Looming Blindness and the Slow-Motion Genocide of Social-Service Cuts Make 2016 My Most MiserableYear

TO MY HORROR, I have learned the cataract surgery I had in late 2014 has failed. I am again going blind, this time from a post-operative condition called posterior capsule opacity – essentially the failure of a production-line surgeon to remove enough of the cataract cells to prevent them from growing back in a new inner-eye locale.

But now the slow-motion genocide of cuts to social services has left me without any means to pay the out-of-pocket cost of corrective surgery, which is $608 plus an additional sum in co-payments of approximately $200 – a total of $808.  

It might as well be $800,800.  Either sum is impossibly beyond my reach. 

Thus – barring a miracle – I will end my life a helpless, hopeless blind man, unless of course I am fortunate enough to die before declining vision forces me into the nightmare of assisted living in some miserably neglectful, piss-reeking nursing home.

In other words, 2016 – though it has hardly begun – has become the most miserable year of my entire life.

Before learning on 6 January of my encroaching blindness, I was already in extended shock at the magnitude of the cutbacks imposed on my 2016 income. It had been the worst yet of the now-inevitable Dismal Decembers – the annual political-becomes-personal nadir-of-reckoning in what is the cruelest month of all for U.S. lower income people. This year – a year in which the Big Lie Democrats claim to have “restored” social services – my monthly Medicare Extra Help stipend was cut from $22.90 to $4. My monthly food stamp allotment was slashed from $103 to $17. And, as noted in November, my telephone subsidy, approximately $17 per month, was abolished entirely.

In 2016, a year in which we seniors and disabled people are notoriously denied a Social Security cost-of-living increase – my barely livable monthly income of $1263 has been chopped by at least $121.90 – “at least” because I can only estimate the impact of an immediate 16 percent increase in Medicare Part D prescription drug co-payments and a pending 33.3 percent increase in local transit fares.

(Yes, I realize $121.90 is mere pocket change for a sneering One Percenter or any of the super-fortunate USian suck-asses whose abject obedience to capitalist tyranny enables them to cling to living-wage jobs. But for someone on a fixed income of scarcely more than $15,000 per year, the loss of $121.90 per month is total, irremediable ruin. What it does to me is eliminate every last penny of my discretionary income – this in a year in which I already [before the doctors discovered my impending blindness] – needed denture adjustment [approximately $100] and three pairs of new shoes [another $150 at least] – money I no longer have no matter the state of my eyesight.)

But the point here is not the hopelessness of my own circumstances – the fact I too like so many others in this ever-more-openly malignant nation must now choose carefully whether to spend my meager income on shelter, food, medicine or clothing – all of which civilized nations regard as human rights. Nor is it the fact my encroaching blindness makes all those choices ultimately meaningless.

The point is the documents I quoted here on 25 November 2015 only hint at the savage magnitude of the social-service cuts inflicted by the Republicans and their Democrat collaborators in the Washington State Legislature – cuts signed into law without so much as a whisper of protest by Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee.

As previously reported, one of the documents I cited was a slickly art-directed, expensively printed Democratic Party mailer boastfully claiming its legislators had “restored” social services. The other was a grimly unsigned notice from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services announcing the state would no longer subsidize telephone service for lower-income people. Together, the two documents clearly demonstrate the ugly truth the Democrats are (again) operating as the party of the Big Lie.

Since then, it has (again) become obvious the Democrats are – perhaps even more than the Republicans – the enablers of austerity, a clever euphemism for slow-motion genocide: the methodical extermination of those of us who, whether because of age or disability, are no longer exploitable for capitalist profit. For now our already-bloodied noses are rubbed in the fact the legislators – the bought-and-paid-for strumpets of the One Percent who are always trying to bullshit us into believing U.S. “democracy” is anything but cruel deception – also slashed Medicare premium subsidies and hacked away still more dollars from food-stamp allowances.

But an apparent gag order – unprecedented in my years of covering state and local politics – has made it thus far impossible to determine the actual magnitude of the cuts. The Democrat legislators appear to have adopted a policy of ignoring any constituent who dares complain about the cuts, even those who send letters. Normally vocal advocacy groups – organizations necessarily aligned with the Democratic Party and therefore undoubtedly silenced by the Democrats' pre-election bullying – have yet to utter a single word of protest. Welfare bureaucrats, when pressed for information, reluctantly mutter “the legislature did it” but refuse to disclose further details.

All I want to know is who to blame – what perpetrators to name in public print. But even my own sources – the remnants of a handful of insiders whose veracity and reliability were established by years of providing accurate information – are refusing to answer my questions about the cuts. I am not an accountant, and without expert assistance, the closed-door secrecy of the budget process and the opacity of the budget itself nullifies my investigative reporting skills. As always, the operant principle of capitalist governance is “fuck the 99 Percent.”

Meanwhile, the local “mainstream media” – that is, the local branches of the plutocracy's de facto ministry of propaganda – continue to ignore the story, which any even halfway competent reporter of my generation would have pounced on. This in turn strongly suggests the media silence about the cutbacks is deliberate – truth-suppression in obedience to the plutocratic cabal that owns all U.S. major media and all Democrat and Republican politicians as well. Such is what passes for “journalism” here in the de facto Fourth Reich – where our capitalist overlords have by their diabolical cunning given themselves not only a Josef Goebbels-type propaganda apparatus but one that earns them obscene profits by its lies and disinformation. 

Not that I'm surprised. What is being employed to hide these newest social-service cuts is merely the logical extension of the Big Lie tactic the Democrats first employed in President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, most notably in the slogan “change we can believe in” – which “change” turned out to be Obama the Orator's shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer. 

Now, just as the Betrayer tried to cover up his 2014 food-stamp cuts with a truly Orwellian lie – claiming the cuts “make sure America's children don't go hungry” – so are his state-level minions doing likewise.
 
The strategic advantage in this sort of Big Lie is found in the fact the Moron Nation electorate accepts it without question. This is partly due to conditioned ignorance, partly due to the ever-more-obnoxious, ever-more-implicitly reactionary cult of “positive thinking” by which the white USian 99 percenters who still have jobs deliberately blind themselves to what is going on around them. Thus they are psychologically distanced from capitalism's socioeconomic and political atrocities in exactly the same way the citizens of Nazi Germany were shielded from the more obvious atrocities of their own nation. Thus too when we the victims complain or protest, we are confronted with hostile disbelief and denounced as welfare queens or “greedy geezers.” 

Fortunately there are still a few websites, among them Reader Supported News, that remain willing to report just how truly wretched life in the USian homeland has become, not just for elderly and disabled people, but especially for women, particularly women of color, whose likelihood of suffering death in childbirth is nearly four times that of white women.

Because I am an old man, my time is obviously ending, and though it surely hurts when the capitalists and their factotum bureaucrats and politicians kick me in the balls, my pain has little affect on what is to come. But when you kill the mothers, you murder the very source of life. And this nation's deliberately deadly, methodically sustained misogyny exemplifies more vividly than any of capitalism's other atrocities its unconscionable threat to our species' survival.

LB/11 January 2016

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Total Surveillance: Absolute Proof We the People Are Nothing More Than Lab Rats in a Capitalist Skinner Box

Another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, the woman's placard as apt now as in October 2011, when her smile reflected the joy and optimism that was all too soon crushed by USian governments at all levels. Pentax MX, 100mm f/2.8 SMCP-M, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013 (Click on image to view it full size.)

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(Note: Vital medical procedures consumed so much of my time during the past seven days, this essay is again unavoidably late, and I again apologize for my tardiness. But the news is good. Contrary to what was first suspected, my eyes are free of glaucoma. Moreover, the latest surgical techniques bypass unrelated conditions that would have prohibited cataract surgery. Thus my eyesight – and therefore my ability to photograph – can be surgically restored, for which I am grateful beyond words.)

 

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THE TOTAL-SURVEILLANCE STATE is undoubtedly the most terrifying governmental application of modern technology that has yet been revealed to us. Its terror exceeds that of thermonuclear weapons or nuclear melt-downs, which we can always convince ourselves will only be inflicted elsewhere upon others. Unlike The Bomb, which save in Hiroshima or Nagasaki has not yet been dropped, or the homicidal reactor, which – at least so far as we're allowed to know – has run amok only at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima – the total-surveillance state murders us all by killing our ability to think and speak freely. It thereby makes us less-than-human. In other words, it reverses evolution, reducing us to the mind-crushed state of slaves or prisoners. And as we grasp what it does to us in the context of the additional fear generated by organized assaults against specific groups and individuals  – women; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamp recipients; organized labor; members of the working press; photographers whether professional or amateur; any other social critics whose disclosures or protests dare expose the unapologetic savagery of the new paradigm of USian governance – it should already be provoking massive, nationwide anger. The very concept of what it meant to be “American” has not only been ruthlessly violated but maliciously abandoned, as if the government itself has officially torn down our flag, burned it, urinated on the ashes and stomped them into filth. Might there then soon be the same public outpouring of humanistic, patriotic rage as followed the sinking of the Lusitania, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the massacre of innocents symbolized by the numbers 9/11? Apparently not. The vast majority of the USian people are sullenly silent – and in all probability will remain so.

Yet what is inflicted upon us is not, of course, really a new paradigm of governance at all, and that – especially the associated guilt – may be one of the reasons we are thus far so submissive. To the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, to the subjects of the colonial empire the United States seized from Spain, sought to expand into Asiatic Russia  and imposed elsewhere including Africa and other parts of Asia, the sadism and brutality that now characterizes USian governance of its homeland is an old and ugly story. All that has changed is such imperial malevolence has now become the domestic policy of the dominant political parties (or, more correctly, the One Ruling Class Party of Two Names), which means it is now enforced by the entire federal government (especially by the secret-police apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security), as well as by all the state and local governments. But it has always been the policy of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department and the various other overseas extensions of the USian empire whether official (as in Vietnam), capitalist (as at Bhopal and Bangladesh) or mercenary  (as in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans). It also means we of the USian 99 Percent are now potentially no better off than the Iraqis or even the First Nations people our ancestors genocidally displaced – perhaps the true meaning of Barack Obama's “change we can believe in.”  The only difference is we have yet to suffer our own Trail of Tears,  our own Wounded Knee. But we can be certain of one thing: equal horrors – or probably events far more horrible – are looming, and they are not on a comfortably distant horizon, which means they will occur within many of our own lifetimes. For that is the hideous truth of the total-surveillance state: it has no other purpose  than to facilitate maximum zero-tolerance tyranny. And the fact we have not already taken to the streets in massive resistance suggests we have already been conditioned to the reflexive submissiveness required of a conquered people.

However there is one flame-bright exception to this dismaying acceptance of what seems ever more likely to be our unavoidable reduction to permanent serfdom and slavery: a growing number of USian women, whose liberation movements I once believed might at last force this nation to be true to its stated principles, are again rising up angry. More than any other force within the 99 Percent – certainly more than we males whose identities are occupational rather than biological and have therefore been hopelessly shattered by permanent unemployment – these women seem closest to recognizing that the United States has been cunningly turned into the human equivalent of a Skinner Box. Though they have yet to connect the proverbial dots, I have no doubt they will soon understand how the dramatic increase in oppression – the atrocities summarized above – exemplifies the new Ruling Class methodology of forceful behavior modification even as the all-seeing god's-eye of total-surveillance enables the overseers to monitor and refine their techniques with a speed and efficiency hitherto imagined only by villains of the same Ted Bundy arrogance that characterized Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet and let us not forget our own Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. In this repugnant context – especially given that history shows the grievances of women are often the hinge-issues in successful revolutions, the methodical assaults on women's hard-won sexual freedom – the avowedly misogynistic political efforts  and the growing epidemic of physical attacks combined with the institutionalized protection of the attackers  – reveal how the Ruling Class views the suppression of female independence as the key to the abolition of liberty and justice for all. Damning enough in its own right, the revelation is underscored by the associated treachery of the Obama Administration, typical Obama the Orator ploys of eloquently endorsing women's demands while Barack the Betrayer sneakily back-stabs  the very measures he falsely claims to support. The common denominator in all these outrages – just as the would-be victims themselves proclaim – is a concerted effort to force women and girls back into the de facto slavery demanded by patriarchy, explicitly by its Abrahamic religious offspring (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), implicitly by its economic fulfillment in capitalism's final transformation to fascism. Every time a woman is imprisoned by the (very rational) fear she will not only be raped but her assailant will be officially protected, the intended behavior modification has achieved its goal. Factor in the similar barriers and prohibitions inflicted on social critics, journalists, photographers, labor activists, anyone else of either gender who might be inclined to resist the blitzkrieg by which Ayn Rand fascism is conquering the United States, and our portrait of a nation ruled like a Skinnerian rat-maze is complete and undeniable. B. F. Skinner himself stated in 1972 what is obviously the key precept of USian governance today: "The issue is to improve the way in which (humanity) is controlled." To which women are responding with increasingly public defiance.  The question, of course, is what they will do when the state confronts them with the same combination of economic retaliation bolstered by truncheon-and-pepper-gas barbarism that has already hammered us men into submission.

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Nevertheless it is by viewing the war against women as a carefully scripted campaign of behavior-modification we gain our most sharply focused picture of capitalism's thrust toward Christian theocracy as its primary modality for controlling the USian 99 Percent. But the Left is as powerless as the Right to combat it. The secular and/or libertarian Right is of course nullified by the fact the imposition of theocracy is a major objective of the Right's capitalist financiers. The Left however is paralyzed by its own insistence on political “correctness,” in this instance its refusal to recognize Islam's history of imposing its own brand of theocracy – including the most virulent forms of misogyny characteristic of human societies today – wherever it ascends to power. To denounce theocracy is therefore – at least obliquely – to denounce Islam, something the doctrinaire Left and even the pseudo-Left cannot bear to do. Though it is something of an aside, no doubt the associated taboos explain why Socialist Worker refused to publish the following letter, my response to its (above-linked) report on how President Obama backstabbed women even on the hitherto (seemingly) long-settled issue of access to contraception: 

While Ms. Schulte's reporting on how President Obama enabled the Religious Right to gain the tactical and strategic high ground in the reproductive-rights struggle is the best such work I have seen anywhere, it nevertheless omits a vital fact: the extent to which (even) Democratic Party politicians are (clandestinely) committed to the imposition of Christian theocracy on the United States.

 

Though it is fashionable for socialists of all sorts to underestimate the importance of Christianity (and Abrahamic religion generally) in USian life, a majority of at least 63 percent of the U.S. population is already fundamentalist as defined by belief in the Bible as "literally true" (see http://legacy.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Bible.htm), which itself indicates a looming danger to secular governance. Combine that with capitalism's historical preference for zero-tolerance theocracy as the most efficient means of ensuring a submissive, slave-minded Working Class, and the probable motive behind Obama's serial betrayals of reproductive freedom come into sharp and terrifying focus.

 

As for documentation of the Democrats' clandestine role in the imposition of theocracy, one source is especially useful. This is Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, (HarperCollins: 2008), which exposes Hillary Clinton's behind-the-scenes collaboration with Sam Brownback "for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it" (pg. 275). The same sort of "tunneling" is precisely what was accomplished by the Obama “compromise” that added to the USian definition of religious liberty the alleged “right” of believers to impose their doctrines on non-believers, as for example in the case of Christian pharmacists who arbitrarily deny contraception to unmarried women. Given the president's oft-demonstrated Machiavellian skill, this staggering blow to church-state separation is clearly no accident.

 

Another excellent albeit more generalized book on the threat of theocracy is Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Simon & Schuster: 2006). But in most of the United States, the danger is already reality. The Bible Belt South has been a de facto theocracy since the Civil War: note the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan – “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class” – which denotes its function as a Christian equivalent of the lslamic Morality Police. And – as proven by worsening restrictions on contraception and the near-total destruction of abortion facilities – the remainder of the midlands are not far behind. It is a risk we ignore at our own huge peril – a dire hazard that indeed we have already ignored far too long.

 

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It is perhaps worthwhile to note at this point that beyond history's seemingly endless series of isms, there are only two alternative forms of human governance. One alternative is tyranny: rule by a dictator, or dictators, whether overt (as in Nazi Germany or the theocracy of Iran), or from behind various pseudo-democratic facades (as in today's United States). The other alternative is liberty – the never-fully realized theory embodied in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.” During my elementary-school days, 1946 through 1951, all third graders not only learned to recite the Preamble from memory, but to give simple examples of its meaning, a requirement long ago repealed as dangerous to capitalism and deleterious to its objectives. But the Preamble is not as unique as we USians were typically taught, back in those halcyon days when fledgling minds were still entrusted with libertarian ideals. Similar sentiments are expressed somewhat more bluntly in the concluding lines of The Communist Manifesto: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite!” Thus the greatest fear of the USian Ruling Class has always been that Communism (or some other form of socialism) would prevail here – a perfect fit with the purposes and principles of “we the people” as elicited by the Preamble and the Constitution itself. But in the Skinner Box United States, monitored as it is by total surveillance, all such potential is obliterated forever. 

The limitless tyranny of the total-surveillance state is, perhaps ironically, the final result of the so-called “revolution” brought about by computers, which have given the global Ruling Class the godlike omnipotence it has consciously sought for at least two thousand years. The computer is thus irrefutable proof of the One Percent's defining purpose – the unspeakable lust for the zero-tolerance subjugation and total enslavement of all the rest of us, which it is now after 20 centuries of effort achieving via technologies against which there is no effective defense save re-adoption of seemingly obsolete machinery.  Meanwhile the popularization of the computer is the result of the most elaborate snake-oil scam in human history. It and its offshoots are peddled to the public as the apex of modern necessity even as society is methodically restructured to make all such gadgets essential – and damn those who cannot afford to keep up. Yet all the while, and from the very beginning, the profits so amassed are focused on perfecting the computer as the ultimate weapon of oppression. Nor could this story have ended in any other way; the computer as we know it grew not from humanitarian objectives but from the profiteering instincts of the capitalists  and the deadly necessities of modern warfare.  Indeed the computer and the manner in which it was thrust upon us is an object lesson in pure capitalism – the moral imbecility of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, and therefore the closest approximation to absolute Evil our species has yet evoked. The computer, given its vital role in creation of the global slave state, is perhaps capitalism's most definitive product. It is surely capitalism's most pivotal tool. For without the computer, the Ruling Class would never have been able to shrink all human society to a Skinner Box, with ourselves reduced to nothing more than laboratory rats in the One Percent's frantic, apocalypse-driven quest for wealth and power. 

LB/13-14 July 2013 

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