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.
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2012/march/20/ryan-budget-medicare-medicaid-republicans.aspx
(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.
(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.
“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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