Oligarchic Gaslight In America's Twilight

If the billionaires who own the place want their failing state to turn an even bigger profit for them, their first task is to ensure that the superfluous population keeps fighting among themselves instead of punching up at them, their real oligarchic enemy.  

Only in America could the worst pandemic in modern human history vie for media attention with the tragedy of "divided government" and a supposed mass outbreak of violence and verbal vitriol among ordinary people fighting with each other over masks and political parties that don't care about them. If people weren't supposedly fighting each other all the time, they might stop and remember that three out of every four of them, both conservative and liberal, want the government to provide and finance their health care. And then, if people started making demands to benefit one and benefit all, the media would finally be forced to cover and report on what people really want.

To prevent that from ever happening, we're instead being fed competing stereotypical culture war narratives aimed at deflecting our attention away from the cruelty emanating from the highest of high places and directing our ire toward a whole panoply of Others. Fox News viewers get a cartoon picture of snobbish "woke" latte-sipping socialists and their hired Antifa thugs, while MSNBC fans learn to abhor supposed hordes of racist anti-mask cultists who always vote against their own interests. 

If you don't think that this hand-wringing narrative of Divided Regular Americans is all part of the plan and the "fix," look no further than two articles in Tuesday's New York Times. Regarding the tactics and aims of the ruling oligarchy, they are case studies in both self-contradiction and gaslighting.

The first, concerning "Biden's Economic Plan For the Virus," casts the oligarchs as deeply concerned and caring souls who only want the best for each and every one of us. They care so very much, in fact. that part of their propaganda is aimed at us with actual bullet points:

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris yesterday outlined their plan to help restore the economy while battling the coronavirus, calling on Congress to act immediately and insisting on the need for bipartisan cooperation.

Biden and Harris spoke from Wilmington, Del., immediately after meeting via Zoom with business and labor leaders. In his remarks, the president-elect described that conversation as "very encouraging," painting it as an example of his campaign message - national unity - in action.

He said that both the C.E.O.s and the union bosses had agreed that the government must act boldly to bring the economy back up to speed. “I wish you could’ve heard — corporate leaders and labor leaders singing the same hymnal here,” he said.

That touchy-feely propaganda about a meeting (to which the public was not invited) of a new era of rich and poor being all in this together is directly contradicted by the article in the same issue called "In Georgia, Private Equity Is Investing in Divided Government." Centering around a pair of runoff elections early next year which will determine the Senate majority, it bluntly asserts that without manufactured gridlock, the rich cannot possibly get richer at the expense of everyone else. The fix is in. Despite what their lackey Joe Biden tells us,  the ruling oligarchy doesn't even remotely want to fix what they themselves have broken. And Biden knows it:

Government gridlock protects private equity’s business model, ensuring that major changes proposed by Democrats, like Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act, won’t become law, Mr. Valadez said. (Richard Valdez of the nonprofit Americans For Financial Reform.) Mr. Biden got the most direct contributions associated with private equity in 2020, but Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas and Susan Collins of Maine were the next-biggest recipients, reflecting the sector’s preference for divided government.

Still, the Times must go through the motions of providing fair and balanced propaganda, evidenced by its Dealbook subsidiary's hosting of a concern-trolling online summit starring such oligarchic luminaries as tech mogul Bill Gates, who has no qualms about departing from his own area of expertise to pontificate about vaccine confidence. They're saving Elizabeth Warren for the end of the long day, when people are beginning to get fatigued and tuning out, to prod her about how her mild anti-corruption bill would hurt Wall Street, pretending that it actually has a chance of passing, not to mention ever being enforced if it does get passed after the requisite watering down. They want assurances from Warren that Joe Biden will treat them well, pretending (yet again) that there is a slight chance he will not treat them well while wagging the occasional scolding finger at them for appearance's sake.

Given his administration appointments so far, they haven't got a worry in the world which they have plundered to near-extinction.