Tiny Food-Stamp Cut Reveals Bureaucrats' Big Lies

THE FALSIFIED-INFORMATION tactic employed by many (if not all) the USian state welfare bureaucracies to justify cuts in stipends and services – in this instance to deprive me of food stamps – is exemplified by the official notice I received recently from the always-adversarial Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.

As shown in the main paragraph of the copy reproduced above, the DSHS bureaucrats are falsely claiming my rent-and-utilities expenditures have “chang(ed)” – in other words, decreased. And while the $1 food-stamp reduction shown above is seemingly insignificant, the rationale upon which it is based is an obviously malicious bureaucratic lie. More to the point, it is indicative of the methodology of malicious lies by which DSHS slashed my food-stamp allocation from $103 per month to $17 per month – an 83 percent cut – effective 1 January 2016.

Nor is “malicious” an inappropriate choice of adjectives. DSHS's malice is proven not merely by its well-deserved reputation for hateful treatment of the subsidy-dependent poor, but by the indisputable fact my rent, which includes most of my utility costs – specifically electricity, water, sewerage, garbage collection and recycling fees – has risen steadily (albeit minimally) throughout the 12 years I have lived at my present address. The seven years I have been a food-stamp recipient are no different. Since May 2009, when losses inflicted by the so-called “recession” – the plutocracy's murderous theft of income from all the rest of us – hurled me into bankruptcy and forced me onto the dole, my rental payments have gone up 1.3 percent.

Meanwhile my telephone costs, constant from May 2009 until August 2015, skyrocketed 293 percent thanks to the Washington State Democratic (sic) Party's 2013 decision to abolish forever the Washington Telephone Assistance Program subsidy that guaranteed those of us who are officially impoverished our telephone bills would never exceed $8 per month. Thus my monthly phone bill leapt from $8 to $31.44 immediately after the subsidy was terminated last August. It has since – largely due to tax increases – inched upward to $35 as of my September 2016 bill.

Where then is the alleged decrease in rent-and-utility expenditures that caused my already minimal food-stamp allocation to be docked yet another dollar?

While DSHS (predictably) refuses to answer – more about that in a moment – the following National Public Radio report provides a powerfully indicative clue  as to what really obtains:

“In a recent federal court hearing, nine employees of New Mexico's Income Support Division — which oversees food stamps — took the stand to testify about fake assets being added to food stamps applications...When higher-ups were questioned in court, they pleaded the Fifth repeatedly. The state launched an internal investigation, but the results are sealed, and officials have refused to grant interviews about the allegations.”

Such defiance of the public's right to know has become a signature tactic of welfare bureaucrats, who have manipulated confidentiality regulations originally intended to protect welfare recipients into bureaucrat-shielding obstacles that now block even legislative oversight. The fact food stamps are now known by several names bolsters the welfare-bureaucracy's opacity even as it ensure the non-foodstamp-dependent public remains ignorant or at least confused about the associated issues. The feds call the program “SNAP,” a happy-faced, Madison-Avenue-contrived acronym for “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” the name also used by the New Mexico food-stamp program. DSHS calls it “Basic Food Assistance.” Other states have their own names for it: California's is “CalFresh,” while Wisconsin – where the unapologetically fascist (and possibly criminal)  regime of Gov. Scott Walker has made war against the poor a doctrinal centerpiece – ironically labels it “FoodShare,” never mind the sharing of food (or anything else) with lower-income folks violates Walker's Ayn Rand credo.

NPR report's on-line text is headlined, “New Mexico Defrauds The Poor Out Of Food Stamps, Whistleblowers Say.” The head aptly summarizes the entire story, which was first broadcast on 5 July 2016 and focuses on Kimberly Jones, an impoverished woman whom state welfare bureaucrats deliberately victimized by fraudulently inflating her income to deny her emergency eligibility for food stamps. The denial forced her to wait two months before she began receiving assistance.

By contrast, the theoretically permanent cuts inflicted on me by DSHS bureaucrats included not only January's $86 food-stamp cut (now 87 percent counting the $1 cut detailed above), but an 82 percent reduction in my Medicare Extra Help stipend, from $22 per month to $4. This plus associated Medicare Part D prescription-drug price increases of 11 percent and the Democrats' cancellation of the $23.44 telephone subsidy cost me approximately $155 per month.

In other words, in a year in which the anti-food-stamp Obama Administration denied Social Security recipients any cost-of-living increase, from 1 January onward I have been struggling to survive on approximately $155 per month less income than I had in 2015.

The immediate result of these cuts was to trap me in the most miserly of my Medicare Advantage provider's programs – low premiums and minimal levels of (nevertheless skillful) care with maximal, often-prohibitive co-payments. The longer term result was to hurl me into an abyss of such poverty as I had never before experienced – an ultimately deadly realm in which I am literally forced to choose between eating properly or obtaining the health care I need for survival.

For example, in the wake of last May's diagnosis of congestive heart failure, I am technically required to regularly consult a cardiologist. But the co-pay is $50 per appointment with this or any other specialist, which is nearly twice the program's monthly premium. Thus – thanks to the cutbacks inflicted on me by DSHS – it is a co-pay I cannot possibly afford.

Indeed, as I said to the visibly unsympathetic DSHS bureaucrat who last December handed me the paperwork announcing the $86 reduction in my food stamps, “this is a death sentence.”

Months later, while trying determine how the cutbacks were rationalized, I learned from credible inside sources whose anonymity I am sworn to protect that DSHS bureaucrats had done to me exactly what New Mexico's welfare bureaucrats did to Kimberly Jones, albeit by a more plausibly deniable method.

While the welfare bureaucrats always claim such cuts are mandated by regulations, the New Mexico and Washington state cases prove they falsely manipulate supplicants' income to create the desired illusion of regulatory compliance. The bureaucrats are also trained to discourage appeals by telling supplicants their food-stamp allocations are calculated by computers in unerring electronic obedience to state and federal law, another lie. Hence a typical bureaucrat's veiled-threat response to a cutback victim – a person often in shock (as I surely was last December): “You can appeal, but you're sure to lose, and then you'll have to pay back whatever we determine you owe us.”

Though DSHS is known to employ the New Mexico tactic of falsely inflating a supplicant's income, particularly against persons less able to defend themselves, the falsification method its bureaucrats used against me was radical understatement – by nearly $300 – of my monthly living expenses. My sources tell me this is the agency's most common approach – probably because when challenged, it can be more easily excused by a deluge of carefully pre-scripted lies claiming accidental omissions and/or miscalculations.

As to the Medicare Extra Help cuts, I am still in the proverbial dark about the regulations upon which they were based. Were they state or federal? Not only did DSHS bureaucrats refuse to answer my questions, their sullenly uncooperative silence forced me to get the information from my Medicare provider, whose employees proved infinitely more helpful: yes, DSHS had indeed inflicted the cut, but it was transmitted by the briefest of written orders, with no additional explanation forthcoming.

Could I then get a copy of the order? No, I was told, because the calculations are done by DSHS and transmitted to the provider in bulk, so that giving me access to the documentation would would violate the privacy of other Medicare patients: a perfect example of how welfare bureaucrats protect themselves from accountability.

Apparently – as best I can glean from inquiries amongst my neighbors in the lower-income senior housing complex wherein we all reside (and which I continue to serve as the volunteer editor/producer of its monthly newsletter) – the Medicare Extra Help cut inflicted on me last January is another result of DSHS's deliberate falsification of my living expenses. Those with less income than I said their Medicare subsidies were not reduced.

Thus on 23 September 2016 I filed a written, registered-mail demand for an appeal hearing before an administrative judge. Since then, the bureaucracy has orally informed me the hearing has been granted, but its snail-paced clerks have yet to officially notify me of the hearing's locale, date and time.

Needless to say – knowing as I do the favorite DSHS tactic of deliberately mailing such a notice so late the appellant learns of the assigned date only after it has passed and the appeal is thus summarily dismissed – I'm more than a little anxious. Stay tuned: assuming I am still alive, a follow-up report will most assuredly follow.

***

ALAS, MY FIGHT with DSHS is not my only ongoing struggle with government bureaucracies that are unapologetically tyrannical.

Because of the spinal injuries inflicted on me in 1978 by one of Washington state's innumerable defiantly habitual drunken drivers – the man had been arrested 19 times for drunken driving before he clobbered me – I have since the late '90s been prescribed a generic muscle relaxer called methocarbamol. My episodal use of this drug has increased as my spine deteriorates, the 1978 injuries now painfully inflamed by what one consulting MD said – this after I underwent a long and thorough spinal exam by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) – is “the worst case of spinal arthritis (she had) ever seen.” Hence there is no question about the source of the muscle spasms that, ever more often, render me temporarily immobile. Nor is there any question about my need for the drug.

Moreover, methocarbamol has proven itself particularly appropriate for me. It is non-addictive. But most importantly – especially since journalism is like organized crime in that it is an occupation from which one is never really allowed to retire – it is the one muscle relaxant that does not anesthetize me into a slumberous, depression-like state that makes it impossible for me to write or edit. It also – at least in me – generates no other prohibitive side-effects.

Five years ago (in 2010), Medicare bureaucrats, claiming methocarbamol is dangerous to those of us age 65 and older, arbitrarily canceled my prescription and ordered my pharmacist to replace it with baclofen. Initially I submitted to the bureaucracy's orders because I was told I had no alternative. But soon I discovered the baclofen not only gave me severe headaches but made it nearly impossible to stay awake even after a full night's sleep. Hence I complained, rather vehemently, to my doctor. He promptly overruled the Medicare officials, restored my methocarbamol prescription – and thereby also restored my ability to undertake occasional writing, editing and photographic assignments, among them the extensive pictures-and-text coverage of Occupy Tacoma I provided as an unpaid volunteer to the website Reader Supported News c. 2011-2012.

Then all was well until this April, when the Medicare bureaucrats intervened again, this time much more forcibly. Not only did they deny me methocarbamol, they specifically ordered the pharmacy to provide a drug called tizanidine as its replacement. Again I submitted. But within a few days, as I was attempting to write a rather complex historical essay for a class in which I participate, I discovered the tizanidine anesthetized me so thoroughly I was literally falling asleep at my computer keyboard. I complained, was told to reduce the dosage, and complied as instructed. But then I began experiencing repeat episodes in which I was severely short of breath. While a very minor breathlessness had been a known symptom of my congestive heart failure, in these new instances – triggered even by every-day walks to bus stops and local stores – I felt as if I was suffocating. I literally could not get enough air. Apparently – or so I supposed – my CHF had suddenly worsened, and I was therefore at death's door.

Wondering what I should do – I have no remaining fear of death but am admittedly fearful of dying in hospitals, which psychic research has convinced me are soul-traps – I realized my shortness of breath dwindled rapidly any time I was off tizanidine for more than a day or too. Hence I researched the drug, learned it is known to cause just such respiratory problems as I had experienced and so complained again to my doctor, with whom I have an excellent relationship. He responded by appealing to Medicare as he had done in 2010.

But this time its bureaucrats essentially told him he had no choice but to obey their edicts. At the same time they told the pharmacist that if my doctor wrote me a prescription enabling me to buy methocarbamol as a non-Medicare purchase, everyone involved – doctor, pharmacist, possibly even the pharmacy clerk – would be subject to Medicare fraud charges. My further use of methocarbamol, the bureaucrats decreed, was forbidden, and no doctor's appeal would change that prohibition.

Since then, my doctor, a former military MD who saw combat in Iraq and has the chain-of-command experience typical of most of us who are veterans, has been appealing the bureaucrats' decision ever-further up the hierarchical ladder– so far to no avail.

Thus whenever I am pained by back spasms, I am still compelled to depend on the tizanidine, which I now take only in the smallest possible doses: a four-milligram tablet quartered into one-milligram segments, and those segments cut again with my Xacto knife into half-milligram doses. But even that tiny amount leaves me noticeably short of breath. Worse, it submerges into such lethargy, I have had resume drinking real coffee, which is forbidden me by my heart condition, in order to do any serious writing or editing. Otherwise – as I said before – no matter how engrossing the work, I literally fall asleep at my keyboard.

Again, stay tuned: if I'm still around – that is, if the Medicare bureaucrats don't kill me with their damn tizanidine – I'll have a follow-up story on this matter as well.

*****

GIVEN PRESIDENT OBAMA'S history of brazenly pandering to the plutocrats  while waging undeclared economic warfare against the USian 99 Percent,  it is surely legitimate to question the striking similarity of the atrocities committed by the Washington state and New Mexico welfare bureaucracies. Are they are independent acts that are only coincidentally alike? Or are they – as inside sources have privately suggested to me – part of a clandestine, federally scripted national campaign to go far beyond the savagery of the food-stamp cuts already mandated by Democratic (sic) President Bill Clinton's so-called “welfare reform”  and further intensify, perhaps fatally, the suffering of the nation's poor? And could such a scheme be why the New Mexico welfare bureaucrats are hiding behind the Fifth Amendment's protection of self-incrimination?

The damning information contained in the three reports linked in the above paragraph – material doubly relevant because its disclosures about Obama's lies and treachery and the Democratic (sic) Party's now-routine employment of bait-and-switch tactics are powerfully indicative of how former Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton  would govern – suggests such a secretly scripted national targeting of the poor is well within the realm of possibility. Indeed, Obama's penchant for unprecedented tyranny  cloaked by dictatorial secrecy  provides an environment in which egregiousness of any sort – with or without presidential complicity – might easily thrive. It has already spawned an epidemic of outrages – for example Obama's blatanly unconstitutional program of total surveillance –  the uppermost of a long list of U.S. government crimes so effectively concealed only the courageous efforts of whistle-blowers and the tireless work of pro-democracy hackers could reveal them. And we already know the poor (and the 99 Percent in general) are among Obama's favorite targets. As Black Agenda Report Managing Editor Bruce Dixon said recently,  “In eight years Democrat Barack Obama has gone further to protect criminal banksters and their investors than any Republican dared go before him...It’s simply not punishable...as long as you steal from the poor or from the public.”

In the same linked text, Dixon accurately laments that crimes against the poor are no longer even investigated, a legitimate grievance for which USia's so-called “mainstream media” is as answerable as government itself. Such media was once, as in the Pentagon Papers episode,  an effective guardian against despotic politicians, criminal capitalists and all their greedy and/or subversive scheming. But now it is owned by the same One Percenters who effectively own and therefore control all USian governments at every level.

Thus censored, “mainstream media” has become nothing more than a privatized, for-profit (and therefore uniquely self-supporting) version of the Third Reich's Ministry of Propaganda. Thus too the editors and reporters of “mainstream media” follow the example of the late Josef Goebbels in dutifully echoing whatever Big Lie the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals want peddled as truth. And even the most dedicated of the USian whistle-blowers and hackers are likely to have been steeped from birth in the Ayn Rand, capitalism-über-alles dogma that now defines the United States, which means – particularly given the nearly inconceivable wealth required to equip and operate successful hacking operations – these alleged enemies of the state are nearly as likely as their fascism-minded adversaries to dismiss the poor as subhuman.

The overwhelming probability is therefore that any secret, federally organized effort to fatally afflict those of us who are impoverished will never be revealed.

However – at least in the New Mexico  and Washington state  cases – there are motives for crimes against the poor that are far older than the Obama regime. As noted in the NPR report that exposed the malfeasance of New Mexico's welfare bureaucrats, that state has “been under legal pressure for more than 20 years about how it doles out public assistance.” And Washington became somewhat similarly notorious – though all the relevant information has since been disappeared from the Internet – after Seattle's late Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman testified the state was the national plutocracy's favorite rat-lab for testing new techniques of oppression. The two states are also similar in their political ambiguity – that is, they are governed sometimes by Democrats, sometimes by Republicans, with both parties strong enough in each state to ensure that behind the typical charade of USian “democracy,” the One Percent retains absolute control.

While I know nothing more about New Mexico than what can be gleaned from standard public sources, I covered Washington state for nearly a dozen years as a card-carrying member of the working press and for another six years as a freelancer. After my official retirement in 2005, I became openly involved in local politics, most notably as an early activist in Occupy Tacoma (2011-2012). Since then have been at the core of other progressive efforts. Though geriatric physical disabilities increasingly curtail my ability to photograph, I continue to write for OAN and to post regularly on Internet discussion threads as well as to edit and produce a monthly newsletter for the 90-unit housing complex in which I dwell; the housing complex provides so-called “independent living” for elderly and disabled persons, and via its newsletter I cover such political topics – for example public transport – as are relevant to my fellow residents' needs and interests.

Thus I have a long and extensive familiarity with Washington state politics, enough to state unequivocally that beneath its deliberately deceptive “progressive” camouflage, it is in many ways – especially socioeconomically – more reactionary than any other state in the imperial union. For example, a Tacoma city official tells me it is the only state in which tenants have no legal rights whatsoever, a statement confirmed daily by the seemingly endless intrusions and disruptions  inflicted on my neighbors and me by a facilities-renovation that was supposed to be completed months ago but – thanks to the landlord's greedy indifference to our well-being – will probably continue to plague us at least until November. But the clearest demonstration of the state's longstanding hatefulness toward lower-income people is its tax structure, which is by far the most regressive in the nation  – and therefore probably the most regressive in the world.

The anti-Working-Class viciousness of the state's tax structure is vividly underscored by its contrast to the politicians' breathtakingly obscene generosity toward their corporate masters. Washington's corporate tax giveways, by far the largest in the nation, include the perpetually controversial $8.5 billion exemption granted Boeing.  The resultant need to slash stipends and services thus provides motives aplenty for welfare bureaucrats to go far beyond legal limits in minimizing public-assistance costs. And I know from conversations with former DSHS employees they are evaluated not on the number of impoverished people they serve, but rather on how many of us they deny stipends and services.

But the fact remains food stamps are a federal program...

Which brings us back to the likelihood the state bureaucracies are under federal orders to cut food- stamp approvals by any means possible – including unquestionably criminal manipulations of supplicant's eligibility data.

As already noted, the Obama Regime is notorious for perpetuating the anti-Working-Class bias that has effectively unified the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties since President Clinton's abject surrender on welfare policy. Thus the probability a cut-food-stamp-use-by-any-means order has been clandestinely issued by Obama is implicit in the overt hostility – not just indifference – he exhibited in his response to the recession and his pro-austerity appointments.

Thus too it was no surprise when Obama's Deficit Commission Co-chairman Alan Simpson publicly denounced Social Security recipients – never mind their average income two years previous (the most recent year for which data was available) had been a definitively-impoverished $1,115-per-month  – as “greedy geezers.”

Though the angry reaction Simpson's bigotry provoked was soon suppressed by the “mainstream media” propaganda ministry, the remark itself remains significant proof of the attitudes of the Obama Regime and the present-day Democratic (sic) Party toward poverty and those of us afflicted by it. Thus since Obama is known to demand ideological conformity throughout his regime, and since Democratic (sic) Presidential Hillary Clinton was a key part of his cabinet, it is arguable Simpson's malice toward those of us who are poor is probably, behind its rhetorical camouflage, little different from her own: another indication of how Hillary would govern if elected.

Meanwhile, whether or not Hillary remains the incipiently fascist Goldwater Girl she was in her youth, what is (deliberately?) overlooked in all the USian Empire's present-day “mainstream” political controversies is that now fully half the USian homeland population is definitively low-income.  Nor, short of (extremely improbable) economic revolution, is there any likelihood our lot will improve in the foreseeable future – most certainly not in my remaining lifetime. Not only has the homeland's so-called  “surplus population” thus become an issue. The near-certainty of additional job-stealing  “free trade” agreements – the irony quotes because the only “freedom” in “free trade” is that of the One Percent to further subjugate us – means the socioeconomic destitution into which we the people are being thrust will soon become the nation's majority condition. That's why it is increasingly evident, particularly to the millennial generation, the only hope for restoration of the so-called “American Dream” is to redefine it in socialist terms – “from each according to ability; to each according to need” – and then impose it by whatever means prove necessary.

The fact this pre-revolutionary attitude has been to varying extents apparent in the USian homeland since the advent of the Civil Rights Movement  in the 1950s no doubt explains the underlying purpose of Obama's total surveillance program. Just as Kate Epstein notes in the report linked in the preceding sentence, “What very few people are acknowledging, amidst all the discussion about the Snowden leak and what it reveals, is that a very real purpose of the surveillance programs—and perhaps the entire war on terror—is to target and repress political dissent. 'Terrorism' is the new 'Communism,' and the war on terror and all its shiny new surveillance technology is the new Cold War and McCarthyism.”

It is in this context we should consider not only the potentially deadly impacts of food-stamp cuts – extra-legal or not – but also Washington state's even more potentially murderous elimination of its telephone subsidies, which deny 911 emergency services to an unknown number of people who were already desperately poor. The Obama Regime's change in Medicare regulations to give medically ignorant bureaucrats absolute veto power over trained and licensed physicians is also potentially death-dealing and should therefore be viewed in the same light – that is, as an intensification of government authority in response to an increasingly rebellious population. Finally – and here is the culmination of my argument – there is the Empire's now-undeniable war against African-Americans,  who were the first post-First-Nations people to launch a culture-wide rebellion against USian capitalism and are therefore, by the deadly logic of violent subjugation, now the first targets of the local police who have been federalized and militarized into a de facto national police force – a merciless army of occupation that ever more often performs the genocidal function of a new Gestapo. 

While a growing number of USians recognize the Empire's foreign wars as genocidal, there remains widespread reluctance to apply that term to what obtains here in the USian Homeland. That is because of our failure, typically the result of obstructive optimism, to acknowledge that since the Decade of Political Murders – President John Fitzgerald Kennedy slain in 1963, Malcolm X slain in 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy slain in 1968 – the Empire now increasingly employs the same oppressive policies at home it has always used abroad.

Identifying these policies as genocidal is further hampered by the slow-motion process of death inflicted by the thousand cuts of stipend-and-service reductions. Those of us who are its victims – we who are elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed (and thus no longer exploitable for capitalist profit) – cannot doubt the genocidal intent of what is being done to us. But with the USian majority cleverly trained to see genocide only when it is manifest as death camps and gas chambers, it is difficult to to make our case save to others who are similarly victimized.

True, the more obvious genocide inflicted on African Americans, Hispanics and First Nations people by federally trained and equipped local police – which by its endlessly increasing death toll is obviously in response to a national shoot-first order – is finally being (minimally) acknowledged outside the targeted communities. Even so, the white population's closed-minded, 77-percent resistance to recognizing the racial (and therefore implicitly genocidal) motive behind the abandonment of the black population of New Orleans to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 suggests any sort of broader ideological awakening remains decades distant – as does the lynch-mob malevolence typified by the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump and his pledge of an anti-minority domestic Holocaust to “Make America Great Again.”

Such is capitalist governance in accordance with Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation and deadly poverty for all the rest of us. So goes the Empire in the early 21st Century, its ever-more-evident ethos that of a uniquely USian form of Nazism, its Caucasian masses united by the mesmerizing chants of “USA! USA! USA!” – our species' newest equivalent of “Zieg Heil.”

LB/29 September – 3 October 2016.

-30-

Six Reflections on the Politics of Trauma

 

Loren Bliss as the crowd applauded (above), the legislators (below) responding with imperial disdain. On the dais from left: Rep, Jake Fey, Sen. Jeannie Darneille, Rep. Laurie Jinkins.  Photos by KD, OAN © 2016. (Click on images to view them full size.)

       

VOLUNTARY SELF-CRITICISM is one of the primary techniques of consciousness-raising, and the entire USian Left – both the True Left of revolutionary socialists and the False Left of pro-capitalist reformers, anti-union “progressives,” identity-politics zealots, self-proclaimed “anarchists” and all their ideologically ignorant (or merely thoughtless) kindred – could surely use large and regularly administered doses of it.

I am certainly no exception. Hence I will begin by temporarily sidestepping the contents suggested by the title – the trauma inflicted by 42 years of economic malignancy preceded by 11 years of political murder (its dead including at least 13 victims, the last of whom was Karen Silkwood)  – and I'll  address instead its results – this in the context of self-criticism. I'll also acknowledge one of my own more humiliating political failures and reflect on the lesson therein – a lesson that exemplifies how the politics of today's United States are in fact precisely what I hereby name them: the politics of trauma, the more purely psychological dimension of Naomi Klein's disclosures about capitalism and its shock-doctrine economic aggression.

My political failure – that is, the one central to these reflections – was caused by how the instinctive politeness and deference to authority I set aside so easily when shielded by a press card so often becomes reflexive when I am not so shielded. It is the admittedly craven legacy of my boyhood and adolescent years in the South, where because of familial notoriety and obvious northern origins I was generally marginalized as “white trash,” and I therefore learned to behave accordingly – that is, in ways always carefully indicative of “knowing my place.”

The resultant submissiveness, of which I foolishly imagined I had purged myself at least 50 years ago, came back unexpectedly last week to nullify the righteous anger I had intended to express in a public confrontation with a trio of Washington state's elected Democrat legislators, Senator Jeannie Darneille,  Rep. Jake Fey and Rep. Laurie Jinkins.  Each of these officials theoretically represent all the people of the legislative district in which I reside and vote, but in singularly USian truth they represent only their financial contributors. (That's right, like all U.S. major-party politicians, these legislators are vassals of their pro-capitalist donors, and what they favor or oppose is therefore dictated not by us, the voters, but by legalized bribes from business and professional sources.) We the people are thus left out in the proverbial cold, with no representation whatsoever. Such is capitalism – and capitalist governance – in action.

Each of these politicians is also therefore a betrayer of the 99 Percent, the present day synonym, born of the Occupy Movement, for the Working Class or Proletariat as defined by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. In other words, the 99 Percent is literally every one of us – that is, every one of us who is not part of capitalism's hereditary (One Percent) aristocracy, every one of us who will never be admitted to capitalism's somewhat broader Ruling Class, which includes the executives, bureaucrats, military officers, police commanders, academics, journalists and politicians who are rewarded with significant wealth and power for fulfilling the One Percent's needs – above all else by strict obedience to the One Percenters' orders.

Regardless of their socioeconomic origins or their use of rhetorical camouflage, no member of the USian Ruling Class long retains any real concern for the well-being of the 99 Percent. Each answers only to their One Percent masters. Whether publicly or privately, most members of the Ruling Class soon adopt the sneering contempt that characterizes the One Percent's stance toward all of us – we the people of the 99 Percent. While the Republicans are more open about their disdain,  and often more gleefully sadistic in its expression,  the Democrats – as proven by their constant surrenders to Republican demands – are obviously no different.

Which brings me to the legislators I sought to confront. One of the three has a long record of support for gentrification and is therefore almost certainly an intentional betrayer of the Working Class. Another is a betrayer – probably not by original intent, but rather due to the inertial legacy of many years in a legislature so brazenly hypocritical, reporters and editors of my generation ridiculed it as a “clown show” – never mind its cost to the people in tax-exemption subsidies granted to the capitalists undoubtedly made it the most expensive clown show on earth. The third legislator, whose Ivy League academic credentials indicate a Ruling Class background, probably felt she had no choice but to ally herself with the Democratic Party and is now strait-jacketed by its incipiently fascist “neo-liberal” ideologies and its rigidly enforced policy of fascism-enabling surrenders to Republican demands.

Thus each of these legislators collaborates, willingly or unwillingly, with the Republicans' efforts to genocidally reduce social-service programs. Again willingly or unwillingly (but in this case unforgivably), each also participated in the Democrats' Big Lie campaign to keep these cuts secret from the non-victimized public.

Such secrecy, it should be noted, is a classic Big Lie tactic, especially for enabling genocide. Indeed it is traceable to Nazi Germany and how its propaganda apparatus ensured the German public was (generally) kept ignorant of the death camps. The operant principle is simplicity itself: if atrocities are concealed and officially denied – and the social-service cuts inflicted on Washington state seniors and disabled people are indeed atrocities – then we the victims are silenced by the (usually impossible) burden of proving the atrocities are real – this before we can even begin to demand redress for the devastation so inflicted.

Obviously the Democrats' intent is to sandbag our efforts to obtain redress – and just as obviously the keep-the-cuts-secret tactic is working. The Democrats including Obama himself are using the same tactic nationally to cover up their savage cuts to the food stamp program. In a realm of lies, it is always the liars who win.

*** *** ***

NORMALLY I AVOID conventional political activism. It is usually a fool's errand, a waste of time that merely perpetuates the Big Lie of USian “democracy.” But on this occasion I was motivated by pure anger – the anger evoked by a state-imposed income-reduction so vicious it is forcing me out of the apartment I have occupied since 2004, the additional anger generated by the Big Lie tactics the Democrats are employing to hide the cuts and their party's (now nearly traditional) role as Republican enablers.

It was the possibility of publicly expressing this anger – and thereby publicly embarrassing the Democrats' for their lies – that energized me to write a statement to make during the so-called “Town Hall Meeting” these three legislators convened on 10 February in the auditorium at the Tacoma campus of Evergreen State College. I knew my statement would change nothing. The cuts had been made, and given the continuing dominance of neo-liberal sociological theory and Ayn Rand economics, the funding will never be restored. But at least I would have the satisfaction of raising my voice in protest.

However, my journalistic instincts kicked in as I wrote, and I soon realized I would be speaking not only for myself but for the untold number of other seniors and disabled people who are being similarly victimized – a number “untold” only because the state is stubbornly refusing to release it. Assuming there would be some post-comment discussion, I carefully edited and rehearsed my remarks to fill three-fourths of the standard two-minute limit on speakers. Here after about three hours work is what I typed on a cheat-sheet and brought to the meeting:

Thank you for this opportunity to speak. I'm Loren Bliss, obviously a senior, obviously physically disabled (gesture with cane), and after the Great Wall Street Ripoff took away nearly 70 percent of my income, a very impoverished senior, which is why I want to ask you this question about social services.

But first let me say I'm also a reasonably well-educated senior, even in retirement sometimes still a working journalist and among other things a former college instructor, which means I know who owns the two-party system and understand why you impose social service cuts like this one (brandish document) – ending forever the Washington Telephone Assistance Program. Or like the 82 percent cut in my Medicare Extra Help, from $22 per month to $4 per month. Or like the policy changes that slashed a neighbor's food stamps from $128 per month to nothing.

And then you say in the “27th District Legislative Update” you mailed us all last fall – and I'll read it word-for-word (brandish publication) – your biennial budget (quote) restores damaging cuts to public assistance programs made during the lean years of the great recession (unquote).

Obviously that's a lie. You didn't restore anything except maybe the cuts themselves. In fact you made the cuts far worse than they were last year.

So I have to ask – and in an election year it's a question a lot of seniors and disabled people are asking – is there any real difference between you and the Republicans? Except maybe the Republicans are more honest about their genocidal intent.

*** *** ***

I BELIEVE IT was von Moltke the Elder who said no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy's main strength, and this was surely true of my experience at the 27th District's alleged “Town Hall Meeting.”

The college auditorium was filled to near capacity with approximately 200 people. But they were nearly all Caucasians despite the fact the meeting was held in Hilltop, which is not only part of the 27th District but is Tacoma's main black-majority neighborhood. The majority of the attendees also appeared to be middle-aged petite-bourgeois types. If typical of similar demographic groups elsewhere in the USian homeland, the majority was thus presumably indifferent (if not actually hostile) to the plight of lower-income people. Whatever, their numerical strength (and therefore their white-bourgeois ideological dominance) was surely enhanced by the notable absence of any substantial number of elderly African-Americans – the very people who would have been, as a group, hit hardest by the social-service cuts. The absence of younger people was also notable.

Though it is a bit of an aside, the absence of each group, older blacks and youth of all races, suggests both groups are increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party– a significant indication particularly given claims the Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy is fostering a youth-renaissance within the party.

Ironically, the crowd's largest faction – a seemingly all-white band of not-in-my-back-yard “environmentalists” – had come to protest a local methane-plant proposal over which the Legislature has no authority at all.

But Darneille, who as a senator outranks the representatives and was thus the event chair, ruled the NIMBYs would be allowed to speak first – to squander more than half the time allotted for public statements – even as those of us with grievances inflicted by legislative action (and therefore the very grievances the three legislators might have been able to help redress), were relegated to the closing 30 minutes of the two-hour session. Darneille also announced our statements would be limited to one minute rather than the customary two minutes.

It was, indeed, a diabolically clever use of the (distant) methanol-plant threat to distract from the (immediate) issues of social-service cuts. In other words, the “Town Hall Meeting” was yet another example of USian (non)democracy in (calculatedly oppressive) action.

My response to the newly imposed one-minute time limit was to again edit my statement, paring it to the bare essentials of protests against the cuts in social-service stipends and against the Democrats' use of the Big Lie to cover up the cuts and thereby suppress any possible protest.

But then I noted how the legislative trio was so carefully avoiding any mention of the true source of the state's financial crisis – the staggering, no-cost-is-too-great extravagance of the legislators, Republican and Democrat alike, in awarding unprecedented subsidies to the One Percent. Washington state politicians have given their capitalist owners the largest tax exemptions not just in U.S. history, but in the entire known governmental history of Planet Earth. Yet not one of the nearly 200 people in attendance had dared utter even a single word protesting this robbery of the poor to further enrich those who are already inconceivably wealthy.

Thus when I was finally granted the alleged democracy of my allotted one minute, I opened my remarks with the traditional “thank you,” then said something like “I'm here to protest the cuts you made in social services, but first I want to ask a rhetorical question: just how much of the budget shortfall you keep complaining about is due to the truly obscene tax exemptions this state grants Big Business? They're the largest ever in the world – not just in the country but in the world – when you factor in that $8.5 billion tax cut you gave Boeing.”

The audience applauded enthusiastically (see the top photograph above), and Jinkins – in sharp contrast to the silence of her two colleagues – emphatically declared herself as an opponent of all such definitively anti-humanitarian transfers of wealth from the citizenry to the aristocracy.

Then I launched into my much-abbreviated condemnation of the social-service cuts and the Democrats' breathtakingly dishonest attempt to conceal them. But as soon as I got to “obviously that's a lie,” Darneille forcefully contradicted me, stating that TANF funding – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families – had been restored. She uttered the usual Democrat excuse for the cuts I was protesting (“the Republicans made us do it”), and she concluded her interruption with the meaningless statement that legislation had been introduced to restore funding to remedy these same cuts. (Her statement is meaningless because, given Republican control of the state senate, no such restorative legislation will be approved.) At that point – my one minute of pseudo-democracy mostly consumed by the state senator – the time-keeper flagged me into silence.

Now utterly intimidated by the prospect of being made to look like some stereotypically doddering early-Alzheimer's oldster, I mumbled a short, not very articulate protest that “senior needs are being swept under the rug” and, head down in defeat, hobbled away from the lectern. Never mind the response to my ad-lib comment about corporate tax exemptions; my cutback protests drew only stony-faced silence, thereby confirming my estimate of the crowd's petite-bourgeois majority bias.

Worse – because I allowed myself to be intimidated into self-censorship – I never made my most important point: that under capitalist governance, the only real difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the latter have become habitual liars while the former are increasingly more honest about their genocidal intent.

Only two people, one an elderly black woman who is a neighbor, the other a middle-aged Hispanic male with whom I had no previous acquaintance, thanked me for speaking up on behalf of all the seniors and disabled people who have been hurled under the proverbial bus by Jeannie Darneille, Jake Fey, Laurie Jinkins and all their Republican and Democratic colleagues in the 2015 Washington State Legislature.

And at least I had forced Darneille to tacitly admit the Democrats have now themselves adopted the long-time Republican strategy of pitting one group of victims against another, in this instance seniors and disabled people versus welfare mothers and children. That would have been a significant disclosure were I covering the event for some publication that does not limit “news” to that which attracts only the readership its advertisers seek as customers. But publications that define “news” as it was formerly defined – as anything that impacts humans whether rich or poor – now exist only on the electronic fringe. Hence Darneille's inadvertent disclosure goes forever unexposed.

In other words, my protest failed abysmally.

*** *** ***

I SHOULD NOTE here that in my 23-odd (award-winning) years as what in the craft of journalism is described as a “public affairs reporter” – that is, one who covers the performance and politics of state and local government, as I did in Tennessee (1957-1959; 1963-1965); in New York City (1965-1967); in New Jersey (1965; 1967-1970); again in NYC (1983-1986), and in Washington state (1971; 1974-1981, 2004-2009) – I have witnessed a significant change in the dynamics of public-meeting dialogue between elected officials and the citizens they (allegedly) represent.

The first political meetings I covered were in East Tennessee, where the politicians themselves would sometimes engage in fist-fights,  but their dialogues with the voters – at least the many I witnessed – were always respectful. Ditto everywhere else I worked until maybe 1978 or 1979. But – though I had not focused on it until now – this paradigm of mutual respectfulness eroded rapidly following President Carter's neo-liberal betrayal of the New Deal. Next came the Reagan Revolution, the subsequent transformation of the Democratic Party into the Republicans' austerity-enabling apparatus, and finally – to the infinite gain of the One Percent and a bottomless loss inflicted on all the rest of us – the reduction of the United States to de facto single-party plutocracy.

Political-meeting dialogue changed accordingly. Formerly, when I was a young newsman, the purpose of such dialogue was to allow (most of) the people to seek redress – an intent clearly demonstrated by the politeness with which the politicians (actually) listened to their (usually white) constituents.

But since the era of the Carter betrayals, public voter-politician interactions in the U.S. have moved far away from their post-colonial town-meeting origins to become ever more reminiscent of what I suppose political assemblies in pre-revolutionary France or pre-revolutionary Russia were like: public meetings during which exalted officials would pretend to humor the sans culottes (in popular usage, “those so poor they cannot afford pants”), or the народа (naroda: “the people” [as opposed to the aristocracy]), in either case by regally granting us a few moments to speak and then lecturing us on our alleged ignorance – exactly as Darneille lectured me.

Such is the political deterioration inflicted on the United States by capitalism: from the manifest democracy of genuine dialogues between (mostly white) voters and their elected representatives, to the implicit tyranny of assemblies the obvious function of which is to embarrass anyone who dares criticize the (ever more oppressive) regimen of capitalist governance. Now we Caucasians are increasingly subject to the same marginalization that has always been the lot of USian minorities.

How then might I have carried my self-assigned mission through to its conclusion?

The only answer is to have followed the behavioral example of Black Lives Matter and shouted down the state senator when she interrupted what I was trying to say.

Yes, as I implied earlier, I sometimes exhibited this sort of righteously angry relentlessness in my quests for information, particularly at press conferences.

But scheduled meetings of legislative committees or state or local governing bodies, where my official role was never more than that of silent observer, are very different from press conferences, which are by definition often confrontational, and where, shielded by my press card, I was authorized to be forceful or even rude in my demands for answers to questions. It was a ploy with which I was never truly comfortable (for under such stress there was always the fearsome possibility of some dyslexic speech-error that would reduce me to a professional laughingstock), but it was nevertheless a tactic I dutifully employed when necessary – occasionally with scoop-the-world results.

Yet last Saturday I allowed myself to be intimidated into squandering the only opportunity I am ever likely to get in this lifetime to publicly underscore the most vital truth of present-day USian politics – that the Democrat/Republican collaboration fostered by unlimited sums of capitalist money has reduced the United States to a one-party nation. Which means its governance differs from that of its financier and (alleged) enemy China only in that the Chinese are presumably fully aware of their circumstances – that their communism has been co-opted to meaninglessness by capitalism – while we USians are kept in a constant state of delusion and/or ignorance about how we are governed: hence Moron Nation.

Obviously – both because of fears related to dyslexia and because slightly more than one month away from my 76th birthday I am probably too old to un-learn my habits of deference and politeness, my best course of action is to avoid all such encounters like the one that took place at the alleged “Town Hall Meeting.” And if for some reason that is impossible for me to do – as indeed it was on 20 February (with all but one of my comrades engaged in vital political activity elsewhere) – to rehearse my protest so thoroughly, my unshielded responses to oppression become as automatic as they were when I was shielded by membership in the working press.

Meanwhile Black Lives Matter is thus proven to be the tactical master of this new age of resistance. The only way to be heard by Ruling Class politicians is to confront them with maximum rudeness – which for people like myself is a profoundly difficult tactic to learn.

That said, my apology to those who had expected better from me at the “Town Hall Meeting.”

*** *** ***

SUCH ARE THE present-day conditions that exemplify the politics of trauma.

Reflecting on my embarrassing failure at the “Town Hall Meeting,” I realized my core assumption is scarcely different from that of my fellow USians. I recognize I have no influence whatsoever over U.S. politics and even less over its Ruling Class perpetrators, and I take the hardships thus inflicted on my friends and neighbors and on me personally as mounting proof of my own ever-worsening powerlessness. (At least I avoid the error of blaming myself – the automatic reflex of most USians, induced by 35 years of Ayn Rand propaganda and prosperity-gospel conditioning.)

Though I still vote, rationalizing my participation as a meaningless gesture that is nevertheless necessary to preserve the franchise, in every other sense I am at one with those who who are so alienated from our failed experiment in representative democracy, they ask themselves – if indeed they trouble themselves to think politically at all – “why bother when it changes nothing?” Therefore they neither vote nor otherwise participate in politics whether local, state or national. This is the reality so vividly demonstrated by the USian Homeland's ongoing decline in voter turnout,  which in Washington state between 2010 and 2014 produced the largest such drop recorded anywhere in the nation.

Beyond the reams and kilobytes of Right Wing academic obfuscation, the real message of these declines is obvious. It goes like this: “There is no longer any real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. That means we're going to get a Republican even if we elect somebody who's supposedly a Democrat – just like we got with Obama. That also means it doesn't matter – it won't make any difference – if the Republicans win. So why should I bother to vote (even if, with Washington state's 100-percent mail-in ballots, it only costs me a postage stamp).”

Such statements, from young and old alike, I have heard more times than I can count.

Significantly, the de facto election boycott by Washington state's voting-age citizens, from a 53.1 percent turnout in 2010 to a 28.0 percent turnout in 2014 (which some commentators have called the lowest rate ever recorded in the United States), occurred after the Republicans nullified all the 2012 state election results by a genuine coup that – exactly as I said on the comment thread of the linked report – gave them budgetary omnipotence and thus absolute control of the state government. The turnout of Washington's voting-age citizenry in November 2012 had been 60.77 percent – but that was five weeks before the coup.

Afterward, there was a gradual but eventually statewide awakening to the fact we the people are powerless in the face of such skulduggery. The coup itself was traumatic, the source of acute fear amongst lower-income people astute enough to recognize we were now doomed to become its primary victims. And its consequences, which include the savage cutbacks I unsuccessfully tried to protest last week, are more traumatic still. In fact the resultant voter-alienation will almost certainly enable the Republicans to sweep the state's 2016 elections – with an acceleration of deadly consequences for those of us who depend on Medicaid, Medicare Extra Help, food stamps or any other sort of state social-service money.

*** *** ***

PROBABLY FOR POLITICALLY alienated people who are in their 50s and 60s, the politics of trauma began with the carefully engineered war of economic subjugation demanded by the infamous Powell Memo of 1971 and publicly declared by President Richard Nixon when he proclaimed to William Randolph Hearst Jr. in a 1973 post-inaugural interview that “Americans had it too good,” that he would devote his second term to making life miserable for the 99 Percent. Nixon was thus voicing the One Percent's declaration of class-war against the American Dream, against the U.S. experiment in representative democracy and ultimately against the entire 99 Percent – every worker and working family in the nation. (That's probably why the interview, at the time Page One in every Hearst newspaper in the nation, has conveniently vanished down the Orwell hole.)

Those who were born after 1974 were therefore born into relentless economic decline, so if their families were part of the 99 Percent, they have known nothing but steadily increasing wretchedness all their lives. Hence, having no reason to imagine the American Dream as anything but monumental deception, they avoid its political rituals in exactly the same way a recovering Christian shuns even the near occasion of religious rites. Why participate in something bitter experience has taught you is nothing more than an invitation to abuse?

Even so, what too often gets lost in the telling is the fact it is the Ruling Class – and the Ruling Class alone – whose colossal treacheries and betrayals have reduced USian politics to a politics of disappointment and frustration and despair and thus condensed its diverse miseries into the politics of trauma.

The ultimate example of this process – at least the ultimate example to date – is the dismal denouement to our national outpouring of hopefulness evoked by Obama the Orator with his ubiquitous claim of “change we can believe in.” For a few brief months he genuinely uplifted our spirits. But for the past eight years, by his obviously premeditated shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer, he has cruelly hurled us into a hopelessness so deep the only exit is too often death itself.  At the very least it is as if the entire U.S. political process has been deliberately turned into an experiment in aversive conditioning. In this context, Obama's biggest Big Lie ever – the premeditated lie so hypnotically repeated by his 2008 slogan – becomes perhaps the most deliberately wounding ploy in the history of USian governance.

Given the unholy combination of the One Percent's efforts at voter-disenfranchisement and the empire's notorious skill at psychological warfare – one of the darker legacies of its embrace of the Nazi war criminals after World War II – it is certainly possible what we are witnessing is not just the happenstantial emergence of a politics of trauma but rather its deliberate imposition. The motive is obvious: the lower the voter turnout, the easier it is for the One Percent and their Republican storm-troopers to ensure the triumph of fascism.

But for me, as for others my age, the politics of trauma began far earlier, spawned by the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and confirmed beyond doubt by the murder of his brother Senator Robert Francis Kennedy nearly five years later on 5 June 1968. Hence the relevance of what I wrote in response to a Reader Supported News exclusive by Paul Schrade, who witnessed the RFK assassination. (The text here is not italicized because it includes details I omitted in compliance with RSN's 1500-character limit):

I was working the day JFK was murdered – was the only one in the newsroom of The Oak Ridger, a small but excellent afternoon daily in East Tennessee. (The editor and all my colleagues were at lunch; I was finishing an unrelated story that would run the following week, this so I could leave early for a weekend with my lover, who was attending Virginia Intermont, an all-women's college in Bristol 100 miles to the north.) For the past week I had felt grave forebodings about the president's trip to Dallas, and when I heard the flash-bell ringing like an unanswered telephone on the A-wire teletype, the line that carried national and international news, I had a terrible premonition of what I would see:

F  L  A  S  H

PRESIDENT KENNEDY SHOT IN DALLAS.

It was the only time in my career I gave a “stop the presses” order, though it was not really needed as the press room crew had just heard the news on the radio and were already stopping the machinery on their own initiative. Within an hour we remade our home edition, published that, and then as the story developed we produced one extra (a special edition prompted by breaking news), considered producing a second extra, decided it was unnecessary and finally, just before midnight, closed the newsroom after what had become a 17-hour workday.  
  
Needless to say, I was exhausted. But my lover had successfully navigated the obstacle course of acquiring the false papers and making the clandestine arrangements then required of any young woman who dared seek momentary escape from the chastity belt of dormitory regulations, and both of us were   understandably determined to save as much of our weekend plans as possible. So she borrowed a family-heirloom wedding ring from one of her roommates, stuffed a pillow under her clothing to mimic pregnancy, and bummed a ride into town from another roommate who was so overcome by giggles at the deception she had difficulty driving. So disguised, my lover, a diminutive but formidably articulate brunette scarcely more than five feet tall, signed us into the region's swankest hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Loren Bliss – husband and father-to-be temporarily detained elsewhere on pressing business. 

There were no Interstate highways in those days, and the 100-mile trip was on mountain roads, mostly two-lane blacktop. But I had a good Volkswagen sedan, which handled the curves with far more alacrity than any Detroit iron, so by 2 a.m. my lover and I were in each other's arms. Both of us were so devastated by the assassination that at first and probably for at least the next two hours all we could do was cling to one another like lost and tearful children. 

That Sunday our room-service breakfast was interrupted by the grisly spectacle of Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV. At that moment my lover's normally warm brown eyes turned bleak as  winter behind her tears of shock and despair. “What are we,” she lamented. “A banana republic? God help us.”

It was after the murder of President Kennedy that my late father, a Marxist since the Crash of 1929 schooled him with the unforgiving brutality of capitalism, adopted what became the political mantra of his final eight years: “Eventually things will get so bad in this country, the Red Army will be welcomed as an army of liberation.”

In 1968 when RFK was slain, I was the news editor of The Daily Record, a mid-sized paper serving Morristown, New Jersey and its surrounding Morris County. We normally rolled our home edition at 2 a.m. but on this morning we had held Page One until nearly 3 a.m. so we could include the California primary results. We knew if Kennedy won, he'd be the Democrat nominee and therefore the president. The story arrived as anticipated on the A-wires (two of probably a half-dozen teletype machines in our wire-room). I don't remember now if I chose the United Press International text or the Associated Press version – but I edited it, wrote a head on it (something like “Kennedy Wins It” proclaimed in 96-point type), and sent the copy up to the composing room. A few minutes later I initialed my approval on the Page One proof and then, my choice of careers once more affirmed by the feel-good seismic rumble of high-speed presses, I went home smugly thinking all was well.

When I awoke the next afternoon I walked to my neighborhood's corner store and saw a paper in the window – probably The Newark News – with a headlined reference to a Kennedy shooting. I asked the proprietor why on earth he had a 1963 paper in his window, and he said “oh you didn't know” and handed me the copy of The New York Times he always set aside for me. Exactly as in the cliche, it was as if the ground opened under my feet. Just minutes after I had left the Record's newsroom, assassins bullets – there is now no doubt there were at least two shooters – killed the last politician who might have saved us from ourselves.  
 
As the Crash of 1929 was pivotal to my late father, so was the murder of Senator Robert Francis Kennedy pivotal to me. It was then I recognized our alleged “democracy” is a cunning charade, a Machiavellian fraud, a Big Lie of such breathtaking proportions neither Josef Goebbels nor even his master Adolf Hitler could have imagined it. Indeed were I a Christian – even a modern-minded Christian – I would have no choice but take this Big Lie and its eventually suicidal success as ultimate proof of the Devil's reality. And proof too of all its dire implications: just as in the Tarot deck the Devil card is followed by the card depicting the Tower shattered by divine lightning and collapsing into ruin, so in USian life is our plague of political murders followed by realization that humanitarian change will never again be allowed in this nation – that our wretchedness will therefore worsen until we are liberated by apocalypse or invasion or revolution or perhaps by some combination of all three – or until capitalism reduces our entire species to extinction.

Again I am reminded of what the Celtic partisan Calgacus said of the Imperial Roman invaders and how true it is of the USian Empire as well: “They make a desert and they call it peace.” To which – though I remain firmly committed to the strategy and tactics of non-violence – the only rational response may yet be epitomized by graffito: “Boudicca Lives.” Or as our murdered president once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

LB/21-26 February 2016

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