One of the more gleefully repulsive enforcers of our Great American Oligarchy is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. His latest act of villainy is nixing a floor vote to give modest, one-time $2,000 relief checks to people struggling to survive during the worst biologic and economic catastrophe in modern history.
Well, he is willing, but there are strings attached. Actually, there are reinforced steel chains attached. People will only get the extra money, McConnell smarmily insinuates, if the Democratic Party-aligned social media companies are made bereft of their legal protections. Some of them - namely Facebook and probably Google - already face antitrust lawsuits because they own and control the entire world, and censor content that their "deep state" Establishment partners don't like. Republicans also want them stripped of their legal protections against also getting sued for third party defamation contained in public commentary.
McConnell is further demanding that people lose more of their voting rights through a crackdown on alleged electoral fraud. In other words, he wants the power to thwart the public will and to nullify electoral results he doesn't like by expanding voter disenfranchisement into a redefinition of American citizens as real or incipient fraudsters.
As far as the fortunes of the coddled Silicon Valley billionaires are concerned, I say why not take them all to court at every opportunity? The liability shield protecting them was enacted way back in the 90s, long before they morphed into the monstrous undemocratic and unaccountable sovereign surveillance and data extraction states that they are today. Solve the problem by simply breaking them up.
But McConnell's disenfranchisement gambit is a whole different story. It is not only a poison pill, it is a million-gallon cocktail of arsenic, strychnine and ricin spelling absolute and speedy doom for the body politic.
If McConnell has his way (and when hasn't he gotten his way?), then the only stimulus we'll get, on top of those seductive $600 love-taps, will be a hard, resounding and very contemptuous bitch-slap in the face.
As far as President-elect Joe Biden is concerned, he already has pre-emptively vowed never, ever to "embarrass" McConnell and his other Republican friends in public. “My leverage is, every senior Republican knows I’ve never once, ever, misled them,” he bragged to a select group of establishment journalists recently.
His leverage with the American people is, he doesn't need the American people. He has never cared whether or not we know that we are being misled because a majority of us elected him as our newest misleader.
Rarely, in fact, do the interests of the predatory pathocrats and the interests of dispossessed people align. It's about as rare an event as Jupiter and Saturn aligning in the night sky every 600 years or so. But, as spectacular a sight as Republicans and Democrats, and Wall Street and Main Street, all joining together in the common humane purpose of meaningful pandemic relief may be, it is largely an illusion. Just as to the naked eye Saturn and Jupiter seemed to be embracing in a blaze of light while 456 million miles apart, so too is the comity between politicians and their constituents, the Haves and the Have-Nots a matter of highly skewed perspective. It's hardly the dawning of a New Age of Aquarius.
But it could be a glimmer. Senator Bernie Sanders is doing his theatrical utmost to, as David Sirota describes it, not only embarrass McConnell, but "out-McConnell McConnell." He is putting a hold on the veto override vote for the defense appropriations bill (the death industry's corporate welfare package) and his bravura performance at least is forcing the Senate to stay in town for the New Year's holiday. Come 2021, the wars and the weapons profiteering will seamlessly continue as though Bernie's filibuster never even happened.
It all comes down to the pair of Senate runoffs in the state of Georgia, culminating next Tuesday. Two plutocratic GOP grifters, who each got even richer on insider trading deals after secret Covid-19 briefings early this year, are struggling in the polls against two centrist Democrats being bankrolled by corporate interests. For purposes of winning power, the whole quartet is championing those $2,000 relief checks. The outcome will determine whether McConnell continues to rule the Senate.
Original Check Champion Donald Trump, who these days more resembles a mutilated turkey on the golf course than a lame duck in the White House, is said by the corporate media to have "blindsided" the Duopoly with his sudden demand for the added money, after Congress had worked so hard giving ordinary people the equivalent of half a month's rent and wealthy bosses a tax break on their three-martini business lunches. The media are no longer reporting the original story, which had Trump figuratively bound and gagged by his White House minions after he called for $2,000 checks long before the midnight compromise between Republicans and Democrats was finally reached.
Despite the questionable motivations behind his sudden concern for the masses of people as he exits the White House, Trump's words are having their beneficent effect, in that they expose the political perfidy in his various bipartisan enablers. He also just shockingly ousted Barack Obama from his 12-year reign as the Gallup Poll's Most Admired Man In America.
Miracles do happen. Illusions replace illusions. The Emperor always does have new clothes. But there will also always be outsiders to point out the naked truth to anyone who's interested in seeing or hearing it, not to mention acting upon it.
The largest social media outlets are firmly pushed to "curate" political speech so as to allow only that liked by those pushing them.
ReplyDeleteThat meets the old definition of censorship of news media. It is how Fascists justified what they did, and Stalin too.
How can this curating be stopped? Those censored cannot go to the courts, because the law says the outlets are immune. They can do whatever they like, or whatever they are pushed into, and there is no legal check on it.
I'd think that legal immunity would be protection from censorship, but it is proving to be the opposite, the cause of vulnerability by censorship to serve political pressure and private ambition.
Much as I think Trump a fool, I approve his push for $2,000 stimulus to individuals. Much as I think McConnell is knowingly and happily evil, he is right about repealing Section 230 so that courts can be invoked to protect speech against censorship.
Even bad people can do good things, especially when the "good people" are in fact doing bad things hiding behind a screen of self praise.
ReplyDeleteOur Great Reckoning —
Eileen Crist On The Consequences Of Human Plunder
https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/540/our-great-reckoning
December 2020 ~ interviewed by Leath Tonino
Crist concludes: "To put it accurately, our struggle is to change the course of history. To break with our history. To drop the baton."
Erik Roth -- I read that article. Thanks, it is a good one. Also, I was pleased to see that it is no longer behind a paywall.
ReplyDeleteThe article mentions "monoculture" as the underlying problem, rather than just climate change, because farming and plantation trees and the like have taken so much of the Earth out of its natural life. Yet I'd suggest that pattern need not continue. It is not inevitable, it is a choice, and a poor choice.
Consider the Boundary Waters forests, which are kept as mixed forest and selectively cut to favor old trees. It maintains natural life, and is now one of the major places for studies of underground life linking trees, a life not even known until recently. It is extremely productive of wood, more so than any similar sized area over the time it has been protected and harvested. All of that is very high quality wood too, not just underage soft pulpwood.
The same is true of diversity in farm animals. Not all animals are exactly the same, nor should they be for best growth in varying climate and feed conditions. Beef grown on small farms in Indiana is an example I know from family connection. The same is true there of hogs.
The same can be true of grain. In fact, the farms I know best grow several varieties of corn on each parcel, one around the edges, another in the centers. They grow other things around the fields and road edges, to support helpful insect life that pollinates and keeps down harmful insects. Monoculture seems at first glance to be easy, but it is not most productive for given inputs of land area and water and soil fertility. When well managed it is not even easier for labor input.
We are doing it wrong, mostly, but that is not inevitable nor even cheapest to do. It is just a huge mistake about which we learn better all the time. Farming and forestry are not what they were even 50 years ago, and must continue to change.
Monoculture is a dead end, but it is not inevitable for humans. Thus the article you attached is even more correct than it first claims, because there is much more to be done than just reducing carbon and the focus on climate change/global warming.
ReplyDeleteMitch McConnell has one trait I admire: he is not afraid to exercise power.
Until an opposition worthy of the name takes shape, Mitch and his kind will keep going in the same direction as far as they can as long as they can until they are stopped by a determined counterforce also willing to exercise power.
The “1% v 99%” meme lets too many of us 99 percenters off easy. Would it be unfair to suggest that between the plutocrats, surrounded by their praetorian guard of technical elite, and the millions of nobodies afflicted under the direction of the elite there stands a sizable crowd of guilty bystanders?
Abundant talent idles among the bystanders. Nothing will change, that is, Mitch will carry on as before, with state crimes passing as routine governance, until an army of bystanders steps up and, at some cost, launches a powerful movement to disempower Mitch and the errant elites.
Here's another worthy article:
ReplyDeleteLetters from an American — December 30, 2020
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-30-2020
~ by Heather Cox Richardson
Curiously, a lengthy comment to that, posted by Lynell Abbott, has since been deleted. I thought it worthwhile to note and so happened to copy it before the purge, which I suspect had to do with her quoting a letter posted on her "FB page" as she put it. That basically concerned teacher and student relationships and education post-pandemic. I also copied a posted reply to her, by "Gigi" that still remains. It, too, is long, so I beg your indulgence of my posting it here:
"Thank you for sharing this letter Lynell. I hope the principal comes forward and works with the Biden Administration in some way. As I read it, I was brought back to what I learned in college in preparation for a teaching degree. Most of my teaching career was spent in a progressive school system outside of D.C. in open space schools. The classrooms without walls focused on the students’ preparation for theIr future employment by learning to work together, or independently in centers with multiple learning paths. Students were freed from their seats and teachers from their desks at the front of the room. I loved it but it was a lot of work for teachers to organize the learning centers. When standardized testing became popular, we discovered that students did not know how to take a timed test and their test scores were miserable. In came the business men, the testing companies and up went the walls. The dream of individualized education in public schools died. How did I forget all that?
The media was already full of stories criticizing Carter, who had added a Department of Education, and Reagan was annointed by the release of the Iranian hostages on his Inauguration Day. He spent 8 years criticizing civil servants as lazy, making up dress codes for women wearing pants to work, and having expensive state dinners so Nancy could show off her glittering ball gowns. He probably had Alzheimer’s while in office.
Teflon Ron morphed into Teflon Don still talking up fear of socialism. He was trained by the best haters, Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn.
What I still cannot understand is how Republicans get away with lying, like Nixon, Bush, Cheney and Trump, and having huge, horrible events in their administrations (Iran-Contra scandal, 9-11 attack, recessions caused by Illegal banking practices, now a pandemic that will eventually kill a half million or more) while Democrats do something relatively small in comparison (Bill Clinton’s affair) and get roasted by the holier-than-thou.
Hopefully HCR, you have tied the threads together to make a strong enough rope to hang the conservative movement at last. 🙏🏼👏🏼💐"
The other day I got curious as to the source of McConnell's incredible power to single-handedly keep any bill from being voted on in the Senate, if he so desires. I like to think I'm good at Googling, but have not been able to find the explanation. It certainly isn't in the Constitution. And I doubt it is by some other law. Is there some self-imposed abdication of function that all the other senators have agreed to?
ReplyDeleteI think of the two Democratic senators from my state and I wonder why they spend these precious years of their lives in Washington, in such a non-functional body. It can't be just the salary and free airport parking. Maybe it is the opportunties for insider trading and all kinds of other sweet deals that make it worthwhile?