Let Them Smoke Dope

  "It would be stupidity on steroids" for Congress not to pass a pandemic bill whose essential core is the shielding of employers from liability for workers who get sick from Covid-19, either by being forced back on the job, or being forced to work under unsafe conditions. So said multimillionaire Senator Mark Warner on the unveiling of bipartisan legislation which would also cut already-expired federal unemployment benefits right in half, forgo sending Americans a second round of $1200 stimulus checks, and utterly fail to protect people from a looming spate of evictions and foreclosures.

Democrats, after pretending for months that this liability shield was the only obstacle to them agreeing to the much more generous package then being proffered by Republicans, now plead that it's the best we can hope for. Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo helped foam that runway for them when he absolved New York nursing home operators from culpability as the virus rampaged through his state's care facilities last spring. He was then handsomely rewarded, not only with campaign contributions from the same operators, but with a special Emmy award for his performance artistry during press conferences. There's a lot more money where that came from, from nursing home lobbyists and myriad other corporate predators, and Congress critters of both parties all over Plague Nation have their grasping arms stretched out so far they're practically dislocated from their shoulders.

Since it would indeed be stupidity on steroids for them to stop enabling capitalism on crack, the House of Representatives went whole hog and also finally voted to decriminalize marijuana last week. The stated objective is to rectify the institutional racism which has disproportionately jailed Black and Brown people for minor drug convictions.

 From the New York Times:

“The effects of marijuana prohibition have been particularly felt by communities of color because it has meant that people from the communities couldn’t get jobs,” Representative Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview.

Mr. Nadler, who spearheaded the legislation with Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California and the vice president-elect, described the collateral consequences of a conviction for marijuana possession as creating “an often-permanent second-class status for millions of Americans.”

 The subliminal objectives of what amounts to a political stunt are twofold  First, Joe Biden, one of the leading instigators of the War on Drugs and the ensuing mass incarceration via his 1994 Crime Bill, can be seen as redeeming himself. Second, by tacitly (and ever so magnanimously) encouraging people to smoke pot, politicians from both parties hope to deflect attention from the fact that no pandemic relief is coming, and that the political class has abandoned people during the worst public health crisis in US history.

As of last week, Covid-19 is now the official leading cause of death in America. Some 11,000 additional people died of the virus in just the last week of November, with the death toll expected to reach half a million by March - when, President-elect Joe Biden desultorily forecasts, a more robust "stimulus" package may or may not come to pass. In the meantime, folks, just try to hang on. Smoke a little pot. But if you get the munchies, you're on your own. Maybe you can look at Youtube clips of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bragging about her designer ice cream stash before she "caved" to Republicans.

 Everybody must get stoned in one way or another. Can it also be a coincidence that even Bob Dylan just caved and has sold his entire catalog to the music publishing division of Vivendi, the giant media conglomerate headquartered in France? Now owning one of the "Big Three" recording giants, Vivendi has recovered from a series of bankruptcies because of overleveraging. In 2002, Mitt Romney's Bain Capital was among the private equity vultures that swooped down to glut themselves on the leavings. 

Mitt Romney is also an integral  part of the small bipartisan Congressional cabal which authored the latest corporation-friendly Covid-19 relief package. It's a small world, a big club, and -- altogether now - You Ain't In It.

As Mitt Romney would say, if you haven't stashed away that first and only $1200 stimulus check like Nancy Pelosi's ice cream, or if you foolishly blew your entire temporary unemployment windfall on food and rent, then you obviously don't care anything for your own lives. You didn't save for the proverbial rainy day. He won't even let you ease the pain of plague-enhanced bipartisan austerity by letting you smoke marijuana for medical reasons. He'll fight legalization with his whitened teeth, his manicured nails and his gleaming little stones.