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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Fucked Up: Notes on the Inescapable Curse of Dyslexia

I SHOULD WARN  all of you at the very beginning this is an essay of endless disappointment, anger and embitterment. As I have acknowledged via this space many times before, I am accursed. The curse is dyslexia – an indescribably horrible, bottomlessly depressing, makes-me-look-like-an-idiot disability vividly demonstrated by the mortifying fuckup that no doubt stripped me of all journalistic credibility and reduced last week's essay to a textbook demonstration of personal and political grandiosity.

It is precisely because of dyslexia I have never been able to take myself seriously as a writer. What is so embittering at this (final) stage of my life is I have no choice but to embrace writing as my primary medium. My physical ability to photograph – that is, to lug around the requisite equipment and perform the essential contortions of the Photographer's Ballet – is increasingly diminished: I am crippled by worsening arthritis in knees and shoulders; I am hobbled by deteriorating spinal injuries, the legacy of a Washington state archetype, an obscenely coddled habitual drunken driver. My finances are even more wounded: I can scarcely afford the expense of film and processing; the cost of digital equipment and its prerequisite software is forever beyond my reach. But to call myself a “writer” is a lie, a gesture of phoniness, for no matter how hard I try to avoid it, my twisted mental circuitry will inevitably do as it did last week: make some horrendous mistake – typically a transposition – that will give me the appearance of nothing more than a presumptuous moron.

Such is dyslexia and the bottomless miasma of fear and self-hatred in which the dyslexic is forever entrapped. It is no doubt the reason as a child I came unusually late to speech, so late my mother had begun to dread she would be publicly disgraced by having spawned a congenital idiot. Probably – because dyslexia also destroys one's sense of balance and thereby retards one's ability to learn to walk (for me a frightful struggle during which my parents encouraged bipedal locomotion by spanking me whenever I crawled) – my first recognition of selfhood was acknowledgement of unacceptable inferiority. Obviously I was terrified of making mistakes – or rather of the punishment so provoked – long before I dared talk. I remained stubbornly silent until I felt reasonably sure of my linguistic skill: what remained unsaid remained unpunished. Finally I uttered my first word – “light” – and then, to my parents' astonishment (or so I am told), I immediately began speaking in complete sentences.

Dyslexia is also why I was unable to read until I was rescued from illiteracy by my mother's older sister, my Aunt Alecia Durand, dead of old age since September 1993, but during her long lifetime a working artist and professor of fine arts, the sole familial elder who did not either despise me or regard me with embarrassment and scorn. My memories of Alecia are uniquely fond and always uplifting, the only reliable kindness and warmth in an otherwise cruel and chilly upbringing. It was Alecia who understood what is wrong with me, who did not reject me for my dyslexic failings, who gave me art supplies and encouraged my creativity, who hired me a summertime tutor after I nearly flunked second grade and who thereby freed me to advance so rapidly I was reading at a 12th-grade level half way through third grade. Alecia was my liberator, my childhood's first and only grown-up Muse. The tutoring she arranged for me was the best, most pivotal, most affirming, most cherished gift I was ever given by anyone in this life. It expressed a depth of understanding and acceptance never approached by any other adult in my family including my father, who – though he gave me my first cameras – was so repulsed by my dyslexic disabilities he belittled me as “goon boy” well into my early teens.

But not even Alica could cure my loathsome penchant for dyslexic error. For example though I grasp mathematical principles quite easily, I can never do the actual arithmetic: my dyslexic brain invariably scrambles the digits into the wrong answer. Elementary, junior high and high school math was a nightmare of parental scorn and retribution, two years of algebraic misery and a year of geometric stress, a three-year sequence mandated by my father though my grade never once rose above an unacceptable low C – my dismal performance the source of his judgment I was “not worth sending to college.”

Two decades later, my father already dead, I had the proverbial last laugh. Much to my surprise, college math proved notably easy: I chalked up a solid four-point average in basic physics and astronomy and the remedial courses essential to compensate for my bottom-of-the-garbage-can math score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. I even began to understand the mathematically stated principles of physics as a kind of poetry. At first I rejoiced, believing I had somehow been miraculously healed by passage through the groves of academe. Later I learned it was merely because in college I could smoke in class: nicotine, a potent neurotransmitter, momentarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction.

Meanwhile journalism – specifically photography and reporting (my efforts at the latter always reinforced by cigarettes) – had become the one and only intellectual endeavor at which I dared trust myself: film didn't lie or distort its message, at least not in those days, and when the job called for writing, I made damn sure I took accurate notes. There was always enough nicotine to keep my brain focused and there was always a sufficiently competent editor to make sure the demons of dyslexia hadn't betrayed me with some inadvertent but nevertheless ruinous fuck-up. For the first time in my life I acquired actual self-confidence: if there was a story to be gotten, I knew I could reliably get it. Hence the contents of my lifetime resume: about two-thirds of my income earned by reporting and editing, mostly in staff jobs at various local newspapers and a couple of major trade publications; the other third earned by photography which – because it was blessedly immune to most forms of dyslexic self-sabotage – brought me many years of local recognition as an artist and occasionally garnered the imprimatur of credits from genuinely significant journals: Newsweek, Paris-Match and The New York Times.

But it was my reporting skill – my insatiable curiosity and my ability and persistence at asking pointed questions – that opened the greatest number of newsroom doors. Never mind my dyslexia-tainted spelling was always less than perfect; never mind that was another of the failings that proved to me I could never be a real writer. Even when I was a teenager, covering sports as a part-time stringer, my editors applauded my reportorial talent, suggesting – absurdly I always thought – I was destined for journalism's upper echelons.

Obviously none of these people recognized me as a dyslexic; had they done so they would have dismissed me as my father had : “goon boy,” at worst an embarrassment, at best a creature of no value. But by the time I was doing newspaper work I had learned to hide my affliction behind eloquence, to never allow anyone close enough to discover my dysfunctional family's lurking scandals – madness, attempted murder, divorce, brutality – much less to see my own repugnantly flawed mind. As a result I was alone, profoundly lonely and without hope of alleviating my loneliness. Not only did I “talk funny” – I had never completely shed the accents of my mother's Michigan, my father's Boston and my own native New York City – I was also spastically clumsy, a dyslexic affliction impossible to hide and especially repellent to females raised to lust after only the most gracefully athletic males. My fellow teens saw my body-language as contorted and grotesque; their disgust was palpable enough to keep me on the sidelines at the few dances I dared attend. Better I not dance at all; better I stay home – or content myself with covering the event for the school paper, of which, by my senior year (1957-1958), I was managing editor.

In September 1962, near the end of a miserably off-and-on marriage to pretty but untrustworthy Baltimore art student and after my completion of the three years active-duty required by a six-year Regular Army/Army Reserve enlistment, I took a sports writer's job on The Knoxville Journal, which had employed me as a stringer from September 1957 through November 1959 and offered me full time work when I returned from Korea to civilian life. All went well for the next nine months, but on 3 June 1963 – 49 years ago today – I was swept up in the flagrantly illegal mass arrest of “40 Negroes and whites, most of them students at the University of Tennessee” – suspected Communists, Communist sympathizers, artists, intellectuals, bohemians and Civil Rights Movement activists targeted by the local One Percent, a vindictively racist clique of haughty southern aristocrats. (Have patience; this is a revealing story – I promise – and what it has to do with dyslexia will be clear in a moment.)

Quickly freed on the strength of my press card, I naively believed The Journal would right the outrageous wrongs I had witnessed firsthand: an unprovoked raid against a quiet gathering of graduate students and faculty members, arrests without cause, the savage beating of a Panamanian vice-consul named Milton Vargas, the brutal invasion of an academic couple's shrubbery-enclosed yard and home by Knoxville city police and Knox County sheriff's deputies, sneering thugs-in-blue who rousted the bewildered guests, awakened and terrorized the couple's hitherto soundly-sleeping three-year-old daughter and then trashed the dwelling itself. But Editor-Publisher Guy L. Smith was uninterested in what had really happened. Instead he demanded I write a racist lie – that I substantiate a carefully contrived frame-up that would have convicted and probably jailed 39 innocent men and woman on false charges and in many cases ruined their lives or at the very least destroyed their careers. I refused; Smith retaliated. He had me arrested in his newsroom and charged – again falsely – with disorderly conduct. Ron McMahon, Smith's disciple, star reporter, and chief journalistic factotum then knowingly slandered me and the other arrestees on Page One. Josef Goebbels would have been proud.

The criminal case was soon dismissed, but I had volunteered my reportorial skills to the Civil Rights Movement my first hour out on bail. I agitated judicial resistance to the mass arrest and wrote I-don't-remember-how-many accounts of what had truly happened. Among these was a detailed report eventually published under my byline by The Knoxville Flashlight Herald, a local African-American newspaper. Though a (white) Congress of Racial Equality activist named Phillip Bacon edited the piece to death – he reduced my angry prose to coldly emotionless academic dreck – the text nevertheless revealed the basic facts of the atrocity. Meanwhile Ruling Class Media throughout the nation methodically suppressed the real story, either repeating the racist lie or affirming it by silence, never mind the beating of vice-consul Vargas had escalated the arrests into an international incident. But the formidably skilled reporters of Telegrafnoye agentstvo Sovetskovo Soyuza – Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (aka TASS) – soon assembled all the relevant details, and Pravda published them on Page One of its Moscow and International editions, the first public disclosure of the incident's ugly truth, a welcome exposé of capitalist “democracy” and an enduring lesson in the varied meanings of journalistic freedom.

Though I had nothing to do with the Soviet press coverage – at least nothing I know of – the notoriety of the arrests themselves soon ended my already troubled first marriage. I will never forget the concluding conversation with my first wife:

Carolyn: “Are you getting involved with Communists and stuff?”

Me: “Probably.”

Carolyn: “Then I'm gone.”

Obviously she did not realize I was “involved with Communists and stuff” at least from the moment I became my father's son and – if reincarnation is anything more than fantasy – for a lifetime before that as well.

Given Carolyn's personal goals, which despite her bohemian facade included many of the conventional milestone/millstones of success, she was undoubtedly right to have left me, and I was relieved to see her go. Indeed her departing question was typically, definitively hypocritical: she was well aware of the red-star/hammer-and-sickle politics that for as long as I can remember have been and remain the ideologies of my heart, yes even during the years when – stupefied with anger at my betrayal by a social-service agency – I was trying vainly to transform myself into a “libertarian conservative.”

But that is getting ahead of the story. Suffice it to say I was able – despite the 1963 incident, despite also my penchant for the occasional dyslexic error – to make a comfortable post-arrest home for myself at a succession of small and mid-sized newspapers merely because I had an indelible reputation as a competent reporter. Nor did I conceal the fact I had neither personal regrets or professional contrition for my defiance of Smith and his Ku Klux-minded effort to purge UT of its “troublemakers” and “outside agitators” – the latter the source of this blog's title. Often I made it clear that, were it necessary, I would go to jail again – an assertion I frequently used to determine whether a prospective employer and I would be a suitable paring.

Then as now, the episode's only lingering bad taste is the astonishingly ungrateful silence of the 39 men and women my journalistic integrity and personal honor saved from conviction on trumped-up charges. Not one of these intended victims – some of whom went on to distinguished academic careers – has ever thanked me for the protection I gave them. None even deigned to acknowledge my defiance of Smith, much less the penalties I paid for it. Apparently U.S. academics regard newspaper reporters – even reporters who dare rise up against oppression – as beneath their notice. It is a prejudice I have observed many times since, another manifestation of our nation's allegedly “nonexistent” class-warfare.

The point though is the Knoxville incident, the odium of which undeniably imposed an ideological ceiling on my career, nevertheless left me at least marginally promising prospects for employability as a journalist, thereby further encouraging my foolish belief I could overcome dyslexia. I was especially emboldened in the Northeast, where in 1965 I quickly learned my seemingly odd combination of cynicism and open-minded curiosity was welcomed as an indigenous trait. Back in Manhattan during the middle '80s, it appeared I would prosper there as I had during the '60s – that is, until my first serious (medically mandated) effort to quit smoking resurrected my dyslexia in all its dysfunctional destructiveness. The result not only cost me a superb job but ended my career: when you get the boot at age 46, you're done; the cause of your termination is irrelevant. After that event – in 1986 – my life spiraled steadily downward. Dyslexia always wins.

Its triumph was also victory for the clinical depression induced by the 1983 fire. Though its mysteriously ignited flames destroyed my life's work, consumed my identity and burned away any rational hope my efforts would ever achieve meaningful recognition or significance, gainful employment had dampered the depression itself. But it had nevertheless smoldered like stubbornly persistent embers, and the career-loss inflicted by dyslexia fueled it into a slow-motion inferno, an all-consuming conflagration of inextinguishable magnitude and paradoxically glacial result.

Thus began my interminable journey on the highway of woe that descends to the lowest most frigid circles of dyslexic hell. Familiar with Washington state's formerly generous approach to rehabilitative services – knowledge imparted mostly by years of award-winning reportage (1970-1983) – I returned here from New York City in late 1986, stupidly believing the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation run by the Department of Social and Health Services would help me find some line of steady employment with which to replace my dyslexically ruined journalism career. Indeed I had a prospective occupation in mind, something for which an extensive battery of DVR tests soon indicated I was both intellectually qualified and psychologically fit. But DSHS, apparently viewing me as a “white male oppressor,” chose to destroy me instead. In 1989, after a long and bitter controversy over my eligibility for rehabilitative services, DSHS labeled me “permanently unemployable” and thereby forced me onto Social Security. Twenty-six years before I was due to retire, I was condemned to live out my remaining years inescapably imprisoned by the increasing loneliness and isolation imposed by ever-worsening, eventually fatal poverty. The ruin so inflicted was total and irreparable – not just economically fatal, but a psychological death-sentence as well, anathema to anyone for whom life and work were not just inseparable but synonymous.

Whether ousting me forever from the workplace was the agency's revenge for my earlier history of truthful and therefore invariably adversarial reporting on its outrageous arrogance and habitual malfeasance, or merely another example of the bourgeois-feminist fanaticism with which it defied legislative intent by enforcing secret and illegal gender quotas, or some malicious hybrid of both, I will never know. Nor do I care; it no longer matters. What does matter is DSHS ended my life as anything more significant than a complex lump of protoplasm; its damning decree – ironically rescinded only by the formal conversion of my disability stipend into my old-age retirement pension – informed the world for the next 26 years I had been nullified, finished, canceled out.

Had my quest for a new career been successful, I would have continued writing even if most or all my income came from unrelated sources. I did just that during my year as a commercial fisherman (engineer/deckhand on a salmon seiner, 1982-83), likewise through the years I earned most of my pay working in printshops (1972-1976), during which I was also the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun. But the fire had made it impossible for me to pick up a camera without being felled by grief; its most agonizing loss had been thousands of irreplaceable prints and negatives, many of historical or sociological value. Though I would once more take up photography in the mid-1990s, writing seemed after the fire as if it were fated to remain my primary medium. Because I assumed the label affixed to me by DSHS guaranteed I would never again be credibly published, I now wrote purely for recreation: journal entries, attempts at poetry, even reportage. The utter absurdity of seeking significant publication was a backhanded blessing; it ensured I was never dyslexically compromised by the absence of competent editors and so absolved me from fear. In an eerie parallel to my early childhood, what went unpublished went unpunished.

But deteriorating health forced me to quit smoking again, this time permanently, and 23 September 1995, my first day as a non-smoker, seemed to be my last day as a writer of any sort. To attempt to write was to trigger an intolerable nicotine fit, its physical sensation a massive jangling of nerve-ends, its mental image my brain reduced to a writhing double-handful of spaghetti-like worms from which I was trying vainly to extract a word, a sentence, a paragraph, even a single character or letter. For the next seven years I was so paralyzed by dyslexia I could compose nothing more complex than grocery lists. Eventually – because I discovered I missed the emotional release provided by recreational writing, I taught myself to write again – practice, practice, practice – though I knew my post-nicotine ability would never equal (or even approach) the intellectual focus or the verbal speed and fluency I had achieved by the suppression of dyslexia with tobacco.

Eventually I did learn how to construct workable sentences and paragraphs without nicotininc self-medication. But as I said before, dyslexia always wins. Last week's unforgivable error proves I am as angrily disabled by dyslexia today as I was on my first day without cigarettes, as ravaged as I was on that awful 1946 morning in first grade I was proclaimed the class dunce after the first public demonstration of my inability to read. All that is different now are the manifestations: though I am no longer revealed as an imbecile by my former inability to distinguish between “went” and “want” or between “from” and “form,” I am still effectively reduced to imbecility by the fact – no matter how good I am at editing the work of others – I cannot catch a glaring blunder like the one that utterly destroyed the credibility of last week's essay and in all probability also obliterated the credibility of every word I have ever written: misstating the title of Richard D. Wolff's Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism.

Of course I eventually corrected my horrific fuckup – I had dyslexically typed “Challenging Communism” – but I did not discover it until nearly 12 hours after the irrevocably damning fact of its electronic publication, and by then the damage was done. Now you see why the prospect of dyslexic errors always terrifies me, as well it should; blunders like these have ambushed me for as long as I can remember. As a smoker I nearly always caught them; when I failed, my editors came to my rescue. The one exception throughout my entire career in paycheck journalism – the still-nauseating public mortification of a dyslexia-induced mistake on Page One of a suburban Seattle paper – was allowed into print by a soon-to-be-ousted boss because his malice toward me trumped his concern for the thrice-weekly's quality and reputation. Now, today, as last week so emphatically proved, I have no defense at all against dyslexia. And I presume it is only politeness that protects me from a comments section justifiably overflowing with hurtful jeers. Verily, I thank you for your silence.

Again, such is dyslexia, a source of self-hatred that can never be ameliorated because its demonstrations of disability are unrelentingly merciless. Nor, in my case, is it dyslexia alone. This affliction in concert with a long and depressing litany of other dismal autobiographical facts – the fact I was conceived not with love but to entrap my father into marriage; the corollary fact my mother tried to murder me on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945 (apparently, or so the evidence indicates she believed, to pay the Devil for facilitating her entrapment of my father); the subsequent fact my father – who had saved me from my mother's knife – tried only weeks afterward to dump me in a Virginia state orphanage – all this I take as irrefutable proof the infinitely sadistic god of Abraham (if indeed he exists at all) not only regards me as an abomination and hates me accordingly but takes cruel glee in inflicting just enough suffering to ensure the core characteristic of my life is constant obstruction – omnipresent gloom that now in old age is intensified by the mostly low-grade but nevertheless relentless pains of physical disabilities.

Such too is the awful fate – or so say any number of mythologies – of the intended sacrificial victim who somehow escapes or is rescued from the altar of doom.

Because dyslexia frustrates all its victims, anger and bitterness are among its clinical hallmarks, but my own frustration is radically intensified by the fact I have an exceptional intellect. Depending on the measurement of intelligence-quotient, whether I was hung over when I took the test and whether I was allowed to smoke, my IQ scores range as high as 145 and have never been lower than 135. My verbal skills are even more exceptional: they test in the topmost one-tenth of the nation's uppermost one percent. Worse – at least for me – is the corollary fact such abilities invariably foster irrepressible “callings” – the instinct to be productively useful and win recognition thereby. But now that I am forever denied the clarity of nicotine and the protection provided by editors, dyslexia invariably reduces these alleged “gifts” to liabilities, reducing the associated “callings” to nothing more than invitations to grandiose disaster. Talent and the instinctive need to properly apply it thus become, via dyslexia, a mechanism of indescribable vexation – literally an internalized torture machine.

That is the real horror of dyslexia: whether by the neurological clusterfuck of “went” versus “want” or by its adult counterpart in “capitalist” versus “communist” or by some other failure too hurtful for me to remember or imagine, it forever obstructs my purposes. It obliterates the joys of my achievements and replaces those rare pleasures with unspeakable agonies of failure. Such is dyslexia as I know it: the eternal triumph of a genetic flaw over which I am utterly powerless to do anything save curse the god in whom I mostly don't believe for damning me with an affliction the ruinous totality of which I cannot doubt – a perfect example of divine malevolence, its tribulations escapable only by death and perhaps not even then.

Do not misunderstand: this is not my resignation from an always disappointing and increasingly miserable life that given the realities of capitalism can only become more desolate. As I have said so many times before, the savagery of capitalism redefines survival itself, elevating it to an act of revolutionary defiance. This is especially true if one is, as I am, part of the bottom-most 99 Percent, those of us who – because we are no longer exploitable for profit – are ever-more-brazenly targeted for extermination by genocidal abandonment: the unspoken policy behind the threats to Social Security, reductions in Medicare, Medicaid and TriCare, and the slashing of every other government service vital to our survival. Hence I will continue to write; I will even – when I am so moved and assuming I am physically and economically able – continue to photograph.

But after last week's capitalism/communism fuckup I will never dare imagine my writing has any merit beyond the fact it fills my remaining hours and maybe weeks and months or even years and thus rescues me from the overwhelming boredom that alternates with politically or medically induced fright as the dominant conditions of the cast-off worker's long slide through the carefully muzzled ghettos of old age downhill into the ultimate silence of the grave. Such is the final lesson taught by dyslexia, the ultimate proof life itself is at best a cosmic joke, at worst a terminal illness. Never since the Summer Solstice of 1945 have my actual prospects risen above temporarily abated misery. It cannot be said too often: dyslexia always wins. I am again my disparaging father's “goon boy,” again my hateful mother's “clumsy little oaf.” Dyslexia prevails.

LB/3 June 2012

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