Tiny Food-Stamp Cut Reveals Bureaucrats' Big Lies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/29 September – 3 October 2016.

-30-

Open Letter to Goddess-Centered Pagans; Important Funding Drive; Long-Overdue Eulogy for My Dead Son

HOMELESS HUMANS have become the new exemplars of capitalist reality, particularly in the United States. (I made these portraits with my digital Canon SLR while on unpaid/volunteer assignment last week, then processed the pictures as if I were once again working with my beloved M Leicas and Tri-X at 800 ASA developed in D-76 and printing the results on DuPont Varilure, which had photographic paper's highest silver content and was therefore the best paper in the world but was discontinued in 1973 due to capitalist manipulations that triggered skyrocketing silver prices.) Photographs by Loren Bliss © 2016. Click on images to view them full size.

***

PLEASE CONSIDER THE following as an open letter to the pagan community, the first of the essays on the relevance of socialism to paganism and of paganism to socialism I promised on 18 July I would soon write. Please also forgive the delay; the 18th was the last time my circumstances actually allowed me the time and energy essential to prepare anything genuinely contemplative for this space; my neighbors and I here in the geezer ghetto are still plagued by our heartless landlord's innumerable and invariably disruptive intrusions as he renovates his for-profit properties to comply with federal low-interest loan requirements.

As I wrote in that most recent OAN essay, how “do I resolve the apparent conflict between being a Marxian (and therefore a dialectical materialist) and... also being a Gaian Pagan (and a Pagan not by fad or adaptation or mere inclination but as a direct consequence of two undeniable, inexplicable and unquestionably demanding encounters with its Source)?”

“Preview: in the ultimate sense, I see no conflict at all. In fact I am convinced each is essential to sustain the other.”

But of course I was describing a feeling, emotional reality rather than intellectual reality, right brain rather than left brain, and I as soon as I began applying logic to the question, I initially feared I had stepped into a miasma of contradictions I might never be able to resolve.

Then – as so often occurs in my habitually agnostic/skeptical (if not downright cynical) relationship to all forms of spirituality including my own – synchronicity intervened. As it happens, I am working, again as an unpaid volunteer, on another editorial project which brought me into contact with the mostly unacknowledged truth all philosophies – even our own informal assumptions about life – embody the bias imposed by our socioeconomic class: whether we are part of the 99 Percent or part of the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassalage.  Philosophically speaking, our overlords in the One Percent and its Ruling Class view the world as their rightful “god-given” possession, an exploitable commodity – we the people included – to subjugate as greed, sadistic whim and capitalism's mandatory quest for maximum profit dictate. Meanwhile we of the 99 Percent – all of us capitalism's victims – either (further) shackle ourselves by adopting the philosophies dictated by our oppressors or we (somehow) wake up and evolve our own philosophical view.

Socialism is, of course, one of the (self-protective) results of our awakening; Marxism is merely socialism's purest and most disciplined form. Paganism – especially in its Wiccan or Gaian forms – is another such awakening. The functional twinship of socialism and paganism begins with their common purpose: the preservation of our species from extinction by capitalist depredation, either as World War III or environmental apocalypse.

Indeed I would go so far as to argue that while one may be a socialist without being pagan, one cannot be a pagan without also being a socialist.

Capitalism, remember, is a direct derivative of Protestant Christianity (for which see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). The ultimate form of Protestantism is the Prosperity Gospel,  which reasserts the divine right of kings in its modern form as the divine right of corporate executives and of the One Percent in general. It defines wealth as an expression of divine blessing and attributes poverty to sin. (Backtracking for a moment, Christianity is one of the three Abrahamic religions. It and the others, Judaism and Islam, define the universe as the asexual creation of a male deity and thereby reduce female reproductive power to virtual irrelevance. From this reduction results the contempt for Nature, the misogynistic hatred, the clitoris envy and the implicitly violent insistence on hierarchy that define all patriarchal belief systems.) Predictably, the associated malignancy is intensified to its most extreme, ecocidal and genocidal form in capitalism, which is Abrahamic religion's ultimate distillate. (The historical dynamics of patriarchal religion's distillation into an ever-more-murderous philosophy of exploitation is eloquently documented in The Great Cosmic Mother, Barbara Mor's invaluable work in post-Abrahamic, post-capitalist anthropology, a book that should be twinned with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in terms of significant revelations of our methodically suppressed past.) A basic pagan library should include a well-read copy of each volume.

Remember too the relationship between capitalism and its Abrahamic-religion father is symbiotic: one reinforces the other – hence Marx's condemnation of religion as the opiate of the masses. Hence too the liberation of scientific inquiry resulting from the Soviet suppression of Abrahamic religion – specifically the widespread Soviet investigation of subjects damned as “Satanic”  in the Christian-dominated U.S. Moreover the Soviet suppression of Abrahamic religion encouraged not only the U.S.S.R.'s indigenous tribal religions but the resurrection of European paganism by Soviet and post-Soviet youth.

Given that the official, dominant and often violently sustained philosophy of our pre-revolutionary, pre-apocalyptic era is capitalism cum Christianity (or vice-versa), what then are socialism and paganism but efforts by ourselves, the 99 Percent, to liberate ourselves from enslavement by capitalism and Christianity? (I presume I need not add our enslavement is indisputably proven by how capitalism – its depredations countenanced if not encouraged by the Prosperity Gospel -- has already reduced half the U.S. population  to low-income destitution  during the past 43 years. As to how this has come about, see Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power [Harper: 2008].)

Just as socialism is our instrument of economic revolution, so then is paganism our instrument of spiritual revolution – though the class-based nature of modern paganism (another expression of the socialist/pagan twinhood) – has yet to be commonly recognized by either group.

While the revolutionary origins and history of socialism are thoroughly documented,  the modern history of paganism (or neo-paganism as it is sometimes called), is virtually unknown – even to many present-day pagans. Though such a history is beyond the scope of this essay, it can nevertheless be summarized in three sentences. The modern pagan renaissance – and in particular the resurrection of the Great Goddess as its primary deity – began with the 1948 publication of The White Goddess, Robert Graves' definitively revolutionary “Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 1966). Its initial collective expression occurred within the Beat Movement of the 1950s. (See for example Diane DiPrima's epic Loba (Penguin Books, London: 1973-1998), which, probably more than any other associated work, exemplifies the spiritual revolution implicit in the Beat ethos.) The resurrection process was accelerated by the the Folk Renaissance of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which popularized traditional British and European balladry, much of it the disguised yet still-psychically potent remnants of pagan liturgy, a connection explored in detail by the late Holger Olaf Nygard, Duke University's resident folklore scholar. (Alas, Nygard's cutting-edge work, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad [Duke University Press: 1963], is long out of print – and my copy, probably one of the last in existence, was destroyed by the 1983 fire.) In any case, the point here is that paganism acquired its present global momentum  as an extension of the Counterculture of Rebellion that reached its apex during the 1960s and 1970s – an expression of the same save-the-world-from-capitalist-depredation instinct that birthed the Gaia Hypothesis,  Second Wave Feminism, Environmentalism and the Back-to-the-Land Movement. And I think it no coincidence paganism is, with feminism and environmentalism, among the only Countercultural remnants surviving today.

But from the socialist perspective is spirituality  – any spirituality – not inevitably yet another “opiate of the masses”? And thus, again from the socialist perspective, should not all spirituality therefore be discarded as expeditiously as possible?

Firstly, history shows spirituality is a characteristic human activity impossible to suppress. It is ultimately an expression of our species' quest for individual and collective meaning, as instinctive as other forms of creative expression, as definitively human as sexuality, though – alas (precisely as Abrahamic religion demonstrates) – equally subject to perversion. Secondly the emergence of Liberation Theology,  a radical variant of Catholicism that presents Jesus as a martyred revolutionary and attempts to sidestep Christianity's inherent Abrahamic misogyny, contempt for Nature and hierarchical despotism, proves even a classic, trickle-down opiate might be made to (deceptively) serve the cause of socialist revolution. Thirdly, while Liberation Theology was ultimately an effort by the Ruling Class (as personified by the church) to retain Ruling Class religious dominance (i.e. philosophical supremacy) in an era of rising revolutionary anger, paganism by contrast is an instinctively revolutionary response by those of us increasingly alienated by the roles of organized religion and capitalist governance in spawning, fostering and intensifying capitalism's threat to human survival.

As if to further confirm paganism's revolutionary nature, there is compelling evidence the One Percent and its Ruling Class consider the resurrection of paganism (and particularly its Great Goddess) to be at least as subversive as socialism. (This evidence includes several premature deaths and the mysterious fire that destroyed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” my meticulously researched collection of the evidence that would have redefined the Counterculture as the first wave of a revolution against patriarchy.) Paganism's danger to the One Percent and its Ruling Class thus lies in its accelerating rebuttal of Abrahamic despotism, which remember is the root of capitalism. The contrast between the Abrahamic god and the modern pagan goddess is literally a clash of diametrical opposites. Whether one accepts the Abrahamic god as real or symbolic, he is in fact the personification of oppression – the limitation, destruction and/or perversion of our quintessential humanity. Just as, whether one accepts the goddess as real or symbolic, she is the personification of nurturing – the recognition, encouragement and fulfillment of our individual and collective potential.

In this context paganism offers genuine liberation – not just from the Abrahamic religions' patriarchy-sustaining misogynistic anti-sex, anti-sensual and anti-Nature taboos, but from the innate Abrahamic hostility to science as well. While the Abrahamic myth of creation by a male deity is a genuinely unnatural act, contradicting physics, astronomy and biology, the Gaia Hypothesis restates in scientific terms paganism's core principle – that our planet (and by extension the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating. Moreover, paganism – unlike so-called Liberation Theology – is not dictated from above; the Ruling Class, which sneeringly denounces paganism as childish superstition or damns it as “Devil worship,” wants nothing to do with it and suppresses it at every opportunity.  Modern paganism is thus born entirely of rebellious intent – a 99 Percent philosophy intended, as I wrote in a long-lost essay, “to fault the (patriarchal) bedrock of (what passes for) civilization” and thereby free us from the psychological component of patriarchal/Abrahamic/capitalist shackles.

Thus too modern paganism is the spiritual and emotional counterpart of what socialism is for economics and politics. If one is truly a dialectical materialist – that is, genuinely committed to understanding “the real conditions of materialist existence” (which include the material of human consciousness) – one must recognize that sociological and psychological realities are equal to economic and political realities in the symbiosis that shapes our circumstances. Moreover, if one is genuinely committed to the pagan ethos of rescuing our human selfhood from beneath the jackboots of patriarchal religion and capitalism  – thereby reconnecting ourselves with Nature and (perhaps) saving ourselves from extinction – the socialist ethos of “from each according to ability; to each according to need” is the only way to expand the pagan principle of “as above, so below” to encompass all human society.

Here ends my open letter, which I hope will achieve the widest possible circulation within the pagan community.

*****

DONATIONS FOR WARBRIDES of Japan, a documentary, are desperately needed and are 100 percent tax deductible. While I do not normally use OAN for fund-raising, this is an especially worthy cause, as detailed in an e-mail Director Yayoi Winfrey recently sent me:

“Our production team has scheduled interviews with 11 Japanese war brides and/or their adult children in eight cities and three states. However, donations to our crowdfunding campaign, which began two weeks ago, has slowed down considerably, leaving us short on production funds. We desperately need your tax-deductible dollars for two airline tickets, car rental and gas plus hotel accommodations and meals for two weeks while we shoot. Won't you please help us get this documentary onto the screen? we would appreciate your participation no matter what size your donation.  Again, every dollar is tax-deductible if you donate at this site.  And please don't hesitate to ask questions you might have about where your donation dollars will go.”

*****

I HAVE COME to regard it as a kind of cheating to re-post comments I wrote on threads at other websites, but the following is the first time I have ever been able to bring myself to write publicly of the tragedy that – because it occurred during our society's pre-feminist refusal to acknowledge reproductive trauma – shattered the marriage shared by my second wife and me.

The writing was itself a surprise, my entirely unpremeditated response to an emotionally wrenching report  detailing the birth of a dead child and the creditor-intensified emotional devastation it inflicted on both parents.

What follows is slightly expanded from the original, which was condensed to fit Reader Supported News' 1500-character space restriction:

Albeit without the crushing debt that afflicted the author of the RSN essay after the death of her daughter, my second wife and I were similarly wounded by the death of our son. Hence we share Ms. Blossom's sorrow.

Ironically, we lived in Manhattan, the psychiatric capitol of the world, but it was 1967, and the feminist movement had yet to raise USian emotional consciousness enough for the shrinks to recognize the trauma associated with a still-born child.

We had made our baby deliberately and knowingly, gazing into one another's eyes amidst the exquisite pleasure and infinite joy of love, and like the Blossoms, we were anticipating, with all the characteristic happiness and apprehension, our transformation from a couple into a family. Adrienne, in that singularly female bio-emotional way of knowing  – a mode of perception we men can never truly comprehend  – had decided as a child age seven or eight she wanted a son named Loren, and now she was collecting the requisite baby clothes and related items ancillary to the fulfillment of her desire and intention. I on my part had already decided to give up the uncertain life of an editorial freelancer, take a staff job on one of the many New Jersey dailies that surrounded the City and thus aim for an eventual slot on one of the Manhattan papers, most likely The New York Post, which then before Rupert Murdoch bought it and destroyed it was the most proudly Left-leaning daily in the United States.

But at the end of our sixth month of pregnancy a moral imbecile for whom there are not vile enough pejoratives in any language ran for a train, and in his vicious haste – cursed may he be – he knocked Adrienne down the long flight of iron stairs to the lower level of the Union Square subway station. It was a Sunday; she had gone to visit friends on the Upper East Side, returned home that evening massively bruised and limping from the fall, and three days later our son was born dead.

My wife saw him briefly in the emergency room, an experience she cannot talk about even now, 49 years later. I viewed him for a moment as a nurse carried him in a glass jar through the Beth Israel Hospital emergency waiting room.

“Is that the Bliss baby,” I asked.

“Who are you,” she asked in reply.

“I'm the father,” I said. “May I see?”

Except for his purple color, he seemed perfectly formed, almost a twin of the infant I knew from pictures of myself as a babe-in-arms, his hair as near-black as my own was then.

I cannot yet describe my feelings as the nurse bore him away; even now no words suffice.

In keeping with that era's accepted practice, we stifled our grief. A year later it seemed we despised one another, and by 1974 we were divorced – though now in the final years of our lives we are again emotionally close though we live on opposite coasts.

Thanks to feminist consciousness-raising, trauma such as ours and the Blossoms is at last acknowledged, even unto the fact it is a wound from which full healing is rarely if ever achieved. But its hurt can indeed be ameliorated by therapy – save when capitalist greed prices such relief out of our reach, an atrocity the only cure for which is the abolition of capitalism – another of the many reasons my politics are what they are.

Meanwhile, if reincarnation is real, may that which animated our son live again as someone else's child – and this time thrive.

And yes, we would have named him Loren.

LB/8 August 2016.

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Grabshot of Girl Relishing Cake Foretells Good News

Photographed this young girl while I was on assignment in Tacoma's Wright Park a couple hours before doctors at Group Health Cooperative told me my congestive heart failure is stable and that if it remains so, I should live as long as genetics and Fate would otherwise have allowed. (Photograph copyright Loren Bliss 2016.) 

*

MY APOLOGY FOR the unprecedentedly long silence, OAN's longest hiatus since I began its publication in 2009 and – or so I surely hope – a silence never to be repeated.

While the above cutline summarizes the good news, the details are (1) – that while the echo cardiogram my previous post said was forthcoming does indeed confirm I have congestive heart failure, it also indicates the condition is of a magnitude controllable by medication, exercise and weight loss; (2) – that despite an excruciatingly painful right knee (the bone-running-on-bone result of my 1978 radical meniscectomy  now severely inflamed by osteoarthritis), I am again managing to walk a mile almost every day; and (3) – that with my no-more-than-two-slices-of-bread-per-day diet, which I resumed once the devastation of temporary eviction was behind me, I am again losing weight, so much so I am now comfortably wearing belts with which I had not been able to cinch up my trousers since 2007.

The dark side of weight loss – the dark backside of poverty potentially brightened by a sudden full-moon at emotional midnight – is if I keep losing weight, I will eventually have to buy a new wardrobe, which is unaffordable thanks to the $155 per month Dem/GOP capitalist governance has slashed from my 2016 income. Thus like all of us impoverished folk I am being victimized to Baby Jesus nakedness by the weaponized poverty of Prosperity-Gospel Christianity, Thus too the reference to the full moon: an entirely do-able gesture of bare-assed defiance by anyone reduced to nudity by poverty.

Which, if we reflect on it, elevates nude dancing from its capitalist-proclaimed immorality to the very most moral, ¡no pasaran! form of revolutionary defiance – about which more in a moment.

Meanwhile I have – thanks to a beloved friend who is a genuine Witch, and to her patronesse and Muse who was not just a true Witch but a Laughing Witch brimming with love and humor 500 years ago in what is now Peru, I have a new mantra:

I refuse to be defined by victimization and trauma.
Instead I choose a path of healing and creativity.

I never before believed that sort of recitation of aspirations unto one's self was anything more than a human-potentialist variant of mental masturbation, but now I have discovered it does indeed work, and at long last, no doubt due to its self-hypnosis, I seem to be doing just what the cliche says, “putting behind me” the devastating trauma of my childhood and its vast intensification by the 1983 fire.

Thus it is easy to imagine my Witch ancestors Margaret Blisse and Mary Blisse, comely and successful mother and daughter farmers who were tried for witchcraft in 17th Century Connecticut and beat the rap, are laughing and applauding from their resting places in the Summerlands, unless of course they've been reborn in new bodies. (That they triumphed over envy and malice means they most likely were real Witches, knowledgeable in the clandestinely preserved skill to enchant with Truth, much as the legendary Jack Orion possessed similar skill  but as a man – such arts are remnants of the ancient matriarchies – could not do it with presence alone and thus required the aid of an instrument, originally a harp but by the 1600s a fiddle.

Meanwhile my mantra, which keeps changing as I change, has become an eerily appropriate accompaniment to a conversation I had with a young friend and comrade while walking in the park this very morning. She mentioned an Allen Ginsberg poem, Kaddish  (italicized rather than enclosed by quotation marks because it is an epic published as a separate book), and our conversation, which was about her own growth process, was also significant enough to my own psychological and political growth I looked up the Ginsberg work when I returned to my (now almost fully reconstructed ) home. (Yes, I met him several times in the City, and yes, I have all his published material.) There near the beginning of Kaddish, which I had not read in many years, I found a line that surely applies to all of us who are working to save our species from capitalism and its otherwise-inevitable extermination of our species and destruction of our planet, whether it does so by World War III or environmental ruin or some combination of both:

“...Dreaming back through life, Your time -- and mine accelerating
                                                        toward Apocalypse...”

Ginsberg's text thus prompted a response with my own words, first my oft-repeated statement that “in such times as these, when the One Percent has weaponized poverty and is using it in place of Zyklon B for our own genocidal removal, survival is a form of revolutionary defiance,” and then this I wrote on a Reader Supported News comment thread two days ago (for which scroll down):

Let us ask ourselves: why would the One Percenters want to ensure World War III?

Because -- precisely as their now-obviously permanent obstruction of effective climate-change amelioration proves beyond a scintilla of doubt -- they believe our species and our planet are already doomed.

Never mind it is obvious socialism could yet save us -- that it is in fact the only economic system capable of doing so.

It is equally obvious the One Percenters themselves -- who are most assuredly not stupid -- recognize socialism as our species' only possible mechanism of survival.

But fanatical capitalists (and therefore moral imbeciles) that they are, they are also suicidally committed to the doctrine of "better dead than Red."

They fear -- quite reasonably -- that after a socialist revolution, they would be the very first criminals to be arrested, tried and probably executed for their innumerable crimes against humanity.

Hence, like doomed serial killers making a suicidal last stand against certain arrest and execution, they want to ensure all the rest of us die with them.

Indeed, per Occam's Razor, this hypothesis explains all the situation's knowns and unknowns, hence is the only rational explanation for the USian Empire's terrifying renewal of thermonuclear war-mongering.

Which brings me back to my new mantra, revised yet again and now useful for anyone of any age or race or gender who is transcending subjugation:

I refuse to be defined by victimization and trauma.
Instead I choose the path of Revolution, within and without.

Hence the greater significance of the little girl smiling her cake-smeared joy at my camera: may my comrades and I ensure by our solidarity her daughter and her granddaughter and all the daughters and sons to follow will know such small but seismic pleasures.

But how then do I resolve the apparent conflict between being a Marxian (and therefore a dialectical materialist) and the apparent contradiction of also being a Gaian Pagan (and a Pagan not by fad or adaptation or mere inclination but as a direct consequence of two undeniable, inexplicable and unquestionably demanding encounters with its Source)?

Preview: in the ultimate sense, I see no conflict at all. In fact I am convinced each is essential to sustain the other.

Stay tuned.

LB/17 July 2016

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