An octogenarian enjoys a contemplative moment with his dog. Our right to such a secure retirement, formerly unquestioned even in the notoriously social-Darwinist United States, is now gravely threatened by the collaboration of DemocRats with Republicans and their Wall Street masters in an escalating campaign to privatize Social Security and abolish Medicare. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2011; Leica M4, 35mm f/1.7 Voigtlander Ultron at f/2.8 on Kodak Professional BW400CN.
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EXACTLY AS I WAS shocked to intellectual paralysis by the devastation seismic force and nuclear folly inflicted on the Japanese – what could I have possibly written that would not have been rendered meaningless by such horror? – so am I now face-slapped back to mental activism by Friday's report that 32 DemocRat senators have openly joined the Wall Street/GOPorker effort to loot Social Security and destroy Medicare.
The result is a 64-member senatorial death panel – 32 'Rats, 32 'Pigs – that by further shrinking already-frozen Social Security stipends and notoriously miserly Medicare allowances will impose on those of us no longer exploitable for capitalist profit a particularly cunning U.S. variant of the Final Solution: not extermination camps per se – that would be entirely too embarrassing – but poverty, abandonment and neglect clearly intended to have the same deadly impact on lower-income seniors and disabled people.
I say “will impose” rather than “would impose” because the death panel's bi-partisan majority makes it obvious the political situation – at least for those of us who are elderly or disabled – is already hopeless: that just as quake and tsunami and meltdown are savaging Japan, so will the capitalist Ruling Class savage Social Security and Medicare – never mind Sen. Harry Reid's obviously impotent, perhaps deliberately misleading assertions to the contrary.
Yet with the notable exception of The Hill, the right-leaning on-line journal that broke the story Friday morning, not a single Ruling Class Media outlet – not even MSNBC – has reported the hideous truth: that the 64-senator supermajority combines with the Big Business/Teabagger House to ensure there is no longer any doubt we will soon be ravaged by the very cutbacks we so desperately fear.
Indeed it is my own prediction those of us already on Social Security will be hurt at least as badly as future retirees and disabled people. Given the genocidal hostility toward lower-income people obvious in President Barack the Betrayer's handpicked anti-Social Security, anti-Medicare Fiscal Commission and in both houses of Congress, I strongly suspect we have seen our last-ever cost-of-living increase – no matter the death-dealing runaway inflation in food, fuel and medical prices.
The murderous intent of the politicians and their masters is obvious despite the “we may not agree” weasel-wording of the death panel's letter to Obama:
“As you know, a bipartisan group of Senators has been working to craft a comprehensive deficit reduction package based upon the recommendations of the Fiscal Commission. While we may not agree with every aspect of the Commission’s recommendations, we believe that its work represents an important foundation to achieve meaningful progress on our debt. The Commission’s work also underscored the scope and breadth of our nation’s long-term fiscal challenges.”
“Beyond FY2011 funding decisions, we urge you to engage in a broader discussion about a comprehensive deficit reduction package. Specifically, we hope that the discussion will include discretionary spending cuts, entitlement changes and tax reform.”
And who are these DemocRats who by their endorsement of “entitlement changes” now openly reveal themselves to be closet Republicans? Some of the names might surprise you:
John Kerry (Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Joseph Lieberman (Conn.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Thomas Carper (Del.), Mark Udall (Colo.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Dianne Feinstein (Caif.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Christopher Coons (Del.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Ben Cardin (Md.), Al Franken (Minn.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Mark Warner (Va.), Dick Durbin (Ill.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Patty Murray (Wash.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Tom Udall (N.M.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio).
One name on this rat list that does not surprise me at all is Washington's Sen. Patty Murray: as two-faced as Janus, her voting record (which includes lockstep support for NAFTA and other job-stealing, anti-labor “free trade” measures) proves her “progressive” rhetoric is as much a Big Lie as the Betrayer's “change we can believe in.”
The full text of The Hill's report is here, though (free) registration may be required to access it:
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I'm sad to say my predictions of Obamanoid/DemocRat treachery are now 100 percent accurate.
Remember how many times I said the President would fling us a few strategically timed culture-war concessions that, though economically meaningless, would appeal to the Left Bourgeoisie – the Democratic majority of arrogant academics and professionals and technicians and bureaucrats who (because they are still financially comfortable), moronically reject all notions of class struggle and therefore remain willing slaves of capitalism?
Remember when I wrote that even as I welcomed Obama's sudden about-face endorsement of gay rights, I believed it nothing more than an insidiously clever pre-2012 fence-mending ploy – and the harbinger of many more such devious stratagems to come?
Remember when I predicted Barack the Betrayer would eventually use gun control – more accurately forcible disarmament and compulsory victimhood – to win back the mandatory-pacifism fanatics and anti-self-defense zealots dominant amongst the bourgeois voters alienated by his serial betrayals?
Remember how many of you disagreed?
Well folks it's happening, an obviously pre-scripted anti-gunowner campaign that's already re-igniting the old Vietnam Era antagonisms just as the Ruling Class intends. On one side there's the formerly draft-exempt, now again hysterically anti-gun elite. On the other side are the mostly blue-collar folk who in years past often had no choice but to serve in the military and now own firearms, not just because it's a constitutional right but for practical purposes of subsistence and self-defense.
These men and women recognize the necessity of such measures because they have long been the nation's primary victims of crime – whether random murder, rape, robbery and mayhem or methodical capitalist exploitation, downsizing, outsourcing and union-busting.
Obviously – given these are the very workers who would be most likely to provide an expanded Wisconsin Rebellion the righteously angry nonviolent muscle it needs to be self-sustaining – their renewed alienation by resurrection of the DemocRat war against legal civilian firearms ownership (and therefore against the right to self-defense) is no coincidence.
It's no surprise I'm already hearing again what I heard so often in the Clinton years: “fuck it; might as well vote Republican: bad as they are, at least they'll let us keep our guns.”
Once again solidarity is flushed down the proverbial commode.
Thus the DemocRats deliberately work against themselves, antagonizing the very workers who might have truly revitalized the Democratic Party a la Wisconsin.
Thus too these same Obamanoid betrayers collaborate in thrusting Moron Nation ever closer to the permanent Republican majority the Ruling Class demands – the last step before the United States becomes the United Estates, the de facto Fourth Reich, the ultimate Big Business despotism.
LB/21 March 2011
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My apology for leaving the tech data off the above photograph; I was so furious over this latest DemocRat betrayal I simply forgot to include it. The camera was an M4 Leica, the lens a 35mm f/1.7 Voigtlander Ultron at f/2.8, the film Kodak Professional BW400CN.
Posted by: Loren Bliss | 03/25/2011 at 11:10 PM