Just Who Is Getting Hammered?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, blandly admitting that his cruel denial of direct cash aid to Americans has led to the two sleazy Georgia GOP candidates getting so "hammered" by desperate voters that his majority power is threatened, appears to be relenting. He reportedly has agreed to try and cheaply bribe people with a new round of one-time stimulus payments of about $600. If it comes at all, this monetary relief will not come in time to buy the kids Christmas presents this year.

It will, however, come just in time to justify imposing a new round of austerity on people in the new year in collusion with a new administration - a/k/a the third term of Obama, which itself was the third term of Clinton. Forget moving on from Donald Trump. We're right back to the Trump Prequel.

Octogenarian House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who ensured last year that the so-called "Paygo" rule requiring that all new government spending be offset by cuts to other programs, will remain in charge of the lower House despite a campaign led by comedian Jimmy Dore to shame the progressive Democrats to vote her out unless she agrees to bring a Medicare For All vote to the floor. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, despite agreeing that the current conservative party leadership has got to go, pleads that there is nobody willing, able or qualified to take Octomomma Bear's place.  It's a pitiful rationale of StayGo as far as the unpopular Pelosi is concerned. They hate her but they'll vote for her anyway because she is less evil than a vacuum. Plus, she is the one who vacuums up all the money from the oligarchic donor class and holds it tightly in her designer handbag for disbursement to only those Democratic politicians willing to do the bidding of the donors.

Meanwhile, tens of millions of people are getting hammered financially, physically and emotionally. It's elected officials like Pelosi and McConnell, in thrall to the ruling oligarchy, who are willfully wielding the hammer and crushing the bodies and spirits of their constituents in a veritable orgy of violence. With the "official poverty" rate increasing by another couple of percentage points, this is by far the worst  pandemic of political malpractice and manufactured misery in modern American history.

And the evil is being perpetrated with breathtaking cynicism. An app that actually calls itself Robinhood only got a friendly little wrist slap of a warning fine from the Securities and Exchange Commission for bilking mainly young members of the Precariat out of millions of dollars in an online stock trading scam. Although the trades were advertised as being commission-free, the SEC complaint said, customers were never advised that this upfront savings then translated into them paying higher prices for the actual stocks that they were betting on. The price difference was then funneled from Wall Street trading firms right back to Robinhood, whose owners, as of now, are stunningly not being criminally charged as individuals.

 Are we going on a general strike yet? Or is everybody too hammered on booze, drugs, despair, or just plain old boredom to even realize how badly our elected "reps" and their owners are hammering us, all day and every day?