27 August 2012

Capitalist Genocide: We're Targets No Matter Who Wins

But Romney/Ryan Is Surely More (Overtly) Murderous Than Obama/Biden

THE LESSON TAUGHT by the present-day economic crisis is that all capitalists – like the Democrat and Republican politicians who do their bidding – are sociopaths. They have no conscience. They value us only to the extent we can be exploited for profit, whether in the workplace, the marketplace or the voting booth.
 
Capitalists also despise spending money on anyone whose existence does not promise them enormous gain, either immediately or in the near future. U.S. jobs are thus outsourced to cheap-labor foreign countries, the national defense budget thus grows fat as the socioeconomic safety budget starves. War is Big Business, and war specifically for profit is the biggest Big Business of all.
 
Not that we should be surprised: the forcible extraction of profit – the same process by which a parasite kills its host – is what capitalism is all about. 

That's why, once we're elderly, disabled, unemployed – once we're unprofitable for any reason – the capitalists tell us we have no value, that we're worthless. Then they discard us as if we were worn out machinery.
 
It's the capitalists' effort to throw us all away that's behind the attacks on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, veterans' benefits and government services in general. The capitalists and their politicians want the money we've put into these services, and they want us dead.
 

***
 

The capitalist grandfathers of today's Wall Street profiteers financed Nazi Germany. In effect, they paid the Nazis to build death camps – to enslave and murder anyone deemed unprofitable.

In the Bankers Plot of 1934, these same capitalists sought to impose Nazism on the United States. But the Communist Party exposed their scheme and saved both the American Experiment in constitutional democracy and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Perhaps – if the infiltrators who defeated the Bankers Plot were indeed Soviet agents (a story I heard when I was much younger) – that explains FDR's uniquely favorable regard for Soviet Premier Josef Stalin.
 
It also explains the relentless hatefulness with which U.S. capitalists began attacking Communists, socialists, even liberals – intellectuals in general – literally hours after the end of World War II. The Left had blocked the capitalists' attempt to make the U.S. part of Hitler's Axis, and now – by the purge that started in August 1945 and peaked a decade later under Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisc.) and the House Un-American Activities Committee – Wall Street was extracting full revenge.
 
In any case, though the downfall of the Bankers Plot was bloodless, it was nevertheless a prelude to how the Soviet Union – at cost of 35 million of its own citizens dead – would later play the major role in defeating the Nazis themselves. Yes, Stalin was subsequently proven to have been a murderous tyrant. But that does not excuse how we are all conditioned to shamefully forget the epic heroism of the Soviet people and how their unprecedented sacrifice kept alive the light of liberty they themselves were denied.
 
Now, as a legacy of that sacrifice and of the larger victory in World War II, death-camps are forbidden. At present they are too offensive – too embarrassing – for today's capitalists to publicly endorse. But such restraints are under constant assault and are crumbling accordingly. Already we live in a world in which only a dwindling number of governments still protect our human rights and fulfill our species' humanitarian instincts.

Frighteningly, the United States is not one of the protectors. Its privately owned for-profit prison system has already re-imposed slavery. Could for-profit death camps be far behind?


***


Under capitalism we are all potentially throw-aways: throw-away children, throw-away teenagers, throw-away women, throw-away men, throw-away elders.
 
The purpose of a socioeconomic safety net is to keep us alive even after we have been thrown away – after the capitalists have abolished our jobs and declared us surplus; after the capitalists have discarded us as broken by disability or worn out by age; after the capitalists have told us that if we are not profitable, we have no right to live.
 
Hence the humanitarian response: the safety net. Socioeconomic safety is an expression of community solidarity, of love and hopefulness. The capitalists regard these qualities as obstacles to “growth” and hate them with a hatred too intense to convey in words.

The safety net is therefore public confirmation – and public condemnation – of capitalism's predatory nature, of the conditions that make the net essential to human survival.
 
Which are the very reasons the capitalists despise it even more than they despise community solidarity and the love and hopefulness from which it is born.

Thus in the capitalists' reactions we see socioeconomic safety as the ultimate nonviolent antidote to capitalist venom.


***


For many years, the post-World-War-II taboos against slavery and death camps forced the capitalists to allow the socioeconomic safety nets of Europe, industrial Asia and the United States to function as intended.

Thwarted by these safety nets, the capitalists nevertheless continued scheming and plotting how to get rid of us. Eventually they developed the strategy and tactics of attacking not just the safety net but the entire concept from which it was born, the so-called Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
 
Hence the imposition of Ayn Rand as required reading in most U.S. high schools. Her core doctrine – that infinite greed is our species' greatest virtue – is the rejection of every moral code ever articulated.
 
In the United States, the near-universal indoctrination of the population in Randite moral imbecility is capitalism's greatest triumph.
 
Hence too – after years of Randite conditioning – the successful and ever-escalating attacks on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, all other forms of humanitarian stipends and services.
 
Here are five examples:
 
(1)-The genocidal Romney/Ryan budget – sure to become law if the Republicans win in November – will destroy Medicare. 

 
(2)-But never imagine the Republicans are our only enemy. An Oregon Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden, joined with Ryan to jointly propose a kill-Medicare measure almost identical to the one in the Romney/Ryan budget. 

 
(3)-The bitter reality of post-American-Dream U.S. politics – the fact we are effectively disenfranchised, that both parties represent only the capitalists and no one else – is already old news. Remember the Super Committee and how even its Democrat members promised to slash Social Security? Far less widely reported but equally embittering are the bipartisan attacks on veterans' benefits.




(4)-Meanwhile, an AARP report – predictably censored by Ruling Class Media – notes that we elderly are already among the hardest hit by the U.S. housing crisis, with 600,000 Americans over the age of 50 facing foreclosure. The proposed cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans' benefits will throw many millions more into foreclosure. Many of these victims of capitalism, perhaps most, will be flung into homelessness.

(5)-As if all this were not disturbing enough, there's the conflict between President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden over the future of Social Security. In momentary departures from his election-year role of Obama the Orator, Barack the Betrayer says repeatedly he wants to slash Social Security. Biden says it won't happen. Who are we to believe? 

 
Hence a petition we should all sign: “If they want to run on the guarantee that Social Security will not be touched, that's commendable – but they must be held to that promise during and after the campaign.”

 
It probably won't change anything, but at least we'll have stood up for what we know is right.

***

I had planned to end this piece here, but the capitalists' war against us – we the increasingly impoverished, increasingly oppressed people of the United States – continues to escalate, with even applicants for unemployment compensation now targeted by Ruling Class Media hatefulness.
 
The nastiest such slandering I have yet seen – “yet” including a five-decade journalism career that began in 1956 – was spat at thrown-away workers by The News Tribune, which in an exceptionally venomous headline described these newest victims of capitalism as “Jobless pay seekers.”

TNT is the McClatchy daily published in Tacoma. Typical of McClatchy rags, it is notorious for its opposition to workers' rights, its relentless attacks against unions and unionized workers. 

But the deliberately inflammatory defamation of traumatized people suddenly deprived of their jobs and rationally terrified by the probability they will never work again was a new low even for anti-worker McClatchy.

As I commented via the paper's website: “Used to be you only saw this sort of hate-mongering in overtly fascist publications, but these days Ruling Class Media makes no effort to conceal the Ayn Rand maliciousness of its executives – and too many of its editorial people as well.”

“That's why U.S. newspapers – note again the genuinely vicious but nevertheless non-actionable slander in the above head – read more and more like the old Voelkischer Beobachter,” which, as most of us know, was published by the German Nazi Party. 

 
LB/26 August 2012
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