But now the slow-motion genocide of cuts to social services has left me without any means to pay the out-of-pocket cost of corrective surgery, which is $608 plus an additional sum in co-payments of approximately $200 – a total of $808.
It might as well be $800,800. Either sum is impossibly beyond my reach.
Thus – barring a miracle – I will end my life a helpless, hopeless blind man, unless of course I am fortunate enough to die before declining vision forces me into the nightmare of assisted living in some miserably neglectful, piss-reeking nursing home.
In other words, 2016 – though it has hardly begun – has become the most miserable year of my entire life.
Before learning on 6 January of my encroaching blindness, I was already in extended shock at the magnitude of the cutbacks imposed on my 2016 income. It had been the worst yet of the now-inevitable Dismal Decembers – the annual political-becomes-personal nadir-of-reckoning in what is the cruelest month of all for U.S. lower income people. This year – a year in which the Big Lie Democrats claim to have “restored” social services – my monthly Medicare Extra Help stipend was cut from $22.90 to $4. My monthly food stamp allotment was slashed from $103 to $17. And, as noted in November, my telephone subsidy, approximately $17 per month, was abolished entirely.
In
2016, a year in which we seniors and disabled people are notoriously
denied a Social Security cost-of-living increase – my barely livable
monthly income of $1263 has been chopped by at least $121.90 – “at
least” because I can only estimate the impact of an immediate 16 percent
increase in Medicare Part D prescription drug co-payments and a pending
33.3 percent increase in local transit fares.
But the point here is not the hopelessness of my own circumstances – the fact I too like so many others in this ever-more-openly malignant nation must now choose carefully whether to spend my meager income on shelter, food, medicine or clothing – all of which civilized nations regard as human rights. Nor is it the fact my encroaching blindness makes all those choices ultimately meaningless.
The point is the documents I quoted here on 25 November 2015 only hint at the savage magnitude of the social-service cuts inflicted by the Republicans and their Democrat collaborators in the Washington State Legislature – cuts signed into law without so much as a whisper of protest by Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee.
As
previously reported, one of the documents I cited was a slickly
art-directed, expensively printed Democratic Party mailer boastfully
claiming its legislators had “restored” social services. The other was a
grimly unsigned notice from the Washington State Department of Social
and Health Services announcing the state would no longer subsidize
telephone service for lower-income people. Together, the two documents
clearly demonstrate the ugly truth the Democrats are (again) operating
as the party of the Big Lie.
But an apparent gag order – unprecedented in my years of covering state and local politics – has made it thus far impossible to determine the actual magnitude of the cuts. The Democrat legislators appear to have adopted a policy of ignoring any constituent who dares complain about the cuts, even those who send letters. Normally vocal advocacy groups – organizations necessarily aligned with the Democratic Party and therefore undoubtedly silenced by the Democrats' pre-election bullying – have yet to utter a single word of protest. Welfare bureaucrats, when pressed for information, reluctantly mutter “the legislature did it” but refuse to disclose further details.
All I want to know is who to blame – what perpetrators to name in public print. But even my own sources – the remnants of a handful of insiders whose veracity and reliability were established by years of providing accurate information – are refusing to answer my questions about the cuts. I am not an accountant, and without expert assistance, the closed-door secrecy of the budget process and the opacity of the budget itself nullifies my investigative reporting skills. As always, the operant principle of capitalist governance is “fuck the 99 Percent.”
Meanwhile, the local “mainstream media” – that is, the local branches of the plutocracy's de facto
ministry of propaganda – continue to ignore the story, which any even
halfway competent reporter of my generation would have pounced on. This
in turn strongly suggests the media silence about the cutbacks is
deliberate – truth-suppression in obedience to the plutocratic cabal
that owns all U.S. major media and all Democrat and Republican
politicians as well. Such is what passes for “journalism” here in the de facto
Fourth Reich – where our capitalist overlords have by their diabolical
cunning given themselves not only a Josef Goebbels-type propaganda
apparatus but one that earns them obscene profits by its lies and
disinformation.
Now, just as the Betrayer tried to cover up his 2014 food-stamp cuts with a truly Orwellian lie – claiming the cuts “make sure America's children don't go hungry” – so are his state-level minions doing likewise.
The strategic advantage in this sort of Big Lie is found in the fact the Moron Nation electorate accepts it without question. This is partly due to conditioned ignorance, partly due to the ever-more-obnoxious, ever-more-implicitly reactionary cult of “positive thinking” by which the white USian 99 percenters who still have jobs deliberately blind themselves to what is going on around them. Thus they are psychologically distanced from capitalism's socioeconomic and political atrocities in exactly the same way the citizens of Nazi Germany were shielded from the more obvious atrocities of their own nation. Thus too when we the victims complain or protest, we are confronted with hostile disbelief and denounced as welfare queens or “greedy geezers.”
Fortunately there are still a few websites, among them Reader Supported News, that remain willing to report just how truly wretched life in the USian homeland has become, not just for elderly and disabled people, but especially for women, particularly women of color, whose likelihood of suffering death in childbirth is nearly four times that of white women.
Because I am an old man, my time is obviously ending, and though it surely hurts when the capitalists and their factotum bureaucrats and politicians kick me in the balls, my pain has little affect on what is to come. But when you kill the mothers, you murder the very source of life. And this nation's deliberately deadly, methodically sustained misogyny exemplifies more vividly than any of capitalism's other atrocities its unconscionable threat to our species' survival.
LB/11 January 2016
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