Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Midterms: The Dead Sea of Democracy

 Today's Narrative: like a born-again Moses, Joe Biden has led his people out of the desert, parting the Red Sea just long enough to stave off a full-scale disaster for as long as another month. Much depends (as of this writing) on the outcomes of four close Senate races.

 The ballyhooed Republican "Red Sea" tsunami of doom failed to materialize, and voter turnout was unusually high for a midterm election. So perhaps the Battle for Democracy and the Soul of the Nation melodrama had some life in it after all. Fear of fear itself is a pretty good incentive to vote.  So, apparently, is the danger to women's reproductive rights caused by the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe Vs Wade. Even residents of deep-red Kentucky voted in a special referendum to maintain their abortion rights.

Unfortunately, the fear factor in this campaign did not extend as far as Democrats placing the pandemic and the climate disaster front and center of their agenda. Consultants said it was better for their careers to wrap their fear-fomentation in the gauzy rhetoric of patriotism and the old standby of lesser-evilism.

Meanwhile, over in the real Egypt, the United Nations COP-27 climate conference is being sponsored by among other corporations, big polluter and water-thief Coca-Cola. It's being attended by global dignitaries flown in on their carbon-spewing private jets, who will substitute the trading of carbon offsets and other financialized gimmicks for true ironclad emission restrictions. The world's richest nations, including the United States, are also fighting like hell to avoid the payment of any direct reparations to the poor countries which bare the brunt of capitalistic pollution and global warming.

Hewing true to neoliberal dogma - that the very same capitalistic "market" forces wreaking such epic havoc are the only ones that can fix it -  American climate envoy John Kerry is pushing an alternate way to compensate poor countries - but only if they first slavishly agree to cut their own paltry emissions.

And despite the fact that control of the next Congress is still very much up in the choking air, Kerry blithely assured his fellow attendees that with the Republicans in charge, it is simply not realistic to expect the United States to pay no-strings-attached direct compensation or reparations to the victims of rapacious pollution. There must always be hoops for victims to jump through in order to qualify for even barest recompense from the overlords. It's the neoliberal way.

Kerry in his remarks at the conference promised the initiative would generate finance that would “supplement, not replace, other forms of finance.”

Kerry’s proposal would tap private dollars to help fill the gap in climate finance. Kerry formulated the framework with heavy consultation from U.S. banks, and the State Department and the Rockefeller Foundation have held meetings with experts in New York and Washington over the past several months.

Experts who participated in those meetings said finance could be made available in advance of power sector upgrades, like the early retirement of coal plants, new wind or solar capacity, or upgrades to the power grid.

The key word is, of course, private. "Financing" measures to combat climate change in poor countries sound suspiciously like predatory lending... on top of the already predatory IMF debt imposed on Global South nations by the banking cartel. The too big to fail/jail banks and the military-industrial complex - in other words, the main culprits in climate change - will get to decide how to pretend to reverse climate change while cashing in on an existential threat. Let's face it, their sociopathy makes Trumpism look like a comparative pimple. All pimples eventually go away. It's the systemic disease that's fatal.

Now, about the pandemic, and our government's de facto program of eugenics. Despite Biden's decree a few months back, Covid is very much still not over. His administration did grudgingly extend the federal public health emergency right before the midterms, out of fear that canceling it - the result being millions of people potentially getting kicked off expanded Medicaid and food assistance - would also lead to negative political outcomes for the Democrats.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra promised to give the states 60 days' notice (by this mid-month) before formally ending the official emergency, which is now due to expire on January 11th. With an expected winter surge of variants, and despite the inconvenient truth that between 300 and 400 US citizens are still dying from this virus every single day, the administration has been dropping ominous hints, such as issuing guidelines for states to deal with the "churn" that such a gratuitous stop in aid implies. Pediatricians are especially concerned, given the concurrent outbreaks of severe influenza and RSV that already are filling some hospitals to the breaking point.  

The double whammy of ending both food and medical benefits to the most vulnerable people at this moment in time would be especially cruel, given that food security and health security are inseparable human needs. And it's not even taking into account the increasing cost of groceries, caused in large part by the greed of corporations like the aforementioned Coca-Cola. According to the public health journal STAT:

Households rarely experience food insecurity, poverty, or poor health in isolation. Instead, they are linked in a cycle in which high health care costs strain household budgets and lead to food insecurity while, at the same time, food insecurity leads to stress and poor nutrition, which results in poor health.

Given significant gaps between wages and costs of living for families with low incomes, households generally participate in multiple federal assistance programs to make ends meet. In 2017, 89% of children receiving SNAP support also received support from Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). During Covid-19, both programs experienced dramatic increases in enrollment.

Even though the White House has cast blame on a gridlocked Congress for failing to appropriate more funds to fight the pandemic, Biden himself never made Covid an issue during the campaign. But serendipitously enough, a repeat of a Georgia Senate seat runoff may force the White House to delay its plans again, and extend the federal health emergency at least through March 2023. Just as they did in the 2020 runoff, the Democrats might have to continue their campaign into December. It was during the last time the Senate was up for grabs that Biden held out the carrot of $2,000 checks for every American, only to switch to the grudging stick of $1,400 once Team Blue won their slim majority.

So maybe the poor and the sick, the young and the old, will receive another brief stay of execution for purely political reasons. Maybe the estimated 14 percent of children rescued from poverty by the public health declaration renewals can eat and go to the doctor for another three months.

Regardless of electoral outcome, Congress will remain the same as it ever was: a Dead Sea where democracy drowned decades ago, and where only the politicos and influence peddlers are still visible, bobbing about in the pool like celebrity contestants in the corporate-funded zombie olympics.

8 comments:

  1. John Kerry keeps recurring, like a bad dream. At first I thought he was an alternative to Dubya, but once a Bonesman, always a Bonesman.

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  2. Valerie Long TweedieNovember 10, 2022 at 2:51 PM

    Your title, The Dead Sea of Democracy, nails it.

    I hope the Democrats don't take this less than Red Wave as a sign from America that the citizens are happy with their governance. They are delusional, after all. It is truly a case of the Lesser of Two Evils.

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  3. Okay, we were fortunate that the rightists did not consolidate their power in government this round. But we only bought a short respite.

    We need to use this time not to prepare for the next election, but to educate, organize and get into action with an alternative to the Democrat/Republican approach to class warfare (against us). And we still need a new generation of leaders who can inspire the working masses with a clear explanation of the need for solidarity, resistance and revolution.

    Cancel your Twitter account if you have one. It is just a diversion.

    Educate yourselves, gather with your friends and like-minded neighbors and co-workers. Form study groups and learn how to build a movement.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The rightists consolidated their power like seventy or a hundred years ago. What does Twitter have to do with anything?

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  4. "Anonymous" nails it: we need to get smart (educate!) and organize (take action!).

    “Civilization is a race between disaster and education.”
    ~ H.G. Wells

    “The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”
    ~ Wendell Berry

    “Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.”
    ~ Alice Waters

    "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
    ~ Nelson Mandela

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  5. ER: Unfortunately - and I say this as a primary teacher who has taught in the U.S., Germany, New Zealand and now Australia - the governments are doing their best to sabotage the education system and any real critical thinking. Critical thinking is limited to STEM subjects; basically those concepts that can produce a profit for their overlords. Very little is devoted to the kind of critical thinking that arms citizens with the intelligence and power to question their governments and politicians. Great adolescent literature which teaches even fifth and sixth graders to understand political power and injustice is pushed aside in favour of cartoon books. Our kids are not taught how to think, and it really scares me. I am almost 62. Our kids are going to face nuclear proliferation, forever wars, climate change and all the associated issues like food shortages, national disasters (who is going to pay for the damage), poor financial management by the biggest banks and loss of local community. I fear for my daughter's generation and fear their leadership which has been hollowed out by a poor public education system which is focussed on WOKE values and airy fairy curriculums.

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  6. We need Charles Dickens. Governmental corruption seems now to be around the level of those times. I believe teachers and parents could/should read novels such as as Bleak House, Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities to children in schools and homes, and discuss them with their children in class and at home. I had a teacher in middle school who assigned us reading parts of Great Expectations each day, and I was so excited to discuss the chapters in class the next day.

    I read somewhere that Howard Zinn had a similar Dickens experience, or that he grew up having read Dickens and considered him a model for how to behave.

    That might just solve the critical thinking problem. I have a deep regard and love for this wonderful human being who taught us so much about compassion towards his fellow man, in a most lovely and humerus way.

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  7. Here's a great educational resource that I recommend:

    http://ouleft.org/

    "USING THE OUL: Try it in study groups or school classes, face-to-face via video projector with a net connection, or via Zoom meetings. For research, explore our Archives. For interesting arguments, read our blog page. Use the 'Sort' device to group topics. Or just explore us like a great library..."

    ReplyDelete