Food Stamps: Dems, Repubs Vote to Kill Poor People

Obama Says Cuts Ensure 'America's Children Don't Go Hungry'

THE FINAL VOTE against food-stamp recipients was a revealing 68-32, with only nine Senate Democrats opposing the cuts; that plus the president's enthusiastic approval of a decade of downsizing the government now admits will total at least $8.7 billion is tantamount to official notice from the Democratic Party it too wants the nation's poor people dead – that the only difference between the Democrats and Republicans is over the forcefulness with which this genocide is to be accomplished. The Republicans wanted to slash the program by $40 billion,  which would have begun killing off lower-income people almost immediately. But the Democrats apparently feared the GOP's proposal would be too obviously murderous – almost as embarrassing as public endorsement of death camps – which is no doubt why the One Party of Two Names finally opted for the less dramatic, easier-to-obfuscate reduction that will short 850,000 food-stamp-dependent households a starvation-inflicting average of $90 per month.  

Meanwhile, with the Democrats ever more worried by the growing popularity of revolutionary socialism, they've intensified their efforts to hide their Ayn Rand malevolence behind classic, Josef Goebbels-type Big Lies, most recently President Obama's astonishing claim the food-stamp cutbacks will “make sure America's children don't go hungry.”  Though the “public integrity” Barack the Betrayer promised us in 2008 was long ago recognized as no less a deception than “change we can believe in,” portrayal of the deliberate imposition of hunger as a humanitarian act is a new low, a falsehood in comparison to which most of the president's other lies dwindle to insignificance. It is also in the mind-wrenching mode of “freedom is slavery,” a proclamation that characterized the (formerly) fictional tyranny described in George Orwell's prophetic 1984. Now we are implicitly shown its entirely non-fictional equivalent: “hunger is nourishment.” 

And for the 47.2 million USians who now depend on food stamps  to keep themselves and their children fed, the associated pangs will only intensify: as a prescient headline writer at Seattle's excellent on-line daily Crosscut has already implied, this is undoubtedly the beginning of the end  of the entire food stamp program, the formal name of which is S.N.A.P., the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Perhaps now the acronym will become a sardonic joke: Starvation Neutralizing America's Poor, as in “with a SNAP of its fingers, the Ruling Class has fucked us again.”

Hunger as nourishment? Verily, such is the quintessence of absolute evil.

*****

 

Outside Agitation on the Comment Threads of Other Relevant Reports

“50 Reasons We Should Fear the Worst From Fukushima” Harvey Wasserman of EcoWatch exposes the apocalyptic reality of the Fukushima debacle. I quote a Cheyenne Ghost-Dance chant: “The white man's god/ has forsaken him/ Let us go and/ look for our Mother...” Then I add a nightmare notion that should especially bug the UFOs-have-landed folks: what if “the alleged 'divine revelations' that spawned patriarchy – Moses' Burning Bush, Ezekiel's fiery wheel, etc. ad nauseam -- were intergalactic equivalents of the smallpox-infested blankets by which Europeans exterminated First Nations peoples. Thus the ultimate purpose of patriarchy and its maturation over the centuries into capitalism and now finally into ecocidal fascism is to make Earth too toxic for life as we know it – precisely as is happening. Our final, dying clue as to who the Global Ruling Class serves by its relentless moral imbecility (and who – or rather what – will inherit the planet as a result), is found in the fact that of all earthly species, only the cockroach is totally immune to radiation and can within a single generation evolve immunity to any other toxin.”

***

“The New Snowden Revelation Is Dangerous for Anonymous - And for All of Us” Gabriella Coleman of Wired reports on the government's zero-tolerance, maximum-sentence prosecution of on-line civil disobedience, but then inexplicably claims such draconian measures are applied only to cyber-activists – that “physical tactics such as trespass or vandalism of property rarely result in serious criminal consequences for participants and tend to be minor civil infractions instead of federal crimes.” I imply she's either ignorant or in denial: obviously, “the new USian Empire norm – note the felonies for which the Oak Ridge 3 were convicted – is going to be maximum charges and maximum sentences in retaliation for ANY act of civil disobedience.” 

***

“Helping homeless students stay in school”  Joseph Sutton-Holcomb describes the valiant efforts of the specialists employed by local school districts to ensure the Seattle area's many homeless students are able to remain in school. A major challenge, he writes, is arranging the students' transportation to and from classes. I use the story as a teachable moment to point out the only way to end homelessness is to end capitalism.

Only now – too late for the comment thread – did I focus on the fact Sutton-Holcomb failed to report the specialists' tasks are made profoundly more difficult by the region's notorious hostility to mass transit,  with a growing number of local voters rejecting buses, trolleys and even commuter rail service as welfare that encourages laziness by pampering minorities and lower-income people in general. (Note: my OAN piece on the anti-transit-user hatefulness that defines Washington state politics was written nearly four years ago, but the bigotry it describes intensifies each time there is a transit vote,  as in Tacoma during the 2012 general election. Though the local transit authority was not forced to shut down, all that saved it was a small, unanticipated, post-2012 increase in sales tax revenues. Its service remains minimal, the nation's worst amongst comparable cities, with its 37 bus routes so radically downsized, their operations end as early as 5:20 p.m. daily. Meanwhile its minimized schedules inflict extreme hardship on anyone who does not have an automobile, while the refusal of even self-proclaimed “progressive” politicians to take ameliorative action again demonstrates the malice toward lower-income people that increasingly characterizes USian governance at every level.) 

***

“What does Al Jazeera America see in the Northwest?” Olivia Weitz reports on Al Jazeera's new Pacific Northwest bureau but notes that despite the news agency's reputation for accurate reporting, its U.S. viewership remains tiny. I point out it's no doubt “the (very rational) fear of being placed on one or more secret-police watch lists that keeps the Al Jazeera America audience so small. Thus the USian Empire's total surveillance regime fulfills another of its definitive purposes: ensuring that we the people remain imprisoned in ignorance.” 

***

“Whose Radical Jesus? The Story of a Literary Success” Truthout's Paul Buhle reviews Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Random House: 2013).  I point out that regardless of the truth or falsehood of Aslan's hypothesis, its ultimate function is to serve the Ruling Class by re-legitimizing the murderous and ecocidal religion of a god that failed. A far more genuinely revolutionary interpretation of the Jesus story, I add, “was written nearly 70 years ago by Robert Graves in King Jesus, which argues that while Jesus was indeed a rebel zealot, his primary purpose was to extinguish the last lingering remnants of the old goddess-centered religions. The 'money quote' -- morbid pun intended -- in Graves' telling of the story sums up the entire history of patriarchy, from its origins in Moses' burning bush and Ezekiel's fiery wheel to its final manifestations today as capitalism fulfills itself by morphing into terminal fascism. 'I am released from the jurisdiction of the Female,' says Jesus, 'I have come to destroy Her works' (King Jesus; Minerva Press, London: 1946, p. 256). The 'Female' of whom Jesus spoke was the goddess who is the variously titled Mother of All Being, Gaea, the Mother Nature whose act of creation was to give birth to the entire cosmos. Especially if we consider the Gaia Hypothesis -- that Earth (and perhaps by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating -- what Jesus said two thousand years ago is precisely what the capitalists are saying today: that they are released from Nature's jurisdiction; that they have come to destroy all her works.” 

LB/9 February 2014 

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Food Stamp Vote ID's Dems Who Want Poor Folks Dead

14 in Progressive Caucus, 15 in Black Caucus Help Inflict $8.5 Billion Cut

JUST AS “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,”  neither will the murderous impact of the Democratic vote to slash food stamps by $8.5 billion ever be acknowledged by mainstream media. MSNBC, The New York Times and their local equivalents will never tell us what it means that 89 of the 200 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have publicly joined the Republican campaign to savage the nation's poor. That's because “mainstream media” is a clever, falsely comforting, deliberately misleading label for what should properly be known as “Ruling Class media” – the propaganda apparatus that serves (only) the One Percent by ensuring the rest of us remain intellectually imprisoned in a panem et circenses miasma of distraction, falsehood and disinformation.

Food stamps, as the Food Research and Action Center  explains, are essential to the survival of 47 million Americans each month. The $8.5 billion the Democrats are helping hack from the program – even with the cuts spread over ten years as they are – will make it ever more difficult for impoverished USians to avoid starvation. Some 850,000 households will now be devastated by food stamp reductions averaging $90 per household per month. (For the record, the proper name of the food-stamp program is Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the acronym for which is “SNAP.” The damning vote against its recipients was 251 to 166, Roll Call Nr. 31, by which the House of Representatives approved HR 2642, the “Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013.”) It was the second such blow to recipients, who already suffered a significant downsizing in benefits last November. 

But Ruling Class media will never communicate – save in the most hackneyed, stereotypical and carefully pre-approved narratives – the hunger pains and emotional anguish these malicious cutbacks inflict on the children, women and men so victimized. 

While the self-censoring protocols of Ruling Class media are many and complex (as I can personally attest from my own decades in its employ), one particular taboo is especially relevant to the food- stamp coverage – or rather the abysmal lack thereof. The taboo in question, an unwritten but inviolable rule during my decades behind a Ruling Class typewriter, governs the use of the term “genocide,” carefully limiting it to actions by declared or undeclared enemies of the USian Empire, as in “Nazi genocide,” “Communist genocide” or “terrorist genocide.” Never under any circumstances is the term “U.S. genocide” allowed, even to describe the (undeniably genocidal) wars of extermination waged by the empire and its European antecedents against First Nations peoples. That is why Ruling Class media will never report the fact its capitalist masters have contrived a seemingly flawless apparatus for exterminating huge masses of people without the embarrassing stench of death camps. It's called “austerity” – a Big Lie that is perhaps the most diabolically cunning euphemism for genocide in our species' history.

But is austerity really genocide? Isn't calling it “genocide” a bit over the top, as even some of my closest friends maintain? Decide for yourself: the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language defines genocide as “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.”  Merriam-Webster defines it similarly: “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group.”  Now consider how the One Percenters and their representatives are forever denouncing “the culture of poverty”  and its politics of dependency.  In either case, these blame-the-victim diatribes – even those that make no direct reference to racist or socioeconomic stereotypes – clearly identify the USian imperial homeland's poor as “a political or cultural group.” Then note austerity's (deliberately) death-dealing results.  Finally consider the arguments postulated in “Why the One Percent Wants Seniors and Older Workers Dead.” Not only is “genocide” the appropriate noun; it is the only truthful description of the USian war against the poor that began during the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter, radically escalated under Republican Ronald Reagan and has been continued relentlessly by every USian regime, Democrat or Republican, ever since.

(It is an aside, old news to long-time OAN readers but relevant information for newcomers, that in the vicious uniformity of economic policies imposed by Democrats and Republicans alike – Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama – is irrefutable proof the United States is ruled by One Party of Two Names. Behind its deceptive labels and rhetoric, this One Party is exclusively a Ruling Class party. Its sole purpose is to further empower the One Percent. Its long-term goal, already dangerously close to fulfillment, is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. And what is capitalism? Ayn Rand's books – the USian Empire global-economy equivalent of Hitler's Mein Kampf – define it as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue: the conscious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated. It is an operational definition with which the notably prescient Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would surely agree.) 

Meanwhile the Ruling Class media's repeated use of the relatively innocuous “austerity” and its even more deceptively euphemistic forerunner “reform” as code-words for “genocide” has proven remarkably effective. It has not only stifled dissent but shifted (additional) blame onto the ever-increasing multitude of capitalism's victims. Indeed, Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels would applaud its success as yet another real-world confirmation of his principles for mass manipulation.  (Note how concentration of USian mass media into a half-dozen rigidly self-disciplined monopolies allows imposition of the Nazi führerprinzip – “Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority'' – without any obvious government intrusion. Such is another example of the evil genius of capitalist governance.)

As a result, only genocide's immediate victims dare label it the atrocity it is.  And they – or more precisely we – are steadfastly ignored unless we somehow manage to mount massive protests, in which case we are then brutally silenced, just as the Occupy Movement was silenced, by police truncheons and barrages of pepper gas and slander.

The disturbing fact 89 Democrats knowingly voted for what was merely a less murderous version  of reductions in the food stamp program – the still more disgusting fact Washington state's Democratic Senator Patty Murray has publicly admitted she too will vote against food-stamp recipients – are yet additional proofs (if any are needed) today's USian Homeland is governed by One Party of Two Names. That this is the first time Democrats have ever publicly acknowledge their hostility to food-stamp recipients  merely underscores the intensifying oppressiveness of the One Party's rule.

While the names of the 89 Democrats have already been publicized  by both Ruling Class and alternative media, their (allegedly) progressive affiliations have received far less notice. As reported via the preceding link, three of these class-traitors are Democratic Party stalwarts: Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Fourteen members of the Democrats' House Progressive Caucus voted for it: Suzanne Bonamici (Ore.), Corinne Brown (Fla), Andre Carson (Ind.), Emanuel Cleaver (Mo.), Sam Farr (Calif.), Lois Frankel (Fla.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio), Steven Horsford (Nevada), Jared Huffman (Calif.), Dave Loebsack (Iowa), Ben Lujan (N.M.), Rick  Nolan (Minn.), Bennie Thompson (Miss), and Peter Welch (Vt.). 

What has received far less publicity – seemingly none at all in Ruling Class media – is 15 more of these men and women who voted against food stamp recipients are members of the House Black Caucus: Sanford D. Bishop Jr. (Ga.), Corrine Brown (Fla.), G. K. Butterfield (N.C.), Emanuel Cleaver II (Mo.), James E. Clyburn (S.C.), Marcia L. Fudge (Ohio), Alcee L. Hastings (Fla.), Steven Horsford (Nev.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX), Hank Johnson (GA), Cedric Richmond (LA), David Scott (GA), Robert C. Scott (Va.), Terri Sewell (Ala,) and Bennie Thompson (Miss.). That all but two of these representatives are from states of the old Confederacy probably explains their votes as attempts to preserve their election-year attractiveness to the region's malevolently reactionary whites, who whether rich or poor decry food stamps as pandering to allegedly “lazy” minorities. Such paradoxically self-destructive hatefulness by impoverished whites perpetuates the Ku Klux Klan-type Sturmabteilungs that ensure the local white aristocracy's unbreakable hold on the levers of power. A similar, racially motivated dynamic fuels the reactionary malice of lower-income whites in the USian Homeland's interior and thus fosters the nation's ever-more-definitive socioeconomic viciousness, the vote against food stamps included. 

One (deliciously ironic) result is that Wal-Mart, a lavish financier of the reactionary politics that spawned the cuts, is now complaining of reduced grocery profits. In a far more bitter irony reported by the Food Research and Action group, the bill passed the House “almost exactly a year after an expert Institute of Medicine committee found that SNAP benefits are already inadequate for most families to purchase an adequate, healthy diet; and it comes in the same month that researchers issued a new study showing that low-income people have increased hypoglycemia-related hospital admissions late in the month because they run out of food.  The SNAP cuts will be a blow to health and nutrition, and to the government’s long-term fiscal well-being as well.” Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact the Democrats who voted for the cuts, which are now authoritatively estimated at fully $8.7 billion, are inflicting them on their own constituents,  an ultimate “fuck you” from the Ruling Class to the rest of us. (The changing numbers as to the cutback's magnitude reflect how congressional sources themselves now often obstruct the flow of accurate information – another tactic by which the One Percent works to maintain our ignorance of current events.)

In fairness, I should note a long-time Democratic Party activist who is one of my more reliable local (Washington state) sources emphatically states the Democrats who voted for the bill did so because they believed it was the only way to block enactment of the far more deadly Republican proposals. But that glib rationale does not excuse the Democrats' 38-year history of ever-more-feeble representation of the nation's lower income peoples. We the victims – children, women and men (many of the adults elderly and/or disabled) – believe the Democrats should have opposed the bill as a matter of principle. That is, assuming the Democrats still recognize any principles other Ayn Rand's coda of infinite greed as maximum virtue.

LB/2 February 2014

(With special thanks to Pat Fletcher for significant research and reportorial assistance)

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Sick/Recovering; Hence More Off-Site Outside Agitation

THE AILMENT THAT befell me was Cellulitis, a life-threatening bacterial infection that federal officials estimate kills about 30,000 people every year in the USian imperial homeland. Of unknown origin – I am neither diabetic nor was there any apparent source-wound – the disease came on suddenly and immediately afflicted my entire lower left leg, making it a swollen, grotesquely discolored example of something one might expect to see in a gangrene ward. Since then, massive daily doses of intravenous antibiotics seem to have killed the bug before it could kill me – knock on wood and burn a candle – but I lost the entire week to the associated exhaustion. All I could write were three comment-thread posts and a few contemplative paragraphs on how the mental process of photography and the mental process of writing are not only diametrical opposites but actual opponents of one another. The latter, however, is an essay that, in the immortal words of the better teachers of my long-ago youth, “needs more work,” so what we have here this week is again all from elsewhere. 

*

“Why There's No Outcry”  Robert Reich writes about some of the reasons the subjugated USian majority is paralyzed by fear into permanent submission. Though Reich fails to acknowledge the subjugation of the masses is the ultimate purpose of capitalism – and that the widespread availability of a revolutionary socialist alternative might trigger and sustain widespread rebellion (exactly as it did in Tsarist Russia and warlord China) – his essay nevertheless inspires a lively, mostly supportive discussion. But I am quickly appalled by the apparent ignorance of the many who seem to have forgotten the government-inflicted murders at Kent State University and Jackson State College – killings that demonstrate the extent to which USian local, state and federal governments will go to protect the capitalists and their wars for profit. Therefore I posted a historical rejoinder that includes a roll-call of the dead. 

Constrained by the 1500-character response-limit maintained by Reader Supported News, I had to omit whet I feel are vital details of the two atrocities. These include: (1)-the fact the Kent State dead were all nearly a football-field's distance away from the National Guard soldiers when their commander gave the order to fire; (2)-the fact a secret-police provocateur,  an FBI contract-agent named Terry Norman, apparently fired four rounds from a .38 Special caliber revolver to provoke the National Guard's volley; (3)-the probability the entire Kent State incident was orchestrated by the FBI  in much the same way the suppression of the Occupy Movement was orchestrated by the USian secret police today, and (4)-the fact James Earl Green, one of those slain by cops at Jackson State, was neither part of the targeted demonstration nor even on the demonstration-side of the police line. Instead, Green was trying to get home from his job at a nearby grocery store when a racist cop happened to spot him as a target of opportunity and fired a blast of double-ought buckshot into his chest. Such was life – and death – in the free-fire zones of USian higher education. 

*****

“MLK, Victim of the Surveillance State”  Charles Pierce of Esquire redefines the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. as an early product of the total-surveillance state and inspires a lively, interesting discussion thread. In agreement with many other posters, I comment accordingly: “Thus to learn RFK too was a defender of the USian equivalent of the SS/Reichssicherheitshauptamt – let's stop mincing words and call the empire's secret-police apparatus what it truly is – is particularly painful. The lesson here is partly what Mr. Pierce says: that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a victim of the new gestapo. Perhaps ironically, RFK was most likely another of its victims. And (poster) Walter J Smith is certainly correct in his assertion any vote for a candidate of the Democratic or Republican parties – in tyrannical reality one Ruling Class party with two names – is a vote for the status quo. Thus we can vote to perpetuate capitalist governance, which means absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Or we can acknowledge that if our species is to survive, socialism is our only alternative – and then act accordingly.”

*****

“Can We Fix the Race Problem in America's School Discipline?” Molly Knefel of Rolling Stone reports on federal proposals to end the racist bigotry and the parallel malice against disabled children that's increasingly evident in USian public school discipline. I criticize the proposals as typical liberal feel-good measures that have no hope of alleviating the causative malevolence, and instead I advocate two proposals that would impose real change: 

“Step One is admission that 75 percent of U.S. Caucasians are consciously, viciously racist – that this white majority regards all non-Caucasians as inferior and despises them accordingly. The same intensity of hatefulness, however much concealed behind “politically correct” terminology, savages disabled children – whites included – who do not conform to the essentially Aryan (and thus incipiently Nazified) norms of “master race” mental performance and physical appearance. Step Two is therefore to empower parents of oppressed minorities (including disabled kids) to form independent disciplinary review boards to scrutinize every school disciplinary case for evidence of racial prejudice or anti-disability bias. Such boards must be empowered to over-rule school officials and to expose and fire demonstrably bigoted teachers and administrators.” 

Alas, exhausted as I was on Saturday after four days of IV antibiotics, I came too late to the thread, and as of this writing there had been no reactions to my post. Too bad, as I think such review boards are the only way we will ever nullify the seemingly reflexive Caucasian penchant for racial hatred and Nazi-like contempt for disabled people within the USian public school system.

LB/26 January 2014 

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Terribly Sick, I Can Only Link to Outside Agitation Off-Site

WOKE UP THIS morning sick as the proverbial dog: fever of 102F, entire body an uncooperative mass of aches, brain too fuzzy to focus  on anything but the most mundane tasks, no other symptoms yet. Hence, with my apologies,  this collection of my earlier posts on the comment threads of other sites: 

*

“Pentagon & NSA Officials: Assassinate Edward Snowden”  David Sirota of PandoDaily exposes the murderousness at the core of the USian Empire. I link Sirota's courageous work to a report on the extent to which the empire is ruled by white racism  and argue its combination of racism and murder proves it's the de facto Fourth Reich. As Sirota's disclosures imply, “the only relevant question now is when will the government – which is disguising its broader genocidal intentions as cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment compensation – begin openly murdering not just dissidents but all of us it and its One Percent masters want dead.”

*****

“Why is Washington paying Catholic hospitals to take away healthcare?”Monica Harrington of Catholic Watch reports on how the eternally misogynistic Catholic Church is using taxpayer dollars to buy up Washington state's healthcare system and prohibit end-of-life, contraception and maternity care. The usual cadre of Christian zealots denounce her reporting as “hatred,” but I – late to the fair – post a bibliography of texts and links that support her work by documenting even more of the hideous truth about the USian Empire's rush toward theocracy.

*****

“Westlake businesses hold the city's bike plan hostage” Eric Scigliano exposes another example of the Ayn Rand selfishness and political cowardice that lurks beneath the Big Lie of “progressive” Seattle. I point out the associated thread is a perfect example of the reactionary, malevolently auto-centric hatefulness that -- in Seattle as in Tacoma -- invariably rises to the surface of Pugetopolis political cesspool to obstruct any and all improvements in public transport.

*****

“Steubenville Rapist Released After 10 Months, While Activist Who Exposed Him Faces 10 Year Sentence”  Jodie Gummow of AlterNet updates the atrocity story. I point out it is the One Party of Two Names -- the fact the president and all the other Democrats and Republicans are, in reality, members of a single party representing only the One Percent -- that makes our nation the fascist despotism it is. The FBI – part of the massive secret police apparatus that protects the Ruling Class and sustains its fascist tyranny – is merely following orders.

*****

Divide between Governor, Republicans Paralyzes Washington State. This was not the title of John Stang's informative report on state government, but it should have been. As I said last year, the Republican coup in the Senate kills any remaining hope of humanitarian policy-making in Washington state. It also – cunningly (and exactly as intended) – gives the Democrats the ability to muddy the political waters by spouting humanitarian rhetoric. The Ruling Class allows it because there's not the slightest chance any of it will ever be enacted. Moreover, the Democrats' Big Lie re-emergence as a (bogus) party of the people serves the Ruling Class by weakening the voter-appeal of genuine humanitarians -- that is, Kshama Sawant and other socialists. Thus, by discrediting government, the One Percent prevails.

LB/19 January 2014 

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Kshama Sawant Personifies Our Most Vital Yearnings

FOLLOWING KSHAMA SAWANT from the distance of 37 miles I find myself repeatedly moved, sometimes literally to tears, by her breathtaking courage and eloquence.

I desperately wish I could be there to see her and hear her and applaud her in person. I wish too I were able to contribute my knowledge and skill to her causes, not just the fight for a $15-per-hour minimum wage but the struggle for world socialism we must win if our species is to survive.

But I am old, I live in a realm of vindictively downsized public transport, and – as will be true for the remainder of this lifetime – I am denied an automobile by the inescapable poverty that has afflicted me since 2009.

Thus Councilwoman Sawant's Seattle is, for me, as impossibly distant from Tacoma as Paris or Mumbai.

Even so, her words are more elating than I can describe. I never imagined I would live long enough to hear any candidate for office anywhere in the USian Empire – much less any elected official – declare herself a Marxist and urge displaced workers to take over the abandoned factories.

But that is what she does:  She says we need to “organize a revolt,” that “the laws of the rich are unenforceable if the Working Class refuses to obey.” (The linked tape, new material here in OAN, is from 2012, after she was defeated in a battle for a seat in the Legislature – which makes her defiance all the more energizing.)

Thus human beings like us – we proletarians and peasants who are being flung onto the socioeconomic garbage heap or herded into slave pens by the capitalists – are at last (again) blessed by a leader who truly speaks for us alone.

(See also the link to Sawant's inaugural address, “I Wear the Badge of Socialist with Honor,” below.)

*****

Outside Agitation Elsewhere: Relevant Remarks on Other Threads

“What Congress Does When We're Not Watching” Thom Hartmann, the perennial defender of President Obama, disingenuously tries to blame Congress for fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, never mind it's one of Barack the Betrayer's pet schemes for further enslaving the USian Empire's already subjugated proletariat. I contribute my usual anti-capitalist skepticism to the resultant discussion thread and also post vital links to the fast-track legislation itself. But the occasional Outside Agitator award for a truly exceptional comment goes to the poster screen-named Aliceinwonderland: “Thom, maybe I oughta try calling you sometime while you're on the air.  I would love to ask why you're still so Obama-friendly, knowing he's behind the TPP... even to the point of wanting to fast-track it!  Between that and his hit lists with murder-by-drone, I've had my fill of President Obama.  I am ashamed of myself for having squandered my vote on this smooth-talking fascist.  'Change we can believe in' has turned out to be little more than a clever sales pitch...” As is often the case on this excellent blog, the associated thread is still running, and – depending on time and energy (mostly the latter) – I may post additional commentary before it closes. Meanwhile, kudos to Alice for speaking out. 

***

“I Wear the Badge of Socialist with Honor” Newly elected Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant again dares name our true enemy: “Shamefully, in this, the richest country in human history, fifty million of our people - one in six - live in poverty. Around the world, billions do not have access to clean water and basic sanitation and children die every day from malnutrition. This is the reality of international capitalism.” I salute her by noting the subtle changes in Obamanoid rhetoric that indicate her victory is already terrifying the Ruling Class. Later I applaud another poster's definition of capitalism as “slavery or serfdom for the 99 Percent” and (again) point out the moral imbecility at capitalism's core: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle – therefore the closest our species has yet come to embracing Absolute Evil.

***

“A New Low in Health Care Rhetoric” Matt Taibbi of the thoroughly mainstreamed Rolling Stone predictably criticizes a publicly malevolent disciple of Ayn Rand for her expressed belief health care for poor people is a waste of money – that they should be denied health care and abandoned to die. I chide Taibbi for his (obedient?) bourgeois blindness to the obvious fact inadequate and/or prohibitively expensive health care is part of the elaborately euphemistic program of genocide imposed on us by the USian Imperial Ruling Class – its final solution to the “problem” of surplus workers. “The only difference between the Nazi German One Percent and the Capitalist USian One Percent is the latter is troubled by the public relations problems arising from death camps,” I say. “Thus in their infinitely evil cunning, the USian One Percenters now hide mass murder behind Ayn Rand ideology and thereby shift the blame onto the victims.”

***

“Capitalism in Crisis: Who Are the Real Takers?” Ruling Class Propagandist Bernard Weiner uses the classic ploy of an obvious truth (“Capitalism is in crisis around the globe”) to pontificate a Big Lie, claiming the Democratic Party is the only rational hope of the USian Working Class. I respond that we who are socialists should be heartened by the escalating efforts of our opponents: “the One Percent aristocracy Mr. Weiner so obediently serves is clearly frightened. The pivotal question is whether its legions of soldiers and federalized cops will follow orders or stand down in 99 Percent solidarity, as their Petrograd counterparts did at the Neva River bridges on 8 March 1917.”  (Disclosure: I knew Weiner in Bellingham c. 1970-1972, where we were not friends. Weiner organized and led the clique of anarchists and useful idiots who pablumized, neutralized and eventually destroyed Northwest Passage, which had begun life as a fearless, credible, generally well-written alternative journal with a keen but uniquely accessible focus on local environmental issues. At the time there were rumors Weiner was a spook, though these were never substantiated.)

LB/12 January 2014

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Why the 1% Wants Seniors and Older Workers Dead

HATRED OF ELDERLY people, especially those of us who are also poor, has long been amongst the defining sociological characteristics of Occidental culture and of the United States in particular: Google negative attitudes toward the elderly, you get 577,000 hits of instant confirmation. And if that's not enough, there's the tacitly genocidal campaign to slash and eventually terminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food-assistance programs, which would condemn millions of elderly and disabled persons to death by starvation and sickness – getting rid of us and our subversive memories of better times all without the international embarrassment of geriatric death camps.

 

No surprise to those of us who recognize capitalism for the moral imbecility it is – its elevation of infinite greed to maximum virtue is the absolute rejection of humanitarianism – the same murderous trend is now showing up in the USian workplace. Its ugly, ageist truth is exposed by AlterNet's Lynn Parramore in a Truthout-reprinted piece entitled “Fifty Is the New 65: Older Americans Are Getting Booted from Their Jobs – and Denied New Opportunities.”

I recommend we all read it from beginning to end. Its revelations are so important my comment-thread response morphed into this week's blog essay. But Parramore's work nevertheless has one huge flaw: despite being a superb and necessarily diligent investigative reporter, she omits from her otherwise-informative catalogue of capitalism's atrocities against older workers the pivotal fact our memories of infinitely better times make us definitively subversive. The mere fact we recall those halcyon days before the Christian Prosperity Gospel granted all bosses the divine right of medieval tyrants is enough to make us persona non grata – even if, terrified of losing our jobs, we are trying desperately hard not to rock the our place-of-employment boat.

It's perplexing a reporter of Parramore's skills has missed this crucial point. Perhaps she is simply too young to understand how radically different the USian Empire of today is from the United States of the years before the Decade of Assassinations. Thus she would not understand the absolute truth of a statement often whispered by those of us who have lived through the awful transformation from our former American Dream constitutional democracy to the relentlessly oppessive total-surveillance plutocracy that rules us today. “This is no longer the country I was born in,” we say. “It's as if the fascists won World War II.” 

Indeed the difference between that globally admired, seemingly blessed nation we knew as children and young adults and the internationally accursed nation wherein we dwell today is as nearly as great as the difference between Nazi Germany and the postwar German Federal Republic. Here it often feels as if time is marching backward – that the United States is not only becoming the de facto Fourth Reich, but is doing so deliberately, methodically, in malevolent fulfillment of the long-range intentions first revealed by the Bankers Plot of 1934. 

According to some of the old Communists I met years ago – all of them now dead – it was far worse than just a bunch of greedy One Percenters trying to boost their profits by imposing fascism. These old Reds said the plotters had secretly met with Hitler and Mussolini and intended to make the United States the bank, granary and manufacturing center of what was to be the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo-Washington D.C. Axis. Thus did the fathers and grandfathers of today's One Percent reveal what Karl Marx had understood long before the terms “fascism” and “Nazism” entered our vocabulary of horrors – that given the opportunity, capitalism will inevitably morph into pure Evil. 

The disposal of surplus workers and of workplace elders in particular is thus merely another of the cruel measures capitalism employs to ensure the subjugation of its workforce. In the case of all surplus workers, we are deemed no longer exploitable for maximum profit and therefore no longer worth the costs of the social safety net that formerly helped us stay alive between jobs. 

In the case of elderly workers, our individual and collective memories of a time when obscenely greedy capitalists were compelled to reward white males for hard work and diligence -- and were forced to at least render lip service to such rewards for women and minorities -- are viewed as dangerous incitements to rebellion. Thus considered the living equivalents of radical literature if not potential Outside Agitators, we are being disappeared down the Orwell-hole along with every other USian vestige of humanitarianism.

It cannot be repeated often enough the same murderous purpose motivates the "austerity" campaigns against Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation and any other safety-net program. Though no politician or Ruling Class pundit dare say it, the true objective of all these campaigns is genocide: the elimination of surplus workers and especially anyone who might remember what life was like before the aristocrats robbed us of the good times forever. 

We elderly are especially fragile; slash our Social Security stipends and deny us medical care and we're dead -- exactly as the One Percent intends. The associated fear alone – the daily stress of never knowing what the Ruling Class will do to us next – is often itself deadly. None of this is accidental. The sooner there are no longer any of us who remember the humanitarianism that was forced on the United States and on capitalism in general by the Soviet Union's formidable endorsement of global Marxism, the sooner the One Percent can get on with its intention of turning all workers into throw-away slaves and reducing Planet Earth to an electronically policed concentration camp.

Such is capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue -- the methodical rejection of all humanitarian principles, therefore the closest approximation of Absolute Evil our species has yet spawned. Next comes unabashed capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us -- what earlier generations knew as fascism or Nazism.

Though the Soviet Union was never the workers' paradise it claimed to be, its agitation for economic democracy at least forced capitalism to assume a humanitarian disguise. But now, with the U.S.S.R. dead and the People's Republic of China eternally co-opted by Wall Street, there is little or no hope of escaping or even ameliorating the Ayn Rand savagery by which the One Percenters are determined to guarantee their own luxurious survival.

Notwithstanding the superior investigative reporting skill Parramore demonstrated in “Fifty Is the New 65,” she is obviously afraid to confront the hideous malignancy capitalism now reveals itself to be. Nor can we really blame her; she would be instantly blacklisted were she to do otherwise. At least she implies -- but dares not say outright -- that capitalism's war against those of us who are older is bolstered by subtle  brainwashing that encourages younger generations to think of us as parasites and obstructionists. But she fails to note how similar techniques were used by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to engender the murderous hatefulness of an entire nation against the Nazis' racial, ethnic and demographic targets.  

Parramore thus avoids the undeniable truth of capitalism's deadly nature. She remains silent about what should be the main and most terrifying point of her disclosures: that by similar atrocities against specific groups did the Nazis prepare the German public for the Holocaust. No matter there are no geriatric death camps in the United States -- at least not yet. Whether we are herded into gas chambers or thrown out to starve, we are equally dead. Meanwhile, as prophets and rebels as far removed from one another as Lao Tzu and Boudicca and Jesus and Marx have said of oppressors, by their deeds do we know them -- and through our responses to that knowledge do we come to know ourselves. 

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More Relevant Remarks on the Comment Threads of Other Websites

“Cheerios Drops Genetically Modified Ingredients”  Reader Supported News posts a USA Todayreport, and I respond with a wise-ass remark: “Yeah, good for General Mills. But remember that covering up product danger by lying about is standard capitalist practice.”

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“Capitalism, Ecology and the Official Invisibility of Women”  I posted a link to this Chris Williams piece last week, but the associated comment thread, already lengthy, has since turned into a thought-provoking dialogue between me and two other posters, one a fellow socialist, the other a person difficult to afix to any pin, whether of the T.S. Eliot sort or otherwise. 

LB/5 January 2014 

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