Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Biden's Manifesto of Death

Chalking up his reckless call for removing Putin from power to a spontaneous moment of righteous outrage, President Biden has quickly pivoted to calling for more disempowerment and oppression of the serfs back here in The Homeland.

His proposed 2023 federal budget is a deadly and belligerent manifesto for more austerity, more war, and a vast enhancement of the domestic police state.

In true Orwellian doublethink fashion, though, the insider-y Politico news site is calling this gruesome document a "peace offering" to Acting President Joe Manchin, senator of West Virginia. Even the usual progressive congress-critters, according to the article, are willing to give Biden "the space to play." For is not the US political establishment itself the Disneyland centerpiece of the hegemonic World Order, a theme park full of bullies, toadies and untold throngs of silent victims?

Biden was happy to revert for just a moment from his role of global warmongering bully as he addressed the media on Monday:

“The first value is fiscal responsibility. The previous administration as you all know, ran record budget deficits. In fact, it went up every year under my predecessor. My administration is turning that around. Last year, we cut the deficit by more than $350 billion. This year, we’re on track to cut the deficit by more than $1,300,000,000,000. That would be the largest one-year reduction in the deficit in US history.”

And as the document itself more belligerently puts it, 

 “We are at the beginning of a decisive decade that will determine the future of strategic competition with China, the trajectory of the climate crisis and whether the rules governing technology, trade and international economics enshrine or violate our democratic values.”

Meanwhile, following the cynical tradition of all his Democratic predecessors, Biden also made sure to tack on the usual "balancing" suggestions of modestly taxing billionaires and corporations in order to vaguely protect the environment and fund a very few new, barely adequate programs to address a panoply of domestic social and health catastrophes - funding which is guaranteed to fail in Congress. He is giving the oligarchs who own and run the country everything that they want in the way of amusement. He even took special care to emphasize that "I am a capitalist."

Or, as the New York Times spins it, the poor old reactionary is being forced to bow to"political reality" which, apparently, is the Gray Lady's euphemism for giving oligarchs and corporations everything they want.

To add further insult to the injury of this elitist "reality", Uncle Joe also finds his aged spine so buffeted by those pesky "gale-force headwinds" from the narrow-minority Republican wing of the Uniparty that he and his fellow Democrats sadly will be forced to huddle in their storm cellars without actually doing much about the worsening climate catastrophe that is killing, dispossessing and dispersing poor people from all over the globe. Unfortunately, Biden's "bipartisan unity agenda" will have to take precedence for now. The priority must not be the lives of everyday people, but the political fortunes of a few centrist Democrats in danger of losing their seats next fall.

As veteran Washington reporter Jonathan Weisman writes in his own Times-splainer about the Biden White House's proposed 2023 federal budget,

Its framing was a marked shift from the 2021 pitch for a fundamental transformation of an ailing American society. Instead, Mr. Biden’s plan was an appeal based on the reality of the moment, to both new dangers around the globe and at home, where inflation and crime are crushing the president’s political standing.

Endangered Democrats in swing districts have been urging Mr. Biden to counter the messages from the far left and address the kitchen-table issues facing voters with incremental steps, not transformative legislation. For them, the budget promises deficit reduction to cool the economy and tangible steps to unclog supply-chain bottlenecks that contribute to rising prices.

Of course, Biden's call for deficit reduction is not reflected in his military budget, which includes the largest ever increase in spending, at almost $800 billion - or about $2 billion a day for the relentless waging of global war. Given his recent, reckless provocations of a fellow nuclear power, his demand for a radically increased production of nuclear weapons also comes as no great surprise.

The Times article continues,

Far from defunding the police and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two popular slogans on the left, the budget robustly funds both. Customs and Border Protection would receive $15.3 billion and ICE $8.1 billion, including $309 million for border security technology — a well-funded effort to stop illegal migration. The nation’s two primary immigration law enforcement agencies would see increases of around 13 percent.

The budget even includes $19 million for border fencing and other infrastructure.

Federal law enforcement would receive $17.4 billion, a jump of nearly 11 percent, or $1.7 billion, over 2021 levels. And the president, acknowledging widespread concerns that are driving Republican attacks against Democrats, vowed to tackle the rise in violent crime.

As Biden himself proclaimedat his budget-unveiling press conference, “The answer is not to defund our police departments. It’s to fund our police and give them all the tools they need… The budget puts more police on the streets for community policing so they get to know the community they are policing.” 

When the Times opened up its article about the proposed budget to reader comments, reaction was sparse (about 50), compared to the 6.3 thousand outraged reactions to the Number One Trending story in America, concerning the Academy Awards "slapgate" controversy.

But, unlike the accolades about the Biden Wish List so dutifully being gushed out by the "progressive" congressional caucus, these 50 reader comments were almost uniformly critical of the Democrats' unabashed right-wing priorities. And not only were further comments soon cut off, within only a few hours, all the published ones were also mysteriously removed from the article. They simply were not in keeping with the usual positive responses from the paper's liberal readership to Joe Biden and his party.

Here is (was) my own published comment:

As outlined in this article, this budget is nothing less than a manifesto of death.
Increased production of nuclear weapons, and what amounts to military funding with no limits actually cancels out the window dressing of climate change amelioration. The US military already is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet and therefore the globe's biggest polluter. If the extra funding for police were earmarked for stringent programs that psychologically evaluate aspiring cops, weeding out the sociopaths with a penchant for power and cruelty, then great. But if the money will be going to more military weaponization of local police forces, and giving precedence to returning vets, a good percentage of whom suffer from PTSD as a result of long deployments in our endless wars, then we can probably look forward to a lot more George Floyds and Breonna Taylors and Eric Garners The increased funding not only should be used for psychological profiling of candidates, but to pay for the higher education of police officers, particularly in the field of social work.
The alleged motivation behind the "centrist" Biden budget, as explained in this article, is to fend off Republican criticism of the Dems allegedly being "soft on crime," increasing the re-election chances of vulnerable incumbents. In other words, the Ds are trying to beat the GOP at their own depraved game. The sound you hear in this proposed budget is not one hand clapping. It's an empire crumbling.

10 comments:


  1. ‘We do not need a massive increase’: Sanders criticizes Biden’s $813 billion military budget —
    The chair of the Senate Budget Committee noted that the US already spends more on its military than “the next 11 countries combined.”
    https://therealnews.com/we-do-not-need-a-massive-increase-sanders-criticizes-bidens-813-billion-military-budget
    March 29, 2022 ~ by Jake Johnson
    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on March 28, 2022

    ‘No progress’ since George Floyd: US police killing three people a day —
    As Joe Biden pushes to ‘fund the police’, data from Mapping Police Violence shows high rates of deaths at the hands of law enforcement persist.
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/30/us-police-killing-people-high-rates
    30 March 2022 ~ by Sam Levin in Los Angeles

    “There is no way in which a country can satisfy the craving for absolute security but it can bankrupt itself morally and economically in attempting to reach that illusory goal through arms alone.”
    ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

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  2. "For is not the US political establishment itself the Disneyland centerpiece of the hegemonic World Order, a theme park full of bullies, toadies and untold throngs of silent victims" ... waiting in line for ten minutes of fun :-/ .

    I despair for my siblings who feel so sophisticated because they read the NYT.

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  3. Re: Thorstein -- I feel the same, and note how deftly John Lennon skewered those pompous folks, who think they're "so clever and classless and free" and get their "news" and form their views predominately on what is promulgated by that so-called "newspaper of record" plus the WaPo, PBS & NPR, and by that believe they're well-informed.

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  4. “Disappeared”: Chris Hedges Responds to YouTube Deleting His 6-Year Archive of RT America Shows —
    https://www.democracynow.org/2022/4/1/on_contact_chris_hedges_youtube_russia
    April 1, 2022
    YouTube has deleted the entire archive of “On Contact,” an Emmy-nominated television show by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges which was hosted on the Russian government-funded news channel RT America. We speak with Hedges, who connects the YouTube censorship of his show to a growing crackdown on dissenting voices in American media. “There’s less and less space for those who are willing to seriously challenge and question entrenched power,” says Hedges, who says “opaque entities” like YouTube shouldn’t have the power to take down outlets like RT America, despite the channel’s source of funding. “Are we better off not hearing what Russia has to say?” asks Hedges.

    Chris Hedges on Jailed WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange’s Wedding: He’s “Crumbling” in London Prison —
    https://www.democracynow.org/2022/4/1/julian_assange_us_censorship_wedding_chris
    April 1, 2022
    Imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is “crumbling” physically and psychologically, says journalist Chris Hedges, who last week attended Assange’s wedding to his longtime partner Stella Moris at London’s Belmarsh prison. Assange has been behind bars for nearly three years awaiting a possible extradition to the United States on espionage charges for publishing documents revealing war crimes committed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hedges says Assange exposed the “most important information” of this generation, along with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.


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  5. Note to Karen: I tried clicking on "donate" and the response was "Something's not right, this page does not exist". Is there a problem with PayPal?

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  6. Hi Anon,

    Thanks for letting me know. I reinstalled the Donate button gadget, and it seems to be working OK now.

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  7. The 'centrist' Dems have always tried to woo the rightists, assuming the leftists will vote for them regardless because leftists will never bring themselves to vote for Republicans. But, of course, it goes deeper. Their ideological perspective is also more aligned with the right.

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  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  9. Your comment was brilliant, Karen.

    I despair - watching the empire circle the drain. I also have friends who think they are well-informed because they read the NYT. They parrot it back to me, never actually understanding they are simply promoting their "team"'s propaganda. In substance and in every issue that matters to me, the two parties aren't really that different.

    I broke down and voted for Biden because Trump was/is such a lunatic and the fascist forces that support him seemed to be running rampant. But never again. I am so sick of this farce - TLOTE (as JayOttawa called it - The Lesser of Two Evils). The TLOTE isn't all that lesser. They are simply better at putting the frosting on the poisonous cupcake.

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