I’m listening to a disabled woman whine on National Public Radio that she can barely live on the $1,200 a month SSD disability payment she gets now. She complains that her parents, in their eighties and in poor health, with many medical expenses of their own, have very little to kick in from their monthly Social Security check for her upkeep.
And the President is negotiating to lower future payments to the old and infirm for Social Security and SSD. I’m sick to hear it, that he’s left the New Deal Social Safety net on the negotiating table in the artificial emergency hostage situation Republican phrase masters, at no small expense, have named The Fiscal Cliff. I say they forget Fiscal Cliff– call it by what it is, when you ask the weakest to make the sacrifice for other people’s comfort, Lebensunswertes Leben (see FN below).
This disabled caller is worried, calling Tom Ashbrook on On Point to speak for others like her, people already feeling desperately squeezed, living under the poverty line, a line that is drawn artificially low to begin with. Do the math, $1,200 a month is less than $15,00 a year, excluding the bounty she gets in the form of the Food Stamps and Medicaid.
It seems, according to her, that the price of the transportation for the disabled where this physically and cognitively disabled woman lives has tripled in recent years. It now costs her ten dollars to leave her house to go shopping. Logic would dictate she go out less often, but somehow, she seems very unhappy with the idea of how much this semblance of independence eats into her meager budget. It’s not as if this lady is rich, strictly speaking she lives on $14,400 a year. She doesn’t have a cleaning lady and a driver, if that’s what you’re thinking, Eric Cantor.
She is calling Tom Ashbrook in the context of a conversation about President Obama’ s willingness to hack at the Social Saftey Net in the name, presumably, of bipartisanship — showing more of his famous willingness to concede on major principles before the horse trading actually begins– and preserving the oligarchic status quo.
“Oligarchic,” a political adversary will say, raising eyebrows and hackles both. I say, that is the proper name for the United States in 2012, there is no question of it being otherwise as the rich get richer and the poor and gullible are constantly called on to make more and more dire sacrifices.
It’s not as if I don’t see the arguments against the position I’m taking. After all, why should a person making only $400,00 a year be forced to take the hit and go back to the old tax rate before the Bush Tax Cuts? That’s why they built the Fiscal Cliff (you can be sure that well-paid right wing genius of phraseology, the coiner of Death Tax, Collateral Damage, Friendly Fire and so forth, was well-paid to coin this hard image of looming, desperate catastrophe) to capitalize on Bush’s deferred 2004 mandate to privatize Social Security.
How cool would that have been? Everyone free to freely invest their retirement money on twenty thousand lottery tickets, or getting mortgages to buy houses to flip, or on the spin of a roulette wheel that could make them fantastically rich — if they had enough to bet with. 2008 would have been a big “whoops…” for millions who would have lost all retirement income, in addition to the millions who did lose everything, (like the employees of Enron once upon a time) after the last unnatural Fiscal Disaster– the huge fraud that led to the massive losses of 2008.
That organized effort by fantastically wealthy institutions to defraud people with limited means was perpetrated by very, very, very wealthy people, people it wouldn’t be right to prosecute, or imprison, or force to give back billions obtained by fraud and deception. They are too big to prosecute, and besides, they are not considered a threat in the same way that an angry young black man is a threat, but, if you look at the full picture, these are some very dangerous motherfuckers. But anyway, back to lives not worth living, those expendable millions at the bottom of the food chain.
The sickening spectacle unfolds, there goes our supposedly liberal President Barack Obama, sleeves rolled up, agreeing to pony up the Social Safety Net in favor of letting the wealthy pay as little as possible in taxes, the old rate before Bush gave them his temporary one-time tax cut gift a decade ago.
The President seems to have agreed in principle to tie future Social Security payments to a new cost index that would gradually decrease the amount our nation’s oldest and poorest, our most helpless, receive every month. They’ll eat cheaper meat if the market dictates it, they’ll eat less meat, they’ll live like Gandhi. We didn’t make them losers. If they’d made better choices in life they could have also been winners. We didn’t make the jungle.
Still, I have to ask: why is the New Deal being renegotiated at this particularly difficult moment for most people? Whence this radical right wing drive to shred the Social Safety Net? Are we still fighting the damned Civil War? Did Germany win World War Two and nobody told me? Why is the onus for settling an artificially engineered showdown to cut social spending placed squarely on the backs of our most vulnerable? Why is it being presided over by Nobel Peace Prize Winning President Change We Can Believe In?
There must be a hundred more likely places to start to cut the deficit before we talk about cuts to a program that is solvent for at least the next twenty years without any changes.
There are those who insist we live in the freest nation on earth. The vast majority of children who grow up in poverty die in poverty in America. They live shorter, more dangerous lives, their infant mortality rates are like those of Third World mothers. American children in poverty, in the patriotic view of those who proudly call our nation the greatest nation in the history of the world, have the freedom to choose between obedience, discipline and participation or anger, rebellion and prison.
A rational actor, the theory goes, would choose to pay close attention as the cards are dealt and gamely play the crap hand he’s being dealt every round. He is not playing at a high stakes table anyway. For example, if he or anyone he knew were to die and a corporation had liability for that death, their family would get a tiny wrongful death settlement. Think World Trade Center bus boy wrongful death number ($20,000) vs. World Trade Hedge Fund guy’s (multiple millions, widows complaining about the meager pay-outs).
“Let’s see,” the lawyer for the corporation negotiating the settlement for the guy’s death from some kind of toxic product or procedure, would say, consulting charts and punching a calculator “a life expectancy of 31 years times an annual salary, interest, benefits and dividends, of…. let’s see…. zero— prisoners in the State prison system do not make very much money, would be…. we’ll give you $10,000.”
The family would take it, in sorrow and in rage. But really, that’s the game, the way its set up, how the board is rigged, where the finger rests heavily on the scale, how the field tilts, who the refs are, how corrupt and greedy they are, and billions and billions in wealth to be taken, the wealth of the world is inexhaustible, more money than you could spend in a thousand lifetimes, but who cares? God bless unfettered Capitalism, nobody can put a limit on an American’s right to luxury a million times over, as if he had a million lives to spend it.
It’s Winners versus Losers, punk. It’s a clear choice, really. You can choose the side that wins every time– even if you personally keep losing big time you can still root for the Winners, bask in their glow. Or, you can side with the Losers, those who will always lose, always be screwed by those who can. Some are born with advantages, others with disadvantages. It’s up to you— pick a side.
So this disabled woman talking to Tom Asbrook complains that if the monthly check is decreased, if she’s told to buy a cheaper cut of meat, lose some weight, don’t use so much heat in the house, wear two sweaters inside, and a scarf and a hat, live like Gandhi, then she will suffer. The rest of us need it all, so let’s just say, to her and the millions like her: be quiet and have a blessed day.
FN: Lebensunswertes Leben (from Wikipedia)
The phrase “life unworthy of life” (in German:“Lebensunwertes Leben”) was a Nazi designation for the segments of populace which had no right to live and thus were to be “euthanized“. The term included people with serious medical problems and those considered grossly inferior according to the racial policy of the Third Reich. This concept formed an important component of the ideology of Nazism and eventually helped lead to the Holocaust.[1] The euthanasia program was known as Action T4.
