Thursday, March 25, 2021

Why Is Kamala Harris Canoodling With Austerians?

Vice President Kamala Harris is taking a fair amount of heat this week for partnering with notorious horndog Bill Clinton, of all people, for a discussion on women's issues during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Clinton has been serving a long stint in the media doghouse ever since the #MeToo movement gained momentum during the Reign of Trump Terror, and scandals ranging from the Monica Lewinsky saga to Clinton's association with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein started getting re-examined with fresh sets of woke eyes. Harris's marquee role at the Clintons' annual "Global University Initiative"  is therefore being widely lambasted as a ham-handed effort to both salvage Bill's tattered reputation and to unofficially re-cement the entire Clinton clan's role as major players in both the Biden administration and the Democratic Party.

As one editorial puts it, the very idea of Kamala Harris and Bill Clinton getting together to discuss "empowering women and girls of the world" is a bad joke, especially since the former president still considers himself a victim of the women and girls he has abused through the years. It's really hard to woke a comatose horndog, but Harris plans to give it the old college try anyway at her alma mater, Howard University.

What's being ignored in the critical coverage of this gabfest is that the occult purpose of the Clinton Global Initiative University is the imposition of crushing austerity on the women and girls (and men and boys) of the world.  Not for nothing does major funding for this week's confab with Kamala Harris come from the Peter J. Peterson Foundation. Begun by the late Wall Street billionaire and deficit hawk sponsor of Barack Obama's so-called Cat Food Commission and its efforts to cut Medicare and Social Security, his think tank continues to spread the thoroughly debunked claim that government spending for the greater social good is bad for economic growth - a/k/a the unfettered growth of predatory capitalism.

Kamala Harris's participation in this oligarchic enterprise, which is now desperately trying to cloak itself in the masks of feminism and diversity, should disabuse us of the notion that the Biden administration is the most progressive one since FDR. With most of the relief measures in the "rescue" legislation - expanded unemployment insurance, modest food stamp increases and tax credits with direct cash disbursements to needy families with children - set to expire within the year, it should be obvious that their placement of a band-aid on the festering societal wound that they themselves created more than 40 years ago is mainly designed to placate an increasingly restive population.

The Clinton Global Initiative University continues to press for austerity, and it does so by infiltrating the nation's colleges and universities with the specious message that the economic pain of indebted students is due not to debt peonage imposed by greedy lenders, but by greedy older people depriving them, the young future leaders and budding entrepreneurs of America, of the success that they deserve.

"It's Up To Us," the students are instructed, to become politically engaged enough to willingly join the oligarchs in the austerity program. "Get Involved! Join the Movement!" the Clinton website urges, boasting that 131,000 college kids already have signed the pledge to become deficit hawks.

Among the solutions that the Clintons' Campus Crusade For Austerity urges the young people to clamor for is privatizing Medicare with a "premium support program," and raising the Social Security retirement age. It also suggests replacing the income tax with a "progressive consumption tax" - which many critics say is actually regressive, given that poor people must spend most of their incomes on necessities. 

Therefore, immediately after being empowered by Bill Clinton and Kamala Harris at Friday's CGIU "plenary session," participating students will meet privately in an "Office Hours" chat with Hilary Allen, the program director for It's Up To Us, along with "special guests" from media monolith Verizon, another co-sponsor of the conference. According to her bio on the Clinton Foundation website, Allen was inspired to become a "radical moderate" by billionaire Daniel Lubetzky,  founder of KIND snacks, who proved to her that as long as the KIND label is slapped on predatory capitalism, who cares about the actual hidden ingredients?

To that end, Hillary Clinton herself will join the fun, leading yet another plenary session conversation with the theme of kindness promotion, which is mainly achieved by Chelsea Clinton's "Too Small To Fail" initiative to combat poverty by reading to children in laundromats.

As for Kamala Harris, hopefully she will have soaked up so much kindness and empathy by canoodling with the Clintons that her upcoming junkets to Central American countries so devastated by neoliberal US plunder that record numbers of refugees are crossing the Mexico-US border, will convince those political bosses to keep their subjects from ever even reaching Mexico in the first place. This act of American empathy will be accomplished by billions of dollars in kind bribery cash to be paid directly to the political bosses.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, in other words, rumors of the death of the Neoliberal Project and its relentless imposition of austerity and pain on the suffering masses of the world have been greatly exaggerated, Rescue Plan or no Rescue Plan.

And stateside, at least 30 million retired, sick, poor or disabled people have yet to receive their $1400 "stimulus checks." It seems that Congress unkindly forgot to appropriate the funds for the Social Security Administration to compile a list of beneficiaries for the IRS. You know... the desperate people that the Clinton Foundation and its corporate sponsors want you to believe are stealing our futures.

15 comments:

Jay–Ottawa said...


'Grifter' originally referred to a person getting by by exercising his or her talents through a combination of small-time graft and swindling.

The definition is changing; grift has graduated to a place among world-class big players, universities, think tanks, foundations and other once do-good institutions. As grift is sanded smooth and institutionalized, it becomes respectable, something like the Godfather clan going 100% into legit business in the space of two generations, old pals like Jeffrey Epstein being disappeared along the way.

Memory comes with a dimming switch, and professional PR-for-hire's redo of you becomes the forever you.

In the end, greed is good; grift is noble; austerity is just; and little girls are little women.

If the disastrous Bush 43 can be rehabilitated within a handful of years, it's only a matter of a few more Biden months before Clinton 42 can be eased back into the elite pack of newsworthy Good Crooks steering the ship of state onto the shoals of history.

mjb said...

I just had a difficult time getting to the Sardonicky blog. I wonder if it's my computer or the site is being blocked. Weird. It usually goes directly to the website when I type in Sardonicky. I'll try again later. Just wondered if anyone else has experienced this problem. To get here I had to go to Karen Garcia's profile and then select the blog.

mjb said...

Guess I now have to use https://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com to get here.

Mark Thomason said...

The Clintons rode Republican-Lite to power.

Biden is just a Clinton.

Harris is just trying to be that same.

This is why so many of us who supported Bernie just outright detest Biden, and Clinton before him, and Harris for being the exact same.

If we want a Republican, we can just elect Republicans. We ought to have a real Democrat on the ballot, and get that from a win. Otherwise, we are just fools trapped by donor elite power to vote against our own interest for lack of any other voting option.

Jay–Ottawa said...


https://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/
has long been my quick bookmark click to here. Via Firefox and DuckDuckGo.

Google algorithmed this blog years ago, pushing it far, far back in the cue. Hit stats were more than halved overnight. Karen mentioned it at the time, along with howls from many other blossoming but heretical sites who also lost their place.

Taibbi or Greenwald recalled that event in one of his recent essays over at Substack, the new hangout for heretics. In the same way grocery stores put certain brands on the bottom shelf. Loyal-to-brand users like us can still reach down for the superior item, but new shoppers will pass it by unawares. Acceptable brands will remain neatly stacked at eye level, as the followers of heretics like us fade away one by one without replacement.

mjb said...

It happened gradually over time. I used to type sardonicky and it would list Karen's blog. Then eventually a Domino's ad or something would show up first above the blog listing. Now (just in the past couple days) there are all kinds of things that appear after typing in sardonicky: e.g., Sardonika, definitions and many other unrelated sites. This is my first encounter with this type of "hiding" on the internet, although I have read about it in the past.

Kelly said...

The delays in getting the stimulus check out to those on social security but are not required to file income taxes is the fault of a crony still in place in the social security administration. He refused to provide the information to the IRS so they could send them out. The IRS requested the information weeks before the bill was signed but it took two letters from congress demanding to know the reason for the delay before the information was provide to the IRS yesterday. The evil deeds of so many from the previous regime will take a long time too correct.

Karen Garcia said...

Democrats urged Biden to fire the Trump appointee from the SSA, but so far anyway, he has preferred not to.

Karen Garcia said...

Re difficulty in accessing the site. I have noted another decrease in traffic in the past few weeks. I know that Google has been messing with lefty YouTubers but seems like the're also clamping down on the blogs as well.



Anonymous said...

If I type in "Sardonicky", this blog is the first thing that comes up. I really doubt this blog would be a target of google "messing" whatever that implies.

Katty Kat Junior said...

Yeah, this blog is so insignificant that Google could never be bothered to censor it.



mjb said...

Well, the blog always came up for me but not anymore. Even if I type in Karen Garcia Sardonicky, it only shows Karen's Truthout articles which were published two years ago. Yeah, Google doesn't care about the blogs. They only care about reading your thoughts, moods, and "guiding" you along (for profit). Thank you Google.

Anonymous said...

The courts have ruled that google search results are protected speech and they can rank anything the way they want to. There's your free speech absolutism for you.

Jay–Ottawa said...


Who cares about Kamala's courting austerians? Didn't Biden himself walk away from his first press conference without an overlong pause? Maybe he's well enough at the moment, and maybe all those degreed right wing handlers in his cabinet know they had better pull off an FDR to save capitalism.

It appears, after my skim of today's headlines, that Biden & Co. intend to go big in repairing the infrastructure. And, if I read it correctly, the government will more directly plan and manage infrastructure repairs and green development, that is, instead of giving money to the banks and superrich for them to pass it on (or not) to private developers who would be more or less on their own.

Obama, the shadow boxer who never threw a punch at his bluedogs and Republican soul brothers, never dared to go as far as Biden in the latter's first 100 days. And of course nothing remotely like Biden's big plans for jobs of domestic improvement would ever have seen the light of day in a second term of Trump.

Bottom line: I'm a tad hopeful and willing to cut Biden & Co a little slack, at least on the domestic front –– provided real work on the infrastructure is well underway before 2022 elections. Otherwise, it's all paper plans for the file cabinets and more Republicans in the legislature in 2022.

OK, OK, anyone better informed, please disabuse me of my hopey dreams and happy talk. Convince me Biden and the Dems are really about to pull off another Lucy Lie for us ever-credulous Charlie Browns.

Jay–Ottawa said...


Aw, gee. Just found out it's $2 trillion over 8 years. And the gauntlet of Republicans and blue dogs may whittle it down further to a few billion here and a few billion there. Sad.