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.