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| Avowedly non-violent demonstrators such as these -- men and women willing to brave heavy winter rain to picket at the doorway of the building housing U.S. Senator Patty Murray's office in Tacoma -- are frightening the capitalist Ruling Class into desperate measures. Not only do the plutocrats regard such activism as alarming; they also fear disclosures, as on the placard above, of the intimate connection between capitalism and Nazism -- how the latter is merely the logical outgrowth of the former. Thus the oppressive anti-Bill of Rights proposal under contemplation by the Senate (see below) is a predictable Ruling Class response to the nation's rising tide of Working Class anger. (This is another of the 72 pictures I made during the 16 November picketing: FujiFilm 800, 135mm F/2.5 Takumar, Pentax K-1000. Click image to see it full size.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. |
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Emergency Action: Help Stop Congress from Nullifying Bill of Rights
U.S. SENATORS OF both parties are secretly ramrodding a bill through Congress that would give the military the functions of a national police force and allow for the indefinite detention of US citizens – apparently the newest Ruling Class response to the revolutionary impulses incipient in Occupy Wall Street and its local movements nationwide.
According to an emergency call for action issued by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Senate will vote Monday or Tuesday on a bill redirecting U.S. military resources to acts of aggression against American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield - including people in the United States itself.
“Senators need to hear from you,” says the ACLU letter, “on whether you think your front yard is part of a 'battlefield' and if any president can send the military anywhere in the world to imprison civilians without charge or trial...The power is so broad that even US citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.” (Please note the first sentence of this paragraph includes an active link to enable readers to contact their senators via the ACLU website.)
The provisions for worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial are included in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday.
Exemplifying the Big Lie of U.S. democracy – how the Democrats and Republicans are actually united in a single party sworn to defend Ruling Class interests – the bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) and approved in a closed-door committee meeting.
Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), expressed deep concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during a recent Republican debate, says the ACLU document.
DISCLOSURE: Though a member of the ACLU for a substantial part of my adult life, I permanently canceled my membership after the organization wantonly betrayed not just the U.S. Constitution but all underlying principles of representative democracy by its judicial support for the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court verdict that gave the capitalist Ruling Class unlimited financial power to dictate U.S. political affairs. The court's decision is rightfully damned as the death of the American Experiment in governance. ACLU's amicus curiae brief endorsing the Citizens United lawsuit (and thus the court's decision) proves beyond argument the group is merely another Ruling Class front, an organizational Father Gapon that functions ultimately to vent the anger of the 99 Percent, thereby obstructing the emergence of proletarian consciousness. Nevertheless ACLU's emergency-action bulletins are of some use, particularly to circumvent the ever-more-aggressive censorship of Ruling Class media. Hence the link above: please use it.
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Wrongful Cutoffs: Welfare Bureaucrats' Newest Tactic in War on Poor
I RECENTLY LEARNED via U.S. mail the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services has striped me of $130.70 per month in Medicare stipends. Though these are federal funds, they are overseen by state bureaucrats, malevolent drones who falsely charge I refused to comply with their 15 November deadline for eligibility recertification.
Nor am I alone. Thousands – more likely tens of thousands – of elderly, disabled and otherwise chronically impoverished people are receiving the same notices: anguish-generating paper announcing death-dealing cutbacks based on the same bogus charges of noncompliance.
Never mind I mailed the bureaucrats their seven pages of mandatory paperwork on 31 October, DSHS has now reduced my monthly Social Security retirement-pension from a barely survivable $1161 to an impossible $1030.30, the cuts effective the last day of this month.
The terror this inflicts is unimaginable to anyone who has not experienced it.
Nor have I any alternatives. Thanks entirely to the tyrannosauric nature of Bush/Obama capitalism, Social Security has been my sole source of money since early 2009, when I suffered an income loss of nearly 70 percent inflicted by the permanent demise of the journalism market.
And now the welfare bureaucrats have slashed my income another 11 percent – just enough to condemn me to death. I probably won't die immediately – though the associated anxiety has already triggered two episodes of atrial fibrillation – but eventually the malicious denial of life-sustaining medical stipends will prove as deadly as Elizabeth Bathory's knife, whether I am killed by the resultant obstruction of access to clinical care, or by the cutoff of affordable prescription drugs, or by both atrocities combined.
In any case – whether for me or untold thousands of other victims – it is the socioeconomic equivalent of being cast adrift on a terminally-shrinking iceberg.
The best guess is our massive ouster from life-sustaining programs is yet another scheme by the self-serving welfare bureaucrats to save millions of dollars and thus preserve their jobs – in this instance by temporarily dumping us from the assistance rolls, then restoring the stipends to those of us who manage to survive the (deliberately) inflicted fear and other associated stresses long enough to file formal appeals.
I can't say I'm surprised; the self-protective malice of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services – its policy of saving its jobs by savaging its victims – is already legendary. DSHS is at least as notorious for such measures as any other welfare bureaucracy in the United States.
In this context note again the obscenity of how all these bureaucrats feathered their own nests between 1970 and 1990. They increased administrative costs by 5,390 percent even as they slashed stipends and services for desperately impoverished women, children and men – especially men – by 66 percent.
And no, that 5,390 percent is not a typo. It's proven by The Statistical Abstract of the United States, the final word on the nation's socioeconomic and demographic data.
Here's another telling figure from Statistical Abstract. In 1970, 87.7 percent of the nation's federal and state welfare expenditures went to stipends and services for poor people, 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.
A longtime friend – and “friend” in my lexicon has a very specific meaning, not a casual synonym for an “acquaintance” but instead the mental and spiritual equivalent of a brother or sister – tells me I'm being too harsh on the bureaucrats, that they are after all part of the Working Class, the oppressed proletariat, the 99 Percent. He thus urges me to refocus my anger on the One Percent, the capitalist aristocracy the bureaucrats serve so faithfully.
He is usually correct in such matters, often enough he functions as my closest advisor in matters of conscience.
But the forgiving approach he urges – absolutely proper in every other socioeconomic context I can imagine – does not apply to the U.S. welfare bureaucracy.
Look again at the above statistics: the 20-year period from 1970 through 1990 was mostly one of relative abundance for government programs. Never during that period were the welfare bureaucrats operating in accordance with today's Ruling Class mandate to exterminate all non-profitable peoples by denying us life-sustaining food, shelter, medical care and prescription drugs.
Instead the bureaucrats imposed their transformation of the welfare system purely on their own initiative. Again note the 66 percent reduction in stipends, the 5,390 percent increase in administrative costs and above all else the decades of its occurrence.
For this reason I take the U.S. welfare bureaucracy is the ultimate example of how the entire Working Class has been conditioned to accept the core ethos of capitalism: infinite greed redefined as ultimate virtue (and thus the implicit rejection of every code of morality or ethics humanity ever uttered).
As I have written before – and it cannot be said too many times – it is this conditioning that challenges us whenever, in today's struggles, we encounter the me-first/fuck-you values of the Ruling Class amongst Working Class people who – at least in their subconscious minds – should know better.
But the welfare bureaucrats have no such excuse. Since the late 1970s, the primary function of a welfare bureaucrat is not to provide stipends and services but rather to find reasons for withholding them. And the bureaucrats embraced these roles as gatekeepers long before the Ruling Class began publicly claiming capitalism could not afford the social-safety net.
Years before the plutocracy decreed that those of us who are impoverished would be abandoned by the state – that we would either have to find some way to make ourselves exploitable for capitalist profit or we would be left to die – the welfare bureaucrats were willfully facilitating our extermination by neglect. And though the welfare bureaucrats can now claim they are “just following orders” in waging deadly war on elderly, disabled and chronically impoverished people, in the early years of their war against the poor – the '70s through 1990 – they can offer no such rationale.
What we have here is thus a classic teachable moment, a lesson in the new U.S. paradigm of genocide, genocide without gas chambers, genocide as perpetrated by an ironically named “welfare” system, genocide enclosed by the invisible barbed wire of gleefully sadistic bureaucratic tyranny, genocide inconceivable to those who have not experienced its reality firsthand – the welfare system as a vast invisible concentration camp in which the chief executives function as Adolf Eichmanns and the case workers serve as equivalents of Ilse Koch, their paychecks sustained by agonies heartlessly inflicted on the poor – we the 99 Percent – much as Ilse's lampshades were made of the skins of the Nazis' victims.
And no the Ilse Koch analogy is not too extreme: whether you are methodically murdered in a gas chamber or are deliberately slain by the malicious withholding of medical care, you are equally dead – equally a victim of genocide.
Which – again the teachable moment – brings into painfully sharp focus why the U.S. Working Class boils over with such hatred and contempt for government: the very emotions the Republicans cleverly muster into votes, most notably the landslide of 2010.
The more the economy is downsized, the more of us are flung into poverty. The more impoverished we become, the more we are forced into dependence on the smirking tyrants of the welfare bureaucracy. The more we are tyrannized – and this too is how the welfare bureaucracy serves the One Percent – the more we are duped into hating government itself. The more we despise government – the more intense our rage and desperation – the more likely we are to vote for the 21st Century American equivalent of the Nazi Party.
LB/23 November 2011.
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Pictures and essays published in Outside Agitator's Notebook prior to 1 August 2011 remain available at lorenbliss.typepad.com.
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