Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Reasons For Rich People To Feel Smug in 2023

 I haven't posted in the last couple of weeks for the simple reason that I'd deliberately ignored what passes for news. This was for both mental and physical health reasons. But as neoliberal doctrine dictates to the Lessers, there shall be no more excuses.  Western culture hasn't celebrated the whole, original 12 Days of Christmas for centuries. Everybody has to get back to the New Normal before New Year's Day. And for me, that means keeping up with the New York Times so that the more squeamish among you don't have to.

It didn't take me long to find a piece guaranteed to annoy and nauseate. Titled "Reasons for Optimism in 2023," it quickly becomes obvious that this iteration of the year-end "listicle" is exclusively addressed to the people who sincerely believe that the only reason they got so much filthily richer in 2022 is because they are so "blessed." 

But on the off-chance that a twinge of guilt might threaten to afflict the sensitive rich, DealBook's Andrew Ross Sorkin and about half a dozen of his closest assistant scribes are here to assure them that even the Lessers never had it so good. 

The main things that rich people can safely ignore in 2023 are the "tripledemic," the "brutal war with no end in sight," and the climate crisis.

Even though more than 400 people a day are still dying of Covid, they are mainly old or they have pre-existing conditions. The good news is that vaccines became available for "children as young as six months old, a relief for parents as much of the world returned to a new normal." 

The article does not inform its well-heeled readers  that Covid has exploded in China, and that a bipartisan Congress just voted to kick millions of poor people off the Medicaid rolls come spring. That is because Congress had no interest in funding any kind of pandemic relief in the next fiscal year. 

The New York Times listicle does not report these little factoids, possibly because they might make the Smugnorati feel uncomfortable in this season of comfort and joy.

Meanwhile, as if they needed another reason to feel self-satisfied about 2022, they're reminded that rich countries finally abandoned their selfishness and agreed at the COP 27 confab to study pledging financial aid to poor countries suffering from the capitalistic pollution of rich countries.  However, since the Times doesn't want its readers to feel bad, it side-steps the inconvenient truth that it's only a pledge, not an ironclad commitment. And besides, what difference does irreversible global warming make when Science™  just made a nuclear fusion clean energy breakthrough, and Joe Biden promised to cure cancer in 20 years?

And if the rich are altruistically worried that bots and artificial intelligence will replace human sweat, the article continues, they shouldn't be. Bosses and owners should reject the notion that wage labor can ever be fully replaced by technology.

"What the bots can do well is make grunt work easier. One example that went viral shortly after ChatGPT’s release: A Palm Beach doctor posted a video of himself dictating a letter to an insurance company."

The article doesn't mention that such writing programs replace the office insurance grunts who normally would not only take dictation from the boss but would have the skills necessary to write a business letter. This must be especially true in the billionaire paradise of Palm Beach, where denizens have private insurance and concierge medical care, and where nobody will ever notice the millions of people getting kicked off Medicaid because "we" cannot afford it, and because poor people must always jump through hoops in order to prove their deserving need.

And speaking of poor-shaming,  that brings us to perhaps the most shameless whopper in the whole mendacious Times article:

Real progress is being made in tackling child poverty. The number of children in America living below the poverty line has plummeted by 59 percent since 1993. As The Times’s Jason DeParle reported in September, “child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households.”

Conveniently left unmentioned, lest rich readers lose the soft rosy glow of their own smugnorance, is that since Congress failed to renew the temporary Child Tax Credit before they left town for their holiday break. childhood poverty already is heading right back up.

But, the twisted Times logic goes, since kids were lifted out of poverty for six whole months in 2022, that is all the reason that "we" need to celebrate now and in the years to come.  Six whole months of relief was actually a pre-Christmas miracle when you come to think about it, because for once, Congress did not impose much if any "means-testing" poison pills on recipients. Nearly every family in the United States received it, whether or not they worked or paid taxes. This shocking universality brought out all the usual elite concern trolls, who feared that it would discourage people from working.

"Even the theoretical possibility of enabling laziness was enough to make a permanent extension a complete non-starter," explained Bloomberg News.

But never mind all that, because the New York Times concludes its own feel-good piece with news about a giant fan in Iceland that can suck tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "The Department of Energy and a bevy of investors are racing to bring the technology, called direct air capture, to other parts of the world," the newspaper gushed.

I bet they are. If they can do subversive regulatory capture of government agencies that were originally formed to protect the public, and if they can suck the very life out of regular people just because it's profitable and because they can, then they can certainly do air capture.  They might even find a way to capture and privatize oxygen itself, and charge people for the privilege of breathing it.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for keeping up with The New York Times so I don't have to, or actually refuse to since they now charge for the privilege and/or require you to hand over all your personal data and preferences to gain access.

I do find though that their headlines give a pretty good indication of the general line of misleading spin to be found in the main body.

The thing I find really annoying is their new formatting that features photos with no caption to explain what the reader is seeing and usually next to an article that has nothing to do with the photo.

Thank you for not only lifting the curtain, but also class-angling their spin.

Marcus A. A. said...

Aloha Karen, love your blog and most times agree with your views, however before you start celebrating any vaccine stories check out the untold stories of the public health problems due to the vaccine.Talk about manipulating the facts, never never trust the government. ( George Carlin ) I’m well into my seventh decade on the third rock and am glad I live where age is still honored. However, I’m feeling the cross hairs on my back from the current lot of thieves in control of, you guessed it the government. Hou oli
Makahikiho to you and your readers.

stranger in a strange land said...

Hi Marcus,

Do you have any links to share? On Karen’s last post I asked annenigma to expand on her comment about a perceived uptick in ‘sudden and unexpected’ obituaries, but it seems she thought these people might have been unvaccinated so I wasn’t exactly sure what her conclusion was (if any).

I’m a frequent lurker at Moon of Alabama and have encountered several comments there referring to the same kind of thing annenigma observed, but associating the phenomenon with the vaccine, not COVID itself.

Anonymous said...

Were they optimistic about the "brutal war with no end in sight"? They probably wanted to leave that alone for the holidays. Or maybe more "optimism" about Ukraine (winning the war) and praise for Zelensky's "incredible speech" to Congress? No good end in sight. No truthful reporting in sight.

Clean water and air already have a high cost. I'm sure they'll be able keep making profits off that in the future (if).

annenigma said...

@stranger

Sorry. I wrote a response to your question but then it suddenly and unexpectedly (!) vanished from my phone. Since I wasn't sure if it went through or not, I waited for Karen to post it then concluded it disappeared into the ether.

But now I'm on my laptop where I'm less apt to hit the wrong key, so here it is.

I suspect that these sudden and unexpected deaths are likely to be from Covid, particularly the damage done to the vascular system by the virus.

Those who claim that sudden unexpected deaths are from the vaccine alone forget that Covid vaccines don't prevent infection. It's not black and white. People can be both vaccinated and infected with the virus. The virus, once inside, can travel freely through the blood and damage any organ or system whether you're vaccinated or not.

So the 'bad cold' of a Covid infection that seems to have finally resolved may not be resolved at all internally. Most people I've met who admit getting infected have not been officially diagnosed. Many who bothered to get tested were negative to the rapid antigen tests which are unreliable and need to be repeated over several days. Most people aren't going back to the doctor for those, if they even went in the first place to get diagnosed.

Most important to the question, I'm assuming all those who chose to be unvaccinated and unmasked didn't escape infection completely via Ivermectin, Hydrocloroquine, or the Grace of God for the past 3 years. They could have experienced vascular damage which could cause sudden and unexpected death down the road.

I've followed many medical experts since the start of Covid but have found Dr. Eric Topol to be the most professional, plus he stays in his lane, not swerving politically into Ukraine, etc., as others have done. I follow him on Twitter and you don't have to be registered to read his tweets.

https://twitter.com/EricTopol and he has good links too.


[In regard to the New York Times, I no longer even bother checking their headlines. I don't care what they think or say about anything.]

Thorstein said...

Thank you, Karen. Happy New Year, indeed.

It occurred to me while reading your too-justifiable rant that one sure way to decrease the child poverty rate is to set the poverty line lower. This doesn't even need direct, official action, since inflation will do that for US, automatically, especially if we exclude incidental expenses like food and fuel. Because they're so, you know, volatile, and it's all so complicated. If only we could drop the poverty line to zero, then we could argue that *no* children were living in poverty!

The best my crappy search engine could come up with was this chart from Common Dreams ca 2016.. So I guess this observation isn't really *news*, which is why the NYT probably didn't bring it up. It's so yesterday.

Sigh.

unreceivedogma said...

I read that article that you say is about child poverty being down.

But it’s an article about teen pregnancy being down, by a whopping 77% over 3 decades, and the concomitant decrease in childhood poverty.

That is nothing to sneeze about.

The NY Times is The NY Times but please don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

Karen Garcia said...

-Unreceived:

The article I linked to had nothing in it about a decline in teen pregnancy - maybe you were referring to a link within the linked article?

That article did talk about the NUMBER of children defined as poor as decreasing, not about the actual RATE of child poverty. These are the kinds of skewed statistics that policy-makers use to justify doing nothing. They use the kind of statistics regularly churned out by right wing and centrist think tanks, which of course are funded by billionaires and corporations.

Even the centrist PolitiFact had to admit that Bernie Sanders was mostly right when he asserted in 2016 that iBll Clinton's 1996 welfare reform package doubled the household "extreme" poverty rate over the course of just a couple of decades.

."here were about 636,000 American households living on $2 per person per day or less. As of mid 2013, that figure has more than doubled, to about 1.5 million such households, with about 3 million children living in these circumstances.

"That’s a 130 percent growth in families in extreme poverty, compared to just about 20 percent growth in the population as a whole."

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/mar/02/bernie-s/sanders-welfare-reform-more-doubled-extreme-povert/

Claiming that fewer numbers of poor kids is an improvement and a sign of progress is no different than bragging that because the US life expectancy rate is plummeting, and anywhere between 300 and 600 older people are dying from Covid every single day, we should rejoice that there are fewer poverty-stricken old people around. Their lower numbers and survival rates obviously means that geriatric poverty is no longer even a problem!

Happy New Year, everybody!