Obama Says Cuts Ensure 'America's Children Don't Go Hungry'
THE FINAL VOTE against food-stamp recipients
was a revealing 68-32, with only nine Senate Democrats opposing the
cuts; that plus the president's enthusiastic approval of a decade of
downsizing the government now admits will total at least $8.7 billion is
tantamount to official notice from the Democratic Party it too wants
the nation's poor people dead – that the only difference between the
Democrats and Republicans is over the forcefulness with which this
genocide is to be accomplished. The Republicans wanted to slash the program by $40 billion,
which would have begun killing off lower-income people almost
immediately. But the Democrats apparently feared the GOP's proposal
would be too obviously murderous – almost as embarrassing as public
endorsement of death camps – which is no doubt why the One Party of Two
Names finally opted for the less dramatic, easier-to-obfuscate reduction
that will short 850,000 food-stamp-dependent households a
starvation-inflicting average of $90 per month.
Meanwhile,
with the Democrats ever more worried by the growing popularity of
revolutionary socialism, they've intensified their efforts to hide their
Ayn Rand malevolence behind classic, Josef Goebbels-type Big Lies, most
recently President Obama's astonishing claim the food-stamp cutbacks
will “make sure America's children don't go hungry.” Though the “public integrity”
Barack the Betrayer promised us in 2008 was long ago recognized as no
less a deception than “change we can believe in,” portrayal of the
deliberate imposition of hunger as a humanitarian act is a new low, a
falsehood in comparison to which most of the president's other lies
dwindle to insignificance. It is also in the mind-wrenching mode of
“freedom is slavery,” a proclamation that characterized the (formerly)
fictional tyranny described in George Orwell's prophetic 1984. Now we are implicitly shown its entirely non-fictional equivalent: “hunger is nourishment.”
And for the 47.2 million USians who now depend on food stamps
to keep themselves and their children fed, the associated pangs will
only intensify: as a prescient headline writer at Seattle's excellent
on-line daily Crosscut has already implied, this is undoubtedly the beginning of the end
of the entire food stamp program, the formal name of which is S.N.A.P.,
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Perhaps now the acronym
will become a sardonic joke: Starvation Neutralizing America's Poor, as
in “with a SNAP of its fingers, the Ruling Class has fucked us again.”
Hunger as nourishment? Verily, such is the quintessence of absolute evil.
*****
Outside Agitation on the Comment Threads of Other Relevant Reports
“50 Reasons We Should Fear the Worst From Fukushima” Harvey Wasserman of EcoWatch
exposes the apocalyptic reality of the Fukushima debacle. I quote a
Cheyenne Ghost-Dance chant: “The white man's god/ has forsaken him/ Let
us go and/ look for our Mother...” Then I add a nightmare notion that
should especially bug the UFOs-have-landed folks: what if “the alleged
'divine revelations' that spawned patriarchy – Moses' Burning Bush,
Ezekiel's fiery wheel, etc. ad nauseam -- were intergalactic
equivalents of the smallpox-infested blankets by which Europeans
exterminated First Nations peoples. Thus the ultimate purpose of
patriarchy and its maturation over the centuries into capitalism and now
finally into ecocidal fascism is to make Earth too toxic for life as we
know it – precisely as is happening. Our final, dying clue as to who
the Global Ruling Class serves by its relentless moral imbecility (and
who – or rather what – will inherit the planet as a result), is found in
the fact that of all earthly species, only the cockroach is totally
immune to radiation and can within a single generation evolve immunity
to any other toxin.”
***
“The New Snowden Revelation Is Dangerous for Anonymous - And for All of Us” Gabriella Coleman of Wired reports
on the government's zero-tolerance, maximum-sentence prosecution of on-line civil disobedience, but then inexplicably claims such draconian
measures are applied only to cyber-activists – that “physical tactics
such as trespass or vandalism of property rarely result in serious
criminal consequences for participants and tend to be minor civil
infractions instead of federal crimes.” I imply she's either ignorant or
in denial: obviously, “the new USian Empire norm – note the felonies
for which the Oak Ridge 3 were convicted – is going to be maximum
charges and maximum sentences in retaliation for ANY act of civil
disobedience.”
***
“Helping homeless students stay in school”
Joseph Sutton-Holcomb describes the valiant efforts of the specialists
employed by local school districts to ensure the Seattle area's many
homeless students are able to remain in school. A major challenge, he
writes, is arranging the students' transportation to and from classes. I
use the story as a teachable moment to point out the only way to end
homelessness is to end capitalism.
Only
now – too late for the comment thread – did I focus on the fact
Sutton-Holcomb failed to report the specialists' tasks are made
profoundly more difficult by the region's notorious hostility to mass transit,
with a growing number of local voters rejecting buses, trolleys and
even commuter rail service as welfare that encourages laziness by
pampering minorities and lower-income people in general. (Note: my OAN
piece on the anti-transit-user hatefulness that defines Washington
state politics was written nearly four years ago, but the bigotry it
describes intensifies each time there is a transit vote,
as in Tacoma during the 2012 general election. Though the local transit
authority was not forced to shut down, all that saved it was a small,
unanticipated, post-2012 increase in sales tax revenues. Its service
remains minimal, the nation's worst amongst comparable cities, with its
37 bus routes so radically downsized, their operations end as early as
5:20 p.m. daily. Meanwhile its minimized schedules inflict extreme
hardship on anyone who does not have an automobile, while the refusal of
even self-proclaimed “progressive” politicians to take ameliorative
action again demonstrates the malice toward lower-income people that
increasingly characterizes USian governance at every level.)
***
“What does Al Jazeera America see in the Northwest?”
Olivia Weitz reports on Al Jazeera's new Pacific Northwest bureau but
notes that despite the news agency's reputation for accurate reporting,
its U.S. viewership remains tiny. I point out it's no doubt “the (very
rational) fear of being placed on one or more secret-police watch lists
that keeps the Al Jazeera America audience so small. Thus the USian
Empire's total surveillance regime fulfills another of its definitive
purposes: ensuring that we the people remain imprisoned in ignorance.”
***
“Whose Radical Jesus? The Story of a Literary Success” Truthout's Paul Buhle reviews Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House: 2013).
I point out that regardless of the truth or falsehood of Aslan's
hypothesis, its ultimate function is to serve the Ruling Class by
re-legitimizing the murderous and ecocidal religion of a god that
failed. A far more genuinely revolutionary interpretation of the Jesus
story, I add, “was written nearly 70 years ago by Robert Graves in King Jesus,
which argues that while Jesus was indeed a rebel zealot, his primary
purpose was to extinguish the last lingering remnants of the old
goddess-centered religions. The 'money quote' -- morbid pun intended --
in Graves' telling of the story sums up the entire history of
patriarchy, from its origins in Moses' burning bush and Ezekiel's fiery
wheel to its final manifestations today as capitalism fulfills itself by
morphing into terminal fascism. 'I am released from the jurisdiction of
the Female,' says Jesus, 'I have come to destroy Her works' (King Jesus;
Minerva Press, London: 1946, p. 256). The 'Female' of whom Jesus spoke
was the goddess who is the variously titled Mother of All Being, Gaea,
the Mother Nature whose act of creation was to give birth to the entire
cosmos. Especially if we consider the Gaia Hypothesis -- that Earth (and
perhaps by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and
self-regulating -- what Jesus said two thousand years ago is precisely
what the capitalists are saying today: that they are released from
Nature's jurisdiction; that they have come to destroy all her works.”
LB/9 February 2014
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