Hillary Will Kill Me No Matter What – Either by More Cuts to Social Security and Medicare or Starting World War III

Lest We Forget: Memorial Day in Tompkins Square Park, New York City, 1967. Click on image to view it full size.
Photo © Loren Bliss 1967, 2011.

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NO, I'M NOT dead, not yet, though sometimes the aches, pains and political betrayals of old age – arthritis in shoulders, wrists, knees and every vertebra plus the constant foreboding generated by the Democrats' ongoing collaboration with the Republicans in the slow-motion genocide of “austerity” – almost make me wish I were dead.

Especially now, burdened as I am with the physical preparations for temporary eviction from my apartment – an atrocity encouraged by anti-tenant Washington state law that allows the landlords to renovate their buildings without any loss of rental income – it is easy to imagine the grave as a better alternative than the relentlessly increasing wretchedness inflicted on us by capitalism.  

But that is precisely what our One Percent overlords and their Ruling Class vassals want us to think.

The more of us die, whether by our own hands or by the policies of murderous neglect that are the quintessence of capitalist governance, the more money there is for the One Percenters to gamble in their Wall Street casino and buy mink coats, diamond necklaces and Parisian penthouses for their mistresses.

Hence an ultimate truth – one I hope will dissuade anyone genuinely contemplating suicide: in such times as these, with the capitalists intent on eliminating everyone who is not immediately exploitable for profit, survival is an act of revolutionary defiance.

It is also an act of revolutionary defiance to protest what the landlord is doing to all of us who live in this 50-unit senior housing facility. He is compelling old and broken women and men to pack all our possessions, then forcing us out of our apartments for the one day (or possibly more) it takes to replace the flooring therein. And he is coldly, arrogantly indifferent to the weeks of wrenching disruption this inflicts on all of us – in my case, packing before and unpacking after the temporary evictions, a total theft of at least two months from whatever remains of my life. Nor does the landlord give a flying rodent's rectum about the gnawing anxiety inflicted by the fact this sword of Damocles has been hanging over our heads since October 2014.

My understanding, from the Tacoma city officials to whom I fruitlessly complained early last year, is this sort of outrage is illegal everywhere save Washington state, where decades of behind-the-scenes collaboration between the Democrats and Republicans ensure we tenants remain perpetually powerless.

While the landlord's minimum-wage, mostly immigrant workers will physically move our boxes and furniture out of and back into our apartments, we geriatrically afflicted tenants must do all our own packing and stacking, and all our unstacking and unpacking too. Fortunately for the people whose mobility is limited to wheelchairs and walkers, some of our more physically capable fellow residents have volunteered to help those who are physically disabled. Otherwise we'd all be fucked.

For me, a physically disabled 76-year-old, the worst part of the ordeal is over. That was packing my personal library of 1,026 volumes, nearly all hardbacks. These books filled 25 boxes, each box 16 inches by 12 inches by 12 inches; each box weighing approximately 75 pounds when full. In other words, the 25-box total weighs about 1500 pounds – three-quarters of a ton.

The boxes and the requisite packing tape, which contrary to the landlord's promises were NOT provided, cost me $135.92 out of pocket. And there will be no refund from the landlord. In other words, my rent – $470 per month – is effectively raised to $492.65 for the remainder of 2016.

That $22.65 difference may not seem like much, but to me it is a is a ruinous blow. Thanks mostly to Washington state Governor Jay Inslee's Democratic administration, my 2016 income has been slashed $155 per month. That's right – as I have said before and will surely say again – this year I already had $155 per month LESS than I had in 2015.

Hence, even before the landlord-imposed expenses associated with the temporary eviction, I had absolutely NO discretionary income – all of it stolen from me by the same politicians who granted Boeing an $8.5 billion state tax exemption and are always scheming to find additional ways to bolster the bank accounts of the already obscenely wealthy capitalists who own USian governments at every level.

I repeatedly write about my own economic circumstances because they exemplify the fact that, from the perspective of the impoverished peoples who now make up the USian majority population,  there is no economic difference between the openly fascist Republicans and the more closeted but at least equally fascist Democrats. That's why so many of us no longer bother to vote.

Gov. Inslee's Democrats shut down WTAP, the Washington Telephone Assistance Program, by abolishing its tax base in 2013. That particular vulture came home to roost last August, costing me $17 per month. The same Democrats slashed my food food stamps 88 percent, cut my Medicare Extra Help 82 percent and hiked my Medicare-subsidized prescription-drug prices 16 percent. Add in the 33 percent transit-fare increase imposed on the local transit system by a RepublicRat coalition, and the loss to me is at least $155 per month. Atop that, there were the (allegedly “Democratic”) Obama Administration's manipulations to avoid a 2016 Social Security cost-of-living increase. Then add the $22.65 per month I had to shell out to pay for my own temporary eviction, and now I have $177.65 a month less than I had last year.

That's why I now have – I'll say it again – NO discretionary income. And, given political and economic reality, it is obvious I will never again have any discretionary income as long as this lifetime continues.

Moreover, stacking those 75-pound boxes of books extracted its own special price. After stacking 24 of the boxes I went to bed short of breath, panting, heart racing but nevertheless so exhausted I immediately fell asleep. When I awoke the next morning still short of breath, heart still racing, I realized I was in trouble, instantly contacted my doctor and on his orders spent the rest of the day in the excellent Tacoma urgent care facility of Group Health Cooperative. Tentative diagnosis: congestive heart failure, to be confirmed or denied by a two-hour echo-cardiogram (ultrasound) exam administered 19 May, the results of which I should have by the end of this week.

Am I upset, frightened, anxious about the results? Absolutely not. Why? As I said recently on a Reader Supported News comment thread:

Remember I am 76 years old: that means Hillary will kill me no matter what – either by slashing Social Security and further slashing Medicare (the Democrats have already cut my Medicare Extra Help 82 percent and my food stamps 88 percent) – or by starting World War III.

While it is true Trump promises to preserve Social Security and Medicare – and many Sanders-supporting seniors say that absent Sanders, that's why they'll vote for Trump – I know history, which includes the lesson implicit in how Trump's idols Hitler and Mussolini promised world peace.

Spawned by a piece about Former President Jimmy Carter, it was one of those rare RSN threads  on which I was resoundingly down-thumbed. My alleged offense was pointing out that Carter, by his gleefully self-righteous signature on the Hyde Amendment, did more damage to USian women's sexual freedom than all subsequent presidents combined. But today's hard-line Democrats are so desperate for heroes, they will embrace even an outspoken, Jesus-brandishing theocrat who – just as I (so vexingly) pointed out – was the first in the now-seemingly endless line of presidents from the One Party of Two Names.

Apropos Trump, I cannot, unlike too many of my peers, overlook the fact he is a Republican – not just a clandestine enemy of the 99 Percent, as the Big Lie Democrats are, but (his populist rhetoric not withstanding), the presidential candidate of the party that openly despises the 99 Percent. Hence I regard his promises as no more trustworthy than the Big Lies encompassed by the biggest Big Lie in USian presidential history: Obama's “change we can believe in.”

I should note here my reference to the RepublicRats and DemoPublicans as separate parties is not intended to contradict the fact we are ruled by One Party of Two Names. The fact is I have not yet figured out a way to encapsulate that hideous truth in abbreviated language. “Half-party” is incomprehensible, “pseudo-party” is incorrect and RepublicRats or DemoPublicans, though emotionally appealing, lose the point in the acrimony of their implicit jeers. Stay tuned; my subconscious is working on it.

As to the election itself, I am ever more alienated from the entire extravaganza. Of course I support Sanders, though I doubt he has the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell. But at least he has broken through 71 years of Big Lies and malicious censorship to (maybe) reawaken the USian proletariat to the fact socialism is our species' only path to liberation. Thus I find Robert Reich's most recent demand, that we all back Hillary if she wins the nomination,  to be particularly offensive.

“(M)y morsels of advice,” Reich wrote, “may be hard to swallow. Many Hillary supporters don’t want Bernie to keep campaigning, and many Bernie supporters don’t want to root for Hillary if she gets the nomination. But swallow it you must – not just for the good of the Democratic Party, but for the good of the nation.”

My initial comment-thread reply followed Reich's oral imagery, reductio ad absurdum, to its inevitable climax, an ejaculation RSN's censors later (understandably) suppressed:

Quoth Mr. Reich: “...swallow it you must...”

Quoth the 99 Percent: “but, but, but – they promised not to come in our mouths.”

Then I got serious:

I have said it before and I will say it again: a vote for Hillary Clinton – for the closeted “nuke Hanoi” Goldwater Girl who now shows her inner Ilsa Koch by cackling at the torture death of Qaddafi – is a vote for World War III and therefore a vote for human extinction.

Nor is Trump a rational alternative. A vote for Trump is a vote to unleash all the racist malevolence, ChristoFascist misogyny and JesuNazi intolerance that has always festered at the core of USian society.

Who with right mind and informed conscience can make such a choice?

Later in the same thread I elaborated:

She is, or so her relentless self-centeredness makes it seem, a genuine clone of Ayn Rand, who (in what amount to fictionalizations of Mein Kampf), proclaimed selfishness and greed to be not, as we were always taught, the deadliest of sins, but rather the ultimate of human virtues instead.

Surely this explains Hillary's attitude toward capitalism, within which selfishness and greed – and the moral imbecility essential to their embrace – have always been defined as the heights of virtue.

But then, what else might one expect of a closeted Goldwater Girl, who (or so it seems), has in her thinking merely replaced the long-ago slogan “Nuke Hanoi” with a truly suicidal and therefore infinitely more frightful modern variant, “Nuke Moscow.”

Speaking of closeted, might Trump be Hillary's clandestine assault weapon? Perhaps the most damning conjecture yet of the reasons behind Trump's candidacy  was dragged out of my subconscious by an RSN poster's comments about the fear Trump is inflicting on Hispanics, African-Americans and First nations people:

(Y)ou have laid bare a highly probable and very disturbing truth: that Trump's function (and therefore probably his clandestine purpose) is to terrorize people of color into ignoring Sanders and voting for Clinton.

In which context reflect on the documented friendship between Trump and the Clintons.

Shame on me, as – knowing the realities of class-war and therefore the malevolent strategy and tactics of the One Percenters and their One Party of Two Names as I do – I surely should have recognized this probability.

Good catch...for which kudos: what you suggest is no doubt part of the One Percent's strategy for ensuring the ultimate victory of fascism – which is, after all, the only way capitalism can survive – whether under Hillary or Trump.

Near the end of the same thread was my defense of Marxism, in context perhaps my best such effort yet:

Fascism...needs to be recognized as the inevitable consequence of capitalism. While the New Deal and its antecedents sought to ameliorate capitalism's pro-fascist momentum, they failed because capitalism cannot be reformed. With its ethos of infinite greed as maximum virtue – the rejection of all human morality and its replacement with consummate moral imbecility – capitalism is literally too evil to reform. Thus to prevent capitalism from morphing into fascism, it can only be overthrown and abolished. Hence the relevance of Marxism, not only as the one truly effective antidote to capitalism, but – increasingly (as capitalism becomes indistinguishable from governance itself and thus grows ever more tyrannical) – the only life-preserver we humans have left if indeed we are to save ourselves, our species and our planet.

Meanwhile, back in the sweat-shop warehouse my apartment has become, I have yet to disassemble my bookshelves – at least a day's work,  and even with the power screwdriver thoughtfully lent me by a friend, lots of arthritis pain – every twinge an object lesson in the evils of capitalism. 

LB/31 May 2016

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Anti-Black Slander from the Democratic Party?

THE OLDEST QUARREL inside the Left is undoubtedly the fight between pacifists and those who believe humanitarian reforms can be wrest from the capitalist Ruling Class only by violence or credible threats thereof. 

Events in Ferguson  re-heated the dispute to a simmer, but Baltimore  brought it to a rolling boil, and last week it bubbled onto the pages of mainstream media. 

Yet that's only half the story. The other half is that one writer, Jonathan Chait of the aggressively upscale New York Magazine, is using the discussion to slyly blame U.S. African Americans  for the downfall of the Democratic Party.

Thus, in Chait's obliquely presented view, black rebelliousness is responsible for the party's reduction to the me-too fascism that has characterized Democratic foreign policy since the ascendance of Lyndon Baines Johnson to the presidency, and defined its domestic policy since President Jimmy Carter's theocratic signature  enshrined the Republican war against women as federal policy. 

Meanwhile the appearance of the violence-versus-nonviolence debate in mainstream publications is, I believe, of profound political and historical significance. It is unlike anything I have seen during the nearly 60 years I have been a professional writer, editor and/or photographer. Nor have I heard of its like occurring anytime during the 75 years I've been living this lifetime. 

Moreover – and let us not forget this all-important point – Chait and the writers he cites all represent the Ruling Class regardless of the political disguises assumed by their publishers. Thus it is arguable the widespread coverage suddenly being given this issue is the most accurate yardstick yet of Ruling Class fears that Working Class anger in the U.S. is approaching the ignition-point of revolution. 

That's why Chait's opening graf, which builds a pro-violence argument he soon demolishes with volleys of academic research, is worth quoting in totality, especially for its links: 

The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon . “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox's German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.” In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson  asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds to answer her own question in the negative.

But then three paragraphs later Chait not only refutes the writers he cited. He also reaches a conclusion I would expect to find – albeit stated in more obviously racist terms – only in an avowedly Rightist journal:

The 1960s saw two overlapping waves of protest: nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations, and urban rioting. The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson swept every region of the country except the South running a liberal, pro-civil-rights campaign; in 1968, Richard Nixon won a narrower victory on the basis of social backlash.

Because I (of course) do not read New York Magazine, I owe Margaret Flowers and her excellent on-line daily Popular Resistance a salute of thanks for making Chait's “Riots and Social Change” available to a proletarian such as I. PR routinely does a damn fine job of bringing to Working Class attention important stories we 99 Percenters would otherwise be denied by the nation's various mechanisms of de facto censorship, but this time Flowers outdid herself.

All of which is prefatory to what I said on the associated comment thread. But it is more than just another en passant response. It is important for two reasons: it addresses the revisionist history by which the Ruling Class increasingly beclouds what happened within the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It also – or so I hope – alerts a few significantly placed people to a new Democratic Big Lie as potentially malicious as the “welfare queen” Big Lie the Democrats borrowed from the Republicans to justify enactment of genocidal “welfare reforms” in 1995.

(My apology for the fact there are a few repetitions between the explanatory grafs above and those below. The repetitions are unavoidable because I have reprinted my original comment word-for-word.)

Let us not forget that as a writer for aggressively upscale New York Magazine, Mr. Chait's perspective is necessarily that of the Ruling Class.

Hence the subtle but nevertheless implicit race-bating and victim-blaming in his statement that "The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order."

The truth, however, is quite different. The New Deal coalition was not "crack(ed) open" by the Republican Party but rather by the Democrats themselves.

President Lyndon Johnson's 180-degree turn in foreign policy immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led directly to the Southeast Asian (aka "Vietnam") War.

In turn -- and exactly as the Ruling Class intended -- the war destroyed the Working Class solidarity that had created and sustained the New Deal. The war divided the U.S. Working Class -- what today we would call the 99 Percent -- into two venomously hostile camps: the sneeringly contemptuous draft-exempt elite and the equally embittered draft-bait, cannon-fodder majority of those of us who (because we lacked the money and influence to bribe our way out of the draft), had no choice but to serve.

Contrary to the implications of Mr. Chait's remark -- a clever falsehood that seems designed to protect white Ruling Class Democrats by blaming blacks for the party's troubles -- all the significant non-racial divisions in present-day U.S. politics date from that history-changing Vietnam-era divide.

As to racist hate-mongering by the Republicans, that indeed occurred, but again contrary to Mr. Chait's disingenuous claim, the class warfare implicit in the Vietnam draft had already destroyed the New Deal.

Vietnam had also -- because of the tacitly genocidal U.S. policy of sending a preponderance of African-American combat troops to fight its colonial wars -- radically inflamed the long-simmering racial injustices that underlay the riots.

The Republican Party, which since the 1920s has been the primary vessel of U.S. fascism, predictably pounced with malicious glee on the resultant white fear. Obviously -- at least in retrospect -- this too was precisely as the Ruling Class intended.

Subsequent U.S. history makes it equally obvious what happened next. The Ruling Class deftly expanded Vietnam's divisiveness by manipulating it into a plethora of profoundly emotional clashes over firearms, jobs, unions, welfare, immigration, education, abortion, sexuality, Christian supremacy and ultimately the prevalent definitions of patriotism and what it means to be a U.S. citizen.

Again exactly as the Ruling Class intends, the resultant hostilities -- perpetuated as they are by a media machine more psychologically effective than even Josef Goebbels might have imagined -- destroy any future possibility of ever again restoring 99 Percent solidarity.

(Disclosure: I am not a Vietnam veteran but am a Vietnam-era vet: Regular Army enlistment 1959-1965, three years active duty, overseas service in Korea 1961-1962, honorably discharged after completion of three-year reserve obligation).

LB/8-14 June 2015

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