Democratic (sic) Party Kills All Hope of Progressive Recapture
New Hillaryite Rule Locks Out Sanders, Any Others the DNC Won't Ok as Real Democrats, Thus Formalizing the Party's Hatred of Reformers
'"We just came off a devastating presidential loss in 2016. It would seem to me the actual impetus would be to expand the Democratic Party. I just for the life of me don't see any motivation for this beyond personal spite,' Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, told Yahoo News.'I scratch my head and ask why they would want to make the party more narrow and more exclusive.' Other progressives echoed Longabaugh's critique of the new rule on social media, with many noting that such restrictions could demobilize large constituencies that are disaffected with both major political parties...'Democrats don't want Bernie-Most-Popular-Politician-In-America-Sanders running for President, but they're perfectly fine with Mark-Raise-The-Social-Security-Retirement-Age-Warner, because although he commonly votes with Republicans, he IDs as a Democrat...'''
See also: "The Democratic National Committee's rules and bylaws committee adopted a new rule on Friday that would prevent outsiders like Bernie Sanders from seeking the party's nomination in the 2020 presidential race. The move seems to be the latest salvo in the ongoing jockeying over the party's future that emerged following the...bitter primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Sanders in 2016... the move could only have been motivated by lingering animus from the primary race between Clinton and Sanders."
Comment: despite the false pseudo-Left optimism by which these reports attempt to soften the Democratic (sic) National Committee's terminal blow to any rational hope for a progressive takeover of the party, by this new rule the DNC awards itself the absolute power to determine who is and is not a real Democrat. The rule therefore locks in ideological cement overshoes the party's suicidal, already thoroughly documented malice toward Sanders. It also radically expands the party's hateful efforts to exclude all would-be reformers, a brazenly pro-Republican purge exemplified by its maliciously triumphant slandering of Laura Moser. Thus once again we are taught our only possible exit from JesuNazi theocracy is the formation of a genuinely socialist -- and genuinely revolutionary -- party of the Working Class. Indeed the Democrats' fuck-you message to all of us in the 99 Percent was never clearer -- so unmistakable (and such an unmistakable endorsement of Capitalist malevolence) -- even those in the deepest depths of denial can no longer reject it.
And Here is Always Insightful Paul Street to Tell Us Why the Democrats So Ruled
"The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-exterminist right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their own party."
Comment: Street's essay -- though it is entirely too pseudo-Leftish for my taste -- was written before approval of the DNC's rule to exclude progressive reformers, but it explains perfectly why the rule was enacted and -- most importantly -- why those of us on the Real Left should forever abandon any (1930s/Stalinist) notion of infiltrating the Democratic (sic) Party and attempting to make it the mechanism of our national redemption.
Additional late-night insight: today's Democratic (sic) Party -- in an exceptionally grotesque example of Orwelliano-Machiavellian deception proven by its ever-more-fawning obedience to its Capitalist masters -- is now the Republican Party's most colossally ambitious false-flag operation ever. It positions the Democrats as a Fifth Column to bolster by discouragement the more obvious Republican effort to shrink voter turnout even as the illusion of two parties helps perpetuate the apocalyptic Big Lie of "American democracy." (Please remember where you read this hypothesis first: on Dispatches' weekend update, 9 June 2018.)
T/P Regime Resumes Obama's Anti-First Amendment War on Journalists
"Now we know that the Justice Department secretly seized the phone and email records of Ali Watkins, a New York Times reporter, in a leak investigation involving a former Senate staffer. It is the first time the Trump administration is known to have engaged in such an aggressive tactic against a reporter, and it is exactly the kind of press surveillance at which the Obama administration excelled. For years, conservatives attacked Obama for using such tactics to spy on reporters. Of course, there was no outcry from the right on Friday over Trump's willingness to do the same thing."
Why We Must "Beware the Democrats and Their Good Billionaires"
"(Starbucks) Executive Chairman Howard Schultz...(fashioned) for himself a shining reputation as a moral capitalist... As a result, he's become that favored species of Democratic Party hacks: the Good Billionaire...Schultz has political ambitions, perhaps presidential ones. He almost certainly would have been Hillary Clinton's secretary of labor...And let's be honest:The psychopathic acquisitiveness required to actively hoard $3 billion is a close relative of the titanic self-regard and absolute megalomania that drive most presidential candidates...On CNBC, Schultz worried that the Democratic Party has drifted too far to the left...and identified the national debt as the great crisis of our time...There you have it..(worsening) austerity, but with a few rainbow flags and diversity seminars. America's shining, post-Trumpian future."
G7 Summit Reveals Europe's Intensifying Hostility to U.S. JesuNazi Imperialism
"This weekend's summit of the G7 is the most contentious meeting in the body's 43-year history. It has revealed deep and growing fissures between the United States and its European allies...Looming over the summit is Trump's June 1 decision to impose sweeping tariffs of up to 25 percent on steel and aluminum imports from the EU and other countries...At the same time, Trump has opened the prospect of cooling off the United States' two other major geopolitical conflict areas: with North Korea, including a US-North Korean summit scheduled in Singapore immediately after the conclusion of the G7, and with Russia, to which Trump held out the prospect of regaining membership in the G7 after it was ejected in 2014...However, as with the (Nazi) fractured geopolitics of the 1930s, the 'deals' offered by Trump to one or another country are merely the prelude to military conflict. War is on the horizon, though it is not yet clear between whom."
Poll Shows Seattle Citizenry's Growing Contempt and Hatred of Homeless People
"Seattle residents are not only deeply dissatisfied with how the Seattle City Council has addressed homelessness, but also less willing than they used to be to sign off on new taxes to address the problem, according to a poll of 800 likely voters conducted in March that Crosscut has obtained...Those familiar with the results, who requested anonymity to discuss private polling, were stunned: It's the first time anyone can recall the usually generous Seattle voters being overwhelmingly skeptical of additional taxation...a shift from just 18 months prior, when voters responded more positively to the idea of increasing spending on homelessness..."
See also: "The campaign to repeal the recently approved (housing-for-homeless-people) tax has gathered more than 20,000 valid signatures...more than what the campaign needs to put a referendum on the ballot next fall, leaving it to voters to decide whether to keep or repeal the tax."
Comment: having had the profound misfortune to have resided in Seattle from 1972 through 1976, I know too well the malicious hypocrisy of the majority of its white residents. Thanks to the courageousness of the late Walter Crowley, I also know of the breathtaking racism, bourgeois socioeconomic bigotry and anti-Jewish malice exposed by the still-officially-secret polling that explained the self-destructive defeat of the Forward Thrust subway proposal as precipitated not as much by the so-called Boeing Bust as by the white Seattleites' decision to listen to their Inner Fascists. (Walter told me of the poll and its results during an otherwise-social late-1970s J&M Cafe conversation that for a moment became the deepest of what in journalism is known as "deep background" briefing. Thus I promised him I would never write about it as long as he was alive, but now that he is dead [and sorely missed], there is no remaining reason for me to keep silent about his disclosures.) Hence given how the old, clandestine poll results inadvertently predict the new poll's results, I would judge Seattle's alleged change of heart toward homeless people to be nothing more than a 21st Century version of the "we-don'-wanna-be-another-Jew-York/yeah-we're-closet-Nazis-deal-with-it-fuck-you" exclamation like the ones of 1968 and 1970, albeit without the never-more-than-whispered "Zieg Heil" asserted quite so loudly.
How Elite Colleges Protect Their Young Aristocrats from Police-State Savagery
"American police...(are) militarized...occupying forces for America's poor neighborhoods, not unlike the American military abroad. If one lives in America and is poor, especially black and poor, the police are your oppressor, not your protector...Encountering a police officer, let alone confronting one for their injustice, is a dangerous activity for many in this country. The poor have been abandoned by our government yet they are arrested for petty and necessary crimes done to survive. Once in the system it is even harder to make a legal living and people have no choice but to turn to alternative methods of survival. The police in this country consistently use a call to them as an excuse to hit the victim with a crime of their own. The right to protest is considered a criminal offense, as evidenced by Standing Rock and the protests against President Trump. ICE is becoming an increasingly insidious force that obtains people in extraordinarily inhumane conditions.On the other hand, you have elite college campuses that aim to protect their students of crimes at all costs."
New Evidence in RFK Murder Prompts Demands for Reopening Case
"Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5 and died June 6, 1968, fifty years ago today. A new examination of evidence is forcing human rights organizations -- including the (Organization of American States) -- to consider probing the case."
See also: "We now live in a country that would be unrecognizable to anyone who died prior to 1968."
The Empire Escalates Its Efforts to Drag Assange into a Death Chamber
"One day after Ecuadorian Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa declared that her government would continue blocking WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from all communications and deny him any personal visitors, she was elected president of the United Nations General Assembly...There is little doubt that the treatment of Assange...is the outcome of pressure and threats by the US and other powers. Washington is demanding Assange's head...to silence him while Washington (seeks) his extradition to stand trial on espionage charges that potentially carry the death penalty."
Millennials Favor Unions Over Corporations
"Pew Research Center has just released its annual survey on public opinion and unions in the United States. As in the last few years, the general public views the decline of organized labor negatively.... Sixty-eight percent of people aged 18-29 said they have positive views of unions, while just 46 percent of young people said the same of corporations."
Last Words (I): Eulogies for Anthony Bourdain
"Anthony Bourdain was the only major American celebrity who succeeded in depicting publicly the Palestinians as rational, caring human beings rather than as irrationally angry 'inciters' to violence. He was the anti-Bernard Lewis. Lewis smeared the world's 1.8 billion Muslims with the charge of 'Islamic Rage' (as though large swathes of humankind are angry for no reason). Bourdain said, 'The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinians, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity.'"
See also: "Anthony Bourdain, who was found dead Friday in an apparent suicide, opened his viewers' eyes to issues within and beyond the borders of the United States through food. He also championed many of the communities that affected his work in the kitchen and on screen. Whether it was global poverty, systemic racism in the United States or sexual abuse of women in the workplace, Bourdain frequently used the publicity he earned through his celebrity to draw attention to the issues affecting the people behind the food that he brought into Americans' living rooms. Here are some examples..."
With heartfelt thanks to my dear friend and comrade Brie, who in a poignantly teachable moment told me of Bourdain's significance in her own life and then opened my eyes as to his significance for the rest of our species.
And here is Brie's own tribute to him: "Anthony Bourdain taught me from a young age that food is love and a way to connect with others when language-barriers are present. It's a way to respect and honor your elders and your younger comrades too. He taught me that food is what can bring us together when we think that there is no common ground to be found. Food is also love, service, honor and much more. It's what binds us together and fuels our bodies, minds and souls for the fight we all face daily -- and I'll always treasure the ways Tony Bourdain taught me to serve my comrades and community with love, dignity and respect. For that alone I mourn the loss of a man I never had the pleasure of meeting."
Last Words (II): Cossacks Dare Verbalize what All Warriors Secretly Know
"There's something dashing and soulful about Russian folk music, especially when it originates with the Cossacks, Russia's warriors of the steppe. This is perhaps the most famous Cossack song, sung at dinners, concerts and campfires. It's a song about a love that is always just out of reach, a strange mix of longing and recklessness. Listen to it. You won't regret it." (The lyrics translated to English are here.)
LB/9 June 2018
Posted at 02:37 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Censorship, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Healthcare, History, Immigration, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Music, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Television, Visual art, Weblogs, White Supremacy | Permalink | Comments (0)
Official Protection of Violently Racist, Often Murderous Cops Shows the World the True Magnitude of U.S. Nazi-Mindedness
Federally Militarized Police Add Middle-Class Minorities to Target List
"Another day, another black man violently assaulted by five rogue police officers for the ever-increasing crime of BWB (breathing while black). This time it was NBA player Sterling Brown...It's hardly news that people of color are continually harassed, but what's been making the news lately is the frequency with which upwardly mobile, middle-class people of color are being targeted. From the two black men waiting for a friend at a Philadelphia Starbucks, to a black Yale graduate student napping in her dorm's common room, to three black women facing down seven cop cars and a helicopter as they checked out out of an Airbnb house they were renting...there is an overlooked long-lasting collateral damage to the black community's faith in the promise of the American dream and the sinister effect on their children that is much worse than that single assault."
See also: "I am speaking for Dontre Hamilton of Milwaukee, Laquan McDonald of Chicago, Stephon Clark of Sacramento, Eric Garner of New York and the list goes on...The common denominator in all of these (killings) has been racism towards the minority community...The lack of repercussions for the police officers involved in so many of these cases is...a slap in the face to the victims' families and communities."
And this: "American police shoot and kill far more people than their peers in other countries...(but) are almost never prosecuted and convicted for use of force."
Plus this: "The technology giant Amazon is providing police agencies and private intelligence contractors in the United States with facial recognition and video tracking algorithms to (intensify) mass surveillance on the population."
Comment: I posted the above material as this weekend-update's lead story because, once again, we cannot comprehend the true horror of the Empire's domestic and foreign agendas without first examining the capabilities and intentions demonstrated by its ever-expanding catalogue of atrocities.
These newest outrages -- clearly another expansion of the Empire's lifelong, 242-year history of hate-motivated, often genocidal persecution of non-whites -- are precisely what prove "American Democracy" to have never been more than a Big Lie.
What further condemns the United States -- what defines it as a nation ever-more-dictatorially ruled by a multi-generation cabal of Nazi-minded Capitalist overlords -- was first revealed in 1934 by exposure of the too-powerful-to-prosecute/too-rich-to-jail One Percenters who formulated the Bankers' Plot.
But now, 85 years later, the cabal's once-thwarted lust for the savagery of Nazi governance is methodically approaching fulfillment in the Trump/Pence Regime.
It should therefore surprise none of us that the regime's sadistic intensification of signature expressions of its hatred of non-whites -- especially the ever-more-commonplace police violence against Blacks, Hispanics and First Nations people -- is now expanding to include even those minority folk who were hitherto granted some protection by bourgeois occupations and appearance.
Significantly, this ongoing expansion of official USian hatefulness ominously parallels Hitler's step-by-step intensification of Germany's official hatred of its own doomed minorities. `
Meanwhile the ever-more-obvious JesuNazism of the Empire's rulers underscores the apocalyptic nature of their schemes for global conquest and environmental destruction, thereby redefining the Big Lie of "American Democracy" into the most potentially terminal Big Lie in all human existence.
But I have to disagree with those comrades whose focus on class warfare unfortunately blinds them to the bottomlessly sociopathic nature of the white-supremacist hatred of Blacks, Hispanics, First Nations people and Asiatics. To minimize how race hatred drives the USian Empire's domestic and foreign policy is tantamount to minimizing how hatred of Jewish, Slavic and Roma people drove the German Nazis' domestic and foreign policy. To reason that such murderous moral imbecility is the byproduct of class struggle alone is like trying to comprehend a mass murder without reference to the murderer's psychological state; it does nothing to address the hideous truth that a seemingly irremediable hatred of non-whites has become -- especially since the advent of the Abrahamic forms of patriarchy -- the defining characteristic of nearly the entire Caucasian race. In this context, the woeful inadequacy of the class-struggle-only analysis is emphatically demonstrated by how racist malice prevails even within groups and nationalities of whites who, theoretically, have long been securely affluent enough to have cleansed themselves of fear and loathing toward people of color.
Which is most assuredly not to reduce the importance of class struggle; it is instead an urgent plea to continue our examination of intersectionality -- how various forms of bigotry and hatred combine and interact synergistically, rather as if its victims are trapped in the middle of intersections and "hit by cars from many sides." As the Combahee River Collective asserted in 1977, "...Although we are in essential agreement with Marx's theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further..."
This is especially true if one is to understand the unique role of hatred in the formulation of governmental policy, whether in Hitler's Third Reich or the emergent Fourth Reich of the Imperial United States.
Meanwhile Our Species Has Already Destroyed Most Earthly Life
"Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world's 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds."
When the Empire Inflicts "Regime Change," Murderous Chaos Often Results
"When the United States uses its impressive military machine to topple a tyrant...it's impossible to predict the course of the chaos that follows. Fracture a society, it seems, and the most nefarious (and well-armed) actors often rise to the top: militiamen, criminal elements, Islamists and sociopaths of various stripes...Still, Washington never seems to learn. Since October 2001, our military has been ordered to topple at least three sovereign governments—those of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya—and is theoretically seeking to overthrow another regime in Syria. Republican and Democratic presidents alike have ordered these ill-advised operations, demonstrating the striking bipartisanship of American militarism. Let us, then, take a tour of the tragic outcomes unfolding today in each of these victims of U.S.-imposed regime change."
See also: "The question is: has the Trump administration already made a decision to go to war with Iran?...several developments have come together to suggest that the rationale for using sanctions to force a re-negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is cover for an eventual military assault by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia aimed at regime change in Teheran."
And this: "...national security adviser John Bolton, the formidable chairman of the new 'war cabinet,' was never agreeable to the idea of U.S.-North Korean diplomacy."
Comment: I for one believe the murderous chaos is deliberate -- another of the many forms of genocide by which the Empire seeks to ensure Earth and all its resources remain under forever under Capitalist control.
Democrats Again Show True Colors in Votes to Enable Warmongers, Banksters
"While the world responds with alarm over President Donald Trump's...(cancellation of) diplomatic talks with North Korea scheduled for next month—(talks) which aimed to ease rising nuclear tensions—131 Democrats in the U.S. House joined with the overwhelming majority of Republicans to pass a $717 billion Pentagon spending bill that includes massive expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal" (emphasis added). The roll-call vote is here.
And: "Handing President Donald Trump a major legislative victory and delivering a huge gift to Wall Street banks on the very same day (these banks) reported record-shattering profits, 33 House Democrats joined nearly every Republican...in passing a deregulatory measure that independent analysts say will significantly increase the risk of another financial crisis."
Comment: two entirely predictable fuck-off-and-die betrayals of the 99 Percent by the Democratic (sic) faction of the One Capitalist Party of Two Names (OCPOTN) provide yet another illustration of how "American Democracy" is by far the most potentially deadly of all humanity's Big Lies.
Despite the fact Washington state's Puget Sound area with its five major military bases is already the most target-rich environment on this planet, Tacoma-area representatives Adam Smith and Derek Kilmer voted to sate the imperial war machine's thirst for blood money by approving the Trump/Pence Regime's bring-on-the-apocalypse budget. So did Puget Sound Democrats Suzan DelBene, Rick Larsen, and Denny Heck, all five (predictably) joining with their state's four Republican representatives.
The one Washington state Democrat with the courage to vote against the let's-make-Earth-a-bug-planet measure was Pramila Jayapal; obviously she is the only Washington representative who understands that expanding the thermonuclear capabilities of the submarines based at Bangor will not protect her beloved Evergreen State from reduction to a black-and-brown radioactive wasteland. (Disclosure: I salute and applaud Ms. Jayapal for her bravery on this war-machine budget issue, though I nevertheless emphatically oppose her schemes for forcibly disarming all civilian firearms owners. )
While Larsen was the only Washington state Democrat to also vote for unleashing Capitalism's most predatory banksters, the unspoken message of the two bills is nevertheless clear: the One Percent and its Ruling Class Vassals are now -- as a growing number of regime's former opponents forgive its premature disclosures of Capitalism's ultimate Evil -- predictably uniting behind its JesuNazi agenda.
Empire Escalates Its Campaign to Enslave Venezuela and Steal Its Petroleum
"Of particular interest to the United States is Venezuela, who is full of oil. They want the oil and anyone who doesn't give it to them is illegitimate. But there are people in Venezuela too. And they have been wonderfully resilient in response to U.S. power. This was why it was such good news that Nicolás Maduro won reelection in Venezuela."
More Genocide: Bureaucrats OK $7 Billion Cut in Children's Health Program
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday approved President Donald Trump's 'despicable' proposal to slash more than $7 billion from the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which helps impoverished families provide healthcare to their kids. The approval came by way of a GAO report delivered to Congress early Tuesday. The cuts to CHIP are part of a broader plan by the Trump administration to cancel $15.3 billion in previously approved funding.
Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine Ignores Poor People's Campaign
"The Poor People's Campaign remains invisible to much of America. Corporate media have chosen to dismiss this call for a national moral revival, but the establishment will not be able to ignore the growing community that is calling for it much longer."
See also: "The Art of Resistance."
Activist Blames West Virginia's Wretchedness on "Corporate Domination"
"West Virginia has the highest rate of obesity in the country. The highest rate of smoking. The highest rate of drug overdose deaths. Why? Corporate domination of the state...(says) Stephen Smith...director of the West Virginia Healthy Kids and Family Coalition."
India's Massacre of Environmental Protestors Exemplifies Capitalism in Action
"The barbarity of social life and class relations in contemporary India were laid bare in Tuesday's police massacre of working people demanding the closure of a copper smelter that has long befouled Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu, polluting its groundwater and environs with toxic chemicals. The massacre...left 12 people dead and more than 60 others injured..."
History Shows Invasion of Russia Would Be "Military Nightmare"
"The Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) recently examined the most difficult countries in the world to invade, which include Russia, Switzerland, and New Zealand. The paper said an invasion of Russia would become a 'military nightmare' for foreign armed forces. While SvD did not define who precisely that enemy would be, our suspicions point to the countries intertwined with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)."
Can Resurrected Indian Country Today Maintain Editorial Independence?
"SCRAPPY AND RESILIENT as the population it covers, a reinvented Indian Country Today recently announced its return after a nine-month hiatus...(but) ICT's comeback brings with it concerns for the publication's editorial independence."
Despite JesuNazi Hate-Mongering, Support for Gay Marriage Rises to 67%
"Sixty-seven percent of Americans support same-sex marriage -- the highest level in Gallup's trend. In each of the past three annual polls, Gallup has recorded three-percentage point increases among Americans who say same-sex marriages should be legally valid. The current figure is up 40 percentage points from the 27 percent who supported gay marriage when Gallup first polled on the question in 1996."
Georgians Pick First-Ever Black Gubernatorial Nominee
"Stacey Abrams...became the first Black nominee for governor in Georgia by either party."
Two Petitions from UltraViolet: (Please Sign Each One)
"The Trump administration is about to literally BAN the word abortion from the doctor's office. Yes, you read that right. For clinics and hospitals that accept dollars from the Title X program--the nation's program for affordable birth control and reproductive health care--doctors, nurses, and other health care providers would be banned from providing, counseling on, or referring any patient for an abortion. Even if it was needed to protect a woman's health or save her life. Even if she asked."
"Did you know that Target, which boasts a family-friendly brand, provides employees who've just given birth just two weeks of paid leave? It's neither enough to recover from childbirth or medically advisable to keep a newborn away from her mother. This year, big companies like Starbucks, CVS Pharmacy, and Walmart caved to organized public pressure and are now allowing their employees meaningful paid time off to take care of their newborns. Combined, that's millions of people finally gaining access to essential parental leave time. If we push Target, the second largest retail employer in the United States, to follow, we can win paid family leave for hundreds of thousands more people..."
Last Words: a Flicker of Optimism in This Darkest of All Human Eras
"Thousands of teachers and students are walking out of schools, marching in the streets, and raising their hands and signs in protest against the war on education. Most recently, South Carolina has joined the wave of teachers' protests and strikes taking place across the nation. In the age of illiberal democracy and the growing fascism of the Trump administration, the unimaginable has once again become imaginable as teachers inspired and energized by a dynamic willingness to fight for their rights and the rights of their students are exercising bold expressions of political power. The power of collective resistance is being mounted in full force against a neoliberal logic that unabashedly insists that the rule of the market is more important than the needs of teachers, students, young people, the poor and those deemed disposable by those with power in our society. Teachers are tired of being relentless victims of a casino capitalism..."
Posted at 01:12 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Censorship, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Film, Healthcare, History, Immigration, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Music, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Television, Visual art, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | Permalink | Comments (0)
Trump/Pence War on Black Dissidents Claims First Victim
NORMALLY I ORDER the linked reports in Dispatches in accordance with news values that were mine as a daily newspaper news editor or telegraph editor. This is to say international news generally outranks all but the most significant local news, and crisis, scandal or disaster outranks everything else unless it is a positive story about some development (such as an increase in the minimum wage) that benefits us all. But those criteria vanish down the proverbial toilet in the face of the following story, which, though it is about the victimization of one man, nevertheless exemplifies the stark, Gestapo-type terror with which the JesuNazi Trump/Pence Regime threatens us all. Indeed it is a wake-up call of the most alarming sort -- precisely why I have chosen it to lead this edition of "Weekend Update":
Rakem Balogun, who lost his home and more while incarcerated, is believed to be the first person targeted and prosecuted under a secretive US surveillance effort to track so-called 'black identity extremists.' In a leaked August 2017 report from the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, officials claimed that there had been a 'resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity' stemming from African Americans' 'perceptions of police brutality.'"
Comment: obviously Mr. Balogun is but the first victim in the JesuNazi regime's Gestapo-inspired terrorizing of dissenters, in which context we dast not forget the words of Martin Niemöller, "first they came for the socialists..."
Fight to Save Net Neutrality Requires Only One More Affirmative Vote
"Democrats on Wednesday officially filed a petition to force a vote in the Senate to save net neutrality. With a single Republican supporting the effort, only one vote is needed to advance a resolution that may one day soon reinstate the net neutrality rules overturned by the FCC last year." Please use this story's clickable form to contact your senators.
Democratic (sic) Party's Closet Fascists Urge CIA Torture Queen's Approval
"Sen. Joe Donnelly on Saturday became the second Democrat to announce he will cast his vote in favor of CIA director nominee Gina Haspel -- boosting her prospects of being confirmed...West Virginia's Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat in a state that voted for Mr. Trump by the greatest margin, has also voiced his support for Haspel."
Comment: yes, it's a Mainstream Media story, but its weekend timing is guaranteed to obscure it, hence the above link to its text.
Trump/Pence Rules Change Encourages Rape of Transgender Prisoners
"In a policy shift LGBTQ rights groups denounced as 'a deliberate recipe for violence against transgender people,' the Trump administration on Friday rolled back rules allowing transgender prisoners to use facilities that match their gender identity and instructed federal officials to use 'biological sex' in determining housing assignments.
Comment: precisely as an LGBTQ advocate said in response to this newest example of the Trump/Pence Regime's JesuNazi sadism, "the administration is clearly prepared to encourage federal prisons to violate federal law and advance its own inhumane agenda."
How Intensifying Grassroots Fascism Bolsters USian World Conquest Agenda
"In the wake of the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, the support of rebel groups against Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the support of a Saudi-led war of aggression in Yemen, the question on everyone's mind at this time is a terrible one: has the United States now committed itself to violent regime change in Iran? Imperialism and militarism, now dominant as cultural values in the United States, will make another war seem attractive to many Americans...The U.S. is a country where nearly two-thirds of the population support torture against suspect terrorists, and where more than forty percent of Americans think it was the 'right decision' to invade Iraq in 2003–a war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands, produced millions of refugees, led to the rise of ISIS, and was done in blatant violation of international law."
See also: "The US is...becoming self-isolated, with full support only from Israel and Saudi Arabia...marginalising and humiliating France, Germany and UK."
And this: "I can tell you from firsthand experience, that I've seen this before. Our government is laying the groundwork for yet another war. Be on the lookout for several things. First, Trump is going to begin shouting about the "threat" from Iran. It will become a daily mantra. He'll argue that Iran is actively hostile and poses an immediate danger to the United States."
Also this: "In the wake of Donald Trump's thoroughly unsurprising decision to scuttle the Iran nuclear accord, two countries that may be most in the hot seat are Germany and Russia. The big question now is whether their mutual discomfort leads them to find common cause."
Plus this: "Trump's proposals to corral Europe into joining U.S. foreign policy on Iran may lead to a severe backlash by EU firms and politicians, especially advocates of a stronger independent European foreign policy."
$tock $urge Proves Prescription Drug Lords Own Trump/Pence Regime
"Topher Spiro, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, argued that a major reason pharma stocks rose as Trump formally announced his plan is because the president placed blame for high U.S. drug prices on the low prices in nations with 'socialized healthcare'—exonerating American drug giants from any blame for soaring costs...Instead of tackling high U.S. prices, Trump effectively promised to work to 'boost prices abroad,' which is the drug industry's 'number one priority,' Spiro notes."
See related petition, which -- despite the fact it will do no good -- we should nevertheless sign as an act of protest: "Trump ran on a promise to let Medicare negotiate aggressively, which would lower prices for everyone. Today, he's abandoned that promise. Donald Trump's cowardice in blocking Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices is more proof that he works for the drug industry not the people...Stand with Social Security Works and demand immediate action by Congress to address the national crisis of skyrocketing drug prices...Sign the petition today!" (With thanks to TigerLille1 for sending me the link.)
Trump Going Full Fascist for Midterm Elections
"Donald Trump's rally in Elkhart, Indiana Thursday night was the latest in a series of campaign-style events where he is testing out a political appeal of a fascistic character. It follows similar events over the past two months, all in the industrial Midwest: a rally in Moon Township in the Pittsburgh suburbs on March 10; a rally in Washington Township, Michigan, in the Macomb County suburbs of Detroit, on April 28; and a fundraising appearance in suburban Cleveland on May 5."
USian Threats May Subject Assange to Kangaroo Court Death-Penalty Trial
"Julian Assange is in immense danger. Remarks made this week by Ecuador's foreign minister suggest that her government may be preparing to renege on the political asylum it granted to the WikiLeaks editor in 2012 and hand him over to British and then American authorities."
Latest Body Count in Israel's Palestinian Genocide: 1 Dead, 700 Wounded "One Palestinian protestor was killed and at least 700 wounded by the Israeli military on the seventh consecutive Friday of demonstrations at the Israeli border fence with Gaza. "See also: "The Gaza border protests...should also be appreciated in (the) context (of) Palestine's own factionalism and infighting."
Kansas, Oklahoma JesuNazis Pass Theocratic Child-Adoption Restrictions
"State legislatures in both Kansas and Oklahoma passed bills last Thursday (Senate Bill 284 in Kansas and Senate Bill 1140 in Oklahoma) that would allow state-funded child-placing agencies to use religion to justify denying children homes and discriminating against prospective parents. Both bills would allow child-placing agencies to refuse to perform, assist or participate in any child placement in the name of religion. That means agencies that receive state funding could discriminate against prospective adoptive and foster parents because they are a same-sex couple, are interfaith, were previously divorced or are a different faith than the agency. Agencies would be able to ignore the best interest of the child – the bedrock standard for placing children."
Trump/Pence Attorney General Gleefully Escalates His War on Poor People
"Ever since his days as an Alabama prosecutor during the War on Drugs era, Trump's attorney general has been dead set on cracking down on poor people in a return to tough-on-crime law enforcement. There probably has been no better week for the fulfillment of that agenda than this one."
Cheated by Neoliberal Academia, Students Question Higher (Priced) Education
"What's the point of four years of rigorous studying, of amassing student loans, of backbreaking night and weekend jobs, if there are almost zero job prospects out there? And, worse, what is their money going toward if not the kind of quality education they have been promised? With most classes no longer being taught by professors but by graduate students or adjunct teachers, (students) find the US educational system to be a scam...(because) universities today follow profit-maximizing strategies...in labor management, that closely mirror those of private businesses."
Patriarchy = Capitalism = Women and Sex as Commodities = Misogynistic Murder
"...at the bottom of the incel worldview: sex is a commodity, accumulation of this commodity enhances a man's status, and every man has a right to accumulation, but women are in some mysterious way obstacles to this, and they are therefore the enemy as well as the commodity...(incel males) are furious at their own low status, but don't question (how Capitalism) allocates status and commodifies us all in ways that are painful and dehumanizing."
See also: "Basically, incels cannot get laid and they violently loathe anyone who can."
Plus this: "A teenage girl in India has been raped and burned alive by her attacker - the third instance of such an attack in the same week."
Comment: patriarchy -- itself as much an incentive to murder as its economic offspring Capitalism -- expresses itself with the same sadistically deadly misogyny everywhere on our planet. Note again my not-entirely facetious observation that if there were such thing as space aliens, the introduction of patriarchy (via talking snakes, burning bushes and fiery wheels) would obviously be the interstellar equivalent of the smallpox-infected blankets employed by Europeans during the genocidal extermination of First Nations people.
Without Irresistible Mass Movement, Progressive Efforts Are Probably Doomed
"During the Great Depression massive organizing efforts and protest movements were necessary just to reform the two-party system. New Deal history strongly suggests that the current...debate is largely a waste of time until we organize movements powerful enough to upset the existing order."
See also: "Ralph Nader argues the (Democratic [sic] Party) must stop searching for scapegoats and start fighting for a bold and progressive agenda."
And this: "...Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Friday let it be known once again that the Democratic Party risks another round of failure unless it embraces the kind of bold, progressive agenda that can unite the working class and upend the normalization of big-money politics and oligarchic rule that helped usher President Donald Trump into office."
Film Review: the Apocalyptic Horrors of Capitalism
"As part of its special series celebrating the 200thbirthday of Karl Marx between May 18-22, the Anthology Film Archives will be screening Capitalism, a 320-minute, six-part documentary that is both supremely intelligent and briskly entertaining, on May 20th at 3:45. Directed by Ilan Ziv, the founder of Icarus Films, it is like no other film I have ever seen about the horror we face in our daily lives that is much more frightening than slasher movies like Halloween or Friday the Thirteenth. After all, the idea of nuclear holocaust or global warming—just two of the threats we face from an economic system gone mad—are not something a plucky hero or heroine in a John Carpenter movie can stave off."
Last Words I: How Crosscut's Censorship Encourages Public School Illiteracy
A major, profusly illustrated story in Crosscut, an online Seattle daily that formerly seemed genuinely committed to fairness in making editorial space available to Left-leaning reporters and comment-thread contributors, commendably published a student's piece detailing how she and her classmates struggle against public-school downsizing. But -- seemingly in cooperation with the Trump/Pence Regime's ever-expanding, Gestapo-like campaign to forcibly silence any and all dissent in the imperial homeland -- the crowd-funded and therefore theoretically independent publication suppressed the comment in which I criticized its editors' failure to correct the glaring example of modern-day illiteracy that contaminated the story's lead paragraphs:
"...when budget cuts left my (Seattle) school, The Center School, at risk of losing its art department...me and a few friends got together..." (emphasis added)
This was the first time in many years of occasional but often outspokenly Marxian comment-thread contributions the publication has attempted to silence me.
I say "attempted" because the censored text follows, defiantly reprinted exactly as I submitted it:
Why did a Crosscut copy editor fail to correct the glaringly illiterate grammatical error ("...me and a few friends got together...") in Christine Cornell's second graf? Was the editor who overlooked that obvious blunder merely asleep at the proverbial switch, or was there clandestine intent to undermine Ms. Cornell's heartfelt plea that we the people recapture the public schools from the Neoliberal foes of universal education?
Whichever, the sadly revealing magnitude of Ms. Cornell's mistake -- an inability to distinguish between nominative and objective forms of personal pronouns (a failure proper schooling would have remedied no later than fifth grade) -- is itself testimony to the depth of the abyss into which public education has been hurled by Neoliberal austerity policies.
Ms. Cornell is thus revealed -- no doubt to her own mortification -- as a victim of the very policies she protests. Worse, she is victimized in ways she herself has not yet learned to recognize. This is no fault of her own; it is a nationally ruinous failure for which we the people are ourselves most grievously at fault. And it matters not whether we are paralyzed by cowardice, ignorance and indifference or mobilized by Christian fanaticism and prosperity-gospel greed. All of those conditions facilitate and accelerate the methodical destruction of our once-envied system of free public education.
I therefore hope Ms. Cornell will soon realize the staggering cutbacks imposed on U.S. public-school funding are not socioeconomic or political coincidence; they are instead the expression of very specific Capitalist policies maliciously crafted to serve three particularly vicious Ayn Rand objectives. These are: (A)-relieving the Capitalists and their Ruling Class vassals of school taxes (thereby further increasing their already murderously obscene profits); (B)-imposing compulsory school privatization (thereby eliminating free education as a right and permanently reducing it to a weaponized privilege of wealth, precisely the irremediable perversion of purpose that already defines U.S. health care); and (C)-creating a methodically dumbed-down citizenry for whom access to genuinely effective education -- that is, education capable of lifting one out of the ever-expanding miasma of USian poverty, ignorance, alienation and disenfranchisement -- is to become the exclusive possession of no more than 10 percent of the population, i.e., our One Percent overlords and their wholly owned political, professional and managerial subordinates.
Sadly Ms. Cornell seems to have remained oblivious to the fact the elected officials to whom she appeals for redress -- Democratic (sic) and Republican alike -- are the very malefactors who are inflicting the wounds she so rightfully decries. Again this is not her fault; it is rather proof of how the USian propaganda apparatus far exceeds in its intellect-neutralizing effectiveness even the mind-crippling restraints demanded by the late Josef Goebbels.
Eventually though Ms. Cornell will no doubt learn that "American democracy" is amongst the very biggest of the Big Lies with which our species has habitually anesthetized itself. The bitter, statistically proven truth is that U.S. elected officials serve only the demands of their Capitalist masters -- which means they are hellbent on tyrannizing everyone else. Pleading with such moral imbeciles to re-fund public education is ultimately nothing more than wasted time and breath. Even when the Capitalists are frightened into humanitarian reforms, they will always subvert and repeal them as soon as they can.
The terrible truth is that Capitalism cannot ever be reformed. That's because the Capitalists' sole purpose is the maximization and fulfillment of their own greed -- precisely the lesson repeatedly taught us by the notably bipartisan destruction of the New Deal, which at its height made life in this country -- especially for white people -- indescribably less wretched than it is today.
Thus in these times because of the near-total authority by which the Capitalists and their vassals command the economic and political systems, an advocate's time is better spent organizing economy-crippling strikes and massive protests in the streets. Yes, our overlords in their frenzied tantrums of frustrated greed will then undoubtedly unleash their militarized police to respond with the same maximum murderousness they already routinely employ against non-white minorities. But once that happens -- as it did for example at Kent State University and Jackson State College in 1970 -- our overlords will have (again) revealed the ultimate, no-holds-barred evil of their bottomless avarice and its mandate for self-protective brutality.
And perhaps, with the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin now achieving what may well be an all-time U.S. popularity amongst younger readers, the deadly lessons of Kent and Jackson will not be so fearfully and hastily discarded. At least Ms. Cornell and her fellow victims may come to recognize what is being done to them and why it is being done. Its purpose is to hasten Capitalism's (inevitable) metamorphosis into a uniquely modern form of fascism, in reality -- for all of us save its plutocratic beneficiaries -- a death-dealing combination of credit-card serfdom, for-profit prison slavery, police-state terrorism, potentially apocalyptic warmongering and inevitably apocalyptic, definitively misogynistic hatred and contempt for our Mother Earth.
That said, and despite being educationally deprived, Ms. Cornell demonstrates commendable courage, passion and skill at advocacy. But if she is to further empower her ability to speak for herself and her peers, she should take a remedial course in English grammar (which in any case she will most assuredly need for college-level work).
Far more usefully -- because the education curtailments she fights are manifestations of class war (i.e.. the Rich "trickling down" on all the rest of us) -- she should familiarize herself with Marxism, starting of course with The Communist Manifesto and its bold, eternally correct assertion that all of us who are not part of the One Percent and its vassalage "have nothing to lose but (our) chains."
Ms. Cornell might even find an inspiring role-model or two in the uniquely pivotal role of women in the Russian revolutions of 1917 and again in the unprecedented courageousness of the Soviet victory over Nazism c.1941-1945.
In any case I wish the very best to Christine Cornell, to her colleagues and to the cause they represent -- a cause we the people must again make our own if we are ever to experience the powerful collective and individual rewards of the liberties pledged us by our now-nearly nullified Bill of Rights.
Last Words II: Museum Finalizes Plans to Honor Native American Veterans
"...the memorial would be dedicated to the spirit, bravery and sacrifice of Native American soldiers across United States history, and would serve as a place of solace and communion for Native American veterans and their loved ones. Now, the submission period has closed, and (the National Museum of the American Indian) has winnowed the pool of designs down to five possibilities." With thanks to TigerLille1 for sending me the link to one of this weekend's very few positive stories.
LB/12 May 2018.
Posted at 10:54 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Censorship, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Film, Healthcare, History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Poor People, Religion, Science, Visual art, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
14-21 February 2018: Darkness of Dystopia, Flares of Defiance
'Hate Speech' Posters Spearhead JesuNazi Offensive in Tacoma Area
One of the JesuNazi posters pasted on walls and utility poles in Tacoma. (Photograph by KD © 2018.)
By Ryley Knowles
THE WHITE NATIONALIST GROUP Patriot Front has slapped up recruiting posters at seven locations in Tacoma, Washington. Photographs of the posters -- see example above -- were published on 18 February in Washington Front, Patriot Front's Twitter for their Washington-state activities.
Patriot Front is a white supremacist group that, according to its website and manifesto, believes America belongs exclusively to its white European settlers. The group is based in Texas and led by 19-year-old Thomas Ryan Rousseau.
Spawned by the neo-Nazi organization Vanguard America, Patriot Front was formed in the wake of the 'Unite The Right' rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on 11 and 12 August 2017.
James Fields Jr, who is accused of driving his car into a group of anti-fascist protesters at the rally and murdering Heather Heyer, was photographed marching only a few feet from Thomas Ryan Rousseau earlier that day. Rousseau claims Fields was not a Patriot Front member and had merely asked to march with them.
Patriot Front has plastered its propaganda in Washington state three times this year. The first two incidents were in Gig Harbor, a coastal town about one mile from Tacoma. Each poster asks, "Will your speech be hate speech?" -- with the phrase 'hate speech' partially erased. One was pasted on a utility shed near the Tacoma Dome. The others are on utility poles in or around the downtown Tacoma area.
The posters feature Patriot Front's iconography, a stylized fasces similar to that used by Italian fascists under Mussolini. It is surrounded by thirteen stars and promotes their website, bloodandsoil.com. "Blood and soil" is a German Nazi slogan, popularized by Adolph Hitler, that sums up the goals of a white ethnostate: an aggressively militarized nation with a racially exclusive population.
(Dispatches welcomes Ryley Knowles, a freelance journalist who lives in the Pacific Northwest, to our expanding roster of contributors.)
(Editor's Note: when italicized and enclosed by quotation marks, the following texts are indicative passages taken directly from their hyperlinked URLs. Each passage is limited to less than 200 words in compliance with present U.S. copyright law.)
More on the JesuNazi Onslaught in the Pacific Northwest and Elsewhere
"...the Atomwaffen Division, a tiny paramilitary neo-Nazi group that has been linked to the suspects in at least five killings in the United States. It is among the most violent groups on the far-right...Researchers believe that some cells are based in Texas and Florida, (with)...others in Washington, near the Seattle area, and Richmond, Va. But details about the group are difficult to confirm." Comment: the unfettered existence of armed and openly murderous groups such as Atomwaffen -- too often protected by the U.S. authorities at all levels -- is precisely why all genuine Leftists should regard any weakening of the Second Amendment as a matter of life and death and therefore oppose "gun control" as a euphemism for forcible disarmament of the proletariat. Regardless of our particular ideologies -- Marxist, democratic socialist, anarchist, even reformist -- we are all equally in jeopardy of the JesuNazis adding our names to their kill lists. In which context note the lessons taught us by the Deacons for Defense.
"Federal prosecutors and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in Washington, DC, colluded with far-right groups in cases against anti-Trump protesters, a recently filed lawsuit alleges. Filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) last week, the lawsuit against DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and Karl Racine in the US Attorney's office seeks information about the relationship between the prosecutors and police and right-wing political groups.'The police here are really serving the political goals of these far-right organisations,' Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director and constitutional rights lawyer at PCJF, told Al Jazeera. 'We are seeing a pattern of this taking place around the country,' she said. 'While there have always been members of police departments who have acted out in abusive and racist behaviour against the civilian population, we're now seeing it at an institutional level.'"
"(To build a) philosophical fascist system that was more appealing to Baby Boomers raised on New Left and post-colonial rhetoric...far-right philosophers...decided to reframe fascist values and ideas in the language of popular national liberation struggles...Organizations like Identity Evropa have already been doing this for almost two years, focusing primarily on college-age men...Operation Homeland will expand that pool, becoming another organization that will work as an independent organization and movement." Comment: the USian culture of "manufactured illiteracy" and violent anti-intellectuality has already guaranteed the fascists' success. The question now is how to resist a toxic infestation that's spreading like deadly nightshade in an abandoned garden.
"While men debated in legislative chambers and listened to challenges on the bench, women headed to school cafeterias, playgrounds and PTA meetings, doing the bulk of the behind-the-scenes work of supporting the politics of segregation. White women organized precinct gatherings to pressure their politicians to uphold Jim Crow laws. They transformed their homes into centers of bureaucratic efficiency — copying fliers, assigning neighborhoods for petition drives and scheduling protest shifts at elementary schools and bus garages. It was also women who shaped the way segregation, white supremacy and ideas about racial identity were knitted into the fabric of their communities." Comment: White women are nearly as hatefully racist as white males. For example, note that 53 percent of white women -- including 45 percent of white women with college degrees -- voted the JesuNazi Trump/Pence Regime into the White House.
"Trump is worse than almost anyone imagined, and while his critics across the ideological spectrum have begun to go after him, they rarely focus on how dangerous he is, hesitant to argue that he is not only the enemy of democracy, but symptomatic of the powerful political, economic and cultural forces shaping the new US fascism."
On the Absolute Necessity of Revolutionary Leadership by Oppressed Minorities
"...the Combahee River Collective Statement...made a case for understanding how racism, sexism, class oppression, and homophobia are all connected:...'If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression'...when it comes to electoral politics, even 'progressive' leaders too often leave out those whose lives fall at the intersections of discrimination, such as poor black women or undocumented LGBTQ youth. Under the Trump administration, these groups are meanwhile overtly targeted...White-dominated, ostensibly "progressive" feminism...continues to miss the mark on respecting and centering those women who arguably have the most to lose, such as women of color, transgender women and trans women of color in particular...We can see this disregard...in their voting patterns today, from the 57% of white women who voted for Trump...to the 63% of white women in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election who voted for Roy Moore..." Comment: how many times must it be said we cannot make a successful revolution unless we follow the leadership of those who are the most oppressed and therefore have the most to gain by throwing off the shackles of patriarchy, racism and sexism implicit in Capitalism?
"Amid the #MeToo movement across the country, the formation of the Silence Breakers, first reported by Crosscut, and their public appearances this week have brought home the reckoning with how women are treated inside the City of Seattle. But the group's discussions have also gone beyond sexual harassment, folding in concerns about intimidation, toxicity and racial discrimination in the workplace." Comment: once again the Big Lie of "progressive Seattle" is laid bare by its victims of class warfare, misogyny and racism.
"I'm too weary from watching well-meaning souls on TV who talk earnestly about gun control without admitting what we all know in some dank corner of our souls: the prime source of mass murder in this world, whether it's in the tree-lined small towns of America or the hamlets of Viet Nam or the drone-blasted deserts of Yemen, is racism. Racism armed with napalm, racism kitted out with bump-stocks and huge magazines, racism poisoning the waters of Flint—the pathogens float easily around the country and the globe, like windblown dandelion puffs. It's the only disease that is terminal for other people, not one's-self."
...we live in a racist country that hasn't figured it out yet. And it's always important to bring attention to it, even if it angers some people." Comment: hear, hear!
Trump/Pence Genocide Scheme Now Criminalizes Humanitarianism
"Based on data, No More Deaths reports that water jugs were destroyed more than twice a week on average. In other words, border patrol are condemning people to death and punishing those who stand in the way of this homicide...Also in the file of punished good deeds: feeding the homeless. This too has been an ongoing attempt at government sanctioned slow homicide. Between 2013 and 2015 alone, 26 cities passed food-sharing bans..." Comment: The USian Empire's methodology of post-deathcamp genocide goes far beyond deliberately murderous cuts in socioeconomic stipends and services and includes making humanitarianism itself a crime, especially when the humanitarianism's intended beneficiaries are targeted minorities.
"The (Trump/Pence Regime's) changes at the Department of Health and Human Services represent 'rapid destruction of so much of the progress on LGBT health,' said Kellan Baker, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who worked with HHS on LGBT issues for nearly a decade. It's only a matter of time before all the gains made under the Obama administration are reversed...Christian conservatives are noticing, and specifically praising, the reversals..." Comment: JesuNazi theocracy marches on.
"Lambda Legal filed a federal lawsuit against Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). The suit was filed on behalf of a same-sex couple who says they were denied the opportunity to serve as foster parents for refugee youth because, according to the lawsuit, they don't 'mirror the Holy Family'...Lambda's lawsuit claims that HHS—a federal agency currently run by Republican donor and pharmaceutical exec Alex Azar—is violating the Constitution by allowing USCCB to impose a religious test on applicants."
"Bad Bureaucracies Are Fraying the Social Safety Net." The headline tells the story. Comment: the author carefully omits any acknowledgement of the bad bureaucrats who deliberately design the bad bureaucracies to function as weapons of oppression. These include the real "Welfare Queens" -- the regally powerful, mostly white female welfare executives whose primary function is to justify -- often by the dictates of white bourgeois feminism -- the imposition of elaborate schemes for denial of stipends and services. Equally culpable are the legions of caseworkers who for various ideological reasons, typically religious fanaticism and/or reactionary politics, consider themselves gatekeepers rather than aid-facilitators.
"...20 percent of US children live in families with incomes below 50 percent of the national median income. In the Nordic countries, the same number is 3.6 percent to 6.7 percent depending on the country...But that's not the only peculiar thing about America's income distribution for children...While the Nordic distribution looks like a bell curve with the overwhelming majority of kids clustered near the middle, the American distribution is a pyramid." Comment: The pyramid in question, with our overlords and their Ruling Class executives, professionals, bureaucrats, generals and politicians at the top and everyone else beneath their boot-heels at the bottom, is the classic portrait of Capitalist tyranny. It is also a classic portrait of "trickle-down" economics, with the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals congratulating themselves and smirking with malicious glee as they piss on all the rest of us and wantonly befoul our Motherland the Earth.
"'Shame': 12 Democrats Join With House GOP to Attack Americans With Disabilities Act." The headline tells the story. Comment: none of the 12 were from Washington state.
"A concrete analysis of the explosive contradictions of contemporary capitalist globalization demonstrates that...the paternalistic 'pro-immigrant' discourse of corporate liberals and the multicultural elite (does not challenge) the structures allowing for the exploitation and oppression of immigrants and migrant workers."
"Interviews with scores of state officials, legal-services advocates and labor specialists indicate that the failure to enforce minimum wages touches every corner of the country, but is especially acute in the six states that have no investigators probing wage violations at all."
"The Washington Post has long had a hostile attitude toward unions, which it expresses in both its opinion and news sections."
"Instead of urgent relief and uplift, most people in Obama's America were confronted with stagnating or worsening conditions at work, growing debts and a rising cost of living, alongside ongoing injustices such as police brutality and mass deportations. The groundswell of hope and optimism gave way to painful disillusionment and demoralization, which paved the way for the Trump disaster. But the road to Trump was long and winding, extending back over the reigns of two Bushes, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter--through a 40-year ruling class offensive to constrict the conditions of working class existence, which came to be known by the name of 'neoliberalism.'" Comment: a broader perspective on how and why the Trump/Pence Regime is fulfilling the inevitable transformation of U.S. Capitalism into JesuNazism, a metamorphosis that began with the Bankers' Plot of 1933-34.
"...on Thursday, the (Federal Communications Commission) will finally publish its rule to revoke network neutrality protections...the repeal will be published on the Federal Register, the official ledger of federal agency rules. It will become the rule of the land 60 days after publication, upon which time internet service providers will be able to block or throttle access to websites or charge websites a fee to reach users at faster speeds." Comment: the result will be economic and technological censorship that is intentionally devastating to minorities. Precisely as demonstrated by the fact polls show 83 percent public support for net neutrality -- this in contrast to the failed and therefore demonstrably delusional efforts to reverse this particularly odious manifestation of the Trump/Pence Regime's malevolently JesuNazi tyranny -- the notion the U.S. is governed by "democratic process" is thus proven to be one of the most devastating Big Lies in Capitalism's arsenal of weaponized deceptions.
Will the Capitalists Victimize Us with Another (Profit-Taking) Recession?
"Trump's multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for business, investors and the wealthiest 1 percent, plus his annual trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, plus his phony real estate industry handouts that parade as infrastructure spending together will lead the U.S. economy into recession, most likely in early 2019. Here's the scenario:"
'''Many analysts pointed to a seemingly unusual cause for the (stock market) turbulence: rising wages'...No, it's not an 'unusual' cause at all. When we start doing better—when wages start going up–Wall Streeters shit themselves. This is the norm. They only celebrate when we're fucked, when workers don't have the ability to demand better wages, better treatment, health care, coffee breaks and less handsy bosses. Stock markets around the world panic when the workers are strong."
"The events of the past two weeks, with the largest fall in markets since the crisis of 2008, raising the spectre of an even bigger disaster than that of a decade ago, have provided a damning exposure of (Capitalism's) entire ideological framework...The lie, which forms the basis of all bourgeois economics, that somehow the growth of capitalist economy can, at least in the long run, provide the road to advancement for the mass of humanity, the working class, the producers of all wealth, has been exposed. It has been laid bare by the fact that signs of economic growth and a growing movement of workers against the decline in living standards have raised the prospect of a new financial disaster, even more serious than that of a decade ago."
The Empire Revises Its Big Lies of War Mongering to Target Russia
"The indictments (of 13 Russian nationals) are primarily aimed at providing The New York Times, Washington Post, and major broadcast media outlets with fodder for their claim of massive Russian involvement in US politics...The campaign has been used to justify a regime of Internet censorship and condition the population for war against Russia...The American population does not need Vladimir Putin to undermine 'public confidence in democracy.' After all, as Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights said after a visit to the United States last year, 'There is no other developed country where so many voters are disenfranchised … and where ordinary voters ultimately have so little impact on political outcomes.'" Update: more details of the fraud, including how it duplicates the Big Lie that justified the neo-colonial conquest of Iraq, are here.
Relevant Miscellany: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly and Sometimes the Inspiring
"Anti-choice protest tactics are on trial in New York amid a marked uptick in violence against abortion providers and clinics."
"Oxfam, a confederation of charitable organizations focused on alleviating global poverty, is reeling under reports that staff members in several parts of the world engaged in sexual misconduct, including using underage prostitutes. Allegations of a cover-up (have) worsened the situation." Comment: patriarchy in action, whether Abrahamic or otherwise, in which context remember that the artificial hierarchy imposed by male supremacy is the ideological grandfather of Capitalism.
"Khudoberdi Nurmatov, a journalist and LGBT activist who was detained by Russian authorities last year for violating migration laws, was granted (Russian) court permission to go to Germany after he faced deportation back to his native Uzbekistan...He originally migrated to Russia in order to escape imprisonment and persecution." Comment: Whether in the name of Uzbeki Islam or Russian Orthodoxy, Nurmatov is a victim of Abrahamic religion and its defining hatreds of women, LGBTQ people and non-believers. Kudos to modern-day Germany for giving him sanctuary.
"Thomas, as a crucial vote on the Supreme Court, holds incredible power over women's rights, workplace, reproductive, and otherwise. His worldview, with its consistent objectification of women, is the one that's shaping the contours of what's possible for women in America today, more than that of just about any man alive, save for his fellow justices. And given the evidence that's come out in the years since, it's also time to raise the possibility of impeachment...because of the lies he told, repeatedly and under oath, saying he had never talked to Hill about porn or to other women who worked with him about risqué subject matter." Comment: the impeachment of Justice Thomas could help save us from JesuNazism, especially in a post-Trump/Pence environment.
History Lesson: Colonial Massachusetts Was Ruled by a Christian Taliban
"There were many subgroups that certainly didn't enjoy life in early Colonial Massachusetts: religious dissidents, agnostics, free thinkers and, well, assertive women. We've all heard of the infamous Salem Witch Trials, but nearly four decades earlier the widow Ann Hibbins* was executed, hung for witchcraft, after having the audacity to complain that hired carpenters had overcharged her for a remodeling job on her house...All told, 344 citizens were accused of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts...Here there was a direct connection between the Puritan religion and the cruelty seen in the Pequot War and King Philip's War. In the Pequot War, Massachusetts militiamen attacked a native fort at Mystic, Connecticut, and through fire and fury burned alive 400 to 700 Indians, mostly women and children. The survivors were sold as slaves...From the 'City on a Hill' it is but a short journey to Manifest Destiny and the conquest of a continent..." Comment: and it's an equally short journey from the white supremacist rationale for continental conquest to the "master race" concept of "American Exceptionalism" that fuels the Empire's apocalyptic schemes of JesuNazi world conquest today. Once again, welcome to the Fourth Reich.
*The text erroneously misspells the victim's name as "Higgins," obviously -- given the proximity of 'b' and 'g' on the standard keyboard, a typographical error. Hence my correction.
More History, This Time as Archaeology
"Archeological finds show that Slavs have been living in Crimea for five millennia."
A Challenge, Especially for Believers in the Big Lie of "Democratic Process"
Which of these two movements will achieve approved of its demands, and which will fail abysmally? The renewed push for so-called "gun control" (actually the newest manifestation of the fearful, 20th Century effort by the Capitalist Ruling Class to impose forcible civilian disarmament on a proletariat increasingly inclined toward socialist revolution)? Or the growing demand for "Improved Medicare for All" (actually the newest manifestation of a 70-year, life-and-death struggle between those of us who favor healthcare as a human right versus the deliberately genocidal Ruling Class policy of retaining healthcare as a privilege of wealth)? While present-day support for each movement is difficult to track -- polls show variations in wording of the relevant questions produce different, sometimes widely varying results -- available results (see here and here) suggest each movement is favored by approximately 60 percent of the electorate. But which -- if either -- movement will win? My guess is the advocates of forcible disarmament will win at least moderate victories, especially in the imposition of regulations that will further restrict firearms ownership amongst the regime's targeted minorities, while the advocates of healthcare as a human right will suffer yet another total defeat. Such is U.S. Capitalism as it metamorphoses into JesuNazism.
LB/21 February 2018
Posted at 12:47 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Visual art, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (1)
Dystopia Dominates, but There's Some Good News Too
Imperial Warmongering Continues; Cubans Thrive as Puerto Ricans Suffer
"The Trump administration's new National Defense Strategy is being touted as a sea change in U.S. foreign policy, a shift from the 'war on terrorism' to 'great power competition,' a line that would not be out of place in the years leading up to World War I...The problem with designating 'great powers' as your adversaries is that they might just take your word for it and respond accordingly."
"How absurd — remove an elected president with a military coup to restore democracy? Does that pass the straight face test? This refrain of Rubio and Tillerson seems to be the nonsensical public position of US policy. The US has been seeking regime change in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998. Trump joined Presidents Obama and Bush before him in continuing efforts to change the government and put in place a US-friendly oligarch government."
"The arrival of 415 members of the U.S. Air Force in Panama has been described by social organizations and media outlets as a 'silent invasion'...a strategic move to carry out military action in Venezuela."
"...the Bush administration went to war with Afghanistan on October 7, 2001...Lacking a stated reason to be in Afghanistan, the US stayed. And the US is still there. And the US is complicit in the deaths of a million or more Afghans, and complicit in the forced exodus of more than five million Afghans, and complicit in the devastation of Afghanistan culturally, politically, militarily, and economically. Only US delusions survive more or less intact."
"Ignoring Calls for Peace Effort, Pence Refused to Engage With North Koreans at Olympic Games": the headline tells the whole story as USian warmongering continues. Why? Because war is the Empire's most dependably profitable export.
"Cuba was hit by Hurricane Irma, a category 5 hurricane, on September 8, 2017. Two weeks weeks later, on September 20th, Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, a category 4 hurricane. In Cuba, the electricity was restored to the entire island within a few weeks. In Puerto Rico, over four months after Maria nearly 40 percent of the island is still without power. The scandal-plagued response to the hurricane on the part of the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments exposes the operation of disaster capitalism at its worst."
More Genocide and Oppression; Workers Unionize; Antifa Mobilizes
"The White House...calls for $1.7 trillion in cuts to crucial safety net programs over the next decade -- including $237 billion in cuts to Medicare alone." Comment: cuts of this magnitude -- also a $300+ billion cut to Medicaid; a $213 billion cut to food stamps; a $21 billion cut to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF); and a $72 billion cut to disability programs -- are intended to facilitate mass murder without the controversy associated with death camps, which have become unfashionable. Yet few dare call it genocide.
"Life expectancy in the US has fallen for the second year in a row...educational performance weakened, social divides (including income inequality) widened, middle class incomes stagnated, and poverty rates exceeded those of most rich countries..." Comment: again, few dare say it, but the declining life expectancy is obviously post-deathcamp genocide in action.
"If the Democrats were alarmed by Trump's obscene tax cuts, they and all their 2018 congressional candidates would be campaigning on a (sincere) promise to repeal them, not just a few parts of them. (They're longtime champions of corporate tax cuts, so they won't want to disturb them much if at all.) They would also be promising to repeal the obscene Bush tax cuts that Barack Obama and his Democratic congressional majority extended in 2010."
"Trump is only a symptom of the economic, political and ideological rot at the heart of casino capitalism, with its growing authoritarianism and social and political injustices that have been festering in the United States with great intensity since the late 1970s. It was at that point in US history when both political parties decided that matters of community, the public good, the general welfare and democracy itself were a threat to the fundamental beliefs of the financial elite and the institutions driving casino capitalism...(and thereby imposed) a climate of terror and repression that is the essence of fascism."
"The system would remain in place even if the Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as if foreshadowed in the timidity of the current Democratic proposals for reform."
Hilton Stamford workers defeated the company's vicious anti-union campaign by voting 110 to 5 for the union. "Beyond the life-changing victory for the workers and their families, the Stamford hotel workers used an organizing formula different from anything most unions use today, ferociously overcoming the challenges most unions face." Comment: Bypassing union bureaucracies and returning to the worker-to-worker organizing model of the 1930s, the Hilton Stamford workers achieved the allegedly impossible -- thereby providing a vital lesson for the entire 99 Percent.
"The centrality of self-defense can never be forgotten when we discuss 'aggressive' responses to fascism. Fascism is inherently aggression, inherently violence, inherently death."
"The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called 'alt-right'...the movement as it's known today can largely be traced back to 2012 and 2013 when two major events occurred: the killing of the black teenager Trayvon Martin and the so-called Gamergate controversy where female game developers and journalists were systematically threatened with rape and death."
"Staffers at Seattle's most prominent National Public Radio affiliate are getting a union. In a card check this week, KUOW reporters, producers, and other staffers overwhelmingly elected to join SAG-AFTRA, a union representing radio and TV journalists across the country...At the heart of their fight: making sure KUOW staff can afford to live in the increasingly expensive city they cover."
"Washington, DC, police and federal prosecutors have been collaborating with notorious right-wing groups known for fascist statements and using doctored videos to ambush their targets in an attempt to convict and jail protesters from President Trump's inauguration...There is a long history of police working with right-wing groups to subvert the organizing and speech rights of social justice groups.
"A statewide meeting of the American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV) and the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) in Flatwoods on Sunday announced that county-by-county balloting showed overwhelming support throughout the state for a teachers' strike...West Virginia teachers, (are) now paid 48th lowest out of 50 states in the United States..."
Burlington, Vermont community members mustered with one day's notice on February 10 to break up a hatefest by the white supremacist group known as Patriot Front.
"A new anti-fascist website tracks the location and activities of people affiliated with Daily Stormer, one of the largest neo-Nazi websites in the United States. Launched on January 28, FashMaps is an activist-run initiative that seeks to inform local communities about the presence and gatherings of neo-Nazis in their area."
"When West Virginia House of Delegates candidate Lissa Lucas decided to take a stand against Big Oil's pernicious political influence last week by rattling off the names of state lawmakers receiving massive campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, she was swiftly and forcefully silenced...forcibly removed from the hearing by security."
"Five people were arrested at a College Republicans rally on the University of Washington campus Saturday that attracted a large crowd of protesters..The UW student Republicans invited conservative group Patriot Prayer to speak at their 'Freedom Rally' in Red Square...They were joined by several members of the Proud Boys, a group that has been referred to as alt-right, as well as Patriot Prayer supporters and conservative students. Some of those attending the rally wore red caps with President Donald Trump's slogan 'Make America Great Again' on them." Comment: bad reporting -- or more likely censorship -- mostly concealed the political affiliations of those who were arrested. But perusal of a half-dozen news reports indicated the only people taken into custody were anti-fascists. Which is precisely what one would anticipate, given the clandestine cop-JesuNazi alliance).
"The White House...released a disappointing package of...transportation budget cuts, including once again advancing plans to gut Amtrak's long-distance services by cutting $757 million from the annual Amtrak grant."
The headline tells the story: "Theater Died So Athletics Could Live at Washington State University." Comment: another example of how Capitalist academia collaborates in the making of Moron Nation.
"In 35 states, it's legal for cops to detain and have sex with someone in their custody. Is your state one of them?" (See map: Washington state is not.)
Why Jackson, Mississippi May Not Be as Progressive as Claimed
Alternet tells us "Cooperation Jackson is one of the most important stories for those of us struggling for social justice, for human emancipation and self-determination, and for a solidarity economics as a base for working class political struggle and the fight against the systematic economic strangulation." But Black Agenda Report reveals that Jackson's mostly Black police force is nearly as murderous as its white racist forerunners: "In the last few months Jackson's supposedly radical mayor has lifted residency requirements for city police officers, and remained silent on a wave of officer involved shootings." Comment: while the Alternet piece is typical of what one might expect from a white/reformist website, the BAR essay includes a thought-provoking and therefore vital analysis of the causes of crime and the relation of USian cops to the imperial homeland's many oppressed peoples.
Acts of Love: from a Mother, for Creatures of Our Motherland the Earth
"Romy McCloskey's late mother said butterflies were a sign she would always be with her. Decades later, those words inspired McCloskey to perform a remarkable act": successfully repairing the broken wing of a Monarch butterfly. Note: perhaps eerily, some Celtic myth regards butterflies as the souls of the dead.
Telling Our Stories: Some Notes on Effective AgitProp Techniques
THE WEBSITE POPULAR RESISTANCE, one of our better sources of real news (and therefore relentlessly censored by the Google Gestapo), ran a piece on 12 February entitled "Understanding How Media Protects the Status Quo." It cited several examples of deliberately distorted reporting, particularly in picture captions, but failed to focus as closely as it might have on a few simple but demonstrably effective tactics to prevent or at least minimize such distortions. Hence I posted the following response, here slightly edited and somewhat enlarged for clarity:
(Note: readers will need to open the link to the original article, as my remarks refer to photographs therein.)
Speaking as an elderly media professional (55-plus years behind typewriter, keyboard and camera, a dozen significant editorial awards and commendations, picture credits including Paris Match and Newsweek) -- the points about clear messaging on protest banners and picket signs cannot be stressed too emphatically, particularly in a realm wherein the anti-intellectual, anti-historical, anti-political agenda of Capitalism and corporate-run schools has made near-illiteracy a tragic proletarian norm.
Every protest group should therefore include an editorial collective. Its primary purpose would be to make sure the protest's message is expressed with maxim impact -- without any misspelled or misused words -- and when necessary to provide individuals to serve as press contacts, thereby avoiding inflammatory remarks by agent provocateurs and misrepresentation by dunderheads. The collective would also document the demonstration itself, preferably with both video and still photography, thereby providing a record of events that could prove decisive in combating hostile propaganda.
Rule of thumb, banners and picket signs should be so succinct that when they are photographed, no explanatory caption is needed. In this context, note the second picture from the top in the "Status Quo" article: the "No 2 SROS" picket signs are utterly incomprehensible to anyone not intimately familiar with the protest, and perfectly exemplify the sorts of slogans that should be avoided at all costs.
This of course also requires photographers who can recognize and capture telling images, a task at which the photographers of the first three images in this report not only failed, but failed abysmally. Had those images been brought to me when I was a city editor and/or a news and picture editor, I'd have dropped them in the garbage and rebuked their makers for wasting my time and their film.
Turning again to the second ("No 2 SROS") photo, the photographer's ultimate error was failing to focus on the large yellow banner in the picture's lower left corner, the message on which, "Get Cops Out Of Schools," could have told the whole story in one memorable image.
Rule of thumb, photographers should always strive to include the reportorial five Ws -- who, what, when, where, why (and sometimes how) -- in their images. I know this is not always possible, but I also know embracing it as a conscious purpose always leads to better pictures.
By contrast, the bottom two pictures in this report are at least adequate. The next to the last picture is actually quite good, though better framing would have made it more immediately obvious the protest was aimed at the bank. The last image is excellent protest portraiture but needs an explanatory caption to put it in context. Again, more thoughtful framing might have helped.
That said, the overall quality of USian photojournalism today is disgraceful. This is no doubt in large measure because corporate-censored academia, aware that real photojournalism is always at least implicitly anti-Capitalist, is suppressing the work of our greatest photojournalists -- e.g., Gene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Jacob Riis, et al. But if you're not exposed to the masters and their masterworks -- and I who taught photography in two colleges am astounded by the number of younger photographers who tell me they have been denied such access -- you'll never be able to achieve the requisite mastery yourself. And that inability -- not the photographer's fault but the result of an especially insidious form of censorship -- is precisely what serves our JesuNazi overlords.
The other factor in the present-day dearth of USian photo quality is the extent to which dependence on technology has replaced visual mindfulness. Just as fully automatic firearms discourage careful aiming, so do fully automatic cameras discourage mindful image selection and careful composition.
Lastly, as a veteran of the alternative press of the late 1960s and early-to-middle 1970s, I cannot but bristle at the name "Unicorn Riot." It is the most damning example of self-discrediting I have yet encountered. It says -- indeed it shrieks -- "don't take us seriously." But given the organization's overt connections to the anarchist movement (which serves the Ruling Class both as the Empire's most effective agent provocateurs and by reinforcing Capitalism's vicious anti-intellectualism), given too the organization's less obvious connections to the Democratic (sic) Party and its pseudo-Left mechanism of reinforcing Capitalism by co-optation and betrayal, perhaps the self-discrediting function of its name is part of Unicorn Riot's mission.
LB (with contributions from TigerLille1)/15 February 2018
Posted at 11:02 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Film, History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Visual art, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Dispatches Lives! Here by Permission Is the Full Text of Black Agenda Report's Thought Provoking Essay on Intersectionality
FIRST, MY DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO the tech support women at Typepad, my blog server, for showing me how to bypass my dead word processing system and assemble, edit and write Dispatches directly on my website at dispatchesfromdystopia.net. Without such expert help -- especially that most recently provided by Anna D. -- I would remain but a lost child in the alien, glitch-haunted forests of Pancomputerdemonium. (The Nurdly consensus is I was not hacked; instead, attempting to run Open Office 4.1.1 in Windows 10, I was yet another of the innumerable victims in Microfuck's ongoing war against open-source software.) Hence this special, catch-up edition of Dispatches, including much of what was to have been 8 February's post but was lost in the WP demise.
NOW LET'S GET TO WORK. As friends, Communist Labor Party comrades and even some kinfolk will attest, I have argued for many years we USian whites will never overthrow Capitalism until we not only join in heartfelt solidarity with our minority sisters and brothers but fully accept minority leadership and thereby take to heart the pivotal lessons, strategic and tactical, these seasoned veterans of extended class-struggle are uniquely qualified to teach us all.
Nor is my stance unique. In the personal sense it was shaped by my late father -- ironically a skilled teacher despite the psychological brutality and sadism that made him an abysmally unfit parent -- who fervently believed the 20th Century Civil Rights Movement would, in his words, "force the United States to at long last live up to its democratic potential." (A few years later, I would for a time hold the same view of the Women's Liberation Movement, believing its original Marxism could save us from Capitalism's march toward fascism.) But my pivotal moment in this thinking was shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Canadian media laid bare a purported Committee for State Security (KGB) estimate of U.S. revolutionary potential in the late 1960s. It concluded that amongst most USian whites, the vast majority of whom were from comfortable bourgeois or petite bourgeois backgrounds, revolution was no more than a passing fad, while within the viciously oppressed African-American, Hispanic and First Nations communities, as well as within a tiny segment of the white Working Class, revolution was correctly viewed as a matter of survival. Hence while the KGB analysts evaluated the revolutionary potential of the Caucasian community as near absolute zero, it rated the revolutionary potential of the minority communities as quite high, though it simultaneously concluded these communities were of themselves too small to qualify for clandestine Soviet assistance.
(Note I write of this KGB analysis from memory; the reportage in question, which appeared in print c. 1992-1993, as I recall in Maclean's Magazine, has either never been referenced on the Internet or has been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole, though I suspect it could yet be confirmed by any researcher who had access to a major Canadian library.)
In any case, the implicit conclusion is obvious: either we whites learn to listen to our Black, Hispanic and First Nations sisters and brothers, or we remain slaves forever. After all, is not listening the first step toward building solidarity? Thus the following, the best (i.e., most thought-provoking) essay on intersectionality I have yet read, reprinted in full with permission from its author, Black Agenda Report Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon, to whom my most sincere thanks.
Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism, Part 2
By Bruce A. Dixon
WHEN I TOOK A swipe at intersectionality last week, declaring that it was a hole, that afro-pessimism was a shovel and it was high time to stop digging, some friends and comrades were displeased. As far as they were concerned, questioning intersectionality amounted to a frontal attack on the place of women in the struggle against capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire, utterly inconsistent with my own politics and that of Black Agenda Report. I also threw some rocks at afro-pessimism, which I labeled the nappy headed step child of intersectionality, to the disappointment of its defenders, some of them friends and comrades too. Additionally neither group admits to understanding why I lumped them together, so I'm taking this opportunity to clarify both critiques and what joins them.
"The second intersectionality according to Smith, is rooted in post-structuralism which categorically rejects socialism and class analysis..."
Intersectionality is a termed coined by California law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 in her attempt to convince her fellow officers of the court to refine anti-discrimination law by incorporating the recognition of multiple overlapping oppressions into anti-discrimination law. While the term hasn't made much headway the last three decades in the arguments of lawyers or the decisions of judges, it's become a pervasive buzzword with multiple meanings in the realms of politics and the nonprofit industrial complex.
Nowadays, and perhaps from the start, as Sharon Smith explains in an indispensable August 2017 Socialist Worker article titled "A Marxist Case for Intersectionality ," there are two separate, distinct and mutually incompatible intersectionalities. The first, she says is firmly in the camp of the real left, those who oppose and aim to overthrow capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire – not two or three out of four but all four. This tradition, which puts intersectionality in the context of class analysis and class struggle goes back at least to Claudia Jones in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and the Cohambee River Collective in the 1970s, although neither of these ever heard or uttered the word "intersectional." The second intersectionality according to Smith, is rooted in post-structuralism which categorically rejects socialism and class analysis, and downgrades the importance of class struggle at most to something coequal in importance with ageism, ableism and speciesism. With no anchor in class struggle, and emphasizing the oppressed experience of individuals and non-class groups this kind of intersectionalism acts to perpetuate the division of the US left and wannabe left into squabbling constituency groups vying for attention, funding and acknowledgement of whose cause is the most righteous. With neither the means nor the inclination to contend for power, this intersectionalist emphasis on individual experience and deeds has given rise to atrocities like callout culture .
Unfortunately this second version of intersectionality is nearly hegemonic among self defined radicals and even liberals in the academy. Since it's vigorously promoted by sectors of corporate media and the funders of the nonprofit industrial complex , it's likely to remain so for the forseeable future. Worse still, since class conscious and class oriented formations neither dominate or even figure prominently in the US left, the class struggle intersectionalists are seriously handicapped at playing the game they say they want to play. Add to this the fact that some left feminists doggedly insist on using the same name for themselves as the anti-socialist, anti-class struggle intersectionalists who have a far broader reach and bigger microphones, and we have what can only be described as a hot mess.
"...the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric to deceive the unwary..."
Zoologists identify about a hundred species of birds they call brood parasites . A brood parasite lays its egg in the nest of a host species, and it counts on fooling the host mom into hatching, feeding and raising the hostile alien offspring. Evolution has engineered the parasite chick to out-eat, out-compete or simply butcher its nest mates. The parasite chicks often grow bigger than both parents put together while still being fed in the nest. In the context of the real left, the community of those aiming to overthrow capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire – not two or three out of four but all four, the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric and branding to deceive the unwary and ensnare many bright, serious and sincere leftists into defending and promoting its fundamentally hostile project.
Melissa Harris-Perry was lauded as a leading intersectionlist at the same time she aggressively defended the government's right to intercept and record every email, text message, phone call and electronic brain fart on the planet and store them for future inspection. DemocracyNow, which has given more air time to intersectionality than perhaps anybody, refused to cover the lynching and ethnic cleansing of black Libyans during Obama's 2012 war on that unhappy country even though they had a correspondent on the ground. To this day DemocracyNow dependably spouts US propaganda justifying Obama's and Trump's war on Syria. Angela Davis gets credit for being a leading proponent of intersectionality too, even though like hordes of other intersectionalists, she lost her mind over Barack Obama. All these people are examples of intersectionalists, with bigger audiences and far more visibility than left feminists are likely to achieve any time soon. When bona fide left feminists defend the word intersectionality and call themselves intersectional they confuse the lazy, the naive or unwary, they surrender their own credibility to the anti-socialist intersectionalists, and they provide protective cover to the eggs of these brood parasites. It doesn't have to work that way.
In the natural world brood parasites have been around for millions of years, long enough for hosts to evolve defenses against them. Birds defensively mark their eggs and their chicks to distinguish them from hostile parasites. Sometimes they stand watch to sound the alarm at the presence of intruders and strange eggs, and more. These are lessons left feminists might do well to emulate. You defeat a brood parasite not by adopting its name, but by making it easier, not harder to distinguish the parasite from the real thing. Real left feminists will never get as many professorships, grants, media outlets and TED Talks as the anti-socialist intersectionalists. They invented the term anyway, for their own reasons not yours. Get over it. The real left can't get intersectionality back and there was never a time when they had exclusive possession of it anyhow. Claudia Jones and the Cohambee comrades made themselves perfectly well understood without it.
There's no shortage of sharp, erudite left feminists who can if they want, come up with some new terminology that will allow ordinary people to distinguish between the anti-socialist intersectionalist project and authentic left feminism without a six paragraph discourse on postmoderism and post-structuralism. We cannot wait on natural selection to take care of this for us. At the risk of being that cis het guy who offers unsolicited advice to woman comrades, I respectfully suggest this is something that needs to happen real soon.
"Like the dominant version of intersectionality afro-pessimism is pretty explicitly anti-socialist and anti-class struggle..."
I said last week that afro pessimism was a stepchild of intersectionality. Like the dominant version of intersectionality, afro-pessimism is pretty explicitly anti-socialist and anti-class struggle. It's about centering (the woke intersectional word for putting something first and last and ignoring all else) the totality of anti-blackness, the permanent war against black bodies, black aspirations, black lives, black livelihoods and black dreams. Sounds a lot like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Like intersectionality, afro-pessimism is not a theory. Like intersectionality, it only describes and does not explain. Like the prevailing flavor of intersectionality, it enjoys considerable support in the academy and mimics enough "woke" rhetoric to deceive the unwary into imagining afro-pessimism is some new kind of emancipatory project, that it prescribes or informs solutions and strategies to tackle real world stuff, even though its foremost proponent Frank Wilderson says it does not.
The only instance where afro pessimism seems to have anything prescriptive to say about how struggle ought to be conducted in the real world is afro-pessisms's consistent disparagement of the possibility of achieving anything in coalition with anybody who ain't black. It's never worked before, the afro-pessimists say, trotting out a long historical list of times and places white "allies" turned tail and defected from the cause of their black compatriots. But since in just about every instance neither the fickle white allies nor the black formations in question were class-based, class oriented or led by the working class it's hard to see how things could have turned out differently. It's a problem the Green Party, which I'm part of, has to this day. If the state, the media and the so-called economy are contraptions a particular class uses to rule the rest of us, how do you contend for power when you don't have a class analysis, or even recognize the importance of class? Nobody can be a dependable ally, a steady rock on either side of an alliance contending for power without a class analysis and an understanding of how power is exercised.
Clearly, the afro-pessimist injunction against working with non-blacks is a prescription for impotence. People of African descent are 13% of the US population. Slavery didn't end until the political moment when a plurality of white people sided with blacks to end it. Reconstruction folded only when that plurality was shrunken, disarmed and shattered. Jim Crow also ended at the political moment that a plurality of whites took the same side as blacks to kill it. But afro-pessimists, even the ones who talk about reparations, rule coalitions off the table period exclamation point. How they plan to achieve that without cultivating and working with non-black political partners is anybody's guess. But I misspoke-- Afro-pessimists do not plan. They engage, they propose, they put on a show making the point that nobody is or ever was as oppressed as they are, all in the same self-involved spirit of post structuralist intersectionality. Their shtick isn't even unique; there's a queer pessimist discourse that sounds a lot like Frank Wilderson or Ta-Nehisi Coates on whatever drug is the opposite of speed.
Tellingly there was no queer pessimism in the early 1980s, when gay men (and even greater numbers of straight black women) were dying like flies from then untreatable HIV-AIDS. People were too busy fighting for their lives then, just as our own ancestors in the 1950s, the 40s, and prior decades had no time for anything like afro-pessimism when Africans in America could be lynched with impunity and Jim Crow was an everyday reality. Queer pessimism only emerged after drug therapies enabled people to live decades with HIV-AIDS. Similarly afro-pessimism only surfaced after enough black faces got comfy spots in the academy.
A few years ago a young comrade in school somewhere told me his professor was insisting that Europeans colonized Africa and maybe the Americas too not because they wanted land, slaves, gold and empire, but because they feared and/or envied the sexual potency of all those outa control black bodies. After I stopped laughing, I assured my young friend this was errant nonsense and I didn't think about it any more. Now I know this is part of a concept Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson and other afro-pessimist academics call, presumably with straight faces, "libidinal economy ."
Ta Nehisi Coates has fashioned a lucrative and prestigious career out of that stuff, although I doubt he would call himself an afro-pessimist. Nice work if you can get it. I really believe the afro-pessimist shtick is about one-upping Coates. It's working well for him, maybe it will work for them too.
(Bruce A. Dixon can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)georgiagreenparty.org., also via Twitter @brucedixon.)
"(An) intra-Korean deal could open a new path to negotiations between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs and a final settlement of the Korean War—if Donald Trump is willing to take such an off-ramp from the crisis. But it's not just Kim Jong Un who has taken the diplomatic initiative to open such a path out of the crisis. Moon Jae-in has been working to advance such a compromise since he was inaugurated as South Korean president last May." (Significantly, any reportage on the Moon proposal...has thus far been suppressed by the war-mongering U.S. mainstream media propaganda apparatus.)
Another example of U.S. law enforcement helping JesuNazis and other white supremacist groups target anti-fascist activists and anti-Trump/Pence Regime protesters.
Seventy-three Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 36 Democratic Senators joined with Republicans...to pass a two-year spending bill that does nothing to protect immigrant communities and throws undocumented 'Dreamers' under the bus." NOTE: Amongst these Democrats, who by their votes have abandoned all pretense of being anything other than fascists, white-supremacist imperialists (and therefore JesuNazi sympathizers), are Washington state's Senator Patty Murry and Rep. Denny Heck.
"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a notice outlining extraordinary plans by the social media company to monitor all the postings and messages of its users, censor independent journalism, and use artificial intelligence (AI) to report users to the police and intelligence agencies."
"From its earliest establishment in America, capitalism has been guilty of enriching its private fortunes out of the most savage robbery of the Negro people and the most ruthless exploitation of the labor power of Negro working people, both during the era of chattel slavery, and throughout the span of the century since emancipation."
"The most cynically brilliant outcome of the 'blame Russia' campaign has been to neuter left activism by focusing the attack on Donald Trump rather than the interests he represents. As evidence, the proportion of Goldman Sachs alumni in Mr. Trump's administration approximates that in Mr. Obama's and what was expected for Mrs. Clinton's. If the problem is Donald Trump, then the solution is 'not Trump.' However, if the problem is that the rich substantially control American political outcomes, how would electing 'not Trump' bring about resolution?"
"What were more than 7,000 'doughboys' (U.S. soldiers) doing in Siberia at the end of the First World War?"
"The political crisis in South Africa derives from the failure of Zuma and the leadership of the ANC to actually oust white monopoly capital from the commanding heights of the economy, after nearly a quarter century in nominal power. Instead, they have fatted a new class of Black bourgeoisie, most of them ANC-connected, as junior partners with the white monopolists through the government's Black Economic Empowerment policies."
"Elizabeth's New Life Center is part of 'a collaborative effort within the state of Ohio to provide abstinence education to students through in-school programming,' according to the organization's website. It is the regional coordinator for the 'Ohio Adolescent Health Centers' collaborative program and had received four years of funding from the Ohio Department of Health in 2011. A Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion case study on the collaborative notes that it uses 'sexual risk avoidance strategies' and is paid for 'with federal funding provided through the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant (aka Title V).' Comment: JesuNazi theocracy marches on.
Recovered from the hitherto-lost text of 8 February 2018:
"These days, Trump mocks Schumer as "Cryin' Chuck" on Twitter and Schumer paints Trump as an unreasonable negotiator who "won't take yes for an answer." But the two have had a close working relationship over years that belies whatever harsh words they exchange today. One example: Schumer has received more donations from Trump across his career than any other sitting member of Congress."
"A quiet coup d'état has taken place in Connecticut. The legislature has effectively turned over control of the state to Wall Street."
"...white people who are more prejudiced toward black people are also significantly more opposed to welfare."
"In the U.S. the absolute majority of the working masses, deprived of elementary rights to survival, are hovering in the abyss of nightmare."
"Which is more frightening? The destruction of the environment and the climate that sustain human civilization as we have known it? Or the collapse of democracy and the rise of endless war and fascism?"
"(The Trump/Pence Regime) has announced that as of January 31 it will stop distributing food and water to residents of Puerto Rico...Politically, the short shrift Trump has given Puerto Rico in the face of the ruinous intensity of Hurricane Maria only adds to the evidence of his bigotry. This will... help him with the white nationalists he has clasped close to his chest."
"When Puerto Rico's governor Ricardo Rosselló announced last week his plan to privatize the nation's largest electric utility, he justified the move as a remedy to the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe being inflicted upon the population... (the utility) was deliberately run into the ground, starved of resources, and allowed to mire in corruption. Meanwhile American capital, abstaining from investment in the productive forces of Puerto Rico, instead offered indebtedness, fully conscious that this would lead toward default and set the stage for the looting of public property."
"Consumed with a Coke versus Pepsi ideological battle, framed within an uncontested arena of historicized nationalism, most Americans, and the political parties to which they owe allegiance, are magnificently unprepared to grapple with their nation's irrelevance in defending them from the unfolding realities of our geo-historical moment; even less, to comprehend the apparent acts of war being waged by non-human forces – forces with which we must now find an accommodation."
"What Trump and his GOP backers want is ethnic cleansing."
"This new narrative of FBI integrity and neutrality is predicated on the assumption that most of the public has forgotten or is unaware of the notorious history of the FBI and its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was a racist anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer. He shared his obsessive anti-communism and anti-Semitism with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's Gestapo chief, who Hoover corresponded with personally and kept on the FBI's mailing list right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939."
"Tobacco changed the entire dynamic of colonization and control in North America. Finally, there was money to be made. The Englishmen shipped the newest vice eastward and pulled a handsome profit in return. Our beloved forefathers were early drug dealers...soon 'blackness' became inseparably associated with slavery and the lowest of social classes."
"It's unclear exactly how many kids in the U.S. are malnourished, but there's some disturbing evidence: A quarter of toddlers don't receive enough iron, 1 in 5 children are obese, 1 in 6 households with children are food-insecure, and over half of infants participate in the federal Women, Infants, and Children program for supplemental nutrition."
"An outspoken neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier is set to become the Republican nominee for an Illinois congressional seat."
"Nearly one in three disabled undergraduate women experiences sexual violence."
"The Trump administration approved Indiana's request requiring some Medicaid recipients to work to get benefits on Friday, meaning thousands of people in the state could soon be without health insurance...Indiana is the second state whose Medicaid changes have been approved, following Kentucky in January. A handful of other states have also sought federal permission to amend their Medicaid programs, from adding work rules to mandating drug tests." Comment: Obviously, an example of the Capitalist/JesuNazi post-deathcamp methodology of genocide.
"Republican Congressman Invited a Holocaust Denier to Be His Guest at the State of the Union Address." Comment: the headline tells the whole story: like the proverbial birds of a feather, Nazis flock together.
"In 2016, 45 million people did not fill their prescriptions because of cost, half of them are becoming even sicker because they do not have access to medication. Please sign this petition in support of common sense policies to lower drug prices in America and expand access to lower cost medication from pharmacies in other countries." NOTE: I am not so foolish as to believe the Capitalists and their JesuNazi puppets can be swayed by petition, but I nevertheless post this item because the prohibitive cost of prescription drugs is another perfect example of the post-deathcamp methods of genocide employed our overlords.
IN MEMORIAM: a statue of Hungarian-born U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, was unveiled Thursday in Budapest as those attending praised the man known for his advocacy of democracy and human rights around the world.
LB (with help from TigerLille1)/ 8-10 February 2018.
Posted at 10:46 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Current Affairs, Disabled People , History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Visual art, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (1)
Even After a Year of Nightmares Come True, It Seems None Dare Admit the Ultimate Horror of the Trump/Pence Regime: That Its Seizure of Our Species' Most Malevolently Apocalyptic Empire Is Tantamount to Nazi Conquest of the Entire World
FACE IT, PEOPLE: the Empire's global thermonuclear omnipotence and its better-dead-than-Red moral imbecility means that 72 years after the presumably victorious end of World War II, the Nazis have in fact conquered our entire planet.
And until we acknowledge this as-yet unspeakable fact, our efforts to build an effective resistance movement will forever be undone by our craven refusal to confront the admittedly horrific truth of our circumstances.
The pivotal question of our time – by far the most potentially apocalyptic of all human eras – is whether we will remain lost in our present fog of self-deluding euphemisms and/or inescapably trapped by our Big Lies of outright denial and thus in either case paralyzed by the deliberately suppressed, none-dare-say-it-aloud JesuNazi reality of the Trump/Pence Regime and the viciously white-supremacist, fanatically Christian tyranny by which it has already captured 24 of the 50 U.S. state governments.
We should never allow ourselves to be deceived by the fact China, Russia, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and a few other nations continue to courageously defy the USian global Fourth Reich. Here again the awful truth is that all these allegedly independent nations combined possess nothing approaching the thermonuclear might of the United States and its imperial subject-nations in Europe and the Middle East. Nor have Russia, China et al developed effective countermeasures to neutralize the JesuNazi fanaticism we know will prompt the Donald or his successors to nuke Earth to a bug planet were defeat ever to threaten the One Empire Under God.
In which context Hitler's final remarks are especially revealing.
The combination of the death of the Soviet Union and Wall Street's permanent nullification of the People's Republic of China means there is – at least at present – literally no effective antidote to the JesuNazi takeover of the USian empire and its resultant global conquest. It is a process that illustrates perfectly how Capitalism inevitably metamorphoses into fascism. It was begun in 1934 by the never-prosecuted, too-rich-to-jail Bankers' Plot conspirators. It resumed in post-war 1945 when the closet fascists in the federal government and their more outspokenly fascist overlords in Big Business granted sanctuary to legions of German Nazi war criminals. And after 11 years of political murders* set the U.S. on an irreversibly pro-fascist course, the process was finalized by the Democratic (sic) Party's clandestine (but now obvious) efforts to ensure the Trump/Pence victory. The result was the ultimate and probably permanent triumph of JesuNazism, the uniquely Christian, theocratic, white-supremacist form of fascism that now defines the United States and its global empire.
In other words, the Trump/Pence Regime is anything but an anomaly. It is in fact the logical outcome of an 83-year effort by at least three consecutive generations of our One Percent overlords, first their failed effort to make the United States the dominant partner in what became the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, next their overwhelmingly successful effort to make the USian Empire what it is today, the global Fourth Reich.
Which brings me to a point on which there is enormous disagreement within the real (i.e., Marxist) Left: whether the support of a foreign power is one of the essential prerequisites of successful revolution. Arguing from the evidence provided by history, I maintain there are four such prerequisites: ideological solidarity and discipline; charismatic leadership; technological mastery; and foreign support (as by Bourbon France in the U.S. Revolution; as by the German Empire in the Russian Revolutions of 1917; as by the Soviet Union in the North Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions; as by Cuba in the ongoing Venezuelan and Mexican revolutions.) Others disagree, often vehemently, arguing for example that the French Revolution of 1789 and the present-day Venezuelan and Mexican revolutions illustrate the potential of success even without significant foreign support.
Interestingly enough, a recent poll shows 58 percent of the Russian citizenry favors restoration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
While I have long recognized and applauded the revolutionary potential of U.S. minority communities, I have no illusions about my fellow USian whites, the vast majority of whom are too malevolently self-centered, racist, sexist, cowardly and/or ignorant to dependably participate in even the mildest forms of protest. Hence I fear that without another Russian Revolution – that is, without re-creation of the U.S.S.R., the old Comintern and most of all the Red Army – there is no hope, now or ever, of escaping the JesuNazi tyranny of what thanks to USian total surveillance and drone strikes is in fact becoming Concentration Camp Earth.
And even with Soviet renewal, our only hope would lie in the genuinely miraculous prospect a re-radicalized Soviet military might somehow avert the thermonuclear, better-dead-than-Red apocalypse by which the Empire intends to murder the entire planet if USian hegemony is ever seriously threatened.
Yes that is how bad it is – infinitely worse, infinitely more hopeless, than anything in previous human history. And given the maliciously paralytic legacies of identity politics – especially the obnoxiously shallow socioeconomic irrelevancies force-fed to audiences in today's Moron Nation as "sexy" (i.e., "revolutionary") art – I frankly doubt our species, or for that matter the habitability of our planet, will survive.
As I said via Reader Supported News, "what we are witnessing in the Trump/Pence Regime is (A)-the end, forever, of the United States as we knew it; (B)-in all probability the end, forever, of Mother Earth as we knew her and (C)-at the very least, the final victory of Nazism over Homo sapiens sapiens and therefore the end of whatever might have remained of our species' potential benevolence. And no, there is not one scintilla of rational hopefulness remaining to us – not as long as our moral imbecile president is allowed to keep his Christian End Times finger on the thermonuclear and/or environmental apocalypse buttons. We have reached that point in our nationhood wherein we literally have nothing left to lose save our own lives..."
*Lest we forget: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1963); Malcolm X (1964); Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., (1968); Presidential Candidate and Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy (1968); Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (1969); Allison B. Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer (Kent State University, 1970); Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green (Jackson State College, 1970); and Karen Silkwood (1974).
Is USian JesuNazism – at Least as Malevolent as German Nazi Anti-Semitism – to Be the Ultimate Form of Moron Nation Governance?
DESPITE MY EYE-OPENING EXPERIENCES as a civil rights activist (1963-1964); despite my invariably unpleasant and occasionally violent encounters with racism as a "race traitor" who dared have public love affairs with Black women in 1966, 1970 and 1979; and despite the examples of white Christian bigotry I repeatedly witnessed as a near-lifelong member of the working press, I doubt I recognized the true magnitude of USian race hatred until a Pew Poll revealed that fully 77 percent of the Caucasian citizenry refused to acknowledge the murderous racism expressed by the Bush Regime's genocidal abandonment of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
I was, like most native-born USians, reflexively loathe – even in the face of decades of utterly damning evidence – to admit the now obviously irremediable influence of white supremacy on Moron Nation's ever-more-definitive politics of moral imbecility.
But subsequent disclosures, as here and here, have since convinced me the USian JesuNazi white majority is even more murderously bigoted than its German Nazi forebears. Never mind that death camps have become unfashionable; the same deadly purpose is fulfilled – with far less potential for public outrage – by the USian policy of deliberately genocidal cuts in health care, reproductive medicine, affordable housing, unemployment compensation, food stamps and all other social services.
The 85-year, multi-generational persistence of such efforts proves that white racism, like German Nazi antisemitism, cannot be unlearned; it can only be outlawed, severely punished and (perhaps) thereby eventually exterminated.
Obviously the same is true of the theocratic Christian fanaticism that provides the "Jesu" element in JesuNazism.
Thus what we face here in the Trump/Pence Homeland is a unique combination of class war, race war and religious war – a one-two-three punch that is obviously history's final answer to Benjamin Franklin's famous challenge to all future USian generations: "a republic, if you can keep it," which clearly we could not, most likely not only to our own national demise but to the doom of our species and our planet as well.
Urgent: Olympia Democrats Consider Granting Imperial Military Commanders Absolute Authority Over State's Land-Use Policies
THANKS TO TRUTHOUT for scooping the world on the Washington State legislature's House Bill 2341, a hitherto-unreported Democratic (sic) Party stealth dictatorship measure that would grant military commanders absolute, unchallengeable authority over land use anywhere in the state including on all private property.
Critics of HB2341 note it "blatantly violates several of the most basic, well understood, and important provisions of the Washington and United States Constitutions."
Thus it (again) reveals the Democrats' role as co-conspirators in the imposition of unabashed JesuNazi tyranny on the USian Homeland.
Sponsored by Federal Way Representative Kristine Reeves (D-30th) and endorsed by Democratic (sic) Governor Jay Inslee, the outrageously oppressive measure is almost certain to become law.
Amongst the unlimited powers it would give local military commanders is the right to arbitrarily prohibit marijuana farming anywhere in Washington state even were it otherwise legal under state and federal law.
Which surely makes me wonder: is HB2341 yet another example of the back-room collaboration between Democrats and Republicans to ensure the permanence of JesuNazi governance?
Personal Note: On the Perverse Blessings of Temporary Disability
AS MOST READERS KNOW, a momentary lapse into astonishing (and astonishingly painful) stupidity on the evening of 7 January left me home-bound with badly torn hip ligaments, a massively bruised pelvis and buttocks-to-ankle hematoma.
While these injuries are healing a bit more quickly than anticipated, the seemingly lesser afflictions of presumably healed congestive heart failure leg-ulcers torn open by the fall have become so disabling, I remain not only a prisoner in my own dwelling but an indescribably thankful recipient of regular in-home wound care.
While most of this genuinely caring care is generously provided by Communist Labor Party comrades and a few neighbors to all of whom I am endlessly grateful, some of it is of necessity provided by medical professionals. This latter mode of treatment has left me owing Kaiser-Permanente a non-negotiable debt that already tops $170 and will therefore in all probability eventually bankrupt me.
(Last year K-P bought out Group Health Cooperative, which had been my Washington state health insurer since 1972.)
Though I have (of course) applied to K-P for financial aid, the genocidal realities of Neoliberal Capitalism – in which health care is permanently defined as a privilege of wealth rather than as a human right – means that despite my sub-poverty Social Security pension, my aid request will most likely be denied.
That said, the immobility and relative isolation forced on me by these now stubbornly weepy leg ulcers has given me a genuine bonus of contemplative hours out of which I have formulated my realistically pessimistic estimate of our nation's, species' and planet's future.
While it is true that as I near my 78th birthday, I have forever abandoned any and all rational hope of ever again witnessing any genuinely revolutionary or even reformist progress here inside the ever-more-tyrannical Fourth Reich, it is also true I yet refuse to be defined by victimization and trauma, which means I remain as committed as ever to making whatever small contributions I might yet make to the process of revolution.
Hence by 1 February I hope to have Dispatches back on its weekly schedule.
As Jean Paul Sartre discovered for himself during the French Resistance, to continue the struggle even when it seems hopeless can become an ultimate act of personal liberation.
LB/25 January 2018.
Posted at 10:46 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Film, History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Music, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Visual art, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (1)
Congress Joins U.S. War on First Amendment Freedoms
Sen. Grassley Blames Russians for Agitating Black Rebelliousness
Anti-abortion fanatic shrieks biblical invective at a Planned Parenthood patient in Tacoma.
(Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2017)
(Note: the following story has undoubtedly received some [probably misleading] coverage by the Mainstream Media propaganda apparatus, but the linked reports below, mostly from World Socialist Web Site, cleave through the disinformation to give us a much more complete picture of what actually obtains as the Empire mentally goose-steps ever more rapidly toward unabashed JesuNazism. Also: as of today I am again changing Dispatches' publication schedule, this necessitated by changes in the schedules of some of my other obligations. Henceforth new material will be posted every Wednesday evening or very early Thursday morning. My apology for any inconvenience so imposed./LB)
CLAIMING "CIVIL WAR," the capitalist owners of the imperial USian government and their political puppets in Congress have launched a bipartisan assault on our few remaining First Amendment freedoms.
An earlier WSWS story, relevant for its slightly different focus, is here.
Significantly, this sudden, dramatic escalation of efforts at censorship and suppression of anti-Capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-theocratic activism is jointly led by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic (sic) Sen. Diane Feinstein.
The Trump/Pence Regime itself has already unleashed its Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) secret police against African-American activists and has long encouraged supporters to attack its opponents in a variety of other ways. Combined with the decision by pro-regime social-media and Internet monopolists to suppress allegedly subversive websites and journalists, these developments lend credibility both to fears the regime intends to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law to facilitate mass arrests and/or that it is preparing to start World War III.
These fears are intensified by the fact the regime's newest tyrannies were actually begun in 2016 by Democrats who were then the regime's (alleged) opponents but are now its obvious allies.
Remember it was Democratic (sic) Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton who advocated thermonuclear war against Russia and China, while Republican Donald Trump promised he would seek world peace while launching what amounts to a latter-day pogrom against minorities and immigrants, thereby confining the empire's savagery to the homeland.
The de facto pogrom began as soon as the regime took office, with skyrocketing immigration arrests and presidential encouragement of police brutality.
Now the collaboration of the two parties on domestic-oppression measures suggests the proverbial fix – in this instance some sort of secret, tyranny-enhancing agreement between the two Capitalist parties – was probably in place long before the Trump/Pence inauguration last January. Proof we are all, as never before (unless we were combat-zone soldiers), in dire and potentially deadly jeopardy. (See also "God's Own Death Squad," below.)
Trump/Pence Warmongers Ban South Korean Peace Activists, canceling their visas as the Empire's massive military build-up continues. Look at a map of the region to see how its geography mandates that a thermonuclear attack on North Korea will, because of radiation and fallout, unavoidably be an attack on Russia and China as well. Hence World War III. Hence the apocalypse we all dread and the JesuNazis all welcome. Hence the reduction of our beloved Earth to a bug planet. Hence kiss your ass good-bye. Hence The End. (Because of the personalities involved, this confrontation is infinitely more terrifying than the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which I was 22 years old, married to my first wife and just back from nearly two years Regular Army service in Korea. In fact our troop transport, the USNS Sultan, was shadowed by a Soviet sub from the time we left Pearl Harbor until we entered San Francisco Bay maybe five days later. It was September and the missile crisis was still secret; when the sub surfaced 600 yards or so off our port side to charge her batteries, which she did two or three times, the Soviet sailors always waved at us and we U.S. soldiers always waved back, though in retrospect I have no doubt the sub's orders were to sink us – nearly 4,000 soldiers – the instant war began.) (These personal details are based entirely on memory as all my journals from that era – all my Korea photographs too – were destroyed in the 1983 fire.)
Nurses' Union Denounces Trump/Pence Abandonment of Puerto Rico, says the regime is knowingly leaving hurricane victims to die. A related story is here.
JesuNazi Death Threats Bar Congresswoman from Congress. Never in my 77-plus years have I heard of anything like this happening in the USian Homeland. In banana republics, yes of course, but never here in the United States. More proof the brazen, regime-encouraged malevolence of our enemies is truly beyond description. (Again see "God's Own Death Squad," below.)
Contrasting Police Responses as Drivers Use Motor Vehicles as Anti-Personnel Weapons: Muslim man in Manhattan legitimately arrested as terrorist, white man in California coddled by cops. For more on the California incident, go here.
Conflict in Catalonia: two situation reports from Spain, here and here.
Genocide in Burma: the killing of Rohingya people continues despite the Empire's pro forma (i.e., meaningless) protests.
Trump Posed to Appoint Four Theocracy-Minded Judges who will undoubtedly do everything in their (considerable) power to advance the JesuNazi agenda. Another warning as to how truly awful our circumstances are. (See also "God's Own Death Squad," below.)
If Money Co-Opts, Does Big Money Co-Opt Completely? See here and here. I thought long and hard before I posted these two stories because of their potential divisiveness. Finally I concluded the fact they each publicly raise the all-important co-optation issue gives them must-post newsworthiness. Such is the sometimes-troubling duty of an editor. Nevertheless I apologize to anyone who is offended by my decision.
On Mothering a Black Son in a Realm Where Blacks Are Targets. A testament of a Black woman's maternal courage, its prose written with such compellingly poetic skill it made me cry. May we all have such loving mothers, as I most certainly did not. (Yes, some of my tears were undoubtedly tears of envy.)
The Struggle in the South: a situation report from Middle Tennessee.
Imprisoned Immigrant Teen Finally Wins Her Abortion. This story did get a little Mainstream Media coverage, but Dispatches has followed it closely, so I'm posting it here in case you didn't see or hear the outcome.
Viciously Deceptive "Clinic" Lures Unwary Abortion-Seekers to Relentless Abuse: the magnitude of the JesuNazis' newest lies equals the magnitude of their misogynistic hatred. (See photo above.)
Hurricane Recovery by LGBTQ People in the JesuNazi Theocracy of Texas: how art and solidarity heals, a useful lesson for every one of us regardless of how we define ourselves.
A Realistic Retrospective on the 2016 Election: The advent of the Trump/Pence Regime has most likely sealed our doom – my opinion, not the linked author's – but as he says, had Hillary been elected we'd probably already be nothing more than radioactive dust, so at least we're getting more time in which to taste the exquisiteness of life. (Yeah, even for me, an arthritic cripple for whom pain has become as much a part of consciousness as breathing.)
Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan, Now Studying Lenin, damns the Democrats' blame-Russia warmongering, notes how the party has become a Capitalist tool for betrayal of the 99 Percent.
Soviet Sub Captain Honored for Defying Launch Order, thereby averting World War III. Would an USian officer dare do likewise? I think not. Nor would the Empire's soldiers dare disobey an order to massacre unarmed USian civilians. All available evidence indicates that we USians – contrary to the Russian revolutionaries of 1917 (who shot their officers rather than fire on unarmed demonstrators) – live in a realm peopled mostly by obedient Adolf Eichmanns.
Two Interesting Reports on the Kennedy Assassination Papers, here and here, the latter revealing undeniable but long-suppressed proof the president was targeted by at least two shooters.
On the Relevance of the Soviet Revolution: "Taking state power is a serious enterprise: it requires a workers' army to defend the country from national and international capitalists."
Knowing Our Enemy: More on the USian Empire as God's Own Death Squad
WHY DOES MAINSTREAM MEDIA refuse to acknowledge the Trump/Pence Regime's wildly accelerating conversion of the white-supremacist U.S. empire into a militantly doomsday-minded thermonuclear Christian theocracy?
Why do we the people continue to deny that our imperial overlords truly believe their sadistic god commands them to conquer the entire planet and subjugate its peoples at least as violently as their forebears massacred the First Nations of North America and vaporized the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The answers to both these questions become obvious once the questions themselves are viewed in their proper sociopolitical and historical contexts.
Jeff Sharlet exposed the theocratic agenda of the U.S. Ruling Class nearly a decade ago in The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). As many Dispatches readers already know, it is a properly frightening revelation of how a generously-financed Christian conspiracy that began in the 1934 is succeeding – not just with the Republican Party's enthusiastic sponsorship but with the clandestine assistance of the Democratic (sic) Party as well – in imposing Christian theocracy on the United States.
(We should ask: is it coincidence this corporate-funded ChristoFascist effort began in 1934, the same year the Bankers' Plot failed to make the U.S. a partner in what was to become the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis?) (See also here.)
Though Sharlet's pivotal work on the Empire's theocratic core was published nearly a decade ago, subsequent events have since elevated it and two earlier but closely related works to the stature of superbly well-reasoned prophetic analysis. One is Chris Hedges' American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press: 2006). The other – the best of the three for historical documentation – is Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Viking: 2006).
The Christian fanaticism Sharlet, Hedges and Phillips decry – which began its boiled-frog climb to technologically enabled Trump/Pence omnipotence long before the politicians of both Capitalist parties formalized the thrust toward theocracy by adding the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance – has triumphed not only by obliterating the few remnants of USian liberty but by threatening human survival in a manner unprecedented in our species' 300,000-year history.
What makes the threat so deadly dangerous is the thoroughly documented JesuNazi belief, as expressed by George the Second and later by a Trumpist pastor, that self-inflicted apocalypse – whether by thermonuclear warfare, Capitalist ecocide or both – is the essential precursor to Jesus's return to Earth.
And the danger is far more immediate than many of us dare admit. It is intensified to near infinity by our Mainstream Media's concealment of just how unspeakably jeopardized life itself has become under Capitalism's (always biblical) agenda and how the Trump/Pence Regime has escalated this jeopardy to almost certain fulfillment by declaring its genocidal, ecocidal, ultimately apocalyptic agenda to now be the summum bonum of the Empire's foreign and domestic policy, which our theocratic overlords and their JesuNazi followers believe is divinely ordained.
Nor is there any rational hope the Democratic (sic) Party might birth any significant rethinking of these policies. As Sharlet points out in The Family, "The difference between the two parties, economically, theologically, is one of degrees, not principles." (p. 384-385)
Hedges, as if he were anticipating Sharlet's work, had already noted the mindset that would propel the Trump/Pence Regime into terminally apocalyptic power: "And the congregation gathering today in this church waits for the final welcome relief of the purgative of violence, the vast cleansing that will lift them into the heavens, and leave the world they despise, the one they ruined or that was ruined for them, to be racked by plagues and flood and fire until it, and all those they blame for the debacle of their lives, are consumed and destroyed by God." (American Fascists, p. 183).
While the people Hedges describes in this passage are mostly members of the Working Class, the same intensity of hatefulness, albeit without the goading of financial desperation, defines the white-supremacist executives and professionals who were by far the largest faction of Trump/Pence voters.
Phillips adds a bit of the historical perspective that makes his work especially valuable: "The essential political preconditions (for theocracy) fell into place in the late 1980s and 1990s with the emergence of the Republican party as a powerful vehicle for religiosity and church influence, while state Republican parties, most conspicuously in the South and Southwest...set out in varying degrees the radical political theology of the Christian Reconstruction movement, the tenets of which range from using the Bible as a basis for domestic law to emphasizing religious schools and women's subordination to men." (American Theocracy, pgs. 232-233)
"The Christian Reconstructionist movement...proclaims ambitions that range from replacing public schools with religious education to imposing biblical law and limiting the franchise to male Christians...Most Americans, having never heard of Christian Reconstructionism, likely assume it has only fringe status. The groups that monitor such activists – Theocracy Watch...the First Amendment Foundation...Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and others – take the movement more seriously..." (ibid., p. 243)
Meanwhile a Center for Inquiry report notes the federal government loses "over $71 billion per year" in religious tax exemptions, much of which underwrites pro-theocracy proselytizing. Susan Jacoby, one of the many sources cited by the report, puts it thusly: the question is why "church authorities adhering to a deeply conservative brand of Christianity . . . get to use taxpayer money to further their parochial agenda."
The answer to Jacoby's question is also the answer to the question that opened our know-the-enemy discussion. The government that grants the tax exemptions to finance the theocratic onslaught and the Mainstream Media that refuses to report the magnitude of the theocratic threat (or even acknowledge its existence) are owned by the same cabal of One Percenters.
Which further confirms the formerly unthinkable truth collectively revealed by Phillips, Hedges and Sharlet – that the USian Empire was clandestinely a sword-of-the-Lord theocracy when Trump and Pence took control. Their job, no doubt scripted years ago by the sons and grandsons of the original Bankers' Plot conspirators, is to do exactly what they have been doing since Inauguration Day: that is, releasing the theocracy from its proverbial closet and ascertaining we the people of the 99 Percent are either its captives or its corpses.
In other words, whether as individuals or a species we are well and truly FUBAR. As to why so many of us remain in such self-destructively stubborn denial of that fact, I suspect it is mostly a manifestation of the classically USian imbecility of hope – the same self-protective "ideological bubble" of all-will-be-well fantasy that fostered the extended refusal to recognize Obama the Orator was in fact Barack the Betrayer.
Plus if we accept the unmitigated horror of our circumstances – that we are already targets in a holy war – we will each have to modify our thinking accordingly, never again forgetting we are opposed not only by the theocratic state but by the lynch-mob fanaticism of its civilian and paramilitary allies.
Thus like Red Army soldiers in the earliest months of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, our circumstances are bound to radically worsen before there is even the smallest chance of compelling their improvement.
If You're in or Near London, There's an Amedeo Modigliani Retrospective – dates to be announced – planned by the Tate Modern, which is essentially the British equivalent of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Meanwhile thanks to an organization called Artsy, the mission of which is to make the viewing of great art readily available to all the peoples of the world, here's a collection of Modigliani's work. Here too, from the visual treat cupboard of Artsy's online magazine, is an interesting study of how and why women and men differ in their approaches to shooting selfies. Indulge. Enjoy. Relish. As the LGBTQ community of Houston discovered (see "Hurricane Recovery," above), art is healing even when one is menaced by the jackboots of the JesuNazis, as indeed – given the Empire's ever-more-apocalyptic global reach – all genuine humans now are.
LB, with contributions from TigerLille/ 24 October-1 November 2017.
Posted at 01:08 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Current Affairs, Disabled People , History, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Visual art, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Suppression of Sexuality Is JesuNazis' Ultimate Purpose
And Far Too Many of Us Underestimate Their Fanaticism and Power
A CLASH OF SIGNS AND SLOGANS: Tacoma Clinic Defense versus screaming JesuNazis. The JesuNazis admit their real purpose is to re-criminalize sexuality, and they often damn TCD members as "abominations in the eyes of the lord." (Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2017)
THE WORST PARENTAL BEATINGS I ever received as a child – a succession of three savage assaults that left me so bruised I was not allowed to attend school until the blemishes had faded to near-invisibility – were punishment for having dared study comparative anatomy with other neighborhood children. I was seven years old. My father administered the beatings as my stepmother cheered him on. The fact he was a presumably enlightened Marxist made no difference at all in the depth to which he had absorbed the sadistic anti-sexual hatefulness that is undoubtedly the darkest, most malevolent aspect of the patriarchal psychosis that defines USian consciousness – the festering Abrahamic malevolence now again gleefully resurrected and writ into law and decree by the Trump/Pence Regime, maliciously applauded by every JesuNazi voter and undoubtedly endorsed, often secretly, by an overwhelmingly vast majority of other USians as well.
Ironically I was never more than a peripheral participant in the comparative-anatomy studies for which I was so brutally punished. Pants-down research was vaguely uncomfortable for me because we – a group of kids ages six to eight, three boys, three girls – conducted our classes in the black-widow, scorpion and poisonous-centipede infested spaces under houses raised two feet off the sandy ground in accordance with wartime 1940s Floridian construction standards. After our activities were discovered – perhaps another story for another time – I was repeatedly beaten until I falsely confessed I had been the chief instigator of such sexual studiousness as had obtained in the Lake Forest neighborhood of Jacksonville c. 1945-1947. My father beat me first with a one-inch hickory dowel, which he broke over my legs. Then he whipped me with a garrison belt. Finally, after he beat me with a steel ruler, I stopped telling the truth and gave him and my stepmother, an allegedly lapsed Southern Baptist, the I'm-an-evil-pervert confession they demanded, thereby confirming my parents' implicitly hateful Loren-is-a-monster fantasy. Thus were the punitively miserable conditions of my life determined until, as an 18-year-old University of Tennessee student, I was hired through the UT employment office as a motel night clerk. That job and my entry into newspaper journalism two years earlier were the greatest blessings of my teenage life. Journalism gave me a permanent sense of purpose, while the motel rescued me from the prison of my father's household and got me a dwelling that was truly my own.
I remember I was not surprised by the beatings. While at age seven I was certainly not sophisticated enough to recognize the wounds inflicted by the fanatical anti-sex hatefulness that defines Abrahamic religion cannot ever be healed – that wisdom was granted me by a (very) brief affair with the rebellious daughter of a Church of God preacher late in my 23rd year – I was nevertheless bright enough to recognize the total rejection expressed by my father's judicially overruled attempt to abandon me in a Virginia state orphanage after my violently schizophrenic mother attempted to murder us both. This was in 1945, eerily enough on the Summer Solstice Eve. My father's reasoning was of course that given my genetically defective mother, I too was genetically defective, and from that moment onward – despite our father-son closeness in prior years – I was literally a despised child, or as I came to think of myself after a beloved English Setter was euthanized for protecting me from a stepmotherly assault,"a dog nobody wanted."
Such trauma – as a result of which much of my teenage sexuality was edged with reflexive fear – cannot ever be overcome, though the exquisite joy of sex had purged it from my conscious mind and presumably neutralized (most of) its crippling influence well before my 21st birthday. But the anti-sex torment the Trump/Pence Regime is sadistically inflicting on an imprisoned 17-year-old in Texas, the young woman known to the courts and the mostly porno-minded public as "J.D.," somehow brought all that 1947 horror back into infuriatingly vivid recollection, including the fact that for at least a decade after 1947 my internal dialogues always labeled those horrific events as having taken place "last spring," thereby acknowledging, if only to myself (and never to even one of the half-dozen shrinks in whose offices I sought redemption c. 1962-1989), that some part of me had died in the spring of 1947, some part of me for which that spring was literally my "last spring" ever.
All of which is preface to my 21 October post on a Reader Supported News comment thread – a post that, not surprisingly given its unapologetic anti-Capitalist, anti-patriarchy, anti-Christian, implicitly anti-Judaic and anti-Muslim anger, was withheld for nearly three days. Obviously this was in service to some site-censor's Abrahamic conviction that by posting it so absurdly late no one would read it – a lack of readership which at 0237 hrs 25 October 2017 is proven by the absence of response. (Note too how the censor – or censors – offer the belated posting, including a falsified date/time signature, in an effort to hide RSN's censorship: a maliciously sneaky Big Lie the calculated deviousness of which is tellingly reminiscent of the pro-Hillary disinformation the site knowingly propagated during the 2016 presidential election campaign – the potency of such deception effectively patented by the post-Kennedy Democratic [sic] Party and brought to perfection by Barack the Betrayer in the ultimate Big Lie of "change we can believe in.")
Here then is the text the RSN censor – or censors – found objectionable enough to delay:
The Trump/Pence Regime's methodical victimization of J.D. is far more than just another of the innumerable for-profit atrocities that define USian policy at home and abroad.
Its viciousness tells us how white Christian theocratic governance bodes unending horror for any of us who dare reject the Abrahamic doctrine of the Heavenly Führer, the deity said to celebrate our species' deadliest genocides as obedience "under god," the divine sadist of whom Hitler was merely (another) earthly personification.
But here we also find the ultimate significance of the physical and psychological torture the Trump/Pence Regime is so gleefully inflicting on a hapless teenage girl. The regime has literally weaponized the content of J.D.'s womb, turning it into a cancer that threatens to destroy this young woman's entire life.
Thus we are again confronted by the bottomless malevolence of the JesuNazi agenda and its apostolic regime. Indeed – recognizing the indescribable magnitude of racial, sexual and theological hatefulness implicit in this atrocity – I find it increasingly difficult to doubt the fanatical Trump/Pence Christians are already plotting the mass arrest of anyone denounced as a heretic, atheist or agnostic.
Meanwhile may we all empathize with J.D., and may our empathy then mature into action.
Writing to RSN's 1500-character limit, I cut two paragraphs from my original draft:
Too bad Moron Nation continues to view the Trump/Pence triumph as just another GOPorker victory – when it is the (probably irremediable) triumph of white Christian theocracy as the official ideology of the United States – in no small measure because of the Democratic (sic) Party's countenance and collaboration.
More to the point, the government-under-god's persecution of J.D. is exactly the sort of atrocity that prompts me, a 77-year-old cripple – my afflictions including advanced congestive heart failure and painfully debilitating osteoarthritis – to regularly participate in Tacoma's relatively small but disciplined, determined and therefore reasonably effective abortion-clinic defense. Physical wreck that I am, the presence of my camera and my obviously disabled geriatric self nevertheless seemingly helps deter the woman-haters' notorious penchant for violence.
Which also explains why I regard the continuing reports on J.D.'s plight as ultimate revelations of the truly indescribable viciousness that has now – with the white majority's enthusiastic endorsement of the Trump/Pence Regime and its theocratic Christian tyranny – become the sole (and soul) defining characteristic of the Imperial United States. I therefore give you Rewire's unflinchingly truthful portraits of the anti-sex hatefulness at the core of "our democracy" and "one nation under god," here, here and here. I urge you to read each of these reports, carefully, contemplatively and particularly with regard to their broader implications. There is also this from TruthDig, a far more thoughtful analysis of the viciously misogynistic Trump/Pence Regime atrocity I reported here a week ago.
No widely recognized writer dares say it, but I cannot doubt such frenzied antagonism toward human sexuality is at the core of the homicidal psychosis that fuels the Empire's accelerating rush toward apocalypse – the final death-dealing assertion of Abrahamic patriarchy's infinitely murderous hatred of women, femaleness, Mother Earth and ultimately life itself. Wilhelm Reich was methodically ruined by the USian authorities in retaliation for expressing a similar notion. Since then, albeit cunningly camouflaged by the grievously limited but pornographically magnified realm of the so-called "sexual revolution," the defining USian hatred of sexuality has grown so relentlessly suicidal it is no longer just "better dead than Red"; it is now "better slayed than laid" or some maximally misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic equivalent thereof.
But most of us are too much in craven denial to acknowledge that those who claim to speak with the voice of their god when they damn sexually active women, LGBTQ people and abortion-clinic defenders as "abominations" are the apostles of a credo so deadly dark it will soon destroy the entire world with exactly the same brutally casual sadism that in 1956 condemned Reich to die in prison and burned his books and now 61 years later is just as methodically using the 17-year-old J.D.'s pregnancy to destroy her. While the entire situation is rationally terrifying, its most terrifying aspect is its implicit prognosis: that the indescribable toxicity of Abrahamic religion – the limitless hatefulness which psychologically murders a young girl – is but a microcosm of the selfsame inconceivable venomousness that – I am now absolutely certain – will exterminate our species, reduce our world to a bug planet and do it with exactly the same glee expressed by its torture of J.D., its de facto murder of Reich and the annihilation of nearly all his work.
Lest we forget, femaleness is the source of life; therefore – to slightly rephrase what I said above – to despise femaleness is to despise life itself. Thus the Abrahamic god is most assuredly not a god of love; he is instead revealed as the god of pure unadulterated hatred – the one and only genuine Biblical truth whether in the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Qur'an. Moreover this god's hatred is so vastly bottomless no human can possibly measure it or even adequately approach it by analogy save perhaps by pointing out that if the weapons of war as waged by patriarchy are in fact substitutes for the invasive penis – note the patriarchal psycholinguistics of shouting "fuck you" or "up your ass" as the symbolic rape of one's enemy – then surely a maximum-megaton thermonuclear blast is the ultimate patriarchal orgasm.
Sexual assault is thus obviously the interpersonal equivalent of the Empire's genocidal efforts at home (as in the murderous abandonment of Puerto Rico) and abroad (as in 201,013 dead Iraqi civilians or the anticipated "total destruction" of 25 million women, children and men if the Empire carries out its thermonuclear threat against North Korea). Sexual assault is the USian microcosm; wars of conquest are the macrocosm. The psychodynamics of conquest – the hostile invasion of one human's body or the hostile invasion of the homeland of 25 million humans – are identical in either case. Again, such is patriarchy, whether as invasive, sneeringly boastful "we came, we saw, he died" imperialism or the equally sneering, equally boastful "grab-em-by-the-pussy" misogyny so obviously relished by President Trump or the more clandestine misogyny routinely inflicted by Harvey Weinstein, James Toback and countless other obscenely wealthy, maliciously powerful and violently patriarchal authority figures. All of which proves not just David Rosen's point – that male sexual violence is "as American as cherry pie" – but that misogynistic violence is the defining characteristic of the vast majority of USian interpersonal relations and therefore defines the Empire itself. The intensity of this violence has become so normalized there is even a purely psychological version of it in the shaping of popular culture.
Such is the hegemony the women's movement correctly labeled "rape culture." In other words this particular strain of misogyny is the interpersonal version of the imperialist impulse expressed by the Mai Lai massacre. Nor is it any coincidence we are the source of about 75 percent of the planet's serial killers. For supportive evidence see the story I originally planned as a separate post headlined "Patriarchy is the Plutocracy of the Penis," here, plus related stories here and here.
Which somehow underscores the significance of the fact an international poll of women adjudges Moscow to be the planet's safest city.
This Week's News Should Be Titled "Drowning in Dystopia"
(Its presentation is foreshortened because there are so many items and I have so little time.)
The Empire Prepares to Put Its Nuclear Bombers on 24-Hour Alert for the first time since 1991.
World Champion Killer Cops, 782 (and Counting), a vitally informative Chris Hedges lamentation.
Is the U.S. Becoming a Military Dictatorship? A World Socialist Web Site analysis says it is.
Confusion and Chaos as Mind Control, the psychological tactics for keeping us all on the Hamster wheel in the rat maze of Capitalism.
Why We're Well and Truly Fucked: "...we've become a nation suffering from full on psychosis..."
How Loss of Ideological Analysis Destroyed the Left, a potentially terminal wound inflicted by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Democratic (sic) Party Raking in the Bucks, significant here as an index to its success at co-opting (and thereby betraying) the nation's Leftward surge.
Don't Ever Imagine the JesuNazis Are Stupid; this scheme demonstrates their grasp of Machiavellian tactics.
LGBTQ Folks Arming, Training for Self Defense; Upstate New York group inspires nationwide action.
Authorities Did Not Warn California Fire Victims and survivors demand to know why.
Spain Goes Full Fascist on Catalonia, will occupy it with troops as if it were conquered territory.
Estimated Death Toll in Puerto Rico Hits 450, but the imperial authorities say it's only 48.
USian Life Expectancy Drops, another indication of the genocidal consequences of Capitalism.
In One State Alone, 840,000 Children Will Be Victimized by the Democratic (sic) and Republican refusal to renew CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Killer Hepatitis-A Epidemic Sweeping California, homeless people at greatest risk.
Trumpcare for Veterans Will Fatten Medical Profiteers but no doubt destroy the quality of care.
Google Escalates Its Censorship, thereby implicitly declaring its support for the Trump/Pence Regime and its JesuNazi agenda.
Is the Imperial War Machine Fucking with the Weather? Here's an anthology of authorative evidence.
Next Time Someone Touts Bernie Sanders, refer them to this mini-biography by Paul Street.
Did Trump Save Professional Football? The culmination of the resultant brouhaha "not only soothed fears that a disrupted season lay in the NFL's future, but gave those fans tacit permission to keep on enjoying the games without being too disturbed about brain trauma on the field, collusion in the front office, or demands for racial justice."
The Hidden Class-War Element in the Las Vegas Massacre. Schoolmate says shooter was an angry, embittered, rebellious teen.
But Here's a Feel-Good Episode in Our Hidden History:
How Russia Saved the United States in 1863: the little-known, oft-suppressed story of how Tsar Alexander II's support for the federal union saved it from British and French invasion.
LB w/several contributions from Tigerlille, 17-24 October 2017
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