Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Bile Rises In Your Throat

 

(photo credit Kat Garcia)

It may look like a misty Monet watercolor,, but let me assure you that it's hard to breathe here in the Hudson Valley of New York. This is the second lengthy  episode of smoke we've experienced here in less than a month.  

Despite the extremely unhealthy quality of the air,  it feels much worse in other parts of the United States.  Southern and western locales may be escaping the smoke but they are not escaping thelife-threatening  heat. For example, it reached 114 F in Nashville on Thursday And of course it's pure hell for the Canadians, whose prime minister reacted to the first major spreading smoke event in early June  by jetting off in a plume of carbon to Ukraine, where he gave that country's president his personal assurances that he would keep the money bombs coming like the good little NATO member that he is.

The ongoing climate disaster has meanwhile been knocked right off the front pages thanks to a slew of reactionary Supreme Court rulings, including the rejection of Joe Biden's pathetic student loan forgiveness plan, a repudiation of LGBTQ workplace rights, and an end to affirmative action in college admissions.

The New York Times, for one, is ever-reliably framing the ruliings around Biden's political prospects and the outrage being expressed in "a chorus of Democrats" who will waste no time seizing on the rulings as more campaign issues with which to flail helplessly. These are some of the same people who supported then-Senator Biden's bill which forbade the discharge of student debt in bankruptcy court, lest such an action offend his banker buddy constituents. Something tells me that Joe Biden is secretly very relieved that the Court saved him the trouble of throwing more people under the bus all by himself.

This way he'll still be able to reassure his donors that "nothing will fundamentally change" while at the same time telling campaign crowds that his empty bellicose rhetoric on their behalf is a monumental accomplishment.

Thanks to the Supremes, Democrats won't have to make any policy promises of their own at all. They'll just keep right on shooting diseased Republican fish in a barrel, adding their political smoke to another epidemic of choking and gagging -  and all without ever  having to utter the dread words "Medicare For All."

The Duopoly is working out very well for the lords of neoliberal capitalism.

Biden's Slow Walk To High Speed

Comparisons of Joe Biden with FDR just refuse to die, despite the president's ostentatious return to his center-right roots, stuffing his administration with Wall Street cronies, and allowing food aid and health care and rental assistance programs to expire with his cruelly premature cancellation of the Covid-19 public health emergency.

Biden's minions are nonetheless trying to keep the FDR mystique alive by ludicrously comparing his piecemeal initiative to expand internet access to Roosevelt's own massive Rural Electrification Act. Since it's costing more in 21st century dollars to build broadband capacity than it did to electrify rural areas during the Great Depression, they're even insinuating that Biden is superior to Roosevelt. 

The first trick is to call it "historic," as the White House is doing with its time-delayed dribbling out of $40 billion worth of grants to states who must submit detailed plans to get even a down-payment, possibly next year, on the promised funds. The bulk of the money would not be out the door until 2030, at the earliest. This is according to the Commerce Department, whose ex-Google assistant secretary will be in charge of vetting the applications.

And we all know what happens whenever these grants remain unused for what is deemed  to be too long. As with the unspent Covid relief funds, presidents can simply bide their time and make deals with Congress to "claw back" federal grants from recalcitrant, or struggling, or corrupt states - all in the name of tackling the federal deficit and giving more tax breaks to the wealthy and buying more guns and bombs for Permawar. This is just the deal that Biden made with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on those unspent pandemic funds. They will help defray the costs of the still-enshrined Trump-era tax cuts for billionaires.

So even while the money for the broadband infrastructure projects will be cynically slow in coming, the White House itself is wasting no time in the self-aggrandizing department. When it comes to bragging in an election season, the need for speed is of the essence. Biden, his staffers and even his family members will be "fanning out" all over the country to tout both his aspirational accomplishments and his long-expired accomplishments, and to outlandishly insist that right now, this very minute, in the spirit of FDR, they "are delivering on their historic commitments."

If you dream of a high speed connection to Amazon to gawk at stuff that you can't afford because Biden reneged on his promise to raise the minimum wage, it will come. If you can't believe, or you're not fond of nightmares,  then you ain't American, and you will probably vote for Trump (or what Biden once called "the other Biden.')

Of course, they will be very careful with their actual words. You will only be guaranteed future "access" to "affordable" high speed Internet, not only to connect with family, friends, school and job, but to "access" fee-for-service health care over the Internet. This will probably be monopolized by Amazon, once they get those pesky privacy concerns out of the way.

To cement the ethos that we must all strive to be good soldiers for the cause of Capitalism, the Biden administration has dubbed the program BEAD - Broadband Equity Access and Deployment. This is a triple neoliberal buzzword whammy if there ever was one. 

They love to spout the word "equity" to disguise the fact that they will protect structural inequality to the death. It has been ingrained in us that it is absolute privilege to pay for the Internet - which, in a truly equitable society, would be declared a public utility and a free public service. But since this is an alleged democracy, some Internet users are more equal than others.

The word "access" is bandied about as though a thing, such as medical care, is there for the taking,, rather  than of being cruelly dangled just beyond our reach, due to our inability to pay for it.  It's too bad that the patient died, seeing as how in the greatest country on earth, she had such unlimited opportunity to strive for proximity to the gleaming private equity-owned hospital right down the street.

The fact that Biden is also only touting "access" to an Internet connection means that if you are very lucky, you might even get to see underpaid gig workers stringing cable from your kitchen window - assuming, that is, that if you have a roof over your head.

Finally, they just can't seem to get war and killing off their diseased minds for even a minute, what with the word "deployment". We must, apparently, never forget that life in America is a constant battle and that we must always be in competition with one another as we selfishly strive to fulfill our own individual career goals and passions.

 Biden and his kin and his cronies are "fanning out" to draw a BEAD on us with their weapons of social mass destruction, even while they cynically campaign on promises magically redefined as accomplishments. This is while a third of this country's inhabitants are in dire need of a giant fan to sweep away all the choking smoke and smog engendered by the massive forest fires in Canada. 

The amelioration of capitalism-induced global warming is not part of of the president's Investing in America tour. As a matter of fact, Biden added to the pollution in hazy Washington, DC when he brought the entire Beltway to a halt this week during evening rush hour -just so that he could attend a closed door fund-raiser in a nearby wealthy Maryland enclave. This is otherwise known as putting the "private" back in that ballyhooed equity.

Elites Cash In On the Necro-Market

We always knew that capitalism kills. But this is getting downright ridiculous.

Three events-cum-scandals in the space of little over a week are cause for renewed despair. But they also provide a paradoxical glimmer of hope.  Despair, because the levels of depravity to which the Lords of Capital have sunk are almost beyond the realm of imagination. Hope, because whenever the mask is so regularly ripped off the visage of capital, not even all  the plastic surgery propaganda in the world can prevent the gobbets of rotting flesh from peeling away and exposing, for all the world to see, the hollow skull beneath the skin.

If this imagery is too hyperbolically grotesque for you, then just take a look at the first Gross Event/Scandal on my list. Harvard University, America's oldest and most prestigious institute of higher learning, has been caught selling body parts right out of its medical school morgue.  Granted, the morgue's director at least had the decency to bring human eyeballs, brains, flayed skin, and other organs home before he and his wife actually sold them over the Internet in the apparently booming necrophilia marketplace.

But coming as it does so closely on the heels of shocking revelations that Harvard was actually founded and funded by wealthy human  slave-traffickers, and has directly profited from colonialism and slavery ever since, the selling of body parts news puts a real damper on its ability to profit from both the living and the dead. Whether Morgue-Mart is more disgusting than its long-running public exhibition of the corpses of enslaved Africans and murdered indigenous people is open to question.  But its  more recent human remains scandal must be causing prospects to think twice about donating their own corpses to this elite institution for "scientific" study.

But true believer in the evolving capabilities of capitalism that it is,    Harvard will no doubt move on. Perhaps the trustees can start a body buyback scheme in much the same way that oligarchs and CEOs do stock buybacks as a way to both avoid paying income taxes and to keep prices for the barely living teeming masses of the world artificially high. Body-part laundering and sales are already a reality in much of the world. For all we know, there's even a thriving hedge fund where the obscenely rich can bet on and profit from any sudden body-part shortages. Or maybe they can go full Steampunk and hire gig workers as body-snatchers who sneak into cemeteries at night and dig up graves. The fresher the better.

The second gross event-scandal was, of course, the implosion of the Titanic submersible during a jaunt which allows billionaires to indulge their own necrophilia habit. Sadly, since their jerry-rigged death tourism capsule met its own demise a mere 1,600 feet from the original shipwreck, those on board probably never even got their $250,000 money's worth. They never had the chance to gawk at death before they themselves died.  Also sadly, their bodies are probably not recoverable and therefore not fodder for a shrine or museum of their own. Harvard must be so disappointed. (Meanwhile, media coverage of the hundreds of money-less refugees believed drowned when their ship capsized off the Greece coastline this week was minimal at best.)

And speaking of disappointment, the third event-scandal I've chosen to discuss might seem, on the surface, to lack the requisite grisliness for all of you horror fans out there. But nonetheless, the pompous state visit, the gluttonous dinner, and the congressional fete for Indian president Nerendra Modi fits well into the genre of the slow-burn, shadowy, evocative horror. The blood-splatter and torture are left to the imagination.  The pod-people starring in this show looked like normal overdressed rich people - on the surface anyway. They didn't leave the audience vomiting in their seats or fleeing the theater or (horror of horrors) demanding a ticket refund.

You are no doubt already familiar with the respectable political horror genre. Knowing that people get tired of constant blood and gore and monsters, the showrunners of political pomp have to lighten things up once in awhile. Just as Americans forgot the original horror of Frankenstein's body-part monster by falling in love with TV's Herman Munster, so too is Modi transformed into a benign character for purposes of profits over people, capitalism over humanism, and of most immediate importance, the bolstering of Joe Biden's "decent" avuncular image as he runs for re-election. Dark Brandon is now (mis)cast as a shrewd diplomatic salesman.

The New York Times performed its own traditional role of transforming monsters into pragmatic, even heroic,  guys who join forces to do battle with whatever Greater Evil has been designated. If the United States and India can play Godzilla and Mothra, teaming up to make a ton of money for a select few by pretending to do battle with Ghidorah the Three-Headed (say, Russia, China nd maybe Iran) monster, while a few hundred thousand toy bystanders (collateral damage extras) are crushed in the process then it will have been worth it. It's simply the price of doing necro-business.

The Times-speak translation of the above:

Two and a half years into his administration, the democracy-versus-autocracy framework has, therefore, become something of a geopolitical straitjacket for Mr. Biden, one that conveys little of the subtleties his foreign policy actually envisions yet virtually guarantees criticism every time he shakes hands with a counterpart who does not pass the George Washington test. Even some of his top advisers privately view the construct as too black-and-white in a world of grays.

This rationalization is nothing new. It is baked into the very fabric of capitalism, dating in the American version right back to colonial-era Harvard, where President Increase Mather's nepo-baby Cotton went on to become a Salem Witch Trials inquisitor. It's not surprising therefore, that more than three centuries later it turns out that one of the top purchasers of the Harvard morgue's body shop runs a "doll" store right near Salem.

Lately there's been a lot of talk about fascism, The New York Times most recently sugarcoated the inclusion of neo-Nazis in Ukraine's fighting forces by euphemizing it as a "thorny" issue whose main danger is not its far-right fascist ideology but in the prospect that Russia would use the reality of modern-day Nazis as a propaganda tool.

Speaking of fascism, the mainstream corporate media are still busily pretending that Donald Trump is the sole progenitor and operator of the American version. 

Even if you don't agree with the premise that fascism has always been an integral feature - not a bug- of United States leadership, just look back to how the American ruling class made common cause with its German counterparts during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Even when the US government became aware of the Holocaust, it made a point to artificially separate the financial backers and profiteers of the Nazi atrocities from the inner circle of Hitler and his uniformed henchmen.

Under the direction of future CIA founder and director Allen Dulles, the US made up a "White List" of German oligarchs who supposedly were anti-Nazi, but who had profited mightily from forced labor and money and property looted from the millions of Holocaust victims. 

As Christopher Simpson wrote in "The Splendid Blond Beast,"

Although they were not Nazi ideologues, most of them had made their peace with the Nazi party and served in trusted positions throughout the Hitler years."

He added that one such White Lister, Hitler-era, oil magnate Karl Blessing, was later falsely puffed up in the New York Times as an anti-Nazi resistance fighter who spent years hiding out from the Gestapo.

Simpson observed that powerful people like Dulles believed that "competent governmental authorities, operating within a moral framework,,(were)motivated by a sincere sense of U.S. national security, and national interest - themselves, for example'

 He and his cohort "repeatedly reached secret verdicts they believed necessary to to construct a postwar order that fit their idea of progress, and they reached them with a clear conscience.

I'd make one quibbling correction. They reached them with no conscience whatsoever. The lack of conscience is the definition of sociopathy. It's also the main feature of capitalism itself.

The horror.

A Pox On All Their Docs

The federal indictment of Donald Trump and his valet might  have a very P.G. Wodehouse feel about  it, were it not for one humorless twist. When wealthy Bertie Wooster was  accused of a theft, as he was in every single story in the series, his faithful man Jeeves would always come to the rescue. Not in real life, though, given that Trump's own faithful valet has been indicted right along with him. The objective seems to be to pressure Jeeves into turning state's evidence against Bertie.

You didn't think that Trump would haul all those boxes of files into his MAGA-Largo bathroom himself, did you? 

If the former president had any sense, as I wrote in a previous post, he would defend his theft of the top-secret documents by claiming that he needed them for research on his memoirs, or at least that he was only storing them prior to the eventual conversion of his mansion into a very serious public presidential library. All he needed to do was to bullshit the National Archives about his pure and scholarly motivations. As it was, he was so oafish that he was caught on tape admitting that he should have declassified the papers while he was still president.

Also - has the man never heard of digitization? Has he never heard of the deficit-defeating Paperwork Reduction Act? How easily could he have spilled precious state secrets to his cronies via his smartphone. 

 And since the New York Times had once made a big  blockbuster story of his penchant for flushing papers down the White House toilet, he might even have pled that he thought the boxed bathroom stash were rolls and rolls of the Angel Soft that he'd hoarded during the Great Pandemic Toilet Paper Panic.

Then again, Trump never thought of himself as the steward of a sovereign nation. In speeches, he very often confused the words "country" and "company." As the CEO, he assumed that his golden parachute would protect him into perpetuity, or at least until such time as he could claw his way back from enforced retirement to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But back to the indictment, coming so quickly on the heels of the Stormy Daniels court proceeding in New York and the civil liability verdict for libeling and lying about his department store rape victim. It seems obvious that despite its legal merit under the all-purpose Espionage Act. this prosecution right on the very cusp of Decision '24 is politically motivated. The Espionage Act itself was enacted out of pure political paranoia during World War I. It was  aimed not so much at the German spies allegedly infiltrating the United States, but against the thousands of  American citizens who were critical of Woodrow Wilson's entry into the war. The law's most famous victim was labor leader Eugene Debs, who spent 10 years in jail for very obliquely criticizing US foreign policy in a speech at Madison Square Garden. The very sweeping generalities implicit in the Espionage Act are precisely why it remains enshrined in law right up to the present time. The neocon, neoliberal thugs of the permanent ruling order are using the judicial system to force Trump out of the presidential race, whether he does it willingly or not. There's a reason they're going after him on document theft rather than for instigating an electoral coup.  Indicting Trump for the January 6 riot, or insurrection, or whatever you want to call it would implicate the entire ruling order itself, including the military establishment which sat on its heels for hours as the mob roamed the capitol in, let's be honest, a rather lackadaisical manner.

Trump might even be considered a sympathetic victim were it not for the fact that he himself had embraced the Espionage Act in the indictment of Wikileaks' Julian Assange. So no, we shouldn't feel sorry for him at all. This is a guy who can't even assemble a new team of lawyers let alone score a butler who's smarter than he is.

To the great disappointment of the New York Times, his fans didn't even follow through with the dire expert forecasts of violent riots in front of the Miami courthouse once he was booked and fingerprinted. The arrest of Trump sadly didn't segue into a full-scale fascist revolution, which would have justified even more surveillance and targeting of regular people.

As the Gray Lady ruefully reported, 

Twice in recent months, allies of former President Donald J. Trump have used violent language to criticize the criminal charges brought against him, calling for vengeance and encouraging Mr. Trump’s supporters to respond to the indictments as though they were acts of war.

Both times — first in April in Manhattan and then on Tuesday in Miami — police and civic leaders raised concerns that the angry rhetoric could lead to violent protests when Mr. Trump appeared in court. Both times, in both cities, the crowds that actually showed up for Mr. Trump were relatively tame and fairly small.

These regular people who've shockingly taken to using speech as a deadly weapon and a threat to the ruling order  not only include Trump supporters, they include challengers to the Democratic Party from the left,  including Cornel West and, to a lesser extent, Robert Kennedy Jr. Why else would the centrists of establishment media and the duopoly always make a point of falsely accusing the left of forging unholy alliances with the right? It's really bottom-up resistance that they fear and despise, and which they cynically accuse of being "violent."

Speech itself (First Amendment be damned) is under attack by a new breed of reactionary, repressive liberal. Their more frequent use of the term "violent speech" is ominous because it implies that words themselves might end up getting criminalized. This is, after all, exactly how the grotesquely still-extant Espionage Act was first used against dissidents and critics more than a century ago.