03 December 2012

Xmas Greetings: Why December Is 'the Cruelest Month'

T.S. ELIOT WAS wrong. It's December – not April – that's “the cruelest month.” 

But December's cruelty, unlike April's poignant mixture of “memory and desire,” is not of Nature's making. 

December's cruelty is deliberately manufactured by the One Percent. It began as an expression of aristocratic contempt for lower income people – the notion we the poor, if annually surrounded by an ostentatious display of holiday riches, might be forced by our own hunger and envy to try climbing beyond poverty, as if such wretchedness were no more than a bad rung on the same easy ladder our wealthy detractors had been handed by the pampered circumstances of their births and lives. 

The fact a rare few of us were allowed to succeed in an otherwise impossible ascent gave the Ebenezer Scrooges of capitalism all the data they needed to portray chronic impoverishment as a symptom of laziness and moral degeneracy. 

So it was when Charles Dickens sought to ameliorate December's cruelty with A Christmas Carol

But now not even a Shakespeare could carol away December's cruelty. The Ruling Class contempt for lower-income people has toxified into loathing. Its hatefulness is focused like a death ray on elderly and/or disabled persons and anyone who is chronically unemployed. 

Why? Because once we're forever jobless and poor, we're no longer exploitable for profit.
 
The ugly December truth is the One Percenters and their Democrat and Republican toadies want us all dead. They regard us as throw-away workers, useless junk, no different from worn-out machines, each of us a drain on their wealth, each of us an affront to their “fiscal responsibility.”
 
Were this Nazi Germany, their all-time perfect state, they'd march us into death camps and be done with us.
 
But death camps are an international embarrassment. (Look what happened to Hitler.)

Worse, death camps reveal the core truths of capitalism: that capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue; that capitalism is the forcible, often violent overthrow of every humanitarian principle our species ever articulated; that capitalism is (therefore) our species' closest-yet approximation of Absolute Evil.

So instead of death camps, the always-diabolical One Percent conjured up a new strategy: to murder us by neglect and abandonment, to murder us also by the gut-wrenching terror evoked by the approach of our certain victimhood.

How much money will be taken from us? How much health care will be denied us? How shall we survive? 

Verily, in the talk of a “grand bargain” to destroy the socioeconomic safety net, we see undeniable proof the Democrats and the Republicans are all the same – that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi and Eric Cantor and Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are united in a solidarity of unrelenting murderousness, against us, against anyone who is unexploitable for profit.

Their tactics are now obvious. 

First, with all the deliberate malice, methodical viciousness and gleeful sadism they can muster, these politicians and their One Percenter overlords threaten us with termination of the life-sustaining stipends and services provided by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, food stamps, any number of other programs that keep us alive when we're old and/or disabled and/or jobless.

The details of their threats sometimes differ – the Republicans want to shut down all social services immediately and use the ensuing riots to excuse far harsher measures; the Democrats want to kill us more gradually – but the long-term intent is identically homicidal.
 
They know (and they rejoice in the fact) their threats alone are deadly: old hearts do not long tolerate the constant fear of murder by starvation and homelessness and denial of medication.
 
Indeed no one dares say how many lives have already been ended by the climate of terror the One Percent and its Democrat and Republican henchmen have imposed on us all.
 
Next – as the One Percent is already doing via the Democrat and Republican parties – they actually terminate those stipends and services.
 
Note, for example, the following press release from the Social Security Administration:

“Effective November 19, 2012, Social Security field offices nationwide will close to the public 30 minutes early each day.  For example, a field office that is usually open to the public Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. will close daily at 3:00 p.m.  In addition, beginning January 2, 2013, offices will close to the public at noon every Wednesday.”

“While agency employees will continue to work their regular hours, this shorter public window will allow them to complete face-to-face interviews and process claims work without incurring the cost of overtime.  The significantly reduced funding provided by Congress under the continuing resolution for the first six months of the fiscal year makes it impossible for the agency to provide the overtime needed to handle service to the public as it has done in the past” (bold face added for emphasis). 
In other words – if you're a Social Security or Supplemental Security Income recipient with a problem that needs an immediate solution – the Democrats and the Republicans have collaborated on behalf their One Percent masters to make damn sure you're left out in the December cold. 

It also means the annual Social Security award letters – the statements that tell us how little we'll be getting next year – are going out later than ever in living memory. Usually we have them by mid-November; rumor has it they won't be mailed until January.

Unless the local welfare bureaucracy decides to be merciful – and “merciful” has never been part of the welfare bureaucrat's job description – that lack of documentation could inflict ruinous costs.

Why? Because documented income and expenses are the basis of supplementary Medicare stipends, the so-called Medicare Extra Help. No documents, no Extra Help: a loss of at least $104 per month. 
 
The same documentation is necessary to get food stamps, a form of aid slashed so severely its desperate recipients are already going hungry. 
Food stamps aren't stamps anymore; they're now on credit-card-like plastic – which reaps the banks a generous profit of course. The former stamps are now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or, more accurately, Stealing from Needy Americans for Profit. Whichever, it's SNAP – as in “SNAP: there's that much more money in some damn One Percenter's pocket.”

Because no documentation means no disbursements, many states will leap to take advantage of the “savings.”

In those states, it's a huge windfall for money-hungry welfare bureaucrats – the same kind and caring people who, from 1970 through 1990, feathered their nests with a 5,390 percent administrative-cost increase – this while slashing stipends and services to the poor by 66 percent.

(No, that 5,390 percent is not a typo; nor is the 66 percent. They're real numbers derived from real data in the real bible of USian financial reality, The Statistical Abstract of the United States.)

And it's in December all this bad news comes together for those of us who are old and/or disabled and/or too long out of work.

It's in December we realize there will never again be any good news ever.

It's in December we find out just how meager our next year's stipends will be and just how savagely they will be slashed and just how much worse our circumstances will be as a result.

It's in December we're forced to ask ourselves whether the shrunken remnants of our lives are still worth living.

Mostly it's in December we learn how the ever-cunning One Percenters will target us with the newest tactics in their no-need-for-death-camps strategy of genocide.

Merry Christmas from Jesus, the one true god of capitalism, his anointed aristocrats and their Democrat and Republican minions united as executioners acting out his infinitely vicious Parable of the Talents: “throw out the unprofitable into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Goddess save us, every one.

LB/1 December 2012

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