A
TERRIFYING ASSAULT on my always-fragile finances by an ongoing plague
of so-called "billing errors" combined with attempted thievery by
alleged "fraudsters" tells me I am again a target of the extra-legal secret-police malevolence for which the United States is increasingly infamous.
My
alleged sin? I suspect it is writing about what should be obvious:
that the only possible reason the One Percenters are not fighting
climate change is they are weaponizing it as the plausibly deniable
mechanism of their ultimate Final Solution: reshaping the remnants of
human society into a global concentration camp with themselves as
commandants, guards and executioners.
Thus
it would appear I am being told to shut the fuck up, lest everything on
which I am dependent -- apartment, telephone service, Internet
connection, health insurance, food stamps, even my Social Security
retirement pension -- be taken away from me without notice.
(Question:
How do you fight a 76-percent overcharge accompanied by an immediate
disconnect notice when [A], you've already paid your monthly bill; when
[B] you're a 15-year customer who's never been late with a payment; and
when [C], Century Link initially claims to have no record of either the
overcharge or the pending disconnection? Answer: You stay on the phone
for nearly seven hours, shouting yourself hoarse and repeatedly
threatening legal action until CL employees eventually dig deeply enough
into their computers to find the "error" and correct it.)
How did the "error" happen? The employees insist there is no explanation.
Such
harassment is never "explainable"; that is often what identifies it as
the product of malice rather than ineptitude. In any case the fact this
allegedly inexplicable Century Link "error" was immediately preceded by
a half-dozen bank-thwarted efforts at electronic "fraud" makes it
obvious I am (again) under deliberate attack.
One
or two such incidents might be coincidental, but eight -- the count so
far (including a new, ongoing attack by Century Link similar to the
first) -- is unquestionably enemy action, especially since I am
meticulously protective of the relevant passwords and
confirmation-of-identity information.
More
to the point, the alleged "fraudsters" were able to access new,
hitherto-unused replacement accounts, which means they had information
only the credit-bureaus and the bankers -- or the secret police -- are
able to obtain. And we already know each of the 17 U.S. secret police agencies are dominated top-to-bottom by the ChristoNazis and their fascist allies.
As
in the Beatles' song, "I get by with a little help from my friends."
But the friends and comrades whose caring and generosity sometimes
sustain my survival have not the resources to save me from the
death-sentence horrors that would result were my Social Security account
to "inexplicably" vanish from the government's computers -- exactly as
my Washington state unemployment compensation account vanished in
December 1982.
This
happened the height of the Reagan Recession -- here in Washington state
a genuine depression with actual joblessness approaching 30 percent.
The disaster inflicted by the surprise loss of my unemployment stipends
thus reduced me to homelessness long before my repeated, increasingly
forceful letters-of-appeal generated sufficient political pressure to
compel notoriously recalcitrant bureaucrats to reconstruct and restore
my disappeared account.
Significantly,
inside sources I had developed during my years covering the
legislature (1977-1981), told me the clerk who vindictively deleted my
account was never punished. Supposedly she acted on her own initiative,
in Nazi-minded revenge for my anti-Vietnam-War activities 11 years
earlier. But the extent to which she was protected tells me she was
obeying the orders of some higher authority or at the very least had
been assured of such support.
As
would be the case again today were my Social Security pension to
suddenly vanish, in December 1982 my lover, friends and acquaintances
were all too impoverished to provide more than minimal help. The best
these folks could do was offer occasional free meals and a few nights on
a living-room couch or in a spare bed. My lover, herself a victim of
Reagan-inflicted economic woes, ended our relationship by returning to
California.
By
the time the state got around to paying my unemployment-insurance
stipends, the money was nine months overdue. My increasingly desperate
hunt for work and shelter had meanwhile forced me back to New York
City, where my award-winning journalistic skills netted me immediate
employment as a writer and editor and brought me regular freelance work
both as a creative director and a photographer.
But
I was compelled to leave behind in Washington state the photography and
manuscripts that were already beginning to achieve recognition as my
life's most important work. These filled a pair of four-drawer filing
cabinets, their contents including a 150,000-word draft of "Glimpses of a
Pale Dancer" and the tens of thousands of photographs I had made since
1952, when my father honored my 12th birthday by giving me my first
camera, a truly life-changing gift. Perhaps a thousand of these photos
-- my intent was to edit them down to about 50 images -- provided the
visual backbone of "Dancer," which by then had generated 24 years of
file-folders bulging with research notes, outlines, clippings and
earlier drafts. Also within the cabinets were notes, photos, maps and
site drawings for a book on Washington state archaeological anomalies,
and a comparable files for a third book about the people of the Pacific
Northwest salmon fishery.
Because
there was no way I could fit even one of these cabinets into my 1976
Honda Civic for the 2,900-mile drive across the country to Manhattan, I
stored both cabinets and all the work they contained with an especially
dear friend and trusted colleague; I would send for them as soon as I
had achieved permanent housing in the City.
But my friend's house was destroyed by arson on 1 September 1983 -- a blaze ignited at the exact instant
I began a meeting with the book editor who believed "Dancer" to be a
cultural turning-point and had therefore promised to mother it to
mainstream publication.
The
timing -- literally to the minute -- makes it obvious the fire was no
coincidence, that it was clearly an assault by the secret police or
their Nazi allies.
And
my loss -- as I'm certain was intended -- was ruinous. The destruction
of my life's work was the destruction of my life. No matter how
determinedly I tried, I was never able to recover either from the fire or from the preliminary blow dealt me
by that vengeful clerk in the Bellingham office of the so-called (and
laughably named) Washington Department of Employment Security.
I
was never again able to afford a place of my own -- that is, an
apartment without room-mates -- until I returned to Washington state in
October 1986. Next a stubborn bout of post-fire traumatic depression --
impossible to conceal from future employers after
poverty forced me onto welfare and the Washington State Department of
Social and Health Services vindictively shunted me onto Social Security
Disability -- ended forever my career as a newspaper and magazine
staffer. And I would never again have a lover; my poverty had become
too hopeless to hide.
What
saved my life was my excellent physical health; I was in my 40s; my
back and knee injuries had not been complicated by arthritis, and the
onset of congestive heart failure was two decades in my future. I had
the stamina essential for survival when survival itself becomes -- as it
has under Neoliberalism -- an act of revolutionary defiance.
Now,
at age 79, severely crippled by arthritis and slowly dying of
congestive heart failure, there is no possible way I could successfully
combat such a sudden loss of income. The magnitude of my poverty would
again, exactly as it did in 1982-83, prohibit amelioration by friends
or comrades. Again I would be homeless, isolated, alone -- and this
time soon dead.
So endeth the lesson.
***
BUT
THIS THREAT of fatal retaliation is only a small part of what pushed
me over the proverbial edge into something that at first glance seems
uncomfortably close to the scary intellectual death I fear actual
retirement is bound to be.
Consider:
There
is no question the One Percenters and their minions have achieved
genuine omnipotence in their tyranny over this planet and its
inhabitants. They do as they wish. Their
technology has given them abilities hitherto attributed to the gods
alone -- including the power to heal the global wounds inflicted by our
man-made socioeconomic and environmental emergencies.
Have no doubt; our masters could have ended austerity anytime they chose to do so.
The
misogynistic depth of anti-environmental sentiment in "Christian
America" -- the magnitude of its metastasis confirmed when the
patriarchy's "one nation under God" gave the Trump/Pence Regime
unfettered access to the doomsday button -- cannot be over-estimated. It
is perhaps best exemplified by the startling messages that began
appearing on church reader-boards during the early 1970s. Examples
include "Organic Is Satanic" and "Environmental Is Of The Devil."
But
since the death of the Soviet Union, no people on earth have
demonstrated the leadership, organization and discipline necessary to
slow the One Percenters' tyrannical momentum, much less to overthrow the
ever-more-obvious One Percent agenda, a shock-doctrine of strategy and
tactics cunningly camouflaged by political hurly-burly yet clearly based
on the deliberate furtherance of ecocidal genocide and genocidal
ecocide.
That
is why -- though in ever-deepening despair we press our masters ever
more frantically to use their infinite power and wealth to at least
reduce the death and destruction wrought by their weaponized Apocalypse
-- they respond with naught but dithering, obstructionism,
disinformation, outright lies and defiant intensification of all the
trumped-up persecutions at the heart of their global assault on
democratic process.
At
best our masters are sneeringly indifferent to our fate; at worst they
want us dead. That's why our traditional democratic methods --
disclosure, dissent and non-violent demonstration -- no longer work.
And
so it shall remain so unless some miraculous cataclysm evens the odds
by nullifying the unbeatable technologies of oppression that grant the
One Percenters their ever-expanding omnipotence.
Beyond that, we desperately need a new strategy and new tactics, all grounded on the elemental wisdom of Sun Tzu.
As
the Ku Klux Klan learned 56 years ago, the prospect of sudden death
does not scare me. That's why, to the sadly limited extent allowed by
worsening physical disability, I will continue volunteering for picket
lines and helping discourage the increasingly violent ChristoNazis who
are waging war on women's health services.
But
slowly starving to death huddled abandoned and alone beneath
piss-reeking blankets in some filthy urban doorway -- which is
precisely what would happen to me were all my income to be disappeared
as it was 36 years ago -- is more repugnant and frightening than I can
describe.
***
SOME
OF US -- especially those of us adept enough to transcend even the
censorship imposed by price and paywall -- are discovering irrefutable
evidence our overlords are indeed exploring how to manipulate the serial
disasters inflicted by climate change and Neoliberal economics into
plausibly deniable campaigns of ecocidal genocide.
(To read the rest, go here.)
