Biden on the Blankety-Blank Brink

 Besides the requisite fear-mongering about Debt Ceiling Armageddon, the most annoying part of all the mainstream media coverage of this manufactured crisis is the notion that President Biden simply doesn't have the guts or the smarts to withstand Republican demands to rob the poor and reward the rich.

Biden is, of course, neither "blinking" nor is he "caving" to blackmail, like the Democrats' liberal wing are insisting. He is being absolutely competent in taking this golden opportunity to do the right bipartisan thing at the last possible minute. At the end of the month, at the very stroke of midnight, his recalcitrant party will be the caver, just as they always are. They are reluctantly agreeing to snip more holes in the social safety net. In doing so, they will save the entire global economy from total destruction. It was such a hard-fought battle. Therefore, vote for them again and send them some of your money for all the future scripted battle narratives yet to come!

"We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good," they will preach to the SNAP (food stamp) recipients who, if the establishment gets its way, will have to score low-paying work or at least prove that they are constantly looking for low-paying or non-existent work in order to eat. Temporary cash aid to poor parents - mainly single moms - will be rendered even more temporary.  

This is despite government food stamp stipends recently being cut back to pre-pandemic emergency bare-bones levels. Since it will cost SNAP recipients and poor parents both time and money that they don't have to pay for work-seeking or job-training transportation, the underlying goal is obvious. Our rulers simply aim to cut people off their aid entirely, as punishment for their failure to jump through enough poor-shaming hoops.

Joe Biden boasted to the press only a few days ago that as a senator, he voted for similar cuts throughout his long career.  His feeble promise that he would never negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling never contained one iota of sincerity. He is not about to waste a golden opportunity to effect what the GOP could never do without Democratic complicity.

Of course, the far-right Marjorie Taylor Greene wing of the party could always spoil things, just as their Tea Party forebears did during the  administration of Barack Obama, whose own "grand bargain" of Social Security and Medicare cuts never came to pass. They simply were not deemed cruel enough. The latest crisis in debt ceiling theater is Biden's noble refusal to make sick Medicaid patients work or go without medical treatment. Lower life expectancy and morbidity stats in the US are already shocking.. And it wouldn't look good for the US hegemon's world standing to be too obvious about the official sadism..

 Oligarchs who run the place, wishing on and off for  a Biden presidency for the past half-century, have finally gotten their wish. After all, he was a founding member of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council which was formed for the express purpose of joining the neoliberal Reagan Revolution.

Let me reprise and update a bit of what I wrote several years ago about the origins of this Clinton/Obama/Biden wing of the Democratic party:

Back in the 80s, the three most common "colorblind" euphemisms for the "N" word being utilized by Biden and both establishment political parties were Welfare, Drugs, and Crime.

Reagan himself not so subtly railed against welfare queens and "young bucks" on food stamps in such blatantly symbolic places as Mississippi. But the Democrats, who still needed the support of black and brown people in the South, had to be a tad more politically correct about their zest for race and class-based eugenics. 

Mere months after Reagan took office,  DLC architect Al From recalls in his memoir that Congress's then-named New Democratic Caucus was absolutely thrilled when on April 9, 1981, the New York Times published, verbatim, its entire "movement manifesto" of economic principles.

This  archaic document has become the Bible of every conservative Democratic ideologue since Clinton, seamlessly morphing into Obama acting as the other heel of the Bush Jr sandwich filling. Now, Joe Biden is the dessert cheese. He's been their adorable the goofy guy in-the-wings since 1972, when he was still only a 29-year-old senator (D-Capitol One) from Delaware, LLC/USA. Four years of President Biden are simply not enough for them. He is that rare crumbly aged cheese  The older he gets, the more pungent his flavor.  Carefully cultivated mold is pricey, sure, but so very, very good for them!

The first principle of the DLC (later renamed the "New Democrats" in the age of Obama) - once they get the requisite gushing over the New Deal out of the way - is  deficit reduction, even when times are bad. They spread the lie that austerity is a guard against inflation. Inflation is making a very convenient comeback, thanks to the greed of corporations. Unlike Nixon, Biden would never dream of ordering price controls to reduce inflation, to make the cost of groceries more affordable for those that he and the GOP want to starve into submission. Their cure for inflation is to make hungry poor people go on another diet.

When Republicans cycle into power, deficits don't matter when it comes to giving tax breaks to the rich. And now that it's another Democrat's  turn, all programs benefiting regular people suddenly must be "paid for" by cutting other programs benefiting regular people. Both parties always exempt the permanent war machine from any of their inflation fear-mongering. Meanwhile, Biden is also "open" to clawing back unspent pandemic funding - rather than, say,  re-allocating it to health care, especially for Long Covid patients.

A related founding principle (a/k/a shameless propaganda) of the original DLC is that since "people" (the rich) demand austerity and spending cuts, the New Democrats must always try to placate the rich (and Republicans) as a show of their good faith and liberal tolerance within The Club.  But to prove that they really also care about the working and poor people who actually vote them into office, they're always quick to add that the wealthy should (it's just a suggestion) equally share the burden of sacrifice.

Here's the clunky concluding chunk of the first Official DLC Manifesto, reprinted verbatim for your reading pleasure. I have bolded all the neoliberal keywords, which have survived for nearly half a century, to poison our minds and our spirits and our lives to this very day. These principles remain at the rotten core of the Joe Biden agenda. They were baked into his political psyche from the very beginning of his career... which, by the way, more or less coincided with the beginning of Donald Trump's own career:

In controlling Federal spending, we intend to abide by the following guidelines:

-We will seek out and eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse. We will provide the resources to prosecute those taking advantage of government benefits to which they are not entitled, whether wealthy tax evaders, illegal monopolies or participants in welfare fraud.

- We will promote the work ethic by encouraging recipients of government assistance to work and resisting cuts that would throw people out of work and onto welfare. 

- We will help those who cannot work, particularly the disabled, the sick and the elderly. A society cannot remain health and self-respecting while ignoring those who are poor and helpless through no fault of their own.

 - We will strengthen our defense force, in cooperation with our allies, to ensure world peace. We will increase military capability and readiness, eliminate Pentagon waste and renew the search for mutual arms control agreements.

- We will promote cooperation rather than conflict among the levels of government. We must recognize local strengths, local initiative and regional differences in the country as we decide the structure and number of Federal programs. We will not purposely add unnecessary tax and regulatory burdens to state and local governments.

 We will examine indirect spending through the tax code with the same critical eye we focus on direct spending. Wasteful and unfair tax loopholes will be closed.

- We will upgrade our efforts in the area of law enforcement to intercept the flow of illegal drugs across our borders, stem the tide of illegal immigration, introduce efficiencies into our criminal justice system, and work in partnership with state and local governments to combat crime. 

 - In short, we pledge to develop a lean Federal budget, which puts us on the path of balancing the budget and provides for the human needs of our people.

Translating the above into normal person-speak:

-- A poor single mother on food stamps is the other side of the Donald Trump villain-coin. We will demonize and even jail the poor mother while comparing her to Donald Trump, who still roams free and who the Democratic establishment mightily hopes will run again.  Not only that, we'll once again promote him to our friends as our Pied Piper GOP nominee, to make Biden smell as sweet and look as appealing as that other founding DLC member Hillary Clinton did back in 2016.  The hackneyed definition of insanity -  repeating the same things and expecting a different result - is just so much malarkey.

--The DLC, under Bill Clinton, soon got its dream fulfilled when millions of poor mothers got thrown off welfare in the 90s, only to be thrown into low-wage or non-existent jobs without the promised child care aid. At the same time, Donald Trump kept "losing" billions of dollars on paper, which allowed him to pay zero income taxes for more than a decade, as he importuned crooked banks to fraudulently bankroll his real estate empire, which ultimately landed this self-made grifter his own hit TV show on NBC. So as you can see, the DLC's work ethic sermon of a manifesto worked exactly as intended. The New Dems helped to inspire Trump (then a registered Democrat) to keep struggling against all the odds. Even better, his ladder of opportunity turned out to be an elevator of opportunity!

--There are the deserving poor. and then there are the undeserving poor. The different groups of Poors must be divided, and taught to resent one another so that they will be less apt to resent the rich racketeers of the ruling class, including Donald Trump.  Ex-GOP Speaker Paul Ryan is unfairly often blamed by Democrats for coming up with this poor vs. poor crap all on his own. But, as self-avowed New Democrat Obama used to gently chide his Old GOP bro Mitt Romney: "You didn't succeed all on your own, Governor. You didn't build this all by yourself!"

- Calling Mr. Orwell. We will arm ourselves to the gills to promote world peace, love and understanding. We will impose sanctions on Iraq and Iran and Russia and Venezuela, and the deaths of millions of innocent people will, to paraphrase the late Madeline Albright, have been "worth it." 

--Regulations on capital and greed are bad. As a result, Bill Clinton and his bipartisan Congress (including Biden) repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and other anti-graft legislation from the New Deal era. As a result of that repeal, the financial system crashed in 2008, just in time for Obama to win the White House and the Democrats to win the whole Congress and stuff the new ruling administration with the same deregulation-happy culprits, like Jeffrey Epstein pal Larry Summers, who caused the whole mess in the first place. And the regular people struggled on for eight more years until 2016, just in time for Trump and the Republicans to complete the inevitable cycle.

--Mexicans were bringing drugs across the border decades and decades ago! Blacks and Browns were committing all the crimes! Stop them, police them, jail them, and begin a new Jim Crow era and conduct a virtual slow genocide -  but be sure to call your institutional bigoted practices "efficiencies." Then slap a slick "War on Drugs" label on it so you don't sound racist. Decades later, act all shocked and appalled when Donald Trump unleashes his racist rhetoric and tragically rips the whole happy-face mask right off your long-standing official DLC manifesto.

As Al From wrote in 2013's "The New Democrats and the Return to Power," the original 1981 manifesto was the absolute catalyst for "vibrant economic growth in the private sector of the economy.... "

It was the right first battle for us to take on. It left a good impression and gave us running room for later reform efforts.... It allowed us to establish our new themes without fear of being crushed by the old bulls.... That the New York Times chose to print it in full was icing on the cake."

This manifesto set the Democrats on their relentless, nearly half a century-long trajectory to the right, moving the GOP even further to the right as a result.

Al From adds in his memoir that as disappointed as DLC conservatives were when, in 1984, Biden refused to run for president, Joe "had the good sense to put a stop to our nonsense" of trying to oust Reagan challenger Walter Mondale. They remained confident that Joe's zealous reactionary contributions to their right-wing platform would ultimately prevail. "Developing a winning message" was their ultimate goal then, and it's their ever more feeble ultimate goal now.

Their 1986 midterm message was "Defending America," which according to From, sent the Reaganites into conniption fits of jealousy for out-flanking them from the right.

From also brags that it was the core DLC membership who, in 1981, came up with the anti-democratic superdelegate system to ensure that the right-wing faction of the party would always prevail against any potential lefty upstarts.

From credits #Russiagate maven Hillary Clinton with spreading the New Democrat ideology far and wide throughout the world during her stint as Obama's secretary of state. He doesn't mention the subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarianism in the same countries that Hillary so ingeniously inspired.

And in his own introduction to From's book, written just three years before Donald Trump was elected, Bill Clinton gushes that despite all the pain and destruction and death that he wrought, he is still a true believer in the DLC message of mass austerity, endless war, the continuous growth of capitalism, the expansion of globalism, "reform" of welfare and the fight against "crime". Bill added nary a word about the climate catastrophe.

Joe Biden himself is not putting the climate catastrophe anywhere near the top of his DLC-inspired agenda. Forget the U.N. report revealing that millions of plant and animal species will go extinct because of the crisis. Not content to be a do-nothing vice president, in 2011, after the GOP congressional "shellacking" of the Obama White House,   he breathlessly proclaimed that he was "the new sheriff in town" who would ruthlessly cut all the "waste, fraud and abuse" displayed by living beings protected by the big, bad guvmint. 

As president, Biden has not only rubber-stamped major oil drilling projects in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, he has used the manufactured debt ceiling crisis to snub a climate summit in Australia... which, now that Biden is not attending it, has been canceled altogether.  Heads he wins, tails we all lose. 

Joe Biden certainly has come a long way from his perches in the senate and as vice presidential deficit hawk. 

Here's what he bragged about as his first order of VP business in the Obama White House:  

Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?

 And I bet you didn't know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I'm sure it's a wonderful species, but we can't afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom. It's just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.  

This kind of waste is just unacceptable. Particularly at a time when we’re facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it's a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody.

That’s why President Obama asked me to head up the Campaign to Cut Waste—a new effort to root out wasteful spending at every agency and department in The Federal Government.

 All this gruesome history makes AOC's performative demand that Biden reject everything he's ever stood for that he invoke the 14th Amendment and simply order the debt ceiling raised, sound all the more quaint and disingenuous. For as long as elected progressives like her keep pretending to "fight for us," what more can we expect?

After all, when you look around and all you see is a decaying gerontocracy, there has got to be a smidgen of hope and a revived supplementary definition for the word "revolting". Nobody lives forever - not even them. Despite all the gold-encrusted health care in the world, even they fall apart. Eventually. Which is not nearly soon enough.

The Horror of Congressional Hunger Games

Just as the Biden administration prematurely announced the end of the public health emergency, just as pandemic-related Medicaid coverage and enhanced food assistance are abruptly being yanked away from millions of vulnerable people, our elected congressional "representatives" in the lower house last week found it necessary to twist the knife in even further.  

 One hundred nine Democrats joined 218 Republicans in passing a resolution "denouncing the horrors of socialism."

Even the democratic, pluralistic socialism practiced in the Scandinavian countries will inevitably devolve into vicious authoritarianism, the document insinuates, as it falsely and hysterically conflates the regimes of Stalin and Pol Pot with the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Among the Democrats, you might be surprised to learn that Ro Khanna of California broke ranks with the progressive caucus,  justifying his own condemnation of socialism by pleading that he is a "progressive capitalist." Fourteen other progressives decided to just play it safe and simply voted "present" in response to the GOP's red-baiting resolution.

 My own newly-elected Democratic rep, Pat Ryan, had just delivered a rousing floor speech blasting our local, private equity-owned utility for ripping off its customers .But since he'd only demanded the resignation of its CEO, and didn't actually call for taking the gas and electric company public, I wasn't too surprised when he also condemned the "horrors" that a government-run utility would inflict upon its victimized customers.

It's a dog-eat-dog world out here in America. It doesn't matter to either establishment party that more than a million of their constituents are dead of Covid, and that at least 500 of us still are being killed by it every single day. 

 The anti-socialist resolution justifies its inherent cruelty and cynicism by pointing to the puritanical principle of rugged individualism upon which this nation was founded:

Whereas the Father of the Constitution, President James Madison, wrote that it is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest; and

Whereas the United States of America was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and necessarily opposed: Now, therefore, be it resolved 

 That Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.

The resolution, introduced by Florida Republican Maria Salazar, is no doubt also the result of socialist politicians winning a slew of recent elections in Central and South America  US-based corporations might be thwarted in their campaign to extract natural resources, such as oil, and exploit populations in the process. The actual and potential loss of predatory power, both at home and abroad, is really what the lords of global capital and their political servants find so horrific. 

But for all its paranoid craziness, this anti-social and anti-socialist proclamation should at least put paid to the notion that the Democratic Party is the lesser of two evils. In fact, too many Democrats want to be Republicans. Ro Khanna voted for the resolution because his bright future in the corporate California party depends on it.

The Covid pandemic has been both a curse and a blessing to the poor. While they have sickened and died in disproportionate numbers during the last three years, our government's temporary socialistic policies of guaranteed health care,  a trio of stimulus checks,  eviction protections and rent assistance, enhanced SNAP (supplemental nutrition) stipends, unemployment benefits, and child tax credits in the way of cold hard cash to families improved their lives so much that for the first time in their lives, millions of Americans discovered what it's like to live without financial precarity and hunger. It was socialism in action, and it has absolutely horrified Congress and the very wealthy and the very tax-averse people who fund the politicians and who nevertheless actually became even richer from the pandemic.

No wonder they're yanking benefits away from vulnerable people, whose version of getting back to  Normal means going without medical care and adequate food, and becoming even more prone to losing the roofs over their heads as evictions by private equity landlords have commenced in higher numbers than ever.

Just the enhanced SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits alone, set to abruptly stop in March in the 35 states that still disbursed them, had cut child poverty by 14 percent. About 42 million people will now see their monthly food allotments drop by at least $95 or as much as hundreds of dollars, depending upon household size and income. This austerity move, passed by Congress just before Christmas, with little fanfare or media coverage, comes at the worst possible time, becaise grocery prices are still increasing and food banks are strapped for donations.

Alice Reznikova, of the Union of Concerned Scientists warns of an approaching hunger cliff, a needless crisis directly caused by bipartisan congressional malfeasance:

In December, in a rush to prevent a government shutdown, but lawmakers pitted summer child nutrition programs against the still-needed continuation of pandemic expansion to SNAP dollars, which had offered low-income households additional SNAP dollars since April 2021. While we applaud the passing of hopefully permanent support to child nutrition programs, we called out Congress for presenting a false choice between alleviating food insecurity for all SNAP recipients during the continued national emergency… and alleviating food insecurity only for SNAP households with children, only during summers. 

But wait! It gets even more antisocially cynical, because at the same time that Congress allotted a measly $40 per month per needy child for a measly three months out of the year, it made the Hunger Games even more exciting by cutting out free school lunches for 30 million needy children for the other nine months of the year. That is because the income eligibility requirements relaxed due to the pandemic have now reverted to pre-Covid extreme poverty guidelines. As a result, previously enrolled families who once qualified for the program now find themselves deep in debt for their kids' school meals. 

As the New York Times reported in January, 

 It is difficult to estimate how many students are now going hungry. But school officials and nutrition advocates point to proxy measurements — debt owed by families who cannot afford a school meal, for example, or the number of applications for free and reduced-price meals — as evidence of unmet need.

  In a survey released this month by the School Nutrition Association, 96.3 percent of school districts reported that meal debt had increased. Median debt rose to $5,164 per district through November, already higher than the $3,400 median reported for the entire school year in
 the group’s 2019 survey. 

Older people and those on disability who have received enhanced SNAP benefits for the past three years now stand to lose an average of $300 a month in aid. Vulnerable recipients who relied on Instacart and other shopping services to purchase food, so as to avoid catching Covid, will not be able to afford to do so come March - not on a monthly food allotment of, in some cases,  only $18.

Meanwhile, the craven people who run the place are busily trying to make us forget about their own cruelty by creating yet another outside enemy for us to hate and fear. The latest deflection is a giant Chinese balloon, which Joe Biden bravely shot down over the weekend with a guided missile off the South Carolina coast, and whose remains are being heavily guarded by the Navy for our protection.

They really think we're idiots. So even if their xenophobic, saber-rattling propaganda doesn't work, they can at least try to starve us into submission and make us too weak to take to the streets in protest.

As centenarian Henry Kissinger ever so wisely instructed the ruling class: "Control oil, and you control nations. Control food, and you control the people."

Bleak House, USA (Mervyn Peake)

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.

The Global Class War Is Getting Really Ugly

The economic war declared on Russia by the US and its NATO client-states is, on the surface, payback for Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine. But this intra-global war of oligarchs is at its very essence a war of rich against poor. It's all about which oligarchy gets to extract the natural resources of one of the poorest nations on earth.

The 2014 US-backed coup against Ukraine's democratically elected president, Victor Yanukovich. was a victory not just for NATO, but for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose historical core purpose is to "open up" distressed nation-states for looting ("investment") by multinational corporations. Yanukovich had to go, because he was reneging on his agreement to impose austerity on his constituents as the price for borrowing money from the global financial system. Even worse as far as "the West" was concerned, he thought that he could get a better financial deal from Putin.

 Among the conditions that the IMF had imposed upon Ukraine for loaning it billions of dollars was raising the retirement age of Ukrainians to 60. This may sound like a reasonable demand, until you consider that Ukraine ranks a dismal 99th in the world in terms of life expectancy, and that at the time of the coup, the average Ukrainian male would be dead by the age of 67. Raising the retirement age was tantamount to a massively cruel cut in benefits.

Even so, one year after the coup, the Ukrainian government was still balking at "reforming" its pension program and raising the retirement age. It already had complied with such  IMF loan conditions as drastically increasing domestic gas prices to consumers and reducing energy subsidies.

As economist Michael Hudson noted in 2014, the US-backed coup's ensuing austerity policies, administered by the US and the IMF, would not only turn Ukraine into another Greece or Spain, they'd make Ukraine (already being even poorer than Greece and Spain) "a lot more miserable":

 German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told the press last month, with all the sensitivity of a Cliven Bundy or Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling, that Greece could serve as a model for Ukraine. This is like saying that the United States’ Great Depression could serve as a model for Ukraine.

But we don’t have to look to Greece or Spain to see the risks of signing on to a program of fiscal austerity and “reforms” run by the IMF and its European directors at this time. Ukraine has had its own experience not that long ago: in just 4 years from 1992-1996, Ukraine lost half of its GDP as the IMF and friends took the wrecking ball to both the Russian and Ukrainian economies . Ukraine’s economy didn’t start growing again until the 2000’s. For comparison, the worst years of the U.S. Great Depression (1929-1934) saw a real GDP loss of 36 percent.

Enter then-Vice President Joe Biden, the Obama administration's designated "point-man" for Ukraine, who brayed a year later that the austerity-driven Obama administration itself could also serve as an inspiration for Ukraine. 

 Much, actually over-much, has been made of Biden's putative task of "rooting out corruption" and punishing the "bad" oligarchs who had been looting Ukraine's treasury since the fall of the Soviet Union. (His son Hunter's own lucrative gig with a newly privatized energy sector in Ukraine was brushed off as working for a "good oligarch" who allegedly did not have a corrupt bone in his whole body.)

But when Biden showed up to give a hectoring speech to the Ukrainian Rada, or parliament, right before Christmas 2015, it was not only to inveigh against the ongoing corruption, it was also to demand that ordinary Ukrainians continue to bear the brunt of both the corruption and the predatory IMF debt.

Once Biden got through all the preliminaries, moving to soften up the the assembled politicians with the carrot of more financial aid, and the obligatory flattery for their allegiance to democracy, freedom, and human rights, he finally went full hit man and wielded his big stick: 

Yesterday I announced almost $190 million in new American assistance to help Ukraine fight corruption, strengthen the rule of law, implement critical reform, bolster civil society, advance energy security.  That brings our total of direct aid to almost $760 million in direct assistance, in addition to loan guarantees since this crisis broke out.  And that is not the end of what we're prepared to do if you keep moving. 

But for Ukraine to continue to make progress and to keep the support of the international community you have to do more, as well.  The big part of moving forward with your IMF program -- it requires difficult reforms.  And they are difficult.  Let me say parenthetically here, all the experts from our State Department and all the think tanks, and they come and tell you, that you know what you should do is you should deal with pensions.  You should deal with -- as if it’s easy to do.  Hell, we're having trouble in America dealing with it.  We're having trouble.  To vote to raise the pension age is to write your political obituary in many places. 

Don't misunderstand that those of us who serve in other democratic institutions don't understand how hard the conditions are, how difficult it is to cast some of the votes to meet the obligations committed to under the IMF.  It requires sacrifices that might not be politically expedient or popular.  But they're critical to putting Ukraine on the path to a future that is economically secure.  And I urge you to stay the course as hard as it is.  Ukraine needs a budget that’s consistent with your IMF commitments.

Anything else will jeopardize Ukraine’s hard-won progress and drive down support for Ukraine from the international community, which is always tenuous.  It’s always tenuous.  We keep pushing that support.

Whenever neoliberal politicians inflict their pain on the masses, they love to insist that it hurts them as much as it hurts you. They are altruistic enough to risk their own careers for you! After all somebody has to save you from yourselves.  And so with the class war, as with any kind of  war, they appeal to your patriotism, asking that you "share the sacrifice" with the rich, who are being ever so politely asked to pay a bit more in taxes. You then will feel so much better about waiting a few more years to collect your Social Security, just so long as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk also have to pay reasonable capital gains taxes. Of course, despite all of this neoliberal posturing and gaslighting, the oligarchs eventually come out as the only winners. There are always a few useful idiots or bad cops like Joe Manchin or Mitch McConnell around to willingly take the blame.

So when Biden was so delicately urging Ukraine to raise its retirement age, or risk "losing the support of the international community," he was also implicitly bragging about the ultimately failed "Grand Bargain" with Republicans that he and Obama had pursued to raise both the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages in the United States, thereby imposing a massive cut in lifetime benefits. Biden tried to paint his administration as a role model for the Rada, having been so politically courageous in its own pursuit of austerity for the masses of people. 

It was not for nothing that Obama had a plaque on his Oval Office desk reading "Hard Things Are Hard." 

To make the hard things less painful, the impending doom less noticeable or more akin to the proverbial frog boiling to death at a low temperature, Ukraine politicians have tried to salvage their own careers by raising the retirement age in six-month increments until 2025, while at the same time gradually increasing the work requirement years for people to qualify for a pension. 

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are fleeing their country by the millions, and their current president is begging the "international community" for fighter jets, ammo and bulletproof vests. And Joe Biden's domestic approval rating and positive media coverage have gotten just the boost that you might expect. Because hard things and hard people are hard!

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is deep in the throes of one of its periodic fever dreams. This current one is even more intense and xenophobic than the pandemic of paranoia and jingoism that we witnessed after 9/11. As The Guardian newspaper, for just one example of the war hysteria afflicting us these days, gushed in its Sunday edition:

 Just as Biden’s empathy was seen as ideal for meeting the moment of the coronavirus pandemic, and just as his record of bipartisanship was thought to be well suited to healing America’s divisions, so his storied foreign policy experience and faith in multinational institutions appear to bode well for this test.

That is certainly the view of Democrats who believe that Biden, who at 79 lived every moment of the cold war, including its gnawing dread of nuclear annihilation, has risen to the occasion. Last month he authorised $350m of military equipment – the biggest such package in US history – to bolster Ukraine’s courageous fighters who have exceeded all expectations.

Who needs an adequate pension, and freedom from poverty, and cancellation of onerous IMF debt when you can be pawned in their game as a courageous freedom fighter?

Why Is Kamala Harris Canoodling With Austerians?

Vice President Kamala Harris is taking a fair amount of heat this week for partnering with notorious horndog Bill Clinton, of all people, for a discussion on women's issues during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Clinton has been serving a long stint in the media doghouse ever since the #MeToo movement gained momentum during the Reign of Trump Terror, and scandals ranging from the Monica Lewinsky saga to Clinton's association with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein started getting re-examined with fresh sets of woke eyes. Harris's marquee role at the Clintons' annual "Global University Initiative"  is therefore being widely lambasted as a ham-handed effort to both salvage Bill's tattered reputation and to unofficially re-cement the entire Clinton clan's role as major players in both the Biden administration and the Democratic Party.

As one editorial puts it, the very idea of Kamala Harris and Bill Clinton getting together to discuss "empowering women and girls of the world" is a bad joke, especially since the former president still considers himself a victim of the women and girls he has abused through the years. It's really hard to woke a comatose horndog, but Harris plans to give it the old college try anyway at her alma mater, Howard University.

What's being ignored in the critical coverage of this gabfest is that the occult purpose of the Clinton Global Initiative University is the imposition of crushing austerity on the women and girls (and men and boys) of the world.  Not for nothing does major funding for this week's confab with Kamala Harris come from the Peter J. Peterson Foundation. Begun by the late Wall Street billionaire and deficit hawk sponsor of Barack Obama's so-called Cat Food Commission and its efforts to cut Medicare and Social Security, his think tank continues to spread the thoroughly debunked claim that government spending for the greater social good is bad for economic growth - a/k/a the unfettered growth of predatory capitalism.

Kamala Harris's participation in this oligarchic enterprise, which is now desperately trying to cloak itself in the masks of feminism and diversity, should disabuse us of the notion that the Biden administration is the most progressive one since FDR. With most of the relief measures in the "rescue" legislation - expanded unemployment insurance, modest food stamp increases and tax credits with direct cash disbursements to needy families with children - set to expire within the year, it should be obvious that their placement of a band-aid on the festering societal wound that they themselves created more than 40 years ago is mainly designed to placate an increasingly restive population.

The Clinton Global Initiative University continues to press for austerity, and it does so by infiltrating the nation's colleges and universities with the specious message that the economic pain of indebted students is due not to debt peonage imposed by greedy lenders, but by greedy older people depriving them, the young future leaders and budding entrepreneurs of America, of the success that they deserve.

"It's Up To Us," the students are instructed, to become politically engaged enough to willingly join the oligarchs in the austerity program. "Get Involved! Join the Movement!" the Clinton website urges, boasting that 131,000 college kids already have signed the pledge to become deficit hawks.

Among the solutions that the Clintons' Campus Crusade For Austerity urges the young people to clamor for is privatizing Medicare with a "premium support program," and raising the Social Security retirement age. It also suggests replacing the income tax with a "progressive consumption tax" - which many critics say is actually regressive, given that poor people must spend most of their incomes on necessities. 

Therefore, immediately after being empowered by Bill Clinton and Kamala Harris at Friday's CGIU "plenary session," participating students will meet privately in an "Office Hours" chat with Hilary Allen, the program director for It's Up To Us, along with "special guests" from media monolith Verizon, another co-sponsor of the conference. According to her bio on the Clinton Foundation website, Allen was inspired to become a "radical moderate" by billionaire Daniel Lubetzky,  founder of KIND snacks, who proved to her that as long as the KIND label is slapped on predatory capitalism, who cares about the actual hidden ingredients?

To that end, Hillary Clinton herself will join the fun, leading yet another plenary session conversation with the theme of kindness promotion, which is mainly achieved by Chelsea Clinton's "Too Small To Fail" initiative to combat poverty by reading to children in laundromats.

As for Kamala Harris, hopefully she will have soaked up so much kindness and empathy by canoodling with the Clintons that her upcoming junkets to Central American countries so devastated by neoliberal US plunder that record numbers of refugees are crossing the Mexico-US border, will convince those political bosses to keep their subjects from ever even reaching Mexico in the first place. This act of American empathy will be accomplished by billions of dollars in kind bribery cash to be paid directly to the political bosses.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, in other words, rumors of the death of the Neoliberal Project and its relentless imposition of austerity and pain on the suffering masses of the world have been greatly exaggerated, Rescue Plan or no Rescue Plan.

And stateside, at least 30 million retired, sick, poor or disabled people have yet to receive their $1400 "stimulus checks." It seems that Congress unkindly forgot to appropriate the funds for the Social Security Administration to compile a list of beneficiaries for the IRS. You know... the desperate people that the Clinton Foundation and its corporate sponsors want you to believe are stealing our futures.

Slash Away and Dash Away: A Hallmark Covid Christmas Special

 Do you have the sneaking suspicion that the 5,600-page Covid relief bill just passed by Congress has more than a few Secret Santa gifts for the corporations and oligarchs snuggling deep within its luxurious, high thread-count sheets?

Congress has done what it always does best: waited until the very last possible minute in a manufactured crisis to pass something, anything, before an artificially imposed deadline which comes right before the Christmas holiday. Then they call it a miraculous bipartisan victory.

Just imagine. They passed their miracle "stimulus" package just as Saturn and Jupiter were converging in the night sky, in a reprise of the Star of Bethlehem legend surrounding the birth of Jesus himself! 

Forget the Covid-19 pandemic and how it affects you and your loved ones.  Congress critters have been busily jostling for camera position as they shove to the head of the line to get vaccinated, even as the heroes they pay lip service to -  frontline workers such as doctors, nurses, public safety personnel, grocery store clerks and teachers - have to patiently wait their own turns. The politicians insist that they are doing so for purely altruistic reasons having to do with the legal requirement of "continuity of government."  

I mean, you can't expect our elected leaders to keep hammering us with their cruel austerity measures if they are not themselves hale, hearty and healthy, can you?

Here, via Time magazine, is just one of the statistical charts that should have the leaders of the richest country on earth hanging their heads in shame instead of bragging about their bipartisanship while they shoot themselves up with precious vaccine in what is just their latest outrageous act of political theater: 

Select countries by economic relief, as a percent of GDP

Data for U.S. is an estimate as of Dec. 21. All other countries are as of Nov. 29.

Japan

42.2%

Slovenia

24.5%

Sweden

20.9%

Finland

20.8%

Germany

20.3%

United States

18.3%

Australia

16.8%

Canada

16.4%

France

15.8%

Italy

13.0%

Brazil

12.0%

New Zealand

10.9%

Spain

10.7%

United Kingdom

9.0%

NOTE: Figures show fiscal measures, not monetary policies

Inadequate doesn't even begin to describe the miserable Covid relief package passed on Monday. As one commentator put it, the one-time $600 stimulus payment to qualifying Americans is tantamount to a restaurant patron tipping a waiter a measly quarter. It's worse than simply forgetting to leave a tip because it is a deliberate insult. Or put another way, $600 is what rich people think poor people think is a windfall. They either don't know or they don't care that it won't even cover half a month's rent.  But just in case, and to prove they are not complete Grinches, lawmakers also gave renters one more month of reprieve from eviction.

One month's stay of execution is certainly better than starving or going homeless today, lectures the New York Times editorial board in a cheery screed called "The Deal Is Good Enough."

With vaccinations underway, there is reason to hope that the coronavirus pandemic will begin to loosen its grip next year and that economic growth will accelerate. This deal creates a bridge from now until then. It deploys the ample resources of the federal government to prevent economic damage that could not be easily reversed, like the loss of homes and businesses.

Never mind that the deal is like building a flimsy 300 yard footbridge across the Atlantic Ocean. For as long we can hold out hope that one day we can achieve hopefulness, perhaps we won't even notice as we plummet to our dooms once the miracle month, the $600 stimulus checks and the 11 weeks of renewed unemployment benefits run out.  Perhaps people won't hold a general strike or otherwise inconvenience the ruling class.

And if the Times hope-mongers can't get in their digs at Bernie Sanders and his half-successful crusade to get more direct cash aid to what he calls "working families" while they absolve Democrats of all culpability, then they simply aren't earning their generous paychecks.

Columnist Paul Krugman of Bernie Bro-bashing fame, for example, penned these repulsive, reactionary, divide-and-conquer centrist talking points in last Friday's effort:

About good guys getting it wrong: Economic relief legislation is largely about providing individuals and families with a financial lifeline during the pandemic. But who should get that lifeline?

 Should it go to a majority of the population, like those $1,200 checks sent out in the spring? Or should the focus be on enhanced unemployment benefits for the millions of workers who, thanks to the pandemic, have no income at all?

According to The Washington Post, Senators Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin had a heated argument about this issue on Wednesday during a conference call, with Sanders pushing for broad aid while Manchin argued that enhanced unemployment benefits were more crucial.

Well, on most issues I’m a lot closer to Sanders than to Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate. But in this case I’m sorry to say that Manchin is right. The economic pain from the coronavirus has been very unevenly distributed: A minority of the work force has been devastated, while those who have been able to keep working have, by and large, done relatively well. Overall wages and salaries have bounced back quickly.

So if there’s a limit on the amount of aid that can be given, it’s more important to help the unemployed — and, in particular, to sustain that help well beyond the 10 weeks reportedly in the current deal — than to send checks to those who have been able to keep working. The best argument I can see for broader payments is political — people who haven’t lost their jobs to the pandemic may be more willing to support economic relief for those who have if they also get something from the deal.

Although I have been boycotting the Times comment section for months, I did feel compelled to post the following riposte to Krugman's neoliberal narrative, which ever so conveniently completely ignores the permanent economic underclass of millions upon millions of people:

The debate over giving aid to the unemployed vs giving aid to the non-unemployed skirts uncomfortably close to the right-wing cant that pits the "deserving poor" against the lazy slackers. This specious argument is why we don't have free college and other social benefits enjoyed by many another advanced country. Naysayers claim that if there is free tuition for everybody, spoiled rich kids will be lining up at the trough, champing at the bit to get into a public university or community college.

Give me a break! The fear that better-off people are cashing in on a universal benefit, that they might be getting a paltry $600 or $1200 government check at the expense of the unemployed simply deflects attention from the fact that billionaires increased their wealth to obscene new levels during this awful pandemic. The CARES Act was the most massive upward transfer of wealth in modern human history. It was and is disaster capitalism on steroids and crack. The Sophie's Choice between helping the unemployed and helping everybody just because they are human beings also pits ordinary people against each another. The non-unemployed include millions of people not counted in statistics because they gave up looking for work years ago. They include senior citizens and the disabled who are barely making ends meet. Eight million more people have been categorized as "officially" poor this year. Our "reps" just can't let austerity die, even with thousands dying needlessly all around them.