Stop Attacking Our Woke Masters of War!

It's time once again to rev up the official outrage machine. Libertarian Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has gone on the air and called America's top general Mark Milley "a stupid pig". This insult was not, unfortunately, because of Milley's leadership roles in the stupid, swinish perma-wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was for taking the liberal side in the stupid, swinish culture wars. Milley had the absolute effrontery to appear before Congress and defend the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as part of an elective philosophy course offered at the US Military Academy.

So, from the Washington Post's resident neocon Max Boot to the New York Times' liberal Paul Krugman, the pundits of the Duopoly are not only castigating Carlson, they are in lockstep sanctifying Milley and the entire bloated military establishment in the process.

It was only a year ago that the media were piling on in the opposite direction, rightly castigating Milley for his stupid role marching right beside Donald Trump to that infamous church photo-op as federal troops fired teargas canisters at peaceful protesters demonstrating against the George Floyd murder at a park across the street from the White House.

 Since Milley did later apologize for taking part in that swinish bit of political theater, all was forgiven. His career and his reputation were saved and he became openly Woke, embracing diversity training and other putative anti-racism reforms within the ranks, while still maintaining that he finds it very offensive to be called Woke.

Ostentatiously capitalizing the word "white" to, perhaps, virtue-signal its own devotion to racial fairness in its ratings-intensive lucrative culture wars coverage. CNN reported on Milley's retort to GOP provocateur Rep. Mike Walz:

"I want to understand White rage.(said Milley.) And I'm White. And I want to understand it."

Tying the question to the January insurrection, Milley asked: "What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind here."

Milley then humble-bragged that reading Marx and Lenin and Chairman Mao did not lead him to Communism. He studied leftist theory merely to obtain "situational understanding" of the Enemy.... apparently in much the same way that the military has co-opted anthropology to glean "total situational awareness" of countries and populations which they invade and occupy.

Over at the New York Times, Krugman, who once upon a time was one of the few pundits critical of the invasion of Iraq, nodded approvingly, unfavorably comparing the swinish cult of Republican ignorance to the enlightened trillion-dollar war machine, now so cozily aligned with the war-happy Democrats, who are once again pretending to feebly challenge Joe Biden's decision to drop more of those high-IQ megaton bombs on Syria and Iraq in supposed defense of the occupying American forces.

All you need to be a good upstanding liberal is to recognize scientific facts. "To be a Republican in good standing," Krugman writes, "one must deny the reality of man-made climate change, or at least oppose any meaningful action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. One must reject or at least express skepticism about the theory of evolution. " 

So it's not enough to criticize Tucker Carlson for criticizing Milley's loyal allegiance to Biden's new anti-terrorism manifesto, which stupidly and swinishly lumps white supremacists in with what it calls "extremist"  critics of capitalism and globalization. You also have to diss leftists and glorify endless war if you want to remain members in good standing of the Club. You must remember that the only racism that counts in this particular narrative is the racism within the military. It does not apply to the racism inherent in the endless wars of aggression against non-Americans in foreign lands.

As Jodi Melamed of Marquette University explains in Represent and Destroy, it is precisely the official civil rights statutes on the American books as well as the mass media's shallow embrace of "diversity" and multiculturalism -- along with corporate-funded academia's complicit production of an elite black managerial-political class -- that paradoxically gives cover to the global racist predations of the American Imperium. The US political system has been able to "capture" the energy of 60s and 70s social movements and then cynically put it to work for capitalism and international conquest. This policy is most recently manifest in an infamous CIA recruitment video, which celebrates feminism and diversity within the unaccountable surveillance/regime change state.

As long as the military starts leaning Democrat and diversified, no war can be unjustified. Writes Krugman: 

"The U.S. military has traditionally leaned Republican, but the modern officer corps is highly educated, open-minded and, dare I say it, even a bit intellectual — because those are attributes that help win wars."

My published response to his column:

Since the leadership of the modern armed forces is now so full of open-minded intellectuals, I'm waiting for them to also testify publicly that since the US military is the biggest single polluter in the history of the world, we should begin shutting down the 800-plus bases around the globe.

Climate change reversal should include divesting ourselves of the tanks, aircraft, nukes, incendiary bombs and ships of our "defense" industry and our forever-wars - which, by the way, we are still not "winning." Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the modern, open-minded masters of war are embracing critical race theory. Now let's hear the Best & the Brightest also acknowledge that throughout American history, our wars have had a distinctly racist component going all the way back to the Puritans. Before George Washington was a general and a president, he was a real estate speculator who thought that Britain's treaties with Indian populations were a pretty dumb idea, and best ignored. Tucker Carlson and his ilk certainly do come from a long line of landed aristocrats. US regime change wars also have been disproportionately targeted at countries with majority black and brown and Asian populations. You simply can't claim to be woke and still continue bombing innocent people ("collateral damage"). The generals should also read Judith Butler's great essays on violence, and wake up to the fact that our leaders consider that some lives simply aren't worth enough to be grievable.

Support Your Corporate Global Sheriff

That the Republican Party has morphed into a fascist cabal is undeniably true, especially given their successful Senate "killibuster" of the Democrats' pathetically watered-down voting rights bill this week. 

But look no further than the Biden White House's own "National Strategy For Countering Domestic Terrorism" for disturbing evidence that not only is the current Democratic leadership of the enabling Vichy variety, but that they themselves have become at heart true believers in the anti-democratic authoritarian cause. 

The Biden manifesto publicly announces that the government's spy and police agencies and the unaccountable tech billionaires of Silicon Valley will formalize their co-equal partnership to create "innovative ways to foster digital literacy and build resilience to recruitment and mobilization. The United States also recently joined the Christchurch Call to Action to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online, an international partnership between governments and technology companies that works to develop new multilateral solutions to eliminating terrorist content online while safeguarding the freedom of online expression."

This melding of corporations and oligarchs into government is just one of the definitions of a fascist state. The fact that the Biden strategy paper is careful to append promises to uphold the right to freedom of expression to its Orwellian directives is the same window dressing contained in the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 reactionary laws.  In fact, there are so many cut-and-pasted First Amendment fig leaves contained throughout the White House document that methinks they might be protesting just a tad too much.

No specifics are offered on just what these "multilateral solutions" or "the innovative ways to foster literacy and build resilience" might be. There is certainly no mention of our public education system becoming involved. There is no mention of building new schools, or hiring more qualified teachers and professors, the better to enhance the literacy of the masses. There is no mention of continuing to send stimulus checks, expand and extend food aid, forgive student loans and crushing medical debt, build guaranteed housing, implement a government jobs program, legislate single payer health coverage, or any new social programs at all to help struggling Americans to foster the "resiliency" the government says they need to resist recruitment by violent actors.

To the contrary: the White House wants to repurpose the Department of Homeland Security and the secretive network of police and spy agencies into a new Department of Education. It even envisages this top-secret behemoth birthed from 9/11 paranoia to become the very latest cool thing in psychotherapy:

Our law enforcement agencies also play a critical role in responding to reports of criminal and otherwise concerning activity. That is why the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security are working to enhance public understanding of the full range of assistance that can be provided to those in need, including how mental health experts are complementing traditional law enforcement response. Additionally, the National Counterterrorism Center, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Homeland Security will release publicly a new edition of the Federal Government’s Mobilization Indicators booklet that will include for the first time potential indicators of domestic terrorism–related mobilization. These agencies are also working toward including a range of resources that the public may consult in the event of possible domestic terrorist recruitment or mobilization."

Previous editions of the Mobilization Indicator have heavily concentrated on identifying Muslim terrorists. The 2019 edition also lumped white nationalists in with climate and animal rights activists as "violent extremists."

The 2017 edition's scoring system to help FBI agents identify potential terrorists has more than 40 questions on a checklist as warning signs for incipient terrorists. Among them are engagement in paintball or laser tag events, the use of encryption programs on the Internet to mask identities, and people who have recently suffered a severe loss. Given that 600,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began, there might be contained in the newest FBI checklist untold millions of people whose grief and anger potentially make them prime suspects or recruits.

Our "resilience training" will be under the sole purview of the Silicon Valley-Washington Partnership. The first step, though, is to root out the racism and bigotry festering within the population - but not, of course,  festering within the "woke" official government establishment.

To that end, the White House anti-terrorism report ridiculously casts the powerful, violent, official public-private government establishment as an innocent victim in its own right, as oppressed a victim as any minority or out-group, be it black, brown, Asian, LGBT. In order for the Biden administration to address the "systemic racism" that the president himself had a hand in creating and perpetuating with his Crime Bill, it insists that it must first root out the allegedly rampant racist extremism within the relatively powerless population.

The anti-terrorism report effectively ignores police violence, probably because it is the police agencies which form the buffer zones protecting  the Silicon Valley-Washington government and its wealthy donors from the woefully unresilient rabble. 

And make no mistake. The unresilient rabble as defined by the Corporate Partnership running the country potentially includes all of us. The Biden Strategy report comes right out and says so:

"Another key component of the threat comes from anti–government or anti–authority violent extremists. This significant component of today’s threat includes self–proclaimed “militias” and militia violent extremists who take steps to violently resist government authority or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. Government based on perceived overreach; anarchist violent extremists, who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions, which they perceive as harmful to society; sovereign citizen violent extremists, who believe they are immune from government authority and laws; or any other."

In other words, if you are a socialist or an anti-capitalist or are opposed to the undemocratic dispute settlement courts which are part of most "free trade" treaties - if you are "any other" whatsoever - then the Corporate Partnership of America views you as a potential extremist. The problem is not that our de facto oligarchy is harmful to society. The problem is that you mistakenly perceive them as being harmful to society.  

In order for the Corporate Partnership to combat far-right racist extremism, therefore, any critic of capitalism must be considered a potential threat to their national security, which is code for "bottom line." And it is the police state which will enforce the required resiliency. The report ominously continues:

"It (the Biden policy) thus sets a pathway for a unity of effort at the policy level, while protecting the specific work of law enforcement that must be left wholly to appropriate law enforcement entities, whether Federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial..."

"The overarching goal of this Strategy is preventing, disrupting, and deterring that violence. Pursuing that goal it is critical that we condemn and confront domestic terrorism regardless of the particular ideology that motivates individuals to violence....

 “ (It)includes reducing the factors contributing to domestic terrorism. Those factors have multiple dimensions, including incitement to imminent violence online, some transnational linkages, and certain self–proclaimed private “militia” activity that, to varying degrees, is prohibited by the laws of all 50 states. Addressing these factors contributing to domestic terrorism is, in part, a means to achieving the first objective of preventing the violence itself and handling the threats we face today; but it must also be its own objective, as reducing the contributing factors can make a difference in diminishing the threat we might otherwise face tomorrow."

This paranoid document disingenuously and simplistically foists the blame for extremism and all kinds of protest and unrest on our unfettered access to technology. It touts the fostering of the same kind of stoic "resilience" as the "Eat Your Peas" scoldings that the Obama administration preached to justify the imposition of austerity on the masses, even as the rich only got richer.

The current White House continues to gaslight the public. The deflection of blame onto the public continues apace:

Resilience can take many forms. It can mean raising public awareness of how terrorists deliberately seek overreaction, which can help to avoid precisely that overreaction and instead thwart terrorists’ own strategies. And it can mean, broader still, cultivating the type of digital literacy that can empower the American public to resist those who would use online communications platforms and other venues to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize to violence. Fostering and ultimately attaining these and other forms of resilience is a third goal, and one whose achievement would strengthen the United States against domestic terrorism as well as other threats to U.S. national security."

Tamp down your emotions while you are being evicted and starved, proles! As long as you're in touch with your feelings as you needlessly suffer, it will raise your awareness. It is the corporatist state that must be strengthened, not the masses of people. Freelance "extremism" must not be allowed to compete against the real thing, which is our currently existing corporate system.

To that end, the report also recommends the deprogramming of returning troops of the profitable Forever Wars, state-trained killers who are especially vulnerable to PTSD and depression and self-harm and the committing of domestic violence, and a handful of whom become mass shooters. The Biden government pays lip service to combating white supremacy and violence while implicitly upholding white supremacy and violence within its own ranks, most notably within the military and the outsourced mercenaries financed by private equity.

As stated before, the corporate cult of "wokeness" is just another form of capitalistic exploitation of historically marginalized people. In pitting the jobless white working class  against black and brown people, while simultaneously also foisting blame on black and brown people and various out-groups, the corporate state maintains its own supremacy at everybody else's expense.

The White House also continues the grand American Exceptionalist tradition of foisting blame on foreign countries for fomenting racial animosity here in the US, which is the exact same tactic that the FBI employed against unions and socialists during the Depression and against the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, and most recently, in its Russiagate propaganda crusade, non-fealty to which is almost considered a heresy if you're a Democrat.

Now that the official narrative states that the US has instantaneously regained its alleged "standing" in the world with the departure of Donald Trump, the Biden administration is putting pressure on its junior global partners of the unified Corporate State to crack down on their own dissidents and other threats to its manufactured polarization for the prevention of transnational populist solidarity. The administration has also issued a thinly-veiled directive to its junior partners and client states to censor news about racial unrest and police violence in the United States, lest the One Exceptional Nation be accused of hypocrisy when it bombs democracy on regimes it doesn't like.

" The U.S. Government has thus prioritized obtaining from foreign partners credible intelligence and law enforcement information regarding international support for domestic terrorism in the United States, capturing it in written reporting, and sharing that intelligence and information appropriately across the Federal Government. That effort complements an increased emphasis on the sharing of relevant information with foreign partners, where appropriate, on aspects of the domestic terrorism threat of international relevance. We can also learn from our international partners’ challenges and successes in disrupting plots and responding to attacks, integrating that expertise into our own planning and operations."

"Additionally, the intelligence and law enforcement communities will enhance the government’s understanding of how foreign malign influence operations and the dissemination of disinformation, including by foreign governments, relate to the domestic terrorism threat we face. These efforts complement the U.S. Government’s coordinated activities to recognize, understand, and counter terrorist propaganda and disinformation. In addition, the Department of State will leverage public diplomacy programs and messaging to serve as a preventative measure to raise awareness in the short–term and shift sentiments over the long– term. Such efforts can also be used to counter messages from adversaries who use racially motivated violent incidents in America to attempt to erode U.S. credibility."

Credibility is code for supremacy.

But almost as an afterthought, the White House's anti-domestic terrorism report also touts the Democrats' recent efforts to deliver a modicum of financial relief to serve as a counterweight to "the economic dislocation and even despair felt by many Americans. Our continued efforts will augment and accelerate the essential work of economic recovery and sustainable development, alleviating over time (my bold) the sentiments that some domestic terrorists deliberately use to recruit and mobilize. Demonstrating that our government can deliver for all Americans is crucial to restoring confidence in our democracy."

The Biden administration does acknowledge, albeit fleetingly and glibly, that its own Corporate Partnership had a hand in creating the misery and despair leading to violent acts by the populace. But it only acknowledged this truth in one measly paragraph out of the 30 pages that do nothing but issue yet another clarion call for more surveillance, more police, more censorship.

Of course, Biden has already said there will be no student debt relief or continuation of federal unemployment benefits past September, when the national eviction moratorium also will have expired. Immediate relief takes time. First they have to stop the folks from acting out all their anger with the help of some digital literacy classes and websites operated by federal law enforcement with a little assist from Health and Human Services.

Biden's ultimate goal is to restore folks' faith in government, once the government roots out all the troublemaking folks and makes them resilient. The "crisis of misinformation and disinformation" is simply tearing hungry jobless desperate folks apart at the seams.

So What Else Is New In the Pathocracy?

Are we at the tipping point when outrage fatigue no longer feeds upon itself and we are forced to rise up en masse against the overlords who seemingly want to kill us?

The UFO invasion and the Wuhan lab leak stories, obviously designed to soften us up for some sort of war (economic, military, cyber, whatever)  against China and also Russia, are taking a back seat to the undeniable reality of the class war at home.

First comes the totally unshocking blockbuster news that billionaires pay virtually no income tax. Then, closely on the heels of these well-heeled heels, the mainstream media is finally noticing that private equity is gobbling up whole neighborhoods and forcing an ever-increasing majority of people not only to give up all hope of home ownership, but to pay artificially bloated rents to an anonymous group of private investors. 

It's getting so egregious that even the lesser elites of the multimillionaire class are taking vast umbrage. Of course, it's only pretend umbrage; but we should probably appreciate even fleeting lip service reactions from the so-called experts whenever we can get them. The emergence of the tax cheat and land-grabbing stories are, incidentally, conveniently coincident to President Biden being out of the country to pressure European leaders to take part in some sort of war against China while he manfully refuses to hold a joint press conference with Vlad Putin. America is back, baby! is the overarching corporate media theme of the G-7 revelries, with the sycophantic French leader Emmanuel Macron gushing he is so happy that Uncle Joe has rejoined "The Club."

If a select few oligarchs back home have to pretend to take the heat for a few days or weeks in lieu of paying their fair share, while Biden and their other enablers go about the wealth-serving work of helping US citizens to overcome their "sickly inhibitions" against the Forever Wars which promise to add many more billions to the Wall Street portfolios of these same tax-evading oligarchs, then so be it. Crocodiles are, after all, known for their tough hides.

Cue Maureen Dowd of the New York Times to write a feisty op-ed on the "fat cats on a hot tin roof."  What upstanding member of #Resistance Inc could ever have possibly guessed that there are more Donald Trumps than Donald Trump?

It turns out Donald Trump was the canary in the gold mine.

While everyone was outraged about the first modern president who refused to show his tax returns, real billionaires were skating.

 This tax return dump news should help Trump immensely when and if he is ever criminally indicted. As he said so many times, his tax returns and real estate empire might be crooked, but they are also perfectly legal thanks to the codes enacted by crooked congress critters in on the perfectly legalized grift.

 The real canary in the gold mine is that before Congress will even pretend to act and maybe tweak the tax codes just a tad, the government will move quickly to hunt down and catch and jail whoever within the IRS leaked the tyrants' tax documents to ProPublica. Whistleblowers are still the ultimate enemy of the ruling class.

My comment on the Dowd column: 

Meanwhile, the DOJ has made catching the whistleblower(s) who leaked the billionaires' tax records to journalists a top priority. Despite the Attorney General's recent vow to protect journalists, his office is doing its utmost to dry up journalistic sources through intimidation and prosecution.

The DOJ is not, for example, dropping the Trump era's extradition case against Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks organization exposed US war crimes. Chelsea Manning was jailed a second time for refusing to help the government prosecute Assange. Even a sitting member of Congress, Ilhan Omar, is being lambasted from all sides for referring, even obliquely, to America's sordid history of war crimes and human rights abuses. Shooting the messenger has always been exactly how our ruling elites roll. It's a vicious class war of the rich (through their political lackeys, propagandists and lobbyists) against the rest of us. It has many fronts, and new revelations of oligarchic perfidy come almost every single day. Private equity. for example, is depriving people even of the basic right to shelter by buying up huge swathes of real estate and then renting homes back out to the foreclosed, indebted and desperate multitudes at obscenely inflated prices. When I saw a picture the other day of Jeff Bezos gleefully feasting on a roast iguana, I thought what a perfect symbol of the neo-feudalism that's taken over this country. 

How much longer can it take before the long-overdue peasants' revolt?

Roadkill-R-Us

 You may have noticed that Joe Biden, after signaling left (or at least perceived by his tailgating fans to be signaling left) has suddenly swerved sharply to the right.

And what do you know - he's ended up precisely where's he's been stolidly parked for the entire half-century journey of his long political career: deep in the heart of Neoliberalville. His oft-quoted campaign promise last year to a group of wealthy donors ("Nothing will fundamentally change") has been proven more correct with every passing day. Still, his string of recent concessions to his donors and congressional Republicans stings all the more in the wake of his vague overtures to progressives and the passage this spring of his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

His pulsating left-turn blinker light had way too many of these same progressives pretty much blinkered for the first hundred or so days of his administration. The narrative that Biden is the best thing to come along since FDR is getting increasingly frayed, if not yet completely tattered. He rips the rosy media narrative a new one practically every single day, his most recent pronouncement being that he will not fight the expiration of federal unemployment benefits come September, when most kids head back to their physical schools and their parents must therefore head back to their physical jobs, whether or not those physical jobs still exist. (I hear McDonald's franchises are offering signing bonuses, so what could possibly be your excuse for not being an economy-boosting team player?)

Biden's left turn signal was either draining all the energy and confidence from the oligarchic battery of overlords, or he himself was just getting tired of the relentlessly tinny refrain of Happy Days Are Here Again. It was finally time to disabuse his newfound acolytes of the notion and the narrative  that he was a blind St. Paul who'd seen the social democratic light and finally come to progressive Jesus in his enlightened dotage. 

 Biden's "sudden" right turn to Republican appeasement cut his followers right off. They're still so stunned by the ensuing pileup of about-faces and disappointments that they can't even believe that they're trapped in the wreckage. The adrenaline rush of the new UFO craze and the frenzied finger-pointing debates over that alleged Wuhan lab leak are, as the manufacturers of consent seem to hope, at least temporarily masking the pain of no minimum wage increase, no single payer health coverage, no new or recurring stimulus checks, no federal guaranteed jobs program, no student debt forgiveness. And the icing on the cake is Senate Parliamentarian (a/k/a America's unelected and unaccountable Pope-Queen) Elizabeth MacDonough's edict that the Dems will only be allowed one more reconciliation bill this year, dashing their ever so sincere hopes to usher in a new New Deal. And then there are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to complete the bad cop triad.

Funnily enough, neither Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris - really no establishment Democrat that I know of - is directly challenging this latest directive. Harris, who as president of the Senate, does have the power to overrule or even fire MacDonough, is apparently otherwise occupied in Central America, trying to convince subsistence coffee growers that a new Internet app showing them worldwide market prices for their product will make them forget all about migrating to the U.S. An internet app is actually supposed to help them more than, say, being allowed to sell their coffee directly to consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere. Don't they know that the freedom of the Free Market doesn't apply to them?

Meanwhile, according to yet another "soul-searching" effort by Democratic party operatives to discover why they barely hung on by a thread in the 2020 elections, the problem was that they recklessly assumed that black and brown voters are both progressive and anti-police. The study's authors, while decrying the notion of categorizing people into voting blocs, nonetheless assert that since there are more conservative black and brown people than there are progressive black and brown people, they must attempt more outreach to this supposed bloc of law-and-order black and brown people. The Dems have to do much, much more to fight against the GOP misinformation that slanderously insists that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a radical left-winger. Democratic candidates have to do more to convince the electorate of their own conservative and pro-war bona fides if they have a prayer of clinging to their razor-thin majorities in the 2022 congressional elections. They have to double or even triple the dosage of their fact-checking designer drugs to combat the epic epidemic of "disinformation." 

There is nothing in the report about making people's lives better. It's all about what sort of propaganda will work best to convince people that the Democrats are better than those nasty, lying Republicans.

"Our hopes for 2020 were just too high," the report summary concludes, after also blaming the pandemic, bad polling, and too much talk of wearing masks and not enough talk of "reopening the economy" for their party's bare squeaker of a victory over Trumpism. 

It's the whimper being heard round the world of Martha's Vineyard, or wherever the neoliberal elites are out to brunch these days. 

Do I even need to mention that the report was funded by, among other oligarchic influence-peddlers, the late billionaire Pete Peterson's Third Way think tank? At least the Times, in its synopsis of the "most thorough soul-searching by either party so far this year" is finally referring to this outfit as solidly "centrist" as opposed to its previous disinformative placement as "center-left."  I'll be even happier when they start properly referring to Third Way as fascist or reactionary. But with their star reporters balking at paying higher News Guild dues, rather than show solidarity with low-wage journalists at other outlets, I'm not holding my breath.

I don't know about other readers, but every time I hear the term "centrist," this grisly image immediately comes to mind:

Photo credit: Tom Garcia

Roadkill is tossed to the side, the double yellow line of centrism extending beyond the infinite horizon of What Is Pragmatically Possible and Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good.

 The  Republicans, of course, would simply have tossed the corpse into the ditch after running over it a few more times just for sport. The Democrats at least recognize the Roadkill by cynically adorning it with the cheery bright balloon of hope.

A popular modern interpretation of folksinger Loudon Wainwright III's own song about roadkill is that centrists themselves stink like skunks for all their wishy-washiness and devotion to a bipartisan duopoly which enriches the wealthy and powerful via their governing style of gridlock and manufactured paralysis.  Wainwright wrote the ditty in 1972, at the barely noticeable beginnings of the  Neoliberal Era, and also at about the same time that Joe Biden was winning his first election.

Wainwright said he was inspired by merely encountering a literal stinky dead skunk in the middle of the road. Those must have been different times for sure, not least because six major corporations did not yet own and control practically everything we see and hear.

Fifty years later, the ruling elites blame us for lacking enough personal responsibility for our own lives when we fall under the wheels of all their speeding luxury cars. You "shoulda looked left and you shoulda looked right" before ever presuming to cross the road outside of the narrowly defined pedestrian lines. That's because your safety as a cooperative wage slave is their biggest concern.

Can't get a job or earn a living wage or been bankrupted by medical bills even though you're insured? Then you should have been an entrepreneur or at least increased your skills at your own debt-heavy expense while saving enough money for retirement.

The only traffic signal the movers and shakers seem to know is a giant middle finger aimed at their rear view mirrors, against all the unpragmatic people who simply refuse to stay in their own lanes any longer.