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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