Looming Blindness and the Slow-Motion Genocide of Social-Service Cuts Make 2016 My Most MiserableYear

TO MY HORROR, I have learned the cataract surgery I had in late 2014 has failed. I am again going blind, this time from a post-operative condition called posterior capsule opacity – essentially the failure of a production-line surgeon to remove enough of the cataract cells to prevent them from growing back in a new inner-eye locale.

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.

(Yes, I realize $121.90 is mere pocket change for a sneering One Percenter or any of the super-fortunate USian suck-asses whose abject obedience to capitalist tyranny enables them to cling to living-wage jobs. But for someone on a fixed income of scarcely more than $15,000 per year, the loss of $121.90 per month is total, irremediable ruin. What it does to me is eliminate every last penny of my discretionary income – this in a year in which I already [before the doctors discovered my impending blindness] – needed denture adjustment [approximately $100] and three pairs of new shoes [another $150 at least] – money I no longer have no matter the state of my eyesight.)

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.

Since then, it has (again) become obvious the Democrats are – perhaps even more than the Republicans – the enablers of austerity, a clever euphemism for slow-motion genocide: the methodical extermination of those of us who, whether because of age or disability, are no longer exploitable for capitalist profit. For now our already-bloodied noses are rubbed in the fact the legislators – the bought-and-paid-for strumpets of the One Percent who are always trying to bullshit us into believing U.S. “democracy” is anything but cruel deception – also slashed Medicare premium subsidies and hacked away still more dollars from food-stamp allowances.

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. 

Not that I'm surprised. What is being employed to hide these newest social-service cuts is merely the logical extension of the Big Lie tactic the Democrats first employed in President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, most notably in the slogan “change we can believe in” – which “change” turned out to be Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. 

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

-30-

Why I Will Probably Never Again Vote for a Demoicrat

THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS explain why it's almost certain I will never again vote for a Democrat – not even Bernie Sanders. Each essay describes an aspect of the defining truth of present-day U.S. politics: that when we vote a self-proclaimed Democrat into office, we almost always discover afterward we have elected a Republican instead.

This has been the result of an overwhelming deception – simultaneously Orwellian and Machiavellian – that became the operational core of U.S. “democracy” in 1964, when President Lyndon Banes Johnson presented himself as the “peace candidate” even as he and his henchmen were engineering the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify the Vietnam War. Thus LBJ escalated limited military assistance to the viciously anti-Buddhist Diem regime into a major regional conflict that killed millions of human beings and reaped the USian One Percent literally untold profits.

While the Republicans make no secret of their warmongering and their intent to savage us every way they possibly can – “us” meaning the U.S. 99 Percent, and “every way they possibly can” including the slow-motion genocide of intentionally deadly social-service cuts – the Democrats raise our expectations by feeding us an entire mushroom-farm of bullshit humanitarian rhetoric. Then, exactly as if they were Republicans in disguise, they methodically inflict upon us all the GOP's proposed depredations – all the while claiming “political reality” leaves them no other choice.

In other words, just as it took a seemingly pacifist Father Gapon to set up the original Bloody Sunday,  so does it take the Democrats to turn the Republicans' visions of a permanently enslaved Working Class into inescapable and ever-more-harsh U.S. reality.

This is the Big Lie writ large, and the ultimate example of how it has become the Democratic Party's signature strategy is President Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign. Obama the Orator proclaimed “the audacity of hope” as the one sure path to “change we can believe in,” only to demonstrate – by his instantaneous and obviously pre-planned post-election transformation into Barack the Betrayer – that hope is imbecility instead.

Three additional examples of the imbecility of hope should suffice to underscore the point, but here for the record are five...actually six, when I include the fact that – despite Washington state's (allegedly) Democrat administration – its Department of Social and Health Services has begun inflicting on seniors the same deliberate viciousness that has always characterized its response to the needs of younger impoverished people.

***

Example One: Democrat Doublethink – Cancellation as “Restoration”

ACCORDING TO AN obnoxiously upbeat newsletter snail-mailed to all registered voters in September by the House Democrat Caucus of the Washington State Legislature – bear in mind, Washington is allegedly a “progressive” state – the Democrat-approved budget for the 2015-2016 biennium “restores damaging cuts to public assistance programs made during the lean years of the Great Recession.”

Sounds good, right? (We'll take up the ironically misplaced modifier – apparently the combined work of a less-than-literate writer overseen by a woefully incompetent editor – in a moment.)

But days before I received this latest example of Democrat deception as part of the daily deluge of huckstering that endlessly floods my Postal Service mail box, I had gotten a disturbing notice from the Washington State Department of Health Services:

“You have been getting help paying for your home phone (landline) through the Washington Telephone Assistance Program (WTAP). We are sorry to tell you that WTAP will end August 31, 2015. This is because the legislature did not fund WTAP in the current budget. As a result, your landline phone service will cost you more.”

The bottom line is that, thanks to the Legislature's decision to eliminate WTAP, our telephone bills will spike approximately $17 per month, in my case an increase from a subsidized $2.97 to an unsubsidized $18.80 or 533 percent. This combined with other devastating cuts in 2016 (for which see below) will inflict enough of an income-loss to force many low-income seniors and disabled people to cancel their landline telephone service. The only alternative will be going without food, medicine or shelter.

It was the Republican Senate, the Democrats claim, that made us do it. But it was the Democrats who in 2013, when they controlled both houses of the Legislature,  enabled the 2015 destruction  of WTAP by abolishing its tax base. The legislation that ended WTAP's funding was part of a measure that increased phone bills by imposing Washington state's highest-in-the-nation retail sales tax on residential telephone service. This year's termination of the WTAP program and its potentially ruinous phone-bill hike was thus not only predictable but obviously planned at least two years beforehand.

Welfare bureaucrats – never truly empathetic with the poor – now say people afflicted by the end of WTAP should apply to the federal government for free cell phones.  But here in Washington state, this is all too reminiscent of the infamous “let them eat cake” comment that – whether apocryphal or not – was one of the provocations of the French Revolution. That's because in Washington, severe storms are the wintertime norm and seismic or volcanic disasters are a constant threat. Cell-phone service, especially in rural parts of the state, is notoriously unreliable – and therefore effectively useless as a (life-preserving) communication medium.

Which means the legislators have undoubtedly murdered some of their constituents. No such death has been reported yet – at least not to my knowledge. But the winter is young. And the first time one of the cutback victims needs to call 911 for emergency medical care but has no way to do it, he or she will almost certainly die.

Why then are we denied reliable landline service? One reason is to enable the state to continue its obscene, largest-in-the-nation's history tax exemptions for Big Business.  The other reason – increasingly axiomatic amongst lower-income seniors – is the Ruling Class wants us dead, albeit without the public embarrassment of death camps.

WTAP served at least 121,404 households including 19,500 persons age 65 and above,  all of whom the Democrats hurled under the proverbial bus. (Alas, thanks to ever-intensifying efforts by the One Percent and their wholly owned politicians to conceal the true magnitude of U.S. poverty, 2008 was the last year for which I could find WTAP recipient statistics.)

Oh, yeah: one more thing:

Out of perverse curiosity, I checked to see if DSHS had publicly announced the end of WTAP,

It should have been big news when the Democrats met in a back-room during the 2015 legislative session and decided not only to end the program forever but to make sure their decision was kept secret until it was too late to fight it.

But did DSHS even bother to send out a press release reporting the death-dealing decision to end the program? Of course not. See for yourself.

Nor was it ever reported by “mainstream” media – not surprising, since “mainstream” media is owned by the same One Percenters who own the politicians who killed the WTAP program. Indeed it is “mainstream” media's (intentionally) damaging refusal to adequately cover politics that provides the cover under which our plutocratic overlords are looting the country.

But the point here is the restoration of public assistance programs touted in the Democrat newsletter is (another) Big Lie – (another) example of how the Democrats talk humanitarianism but actually govern as if they were Republicans.

Perhaps, though, that phrase “restores damaging cuts” should be taken not as a badly misplaced modifier but as a sneaky statement of truth a crafty, subversion-minded editorial team slipped past the censors.

***

Example Two: Routine Betrayal of the Most Powerless Constituents

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION – which like all persons and groups labeled Democrat tries desperately to hide the party's Ayn Rand viciousness behind a smokescreen of deceptive oratory – is more effectively hostile to the social-safety net than any presidential administration since Herbert Hoover.

Yes, it was President William Jefferson Clinton – aka “Slick Willie” or “Blowjob Bill” – who by so-called “welfare reform” sentenced untold numbers of welfare recipients literally to death  and created a new and particularly insidious form of institutionalized racism  as well.

But Democrat Clinton's depredations were inflicted during a time of relative prosperity, which means they pale by contrast to the economic wounds inflicted on us by Obama the Orator and his cronies after his speed-of-light post-2008-election transformation into Barack the Betrayer.

First there was the death of Employee Free Choice, which ended forever any hope of resurrecting the U.S. labor movement. Next was the death of real health-care reform, also the death of the remnants of our (former) constitutional rights.

Then there was Obama's steady escalation of the war against the poor – the constant, obviously methodical destruction of the already-damaged socioeconomic safety net. It is a process that is ever more obviously a carefully conceived program of slow-motion genocide – a “final solution” by any other name – against all of us the Ruling Class deems useless because we are not exploitable for profit.

The Republicans threaten it openly, but the Democrats, hiding behind their “humanitarian” rhetoric, are the ones who make it happen. Every time.

Thus the slashing of food stamps, first, in 2013, by $35 a month for a family of four, then, last year, by $90 more  – a savaging the Democrats deceptively applauded as “maintaining the important benefits for families” (doublethink by Sen. Debbie Stabenow) and making the program “more legitimate than it was” (doublethink by Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack) – truly Orwellian examples of Big Lies  topped only by the Betrayer himself, who said the cuts will “make sure America's children don't go hungry” – probably the most damning example of presidential doublethink to date.

Indeed that's almost as big a Big Lie as “change we can believe in,” since proven to be the biggest Big Lie in U.S. presidental history.

***

Example Three: Depredation and Disenfranchisement by Appointment

JAY INSLEY, THE Democrat governor of Washington state, appointed a plutocrat to run DSHS, the state's largest agency, which has long been deservedly infamous – especially amongst welfare rights activists and the few remaining members of the working press who actually care about the increasingly Dickensian circumstances of lower income people – as quite possibly the most arrogantly vindictive governmental bureaucracy in the entire United States.

The plutocrat's name is Kevin Quigley,  who said from the beginning he would run the welfare department like a business – that is, by doing everything possible to maximize the gains of the stockholders (in this instance the state's taxpayers) and therefore doing everything possible to enslave the workers and short-change the customers.

Selecting a capitalist business executive to head a state welfare bureaucracy is thus rather like appointing a Ku Klux Klansman to run a for-profit nursery school for African-American children. By definition a capitalist is one for whom insatiable greed is the highest virtue, and the fulfillment of that infinite greed is the ultimate in virtuous behavior. The poor – no matter our circumstances – are viewed either as serfs to be exploited for maximum profit or as lazy and therefore worthless parasites to be eliminated as expeditiously as possible – again, as already noted, without the public-relations damage done by death camps.

Quigley's definitively punitive, definitively exploitative (Ayn Rand) conception of welfare and welfare recipients is glaringly evident in one of DSHS's recent press releases about food stamps, for which SNAP – Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – is the current acronym:

“DSHS Takes Additional Steps to Reduce Food Assistance Fraud...The Department also has worked hard to improve the efficiency of the program. In fiscal year 2013 (the latest federal data available), the total administrative cost per SNAP case associated with eligibility determinations was $18.24, compared to $22.51 in fiscal year 2012. This efficiency is saving taxpayers in excess of $2.5 million per month, based on an average monthly caseload of 595,115 cases. Washington’s SNAP administrative costs are among the lowest in the nation, and much lower than Oregon ($25.81) and California ($67.84).”

Note how the text of the release methodically reinforces the public image of welfare recipients as thieves and thereby focuses on “saving taxpayers in excess of $2.5 million per month” rather than the agency's (alleged) purpose of helping people escape poverty.

Indeed this is more evidence of the same 180-degree turnabout – the shift from defining the poor as victims of circumstance to damning us, a la Ayn Rand, as perpetrators of our own wretchedness – that underlay Clinton's “welfare reform.” It – and the ongoing Randification of USian public opinion – is also reflected in the fact that, between 1970 and 1990 inclusive (and as shown by data in Statistical Abstract of the United States), the federal and state welfare bureaucracy increased its administrative costs by 5,390 percent even as it slashed stipends and services to recipients by 66 percent.

Nor is Washington state in any way exceptional. The Democrat/Republican war against the poor is equally evident in how Obama has stacked the Social Security Board of Trustees with people who want to slash stipends and privatize the program, another of the (deliberately unreported) facts that show how the Democrats are working hand-in-glove with the Republicans.

The Democrats' intent – identical to the Republicans' intent – is to pay back their capitalist benefactors by robbing us of the money the government deducted from our paychecks. The downsizing and privatization of Social Security has at least two purposes, further intensifying economic fear within the Working Class, and giving the money to the Wall Street robber-barons the Democrats and Republicans so dutifully serve.

Here is a list of Obama's trustees and a brief description of their views and activities, with Wikipedia links for documentation:

Jacob J. Lew – Secretary of the Treasury and Managing Trustee of the trust funds. (Clintonite, bankster, unindicted housing-bubble criminal, loved by the Republicans.)

Thomas E. Perez –  Secretary of Labor and trustee. (Clintonite, hence presumably in favor of Social Security cuts but hated by the Republicans nevertheless.)

Sylvia M. Burwell –  Secretary of Health and Human Services and trustee. (Bankster associate, former Wal-Mart exec, loved by the Republicans.)

Carolyn W. Colvin –  Acting Commissioner of Social Security and trustee. (Obvious Obamanoid; will no doubt do whatever the president orders; significantly, approved by most of the Republicans.)

Charles P. Blahous III –  trustee. See also here. (Bushnik, outspokenly conservative, is Obama's chief destroy-Social-Security hitman on the board of trustees – hence his presence as Obama's appointee reveals the Betrayer's true [and truly genocidal] agenda.)

Robert D. Reischauer –  trustee. (Obama's token [apparent] liberal, but like all Obama appointees, he would not have been chosen were there any question about his unquestioning obedience to the president's orders.)

Virginia P. Reno –  trustee. (Seemingly a friend of the worker, but scanty on-line biographical material makes her true ideology and intent uncertain.)

Admittedly I don't know how much influence the anti-Social-Security majority on the board had over the decision to deny us a cost of living increase in a year of skyrocketing medical expenses. But what is significant here is that despite my reportorial resourcefulness, I could not find anybody in authority willing to talk to me about it.

Nevertheless I have no doubt the denial of a COLA will kill some of us before 2016 is finished. I also have no doubt the denial's deadly impact is intentional. Moreover, after years of covering municipal and state government, I know the interactive machinations of politicians and bureaucrats well enough to recognize the pro-genocide trustees undoubtedly influenced the decision.

Obviously, in this new United States – so different from the United States in which I was born – the fact I am old and no longer exploitable for profit has not just nullified but definitively canceled what I was taught were my rights as a citizen.

Worse, because I am old, I remember when the U.S. was – assuming you were white – a fairly good country to live in. And the fact I remember such good times makes me a genuine subversive. It does likewise to every other elderly person who remembers when the U.S. actually made an effort to live up to its ideals.

That's no doubt among the reasons we seniors are forced to live apart, ghettoized in age-segregated housing and activity centers. Obviously the Ruling Class fears our memories of good times might foster rebelliousness amongst our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It's also another reason the Ruling Class unquestionably wants us dead – the quicker the better.

***

Example Four: How Media Silence Helps Democrats Abolish Tenant Rights

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION has joined hands with the national landlord associations in a new effort to suppress tenants' rights – in this case by shifting pest-control costs from landlords to tenants.

What is especially significant about this story is that it isn't a story. Though OAN has several times over the years broken stories that soon thereafter were apparently picked up by major media, my exclusive report on the administration's curtailment of tenants rights has been resoundingly ignored. Once again, we see what happens when the government and the media are owned and controlled by the same unimaginably wealthy (and therefore unimaginably powerful) clique of One Percenters.

The bottom-line truth is that behind its seductive glitz and glitter, the United States is a fascist dictatorship little different from any of the world's other fascist dictatorships – those of Mussolini, Hitler or Pinochet. But here the dictator is a capitalist cabal rather than a single individual and the de facto propaganda ministry is the for-profit media monopoly, which includes the deceptive genius of Madison Avenue and its almost inconceivable skill at sustaining the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

Though now, with Donald Trump bidding to become the dictatorship's public face – the 21st Century equivalent of der Führer...

I ask you readers: is the Trump poster in the photograph at the end of this linked report  disturbingly reminiscent of some of the Hitler posters here?  And does Trump's “Make America Great Again”  have the same jack-booted, Horst Wessel  resonance as “Deutschland Erwache”  (“Germany Awaken”)? Knowledgeable as I am in semiotics – including the unspoken messages in commercial art – I believe the answer in each instance is yes.

***

Example Five: Democrat Precursors to Barack the Betrayer

LEST WE FORGET, the Democratic Party's standardization of the Big Lie began with President Lyndon Banes Johnson, who immediately after the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 reversed the dead president's efforts to disentangle the U.S. from its escalating military involvement in Southeast Asia.

In this instance, the Big Lie was LBJ's presentation of himself as the “peace candidate” even as he and his henchmen were scheming to expand U.S. military aid to South Vietnam into a major war. In retrospect, this began the first of the USian Empire's efforts at preemptive global conquest or – failing that – the deliberate, shock-doctrine  creation of international chaos from which only capitalism can benefit.

An equally damning example of the Democrat Big Lie was the party's longstanding pledge to protect women's reproductive rights – a pledge the Clinton Administration knowingly violated with the North American Free Trade Agreement. Imposed in 1994, by 2003 it had already stolen 1,673,453 jobs from U.S. workers. Women were at least 35 percent  – and in many industries 66 percent  – of these job-theft victims. Thus were as many as 1,104,479 women denied health insurance and as a result robbed of their sexual freedom – an atrocity about which the USian feminist movement (shackled as it is to the Democratic Party) – remains astoundingly silent even now.

Those who wonder at the motives underlying this particular Democrat hypocrisy – and also wonder what force could possibly be powerful enough to so completely silence U.S. feminists – should read The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008), Jeff Sharlet's carefully researched exposé of how the U.S. government has become the global executive-action agency of fundamentalist Christianity, which itself is the ideological handmaid of capitalism.

But Clinton's betrayal of women via NAFTA was not the first instance of the Democrats' unreported collaboration in the deceptively labeled “Republican” war against women – which is, in ugly truth, a relentless campaign by the USian Ruling Class to force Working Class women back into domestic slavery. The first Democrat betrayer of women was the defiantly Christian theocrat Jimmy Carter, who even before he took office had effectively nullified the party's platform-pledge to protect women's reproductive rights.

I should note here I was a member of the working press during the Carter campaign and distinctly remember the (subsequently validated) pre-election concerns of my female friends, all of whom were veterans of women's liberation. Given Carter's publicly declared Southern Baptist fundamentalism – a declaration tantamount to proclaiming one's self a biblical-law misogynist – all these women (very rationally) feared he would try to abolish their sexual freedom. But most of them voted for him anyway because – in what I now recognize as preview of future Ruling Class election strategy – they were convinced their only alternative was voting for “the far greater evil” of a Republican.

When I am writing of such matters I always – at least whenever possible – authenticate recollection by documentation. Thus it is both relevant to this essay and indicative of the magnitude of our allegedly “nonexistent” Internet censorship here in the USian homeland that virtually every reference to Carter's pre-election public pretense of supporting women's rights has vanished down the Orwell hole. The last time I sought this topic's corroborative links, probably four years ago, I found many within a very few minutes. Now, after three hours of diligent searching, I have found only one – a formerly famous, once universally available Time magazine piece describing Carter's denial of abortion rights to impoverished women via the Hyde Amendment as “mean spirited” – a report that is now price-censored by a pay-wall.

Obviously – just as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia -- the historical revisionists have been busy. Thus does the malevolently theocratic USian Imperial Ruling Class  methodically protect its own.

Nevertheless, the Internet search paid off by showing me the best analysis and historical summary I have yet read anywhere of the Democratic Party's lethal transformation from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism, which is actually a new and frightfully Orwellian name for fascism.

***

Example Six: Intensifying Bureaucratic Hostility to Low-Income Seniors

AT THE BEGINNING of this piece, I mentioned how DSHS, the Washington state welfare bureaucracy, has extended to seniors and disabled people the unprovoked viciousness with it has always responded to younger, more conventional welfare applicants. For the latter group, the function of DSHS was never to provide assistance, but rather to gate-keep public funds by maximizing denial, cancellation or reduction of stipends and services. But toward seniors and physically disabled people, the agency was until now relatively friendly, as I myself – a DSHS beneficiary since the Great Wall Street Ripoff permanently obliterated nearly 70 percent of my post-retirement income – can personally attest. Indeed it seemed to me DSHS personnel often went out of their way to be helpful to folks in my demographic group.

To me this was a double surprise, since I had encountered naught but hostility – often extremely vindictive hostility – when I was forced to deal with DSHS during the clinical depression that followed the destruction of my life's work by fire in 1983 and, in the decade before that, when I was a member of the working press, during my (invariably adversarial) contacts with DSHS when it was a source of news.

But under the plutocratic despotism of Kevin Quigley, the scornful antagonism that always defined the DSHS attitude toward younger welfare supplicants now defines its interactions with elderly and disabled people too. Two examples – each unthinkable in previous years – should suffice to illustrate the agency's new, decidedly Ayn Randish policy of deliberate nastiness:

The worst of these examples is the victimization of a woman of the lower-income Working Class who is both physically disabled and officially retired. A lower-level menial employee all her worklife, she was receiving pension payments of $255 per year plus a Social Security retirement stipend of $1001 per month for a total income of $12,267 annually. Including the two tiny pension payments, this averaged out to $1022.25 per month, which included subsidies for nearly 100 percent of her health-care costs. This is definitively rock-bottom poor, which also qualified her for $134 in food stamps each month. Apart from these stipends and subsidies, she had no other income, but by living frugally, she was able to survive.

A few months ago, DSHS randomly audited her case and mistakenly recalculated her pension payments as monthly rather than annual. Thus they abolished all of her health-care subsidies and food stamps,which leaves her only $870 per month to live on. When she appealed, submitting all the requisite documentation, the welfare bureaucrats rejected the documents as fake, called her a liar to her face and refused to reverse their decision. Now – denied all access to health care and needing more than half her monthly income for rent – she lives in abject terror, wondering which will kill her first, the denial of medical services, starvation or homelessness.

In the second example, various non-governmental organizations had stepped up to help process DSHS paperwork in the wake of the huge bureaucratic downsizing fostered by the Great Wall Street Ripoff – no doubt one of the primary reasons the capitalists engineered the crash, as I speculated in 2010  (and for which I was immediately and forever banished from Facebook). Typically the NGOs take welfare applications, verify the documentation and electronically forward the work to DSHS. Now however DSHS has begun rejecting these applications, demanding the supplicants appear in person at the local welfare office, bringing the documentation there for further review. This adds weeks (and sometimes months) to the process and – obviously as intended – also makes it profoundly difficult for many elderly and/or physically disabled people to comply.

The second-example maliciousness I have experienced personally: specifically the arbitrary denial of nearly $700 in medical expenses that – supported as they are by official receipts – would previously have been factored into my monthly food-stamp allotment.

Hence – and I say this again for emphasis – the purpose of the Washington state welfare bureaucracy (which is now the purpose of the federal welfare bureaucracy in Washington D.C. and in all the 49 other states), is not to help the poor, but rather to placate the ever-more-frightened taxpayers – that is, those who still have living-wage jobs -- by denying us life-sustaining stipends and services, and thereby shoving us as quickly as possible into our graves.

Welcome to the Democratic Party's United States.

***

Conclusion: the Big Lie Has Become the So-Called “American” Way

THE ULTIMATE LESSON here is in the varied applications of Josef Goebbels' famed Big Lie.  His basic principle was simple: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Application of the Big Lie by the USian Ruling Class is evident two forms, firstly in how the Republicans routinely lie about reality (as in the “weapons of mass destruction” falsely claimed  to be in Iraq), secondly in how the Democrats routinely lie about their intent (as in Obama's “change we can believe in”).

The first Big Lie form – the knowingly false description of reality – is ultimately subject to fact checking and is therefore maintainable only by the strictest censorship, in which context the remainder of the Goebbels quite linked above is especially relevant: “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State” (emphasis added).

In the Big Lie's second form – deliberate falsehoods about intent – the truth cannot be established save by the (invariably speculative) indications of past conduct, which in the case of a carefully managed candidate may themselves be deliberately deceptive. From the perspective of the Ruling Class, the primary advantage of the second form is that it requires a much-less-severe regime of censorship and is therefore particularly amenable to maintaining the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

Thus, in these applications of the Big Lie – one to drum up support for an imperial conquest, the other to dupe the voters into accepting “progressives” who in fact are no less fascist than their Republican rivals – we see how the Democrats are far worse than the Republicans, not only in their savaging of the socioeconomic safety net (and of non-police, non-military government services in general), but most especially in the long-term damage they have done to the U.S. experiment in representative democracy – damage obvious in the unprecedentedly low voter turnout  and in the various expressions of public hopelessness that sometimes surface via random polling, for example here  and here. 

In short, the Democrats hide their malevolence behind humanitarian Big Lies even as the Republicans brandish their own viciousness to make the eventual Democratic alternative palatable – never mind in principle it is equally savage. The Republicans thereby create the perfect diversion behind which to camouflage the ugly fact the Democrat Party of today is as much the party of Ayn Rand as the GOP. The Democrats meanwhile lie about who and what they are, exploiting the genuinely humanitarian history of the (forever abolished) New Deal and the (never-to-be-fulfilled) expectations deliberately raised by carefully selected, allegedly “progressive” personalities such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alan Grayson to further conceal the party's predatory intent. This is, indeed, the defining Big Lie of USian Empire politics – an alleged two-party system that is in fact a single-party dictatorship diabolically disguised as its opposite.

Why then vote at all? However much our election process has been perverted – and I believe that since Citizens United  it has been totally perverted – I think it is vital to preserve the franchise itself against the (faint) possibility of revolutionary reform. The more we don't vote, the easier it will be for the Ruling Class to abolish elections entirely.

For whom then will I vote? For third-party candidates: Communists, socialists, maybe even Greens if they'd set aside their white-bourgeois hostility to unions.

Why only third party candidates? Because – as we see from the above – the notion that not voting for a Democrat automatically aids the forces of reaction is yet another Big Lie. Both parties are instruments of the Ruling Class, and by playing the good-cop/bad-cop role, they intimidate us into giving the Ruling Class everything it wants. Hence, as a member of the Working Class, I know I'm fucked whomever I vote for – or whether I vote or not. That's because we in the Working Class are methodically denied any influence in U.S. governance,  whether it's the Democrats in power or the Republicans.

Again – and it cannot be said too often – that's why voter turnout is already at an all-time low and still declining. Why cast a ballot if your vote is meaningless?

Though the U.S. population yet remains too Moron Nation ignorant to understand the necessity of voting to preserve the franchise, it is at least awakening to the fact elections don't matter when the country is ruled by a handful of nameless, faceless plutocrats who, individually and collectively, have the same serial-killer mentality as Adolph Hitler, whom their fathers and grandfathers financed into power to be the savior of capitalism – the very role Trump now seeks for himself.

LB/10-24 November 2015

-30-

Capitalism Requires an Endless Succession of Big Lies

CAPITALISM, OF NECESSITY, requires constant use of the Big Lie.  That's because, when capitalism is reduced to its lowest common denominator, it is ultimately moral imbecility – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth. The same is true of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – and for the same reason. Neither capitalism nor capitalist governance can exploit its victims without a perpetual smokescreen of lies and evasions to conceal its quintessential savagery.

While the lies of our capitalist masters are typically blatant – for example President Obama's knowingly false assertions the Russians are to blame for the Ukraine Crisis  – sometimes their deceptions are more subtle. One example is the methodical destruction of the career and ultimately the life of the journalist Gary Webb,  detailed by Robert Parry in “The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up.” Another is the lie-by-omission at the core of the Democratic Party's pre-election effort to make us forget how Democrats joined hands with Republicans to try to slash our already inadequate Social Security stipends. Thus a recent Truthout piece, “The GOP Social Security Deception Game Is On - Here's How to Fight Back,” dutifully disseminates the propaganda the Democrats desperately hope will enable them to retain control of the U.S. Senate. Its story-line is the Big Lie that Democrats are eternal fighters for the Working Class, and with Sen. Elizabeth Warren  arguing the case, it's an easy lie to believe – especially for those of us foolish enough to still have faith in the possibility of obtaining redress from our hopelessly corrupted political system.

But lest we forget the truth – which Truthout does reliably publish save when the its election-year fealty to the Democratic Party overrides its journalistic ethics – here is an AlterNet report, “Sell-Out Alert: 9 Democrats Already Caving to GOP On Social Security Cuts,” to remind us what really happened.  As it says, “...the biggest Democrat of all – and the one not drawing a line in the sand but possibly leading a historic sellout – is President Obama.” In other words, Barack the Betrayer strikes again, targeting Medicare as well as Social Security – and now he's got Sen. Warren, the alleged defender of the 99 Percent, to cover for him. Equally ironic is the role Washington state Sen. Patty Murray – a Democrat who likes to brag about her feminist credentials – played in proposing cuts which (see below) would have been especially devastating to women.

For those who still doubt the Democratic and Republican parties are nothing more than deceptively named factions of a single party of plutocrats, there's the fact 43 of the 55 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus voted just last February to help President Obama impose an $8.5 billion food-stamp cut.  Note the Democratic numbers: 43 of 55 is 78 percent. And when you eliminate the two independents and count only the actual Democrats, you have 43 of 53 or 81 percent – which gives us the real percentage of Democratic politicians who are indistinguishable from their Republican counterparts in hatred and contempt for us, We the People of the 99 Percent. As Washington state Senator Maria Cantwell put it (scroll down the linked text), “it's time that we move forward” – never mind the vast majority of the cutback's victims are women and children. 

Cantwell is considered one of the Democrats' leading liberals and feminists. But it is her Marie Antoinette indifference to the deliberately genocidal consequences of radically downsizing the food-stamp program that underscores another of the Democrats' Big Lies – their now obviously false claim they can at least be counted on to protect the wellbeing of women.  It was Democratic President Jimmy Carter's signature  on the Hyde Amendment that robbed lower-income women of their abortion rights. It was Democratic President Bill Clinton's expansion of free trade  that took away so many jobs – and so many health-insurance policies – that were the sole sources of reproductive choice for working women who were not independently wealthy. (Rich women, Ruling Class women, always have reproductive freedom; it's one of the innumerable privileges the plutocrats are ensured by their obscene wealth.) More recently it was Obama the Orator's initial shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer – the irremediable betrayal that forever defined Usian health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right – that opened the door to Hobby Lobby  and all the other looming theocratic restrictions on abortion and contraception. And don't forget the deadly damage  the Democrats' proposed Social Security and Medicare cuts would have done to women.

What, therefore, will change if the Republicans – as expected – win a majority of seats in the Senate? Not much; arcane, pro-plutocracy Senate rules already give the Republicans de facto control,  so all that will happen is the nation's march toward overt fascism and Christian theocracy and its simultaneous descent to the total wretchedness of de facto slavery for the 99 Percent will merely accelerate a bit. Besides – just as the Social Security and food-stamp issues demonstrate – the only real difference between the two parties is rhetoric. The Republicans are already unapologetic Christofascists. The Democrats meanwhile have become breathtakingly skilled at hiding their fascism behind legislative sleight-of-hand and election-time declarations of humanitarian principles in which they no longer believe. The latter have therefore become Big Lies in their own right: the classic example is Obama's 2008 campaign slogan: “change we can believe in.”

The bitter truth is we are governed by one Ruling Class party of two names. Thus government at every level in the United States, federal, state and local, is by, for and of the capitalists, with the rest of us – despite the Big Lie of “democracy” – methodically excluded.  But when oh when will we awaken to the awful truth?

******

As I said above, Truthout can be counted on to tell the truth about anything save the Democratic Party. Hence the relevance of two unusually insightful reports that explain exactly how capitalism works. One, which describes how New York City perfected a mode of zero-tolerance policing that helps force lower-income people out of neighborhoods targeted for gentrification,  is entitled “Policing for Wealth.” The other – a timely essay on how private charity preserves capitalism  and thereby facilitates its oppression of lower-income people – is headlined “The Charitable Society or 'How to Avoid the Poor and Perpetuate the Wealth Gap.” It's money quote – no pun intended – lays bare a perfect example of the systemic dishonesty essential to capitalism's survival: “...corporate charity becomes a kind of self-rewarding capitalist enterprise because it is able both to maximize profit through tax breaks, and subtly cement capitalist economic, social and political policies that reflect the interests of the super-rich – from monopolization to privatization of public goods and institutions. So, it turns out that much of the giving involved here is not giving for the sake of promoting the common welfare, but philanthropy for private profit and corporate self-interest at the expense of long-term public good” (italics as in original).

******

At various times I have pissed off many of my more politically naive comrades in the USian Left by proclaiming that the so-called “revolution of the 1960s” never happened. Yes, it was a potentially revolutionary time – so much so Soviet intelligence scrutinized the era's people and events in a meticulous search for revolutionary potential. But the Soviet analysts, who (let us not forget) were themselves professional revolutionaries, concluded that only the USian minority communities had the requisite combination of grievances, leadership, anger and determination. And even these qualities, the analysts found, were nullified by the communities' relative smallness and the exclusionary bigotry of the Caucasian majority. The rebellious whites were meanwhile dismissed as mostly bourgeois faddists who had merely seized upon revolutionary rhetoric as a means of rationalizing ultimately selfish demands. Hence no Soviet advisers were ever dispatched. The analysis, by the Committee for State Security, Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or KGB, came to light after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. By then, the accuracy and indeed the prescience of the analysts' work had been confirmed by how quickly anti-war dissent and a plethora of other seemingly “revolutionary” activities were terminated by the end of the military draft in 1972. Hence my “no revolution” argument is – at least in a limited sense – validated by world-class experts.

Not all whites, of course, were faddists. Many were in fact genuine revolutionaries. But their revolution – manifest in feminism, environmentalism, the back-to-the-land movement, the alternative press, the resurrection of paganism and most of all in music and art – was no more or less than what the late Walter Bowart called it in a conversation with me in 1967, “a revolution in consciousness” rather than in political or socioeconomic terms. This was the revolution I described in the forever lost work “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which argued on the basis of a 24-year collection of evidence that the epicenteral rebellion of the 1960s was the first wave of a spontaneous global uprising against patriarchy.  (As many of you know already, “Dancer” was destroyed by fire just as it seemed destined for mainstream publication.) But other relics of that era fortunately live on, albeit sometimes only in the contents of academic papers. One of these is a carefully researched, tautly reasoned, competently written masters-degree thesis, a brief history of the feminist back-to-the-land movement,  “Country Women: Back-to-the-Land Feminism and Radical Feminist Praxis in the Women's Liberation Movement,” that despite its somewhat awkward title is useful far beyond the realm of women's studies. It contains the most complete back-to-the-land-movement bibliography I have yet encountered. Not withstanding its singular focus, it provides what is probably our best-ever portrait of the attitudes and yearnings that brought the entire back-to-the-land movement, feminist or otherwise, into being.

In this latter context, perhaps my own back-to-the-land piece, a prose elegy to an ill-fated commune,  is again relevant.

Unfortunately our understanding of the era in question remains limited by the label – “the '60s” – which the Ruling Class insists we use to describe it. But it was not merely the phenomenon of a single decade. A more accurate chronology would mark its beginning with two events in 1955. One was Rosa Parks'  infinitely courageous protest against Southern segregation; the other was Allen Ginsberg's completion of the epic poem Howl.  What followed those two seemingly disparate events was an astounding symbiosis of political and aesthetic rebelliousness that not only gave birth to a half-dozen identifiable movements – civil rights, anti-war, feminist, environmentalist, back-to-the-land, alternative press – but evolved its own signature musical and artistic forms. It also legitimized quests in realms of hitherto-forbidden spirituality including Buddhism, First Nations wisdom and goddess-centered paganism. The associated metaphysical rebellion – particularly the evolution of modern Wicca  – was especially important in adding spiritual dimensions to feminism and environmentalism.

However, from the bourgeois (and therefore culturally dominant) perspective of Caucasian university students, the era's significant rebelliousness was mostly political and is assumed to have begun with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement,  which seemed to end triumphantly and thereby raised false hopes that would eventually be forever shattered as the capitalists fought back with a slow but inexorable vengeance, turning the United States into an electronic concentration camp  and relentlessly shackling the population in the same sort of economic and political slavery that has always characterized the lives of USian minorities. Now, 50 years later, Barbara Garson, who was one of the original FSM activists, poignantly wonders what the hell happened: “Who Really Won the Battle of Berkeley.” As if in reply, an analysis by Marlene Dixon, another activist of the era, provides the best explanation  I have yet read, never mind “The Rise and Demise of Women's Liberation: A Class Analysis”was written in 1977. Dixon argues – correctly I believe – the era's political and economic revolutionary potential was nullified by widespread refusal to acknowledge the reality of class warfare and by wholesale rejection of ideology and ideological discipline – all of which failings were legacies of the reflexive anti-intellectuality drilled into the nation by the sweeping anti-Leftist purges that followed World War II. While Dixon's work focuses on Women's Liberation, it is, like much feminist writing, a microcosmic portrait of the internal conflicts that characterized the entire spectrum of the era's political movements.

As to when the era ended, that too remains in dispute. But if I were to select an arbitrary date, I'd pick 4 November 1980, national election day, when fully 55 percent of the post-World-War-II baby-boom generation  voted their bourgeois, white-racist values and elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Thus the same generation that opposed the Vietnam War and claimed to be “revolutionary” later set the United States on the counter-revolutionary path to overt fascism along which it has relentlessly marched ever since. Hence, as it turns out, the aforementioned Soviet analysis was not nearly negative enough. Too many of the bourgeois whites who claimed to be revolutionaries were not just faddists; they were also fascists at heart – a perplexing condition indeed until you factor in the soaring popularity of Ayn Rand's work, particularly Atlas Shrugged,  which, when it was published in 1957, even conservative reviewers damned as a fictionalization of Hitler's Mein Kampf. But  Atlas Shrugged's  promoters claim it sold an average of 73,400 copies per year during the 1980s and now, they say, it sells at an annual rate nearly 4.1 times that. If these figures are accurate, what they tell us is there is no likelihood at all of diverting the already global USian Empire from its ever-more-obvious goal of becoming the de facto Fourth Reich. Exactly as history demonstrates, what is fascism but the mature form of capitalism?

Nor is there any rational likelihood of a movement arising to somehow ameliorate capitalism's ever-escalating brutality. Quoth one of its victims, the activist Cicely McMillan, speaking via a recent interview by Anna Lekas Miller entitled “On Being a Woman Inside and Outside of the Criminal Justice System”: “I don’t see a movement coming unless it is led by women, cross-class, cross-culture, cross-race. I think this has got to be a highly collaborative movement. I think women are the only ones who have been socialized with a certain experience to be able to do that. If we can work on behalf of women, on behalf of families, on behalf of communities collaboratively then we will see a movement of the 99 Percent, and the only way we will get at that is through the inter-workings of the people who are the community leaders and those are still women.” McMillan is obviously correct. As Vladimir Lenin noted in 1918,  “the experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much women take part in it.”

As to what really happened to the USian revolutionary potential, whether from 1955 through 1980 or now, it seems neither Garson nor Dixon – nor for that matter McMillan – are familiar with the works of Sun Tzu.  Hence they each overlook the simple fact even the most competent of the nation's would-be revolutionaries committed the always-fatal sin of underestimating the enemy. They failed to recognize the USian Imperial Ruling Class is the most all-powerful, most malevolently cunning ruling class in human history. The Occupy Movement, in which McMillan played a key role, was undone by the same failure. Thus were squandered what were undoubtedly our species' last opportunities to escape the slave-world horrors of capitalism matured to fascism – the aforementioned electronic concentration-camp. More to the point, the rebelliousness associated with the '60s was also probably our last chance to avoid self-inflicted extinction. Already the Ruling Class is moving to ensure a fully indoctrinated, relentlessly ecocidal fascist future: Atlas Shrugged is now required reading in many of the nation's colleges universities. Other Ayn Rand diatribes have been required reading in USian high schools and middle schools since the mid-1960s. Josef Goebbels – who sought to achieve universal German readership for Mein Kampf – is no doubt smirking in his grave. 

 

Meanwhile the terrifying totality of the secret-police operations by which we are already oppressed becomes ever more evident thanks to a few die-hard journalists and civil libertarians – daring men and women who will undoubtedly be among the first persons disappeared when the Ruling Class decides it's had enough dissent and protest and orders the Last Roundup. The following is from “Police Sign Gag Order Before Getting FBI Spy Equipment,” a MuckRock report:“Advanced cell phone tracking devices known as StingRays allow police nationwide to home in on suspects or to log individuals present at a given location. But before acquiring a StingRay, state and local police must sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI, documents released last week reveal. The document released by the Tacoma Police Department is heavily redacted — four of its six pages are completely blacked out — but two unredacted paragraphs confirm the FBI’s intimate involvement with StingRay deployment.”

Yes, dear readers, that's the same Tacoma in which I now reside.

******

For those of us who recognize the course toward overt fascism the U.S. has been steering since 22 November 1963 – and for those who do not, a superb primer is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (James W. Douglass; Orbis Books: 2008) – it is no accident an unprecedented campaign for forcible civilian disarmament has emerged just as the 99 percent has begun awakening to the fact the American Dream is dead beyond resurrection. With the nation's socioeconomic conditions in a permanent nosedive  and even members of the Ruling Class now openly predicting revolution,  the forcible disarmament of the civilian population is merely another (logical) element on the Ruling Class list of measures to ensure we will never escape the electronic concentration camp in which we are already imprisoned. (Yes, it's true a hunting rifle is no defense against a tank or a drone. But a hunting rifle can surely be used to acquire weapons that are – which is why, for example, Hitler began disarming his opponents as soon as he took power.)

However, the USian Ruling Class – bolstered by its mastery of psychology and its manipulative subsets in marketing and behavior modification – is infinitely more sophisticated in its application of the techniques of oppression than ever the Nazis were. That's why, here in the land of the Second Amendment, forcible disarmament is invariably cloaked with a Big Lie, always in the form of deceptions, often by censorship as well. Thus the enormous relevance of a censorship-defying report  by Charles E. Cobb, “Guns and the Southern Freedom Struggle: What’s Missing When We Teach About Nonviolence.” Cobb, a former field secretary in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is the author of This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014). As I said on the comment thread when CommonDreams, which is often painfully politically correct, dared circulate the aforementioned text:

Thank you for publishing Mr. Cobb's oh-so-relevant report. Especially thank you for  having the incredible (and incredibly rare) courage  to defy the venomous, maliciously dishonest and sometimes violent hatefulness of the forcible disarmament cult -- the hysterically anti-gun fanatics who, in clandestine alliance with the One Percent, are reducing us all to compulsory pacifism and mandatory victimhood. (Yes, there really are some of us on the Left – far more than the forcible-disarmament cultists dare admit – who support the Second Amendment in its broadest interpretations. And Mr. Cobb's report illustrates one of the reasons why.) 

     

Soon afterward, perhaps fearful of being outdone by one of its rivals, Truthout published a report that refutes one of the forcible-disarmament movement's most oft-repeated Big Lies.  Entitled “Fact-Checking Feinstein on the Assault Weapons Ban,” it notes how throughout the 10 years since the federal assault-weapons ban expired, its originator, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), continues to claim the ban reduced crime and saved lives. “But gun violence experts,” the report states, “say the exact opposite.” In other words, Feinstein – like most of her colleagues in the forcible disarmament movement – knowingly lies.

The proponents of anti-gunowner Initiative 594 in Washington state are using the same tactics. They bill their initiative as a “simple” measure to tighten the restrictions that presumably keep felons and dangerously mentally ill persons from acquiring firearms. But its oppressively complex, turgidly written text is laden with prohibitions intended to criminalize many legal and commonplace uses  of shotguns, rifles and handguns – including shared usage amongst family members. And it is being promoted by some of the slickest anti-gun propaganda  I have yet witnessed. Once again, just as the late Watergate felon John Ehrlichman acknowledged in his 1974 testimony, it seems Washington state is being used as a national proving ground  for techniques of oppression.

 

Nationally the ultimate firearms-related question would now seem to be whether the Left is at long last awakening to the need for an armed Working Class to discourage capitalist savagery. Locally the question is whether the I-594 proponents' Big Lie tactics will prevail in a state the electorate of which – albeit nominally progressive – is nevertheless noted for its skepticism toward any measures that expand the authority of government. The answers will undoubtedly be vital in shaping our national future.

LB/27 September-5 October 2014

-30-