Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Abortion Economics, Neoliberal-Style

With a GOP midterm blowout almost a forgone conclusion, the Democrats finally seem to be heeding the warning that their one-issue campaign on abortion rights is not quite catching on with the inflation-battered electorate.  They're just now beginning to take the Clintonoid nostrum of "It's the Economy, Stupid!" to heart.  Or so it may seem.

Because if Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams's own version of the intersectionality between reproductive rights and economic rights is any indication,  their messaging pivot to bread and butter issues becomes just more tasty fodder for the right.

Here's the MSNBC appearance by Abrams that has Republicans reaching for the knives and forks:




The right has immediately taken out of context her clumsy statement that "having children is why you're worried about your price for gas, it's why you're concerned about how much food costs."

This seeming correlation of child-bearing with inflation has "shocked political observers," crowed the reactionary New York Post, its own interpretation being that Abrams claimed that it's more cost-effective to kill babies than it is to feed them.

"Despicable," chimed in Ted Cruz in his best Texas drawl version of Bugs Bunny. 

"Demonic," Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona alliteratively agreed. 

Isn't it awful that those elitist Democrats are now reduced to even blaming kids for having the effrontery to be born?

Lather, rinse, repeat. Stacey Abrams is now doing what the Dems do best: defending themselves against scurrilous charges of perfidy from the Republicans - in lieu of, say, the feckless Dems coming up with a new agenda for the greater good.

If only Abrams could have supplemented - nay, prevented - her mad scramble to damage control with some radical policy prescriptions to appeal to the voters, then it might have been a whole different story. What if she had gone beyond merely acknowledging that women who are forced to bear children are condemned to poverty, by first of all admitting that this is precisely because Bill Clinton colluded with te GOP to abolish Aid to Families With Dependent Children back in the 1990s?  What if she had proposed single payer health insurance for all people, from cradle to grave?  What if she had proposed universal government-subsidized child care, the construction of guaranteed housing, a debt-free higher education? Then, perhaps, the fascist Republicans would have a lot more fodder to chew on besides the Dems' alleged new plot to sell the unwanted fetuses of the poor for food, a la Jonathan Swift's satirical solution to the Irish potato famine. 

What really would have riled them up was if Abrams had called for taxing the rich and corporations at Eisenhower era levels - in Georgia and throughout the country - in order to pay for all these radical new programs for the greater good.  A demand to end the forever-wars might have done the trick as well, despite the GOP's current totally phony opposition to funding the US proxy war in Ukraine.

As it is, given that Abrams's $20 million-plus campaign is funded by tax-averse corporations and wealthy liberal donors, she has had to settle for criticizing Brian Kemp, Georgia's current governor, for his refusal to allow Medicaid expansion in the state under the privatized Obamacare regimen, along with his vicious refusal to avail the state of even the very temporary and very inadequate rent relief and eviction protections afforded by last year's American Rescue Plan.

The standard neoliberal messaging about the economy prevails. As the Democratic platform pertains to women in particular, as long as they are recognized as full human beings with full-spectrum "access" to health care, and as long as they "work hard," then any relief from their economic burdens by the government will remain piecemeal, temporary and strictly means-tested. The shame poison pill will remain.

Interestingly enough, Stacy Abrams's remarks about abortion and inflation were in response to former President Barack Obama's own complaints last week that when it comes to their messaging and campaigning,  the Dems have been a real "buzzkill." 

It does, after all, sometimes take a scold to scold a scold.

 "You know, sometimes, people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells. And they want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us at any given moment can say things the wrong way, make mistakes.” Obama lectured in a Pod Save America podcast.

Here's looking at you, Stacey, Obama might have added were he as prescient as he pretends. As it was, he showed his own respect for womenfolk as he clumsily dished that his elderly mother-in-law is "struggling to learn the right phraseology to talk about issues" from his exasperated and long-suffering wife Michelle. This re-education vocabulary regimen stems from GOP blowback over such slogans as "defund the police," he lectured. 

I wonder if the learning of proper phraseology could be made intersectional with politicians' acknowledging that people's lives are miserable, thus teaching the lower orders that as long as they and their diverse identities are "recognized" by the ruling elite, then their desire for food, shelter and health care will disappear with just the right dose of Neoliberal Narrative. A spoonful of messaging might help the messiness go down, in other words.

I wonder if Stacey Abrams is thinking up some radical new phraseology with which to convey her very own heartfelt "Thanks, Obama" message.

Monday, April 13, 2020

Pandemic Trumpery

Democratic leaders are in a real quandary. As much as they'd love to give more aid, sustenance and comfort to ordinary Americans suffering so horribly through this pandemic, doing so would only prop up "Trump's economy" and boost his re-election chances. People having more cash in their pockets and food in their bellies would only end up thanking Donald Trump for the relief. And that will never do, Because beating Trump in November is more important to the feckless Democrats than making people's lives better in the here and now. 

As Michael Grunwald chillingly writes in Politico, since putting compassion over winning back power would be "politically clueless," House Democrats are loath to use the enormous leverage they now possess to ram through such measures as emergency single payer health legislation, a guaranteed income package and forgiveness of debt.

Why? Because Trump wants these things too. Not because he's even remotely humanistic, of course, but because he wants a second term, even if it means having to relinquish his own clueless "all Democrats are socialists" manufactured hysteria for the duration of the crisis.

Therefore, the Democrats are effectively claiming that they now have no other choice but  to "resist" Trump from the right wing of the political duopoly.  

Grunwald writes:
For example, they want to pump money into underfunded state agencies overwhelmed by unemployment claims, which makes sense on compassion and policy grounds—but that would also be a political bailout for Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis. And while Schumer’s call for a “heroes fund” to increase the pay of essential workers during the crisis is a worthy idea, it’s not hard to imagine the heroes being grateful to Trump for the extra cash.
The art of negotiation is about using your leverage to get things that your counterpart doesn’t really want to give you, and Democratic leaders don’t really seem to want to do that.
If millions of people have to needlessly suffer and even die and become martyrs for the Democratic Party cause of retaining Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker and installing Joe Biden in the White House, then that is the price we have to pay. This is not only a matter of Greater Vs. Lesser Evil, it is a matter of Feckless vs. Feckless. Which of our two corrupt parties can win the contest of loathsomeness?

Simone Weil, my favorite French philosopher, was right. The only and ultimate purpose of any political party is to win power and then to hold on to power. Never has her assertion been more glaringly proven than during the ongoing pandemic catastrophe.

Since winning power entails the generation of "collective passions" in the electorate, it's even harder to fathom why the Democrats have put up a senile groper and accused rapist as their presidential candidate. Does the sight and sound of Joe Biden rambling in his basement bunker generate any passion other than disgust - or at best, sheer boredom? 

Weil writes:
"Political parties are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice. Collective pressure is exerted upon a wide public by the means of propaganda. The avowed purpose of propaganda is not to impart light, but to persuade. Hitler saw very clearly that the aim of propaganda must always be to enslave minds. All political parties make propaganda. A party that would not do so would disappear, since all its competitors practice it... Political parties do profess, it is true, to educate those who come to them: supporters, young people, new members. But this is a lie: it is not an education, it is a conditioning, a preparation for the far more rigorous ideological control imposed by the party upon its members."
So Grunwald's premise that the Democrats are "terrified of being seen as obstructionists" if they dare to play hardball with Republicans is just excusing them and ascribing their inaction to well-intentioned timidity. The truth is that the Uniparty actors are simply playing the parts they've been assigned for the ultimate benefit of their oligarchic donors and for the increasingly hollow cliffhanger entertainment of the rest of us.

Propaganda and platitudes and posturing simply don't have the oomph they used to, especially when the thrust of the elites is on "opening up the economy" while ordinary humans in the millions are bleeding from their open veins.

"How the poor people found the insufficiency of those things, and how many of them were afterwards carried away in the dead-carts and thrown into common graves of every parish with those hellish charms and trumpery hanging about their necks, remains to be spoken of as we go along." -- Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year.

Saturday, November 9, 2019

Bloombergville Redux

Months before the Occupy movement sprang up in 2011 and its first major encampment made New York City's Zuccotti Park a household word, there were sidewalk sleepovers known as Bloombergvilles. The longest of these anti-austerity protests, in front of City Hall, lasted for three weeks before police broke it up and arrested 13 of the participants.

Inspired by the Depression-era Hooverville shantytowns erected by the destitute and homeless, the pre-Occupy Bloombergvilles were set up to irritate the city's multibillionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, under whose watch the Big Apple had become Income Disparity Capital of the Universe. The big Wall Street banks got the bailout while the rest of us got the bum's rush as well as the bill for both their reward and our punishment. As Bloomberg's own personal wealth was in the process of tripling to more than $53.4 billion, making him the eighth richest person in America, wages of workers stagnated and more jobs disappeared. Social programs were cut nationally and locally. Bloomberg even ordered that the city's food stamp applicants be fingerprinted as if they were criminals, before Gov. Andrew Cuomo finally put the kibosh on that cruelty.


Bite Me


It goes on and on. Bloomberg in 2011 had very Trumpily appointed as schools chancellor his own version of Betsy DeVos, a crony named Cathie Black, despite the fact that she had no education experience. Her liberal take on school overcrowding was to wonder out loud why poor minority women didn't use birth control. Unlike DeVos, though, Black didn't last too long on the job. Maybe it was the disclosure that Bloomberg had also had to hire a separate person to actually do Black's job for her.

 The very legitimacy of democratic institutions had become a critical issue of contention and mass outrage long before Donald Trump ever stumbled onto the scene to cast a lot of unwanted light on the corruption long endemic in our neoliberal society, in which government and corporations are for all intents and purposes the very same entity.

Then, as now, you would never have known that people were taking to the streets if you got all your news from the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. Six months before the corporate media had no choice but to acknowledge Occupy (first by ridiculing it and later by covering it as legitimate news once the police beatings began) there was a "Day of Rage" march on Wall Street by a diverse group of thousands of students, teachers, trade unionists, retirees, doctors, nurses - in other words, a cross-section of humanity forging a new solidarity which cuts across income and racial and "identity politics" lines.

Young student debt slaves are forming coalitions with the homeless, the recently unemployed or underemployed professionals of the middle class, trade unionists and others with the common experience of having suffered injustice and who are united in outrage. This building of cross-class coalitions is something relatively new. The "helping professions" have all been in the forefront because their ability to do their jobs has been so adversely affected by the budget cuts of the neoliberal project. Likewise, people who had heretofore been permanently relegated to victimhood, such as the disabled, the homeless, the mentally ill have taken on activist roles in protest movements as well. Tenant unions have sprung up as associations of eviction victims united in fighting landlords, more apt of a name than ever in these times of neo-feudalism.

The Bloombergville/Occupy movement was the beginning, in America at least, of the refugees from the middle class finding common cause with more historically oppressed groups of people. It was a slap in the face to the Divide and Conquer regimen which created enough of a norm-busting vacuum for Donald Trump to be ushered into power, courtesy of the arcane Electoral College and the dismal campaign of Hillary Clinton.


Pre-Occupy March 2011 March On Wall Street

The only media outlets bothering to cover this huge Bloomberg-era march and rally were Al Jazeera and the Amsterdam News.

So, for me anyway, nothing brings back memories of the heady, halcyon days of those civic uprisings than the possible/likely/all but certain entry of the despised Bloomberg, a virtual parody of smug class privilege, into the Democratic presidential primary race. Nothing spells irony better than Bloomberg's plaintive reason for running for the presidency in the first place: to restore the "norms" that the elites feebly claim were so suddenly and tragically lost during the reign of Donald Trump, along with the "legitimacy" of our democratic institutions.

Politics has been in legitimacy crisis mode for decades. Long before Trump, there was deep distrust of citizens for their government, a reality which Trump and other right wing "populist" leaders have co-opted brilliantly.

 Political parties are not allies of the citizens. And since the political system depends on the mass loyalty of citizens, it reacts to this negativity by clamping down, via censorship, policing, mass surveillance. As Barack Obama made plain in his annoying lecture on "wokeness" last week, deferential citizens are viewed as better citizens than critical citizens. He wanted to deflect from the scary truth that conflict is absolutely essential for the development of democratic rights.

It was Bloomberg (who was offered and turned down the World Bank presidency by Obama) himself who had directly crushed legitimate democratic protest when he spearheaded the orchestrated nationwide police crackdowns on the Occupy camps in December, 2011. (To be fair, he got a little help from the Democratic veal pen of organizers, such as MoveOn, which had attempted to co-opt the movement by starting its own get-out-the-vote "99% Spring" astroturf imitation,  which mysteriously disappeared around the time that the camps were destroyed.)

Bloomberg's threatened entry into the race is all about saving the oligarchy at the continued expense of the rest of us. His candidacy is living proof that we do indeed live under neo-feudalism,  and that our quadrennial participation in presidential politics is a privilege granted to us, and not a right. Specifically, his entry into the race is meant as a warning and a rebuke to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and its popular candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

His entry into the race is above all a sign of desperation by the oligarchs that there is the tiniest possibility that they may actually be parted from a smidgen of their obscene wealth sooner rather than later.

From Barack Obama last week chiding the victims of his austerity policies to tone down their indignant rhetoric, to mega-banker Jamie Dimon complaining on TV that the "success" his predatory cohort is being disrespected, to Jeffrey Epstein pal Bill Gates threatening to vote for Trump if Warren is the nominee. the Ruling Class is wallowing in a virtual orgy of overblown sensitivity. They are so corrupt that any vestigial insight into the ugly fact of their own corruption and criminality has long disappeared. whittled away by both their ill-gotten gains and the fawning coverage they get from their corporate press courtiers.

Bloomberg even owns his own media empire, a feat he had accomplished long before Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.

No wonder all the usual suspects are welcoming this godzillionaire ex-mayor to the party with open arms, despite there being no chance that he'll win the nomination, let alone even make it on to the debate stage. Bloomberg has all the debate stage he wants in the way of free publicity. 

One positive point: the Stop and Frisk former mayor who made extreme racial profiling by cops a core part of his agenda, makes South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who failed to rein in police misconduct and to address racism in his own little town, look like the rube he is. He's also pulling the rug right out from under fellow centrist Joe Biden, increasingly viewed as a liability by the Owning Class because of his chronic "gaffes" and obvious mental decline. 

Bloomberg's self-funding billions will buy him all the air time and space he demands with which and from which to hurl class venom at the lesser people under the guise of hurling venom at Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. He is the leader of his own party, the Oligarch Party. His MAGA motto is to Make America Gentrified, Always. His task is to promote the narrative that 1) Bernie and Liz are making our Trickle-Down Tyrants so nervous that they can't even pee their golden drops of beneficence on us without getting a nasty groin-ache; and 2) the serfs of the Heartland are so bummed and so terrified by the prospect of guaranteed health care and debt-free college that they will vote for Trump again out of a dearth of centrism.

Bloomberg has heeded the call of fellow financier Steve Rattner, who is granted regular New York Times opinion page space despite his tacit admission to robbing public pension funds in a sleazy kickback scheme. Like most members of his class, he avoided criminal indictment and prosecution by "settling" with New York and agreeing to pay a fine. Like most members of his criminal class, he no doubt later claimed the fine as an income tax deduction.

Three days before Bloomberg filed the paperwork to enter the Alabama Democratic primary, Rattner complained in the Times that even worse than Medicare For All and the threat to private insurance predators are Warren's regulatory reforms and taxes, which would greatly threaten his class's ability to rob, cheat, steal and pollute:
Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated. Shale fracking would be banned, which would send oil and natural gas prices soaring and cost millions of Americans their jobs. And on and on.
 Oh, the humanity. Notwithstanding that Warren cringe-worthily said that among the Black leaders she'd consider for her cabinet were Bain Capital's Deval Patrick and Melody Barnes, late of the Obama administration and revolving doors to JP Morgan Chase and Booz Allen Hamilton, at least she's making them momentarily uncomfortable, albeit probably unnecessarily so if she wins the nomination. They count Bernie out at their own peril.

Since normal tycoons, meanwhile, are so not used to defending themselves in public, it will now fall to Bloomberg to seamlessly continue what Barack Obama started last week by way of gaslighting the underdog and reassuringly dog-whistling endless class supremacy to the traditional movers and shakers of The Realm who have so richly rewarded Obama since he left office.

And just to be on the safe side, the Oily Garchs will protect their bullshit narrative by ostentatiously moving Wall Street's mythical bull sculpture to a place of greater safety. Just last month, a protester doused it with fake blood. And the month before that, another ne'er-do-well violently bashed it with a toy metal banjo. This symbol of the Overlords was not only punked, it was plinked. And that is so rude, seeing as how the Overlords paid homage to women's rights -  not by passing wage parity legislation -  but by commissioning a Fearless Girl statue to face down the Charging Bull.

No word if Bull will be reunited with Girl, who also had to be fearfully removed from the site due to safety concerns.

Maybe Bloomberg and the other belly-aching, plutocrapping Thought Leaders can get together before the first terrifying Democratic primaries and strain to come up with a solution to the pressing dilemma of where they can run, where they can hide.


(graphic by Kat Garcia)

Friday, May 19, 2017

Most Ingenious Paradoxes

-- A reporter was pinned to the wall by security guards and later bodily ejected from the Federal Communications Commission building after he dared to ask a question in a public hallway. An FCC official later explained that when it comes to the agency's brazen attempt to privatize the Internet, the de facto policy on journalistic questions is threat neutrality. A threat is a threat is a threat, First Amendment rights be damned. Therefore, the Federal Communications Commission is refusing to communicate any further about this incident.

-- Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman, profoundly announced to reporters that a private meeting in a public building with Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had "renewed my confidence that we should not have confidence in this administration.” This has renewed my confidence that whatever politicians choose to tell me about secret meetings with no press or cameras allowed is always absolutely true and factual.

-- Senator Lindsay Graham (R-Confederacy) sagaciously told MSNBC that he'd found former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates's own public Congressional testimony on #RussiaGate to be "incredibly credible."  Incredibly, he said this two times in quick succession, perhaps to ensure that his audience will always view his constant TV appearances as unbelievably tedious.

-- It is a truthiness universally acknowledged that Donald Trump is the most inept, dangerous, treasonous president in the history of America. But lacking sufficient evidence to back up this claim, the "sober-minded" elders of the Democratic Party are primly lecturing their punch-drunk colleagues and constituents to keep calm, carry on, shut up, and most important, continue raising money and sending money. Just because Dems are attacking Trump mercilessly 24/7 shouldn't communicate that they want to railroad him out of the White House, for goodness sake. Just because he's impaired doesn't mean he should be impeached. Of course it's the pits, but I'm afraid that you'll just have to keep sucking it all up.