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| Of Occupy Tacoma: maybe – especially colorized – another candidate for iconography. Click on image to view it full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. |
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FRANCES FOX PIVEN, professor of political science and sociology at the City University of New York, has written a brief, accurate but unfortunately incomplete history of the capitalists' ongoing war against the U.S. poor. Despite its omissions, for examples of which see below, Ms. Piven's well-researched essay should be read by anyone who seeks to understand the socioeconomic oppression that fuels Occupy Wall Street and its local expressions.
Entitled “The War Against the Poor and Occupy Wall Street,” it first appeared on TomDispatch.com and was further disseminated by Common Dreams, where I responded with a long and carefully thought-out critique.
Alas my critique of Ms. Piven's work was potentially discredited by the fact I misspelled her name in second and subsequent references, the sort of infinitely mortifying dyslexic error that has ruinously plagued me since medical problems forced me to quit smoking tobacco 16 years ago – four months after I wrote the investigative report on welfare statistics referenced below – a project I would never dare attempt as a non-smoker. Nicotine, a potent neurotransmitter, temporarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction. Without nicotine, my writing skill is effectively nullified – hence my always deep and impassioned preference for photography has become even more compelling since I gave up cigarettes. Indeed one of the most bitter lessons of my post-smoking years is that I cannot trust my (formerly reliable) writing ability unless I am able to have my work scanned by a competent editor. But no such editor was available today, and by the time I discovered how dyslexia had (again) ambushed me and (again) made me look like an idiot, it was too late to correct the error because Common Dreams had closed my post to revisions. My deepest apology to Ms. Piven.
The text below is a corrected and slightly expanded version of what originally appeared.
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Ms. Piven's data is superb as far as it goes, but she fails to acknowledge how the nation's welfare bureaucrats thrive at the expense of the poor, for example by increasing administrative outlays 5,390 percent (not a typo) even as they slashed stipends and services by 66 percent.
The 5,390 percent increase in administrative expenses and the attendant 66 percent downsizing of stipends and services are revealed by The Statistical Abstract of the United States, the ultimate authority for data about federal and state governmental operations. The changes occurred over 20 years, from 1970 to 1990, the latter the last year for which complete state-level statistics were available when I, then a journalist of some three decades experience, exposed this atrocity via a 1995 Internet story.
In 1970, 87.7 percent of the nation's federal and state welfare expenditures went to stipends and services for the poor, while the remainder, 12.3 percent, paid administrative expenses. By 1990, aid to the poor had been downsized to 24.5 percent of the total, with the remaining 75.5 percent going to the bureaucrats, most of it for radically expanded payrolls.
These findings – all from Statistical Abstract, show how the appointed guardians of the poor became predatory parasites instead.
Not only that: the bureaucrats willingly collaborated with Ruling Class politicians, academics and media celebrities to create the viciously racist Big Lie of the “welfare queen” archetype – some African-American single mother falsely but universally scapegoated as the personification of runaway welfare costs.
But the statistics reveal the real “welfare queens” are the bureaucrats themselves – present tense because the same shenanigans that facilitated their bounteous 5,390 percent increase in administrative expenses are routinely employed today.
For example, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services formerly conducted recipient-eligibility reviews once each year. Now it imposes them quarterly, using the (wholly unnecessary) 300 percent increase in paperwork to justify retaining a maximum number of employees.
Meanwhile it ousts thousands of people from its assistance rolls, inflicting starvation and death by neglect and abandonment.
Thus capitalism rids itself of those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed or otherwise no longer exploitable for profit.
Whether imposed on recipients of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or welfare per se, social-service cutbacks are literally the U.S. version of genocide, a policy all the more cunning for its lack of barbed wire and death camps.
But not only do these policies provide us with a singularly teachable moment; the associated revelations are among the most terrible truths about the United States.
What imprisons us in Wall Street's slave-pens is the notion infinite greed is maximum virtue. This is the core principle of capitalism. Popularized by Ayn Rand, it is drummed into us until we accept it without question – never mind it refutes every standard of ethics or morality our species has ever uttered.
As a result, capitalism's savage ethos is now as prevalent in the workplace as in the boardroom. From the country-club to the corner tavern, from the executive suite to the shop floor, our national ideology is a relentless me-first/fuck-you selfishness.
Hence the prevalence of the class-traitors formerly called “Reagan Democrats,” the ultimate perpetrators of the ruinous decline in union membership that dis-empowered the U.S. Working Class. Hence too the number of welfare bureaucrats – lowliest clerks included – who happily function as what has been aptly labeled “little Eichmanns.”
As Ms. Piven implies, many New Yorkers – probably a majority – are appalled by the hatefulness and sadism of the war against the poor. But as James Baldwin said 53 years ago, the City truly is "Another Country." Out in here in America, where gentrification has forced me into permanent exile from my beloved Manhattan, the masses cheer, applaud – and vote the fuhrers who command the "little Eichmanns" back into office.
Though such voters are part of the 99 percent, they are conditioned to imagine themselves part of the One Percent. And until they develop a proletarian identity – until they stop identifying with the oppressor – they will never evolve the solidarity essential to what Ms. Piven calls “moral economy.”
Indeed it is the 99 percent's belief in infinite greed as ultimate virtue that facilitates capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.
A variant of the same problem – assumptions and reactions tantamount to identification with the oppressor – threatens the U.S. Occupation Movement itself, especially in those locales where it escapes the corrective influence fostered by New York City's uniquely diverse but essentially European intellectual culture.
Contrary to Ms. Piven's optimism, there is grave danger that – once beyond the City and its self-correcting acumen – the Occupation will repeat the errors which nullified the revolutionary potential of the 1960s: that it will remain stubbornly bourgeois, cliquishly shunning the more obvious victims of capitalism.
Though I have been a working journalist most of my adult life, I am also now at age 71 amongst the hopelessly impoverished, and I write (when I am impassioned enough to dare risk dyslexic mortifications like the one above) and photograph (when I can afford the film and processing) from the perspective of an avowedly angry proletarian.
Thus I'm painfully aware how often the self-proclaimed, implicitly self-congratulatory “progressives” – however vehemently they may seem to defend the demographic abstractions they so tellingly label “the poor” and “the homeless” – nevertheless reject us as persons. Their habitual use of the prefatory article – the unemployed, the evicted – denotes a truly unbridgeable chasm, as if the revolution were somehow their own private social club.
Not surprisingly, such “progressives” make no secret of the extent to which they are repelled by our chronic inability to purchase the knowledge and technology required for participation in the Internet and other electronic media. Thus, even on Occupied ground, our poverty remains an inescapable repugnance, one of the unforgivable sins against the capitalist mentality in which we've all been so thoroughly conditioned.
But probably our worst offense – no doubt the ultimate cause of our pariahdom – is the extent to which the emotions that boil beneath our grievances violate the white bourgeoisie's zero-tolerance taboo against anger. Never mind this is the very taboo – so carefully induced by the Ruling Class as its ultimate psychological fail-safe – that now functions as the chief instrument of our oppression, the padlock to the shackles that guarantee our continued enslavement.
Nor – though I applaud the accuracy (as far as it goes) of Ms. Piven's description of the struggle – can I accept her implicit endorsement of reform. The history of the past 70 years – not just the destruction of the New Deal but the methodical murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Karen Silkwood and indeed every other effective reformer – proves reform is impossible.
The body-count alone leaves no doubt capitalism is in fact the greatest evil the human species has ever unleashed. It is terminal cancer not just of our body politic but of our entire planet. And until it is eliminated accordingly, every one of us is at deadly risk.
*****
Promised Piece Nr. 1: Occupy Wall Street's Neva Bridge Moment
(Originally published on the Occupy Tacoma website.)
Once we know the story, a profoundly heartening moment Sunday in Manhattan and an equally astounding event 94 years ago in Russia are eerily similar:
On 8 March 1917 – 23 February by the old Tsarist calendar and in either case International Women's Day – some 5,000 women of the Lesnoy Textile Works boiled into the streets of Petrograd in a strike against the firing of their Bolshevik sisters who had been helping them organize a union.
As the women marched through the war-starved industrial neighborhoods and toward the center of the city and the Tsar's Winter Palace, they chanted "Klyeb! Myr!" (Bread! Peace!).
Soon they were joined by thousands more, a huge outpouring of men who had been locked out of the nearby Tupulov Machine Works, then a growing mass of soldiers' wives, shopkeepers, typists, soldiers home on leave from World War I.
By now numbering at least 50,000, the demonstrators reached the bridges across the Neva River but were met there by police, formations of Cossacks with drawn sabers and lines of infantry with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets.
The demonstrators paused, unsure what to do next. It was bitterly cold; the Neva was solid ice. Toes and fingers ached. The Cossacks' horses were restless, chomping their bits and stomping their iron-shod hooves on the cobblestones, breath steaming in the frozen air.
At two of the bridges, the marchers turned away. Then, at a third bridge, something happened. A young woman stepped forward and pled with the troops to let the demonstrators pass; a man – perhaps a soldier on leave – argued that to fire on women and girls was to fire on Mother Russia herself. Stories differ wildly as to what was said and who said it; nobody was taking notes. But the Cossacks refused orders to charge, the soldiers refused orders to fire. The police-line drew back. The marchers strode across the bridge, onto the Nevskiy Prospekt and into the center of Petrograd.
The rest is history.
This video, made in New York City on Sunday, recorded what is perhaps our own Neva Bridge moment:
http://www.youtube.com/user/BklynJHandy
Verily, it is as Peter Gabriel foretold:
You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flame begins to catch
The wind will blow it higher...
On 8 March 1917 – 23 February by the old Tsarist calendar and in either case International Women's Day – some 5,000 women of the Lesnoy Textile Works boiled into the streets of Petrograd in a strike against the firing of their Bolshevik sisters who had been helping them organize a union.
As the women marched through the war-starved industrial neighborhoods and toward the center of the city and the Tsar's Winter Palace, they chanted "Klyeb! Myr!" (Bread! Peace!).
Soon they were joined by thousands more, a huge outpouring of men who had been locked out of the nearby Tupulov Machine Works, then a growing mass of soldiers' wives, shopkeepers, typists, soldiers home on leave from World War I.
By now numbering at least 50,000, the demonstrators reached the bridges across the Neva River but were met there by police, formations of Cossacks with drawn sabers and lines of infantry with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets.
The demonstrators paused, unsure what to do next. It was bitterly cold; the Neva was solid ice. Toes and fingers ached. The Cossacks' horses were restless, chomping their bits and stomping their iron-shod hooves on the cobblestones, breath steaming in the frozen air.
At two of the bridges, the marchers turned away. Then, at a third bridge, something happened. A young woman stepped forward and pled with the troops to let the demonstrators pass; a man – perhaps a soldier on leave – argued that to fire on women and girls was to fire on Mother Russia herself. Stories differ wildly as to what was said and who said it; nobody was taking notes. But the Cossacks refused orders to charge, the soldiers refused orders to fire. The police-line drew back. The marchers strode across the bridge, onto the Nevskiy Prospekt and into the center of Petrograd.
The rest is history.
This video, made in New York City on Sunday, recorded what is perhaps our own Neva Bridge moment:
http://www.youtube.com/user/BklynJHandy
Verily, it is as Peter Gabriel foretold:
You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flame begins to catch
The wind will blow it higher...
(18 October 2011)
*****
Promised Piece Nr. 2: Why I Got Involved with the Occupation
(Written at the request of Stacy Emerson, one of the Occupy Tacoma organizers. It was among first texts to appear on the OT website.)
I got involved because the war against Medicare and Medicaid murders us by deliberate abandonment and kills us by neglect and is therefore a form of genocide.
I got involved because the war against affordable health care is a war against our human right to the means of survival.
I got involved because the war against public transit is a war against our human right to travel to work and to the store and to visit our friends and families.
I got involved because the war against public education and public libraries is a war against our human right to knowledge.
I got involved because the war against firefighters and police and military veterans is a war against our human right to safety.
I got involved because the war against Social Security is an assault by already-rich thieves trying to steal the nest egg I earned by my own labor.
I got involved because the war against unions is war against everything that was good about the United States.
I got involved because the great affliction of our world is war by the greedy One Percent against everyone else.
I got involved because I am 71 years old and sick of being cast away despite the fact I have many useful skills honed in a lifetime of work.
Mostly I got involved because I am damn tired of how our We-the-People Constitution – the Constitution I swore as a young soldier to protect – is routinely betrayed by governance that protects the One Percent and savages the rest of us as if we were but slaves.
(5 October 2011)
*****
Continuity: Where to Find My Pre-Blogspot Pictures and Essays
When I began this blog in 2009, it was on the server TypePad, with free space provided under what its then-owners called “the Journalist Bail-Out Program,” a gift to the U.S. journalists – 85 percent of the total media workforce – who had been permanently stripped of our jobs. The idea was that via on-line publication, at least some of us might by electronic magic somehow preserve our careers.
Though I had no such delusions – despite ongoing freelance assignments, my career was destroyed beyond any hope of repair by the bottomless hatred and fear with which U.S. employers react to mental illness – in my case the clinical depression that followed obliteration of my life's work by a mysterious fire in 1983.
Nevertheless and for obvious reasons I leapt at TypePad's opportunity, particularly to (again) display the few photographs that had been in my working portfolio and thus survived the fire.
But last spring TypePad was absorbed by a global advertising agency, and last summer I was summarily ousted – locked out from the server without notice or explanation, this in obvious retaliation for my ever-more-vehemently anti-capitalist politics.
Even so, my work on TypePad gathered sufficient readership to remain available. You can find it at lorenbliss.typepad.com.
*****
Visual Thinking: More Notes on 'Portrait of a Nonviolent Revolution'
Obviously the one photograph above is part of a body of new work about Occupy Tacoma. The remainder of the pictures are ready for posting, but I am withholding them for a few more days so the above writing won't distract from the imagery and vice-versa.
The photo published here today is an outtake from a mini-essay about another of Occupy Tacoma's informational demonstrations in lower-income neighborhoods. I set it apart from the essay because – though I like the deliberately out-of-focus face against the sea of sharply-focused protest placards I caught with the 135mm f/2.5 Takumar on my Pentax MX – the image seemed to add nothing to the story told by the other frames I selected.
Perhaps though, as noted in the caption, by reducing it to black-and-white and adding colorization I can make of it an icon. But what do I know? (According to some I'm just an uppity geezer with an ancient camera, man and machine equally obsolete.) As usual, the medium is FujiFilm 800.
LB/13 November 2011
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