Food Stamp Vote ID's Dems Who Want Poor Folks Dead

14 in Progressive Caucus, 15 in Black Caucus Help Inflict $8.5 Billion Cut

JUST AS “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,”  neither will the murderous impact of the Democratic vote to slash food stamps by $8.5 billion ever be acknowledged by mainstream media. MSNBC, The New York Times and their local equivalents will never tell us what it means that 89 of the 200 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have publicly joined the Republican campaign to savage the nation's poor. That's because “mainstream media” is a clever, falsely comforting, deliberately misleading label for what should properly be known as “Ruling Class media” – the propaganda apparatus that serves (only) the One Percent by ensuring the rest of us remain intellectually imprisoned in a panem et circenses miasma of distraction, falsehood and disinformation.

Food stamps, as the Food Research and Action Center  explains, are essential to the survival of 47 million Americans each month. The $8.5 billion the Democrats are helping hack from the program – even with the cuts spread over ten years as they are – will make it ever more difficult for impoverished USians to avoid starvation. Some 850,000 households will now be devastated by food stamp reductions averaging $90 per household per month. (For the record, the proper name of the food-stamp program is Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the acronym for which is “SNAP.” The damning vote against its recipients was 251 to 166, Roll Call Nr. 31, by which the House of Representatives approved HR 2642, the “Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013.”) It was the second such blow to recipients, who already suffered a significant downsizing in benefits last November. 

But Ruling Class media will never communicate – save in the most hackneyed, stereotypical and carefully pre-approved narratives – the hunger pains and emotional anguish these malicious cutbacks inflict on the children, women and men so victimized. 

While the self-censoring protocols of Ruling Class media are many and complex (as I can personally attest from my own decades in its employ), one particular taboo is especially relevant to the food- stamp coverage – or rather the abysmal lack thereof. The taboo in question, an unwritten but inviolable rule during my decades behind a Ruling Class typewriter, governs the use of the term “genocide,” carefully limiting it to actions by declared or undeclared enemies of the USian Empire, as in “Nazi genocide,” “Communist genocide” or “terrorist genocide.” Never under any circumstances is the term “U.S. genocide” allowed, even to describe the (undeniably genocidal) wars of extermination waged by the empire and its European antecedents against First Nations peoples. That is why Ruling Class media will never report the fact its capitalist masters have contrived a seemingly flawless apparatus for exterminating huge masses of people without the embarrassing stench of death camps. It's called “austerity” – a Big Lie that is perhaps the most diabolically cunning euphemism for genocide in our species' history.

But is austerity really genocide? Isn't calling it “genocide” a bit over the top, as even some of my closest friends maintain? Decide for yourself: the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language defines genocide as “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.”  Merriam-Webster defines it similarly: “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group.”  Now consider how the One Percenters and their representatives are forever denouncing “the culture of poverty”  and its politics of dependency.  In either case, these blame-the-victim diatribes – even those that make no direct reference to racist or socioeconomic stereotypes – clearly identify the USian imperial homeland's poor as “a political or cultural group.” Then note austerity's (deliberately) death-dealing results.  Finally consider the arguments postulated in “Why the One Percent Wants Seniors and Older Workers Dead.” Not only is “genocide” the appropriate noun; it is the only truthful description of the USian war against the poor that began during the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter, radically escalated under Republican Ronald Reagan and has been continued relentlessly by every USian regime, Democrat or Republican, ever since.

(It is an aside, old news to long-time OAN readers but relevant information for newcomers, that in the vicious uniformity of economic policies imposed by Democrats and Republicans alike – Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama – is irrefutable proof the United States is ruled by One Party of Two Names. Behind its deceptive labels and rhetoric, this One Party is exclusively a Ruling Class party. Its sole purpose is to further empower the One Percent. Its long-term goal, already dangerously close to fulfillment, is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. And what is capitalism? Ayn Rand's books – the USian Empire global-economy equivalent of Hitler's Mein Kampf – define it as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue: the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated. It is an operational definition with which the notably prescient Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would surely agree.) 

Meanwhile the Ruling Class media's repeated use of the relatively innocuous “austerity” and its even more deceptively euphemistic forerunner “reform” as code-words for “genocide” has proven remarkably effective. It has not only stifled dissent but shifted (additional) blame onto the ever-increasing multitude of capitalism's victims. Indeed, Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels would applaud its success as yet another real-world confirmation of his principles for mass manipulation.  (Note how concentration of USian mass media into a half-dozen rigidly self-disciplined monopolies allows imposition of the Nazi führerprinzip – “Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority'' – without any obvious government intrusion. Such is another example of the evil genius of capitalist governance.)

As a result, only genocide's immediate victims dare label it the atrocity it is.  And they – or more precisely we – are steadfastly ignored unless we somehow manage to mount massive protests, in which case we are then brutally silenced, just as the Occupy Movement was silenced, by police truncheons and barrages of pepper gas and slander.

The disturbing fact 89 Democrats knowingly voted for what was merely a less murderous version  of reductions in the food stamp program – the still more disgusting fact Washington state's Democratic Senator Patty Murray has publicly admitted she too will vote against food-stamp recipients – are yet additional proofs (if any are needed) today's USian Homeland is governed by One Party of Two Names. That this is the first time Democrats have ever publicly acknowledge their hostility to food-stamp recipients  merely underscores the intensifying oppressiveness of the One Party's rule.

While the names of the 89 Democrats have already been publicized  by both Ruling Class and alternative media, their (allegedly) progressive affiliations have received far less notice. As reported via the preceding link, three of these class-traitors are Democratic Party stalwarts: Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Fourteen members of the Democrats' House Progressive Caucus voted for it: Suzanne Bonamici (Ore.), Corinne Brown (Fla), Andre Carson (Ind.), Emanuel Cleaver (Mo.), Sam Farr (Calif.), Lois Frankel (Fla.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio), Steven Horsford (Nevada), Jared Huffman (Calif.), Dave Loebsack (Iowa), Ben Lujan (N.M.), Rick  Nolan (Minn.), Bennie Thompson (Miss), and Peter Welch (Vt.). 

What has received far less publicity – seemingly none at all in Ruling Class media – is 15 more of these men and women who voted against food stamp recipients are members of the House Black Caucus: Sanford D. Bishop Jr. (Ga.), Corrine Brown (Fla.), G. K. Butterfield (N.C.), Emanuel Cleaver II (Mo.), James E. Clyburn (S.C.), Marcia L. Fudge (Ohio), Alcee L. Hastings (Fla.), Steven Horsford (Nev.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX), Hank Johnson (GA), Cedric Richmond (LA), David Scott (GA), Robert C. Scott (Va.), Terri Sewell (Ala,) and Bennie Thompson (Miss.). That all but two of these representatives are from states of the old Confederacy probably explains their votes as attempts to preserve their election-year attractiveness to the region's malevolently reactionary whites, who whether rich or poor decry food stamps as pandering to allegedly “lazy” minorities. Such paradoxically self-destructive hatefulness by impoverished whites perpetuates the Ku Klux Klan-type Sturmabteilungs that ensure the local white aristocracy's unbreakable hold on the levers of power. A similar, racially motivated dynamic fuels the reactionary malice of lower-income whites in the USian Homeland's interior and thus fosters the nation's ever-more-definitive socioeconomic viciousness, the vote against food stamps included. 

One (deliciously ironic) result is that Wal-Mart, a lavish financier of the reactionary politics that spawned the cuts, is now complaining of reduced grocery profits. In a far more bitter irony reported by the Food Research and Action group, the bill passed the House “almost exactly a year after an expert Institute of Medicine committee found that SNAP benefits are already inadequate for most families to purchase an adequate, healthy diet; and it comes in the same month that researchers issued a new study showing that low-income people have increased hypoglycemia-related hospital admissions late in the month because they run out of food.  The SNAP cuts will be a blow to health and nutrition, and to the government’s long-term fiscal well-being as well.” Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact the Democrats who voted for the cuts, which are now authoritatively estimated at fully $8.7 billion, are inflicting them on their own constituents,  an ultimate “fuck you” from the Ruling Class to the rest of us. (The changing numbers as to the cutback's magnitude reflect how congressional sources themselves now often obstruct the flow of accurate information – another tactic by which the One Percent works to maintain our ignorance of current events.)

In fairness, I should note a long-time Democratic Party activist who is one of my more reliable local (Washington state) sources emphatically states the Democrats who voted for the bill did so because they believed it was the only way to block enactment of the far more deadly Republican proposals. But that glib rationale does not excuse the Democrats' 38-year history of ever-more-feeble representation of the nation's lower income peoples. We the victims – children, women and men (many of the adults elderly and/or disabled) – believe the Democrats should have opposed the bill as a matter of principle. That is, assuming the Democrats still recognize any principles other Ayn Rand's coda of infinite greed as maximum virtue.

LB/2 February 2014

(With special thanks to Pat Fletcher for significant research and reportorial assistance)

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