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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I got serious:

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

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

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

Later in the same thread I elaborated:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/31 May 2016

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Capitalism's Deeds Reveal Its Intrinsic Evil; Identity Politics Exemplify the Cunning by Which We Are Kept in Slavery

CAPITALISM DEFTLY CAMOUFLAGES its evil behind innumerable Big Lies and a facade of constitutional democracy. But we see its hideous truth in the atrocities the U.S. Empire commits abroad.  Here at home we see the same capitalist savagery manifest in the eviction of that older woman I wrote about  four  weeks ago. 

 

We also see it in ever more glaring evidence of the desperate poverty that now oppresses fully half the USian population: young workers missing teeth due to the definitively capitalist combination of sweatshop wages and prohibitive dental costs; formerly middle-class parents whose jobs were outsourced, whose mortgages were foreclosed, who were evicted into homelessness and whose children now live as street urchins; formerly secure elders now dependent on soup kitchens as their only defense against starvation. 

All these atrocities and innumerable more – think Bhopal or Deepwater Horizon  or Bangladesh – are the essence of capitalism in action. Capitalism's defining premise is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species ever asserted, the ultimate example of the biblical exhortation, “by their deeds shall ye know them.” Though I am not a Christian – though I can never be a Christian – these words attributed to Jesus surely apply to recognizing the evil capitalism inflicts on all but the obscenely privileged few. 

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Witnessing that eviction four weeks ago was wrenching for many reasons, but the most painful was the extent to which the woman's frantic scurrying about the ruins of her life reminded me of my own helpless behavior after the times my identity was violently obliterated.

I write this statement knowing it will be challenged by anyone who stubbornly clings to identity politics. How could I, a so-called “privileged white male,” presume to imagine suffering a loss such as that Tacoma woman suffered. (Yes, despite the socioeconomic lessons of the past several decades, there is still a legion of useful identity-politics idiots who serve the Ruling Class by fostering the hostility of one Working Class identity group toward all other Working Class groups.) 

The hypothetical identity-politics question – and I have no doubt it will be asked in real time – reminds of an incident in Manhattan c. 1983, when a white female personnel executive rejected my employment application because it had taken me until I was 36 years old to earn my bachelor of arts degree. According to this personnel officer, the duration of my educational effort combined with the fact I “had all the advantages of being a white male” to prove I was “obviously not serious about doing college-level work.” Therefore – or so she reasoned from her (genuinely) privileged Ivy League background as she looked down upon me from her managerial throne – I was unsuitable for editorial employment.

By the diplomas and certificates on her office wall, this young woman had undoubtedly lived a sheltered, pampered life – a prerequisite of graduation from any of the prohibitively expensive Ivy League schools that train the sons and daughters of the One Percenters and their most valued Ruling Class servants. Moreover, her reference to white male advantage made it clear she was blinded by identity-politics resentments. She could not imagine any seemingly successful, apparently middle-class white male encountering genuinely insurmountable obstacles. Hers was the same Ayn Rand/New Age hybrid of presumptuousness that believes unemployability is merely a state of mind: “change your thinking and you change your reality,” no revolution required. From her perspective, there was nothing in the world so daunting it could delay a white male's baccalaureate degree by 14 years, unless of course the male in question was “not serious” – that is, too lazy. 

Thus does identity politics eliminate empathy, which in turn eliminates class solidarity, blinding huge segments of the 99 Percent to the fact all USian Empire subjects whether proletarians or peasants and regardless of our gender or race or ethnicity are sisters and brothers of the Working Class. 

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The bitter truth of my own life is that I was never middle-class enough, much less successful enough, to be financially secure. Even at the height of my journalism career, whether as a daily-newspaper news-editor in Northern New Jersey or as the editor-in-chief of an international trade-journal in Manhattan, I was never more than a paycheck or two away from financial ruin. 

Though I have never been thrown into the street with all my possessions, I was ousted by family treachery from a place where I had lived for 11 years and assumed I would spend the remainder of my life. The ouster, which occurred in 2004, is a perfect example of why to me the term “family” is a synonym for all sorts of unpleasantness including rejection and betrayal, which were the everyday norms of my childhood, and genuine risks of bodily harm or death, which thank Goddess occurred only rarely. 

But you can only lose your home once, and I lost mine – and my family as well – on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945, when my mother sought to kill me. Based on independent evidence I gathered as a middle-aged adult, my death was to have climaxed a sequence of events my mother had been scheming since before my conception. I was not a love-child; in fact I was its opposite, a hate-child deliberately conceived to entrap my father into marriage. Though my father saved my life – a canceled meeting brought him home early on that pivotal Solstice Eve – now that I know the larger circumstances, I can understand and almost forgive what he did next. As if he were overwhelmed by the parental equivalent of buyer's remorse, a few weeks later he sought closed-door judicial permission to dump me in a state orphanage, but the judge forbade it. From then until I turned 18, I was never more than an albatross around the necks of my father and my new stepmother, his former executive secretary.

Meanwhile, to escape the looming public scandal of judicial actions in open court, my mother's wealthy parents paid for her confinement in a posh private insane asylum. She remained there until 1947, after which she obtained a court order decreeing I would spend the summers with her and spend the school years with my father and his wife. But from the moment my mother tried to celebrate the 1945 Solstice by her intended sacrificial act of post-partum abortion, all but one of her kin regarded me as an unwelcome reminder of bad times and scandalous events. The one exception was the blessed aunt whose later intervention saved me from dyslexia. In the eyes of my other maternal relatives, I was never more than a worm in the shining apple of the hypocritical bourgeois respectability they so carefully cultivated and so diligently maintained. 

Albatross and worm – so I remained until I moved out of my father's house and was freed from the judicial indenture of obligatory summertime visits to the domain of my mother. Thanks to my aunt, who in the summer of 1948 got me the tutoring that laid the foundation for all I later became; thanks to my father's books, which filled a wall 22 feet long and 10 feet high from floor to ceiling and overflowed into several glass-front bookcases; thanks even to my father himself, a master of Socratic method despite his rejection of me as a son and his failure as a parent; and thanks most of all to an inner strength I often cursed in please-let-me-die adolescent despair – I had managed to survive. Eventually I even thrived, though only for a bit. 

But then at age 43, just as it seemed I was approaching a peak of journalistic achievement, I was robbed of my life's work, stripped of all my identity and denied any further potential for anything humanly recognizable as success. The mechanism of my ruin was a fire I do not doubt but cannot prove was government arson – the event of 1 September 1983 that obliterated all my life's work and has ever since defined who I am, what I am and all that I will never be. 

In other words, I am no stranger to losses of the magnitude suffered by that shockingly unfortunate woman who was evicted from her home in Tacoma on what should have been called not an “anniversary” but rather our 50th annual day of mourning. There is not one scintilla of hyperbole in my assertion of empathy with her. But at least I have thus far survived all that has been done to me, and with all my heart I wish the same for the woman who was evicted. 

That is why, in the face of all that is being done to all of us, I long ago recognized survival as an act of revolutionary defiance – the very point at which the personal becomes political. 

It is a realization now made all the more poignant by a “happy holidays” convergence of complex medical problems that promise to reduce my 2014 to a year of unrelenting misery even before its arrival: Merry Christmas to me from a relentlessly hostile Jesus. 

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Relevant Remarks on the Comment Threads of Other Websites 

“NSA Surveillance Program: It's Going to Get Worse”  Dave Eggers of The Guardian notes how the National Security Agency and its kindred secret-police agencies have effectively nullified all U.S. constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure. Moreover, he warns, history – specifically the post-World-War-II purge – proves that anything the government can employ to oppress us, it will eventually use without mercy. I agree, noting that a government does not collect such material without malevolent purpose. I also note it is increasingly obvious an enemy of the USian state is anyone who objects to capitalist savagery, whether they seek to abolish capitalism or merely reform it. “(F)rom the perspective of the One Percenters who own the government and the politicians, bureaucrats, cops, soldiers and religious authorities who make up the Ruling Class -- the enemy is anyone who dares challenge the present socioeconomic order.” 

“Barack Obama Is Not George Bush”  Jonathan Chait of the Ruling Class journal New York Magazine pens a clever piece of Democratic Party propaganda, and I refute it as another of the party's pre-Congressional-election efforts to make us forget how Obama the Orator became Barack the Betrayer and thus revealed the party's new strategy for serving the One Percent: campaign as Democrats, rule as Republicans. Challenged to provide an alternative to capitalist governance by the One Party of Two Names – to posit a means of relief from the policies of absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the rest of us – I answer that the winning methods of Councilwoman Sawant in Seattle teach us everything we need to build an effective 

resistance.

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Winter Solstice Greetings and happy holidays to all, even amidst this time of political strife and personal wretchedness.

LB/22 December 2013 

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