Food Stamps: Dems, Repubs Vote to Kill Poor People

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.

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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.”

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“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.” 

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“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.) 

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“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.” 

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“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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Xmas Greetings: Why December Is 'the Cruelest Month'

T.S. ELIOT WAS wrong. It's December – not April – that's “the cruelest month.” 

But December's cruelty, unlike April's poignant mixture of “memory and desire,” is not of Nature's making. 

December's cruelty is deliberately manufactured by the One Percent. It began as an expression of aristocratic contempt for lower income people – the notion we the poor, if annually surrounded by an ostentatious display of holiday riches, might be forced by our own hunger and envy to try climbing beyond poverty, as if such wretchedness were no more than a bad rung on the same easy ladder our wealthy detractors had been handed by the pampered circumstances of their births and lives. 

The fact a rare few of us were allowed to succeed in an otherwise impossible ascent gave the Ebenezer Scrooges of capitalism all the data they needed to portray chronic impoverishment as a symptom of laziness and moral degeneracy. 

So it was when Charles Dickens sought to ameliorate December's cruelty with A Christmas Carol. 

But now not even a Shakespeare could carol away December's cruelty. The Ruling Class contempt for lower-income people has toxified into loathing. Its hatefulness is focused like a death ray on elderly and/or disabled persons and anyone who is chronically unemployed. 

Why? Because once we're forever jobless and poor, we're no longer exploitable for profit.

 

The ugly December truth is the One Percenters and their Democrat and Republican toadies want us all dead. They regard us as throw-away workers, useless junk, no different from worn-out machines, each of us a drain on their wealth, each of us an affront to their “fiscal responsibility.”

 

Were this Nazi Germany, their all-time perfect state, they'd march us into death camps and be done with us.

 

But death camps are an international embarrassment. (Look what happened to Hitler.)

Worse, death camps reveal the core truths of capitalism: that capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue; that capitalism is the forcible, often violent overthrow of every humanitarian principle our species ever articulated; that capitalism is (therefore) our species' closest-yet approximation of Absolute Evil.

So instead of death camps, the always-diabolical One Percent conjured up a new strategy: to murder us by neglect and abandonment, to murder us also by the gut-wrenching terror evoked by the approach of our certain victimhood.

How much money will be taken from us? How much health care will be denied us? How shall we survive? 

Verily, in the talk of a “grand bargain” to destroy the socioeconomic safety net, we see undeniable proof the Democrats and the Republicans are all the same – that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi and Eric Cantor and Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are united in a solidarity of unrelenting murderousness, against us, against anyone who is unexploitable for profit.

Their tactics are now obvious. 

First, with all the deliberate malice, methodical viciousness and gleeful sadism they can muster, these politicians and their One Percenter overlords threaten us with termination of the life-sustaining stipends and services provided by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, food stamps, any number of other programs that keep us alive when we're old and/or disabled and/or jobless.

The details of their threats sometimes differ – the Republicans want to shut down all social services immediately and use the ensuing riots to excuse far harsher measures; the Democrats want to kill us more gradually – but the long-term intent is identically homicidal.

 

They know (and they rejoice in the fact) their threats alone are deadly: old hearts do not long tolerate the constant fear of murder by starvation and homelessness and denial of medication.

 

Indeed no one dares say how many lives have already been ended by the climate of terror the One Percent and its Democrat and Republican henchmen have imposed on us all.

 

Next – as the One Percent is already doing via the Democrat and Republican parties – they actually terminate those stipends and services.

 

Note, for example, the following press release from the Social Security Administration:

“Effective November 19, 2012, Social Security field offices nationwide will close to the public 30 minutes early each day.  For example, a field office that is usually open to the public Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. will close daily at 3:00 p.m.  In addition, beginning January 2, 2013, offices will close to the public at noon every Wednesday.”

“While agency employees will continue to work their regular hours, this shorter public window will allow them to complete face-to-face interviews and process claims work without incurring the cost of overtime.  The significantly reduced funding provided by Congress under the continuing resolution for the first six months of the fiscal year makes it impossible for the agency to provide the overtime needed to handle service to the public as it has done in the past” (bold face added for emphasis). 

In other words – if you're a Social Security or Supplemental Security Income recipient with a problem that needs an immediate solution – the Democrats and the Republicans have collaborated on behalf their One Percent masters to make damn sure you're left out in the December cold. 

It also means the annual Social Security award letters – the statements that tell us how little we'll be getting next year – are going out later than ever in living memory. Usually we have them by mid-November; rumor has it they won't be mailed until January.

Unless the local welfare bureaucracy decides to be merciful – and “merciful” has never been part of the welfare bureaucrat's job description – that lack of documentation could inflict ruinous costs.

Why? Because documented income and expenses are the basis of supplementary Medicare stipends, the so-called Medicare Extra Help. No documents, no Extra Help: a loss of at least $104 per month. 

 

The same documentation is necessary to get food stamps, a form of aid slashed so severely its desperate recipients are already going hungry. 

Food stamps aren't stamps anymore; they're now on credit-card-like plastic – which reaps the banks a generous profit of course. The former stamps are now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or, more accurately, Stealing from Needy Americans for Profit. Whichever, it's SNAP – as in “SNAP: there's that much more money in some damn One Percenter's pocket.”

Because no documentation means no disbursements, many states will leap to take advantage of the “savings.”

In those states, it's a huge windfall for money-hungry welfare bureaucrats – the same kind and caring people who, from 1970 through 1990, feathered their nests with a 5,390 percent administrative-cost increase – this while slashing stipends and services to the poor by 66 percent.

(No, that 5,390 percent is not a typo; nor is the 66 percent. They're real numbers derived from real data in the real bible of USian financial reality, The Statistical Abstract of the United States.)

And it's in December all this bad news comes together for those of us who are old and/or disabled and/or too long out of work.

It's in December we realize there will never again be any good news ever.

It's in December we find out just how meager our next year's stipends will be and just how savagely they will be slashed and just how much worse our circumstances will be as a result.

It's in December we're forced to ask ourselves whether the shrunken remnants of our lives are still worth living.

Mostly it's in December we learn how the ever-cunning One Percenters will target us with the newest tactics in their no-need-for-death-camps strategy of genocide.

Merry Christmas from Jesus, the one true god of capitalism, his anointed aristocrats and their Democrat and Republican minions united as executioners acting out his infinitely vicious Parable of the Talents: “throw out the unprofitable into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Goddess save us, every one.

LB/1 December 2012

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