Big Business, with the Republicans functioning as a Machiavellian noise machine to provide Obama the cover he needs for his betrayals.

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Just as many expatriates from the States were prompted by the attack on Pearl Harbor to once again acknowledge their U.S. citizenship, so did the atrocities of 9/11 prove to this exiled Manhattanite there is no such thing as a “former” New Yorker.

I was up unusually early the morning of 9/11 because a friend and I were going grouse hunting – the forest-grouse season in Washington state opens on 1 September and the all-white meat is one of Mother Nature's delicacies. My friend had the early morning news on the idiot box to accompany his coffee, and by the time I walked into his living room, the first attack had already happened. I dismissed the initial strike as a terrible accident – I could hardly forget the B-25 that had flown into the Empire State Building in 1945 – but then the second plane hit the second tower, and I knew we were under attack.

Though I left the City in late 1986,  my first reaction after horror and outrage was a strong and surprising impulse to return home, and my next emotion an astonishingly deep guilt that I would not – a guilt no doubt partly expressed by my telephone call later that day to confirm the survival of my former wife and dear friend Adrienne. Meanwhile I was quietly damning myself for being Here and not There – There in the City where at the very least I could record the valiant struggles of my fellow New Yorkers and perhaps even provide some small but useful assistance beyond my obligations as an archivist.

Skeptics who jeer at the notion of a journalist providing “some small but useful assistance” should note the ghoulish, morally imbecilic non-involvement now attributed to journalists in general was originally a defining characteristic of television personnel only. (The fact I avoid saying “television journalists” is a declaration of my recognition “journalism” and “television” are mutually exclusive terms.) Print journalists – real journalists (self very much included) – often provided initial aid to police and paramedics, performing basic duties like setting out road flares to mark accident scenes or helping usher gawking crowds away from danger or even rendering basic first aid. In the old days – when Big Business ownership was limited to television, only the televoids were required to be lurking ghouls. For the rest of us, getting the picture or the story or both didn't mean we just stood and watched, especially when we were first on the scene. Of course it's different today: everywhere in Ruling Class Media, “corporate ghoul” is now part of the job description. But amongst my generation of reporters and photographers, the impulse to render aid when necessary had not yet been suppressed by management.

Which brings us back to 9/11. Ironically, when the World Trade Center was being built, I was among its many detractors. (Construction began in 1966, and that only after raging controversy.) Once it was erected, I like many other aesthetically minded New Yorkers thought the Twin Towers ruined the formerly-perfect Manhattan skyline, the structures giving the island a jarringly stern-heavy look, as if it were sinking into the harbor, Battery Park first. But when bin Laden's terrorists attacked the towers and turned them into the tomb of 2,792 women, men and – let us not forget – children, it felt as if my own neighborhood had been bombed, and my eyes teared with impotent fury.

Thus my applause for the bin Laden hit. And a hit it clearly was, its Mafiosi spare-the-wives-and-children efficiency surely appropriate vengeance for an attack on the City not just boastfully famous as the cultural center of all Westernesse but also quietly infamous as the national headquarters of Cosa Nostra.

Nor will I apologize for applauding. Truth is, the whining, sniveling and hand-wringing of critics – the wailing and gnashing of teeth whether from Left or Right – disgusts me exactly as I am disgusted by the revisionist “historians” who now so disingenuously lament our response to Axis Japan's raid on Pearl Harbor.

The fact is bin Laden attacked the City that is my birthplace and original home, the realm that shaped my consciousness and nurtured my intellect and is thus quite literally my Motherland. My only regret is the murderer's end was so quick and clean: Osama bin Laden should have been paraded in chains through the streets of the Five Boroughs, introduced to Madam la Guillotine before a crowd of 100,000 in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park and his severed head then pickled in a bell jar – to be brought out for public display at the former World Trade Center site every 9/11 hereafter.

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NULLE BASTARDO

Thanks to Truthout, a follow-up on the Tucson Rebellion (with pictures): The Tucson school board was to begin eliminating Mexican-American Studies (MAS), but before the board arrived for its 26 April meeting, nine students and alumni of Tucson schools seized the board members' seats, sat and chained themselves together to oppose this newest manifestation of Arizona thought control. A security guard grabbed the two young women leading the charge, but they struggled free and shackled themselves with the others.

Republican Tom Horn, the former state superintendent of schools who last year won election as Arizona attorney general after a campaign of Nazi-style hate-mongering, has sought for years to suppress ethnic studies and has made MAS his primary target. Horn claims “the program promotes anti-American ideas and radicalizes students of color by teaching them that they are members of an oppressed minority.”

Here's a report the Ruling Class doesn't want us to read, with full details including the background of the fight:

http://www.truthout.org/education-action-inside-arizona-ethnic-studies-battle/1304619698

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Foreclosure reveals the true savagery of capitalism: Evicting homeowners and their families into inescapable poverty and often-permanent homelessness is part of “a broader set of interlocking efforts to exploit those hardest hit by the endless economic hard times...There is no underground conspiracy. The facts are in plain sight...If the public ever gets a complete picture of the personal, financial, and legal assault on citizens at their most vulnerable, the outrage will be endless.” Another story the Ruling Class Media routinely suppresses:

http://www.truthout.org/beyond-foreclosuregate-it-gets-uglier/1304731308

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Americans United fights theocracy by protesting the National Day of Prayer: “Americans don’t need a federal government directive to tell them when, whether and how to pray,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “There are many things that government does well, but managing Americans’ religious lives isn’t one of them.”

Given the intimate connection between theocracy and capitalism – capitalists as tyrants, religious authorities as thought police – we should all join Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It is far more focused than the American Civil Liberties Union, and unlike the ACLU, it did not betray us all by arguing for Citizens United, the supreme court decision that forever destroyed the (few) remnants of U.S. constitutional democracy.

http://www.au.org/media/press-releases/archives/2011/05/congressionally-mandated.html

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Christian bullies attack anti-bullying efforts: as states and school districts work to stem a tide of fundamentalist-provoked anti-gay bullying in American public schools, the JesuNazis have launched a counter-offensive to ban programs that seek to protect LGBT youth from homophobic thugs. People for the American Way, a group well worth supporting, has the details in an investigative report entitled "Big Bullies: How the Religious Right is Trying to Make Schools Safe for Bullies and Dangerous for Gay Kids":

http://site.pfaw.org/site/MessageViewer?dlv_id=26781&em_id=20181.0

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Capitalism's War on Working-Class Youth (a Seattle perspective): Seattle politicians of “both” parties – the Teabagging GOPorkers and their always-compliant DemocRat enablers – are eliminating government-funded programs for children-in-crisis despite the fact such programs “are one of society's best bargains.” University of Chicago professor James Heckman, awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in economics, “calculates that the rate of return on these investments, 'seen in a purely economic setting, range from 7-10 percent. As a benchmark, the historical return on the stock market is about 5.8 percent.' So there's a comparatively 'very high social and economic return' on 'fixing people, creating a base for future productivity and motivation for the society.'”

“Research posted at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta confirms similarly huge benefits to society in medical terms. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, led by San Diego's Kaiser HMO and analyzed by CDC epidemiologists, indicated that the bodies and brains of children who live with the trauma of family violence, addiction, alcohol abuse, or homelessness are neurochemically changed long-term. The consequence is not just an increased likelihood of adult problems such as chronic anxiety, depression, and cognitive impairment, but physical disorders like cancer, heart disease, emphysema, obesity, chronic bronchitis, and diabetes...even when an individual's diet, exercise regimen, and other lifestyle choices have been healthy.”

http://crosscut.com/2011/05/04/king-county/20879/A-budget-cutting-Sophie-s-Choice:-Youth-programs-hit-hard/?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f6e31d9a69-Crosscut_E_mail_5_4_20115_4_2011&utm_medium=email

(This is one of those stories I'd damn well rather not have read. Coming from a savagely dysfunctional family – my mother tried to murder me when I was five – I already have heart disease and suffer from seemingly incurable post-smoking obesity. Now this report adds the prospect of cancer – the one mode of death that because of its prolonged agony I find utterly terrifying.)

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Capitalism's War on Working-Class Youth (a Michigan perspective): the state's GOPigs now want to force impoverished kids to suffer the (additional) humiliation of getting their clothing only from junk shops. “A small part of the DHS savings, about $200,000, would come from adjustments to the clothing allowance for foster children, or children of the working poor, of $79 for school clothes...children will still get close to that $79, but would be issued gift cards that can only be used at the Salvation Army, Goodwill or other thrift stores.”

From The Detroit News, with thanks to Common Dreams for the catch:

http://www.detnews.com/article/20110415/POLITICS02/104150367/Michigan-lawmakers-push-deeper-cuts

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Why Do Capitalists So Despise Working-Class Youth? The short answer is the Wall Street parasites and the Big Business robber-barons fear the revolutionary potential of Working Class youth just as the Tsar feared the Russian proletariat.

Though none of the four prerequisites of revolution exist in today's United States – the Ruling Class has carefully structured our lives to make sure there is no solidarity-building ideology; no organization; no public access by which to nullify to the technologies of oppression; no possibility of foreign assistance – all of those deficits could be eliminated in the years ahead.

There is no question capitalism is already jeopardizing our species' survival. Opposition to the capitalist-inflicted apocalypse could thus become the bond for an aggressive socialist alliance throughout Latin America. Many Europeans meanwhile believe capitalist tyranny could trigger a new socialist revolution in Russia.

Or the Chinese Empire (which curiously and perhaps significantly remains officially Communist), might declare itself the savior of the world. China could utilize the money and power it has reaped from the capitalist global economy, reinvesting its enormous wealth in worldwide socialist revolution – a possibility underscored by a key principle of Sun Tzu, “all warfare is based on deception.”

Hence I cannot but wonder if the Chinese are merely pretending to embrace capitalism. Given Sun Tzu, what better means of defending against capitalism? More to the point, how better to avoid the fate that befell the Soviet Union?

(Apropos Sun Tzu, probably the most informative translation and commentary is the book by Samuel B. Griffith: Sun Tzu The Art of War, Oxford University Press, London: 1971.)

Meanwhile it is not enough to merely state the obvious, that the capitalists are seeking to zombify us all (and particularly Working Class youth) into the mindset of slavery. We need to know the details – and Henry Giroux has been exploring this topic in analytical detail for several years. His writing, though somewhat verbose – he desperately needs a competent editor – is nevertheless vital reading:

http://www.truthout.org/youth-suspect-society-coming-age-era-disposability/1304604010

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DIALOGUES

To date the most readable analysis of the Consummate Evil that is capitalism is entitled "Delusion and Denial Part I," a stunningly perceptive piece by Kristine Mattis made available through Common Dreams:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/01-1

It prompted me to access its author's blog and respond as follows:

“Even if you do not do as I hope you will eventually do – trace capitalism to its toxic roots in the Abrahamic religions and ultimately in patriarchy itself – you have begun setting out the principles for a new and genuinely species-wide people's manifesto: something no one – especially not the authors of the Port Huron Statement – has been able to accomplish since Marx and Engels.”

http://www.rebelpleb.blogspot.com/

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Facebook's brain-police function: “I'm not the least bit surprised to hear of this (rising) tide of Facebook deletions. FB not only deleted the specific essay but permanently severed the click-on link between FB and this blog when I posted my 27 April 2010 piece speculating the entire economic collapse was deliberately inflicted by the Ruling Class. (See 'Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke to Hated Public Services?')...FB suppressed this work literally minutes after it went up, though several people saw what was happening and quickly re-posted it. But not even the (superb) tech support people at TypePad, my blog server, were able to restore my shortcut to FB. Eventually though I discovered I could still post links to my blog on FB, but I had to do so by the copy-and-paste method, not by merely clicking on an icon.”

“Not long after the 'Economic Collapse' incident, FB began playing games with my photographic portfolio, making specific images inaccessible. Significantly, the pictures so suppressed are illustrations of some of the extremes of urban poverty inflicted by capitalism.

“Finally FB let enough of my personal information out, my friends were under attack by phish-fraudsters, leaving me no choice but to terminate my FB membership forever. This of course resulted in a substantial decline in blog readership, which I am gradually making up via Twitter, though I remain enough unfamiliar with Twitter's processes – I find the associated instructions literally incomprehensible – I surely do not use it with any efficiency.”

Go here for the original anti-Facebook report and 40 additional comments (my remarks are near the end of the commentary thread):

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/29-7

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MISCELLANY

Compensation for dereliction: last week I quoted Peter Gabriel's incomparable “Biko” – “once the flame begins to catch, the wind will blow it higher” – but I failed to provide a link to Gabriel's most stirring performance of the song. I heard this while I was still in the City, was in fact riding a cab from my Upper West Side apartment to my office at Madison and East 39th Street and realized the cabbie, an owner-driver, was listening to Gabriel's 1986 Amnesty International concert live via FM radio on a superb stereo system. I asked the driver to max out the volume, he did, and when the pipes in Gabriel's arrangement began to wail a moment later, it tugged at my soul with the gooseflesh intensity usually achieved only by the more ancient forms of traditional British folk music. Despite our ethnic differences – I of mostly Scots ancestry, the driver a newly-naturalized black South African – neither of us had dry eyes when we arrived at my destination.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLg-8Jxi5aE

(Once again, we see how much – O how much – the late James Baldwin got right: even in the '80s, New York City truly was Another Country.)

LB/7 May 2011

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Barack the Betrayer: Glib Enabler of Wall Street's Republican Despotism

The young woman in this image of oppression always makes me think of how Joan of Arc might have looked as she was led through the marketplace at Rouen on 30 May 1431. Though their fates were far different – this woman beaten and jailed, Saint Joan burned alive – each was nevertheless a victim of tyranny. The picture feels iconic; I remember it did so the instant I framed it in my viewfinder. But not until the advent of Outside Agitator's Notebook was it seen by anyone save those who read the East Village Other in May or June of 1967, perhaps too by the photo editors at The New York Times, Newsweek and Paris-Match and of course the few friends and colleagues familiar with my fire-doomed book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer.” The picture originally appeared in the extra published by EVO immediately after the Memorial Day police riot in Tompkins Park. (The extra was a project on which the late Walter Bowart and I were among the chief collaborators: he was EVO's founding editor and wrote the text, while most of the inside photographs were mine.) Alas that one edition – which today would be an invaluable Lower East Side historical document – has since been disappeared, neatly sliced from the New York Public Library microfiche files, obviously by a librarian, obviously on the orders of some Ruling Class censor. Though my entire 1967 journal was destroyed by the 1983 fire (and with it most of the year's photographic notes and technical data), the film was undoubtedly Tri-X, developed at The Times' darkroom in whatever was their stock developer, probably D-76; the camera was either a Leica IIIG or a VT Canon, the lens a 35mm F/2 Summicron. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1967, 2009.

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AT ONE TIME President Obama's budget speech last night would have had me applauding and maybe even cheering. But now after more than two years of his serial betrayals, my response is limited to muttering “bullshit” and changing the channel.

Everything Barack the Betrayer promised in his 2008 campaign – even his campaign slogan itself – was a lie. So why should I believe him now? Or for that matter, ever again?

More to the point, why should I stupidly embrace the optimism implicit in a positive response to his newest batch of promises? Why should I set myself up for more anguish? Pessimism not only spares me additional pangs of betrayal but gives me the opportunity for at least a small private smile if things don't turn out quite as badly as I now assume they will.

Which – with that curious synchronicity the personal and the political so often demonstrate these days – relates directly to the remainder of this piece. Begun as a response to comments posted a couple of days ago by Franetta McMillan and Sheare Bliss, it quickly morphed into an entirely new essay.

Here – reprinted from 12 April – is the dialogue that inspired it:

Franetta: I wrote one of those pour-your-heart-out letters to Obama, too, while he was deciding what to do about the war in Afghanistan. I must've spent a couple of weeks on it, trying to get every word perfect, like I was actually going to convince him to do right thing. When he announced he was going to escalate it, I felt personally betrayed. I think I might have cried. I was done with him after that.

You know, when Obama first began his run for the Presidency, almost everyone around me was excited, but I didn't trust him -- which, being a black woman, was a positively heretical position for me to take. Too much like a motivational speaker, I thought. It wasn't until after his speech on race that I began to get on board, because it wasn't until then I sensed he had some depth. Oh well. Turns out my first instinct was right.

Sheare: Franetta, I wept on election night, and it was because I truly had not expected that history would be made in my lifetime and with someone that, at the time, I genuinely believed had a strong ethical viewpoint and would bring that viewpoint to action. I should have been weeping for other reasons. I never, ever, ever expected that I would be calling Obama Bush 2.0, and long after other people were expressing concerns, I tried to support him despite my increasing doubts.

I should have been listening to my uncle.

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Thank you both.

My skepticism about the president I now call Barack the Betrayer grew initially from the overwhelming support given him by the Wall Street banksters and the barons of Big Business in general, for which see http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/sectorallc.php?cycle=2008.

It was unprecedented for a Democrat to receive Ruling Class financial support of this magnitude; note how – for the first time ever – the Big Money mostly went not just to Obama but also to the Democratic Party rather than to the Republicans as in years past. To me, schooled as I was in objective analysis (thanks mostly to my father/Sheare's grandfather, the late Donald R. Bliss) – it was obvious the fix was in.

My doubts about Obama were intensified by a foreign policy paper which – published in the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs (thereby implying Obama was the Ruling Class presidential favorite as early as 2007) – argued the United States should expand its role as global tyrant: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62636/barack-obama/renewing-american-leadership

Thus Obama aligned himself with the Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan/Bush I/Clinton/Bush II military and economic policies the United States imposed immediately after the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963. I hardly need point out these are the policies that – especially in the eyes of the international Working Class – define the United States as the de facto Fourth Reich: an identity surely underscored by the Nazi-style helmets the U.S. military adopted during the Nixon years, began wearing during the Reagan presidency and has worn ever since.

Lastly there was the alternative-press report that noted the glaring difference between the Obama who spoke to Ruling Class audiences and the Obama who publicly campaigned for the presidency. I regret I can't provide a link; indeed I no longer recall the source save that it was a credible and definitively Leftist publication – the same journal that tried to make Obama's 2007 pro-tyranny piece part of the 2008 campaign debate. (Interestingly, the Foreign Affairs article, “Renewing American Leadership,” is now price-tagged to discourage public circulation.)

Nevertheless – obviously this was before I fully absorbed the chief lesson of the 2008 campaign (that hope is not “audacity” but imbecility) – I clutched at an Obama presidency much as a shipwreck victim clutches desperately at flotsam: Obama might not save us from capitalism's inevitable march toward fascism, but surely he would do a better job of protecting us from its innate savagery than John McCain and Sarah Palin would do.

Indeed it seemed a McCain presidency might follow the pattern established by the aged and terminally ill von Hindenburg even as Palin would thus be positioned to achieve power much as Hitler had done in the wake of von Hindenburg's death: the historical parallel, which a year later helped inspire my Palin/Hitler collage (in “Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit”), was genuinely terrifying.

As a result, though I never formally volunteered for the Obama campaign, I talked up his candidacy at every opportunity and probably won him as many as 30 or 35 votes. My contribution was surely nothing significant, but it was far more presidential-campaign political enthusiasm than I had felt since the murder of Robert Kennedy, whom I (correctly) recognized as “the last man who could have saved us from ourselves.”

And of course I myself voted for Obama.

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The post-election denouement that elevated my Obamanoia to its present level has two parts.

First was Obama's appointment of the avowed Christian theocrat Rick Warren – a JesuNazi misogynist and gay-basher of the first order – to give the inaugural invocation, the liturgical equivalent of the keynote address at a political convention. That was the instant I knew we'd been had, the Big Reveal “change we can believe in” had never been anything more than a Big Lie, the sleight-of-hand moment by which Barack the Betrayer reassured his capitalist masters he was theirs and theirs alone and would govern precisely as they demanded.

Then came the exegesis – the explanation – of Obama's treachery: Bill Moyers breathtaking admission our exalted democratic processes are nothing but a charade, sham and scam to opiate the masses much as panem et circenses did in Roman times and religion – particularly in the ever-more-theocratic United Estates of Wall Street – still does. That revelation is chronicled here:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html

This was nothing new to real journalists. Most of us learned the hideous truth our first years on the job. (Why do you suppose we are so bitterly cynical? What else explains why so many of us become hopeless drunks?) But until Moyers bravely spoke up, we never dared publicly admit the American Experiment in constitutional democracy was itself a now Big Lie, that the genuine article had been murdered long ago, on 22 November 1963 if not earlier.

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Largely because (again thanks to my father's tutelage) I never committed the suicidal error of underestimating the capitalists' cunning, it took no real intellectual effort for me to recognize Obama might well be the fulfillment of a stunningly Machiavellian  scheme that dates at least to the 1933 Bankers' Plot (for which Google).

The plotters' intent – a classic example of the innately fascist values at the core of capitalism – was to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and replace his New Deal government with a Ruling Class cabal allied with Hitler and Mussolini. But the conspiracy had apparently been infiltrated by Soviet agents – probably Red Army Intelligence (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye or GRU), since nothing related to this episode has yet been disclosed in the huge post-Soviet publication of KGB files. In any case, the plot was soon exposed via the nation's Leftist press, much of it Soviet-guided and at the time almost unimaginably influential.

Though it is an aside, here in the thwarting of the Bankers' Plot is most likely the reason FDR so thoroughly trusted Stalin: the agency that was later to become Hitler's nemesis in Europe seems to have made its global debut by saving the Roosevelt Administration and checkmating the bankers' scheme to turn the United States overtly fascist. (For more on GRU, the files of which have never been opened to public scrutiny, see The Red Orchestra by V.E. Tarrant, published in 1995 by Wiley & Sons Inc., New York.)

Here too is almost certainly the motive behind the vicious anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti-intellectual purge the capitalist Ruling Class unleashed inside the U.S. literally the instant World War II ended. Nor is it any coincidence the purge and its longterm aftermath gave birth to the abysmally ignorant (and therefore infinitely submissive) U.S. electorate of today: Moron Nation.

Returning to the notion of Obama as the perfect fulfillment of longterm capitalist scheming, all we need do is reason from the premise of class struggle: in other words, apply the principles of objective analysis.

The Bankers' Plot, nearly lost to memory down the Orwell hole of revisionist censorship, is undeniable proof of the long-term Ruling Class intent to impose capitalist governance on every level of the United States: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

Having failed to achieve despotism by coup, the U.S. Ruling Class – bolstered by the huge postwar influx of Nazi war criminals – applied the Josef Goebbels lessons of mass manipulation. Beginning with the purge, Ruling Class Media and public schools operated in conformity with Ruling Class mandates to indoctrinate the entire population in the credo of infinite greed as absolute virtue and limitless selfishness as ultimate good.

By so popularizing a shallow version of the ethos formerly held by the aristocracy alone – by expanding it into the philosophical and theological cornerstone of the entire population – the Ruling Class manufactured and sustains Moron Nation as surely as it fabricates the demand for a new but nonessential product. (The works of Henry Giroux, often published by the radical website Truthout, provide a superb source for details of the moronation process. So do the works of Chris Hedges, regularly available through both Truthout and Common Dreams.)

And now – if we view the Obama phenomena and its related developments from the perspective of Moyers' disclosure all we are allowed to see of present-day politics is a theater of deception – a hitherto unthinkable possibility comes into sharp and dreadful focus.

Armed with its batteries of psychological research – capitalism has methodically applied the rat-maze principles of behaviorism since the days of the Third Reich – the Ruling Class seems to have understood that an unprincipled Chicago opportunist disguised as an Afro-Democrat was the perfect agitator to at last thrust the carefully crafted constituencies of Moron Nation into the 21st Century variant of fascism. Just as the droning chants of “hope” and the zomboid repetition of “change we can believe in” mesmerized the Democratic rank-and-file to vote for Obama – note though how “hope” is a sublime admission of abject powerlessness (a point to which we shall return) – so did the prospect of a Black Family in the White House enrage the 70-something percent of the Caucasian citizenry that remains malevolently Ku Klux at heart.

Thus Barack the Betrayer, the ultimate political fraudster: in service to his Ruling Class masters he cons everyone, Left and Right. His promise-everything/deliver-nothing strategy generates such a tsunami of alienation it drowns the Democrats in self-disenfranchisement. Meanwhile the Republicans with their Teabagger storm-troopers (and yes in 2010 a huge number of betrayal-infuriated Democrats and independents) are goaded by their racism to embrace the Wall Street/Big Business tyranny that is the newest and most insidious variant of fascism. With Obama's treachery at least rationalized and often wholly obscured by the resultant controversies, he gives the Republicans (and ultimately the banksters) everything they want.

If my analysis is correct, Obama will set the stage for a Republican sweep in 2012 much as he did in 2010, further alienating the Left with additional broken promises even as his mere presence continues to infuriate the racist Right. The electoral result will complete Moron Nation's transition to the sort of governance envisioned by the capitalist plotters of 1933. With both houses of Congress controlled by the Teabaggers, the GOPorker who takes the White House will be free to impose an openly fascist, unapologetically Nazi-like regime, extinguishing the torch of U.S. liberty forever.

Since the Teabaggers in Maine are now methodically erasing all traces of social conscience from state buildings – tearing down murals and changing nomenclature – I cannot but wonder if 2012's winners will demolish the world-famous statue we New Yorkers know as Our Lady of the Harbor, perhaps proclaiming her, as the victors of 2010 did the now-banished material in Maine, “counterproductive” to the New Paradigm.

Were the resurrection of the dead anything more than theological fantasy, old-time liberal Republicans like Fiorello LaGuardia, Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller would be rising in shame from their graves. So would Robert LaFollette, the Republican who became the original Progressive.

Obviously our experiment in constitutional democracy is finished – and just as obviously our collective subconscious already knows it. The sad proof is in our unquestioning acceptance of “hope” as synonymous with empowerment when in fact it demonstrates the opposite. Hope is the emotion of serfs, of slaves, of prisoners and indentured servants who desperately yearn for their masters to treat them less sadistically. Those who have genuine liberty don't just hope for relief from their grievances; they demand it.

LB/14 April 2011

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32 Senate DemocRats Join GOPig Death Panel to Target Seniors, Disabled

An octogenarian enjoys a contemplative moment with his dog. Our right to such a secure retirement, formerly unquestioned even in the notoriously social-Darwinist United States, is now gravely threatened by the collaboration of DemocRats with Republicans and their Wall Street masters in an escalating campaign to privatize Social Security and abolish Medicare. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2011; Leica M4, 35mm f/1.7 Voigtlander Ultron at f/2.8 on Kodak Professional BW400CN.     

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EXACTLY AS I WAS shocked to intellectual paralysis by the devastation seismic force and nuclear folly inflicted on the Japanese – what could I have possibly written that would not have been rendered meaningless by such horror? – so am I now face-slapped back to mental activism by Friday's report that 32 DemocRat senators have openly joined the Wall Street/GOPorker effort to loot Social Security and destroy Medicare.

The result is a 64-member senatorial death panel – 32 'Rats, 32 'Pigs – that by further shrinking already-frozen Social Security stipends and notoriously miserly Medicare allowances will impose on those of us no longer exploitable for capitalist profit a particularly cunning U.S. variant of the Final Solution: not extermination camps per se – that would be entirely too embarrassing – but poverty, abandonment and neglect clearly intended to have the same deadly impact on lower-income seniors and disabled people.

I say “will impose” rather than “would impose” because the death panel's bi-partisan majority makes it obvious the political situation – at least for those of us who are elderly or disabled – is already hopeless: that just as quake and tsunami and meltdown are savaging Japan, so will the capitalist Ruling Class savage Social Security and Medicare – never mind Sen. Harry Reid's obviously impotent, perhaps deliberately misleading assertions to the contrary.

Yet with the notable exception of The Hill, the right-leaning on-line journal that broke the story Friday morning, not a single Ruling Class Media outlet – not even MSNBC – has reported the hideous truth: that the 64-senator supermajority combines with the Big Business/Teabagger House to ensure there is no longer any doubt we will soon be ravaged by the very cutbacks we so desperately fear.

Indeed it is my own prediction those of us already on Social Security will be hurt at least as badly as future retirees and disabled people. Given the genocidal hostility toward lower-income people obvious in President Barack the Betrayer's handpicked anti-Social Security, anti-Medicare Fiscal Commission and in both houses of Congress, I strongly suspect we have seen our last-ever cost-of-living increase – no matter the death-dealing runaway inflation in food, fuel and medical prices.

The murderous intent of the politicians and their masters is obvious despite the “we may not agree” weasel-wording of the death panel's letter to Obama:

“As you know, a bipartisan group of Senators has been working to craft a comprehensive deficit reduction package based upon the recommendations of the Fiscal Commission.  While we may not agree with every aspect of the Commission’s recommendations, we believe that its work represents an important foundation to achieve meaningful progress on our debt.  The Commission’s work also underscored the scope and breadth of our nation’s long-term fiscal challenges.” 

“Beyond FY2011 funding decisions, we urge you to engage in a broader discussion about a comprehensive deficit reduction package.  Specifically, we hope that the discussion will include discretionary spending cuts, entitlement changes and tax reform.”

And who are these DemocRats who by their endorsement of “entitlement changes” now openly reveal themselves to be closet Republicans? Some of the names might surprise you:

John Kerry (Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Joseph Lieberman (Conn.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Thomas Carper (Del.), Mark Udall (Colo.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Dianne Feinstein (Caif.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Christopher Coons (Del.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Ben Cardin (Md.), Al Franken (Minn.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Mark Warner (Va.), Dick Durbin (Ill.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Patty Murray (Wash.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Tom Udall (N.M.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio).

One name on this rat list that does not surprise me at all is Washington's Sen. Patty Murray: as two-faced as Janus, her voting record (which includes lockstep support for NAFTA and other job-stealing, anti-labor “free trade” measures) proves her “progressive” rhetoric is as much a Big Lie as the Betrayer's “change we can believe in.”

The full text of The Hill's report is here, though (free) registration may be required to access it:

http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/150671-sixty-senators-call-on-obama-to-broaden-budget-talks

*****

I'm sad to say my predictions of Obamanoid/DemocRat treachery are now 100 percent accurate.

Remember how many times I said the President would fling us a few strategically timed culture-war concessions that, though economically meaningless, would appeal to the Left Bourgeoisie – the Democratic majority of arrogant academics and professionals and technicians and bureaucrats who (because they are still financially comfortable), moronically reject all notions of class struggle and therefore remain willing slaves of capitalism?

Remember when I wrote that even as I welcomed Obama's sudden about-face endorsement of gay rights, I believed it nothing more than an insidiously clever pre-2012 fence-mending ploy – and the harbinger of many more such devious stratagems to come?

Remember when I predicted Barack the Betrayer would eventually use gun control – more accurately forcible disarmament and compulsory victimhood – to win back the mandatory-pacifism fanatics and anti-self-defense zealots dominant amongst the bourgeois voters alienated by his serial betrayals?

Remember how many of you disagreed?

Well folks it's happening, an obviously pre-scripted anti-gunowner campaign that's already re-igniting the old Vietnam Era antagonisms just as the Ruling Class intends. On one side there's the formerly draft-exempt, now again hysterically anti-gun elite. On the other side are the mostly blue-collar folk who in years past often had no choice but to serve in the military and now own firearms, not just because it's a constitutional right but for practical purposes of subsistence and self-defense.

These men and women recognize the necessity of such measures because they have long been the nation's primary victims of crime – whether random murder, rape, robbery and mayhem or methodical capitalist exploitation, downsizing, outsourcing and union-busting.

Obviously – given these are the very workers who would be most likely to provide an expanded Wisconsin Rebellion the righteously angry nonviolent muscle it needs to be self-sustaining – their renewed alienation by resurrection of the DemocRat war against legal civilian firearms ownership (and therefore against the right to self-defense) is no coincidence.

It's no surprise I'm already hearing again what I heard so often in the Clinton years: “fuck it; might as well vote Republican: bad as they are, at least they'll let us keep our guns.”

Once again solidarity is flushed down the proverbial commode.

Thus the DemocRats deliberately work against themselves, antagonizing the very workers who might have truly revitalized the Democratic Party a la Wisconsin.

Thus too these same Obamanoid betrayers collaborate in thrusting Moron Nation ever closer to the permanent Republican majority the Ruling Class demands – the last step before the United States becomes the United Estates, the de facto Fourth Reich, the ultimate Big Business despotism.

LB/21 March 2011

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'Far & away the road goes winding: look & see how merrily the road goes'

THE REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL of the Labor Uprising that started in Wisconsin and is spreading across the nation is already terrifying the Ruling Class.

Definitive proof of the extent to which the capitalist aristocracy is genuinely frightened comes from two seemingly unrelated developments.

One of these is the government's decision to charge Private First Class Bradley Manning with a death-penalty crime – the intent obviously to make him an example a la Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

The other development is Time magazine's publication of an anti-Marxist warning that eerily recalls the Rosenberg era.

Wikileaks suspect Manning is facing 22 additional charges that include the capital offense of aid to the enemy. Because the new accusations have received almost no coverage in Ruling Class Media apart from MSNBC, they are detailed here:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/03/02-7

I am hardly surprised by the newest action against PFC Manning. The unusual (and perhaps unprecedented) long-term confinement of an Army soldier in the maximum-savagery environment of a Marine Corps brig is a telling index to the magnitude of both the Ruling Class alarm and the resultant government vindictiveness.

But the appearance of the Time opinion piece is genuinely surprising. For nearly as long as I've been alive, the Ruling Class has conditioned us to believe Marxism is thoroughly discredited by its own failures – that its exposure of the historical truth of class struggle is therefore irrelevant if not delusional.

The Time article discards both these plutocrat-protecting falsehoods. Indeed it is the first printed evidence of specifically anti-Marxist panic – whether civilian or military – I've seen since the 1950s.

It is entitled “Your Incredible Shrinking Paycheck.” Written by Rana Foroohar and published via the Internet on 28 February, it presumably also appears in a print edition of the same approximate date. In any case it's core argument is that capitalism should beware a new Marxist revolution.

To stave off such an event, says Foroohar, the capitalists should evolve a new humanitarian facade – an updated version of the New Deal – behind which to hide capitalism's tyrannosauric malevolence. Such camouflage, the essay concludes, is “a lot better than the Marxist alternative.”

Never mind that – exactly as Gov. Scott Walker is proving in Wisconsin – today's capitalists are far too maliciously greedy to allow even the most minimal concessions.

Though no Time staffer would ever be permitted to describe capitalism as forthrightly as I just did – Foroohar describes the facade urged on the capitalists as “social mobility” rather than a Big Lie – “Paycheck” nevertheless makes the astonishing admission that public interest in Marxism is growing fast:

“Before I started writing this column on why paychecks are likely to keep shrinking even if unemployment starts to inch down,” Foroohar tells us, “I consulted Google to see if the term Marxism was trending upward. It was and has been ever since the end of December, the conclusion of a year in which workers' share of the U.S. economic pie shrank to the smallest piece ever: 54.4% of GDP, down from about 60% in the 1970s.”

“No wonder Marx is back in fashion. It's been more than 100 years since the German philosopher predicted that capitalism's voraciousness would be its undoing — as bosses invest more in new technologies to make things more cheaply and efficiently and less in workers themselves, who, deprived of fair wages, would eventually rise up and revolt...”

“Yet even if unemployment starts to ease, it's unclear whether labor's portion of the pie will stop shrinking. The global headwinds may be too strong. Just as Marx predicted, technology-driven productivity is increasing not just in manufacturing but also in services...

“The other megatrend of our age, the rise of emerging markets, will also continue to put pressure on U.S. wages...

“A recent study by Capital Economics found that from 2002 to 2008, employment abroad by U.S. multinationals (grew by) 22.6%, while employment at home increased by a mere 4.9%. What's good for U.S. companies and what's good for U.S. labor and wages are no longer always the same thing. The discrepancy may become an increasingly contentious political issue.”

The full text of “Paycheck” is here.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2050019,00.html

Prompted by Foroohar's curious omission of the Google statistics so cited, I did some checking on my own and learned that Google searches targeting Marxism have gone up by 420 percent since 2007, from approximately 18,000 to 94,000 in 2010. Hits on Marxist topics have increased by nearly 300 percent during the same period, from 637,000 to 2,380,000.

Meanwhile to older members of the Ruling Class, the renewal of their Marxophobia must seem like the worst possible case of deja vu, harkening back to the 1930s, when Communists boasted what still today was the best organized political party in U.S. history – also the third largest.

In those halcyon years of national resistance to capitalism, the cringing fat cats encountered fearsomeness everywhere, even in music: U.S. Communists and their socialist allies had adopted “Song of the Plains,” a breathtakingly powerful ballad favored by Russia's Red Cavalry, as their own anthem of solidarity.

Its a good bet most of the participants in the new uprising have never heard it. Due to the purges that began the moment World War II ended, “Song of the Plains” quickly became the most forbidden song in the United States, and so it remained until probably a decade ago. But now it's on the Internet. Here it is as sung by the incomparable Paul Robeson on his 1941 album Songs of Free Men:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5PBrFXNQQA&feature=related

The melody is probably as old as Russia herself, possibly even as old as the magnificent Scythian horse-archers who routed Darius and his Persians in 512 BCE.

But the words Robeson translates so movingly came out of the Russian Civil War and its epic cavalry marches from one battle to the next – ride two hours, dismount and walk one hour to rest the horses; ride two hours, walk one hour; on and on across the endless steppe beneath its eternal skies, the leather sling of your Vintovka Mosina wearing blisters and then calluses on your shoulders as your soul aches with yearning for the wife or lover you have not seen in months – and nothing to abbreviate the numbing miles of grassland sameness but singing.

In Russian “Song of the Plains” is called Polyushko Polyē, and it again became a favorite of the Red Army – especially the horse cavalry – in the fight against the Nazi invaders. Here it is as performed and recorded by the Red Army Chorus sometime after World War II:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdHyz0G7qcw&feature=related

The great fear of the capitalists in the 1930s and 1940s and even in the 1950s was that they like the Tsarist aristocrats before them would awaken in their mansions to discover their mercenary guards gone and the gates open and the wind bearing the song of approaching revolutionaries:

O maidens fair raise your eyes
Gaze upon the road we follow
Far and away the road goes winding
Look and see how merrily the road goes...

LB/3 March 2011

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Madison's Pivotal Challenge: Finding Our Way Beyond Capitalist Greed

NOTE THAT NOWHERE in the following – and probably never once in this entire blog since its beginning thanks to TypePad last year – have I used the term “progressive” save as part of a quotation lifted from some outside source.

What this has to do with the Madison Rebellion will be evident when we consider how – if it is to succeed – it must spread far beyond its self-proclaimed “progressive” birth-parents and supporters.

Meanwhile suffice it to say I avoid the label “progressive” because it has become not only meaningless with overuse but socioeconomically exclusionary – a class-identity buzzword that typically denotes an academic and/or professional caste that is frequently as snobbish as any secret society of the capitalist aristocracy.

Indeed to blue-collar ears “progressive” often brings to mind the well-documented Vietnam Era hatred of the draft-exempt gentry for those of us who served. It also evokes the equally notorious malice the ecology elite harbors for loggers and commercial fishers. Each is the sort of anti-solidarity hatefulness the capitalists foster at every opportunity and genuine Leftists forever strive to heal and transcend.

Hence in place of “progressive” I use “humanitarian” – literally “devoted to promoting the welfare of humanity” (Webster) – this not only to define what we on the Left are about, but to contrast our egalitarian and democratic values with the tyrannical anti-values of capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for its Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

*****

Truthout, which no longer allows me to post comments on its website but now claims this is due to technical problems rather than banishment, has published an unusually insightful essay by Rich Broderick entitled “The Death of Capitalism: Is Scott Walker Helping Build a 'Better World'?”

Here's a sample of Mr. Broderick's lucid writing:

“From its beginnings in 16th and 17th century England and Holland, capitalism has depended upon a minimum 3 percent accumulated growth rate year in and year out. If growth exceeds that 3 percent – as it has lately in China and India – so much the better.”

“But if the rate of growth falls below 3 percent, even for one or two quarters, capitalism, which, like the stock market, is absolutely dependent upon a faith that defies logic and anesthetizes memory, begins to sputter. Each time that faith is shaken, it becomes harder and harder to restore.

“Of course any organic system that cannot live without endless growth is ultimately doomed. Critics sometimes like to refer to capitalism as a cancer; they are closer to the truth than perhaps they realize. Another name for endless growth is malignancy. In the end, a malignant entity cannot help but cannibalize its host body. This is the process we see at work today, both in the implosion of the 'American Dream' and in the spreading destruction of the global ecosystem upon which all life depends.”

The full text of the essay – which I heartily recommend we read in full – is here:

http://www.truth-out.org/the-death-capitalism-is-scott-walker-helping-build-a-better-world68079

*****

Were I still allowed to post comments on Truthout, I'd have written that the one great flaw in Mr. Broderick's closing argument – he suggests the demonstrations that started in Madison and have now spread across the country presage “the peaceful transformation of...the United States of America into a better world for all its citizens” – is his failure to recognize the immutable reality of Moron Nation.

When I coined the term, probably in 2006, I was prompted by at least five breathtaking symptoms of national stupidity, phenomena that prove the extent to which we are (deliberately) dumbed down or – as I prefer – moronated.

These five symptoms include:

(1)-the cult of idiot celebrity (picture Britney Spears and Sarah Palin running against one another for the presidency, the presidential debates a contest between Britney's belch and Sarah's wink, the voter turnout the highest in national history); (2)-the failure of our public schools (the fact that U.S. citizens are now the most ignorant people on Earth); (3)-the parallel failure of Ruling Class Media (the fact we are the most ill-informed people on Earth); (4)-our savage anti-intellectuality (a conditioned reflex as apparent on the Left as on the Right); and (5)-the toxic wellspring of it all: our malevolently self-righteous moral imbecility (the fact the capitalist ethos of infinite greed as maximum virtue – of limitless selfishness as ultimate good – has been so effectively propagated by the Ruling Class it has become the core coda of the entire U.S. population).

Ergo: Moron Nation – the ultimate barrier to a “better world.”

*****

Though it is heresy to acknowledge it, anyone who has spent more than a couple of years in the working press – especially anyone who has covered politics, social services and education – knows our national credo of infinite greed and limitless selfishness is becoming as commonplace amongst politicians and bureaucrats and even their receptionists as it is (and always has been) amongst banksters and tycoons. The difference is only in scale: the banksters and tycoons target the entire planet, while the politicians and bureaucrats target far smaller realms.

Indeed this signature combination of capitalist greed and Ayn Rand selfishness has become the binding unum of the e pluribus, the one anti-value that unites the many. It is now the defining characteristic of the nation as a whole.

In a terrifyingly real sense, the gang-banger with the fist-sized solid-gold dollar-sign dangling from his solid gold neck-chain is the common denominator of us all.

Thus the notorious transfer of national wealth: amongst the capitalist elite, salaries that since 1970 have already soared by somewhat more than 500 percent even as the average income of the rest of us is methodically shrunken – for some workers as much as 60 percent; thus too the parallel transfer of wealth amongst welfare bureaucrats, a nest-feathering increase in administrative costs of 5,390 percent even as stipends and services to the poor were reduced by at least 66 percent through 1990 and are now being slashed to absolute zero.

The incomparable Paul Krugman writes of wealth transfer in detail here:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15923.htm

Alas while Mr. Krugman's data provides the most vivid illustration I have yet seen of how the capitalists gloatingly victimize us every one, nothing in his report covers how the wannabe-capitalist bureaucrats maliciously victimize those over whom they exercise increasingly tyrannical authority.

Mr. Krugman's silence on this matter is in keeping with what may be the greatest taboo in modern U.S. journalism, the seemingly absolute prohibition against disclosure of the ugly truth every competent journalist knows: the fact that increasingly in government as ever in business, the operant slogan is “fuck you I've got mine” – the reason the notoriously heavy-handed New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has long been a dark archetype of all government agencies.

Under these circumstances – the consequence of the metastases of Ruling Class values throughout the entire Working Class (which these days is literally every one of us who is not part of the capitalist aristocracy) – we workers are often as viciously self-serving as the capitalists themselves. This means achievement of any sort of socialist consciousness – and therefore any kind of workable socialism – is impossible in the United States.

Which is precisely as the Ruling Class intended. Indeed the deliberate indoctrination of all classes in greed and selfishness is the most diabolically effective form of brain-policing in human experience – undeniable proof of the capitalist aristocracy's evil genius.

Greed and selfishness combine into suicidal fantasy – “but under capitalism I might get lucky and win big” – an obstacle to socialism more lethally prohibitive than all the bayonets and death squads in the world.

Never mind the increasingly undeniable fact that some new localized environmentally centered yet-to-be-expostulated form of libertarian socialism offers our species its ONLY chance for long-term survival.

Therefore the one question we should be asking about the rebellion that began in Madison is not whether its solidarity will spread beyond so-called “progressives” and even beyond the endangered Middle Class. It is instead whether the spread of that solidarity will evolve an antidote to greed and selfishness and elitism, whether it will give birth to a new humanitarian conscience to replace our national moral imbecility.

More to the point, it's whether that evolution will mother a greater solidarity that goes far beyond Middle Class socioeconomic identity to encompass all of us who are capitalism's victims, potential or real, in the workforce and out, regardless of race or ethnicity or gender or sexual preference, regardless of whether we are old and disabled or young and jobless and yes even gangbanger angry.

Yet the greatest heresy a journalist of today might commit is open admission of what is undoubtedly the one most damning revelation about the United States: the fact the anti-government fears and grievances of the rank-and-file Right are every bit as legitimate as the anti-Wall Street fears and grievances of the rank-and-file Left.

And without that admission there is little chance We the People will (again) recognize our common bondage – and our common bonds.

Nevertheless I fervently hope the Madison Uprising is the birth tremor of a new and unprecedentedly fierce humanitarian paradigm, the sudden Jungian/McLuhanesque evolution of effective opposition to the New Paradigm of capitalist governance and its Shock Doctrine, the deadly principles of which must be repeated until they are everywhere recognized: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us. 

It would surely brighten my final years to witness and perhaps even participate in such a national humanitarian reawakening – a nonviolent rebellion that might at long last fulfill the capitalist-betrayed potential of our own American Revolution.

But given the evidence of my own nearly 71 years (and especially the past 48 years of our national history) – which even to an agnostic like me proves the metaphorical truth of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Original Sin (the notion we humans are irreparably flawed) – I remain terribly afraid to give myself over to much optimism.

I do however recognize the decision of the cops to openly side with the protestors is unprecedented – perhaps as pivotal a turn of events as the decision of the soldiers and Cossacks to side with the striking women of the Lesnoy Textile Works in Petrograd on 8 March 1917: the spontaneous act of solidarity that began the Russian Revolution.

Meanwhile – in mind if not in body (my absence due to the fact the organizers of local solidarity-with-Madison protests remain haughtily indifferent to the many of us capitalism has already deprived of transportation) – I stand with my union sisters and brothers.

*****

A terrible cold that's making the rounds in Tacoma and possibly elsewhere is said by a growing number of medical people to be the worst such ailment they've ever encountered – and it is surely the most miserable, most long-lasting cold I've suffered in all my nearly 71 years.

Its dismal duration is about ten weeks. I caught it the first week in December and was sick until the beginning of February. Now thanks to the immune-system destruction inflicted by a necessary course of dental antibiotics, I have the cold again and can look forward to being more-or-less sick for another ten weeks: a total of 20 weeks – or nearly six months – stolen from my life by this invisible bug that came from Goddess knows where.

I have never ever been so naggingly ill for so infuriatingly long.

The affliction – I'm told my symptoms are typical – starts with a sudden and excruciatingly painful sore throat plus what would be pneumonia-class chest congestion save that its accompanying fever is never more than one degree.

Next comes a wracking cough that hacks up seemingly endless quantities of phlegm. It is by far the most physically exhausting, muscularly painful cough I've ever experienced.

Then as the bronchial symptoms (seem to) diminish, you develop the worst sinus congestion imaginable, a head full of mucoid cement that makes nasal breathing impossible and restful sleep therefore but a fond memory – a condition no extant medication can relieve.

Finally after maybe 10 or 12 days you start feeling notably better. But then, just as you think you might be getting well, the entire sequence – sore throat, chest congestion, wrenching cough, sinus congestion yet never a fever above one degree Fahrenheit – starts all over again.

I just learned a few hours ago the bug is viciously contagious, apparently (and utterly contrary to conventional cold viruses) even when its victim has no fever, which means it is probably just as well the denial of transport prevented me from attending a solidarity-with-Madison demonstration in Olympia yesterday.

Meanwhile the affliction has turned the apartment building in which I live into a Petri dish – conditions so dire management recently posted a memo asking sick tenants to please remain in their apartments and avoid interacting with anyone else.

Again this is unprecedented – something the like of which I had never experienced or even imagined.

I'm told the bug also has a malevolent tendency to morph into pneumonia or strep throat and sometimes both at once. Hence the grave warning from medical authorities to watch your temperature if you are one of its victims – that if your fever suddenly spikes, you need to seek a doctor's care immediately lest your next bed be a mortuary slab.

Which leaves me wondering about the bug itself. Is this an early Gaian volley against H. sapiens sapiens? Is it some ancient virus released from polar ice by terminal climate change? Or did it come from a test-tube?

If the last, was it an accident? Or is it intended to facilitate the elimination of those of us who are elderly, disabled or unemployed and therefore no longer exploitable for capitalist profit?

The possibility of such horrors might have been unthinkable even a year ago. But now that we are witnessing the true savagery of the capitalists and their hirelings, the unthinkable is quickly becoming the undeniable, as in the assistant attorney general who called for the Capitol Building in Madison to be cleared, a la Kent State University and Jackson State College in 1970, with “live ammunition” and “deadly force.”

For which – if you missed MSNBC's superb reporting of this newest revelation of capitalist thinking – go here:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/indiana-official-jeff-cox-live-ammunition-against-wisconsin-protesters

LB/27 February 2011

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First an Apology for Erratic Posting; Then a Kind of Manifesto

Self-portrait with pole beans, corn and sunflowers, 1989. Part of a series of pictures entitled “Momentary Exits,” specifically exits from the indescribably bleak depths of post-fire depression, with eternal gratitude to a Whatcom County librarian who blessed me with her late father's ancient Rolleicord II – and by so doing no doubt prolonged my life. I leave her unnamed only to protect her from the consequences of my politics. Kodak 120 color negative film, probably 100 ASA. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.

 *

SORRY FOR MY ABSENCE and the increasing unpredictability of when new posts might appear on this site. Various chronic ailments – mostly cardiac and intestinal malfunctions – are converging to shut me down for ever longer intervals ever more frequently. Because the oracles are uniformly negative – yes I admit I see no contradiction implicit in being a superstitious agnostic – I strongly suspect this seemingly relentless decline is in fact my journey down the last and ever-steepening slope that ends in death. I have no idea how long this odyssey into oblivion will take – I will probably have a somewhat clearer picture after (another) cardiological exam next week – but I can state now with absolute certainty (given that I am 70 and in irremediably poor health), any future medical news in my life will no longer be anything but bad news, modulated only by its degree of dire intensity. Meanwhile – not the least because it is the best painkiller I know – I will keep writing and maybe, on those increasingly rare days I can muster the strength to carry the equipment, even make a few more photographs.

*****

A recent Facebook dialogue – soon lost, like all such events, in the eternity of electronic oblivion – began with a YouTube link revealing enough to re-post here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHhQ71I_fwI

When I finished watching it – and despite the chemotherapy-strength (and thus gravely debilitating) antibiotics I had been prescribed for acute diverticulitis – I found myself inspired to an unusually multifaceted response:

(1)-Given that the video was made in 2007, it is obvious the extreme Right has since stolen the Tea Party motif. (This is a classic psychological warfare tactic for creating confusion; another example is the Right's theft of the color red, the color formerly associated with the Left. The ultimate example is of course the Nazis' use of "socialist" and "workers" – "National Socialist German Workers Party" – to describe a movement to impose capitalist tyranny from the top down, funded mostly by Wall Street and facilitated by the German aristocracy.)

(2)-The 9/11 Truthers may well be asking the wrong questions. Because I was in the City and a member of the working press when the WTC was being built, I can attest that there were widespread rumors of unprecedented graft and corruption associated with the project, including allegations of payoffs to officials and the use of substandard materials. Though these rumors were never proven -- law enforcement seemed to turn a deaf ear and the uptown dailies refused to allow their reporters to investigate – the use of substandard materials would nevertheless explain the structural-failure issues associated with the 9/11 controversy. Of course such malfeasance would be covered up -- hence the aura of conspiracy – both because of the magnitude of the potential lawsuits and the unprecedented international disgrace of the ultimate capitalist monument weakened to the point of incipient collapse by the greed of its developers.

(3)-It seems to me the one truly valid 9/11 suspicion is the probability the U.S. ruling elite knew the attacks were coming and allowed them as an American replay of the Reichstag Fire, not the least to facilitate imposition of the Patriot Act's de facto suspension of the Bill of Rights. This suspension had previously been attempted via legislation proposed by the Clinton Administration and written by Attorney General Janet Reno. But (ironically given present-day politics), it was defeated in Congress by a coalition of civil-rights Democrats and libertarian Republicans. Hence the Ruling Class had a real motive for allowing the 9/11 attacks: the fact the survival of capitalism in a world of increasing scarcity can only be accomplished by the creation of a slave state, which the (now totally nullified) Bill of Rights hitherto prohibited.

*****

The ensuing discussion prompted what is probably the clearest and most concise statement of political principles I have ever written:

Nullification of the Bill of Rights by Clinton/Bush/Obama proposals is among the cornerstones of my argument that there is no meaningful difference between DemocRats and GOPorkers: that because each party represents ONLY the interests of the capitalist ruling elite, the two play a Good Cop/Bad Cop routine in which rhetorical differences hide a singular purpose: the total disenfranchisement – and ultimately enslavement – of all the rest of us. Such is government in exclusive service to capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Big Bosses, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for the Workers.

I used to believe there was still some distinction between the parties locally -- that is, in municipal, legislative and gubernatorial politics. But watching the DemocRats and GOPorkers collaborate in Olympia to forever kill what was known colloquially as “Employee Free Speech” opened my eyes to the fact it's the same in Washington state as it is in Washington D.C. A relatively unbiased report in the nominally anti-labor Seattle Times tells the story:

http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/politicsnorthwest/2009/03/18/the_e-mail_saga_continues.html

But even if there were still a few meaningful differences between the parties, the capitalists' deliberate contraction of the economy – which includes the termination of tax revenues to destroy government services that do not directly bolster profits – has nullified those distinctions as well.

The proverbial bottom line is that without revenues, not even the most ardent humanitarians can protect us from what is to come: the fact a new Final Solution – officially accelerated extermination of the surplus population by abandonment and neglect, the murder of all of us who are no longer exploitable for profit – may be no more distant than the next election.

Remember the slaying of surplus captives on the slave ships? Same thing, just slower and more euphemistic.

Such is the new paradigm – I call it "tyrannocapitalism" -- that is replacing the social contract.

 ****

For all my 70 years (and for at least 40 years before that), the one real fight in the United States has been between the greed-powered cunning and solidarity of the tiny capitalist aristocracy on one side versus the pathetically fragmented humanitarian majority (its leadership variously labeled socialists, progressives, etc.) on the other.

For a painfully brief period – 1932 through 1945 – it appeared the humanitarians were winning.

But the capitalists immediately perceived the New Deal – essentially the grafting of a few socialist principles atop the Bill of Rights – as an unprecedented threat to their long-range plans.

The result, in 1934, was the so-called Bankers' Plot to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and make the U.S. an Axis partner, unquestionably inspired by Mussolini and Hitler, guided by the latter to an extent that remains secret to this day. But because there was a huge Communist Party (the third largest, most disciplined, best organized political party in U.S. history), and because the Communist Party was backed by the formidable intelligence apparatus of the Soviet Union, the Bankers' Plot failed.

Even so, the capitalists recognized in fascism and Nazism the unfettered fulfillment of their greed, and their threat merely went underground – so terrifying to those in the know that an entire generation of gentile males were left uncircumcised lest we be mistaken for Jews and die in concentration camps.

Then in 1945 the capitalist threat again bared its fangs. First came the purges, which began literally the day the war ended and did not end until the socialist movement was dead beyond resuscitation and even the term "intellectual" had become synonymous with "traitor." Next was the Taft-Hartley Act, which destroyed the gains labor had made under FDR and thus ended, forever, any hope of U.S. economic democracy. Finally in 1963 came the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the one president who dared try bring back the New Deal.

And with JFK's death (though we did not know it until years later), so died the American Dream.

What then of the Civil Rights Movement? What of President Lyndon Baines Johnson's War on Poverty?

Because JFK had already proposed the programs that became the War on Poverty, LBJ dared not oppose them. His reversal of JFK's pending withdrawal from Vietnam was well known amongst journalists, this in an era when the working press yet remained beyond monolithic Ruling Class control; another policy-reversal of such magnitude might have raised the simmering whispers of "coup" and "conspiracy" to a boiling revolutionary roar. Moreover LBJ knew he could deftly turn the War on Poverty into the War on the Poor it later became merely by structuring the anti-poverty programs to fail amidst ruinous scandals. Which is precisely what he did – the indescribably painful lesson of my own association (as a press officer and a social-documentary photographer) with the War on Poverty.

As to the Civil Rights Movement, ask today's younger African-Americans what they think of it. It gained them exactly nothing: it does not matter where you can sit on a bus if – because you are unemployed and will never be allowed to work again save as a prisoner on a chain-gang – you do not have the fare to get aboard.

This – the relentless thrust toward a slave state (think of an antebellum plantation with the slaves kept in bondage by today's surveillance and death technologies) – is the direction the U.S. has been going all my life.

The few brief interludes in my life when it seemed otherwise – as when Martin Luther King Jr. widened his definition of civil rights to include freedom from want, or when Robert Kennedy appeared destined to become our next president – I know now these were never more than delusions, swept away as quickly as the gun smoke that marked their terminal moments.

Now all we have is Moron Nation, the epitaph of the American Experiment in constitutional democracy.

And in history there are no miracles, no miraculous rescues; there is only cause and effect.

LB/25 October 2010

-30-

After All Those Years of Effort, I'm Back to Writing Obituaries Again

Photograph and posterization by Loren Bliss copyright 2010: Sunflowers and squash from the land I gardened. (Kodak 400 color negative film, Pentax K-1000, f/4 Tokina 70-210 zoom, c. 1997 or 1998.)

*

THOUGH IT HAS surely been said before, nothing focuses the mind like impending death.

For years I dismissed a vaguely squirmy feeling of minor muscle spasms beneath my sternum as a symptom of the gastroesophageal reflux disease or GERD that had plagued me occasionally since my late 30s and turned severely chronic immediately after I quit smoking 15 years ago.

But last week I discovered that – while there's no doubt I have GERD – that mildly spasmodic sensation I've been experiencing all this time is atrial fibrillation – a killer heart condition that avoided diagnosis because it never before occurred in the presence of medically trained witnesses.

Yes I'd had two episodes of cardiac arrhythmia scary enough to warrant 911 calls, but these had ended before the paramedics arrived. I was hospitalized only because of my history of skyrocketing blood pressure – into the stroke-zone of 225/110 – though after a night or two in the hospital I was sent home to resume as “normal” a life as is possible given the limitations of official disability, poverty and the resultant pariahdom.

Based on the paramedics' attitudes during the second of these cardiac incidents, I am now forever damned in some 911 computer as a hypochondriac who phones in the medical equivalent of false fire alarms. Hence this time when I discovered my wildly irregular pulse, I spared myself another encounter with paramedical contempt and called a taxi, hastily borrowing money from a friend to pay the fare.

Because I am a member of Puget Sound's superb Group Health Cooperative – the sole reason I remain in this otherwise appalling region of xenophobia, ignorance and reflexive hostility to intellectuals (especially “Jew Yorkers” like myself) – I have immediate access to urgent care. Therefore I received instant treatment and was sent home a few hours later.

As long as my miserly Social Security retirement stipend and Medicare Advantage will allow me to pay for it, I will receive the best, most coordinated follow-up care available anywhere in the U.S.

But as is typical everywhere in this sweatshop Moron Nation of ever-increasing capitalist savagery, I soon found myself genuinely terrified by the prospect that what will actually kill me is not heart failure but the exhaustion of my (minuscule) financial resources.

This is because I have since discovered that anytime I eat more than a bite or two of food, what the medical people call “AT-fib” invariably follows, at least for a few minutes – never mind the now-mandatory abstinence from coffee that has reduced me to nearly the same brain-dead state by which I was afflicted for more than six years after I quit smoking.

The lack of caffeine makes writing so unpleasantly difficult I am literally back where I was after I smoked my last cigarette on 23 September 1995 – mentally paralyzed by dyslexia and able to assemble coherent prose only by the most tedious effort imaginable.

Denied coffee, it has already taken me six hours just to write these paragraphs – I who (with my dyslexia suppressed by cigarettes and caffeine) was the fastest rewrite man ever on the city desk of The Jersey Journal c. 1969-1970.

Obviously the darkest suspicion of my life is now proven: that because I am a dyslexic (and therefore was dependent on various chemicals to achieve any meaningful degree of verbal competence), all claims I might have made to being a “real” writer are entirely bogus.

Nevertheless – not that anyone gives a damn – I am toughing it out, inspired by a quote from Geronimo I encountered in one of the trash novels I fetch from the senior center to read for entertainment now that my television has died and I will never have the money to replace it.

The author, Patricia Cornwell, who writes her fiction with a vividness characteristic of old-time  journalism,  quoted Geronimo as having said, “I cannot believe that we are useless...the sun, the winds, the darkness are all listening to what we have to say.” After I confirmed the quote is real, it seemed as good a reason as any to continue to follow the advice Barbara Mor gave me a few years ago: “Try to proceed as if writing matters.”

Fortunately most of the rest of this piece is an editing job, assembling text I wrote before the coffee ban forever robbed me of my last defense against the genetically imposed idiocy I have battled all my life.

Tomorrow (assuming I'm still alive), I will dutifully report back to Group Health that the AT-fib is continuing, after which my life will become an unmitigated hell of almost-daily needles-in-my arm trips to the clinic essential to re-regulate a complicated litany of high blood pressure, cholesterol-reduction, GERD, anti-diverticulitis, scoliosis and arthritis medications to accommodate the addition of a blood-thinner that (maybe) will keep me alive a little longer by preventing the killer clots AT-fib produces.

This alleged “life” – now forever robbed of any work to gave it meaning (because to write with dyslexia uncontrolled by nicotine or caffeine is to expose myself as a moron and because I am too crippled to ever carry cameras again) – will continue either until I exhaust my (very limited) ability to make the $15 co-payments required for the clinic visits or until I drop dead.

I suspect it will be the latter, if only because my sense of impending death is so strong it intrudes not merely on my waking consciousness but on all my dreams as well. For example the interplay of light and shadow in my apartment keeps shaping grotesque caricatures of coal-black skeletons I can glimpse only out of peripheral vision, and some of my dreams are so comically Freudian – myself back in a news editor's slot giving the last ok on Page One of the Final Edition – I've awakened laughing.

The pain of treatment – the real agony of huge cardiac-catheter needles repeatedly jammed into my flesh during an often-fruitless search for adequate veins (a condition resulting from the uncontrollable weight-gain that has afflicted me since I stopped smoking) – frightens me much more than oblivion. Thus my reaction to death, once genuine fear, has been beaten down by long years of physical suffering to little more than curiosity: 

Is death the end we cannot bear to accept? Is all the contrary evidence – ghosts, near-death experiences, credible memories of past lives – merely an expression of an ultimate dementia into which we lapse when confronted by our own extinction?

Do we live again, children of the divine womb, micro-weavers in the macrocosm of some karmic loom inexpressibly beyond our conception?

Or are we trapped in a universe ruled by a divine sadist who hates women, despises nature and damns his enemies to burn forever in his ovens – God the Führer and his cosmos the original concentration camp.

Which formulation will prove correct? I am sorry I will not be able to file a conclusive report. 

*****

One metaphysical hypothesis in which I believe absolutely is Jungian synchronicity – the way seemingly unrelated events and experiences can combine into a meaningful and often revealing whole.

Take a recent discussion on Common Dreams, a 213-response thread – one of its best – prompted by a Guardian piece: “People can't eat hope...The electoral cycle demands more positive answers than the economic cycle will allow, and more positive answers than the Democrats or Obama can provide.”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/13-4 

Originally I posted on this Common Dreams thread a short rejoinder I had written to some of the New Obama garbage appearing on Reader Supported News, one of the many pseudo-Left websites that behind the rhetoric are merely parts of the DemocRat betrayal machine. Not surprisingly, RSN censored my commentary – this was how I discovered I had been banished by yet another allegedly “progressive” site – but I saved the writing because I thought it might be useful elsewhere. As indeed it was on Common Dreams: eventually the ensuing discussion prompted me to detail the ugly truth – suppressed by the DemocRats and twisted beyond recognition by the GOPorkers – about Barack the Betrayer's war on Medicare and thus on lower-income elderly and disabled people.

*****

The following – written before the AT-fib diagnosis – is only slightly edited for inclusion here:

For me and everyone else of my age and caste (I am 70 years old, a near-lifelong journalistic activist and therefore bottom-level poor), the horrors being inflicted on us by the Obama Administration are real and immediate. 

Obama and his DemocRats are looting our Medicare programs, condemning us to the Moron Nation variant of the Final Solution: death by the untreated maladies and illnesses of poverty and old age.

They are getting away with this atrocity because U.S. citizens are the most reflexively anti-intellectual and incurious people on Earth. Therefore they remain indifferent to Medicare until they or a loved one – whether by old age or adjudicated disability – become eligible for Social Security and Medicare coverage.

This enables DemocRats and GOPorkers alike to lie constantly about the real impact of Obamacare on the public.

Knowing I have already lost 99.9 percent of our younger readers merely by mentioning Medicare – “O god there go those fucking whiny geezers again” – I will nevertheless try to explain the core of the “the Medicare issue” as concisely as possible:

Beyond all the confusion imposed by the deliberate opacities of bureaucratic language, there are two kinds of Medicare programs. 

One is labeled “Traditional Medicare”; the other is called “Medicare Advantage.”

Both labels are recently contrived euphemisms, each born of ongoing 'Rat/'Porker campaigns to engender confusion and foster illusions of democratic process. 

So-called “Traditional Medicare” is what is left of JFK's assassination-terminated effort to move the nation toward socialized medicine by building a socialized-medicine program for elderly and disabled people.

“Traditional Medicare” is what we got after LBJ and Congress scaled down JFK's original proposal. 

The scaling-down was to ensure Medicare's compliance with the Big Rhetoric/Little Change principle that governs all U.S. social services: programs designed to look good and sound good but do little or nothing for their alleged target populations. 

In truth capitalism allows such programs only two purposes: propaganda and jobs for the bourgeoisie. 

That's why the real “welfare queens” are bureaucrats not recipients: why – from 1970 through 1990 – the administrative costs associated with welfare increased by 5,390 percent (not a typo) even as stipends and services were slashed by 66 percent. 

It's why “Traditional Medicare” is a meaningful social service only if you're wealthy enough to pay at least half your medical costs out-of-pocket. 

It's also why "Traditional Medicare" gatekeeper fees – exactly what they are – are so viciously prohibitive they are literally a death sentence to anyone in the socioeconomic basement as I am.

With “Traditional Medicare” you have to be a competent enough bookkeeper and clerk to cope with billing the government, keeping your own medical records and above all else making sure you aren't killed by clashing prescriptions – a drug prescribed by one of your doctors interacting fatally with a drug prescribed by another.

Because of the prohibitive co-payments required by “Traditional Medicare” – the fact that nobody at the lower income levels can afford to shell out as much as $250 or even $375 every time we need to see a doctor – “Traditional Medicare” is really (yet another) taxpayer-funded government subsidy to the rich.

Which brings us to what was originally called “Medicare Plus” and has since been (maliciously) renamed “Medicare Advantage” – no doubt to imply that we lower income people who depend on it are “taking advantage” (god forbid!) of the largess with which capitalism rewards the rich. 

Contrary to present-day DemocRat lies, Medicare Plus aka “Medicare Advantage” was created by the Clinton Administration and rather brilliantly shoehorned through a GOPorker-controlled Congress.

The only humanitarian measure ever born of the Clinton White House, Medicare Advantage evens the health-care playing field, giving lower-income people like myself the same access enjoyed by the rich. It sidesteps the “Traditional Medicare” obstacle course by melding Medicare with non-profit health care cooperatives, non-profit HMOs and for-profit insurance-company HMOs.

Medicare Advantage benefits include instant no-fee access to consulting nurses; access to urgent care and scheduled appointments with minimal co-payments (typically no more than $15 or $20 as opposed to the $250 or $375 of “Traditional Medicare”); computerized record-keeping (the one sure protection against death by drug-interaction); and – above all else – a plethora of services like dentistry and eye-care “Original Medicare” deliberately excludes.

Again the contrast, this time in implicit messages: “Traditional Medicare” tells us that if we can't afford to pay out-of-pocket for dental care or eyeglasses, we don't deserve either, while Medicare Advantage provides us affordable access to both.

This is why Medicare Advantage costs the government about 15 percent more than “Traditional Medicare”: the price of providing low-income people with basic necessities like glasses and tooth-fillings the rich can easily afford. 

This is what Barack the Betrayer and his DemocRats are denying us. This – our access to eyeglasses, dental care, hearing aids – is what we are losing forever to Obamacare and its $500 billion Medicare reduction. 

Traditional Medicare – Medicare for the rich – is untouched. It is only Medicare Advantage – health care for the poor – that Obamacare is destroying. It is only those of us who are impoverished who will be exterminated as a result. 

This is the hideous reality behind the death-panel scare; this is the class-war savagery that gave the scare such traction among the elderly – even amongst those of us who voted, as I did, for Obama.

For me – an old cripple afflicted by a variety of ailments – Obamacare is literally a death sentence. Which makes any claim the GOPorkers would somehow be worse than the DemocRats utterly absurd.

LB/13-19 September 2010

-30-

Barack The Betrayer: Behind Republican Noise, A Colossus Of Deception

“I am especially concerned about the protection of the poor. The disadvantages of the poor extend to every contact they have with the world of commerce” – Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY), 29 April 1966.

*

Even after the last man who could have saved us from ourselves was slain in Los Angeles on 5 June 1968, I never imagined I would live in a nation where vampire capitalists suck the economic lifeblood from entire populations then fling us like drained corpses into the garbage-can abyss of inescapable poverty, much less that the politicians we elected as our protectors – including the president in whom we so foolishly invested such hope – would ever more brazenly side with the vampires, even cheering them on.

But now in 2010 that is precisely what is happening, whether as obstructionism by the Republicans or repeated treachery by the Democrats whose knowingly false promise of “change we can believe in” won them the White House, the biggest Congressional majority in 30 years and the unique opportunity to pervert an overwhelming public mandate for another New Deal into what is surely the greatest political betrayal in U.S. history.

The chief perpetrator in this Judas-epic is Barack Obama, who for a time I believed would heal the psychic wound I've borne since the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy hurt me so badly it literally numbed my political consciousness – the condition in which it would remain for the next 40 years.

Though it was often my job to report on politics, and though I always (dutifully) voted in elections, after the murder of Bobby Kennedy I felt excluded from the electoral process – my ballot effectively nullified by systemic denial of meaningful choices.

It was an alienation relieved only by the occasional joy of jamming an investigative reporter's monkey-wrench into the Ruling Class machine or revealing via social-documentary photography the definitive grotesques of capitalism. It remained my political mindset until the Democratic primaries of 2008. And it was this condition – “no matter who wins we always get a fucking Republican” – from which I came to believe Barack Obama might rescue us all.

Admittedly Obama was not my initial primary choice, but his eloquence was a powerful reminder of John V. Lindsay – the man I had always considered Bobby Kennedy's local counterpart, the last mayor of New York who dared defy the aristocracy by governing from the premise the City is for everyone.

Hence despite early doubts fostered by Obama's avowedly imperialistic foreign-policy papers, I soon gave him the same enthusiasm I had given Lindsay's mayoral campaigns and RFK's run for the presidency.

But my disaffection began almost immediately after the election, when Obama named an infamously homophobic, notoriously misogynistic Christian fanatic, the theocrat Rick Warren, to read the inaugural invocation: the theological equivalent of the keynote address at a political convention.

I speculated at the time – with horrible accuracy it turned out – the Warren appointment's breathtaking “up yours” to women, homosexuals and humanitarians in general was Obama's message to the Ruling Class it need fear nothing: that “change we can believe in” had been a false-flag campaign from the beginning.

Hope nevertheless dies hard, even when it is demonstrably ever more irrational.

We battle our growing suspicion the “audacity of hope” is really the imbecility of hope – its absurdity and our gullibility. We become like the mark who wonders if maybe the salesman got stuck in traffic, or if there was a subway breakdown, and like the mark, we tell ourselves if we're just patient and wait long enough here in the shadows under the roadway, he'll show up with our deed to the Brooklyn Bridge.

I am no different, as much a schnook as anyone else – precisely why it has taken me more than a month to write this essay, why no combination of facts and feelings has ever been more difficult to lay bare on electrons and paper.

Though Warren jolted my skepticism to full wakefulness, and though I have been increasingly critical of Obama ever since, until Jane Hamsher's dauntless investigative reporting exposed his underhanded but relentless assault on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, I had remained an admirer of the man himself.

I prized his eloquence; it restored my pride in our nation. I desperately hoped I might yet find one reason to keep faith with my own act of faith – the minuscule effort, diminished to e-mail and personal contacts by the realities of retirement, that added maybe 30 votes to Obama's quest for the presidency.

Now of course thanks to Hamsher I know We the People truly have been bamboozled by yet another in the endless succession of Wall Street/Big Business political vassals – their policies effectively identical whether Democrat or Republican – who have occupied the White House since our last truly representative president was overthrown by murder in 1963.¹

Meanwhile Obama's choice of appointees – which I understand now from the very beginning proclaimed “change we can believe in” a Big Lie – have shaped his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform into a death panel intended to kill Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Which makes it also a death panel that will be passing terminal judgment on every one of us – elderly, disabled, chronically impoverished – whose lives depend on the programs it has been structured to destroy.

Indeed the plutocrat-laden, meet-in-secret group is already being called Obama's “let them eat cat-food commission,” or in equally graveyard-humored brevity, merely “the cat-food commission”:

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/05/10/obama-packs-debt-committee-with-supportes-of-social-security-benefit-cuts-and-privatization/

No longer can I believe Obama to be anything but a more eloquent (and therefore more seductively dangerous) political replicant of Bush II.

A liar is a liar, whether he mutters his falsehoods as malapropisms in a bogus Texas bunkhouse drawl or elucidates his deceptions in the measured cadences of academia.

Because we prefer our despots to be dunces – or at least to appear as if they are dunces – the lesson in which we are being schooled is that even a brilliant intellectual (which Obama unquestionably is) can be a tool of tyranny: Niccolo Machiavelli was neither the first nor the last.

Viewed in this context, Obama's boast that his perversion of health care “reform” is “pro-business” becomes the definition of his entire administration – no doubt why the notably history-conscious New York Times headlined it so prominently and with such obvious surprise: “In Iowa, Obama Calls Health Bill 'Pro-Business'.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/us/politics/26obama.html (NYT access by subscription only)

Given Obama's mastery of nuance and subtlety, his triumphant declaration is also a slyly uplifted middle finger: a gesture of contempt at every one of us conned by his pretense of support for single-payer/public-option alternatives.

Again we are as schnooks waiting in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge: what we got – “pro-business” Obamacare – “is a completely wasteful and poorly designed piece of corporate welfare”:

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/03/30/new-health-care-law-a-republican-plan-that-should-make-insurance-companies-proud/

Not surprisingly, “pro-business” perfectly describes all Obama's other betrayals too:

Employee Free Choice would have re-empowered the Working Class, launching political transformation of a magnitude unseen since the New Deal.

Defenses against Wall Street. bank and consumer frauds would have protected us from capitalism.

Restoration of constitutional governance would have resurrected some of our protections against government – vital now since the sole purpose of the federal government (and soon government at every level of the United States) is the expansion and defense of capitalism: absolute power and limitless profit for the capitalists, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us.

Exactly as Obama told MSNBC/Bloomberg Businessweek – “everything that we have done over the last year, and everything we intend to do over the next several years...is going to put American business on a stronger footing.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35352461/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweekcom//

As it has been since 5 June 1968, as it is now and ever shall be: no matter who wins we always get a fucking Republican.

***

Racism As A Tool Of "Change" (Only) Wall Street Can Believe In

Paul Krugman's “Tragedy in Black and White,” perhaps the most cogent essay anyone has written on U.S. race relations since the Civil War, is doubly important for its relevance to the 2008 Obama campaign.

Krugman's hypothesis is that the reason the U.S. has the most maliciously inhumane social-service and health-care systems in the industrial world is that the nation's racism – no matter how stylishly closeted – remains as relentlessly savage as ever.

http://www.pkarchive.org/column/091905.html

I agree with Krugman, emphatically so, and from a degree of personal experience that – shaped as it was by participation in the Civil Rights Movement – is increasingly rare amongst Caucasians: I know firsthand how racism forever simmers in the collective heart of White America. I have repeatedly been a target of its hatefulness – two attempted murders included – and I am not the least surprised by the racist outpouring against President Obama.

Moreover on the basis of a half-century's journalistic encounters I would expand Krugman's definition of racism-crippled social services to include our nation's public education and public transport, each of which are likewise the worst in the industrial world.

Paradoxically – or perhaps, given that Obama is African-American, not paradoxically at all – it would seem Obama's understanding of the real depth of U.S. racism demonstrates his greatest and most Machiavellian brilliance.

While there is no question Obama's 2008 campaign was based on the desperate hope for escape from the ruinous afflictions of the collapsing economy, it seems to me to have also been built on the unique recognition that, just as the hateful elements of racism are so often mobilized for negative purposes (destroying welfare, withholding health care, eroding education, opposing mass transit), so can racism's affirmative elements – the notion race confers specific skill, knowledge and inclination – be mobilized for positive purposes.

Though as far as I know no other journalist has dared suggest it – for a Caucasian to write of race in this nation is to risk a career-killing minefield of shibboleth and taboo (a hazard from which I am protected by age and retirement) – it seems to me Obama's campaign included subliminal appeal to a kind of “natural rhythm” syndrome: the racist fantasy harbored by so many whites that African-Americans somehow possess unique expertise in coping with poverty and are inclined, as if genetically, to embrace Leftist politics.

Hence “hope” as “audacity” – careful psycholinguistic repositioning of “hope” to make it an expression of defiance (as in the Civil Rights Movement) rather than admission of powerlessness; “change we can believe in” likewise made synonymous with “hope” fulfilled – maybe the most skillful Madison Avenue word-alchemy ever, including even the “silent majority” conjured into being by Nixon's copywriters.

Hence too fragments of real conversations during the campaign:

“I'm troubled by Obama's lack of specific proposals.”

“Shit man he's Black; he's gotta understand how bad things are. His vagueness is just his way of Getting Over. Wait till he's in office...”

Now, nearly two years later – the bigoted Right enraged to Ku Klux intensity by the ultimate triumph of desegregation (a Black family in the White House) – Obama's natural-rhythm strategy has become the most effective silencer of legitimate criticism any presidential administration has yet devised.

Label Obama what he seems to be – surely not the earnest young idealistic community organizer stymied by the complexities of governance and beaten to submission by partisan bullies, not even a two-faced strumpet of the sort that has come to symbolize the Washington/Wall Street aristocracy, but the most cunning betrayer in U.S. political history – you're bound to be slandered as a racist pig.

No one whose wellbeing depends on working-press paychecks dares risk being so denounced.

Nevertheless – and if I have understood it correctly – Obama's campaign is breakthrough thinking, unprecedented applications of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu combined with Orwellian psycholinguistics: conclusive proof Obama is our most effectively educated, creatively contemplative and intellectually powerful president since Thomas Jefferson.

Unfortunately for us, Obama has chosen to side entirely with the Ruling Class.

Lincoln's notion of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” – never truly fulfilled – is vanquished forever.

Step right up.

***

How Barack The Betrayer Is Also Obama The Master Distracter 

Obama's greater function – what the financial industry was buying when it gave him $15 million in 2008 campaign contributions (versus only $9 million for McCain/Palin) – remains something of a riddle.

More details of that $15 million investment – unprecedented both in size and the fact that in the past it was always the Republicans who got the Big Money from the Big Banksters and from Big Business in general – are here:

http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/indusall.php?cycle=2008

But what – besides bailouts – did Wall Street buy with its $15 million?

A prime adage of the now-forbidden practice of investigative reporting is “follow the money”: find out who got paid and who benefited and who got fucked over, and you've pretty much nailed down the whole story including all the whys.

Obviously it's Obama's policy to continue the depredations against the Working Class begun by Johnson in the guise of the Vietnam War and intensified by every president since: Nixon Ford Carter Reagan Bush I Clinton Bush II Obama – no commas because behind the rhetorical camouflage their administrations are economically indistinguishable; no party labels because there's not a nickel's worth of difference between the DemocRats (cap “R” for the fact they're really Republicans) and GOPorkers (Republicans at their porcine worst).

Obama's absolute fealty to the Ruling Class mimics the behavior of every president who has held office since John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered – each president faithfully serving the aristocracy by savaging the rest of us.

What is uniquely Obamanoid is the new assurance with which he (and increasingly the DemocRats in general) assume their deceive-and-betray tactics² will be reliably screened by GOPorker noise – the inevitable eruptions of racism, obstructionism and apparent legislative paralysis that Ruling Class Media predictably denounce as partisan gridlock.

But Bill Moyers' confession that U.S. politics is now all theater nearly all the time reveals the hurly burly as pre-rehearsed conflict  – distracting pseudo-drama carefully stage-managed to conceal back-room capitalist despotism and so perpetuate the illusion of democratic process  – a bitter truth most journalists have known or at least sensed for maybe four decades but dared not reveal lest our roles be edited out of the script.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html

This tells us Obama's deceptions and the Republican-generated controversies are two halves of one process: DemocRats and GOPorkers in clandestine collaboration to further the imposition of Big Business tyranny.³

Glenn Greenwald's essay “The 'Public Option': Democrats' Scam Becomes More Transparent” (first published in Salon.com then disseminated via Common Dreams), provides the best-yet case-study of the bait-and-switch tactics by which “change we can believe in” is being turned into a huge bonus for the Ruling Class. (While the initial beneficiaries of the scam are the insurance companies, let us not forget their ultimate function is to make money for Wall Street itself.) Meanwhile, just as Greenwald reports, the payoff is hailed as democracy in action but is actually Obamanoid betrayal and DemocRat treachery cleverly obscured by GOPorker tantrums. 

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/12-5

Obama is now using the same proven tactics – proclamations of support combined with behind-the-scenes opposition – to kill financial reform:

http://readersupportednews.com/opinion/82-82/1898-white-house-should-stop-pandering-to-wall-street

Remember Br'er Rabbit of the Uncle Remus tales? “Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me in that briar patch!”

Note how – despite the hysterical shrieks of the insurance industry – its stocks shot upward as soon as the briar patch of health care “reform” became law: an estimated windfall of $20 billion per year to the health speculators and sickness profiteers via mandatory insurance.

Hence I cannot overlook the possibility – you read it here first – the cat-food commission's ultimate purpose is not just the destruction of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid but the repeal of those (very few) parts of “health care reform” the insurance industry truly opposes.

Obama's imposition of mandatory insurance has already guaranteed Wall Street a first-year return of 1,332.3 percent (not a typo) on its $15 million investment: $15 million into Obama's campaign, $20 billion out, with the cash flow continuing every year thereafter.

If the cat-food commission pressures Congress to eliminate all “reforms” save mandatory insurance – no doubt with dramatically increased penalties for non-compliance – that would multiply the Wall Streeters' obscene profits beyond reckoning.

Meanwhile even such outrages as Obama's proclamation of his right to order the murder of U.S. citizens – his appointment of himself as federal capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses, Cosa Nostra's title for its Hitman in Chief) – are swept from sight by ongoing torrents of GOPorker squealing.

Has Obama's race – or more specifically its predictable provocation of racist fury – been scripted into a new drama of purposeful distraction to conceal capitalism's destruction of our liberty?

Is the resultant plausible deniability  – “we couldn't do any better because they wouldn't let us” – deliberately structured to mask Obama's betrayals as concessions to democratic process?

Is this Obama's real job? Is this the hidden agenda behind Wall Street's record-breaking $15 million campaign contribution?

“Please, Bre'r Fox, don't throw me in that briar patch.”

The only good news is that the anger of the Tea Party movement shows the imposition of Moron Nation remains unfinished – that a tiny segment of the U.S. population remains politically awake, that it has not been moronated, chemically sedated and otherwise methodically zombified to the catatonia of the muted majority or bullied by ideological robbery into the intellectual paralysis of the Left, alleged or real.

But the bad news is that the Tea Party has been manipulated into a Ruling Class goon squad – the U.S. equivalent of the freikorps and sturmabteilung that toppled the Weimar Republic – which proves that Moron Nation is already inescapable.

The zieg heil echoes of snare drums and hobnailed boots dwindle to forgetfulness; malevolence exhibits a new and curiously feminine resonance: “SAY-ruh SAY-ruh SAY-ruh...”

Numbness prevails.

___________________

¹Anyone who would understand the assassination of President Kennedy should read JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters. By the scholar James W. Douglass (Orbis Books: 2008), this is a work of history – not conspiranoid dreck – that examines motives and consequences. It establishes 22 November 1963 as the date the U.S. experiment in constitutional democracy was terminated by the forces of capitalism, as pivotal as the events of 4 September 476, when the last Roman emperor was deposed by barbarian revolutionaries.

²Several weeks ago a neighbor lent me American Pharaoh, the superb political biography of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, by the journalists Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor (Little, Brown and Company: 2001). Cohen and Taylor report that Daley often made implicitly Left-liberal promises he later betrayed – part of his strategy for presenting himself as a reformer while actually serving the machine – Big Business/Big Crime/Big Corruption – that has ruled Chicago since the 1920s. That Daley's methods are a source of inspiration for Obama is strongly implicit in the fact Obama's political career began in Daley's domain.

³It is an aside, but I am firmly convinced the destruction of U.S. news media is neither accidental nor a product of implacable market forces. Instead I believe the Ruling Class is deliberately terminating the information flow, using economic crisis as camouflage – plausible deniability again – thereby furthering the advent of Moron Nation, ensuring that, once completed, it will be forever inescapable. My belief is based on the history of U.S. journalism: when I began my newspaper and trade-journal career (1956), about 90 percent of all U.S. newspapers and trade journals were locally owned and independently published. The result was probably the most genuinely free press on the planet – certainly the most intellectually diverse. Today all news media – print and broadcast – are owned by six giant corporations, which gives the U.S. Ruling Class the same dictatorial control of information that characterized Nazi Germany. Now, with moronation nearly complete (a process in which public schools share as much blame as Ruling Class Media), the Great Shutdown has begun – the final proof of my hypothesis the emerging evidence most media outlets were hugely profitable until their monopolist owners began destroying them. Again, you read it here first.

LB/16 May 2010

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Capitalism, Corporate Personhood And The Politics Of Moral Imbecility

“Be prepared, then, for the reduction of taxes for the wealthy, and for the corporations, and the elimination of the social safety nets for everybody else, because money spent on the poor means less money left for the corporations” – Keith Olbermann on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruling that U.S. politicians are for sale to the highest bidders.

Like a priest elevating a communion wafer, a man begging for change on St. Marks Place blesses me for giving him a quarter: NYC, near midnight, February or March 1967. The encounter remains vivid – poignant even  – though curiously enough I had forgotten what equipment made the image. But adjacent frames on the negative strip – a fire survivor – indicate the lens was a 28mm, my shortest focal-length until I could afford a 21mm Zeiss Flektagon in 1969, so it had to be an f/2.8 Canon, surely wide open, on either a IIIG Leica or a Canon VT: rangefinder cameras allow fast accurate focus in extremely low light and can be hand-held without blur at shutter speeds below 1/30th of a second (I have a vague recollection this was at 1/15th). The 28mm lens required an auxiliary viewfinder attached to the body's accessory shoe; the Canon had integral framing only for 35mm and 50mm lenses; the Leica only for 50mm. The film is Tri-X (of course), probably exposed at 1200 ASA for development in Diafine. Photograph by Loren Bliss, copyright 1971, 1973, 2010.

*

We live in as bad a time as I have ever known in a very different realm from the blessed nation into which I was born.

Deep Horizon, an offshore oil well with a name eerily suggestive of black holes, has blown its greed-enfeebled preventers and is poisoning the planet with a 200,000-gallon-per-day gusher of tyrannosauric putrescence a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

Meanwhile the impending destruction of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid exposed by Jane Hamsher's superb investigative reporting confirms the post-Citizens United escalation of the class-war has already begun.

Hamsher's findings again bring into sharp focus the extent to which Barack Obama (and the DemocRats in general) are proving “change we can believe in” to have been the biggest of Big Lies – save of course for the Wall Streeters who are already radically enriched by the new administration's continuation and expansion of the looting begun decades ago by the GOPorkers.

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/05/10/obama-packs-debt-committee-with-supportes-of-social-security-benefit-cuts-and-privatization/

Thus we learn “hope” is not the “audacity” Obama so deviously claimed it to be, but rather undeniable proof of our own gullibility.

Thus too we learn the reality of death panels: Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform – more appropriately known as the “let them eat cat-food commission” – will undoubtedly inflict death if it savages Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as intended.

What these bitter lessons have in common is capitalism, the judicial doctrine of corporate personhood and the politics of moral imbecility that result.

***

From Freedoms For Everyone To Freedoms For The Highest Bidder

The transformation of the United States from constitutional democracy to capitalist despotism is vividly reflected in the differences between the texts of two broadcasts.

One is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's “Four Freedoms” address – actually his State-of-the-Union speech – on 6 January 1941, aired by the national radio networks; the other is Keith Olbermann's MSNBC report of 22 January 2010 on the meaning of the Supreme Court decision entitled Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Roosevelt – by far our greatest president (and now obviously the greatest president this nation will ever produce) – summarized the essence of what came to be known as the American Dream:

“The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple.”

“They are:

“Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.

“Jobs for those who can work.

“Security for those who need it.

“The ending of special privilege for the few.

“The preservation of civil liberties for all.

“The enjoyment -- the enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

“These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.”

Then Roosevelt globalized the Dream:

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.”

“The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

“The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

“The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

“The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

“That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”

Though it was scarcely noticed, FDR thus implicitly declared the United States in competition with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for the hearts and minds of humanity – capitalism versus communism; democratic process versus revolution; the state as arbiter of class interests versus the state as the vengeful fist of the newly liberated proletariat:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrthefourfreedoms.htm

At first, via the American Dream, capitalism showed the world a seductively benign facade.

But 50 years later the collapse of the U.S.S.R. absolved the capitalists of any competitive need to disguise or restrain capitalism's intrinsic malignancy.

And 19 years after that, Citizens United gave the Supreme Court's endorsement to the political bribery by which government at every level of our nation is being redirected to the exclusive service of capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us.

So died the American Dream – murdered, actually – slain by the same Ruling Class that created it as a propaganda weapon against socialism.

And now there is not one remaining barrier against the unspeakable tyrannies implicit in the capitalist ethos of infinite greed as maximum virtue.

***

Capitalism's Death Warrant Against Constitutional Democracy

While Citizens United is clearly written and readily available (Google it, then click on ScotusWiki), it is also 183 pages long.

The associated legal commentaries tend to be turgid and passive-voiced – as if the authors were shamed to grammatical avoidance by the decision's function and had retreated into lawerly convolutions to avoid direct confrontation with its dreadful contents.

One exception was Olbermann's commentary, which I had watched when it was broadcast on 22 January. But I searched the Internet for about six hours before I found – thanks to Michael Moore's website – a public-domain video and transcript I could use here.

Olbermann speaks with an honesty and forthrightness almost unknown on today's Ruling Class Media:

“Right now, you can prostitute all of the politicians some of the time, and prostitute some of the politicians all the time, but you cannot prostitute all the politicians all the time. Thanks to Chief Justice Roberts this will change. Unless this mortal blow is somehow undone, within ten years, every politician in this country will be a prostitute...”

“Be prepared, then, for the reduction of taxes for the wealthy, and for the corporations, and the elimination of the social safety nets for everybody else, because money spent on the poor means less money left for the corporations...

“Be prepared, then, for wars sold as the 'new products'...for the ban on same-sex marriage, on abortion, on evolution...for racial and religious profiling, because you've got to blame somebody for all the reductions in domestic spending and civil liberties...

“And be prepared, then, for...President Palin, because if you need a friendly face of fascism, you might as well get one that can wink...

“Be prepared for the little changes, too. If there are any small towns left to take-over, Wal-Mart can now soften them up with carpet advertising for their Wal-Mart town council candidates, brought to you by Wal-Mart...

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/keith-olbermann-citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission

Citizens United truly is the death warrant for what little remains of our liberty.

To paraphrase an 18th Century Scots ballad: “Tyrants' steel we could disdain, but tyrants gold has been our bane: such a parcel of rogues rules the nation.”

***

Capitalism = Corporate Personhood = Moral Imbecility = Capitalism

If we evaluate capitalism as we should – by observation of its real-world behavior (precisely as we are allegedly taught to evaluate communism and socialism) – we see that capitalism truly is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

It grants its tiny aristocracy unimaginable wealth and unrestrained power without regard for the consequences, whether human or more broadly environmental, and it rewards these aristocrats with the billion-dollar applause of soaring stock prices.

For the few so favored, this is surely the economic and political fulfillment of Ayn Rand's assertion that run-amok selfishness is the ultimate human good. 

But wealth is an ever-more limited quantity, which means that the plutocrats' gains – again to the villainous relish of the stock market – increasingly condemn all the rest of us to the inescapable poverty of “Jobless Recovery”: investors scammed out of their life savings and irremediably ruined; lives destroyed by downsizing, outsourcing, foreclosure, homelessness and the corporate murder essential to suppress rebellion abroad and silence critics at home, the Litany of the Slain including Joe Hill, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Fred Hampton, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, James Earl Green, Karen Silkwood, perhaps Paul Wellstone...

Such is Ayn Rand's virtue, its good further detailed by Bhopal, Exxon Valdez and the dying Gulf of Mexico; by Enron and Goldman Sachs; by Massey Energy, British Petroleum and Halliburton ad nauseum.

We would be oppressed enough if the greed-and-selfishness ethos of capitalism had remained exclusively the defining characteristic of the Ruling Class, as indeed it was in former times: the United States of the Industrial Workers of the World versus the Wall Street plutocrats and their goon squads, governmental and civilian; the Russian Empire of the Bolsheviki versus the Tsar, his Grand Dukes, their Okhrana, their cossacks and pogroms.

But the capitalists are not stupid – in fact U.S. capitalists are arguably the most brilliant tyrants in human history.

Long ago – first in the post-Civil-War South (and well before Rand put her class-war invective into words) – the capitalists recognized that when the greed-and-selfishness ethos is metastasized throughout society as the only valid basis of human relationships, it becomes the ultimate facilitator of “growth” – ensuring the capitalists their limitless profits even as it guarantees the endless subjugation of all the rest of us in the consumeroid rat-race.

The process is notably complete in the United States, where the Ruling Class has so thoroughly conditioned us to accept its credo of infinite greed as maximum virtue, our Working Class potential for solidarity has been obliterated forever – destroyed beyond any rational possibility of restoration.

In this context Citizens United merely guarantees the endless flow of political bribery essential to ensure our continued powerlessness.

Meanwhile – because corporations have long been the primary mechanism by which the Ruling Class wields power – it is no coincidence the U.S. judiciary has granted corporations the constitutional protections of personhood.

Noam Chomsky writes authoritatively on this subject in “The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy”:

“In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts (adopted and implemented) the...principle that (corporations) have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood...In later years these rights were expanded far beyond those of persons...Furthermore, the courts determined that these state-established 'natural entities' must restrict themselves to pursuit of profit and market share...”

In other words, corporations-as-persons are uniquely bound to seek maximum wealth and ultimate monopoly – hence (again) the capitalist credo of infinite greed as maximum virtue: not just desiderata but a specific response to mandates imposed by the U.S. judiciary.

http://chomsky.info/articles/20100124.htm

Hence too the corporate “person” in action: Jobless Recovery, downsizing, outsourcing, foreclosure, homelessness and corporate murder; investors maliciously scammed out of their life savings and irremediably ruined; Bhopal, Exxon Valdez and the dying Gulf of Mexico; Enron and Goldman Sachs; Massey Energy, British Petroleum and Halliburton ad nauseum – all excused as “pursuit of profit and market share” – any considerations of conscience or humanitarian restraint implicitly excluded.

But what sort of real-world, flesh-and-blood person acts without conscience or humanitarian restraint?

Capitalism proclaims such a being “successful” whether “success” is achieved by individual or corporate personhood.

Clinical psychology labels such a person a sociopath – and notes how the same characteristically selfish lack of empathy that defined Ted Bundy also defines many of the most successful capitalists.

Martha Stout describes the syndrome vividly:

“Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern of the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members.  Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.” 

http://www.cix.co.uk/~klockstone/spath.htm

Indeed – and precisely as Stout implies – the only distinction between the behavior of some murderous fat-cat capitalist and Bundy is in the huge and hypocritical difference in how it is presented to us.

Woody Guthrie said it as well as anybody: “Some rob you with a sixgun, some rob you with a fountain pen.”

Whether the personhood of the perpetrator is corporate or criminal or both, a synonym for “sociopath” is “moral imbecile,” a term that originated in the 19th Century and had been dwindling into archaic obscurity until it was resurrected by journalists in response to the 20th Century's plague of serial murderers.

In the knife-edged words of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the moral imbecile is “as well able to differentiate between right and wrong as is any normal man — the difference between the two lies in the fact that the moral imbecile does not care what the results may be to others.”

http://www.erbzine.com/mag17/1767.html

Think of corporate personhood as Ted Bundy not only set free by judicial decree but ordered to run amok and exempted by the courts from any obligation or culpability save the mandate to brandish his trophies as proof of his success at generating profit.

Meanwhile – as the presidential cat-food commission schemes the death-panel looting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – Deep Horizon threatens to become the Event Horizon of our extinction.

Thus capitalism, which we once believed our savior, now reveals itself as the doomsday mechanism of terminal species failure.

I wonder which of its manifestations will kill us first: our poisoned environment or the extermination-by-abandonment implicit in “jobless recovery” and the destruction of the remainder of the social safety net.

LB/10-12 May 2010

(-30-)

Smitten Mute: A Belated Reaction To BP's Ocean-Killing Horror

A blessing of unpoisoned water: upper Saar Creek from a fallen tree at sunset; Washington state, late October 1988. A eulogy for what is destroyed beyond recovery by our continued enslavement to Big Oil and Big Automotive. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010; Olympus RC (probably the most convenient pocket camera I ever owned), Kodak Gold 400 color negative film.

*

(Originally I wrote the following as a response to an essay by Knute Berger in the Seattle online daily Crosscut but decided to post it here simultaneously.)

With even secular activists now saying Big Oil has "literally punched a hole into hell,"¹ the consequences of this disaster as measured in intensified public indifference may be infinitely worse than Mr. Berger foresees.

Among my coterie (nearly all of us news junkies with mass media or public employment backgrounds and long personal histories of political activism), the result is such abject horror at the event itself, many of us can no longer bear to read or watch the news at all.

Indeed it is as if this "hole into hell" has transmogrified the very nature of knowledge, transforming it – as if by the very blackest of black magic – from a proud prerequisite of power and certitude to irrefutable and therefore unbearably painful proof of our absolute powerlessness: the final demonstration of our enslavement by a doomsday Ruling Class that truly does have the hell-opening omnipotence of a malevolent god.

I suspect this reaction – which is undeniably also my own – is fostered by the event's confirmation of the absolute and permanent helplessness we have so long suspected to be our true condition under capitalism: it proves above all else there is absolutely nothing we can do to change our circumstances -- or even to minimize the dying-planet agonies of this last and worst holocaust so inflicted.

But it is at least a bit less wrenching if we now deliberately choose to look away from the graveyard toward which we are being herded by the Lords of Infinite Greed.

And this desperate need to pull the proverbial blankets over our heads is surely not limited to myself and my own circle of friends and acquaintances. I glimpse it too even in MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who is providing superbly complete video coverage of this apocalyptic event but even despite her obviously iron-willed professional discipline cannot quite banish the subtle wince of fearful aversion from her eyes nor entirely suppress the flee-the-abyss quaver from her voice.

With such crippling emotion justifiably afflicting people who have spent lifetimes not only conceptualizing responses to crisis but actually so responding – people who thus demonstrably have the intellectual tools to cope with such matters – imagine the helpless terror and subsequent all-consuming catatonia that will surely afflict those less favored.

At least beneath the blankets now pulled protectively over my own head there are blessed memories to soothe the anguish of the spreading blackness.

Indeed the unspoiled Nature I knew in the wilderness-privileged summers of my youth has now become my mandala – and today there are flute and drum (Scott August's “River of Stars”) that quicken my passage to the Tao of its gifts: the unforgettable murmur of clear and troutly water; the rhythmic thrust and pull of a wooden paddle in current strong enough its resistance is also its embrace; bottom-deep trout grown huge in shadowed pools darting to invisible mystery beneath an encroaching canoe; the curiously welcoming glare of brightly pebbled shallows in late afternoon sunlight; a tangy drift of woodsmoke; the rush of night wind in tall conifers; and always the river, the clear and troutly river, the river murmuring enchantment like the soft voice of some indescribably lovely woman – verily (and even in my long ago virginal boyhood) as if my lover were calling to me from a dimension just beyond our own...

I can only hope others are similarly blest, and I pity those born too late to know the fullness of such realms.

Meanwhile hell pours forth its demon-flood of tyrannosauric malevolence. Moron Nation stumbles drunkenly into final submission, first becoming Zombie Land, then at last and truly the Continent of the Dead – with neither bang nor whimper but an all-too-finite threnody of extinction: violent explosions of individual tantrums, human and environmental, in random blood-red counterpoint to the moaning despair of a toxin-dark chorus of hopelessness.

http://crosscut.com/2010/05/05/mossback/19794/Built-to-spill/?utm_source=Crosscut+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=bdc182b6d5-Crosscut_E_mail_5_5_20105_5_2010&utm_medium=email

_________

¹ “They've Literally Punched A Hole Into Hell,” http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1043.php

LB/5 May 2010

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