Our Own Little Gazas

 Gaza has been aptly described as a high tech laboratory experiment for how to most efficiently oppress, surveil, starve, torture, and ultimately dispose of a population deemed to be nothing but excessive, superfluous human flesh taking up too much valuable land and resources.

At its essence, the US-financed genocide by the state of Israel of some two million Palestinians confined in their open-air prison is the ultimate expression of the global class war being waged by multinational oligarchs and militarized corporations against the rest of us.

So it's not just empathy and outrage that's spurring hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of us to take to the streets in protest. It is the shock of realizing that we could very well be next. Too many of us are there already, trapped in the gulags of crushing medical and education debt, low-paid work and unemployment, evictions leading to homelessness, and - especially if we have a darker skin color -  police brutality and mass incarceration.

Gaza is the paradigmatic example of what Achille Mbambe, in his 2019 book Necropolitcs, terms the "matrix of rule" by the ruling oligarchy. Gaza is both a supercharged reiteration of the settler-colonialist atrocities of the fairly recent past, and a warning of what they have in store for us the not-too-distant future.

While they're so busily killing Palestinians, a surplus population sitting on top of what is believed to be a wealth of oil deposits, they're also in a near-frantic crusade of trying to quash dissent in the parts of the world that are still relatively free. For, as Mbembe writes,

"Unmistakably, an ever increasing multitude of voices are making themselves heard... human chains of solidarity are forming. In the darkenss of fear and denunciation, and faced with unrelenting waves of repression, compassionate men and women seek to awaken the sleeping fireflies of hospitaliity and solidarity. In the midst of an otherwise troubling anesthesia, an active minority is taking a stance. With renewed vigor they seek to denounce acts carried out in their name against the Other - who, it is claimed, is not one of us."

In a rank display of their own panic at being caught out in their crimes and lies by the masses of people, our ruling oligarchs and their political lackeys have resorted to plastering the anti-Semite label on the dissenters in a vain attempt to shut us up. This gaslighting has largely failed. So fully two months after October 7th, they are regaling us with graphic propaganda about Hamas incels sexually assaulting Israeli women. When they had to walk back their wild claims of having personally witnessed the beheadings of Jewish babies, they are now whipping up visions of Israeli women being shot in their private parts and abused even in death. Needless to say, the usual suspects have produced no evidence to back up their lurid claims.

But let us, just for the sake of argument, concede that rapes and worse were committed by Hamas. This still does not justify obliterating tens of thousands of Palestinians with bombs and tanks. And let us, also just for the sake of argument, acknowledge that this "war" has emboldened closet anti-Semites to act out their fantasies in public, even on elite college campuses. This does not justify smearing antiwar and anti-genocide protesters with the anti-Semite label, or conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.. Such tactics are a classic case of Freudian projection.

It brings back nauseating memories of late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once publicly admitted that the deaths, by US sanctions, of half a million Iraqi children had been "worth it" in that war for oil, and whom Joe Biden so fondly evokes when he talks about the wars in Ukraine and against Gaza. Albright also had infamously remarked during the 2016 presidential campaign that "there is a special place in hell for women who don't support other women." She was talking, of course, about Hillary Clinton and the female supporters of Bernie Sanders. What she meant was that if you moved beyond the corporate version of feminism and supported policies for the greater public good, you were damned. 

It is indicative of their own consciousness of guilt that the Biden administration waited until 11 p.m. Friday to notify Congress that it was bypassing them and unilaterally giving Israel hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of tank ammunition in order to continue killing Palestinian civilians at the speed of light. Whenever the extermination of powerless trapped people is deemed to be an "emergency," then the niceties of democratic procedure do not apply. Plus, the end-run by the State Department conveniently absolves Congress of actually having to take a principled stand against sending money and bombs to Israel. It's such a clever way avoiding accountability to their dissenting constituents.

It's both ironic and even somewhat entertaining to watch the billionaires and their corrupt political lackeys so publicly accosting the same elite Ivy League presidents they put into office for the express purpose of laundering administering billions of dollars in tax-exempt oligarchic slush funds. 

Claudine Gay, Harvard's current president and one of the trio of female administrators hauled before Congress last week and damned for defending the free speech of students, was handpicked for her job by billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, the former Obama administration commerce secretary who now heads what is aptly called the "Harvard Corporation." Pritzger was also recently named by Joe Biden to lead the postwar multinational corporate  plunder of Ukraine. The corruption is all right out there in the open: elite universities are primarily for-profit corporations, where the education of young people is only the fig leaf. Students are there not to learn, but to be credentialed for elite careers.  They are definitely not to be heard. Too many of them, apparently, did not get the message that as the lucky golden ticket-holders in an overpriced Willy Wonka diploma mill, they're doomed to the hell of the careerist garbage chute when they become too loud and demanding and free-thinking.

Speaking of the mask being ripped right off the Ivy League, it turns out that at least some students have given the aforementioned Hillary Clinton a failing grade in the "Rate My Professor" online survey. Not only did Hillary castigate the pro-Palestinian student protesters on the Columbia University campus - she accused them of  being complicit i in alleged Hamas sex crimes against Israeli women by marching in support of Palestinian women.

she didn't have the guts to  confront the young people in person. In fact, she avoided her students like the plague. She refused to take most questions and left class early when she bothered to show up at all. 

This is according to one disgruntled former student writing in the Huff Post, perhaps Clinton's worst offense was her refusal to even glance at the written work submitted by her students, instead handing it over to low-paid adjuncts to read and grade. 

And these students were the lucky ones, because future attendees of   Hillary's class will have to make do with the video version of what she recently performed. The entire semester was filmed so that Clinton will never again have to return to academia in the actual flesh.

 However, hefty tuition will still be charged for the class, and her handsome residuals as a college performance celebrity will continue to be paid by the Columbia corporation.

Let the masks continue to fall, preferably all the way to hell where they can keep Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger company for all eternity.

It's All About the White Settler Colonialism

 What took European invaders close to 400 years to accomplish in the Americas, the State of Israel hopes to accomplish in less than a quarter of that time. I am talking, of course, about the State of Israel's pivot from its protracted ethnic cleansing of Palestine to the outright genocide of the Palestinians trapped in Gaza.

Just as the Puritans self-righteously justified their own wars against native populations by pointing to their own persecution at the hands of the British, and later, by the often-violent reaction of Indians against the settler-colonists, so too do the Zionists of Israel justify their treatment of native populations by pointing to their own long history of persecution in Europe, which culminated with the Holocaust.  As long as the perpetrators can gloss over their racist white supremacy with the shield of perpetual victimhood, they feel free to do plenty of victimizing of their own. If you criticize their actions, you are labeled an anti-Semite. You might even have a Wall Street job offer rescinded if you're an Ivy League student. (Which might not be a bad thing, in the long run. Maybe these elite college kids can now oot for a teaching job in an underserved public school!)

Joe Biden, on his quick campaign stop in Israel, wasted no time in embracing both Binyamin Netanyahu and Bibi's predictable denial of responsibility for the explosion at a Gaza hospital, which has claimed the lives of at least 500 people. The US president glibly explained his belief that Hamas ("the other team") was responsible by saying that "his" defense department had already told him so. This is the same dude who had enthusiastically embraced the debunked war propaganda of decapitated Israeli babies.

It's all about the solidarity among the settler-colonialists of the world. Both the United States and Israel consider themselves to be exceptional nations, among God's chosen ones. They do pre-emptive war with impunity.

Why else would the US military, in which Biden puts so much demented faith and trust, name a whole series of its lethal weapons and hardware after the native populations it had finally conquered in the late 19th century?  

Here's just a partial list of what the perpetual US war machine has used to maim and kill untold millions of people, the majority of whom have been non-white in the ludicrously-named post World War II "Pax Americana" --

Apache attack helicopter, Tomahawk cruise missile,  a whole series of helicopters bearing such tribal names as Cayuga, Huron, and Iroquois, not to mention the high-tech spy aircraft called Kiowa, Ute and Mohawk. And who can forget that the mission to murder Osama Bin Laden was named after the great Indian warrior against US occupation - Geronimo?

Such naming is a way to continue denigrating American Indians while justifying their own modern wars of aggression. It speaks to a kind of distorted genetic memory  of all those innocent settler-folk being scalped by the "savages" who had the effrontery to resent their invaders. Not for nothing do supporters of the genocide in Palestine attempt to dehumanize the actual victims by calling thenm "savages" and "human animals." It's all too familiar. 

And now, with most of the civilized world aghast and protesting in the streets at the blatant and even downright gleeful genocide of Palestinians, the US has effectively joined Israel in being viewed as a pariah state by the rest of the world.  The US itself is still an apartheid state in all but name, discriminating against and punishing its own citizens based upon their race and class and gender - and lately, even their  independent thought - despite all the sanctimonious laws that it has on the books. Jim Crow is still alive and well. Just witness the gross expansion of the US prison system, the largest in the world, with more Black people now incarcerated than there were slaves prior to the Civil War. This statistic is largely the result of then-Senator Biden's crime bills, passed with bipartisan support in the 90s.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in 2023, the Biden administration is such an unabashed champion of Palestinian genocide, albeit with the usual ass-covering platitudes about humanitarian concerns. It is somewhat gratifying - or worrisome, as far as the New York Times is concerned - that even timorous "progressive" politicians are just now beginning to make the tiniest possible demands of Biden to broker a ceasefire. It was only a week ago that the Democratic Party was so unified. They voted en masse against ex-House Speaker McCarthy. Most of them already endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, for cryin out loud! 

But even the reliably pro-Israel Times isn't quite as gung-ho about Zionist revenge as it was in the immediate aftermath of the atrocious slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas.  Perhaps it has something to do both with the backlash from readers in the comments sections, and from the public at large. Not when "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" has been expanded so disproportionately. Like Biden, Netanyahu's political viability was also in question prior to the allegedly surprise attack by Hamas.

Biden's gruesome theatrical embrace on Wednesday of this brutal right-wing leader of Israel was intended to recast him as a courageous wartime statesman rather than as a bumbling old man with low domestic approval ratings. However, any additional support or kudos that he gets from his fellow Neocons in both war parties will be diluted by the two other hawkish xenophobic presidential candidates in the mix. - Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There are already indications that his political stunt has backfired.

 This creates a much bigger opening for the lone antiwar candidate, Cornel West. He may not win - actually allowed to win - the election, or even get ballot access. But at least the corporate media are now being forced to give him a regular platform. No matter if it's just an attempt to co-opt him in their corporate fold or boost their ratings among the younger demographic.

Because despite its own ham-handed efforts, the Censorship-Industrial Complex cannot control the narrative. The grotesque reality speaks for itself.

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.

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.

Dominants, Discord and Dogs -- Oh My!

We are shocked, shocked that the alleged leaker of secret war documents is a misogynistic racist gun nut who works at, of all the inappropriate and unexpected places, a military base.*

From the Washington Post's alliterative lede:

United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people.

Was he also a Trump acolyte? The Post doesn't say. But the Leaker, according to the guy who leaked about him to the newspaper, certainly sounds sexier than Trump. In fact, he sounds like something out of a John Le Carre spy novel, an immature James Bond wannabe, or even a CIA plant:

The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG, who he said was in his early to mid-20s.

“He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said.

The mysterious cache is a veritable smorgasbord of international dishing. The menu features everything from the usual relentless but bland US spying upon global enemies and "partners" (cowed lapdogs) alike,  to detailed battle plans for the US proxy war in Ukraine, to the drama of elite hand-wringing that not enough lapdogs are supplying enough ammo to Ukraine so as to obfuscate the full spectrum-dominant role that the biggest arms dealer in the world ( USA) has awarded itself into perpetuity. 

How can this faltering Superpower foment World War III without getting a good chunk of the world enthusiastically behind it? It wouldn't do for the US to be seen as a playground bully, or at least as a playground bully lacking a full complement of toadies.

French President Emmanuel Macron, only recently lauded by the corporate-sponsored US press for his "courage" in ramming through an increase in the retirement age of his country's "coddled" workforce, is relegated to the doghouse just a week later for his vocal refusal to be Joe Biden's French poodle in the buildup to a war against China. At least for the moment, he's flagrantly peeing all over American hegemony.

CNN, one of the most trusted names in warmongering propaganda, frames the story of one lone European leader trying to give peace a chance this way:

French President Emmanuel Macron might have hoped to focus this week on what may prove the biggest domestic test of his leadership, as France’s Constitutional Council prepares to rule Friday on whether or not he can push ahead with controversial pension reforms. 

Instead, he finds himself grappling with international blowback from last week’s friendly visit to China – and in particular from comments that have made him rather unpopular both in Washington DC and with some of his allies in Europe.

On his flight home from Beijing, Macron gave an interview to POLITICO Europe. In it, he said that Europe must not become “just America’s followers” when asked about the prospect of China invading Taiwan.

“The question Europeans need to answer … is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the US agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” Macron said, adding that Europe must not get “caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy.”

Notice how CNN conflates American chagrin into a galloping case of "international blowback" against peace from all the alleged war-loving nations of the planet. There is nothing like international blowback to make a leader "somewhat unpopular" among his peers! Almost as ironic as the leak from the gun-loving dude who exposes war and possible war crimes is the elite former banker Macron actually saving the working class cannon fodder of all nations even as he forces his own constituents to toil for two extra years on the domestic front.

As for Joe Biden, he plays his own senescently sanguine part in the Narrative, gushing that even though the leaker is the target of a "full-blown" investigation, most of the information released online is also so outdated as to be meaningless, not to mention mind-blowingly blowback-proof. After all, if Biden's friends and allies and partners don't know it by now, post-Snowden, that their full-spectrum dominant is listening in on all their phone calls and private meetings, than they've been asleep for the last decade. As partners, they should know their submissive place.

Or as Biden tried to explain it from both sides of his orifice:

"I'm not concerned about the leak, I'm concerned that it happened but there is nothing contemporaneous that I'm aware of."

Conveniently enough, the cache of leaked documents also contains possible evidence that China and Russia are in cahoots. The ever-reliable New York Times reports:

The cache of classified documents that has leaked online reveals one source that may have at least reinforced the suspicions in Washington about China’s plans: intercepted communications in mid-February indicating that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service reported the approval of such aid by China’s top military body, the Central Military Commission.

Talk about convenience! There is nothing like a controlled leak by a pathetic loser of a low-level military worker to make the case for World War III. No wonder that Biden is so carefree. When you're a doddering dominant girded with the full faith and credit of the USA in the form of a discreet Depends, all leaks can be absorbed into the matrix, losing their initial stench after a short while. Meanwhile, one can always blame the occasional unsightly puddle on one's disgruntled ,un-housebroken military puppy. One can pretend to be very, very shocked and worried but yet not worried about it.

But back to Biden's diplomatic journey to find his Irish roots and mark  the 25th anniversary of peace after the Troubles. He's been there, done that. Now it's on to war. From the Times:

 President Biden will thank the Irish people for their support of Ukraine in its battle against Russia when he speaks to a session of Ireland’s Parliament on Thursday, part of a three-day trip that is both a personal journey and diplomacy.

The president’s national security aides said Mr. Biden intended to continue his efforts to shore up the global alliance on behalf of Ukraine. They said he would highlight Ireland’s humanitarian assistance and its acceptance of some 80,000 refugees who have fled the war-torn country.

Many of those refugees are being lodged in hotels throughout Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland, a country where housing is scarce and expensive.

Before addressing Parliament, Mr. Biden met on Thursday with Leo Varadkar, the prime minister of Ireland, and thanked him for welcoming Ukrainians to his country.

“I know it’s not easy,” Mr. Biden said.

In turn, Mr. Varadkar told Mr. Biden he “never thought, in my lifetime, that we would see a war of this nature happen in Europe again.”

“If it wasn’t for American leadership, and if it wasn’t for American and Europe working together, I don’t know what kind of world we would live in,” he added.

No word as to whether the Irish leader had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek as he uttered those last words. But to hear the Times tell it, Leo Varadkar was acting every inch the sleek Irish Setter with a severe drooling problem who also labors under the delusion that he is small enough to sit in his owner's lap. But not to worry. The master not only welcomes the devotion, he gets off on the slobber.

*Update: The leaker has now been identified by the New York Times as a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman based in Massachusetts. He was yet to interviewed by the Pentagon or FBI, according to the report.

Joe Biden's Sickly Plan To "Save" Medicare

 What safer place to kick off one's campaign for a second term than in the friendly "rich, white and blue" pages of the New York Times?  If you're an age-addled Joe Biden who must often rely on the cue cards supplied by your minions, publishing a "guest op-ed"  certainly beats holding a press conference and facing possibly hostile questions from the media.  Of course, it being the corporate-sponsored Washington press corps,  any hostility would probably be restricted to goading Biden into cutting health care rather than expanding it. 

It is far, far safer to pen (or have an underling pen) a gaffe-less and gutless essay in which the highest-rated responses in the readers' comments section are in the vein of "thank you for being a friend, Mr. President!"  It's perfect way to be seen as big and bold rather than as the sniveling and craven politician that he truly is.

Because when you carefully read between the lines of Biden's essay, there are all the usual buzzword-heavy signs and symptoms that this Medicare plan is just one more neoliberal head-fake to maintain, even enhance, the status quo of American pain and suffering. Nothing would still fundamentally change under this president's second watch.

It starts out with a real bang of a whimper, as Joe Biden actually tries to distance himself from the position of power that he has occupied for the last half-century: 

Only in Washington can people claim that they are saving something by destroying it.

The budget I am releasing this week will make the Medicare trust fund solvent beyond 2050 without cutting a penny in benefits. In fact, we can get better value, making sure Americans receive better care for the money they pay into Medicare.

He doesn't spell out his definitions of "value" and "care" in this campaign speech of an essay. He doesn't mention that his administration has already begun a pilot program that stealthily privatizes Medicare. Called the REACH program, it aims to move Medicare enrollees into private, for-profit managed care plans without their understanding or consent. This will result in the same kinds of restrictive networks and the rationing or denial of care that already operate in other for-profit "health maintenance organizations," or HMOs.

And as much as Biden pretends to chide "MAGA Republicans" in his op-ed, his privatization scheme is a direct offshoot of Donald Trump's own maga-rific agenda. Uncle Joe has simply changed the name of the horror that punishes the innocent and rewards the lords of capitalism.

As we have already seen with the cost-cutting-for-profit railroad disaster in Ohio, whenever private equity and shareholder interests hold sway, the rights of regular people disappear into a toxic mist. This will also hold true for Medicare privatization. Money might be saved for the investor class. Lives, not so much.

But back to Biden's mendacious op-ed.

The Inflation Reduction Act ended the absurd ban on Medicare negotiating lower drug prices, required drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare if they increase prices faster than inflation and capped seniors’ total prescription drug costs — saving seniors up to thousands of dollars a year. These negotiations, combined with the law’s rebates for excessive price hikes, will reduce the deficit by $159 billion.

He forgets to mention that the price reductions of which he boasts are only for 10 drugs  and they will not go into effect for many years. The exception is for insulin, which voters of all ages must often take to stay alive and, of course, vote in the next national elections.

 And as long as Biden mentions absurdity, isn't it insane how he keeps harping on about reducing the almighty deficit as though it were more important than reducing people's pain and anxiety? This is dog-whistled pandering to his Wall Street donors, pure and simple. Remember, he is only "asking" them to pay a smidgen more in taxes to pay for his deforms. This is money that will only grow exponentially for them once the stealth Medicare privatization is a done deal. It's the destruction that he only pretends to decry as he hypocritically poses as the savior of seniors. Or, as he specifies cynically, at least for another generation.

Here is my somewhat whimsical and censor-proof published Times response to Joe Biden:

Since this budget plan for Medicare is purely aspirational, and doesn't stand a chance of congressional passage, then why is it so limited?

Negotiations with nihilistic Republicans should start from a position of strength Politely asking the wealthy to pay just a wee bit more of their "fair share" in taxes is the same old, same old signal of defeat. It is a veritable invitation to a sausage-making party with the Party of No (and not a few of those "moderate" Dems.) If the Democrats are lucky, they'll get a deal for a tax increase beginning a decade from now for those making a million and up. Since Mr. Biden made no mention of the Medicare eligibility age, I can only assume that he is willing to raise it, just as President Obama offered to do during his "Grand Bargain" negotiations with John Boehner. The only reason that the eligibility age hasn't changed is that the Tea Party nihilists thought raising it by two years was just not cruel enough. I'd feel somewhat better if Joe Biden's plan to "protect" Medicare at least included a vow to maintain the current eligibility age. I'd feel a whole heckuva lot better if he'd embraced Bernie Sanders's plan to lower the eligibility age to 55. I'd be in heaven if the president threw all caution to the winds and began clamoring for Medicare For All, or at for least for the public option that he promised during his first campaign.

Biden Takes Classified Documents... Seriously

 Whereas when Donald Trump smuggles top-secret papers out of the White House, he takes them very capriciously. He apparently just crumpled them up and thoughtlessly tossed them in boxes with other household miscellany.  Then the boxes got spread, willy-nilly, all over the tacky, garish grounds of MAGA-Largo.

Joe Biden, then the outgoing vice president, on the other hand carefully folded and sorted classified papers before responsibly removing them from the White House and then securely locking them in a closet in his think tank. That should prove to everyone's satisfaction how thoughtful and serious he is. 

And to prove just what a down-home regular guy Joe also is, he even folksily stashed some of the stolen papers in the humble garage of his Delaware home. He reportedly did not store them in his beach house, possibly because, unlike Trump, he knows the dangers of flooding from hurricanes, not to mention the damage that salty air can do to exposed paper. 

Feigning surprise that a team of his own lawyers just happened upon the first batch of papers in a closet during the routine performance of their professional duties, Biden scoffed during a Mexico summit press conference, in a non-admission admission that "People know that I take classified information seriously."

As Biden is fond of insisting before many a misleading statement: "No joke". He gives you his word as a Biden that he has no idea what's even in the purloined classified documents. As long as he knows people who know, what more do you want of him?  If you're not one of those people who know, then you ain't human. The same way that if you're an African-American and you didn't vote for him, you ain't Black.

The weird similarity between the discovery of Trump's stolen documents and Biden's is that both were accomplished by whole teams of lawyers - rather than, say office assistants or household cleaners. Either the job description of lawyers has radically changed, or else mere servants simply aren't good enough for presidents. Just being speculative here, but when you're a former or current president with a consciousness of guilt, it seems that using whole armies of expensive private attorneys to ethically discover your booty before the cops do is a fine way of shielding yourself you from any culpability -  before, during or after the crime.

But, hidden deep within the New York Times article on the second garage discovery, lies the real crux of this story. 

The inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter, is a type aimed at helping Attorney General Merrick B. Garland decide whether to appoint a special counsel, like the one investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents and failure to return all of them.

The all-too-convenient discovery of the stolen documents on two of Biden's properties may give the Justice Department just the excuse it needs not to prosecute Trump for his own thefts as they go through the serious motions of investigating Biden.* They probably don't have a case. It would be uncomfortable for Garland to prosecute The Donald without also charging Uncle Joe. The Republicans would only play their hypocrisy card were Biden to be given a pass when Trump went to trial. These two sticky-fingered presidents may just end up canceling each other right out. We can put it behind us, turn the page, go forward and not backward.

It's also possible that Team Biden simply created the classified documents drama as a way to deflect attention from his son Hunter's own legal troubles and imminent GOP attacks and congressional hearings. By coming clean on his own misdeeds, Joe Biden aims to be seen as seriously and nobly and pre-emptively copping to innocent mistakes that were made, in an aw-shucks kind of way. He's shielding his kid by pretending to fall on his own sword.

Since it is still theoretically possible to fool some of the people most of the time, or at least most of the people some of the time, Biden can even use his trademark motto ("Here's the deal, Folks!") to market the latest diversionary product in his Battle For the Soul of Our Nation franchise.

Dems Vs. GOP: The Play's the Thing, Or "You Can Bring a Sword to a Gunfight!"

*After I posted this, Garland did indeed appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden's stash of classified documents. The appointment gives the appearance of fairness and equity with Trump's own ongoing special counsel probe. It's probably only a matter of time before someone dubs this "GarageGate" - because Biden's immediate goofy defense argument was that his expensive Corvette is in the same hallowed space as the second stash of documents. And if he keeps his precious car so secure, then the documents adjacent to the car must be secure, too. Seriously.