A Dark Speech Divided Against Itself

If those garish stage lights at Joe Biden's Independence Hall campaign event last Thursday were powered by lithium batteries, they certainly didn't do much to tone down the essential bipolar psychosis of his speech. The fact that the White House went so far as to dub the performance by his Dark Brandon persona The Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation is one clue that they want us to believe that Civil War 2.0 is already well underway. If all the slanted polls say it too, then it must be true.

Come to think of it, has the first Civil War ever really ended? It was itself the direct spawn of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, documents created by an elite cadre of white males, a good portion of whom fancied themselves to be the literal owners of other human beings. When they decreed that all men are created equal, they weren't kidding, given that women, the enslaved and the indentured were not as entitled to the same life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as the landed property-owning gentry (and the yeoman class they needed to serve them and fight their wars for them) were. Ditto for constitutional civil and voting rights. Not for nothing did our esteemed founders also decree that the Senate would be chosen by elite politicos, and not by popular vote.  

But like all politicians before him, Biden persists in keeping the origin/founding myth alive. He sets the misleading tone right in his intro, claiming that two nonexistent things - "democracy" and "equality" - are suddenly and outrageously "under assault."

Usually when modern elite leaders fear-monger for the purpose of gaslighting and subduing the teeming, restless masses into a state of compliance and governability, they point to the Enemy Outside. But seeing that, post-9/11, Biden has a permanent, unlimited and undebated global war budget and unlimited surveillance powers, it's time to reset the terror dial.  He's got Europe under NATO control, so what better time than the coming US elections to ramp up the fear a lot closer to home? 

He wants people to believe that the MAGA movement sprung fully-formed from the fevered brow of Donald Trump, and that this form of fascism is not a result of half a century of crushing antisocial neoliberal policies, which he had a big hand in creating, thanks to his own half-century in the halls of power. 

Let his Narrative begin:

So tonight, I have come this place where it all began to speak as plainly as I can to the nation about the threats we face, about the power we have in our own hands to meet these threats, and about the incredible future that lies in front of us if only we choose it.

Now would be a good time to remind ourselves that whenever officials and elites say "we," they mean themselves  - not little old you. They've got the power, if and when and how they choose to use it. So when Biden says the future is "incredible," he doesn't necessarily mean it'll be amazing and wonderful. It's a very subtle threat that dissidents and insurgents of all stripes will never believe what just hit them.

 We, the people, have burning inside each of us the flame of liberty that was lit here at Independence Hall — a flame that lit our way through abolition, the Civil War, Suffrage, the Great Depression, world wars, Civil Rights. 

That sacred flame still burns now in our time as we build an America that is more prosperous, free, and just.

Build Back Better is the slogan that can never die, as the red footlights enflame anew, and the shadowy Marines lurk in the background with only their blindingly white gloves broadcasting a muted dog-whistle of a Greek chorus. And remember, folks, you're in a sacred place no matter what the First Amendment says about states and religions.

That is the work of my presidency, a mission I believe in with my whole soul.

Who needs a functioning brain when you're armed with an invisible soul?  Remember, you are in a very sacred place. Faith makes its own reality. To wit: 

But first, we must be honest with each other and with ourselves.  Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.  

 Now, I want to be very clear — (applause) — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.  Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.

I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.

He didn't mention any mainstream Republicans by name, but he had to be referring to his buddy Mitch McConnell, and maybe even the ghost of Strom Thurmond. 

Biden did make a secret, backroom mainstream deal with McConnell right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. The president agreed to nominate the Senate minority leader's Kentucky crony, an anti-abortion lawyer, to a permanent federal court judgeship. The deal backfired only when fellow Kentucky Senator Rand Paul invoked some arcane veto power - not because of any pressure on Biden himself from progressives.

Meanwhile, the far-right makeup of the Supreme Court, so carefully orchestrated by McConnell, will remain intact under Biden's watch. The blue-ribbon panel he named last year, to recommend reforms of the highest court, came back empty. The commission put the kibosh on such democratic improvements as term limits for justices, a system of revolving judges from lower federal courts, and court-packing for purposes of balancing out the current highly skewed extremist ideology. That non-result was almost guaranteed, given that Biden had installed a roughly equal number of mild elite liberals and conservatives, even a rabid Federalist Society member named Adam White, to the cabal. It was just another example of manufactured gridlock to preserve the status quo.

Now comes the part of Biden's speech that goes full-scale bipolar. After bragging about his relationship with fine, upstanding Republicans, the president asserts that these same noble officials are being held in thrall to Trumpists, their free will mysteriously having been yanked right away from them:

 But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.

Are you getting an unpleasant picture of Mitch and the gang all chained to the wall by whip-wielding leather-clad dominatrices holding fistfuls of bribery cash in their hands? Joe Biden seems to think that the solution is to save them by scolding them from the right:

And I believe it is my duty — my duty to level with you, to tell the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful.
 
And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.  They do not believe in the rule of law.  They do not recognize the will of the people. 

No wonder Trump fans are howling on and on about how insane this speech was. Biden is trespassing on their right-wing territory, accusing them of hating law and order and the police and the constitution. It kind of makes it harder for them to accuse the president of being a Marxist, even with his begrudging cancellation of a small portion of student debt for an artificially small percentage of Debt Slave Nationals.

They (the Trumpies, not the debt slaves necessarily) refuse to accept the results of a free election.  And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

Um... I seem to recall that the Republicans stole the 2000 election right out from under Al Gore. The corrupt Florida secretary of state and the corrupt Florida governor, one Jeb Bush, fixed the election in favor of corrupt little brother George Bush, and this fix of stopping vote-counting altogether was duly given the imprimatur of approval by the corrupt Supreme Court. That set the precedent for all manner of voting restrictions and dirty tricks in the ensuing decades. The Trumpies are merely playing a very oafish game of copy-cat with their Stop the Steal dogma.

MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.
 
They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.

Liberal critics have noted that Biden very carefully omitted the words "abortion bans" from his litany. Just as infuriating in my view is his critique, throughout this speech, of "political violence," as though his own hands are not soaked with blood as red as the garish color of his backdrop. He has already requested an additional $14 billion in weapons for his proxy war with Russia. He was the lead Democratic cheerleader and enabler of George Bush's invasion of Iraq. He was the architect of the militarization of local police forces with high tech surplus weaponry during the Obama administration. And that's just a portion of his half-century's worth of bellicose policy-making. It doesn't even take into account his outsize role in constructing Incarceration Nation, creating more black prisoners than there were ante-bellum slaves.

They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people.  This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.
 
That’s why respected conservatives, like Federal Circuit Court Judge Michael Luttig, has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans, quote, a “clear and present danger” to our democracy.

Perhaps Biden finds Michael Luttig (who has not actually been a sitting judge for more than a decade) so respectable because as an adviser in both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, he was integral in greasing the skids for Clarence Thomas's confirmation before then-Senate Judiciary committee chair Joe Biden. Having just been named to the federal bench himself, Luttig delayed his own swearing-in until Thomas himself was safely confirmed, so as to avoid any appearance of cronyism, corruption and conflict of interest.

Luttig eventually quit the bench to take a lucrative position as chief legal adviser at Boeing. He left that job in 2009 as part of the high level executive fallout from the 737 Max scandal, which revealed that cost-cutting measures by the defense giant had caused airplane crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia and the deaths of 346 people.  

Luttig then became chief corporate counsel for Coca-Cola, where Biden's niece, Missy Owens, was in charge of the government affairs division (lobbying)her job including working closely with the Obama/Biden administration from whence she came, as well as with the ensuing Trump White House, over an eight year period. She was recently hired by General Motors to coordinate that company's  transition to electric vehicles, with a big financial assist from the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act.

A mere six days after Luttig joined Coca Cola last year to defend the company brazen tax dodging case lobbed against it by the IRS, the company abruptly reversed a decision to stop donating to any more presidential inaugurations, having gifted the Trump gala more than $3 million in 2016. It only gave the Biden inaugural a little over $1 million; the celebrations were downgraded because of the pandemic. But that still is a very respectable amount, and Biden deems Luttig respectable by dint of his never-Trumpism and his expert lawyering at the Jan. 6th-based impeachment festivities.  Ergo, he got a mention in the Dark Brandon speech. Cronyism has nothing to do with it, of course.

Ready for more bipolarity hilarity? Biden's at it again:

I believe America is at an inflection point, one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come after. And now, America must choose to move forward or to move backwards, to build a future or obsess about the past, to be a nation of hope and unity and optimism or a nation of fear, division and of darkness.

MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live, not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies. But together, together, we can choose a different path. We can choose a better path forward to the future, a future of possibility, a future to build a dream and hope, and we’re on that path moving ahead.....

MAGA Republicans, it seems are not redeemable. The subliminal message here is that if you are angry and afraid, because of a pending eviction or lack of medical care when you get sick or hurt, or if the last 50 years of neoliberal austerity and the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history has gotten you down, then you're living in some chaotic darkness as well. The only chaos you have to fear is Trump chaos itself. Never mind the new report showing that life expectancy in the richest nation on earth has taken the biggest nosedive in more than a century. In Biden's world, all you need is a path to a future of hope.

 Biden-think reaches peak wishfulness as he winds the stemwinder down (I put the obvious whoppers in bold, if only because they are so unashamedly, psychotically brazen): 

But I see a different America — an America with an unlimited future, an America that’s about to take off. I hope you see it as well. Just look around. I believe we could lift America from the depths of Covid, so we passed the largest economic recovery package since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and today America’s economy is faster, stronger than any other advanced nation in the world. We have more to go. I believe we can build a better America, so we passed the biggest infrastructure investment since President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and we’ve now embarked on a decade of rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges, highways, ports, water systems, high-speed internet, railroads.... 

We’re going to end cancer as we know it, mark my words. We’re going to create millions of new jobs and a clean energy economy. We’re going to think big. We’re going to make the 21st century another American century because the world needs us to. That’s where we need to focus our energy. Not in the past, not on divisive culture wars, not on the politics of grievance, but on a future we can build together. And that’s precisely what we’re doing — opening doors, creating possibilities, focusing on the future — and we’re only just beginning.

Our task is to make our nation free and fair, just and strong, noble and whole, and this work is the work of democracy, the work of this generation. It is the work of our time for all time. We can’t afford to leave anyone on the sidelines. (Yes, we can) We need everyone to do their part, so speak up, speak out, get engaged, vote, vote, vote!

Finally, he cuts to the chase. It's nothing but a boilerplate campaign speech livened up with technobabble and much horn-tooting about little things accomplished and big things unaccomplished and big thoughts about big things saved up for later, and that totally awesome road to the Future.

 Vote them back into power - not so they can make your lives better in the here-and-now, but so that they can keep BS-ing you about a future utopia that will only happen if you vote and you vote and you vote some more at the designated two and four-year intervals.

 Speak up and speak out... unless, of course, you're a MAGA person. If you're not a MAGA person, even if at times you're desperate enough to fleetingly contemplate becoming one only because you're so disgusted with the Dems, then the proper, preferred and respectable way to speak up and speak out is to vote three times. (votevotevote).

 Then, you will be cordially invited to shut up and go away.

It's Always Darkest Right Before the Dawn of the Dead.

 It seems like it was only a month ago that the undertakers of the Democratic Industrial Complex (DIC) were lowering shuffling old Joe Biden into his political grave before his body was even cold. 

But to prove that even moribund presidents can become reanimated zombies, the DIC-heads in the White House and their media scribes have suddenly changed the plot - they unearthed Joe Biden right out of the plot. They've transformed Joe Biden into a "bad-ass" monster named Dark Brandon. 

It's apparently meant as self-deprecating parody of the "Let's Go Brandon" pejorative  beloved of Trump fans ever since a crowd yelled "F--- Joe Biden" at Talladega Super Speedway last October. A TV commenter interviewing winner Brandon Brown had lamely tried to convince viewers that the crowd was really cheering for the athlete rather than cursing out the president.

Some bright DIC-heads unleashed the Dark Brandon persona on the world as an arch means to turn the insult right on its head. Manufactured legend has it that the Biden character is scaring whole audiences full of Republicans to death. Word has it that they're even vomiting in the aisles. Shorn of his aviator sunglasses,  Biden's newly revealed squinting red eyes are lasers blasting straight down into their soulless hypocritic innards, leaving them writhing in pain and whimpering for mercy.

Or, so the cheesy DIC narrative goes.

Now, if the monstrous Dark Brandon character reminds you of an aging Hellboy without the antlers and also happens to scare or at least nauseate you, your kids, your grandkids and your nervous Aunt Tillie, that is just necessary collateral damage in this virtual war for the democratic soul of our nation You simply must get in the spirit of DIC fun. Because despite all his loathsomeness, this is no demon from hell, people. This is the new, improved, "feisty" Joe Biden.

 According to the HuffPo, his reincarnation as Dark Brandon has millions of diehard DIC-heads all over the land thrilled in only the best of all possible worlds kind of way. If you can't beat a cartoon villain like Donald Trump with your misinformative anti-disinformation campaigns, then you might as well join him. You might as well throw all caution to the wind and turn electoral politics  into the full-bore monster movie franchise it always was anyway. 

  Imagine, if you will, the shuffling brain-dead lead zombie in Dawn of the Dead  suddenly turning into a "bad-ass" superhero right before your disbelieving eyes. Once only capable of sputtering out one gaffe or non sequitur after the other,  Dark Brandon has developed the preternatural ability to fire off pithy one-liners about rich people and their tax breaks in one breath, and in the next tell a room full of rich donors that Trump Republicans are "semi-fascists."

No matter that Dark Brandon didn't explain why they're only half-fascists and not whole ones. Because his blazing eyes and his fiery words slammed into the elite audience like a semi going a thousand miles an hour. The well-heeled patrons at that exclusive screening were reported to be shocked right into opening their wallets, if only to immunize themselves from insult, zombie virus - or god forbid, Biden threatening them with higher taxes.

 Former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer was so impressed with the new character, that his reliable stock of weasel words failed him. He was reduced to tweeting out: 

Notice that Bad-Ass Biden is not cursing his  rich donors and that he is only extending his index finger rather than the dreaded middle one. This edgy version of the meme actually communicates reassurance to the ruling class, lest they be fearful of getting parted from some of their cash against their will. Just because the propaganda about Biden has changed doesn't mean that anything else will. He did promise them that nothing affecting their coddled lives would ever fundamentally change.

Therefore, they shouldn't fret overmuch about his careful semi-forgiveness of student loans for a selected percentage of America's debt slaves. Because knocking $10,000 or as much as $20,000 off their debt is merely a band-aid over a gaping wound. The borrowers will continue to suffer and pay, while the rich themselves will never feel a thing. That's because the lower classes are being pitted against each other in yet another variation of the Divide and Conquer method which has always kept the rich wealthy and the powerful jn power. Non-grads will be instructed to resent the grads or the semi-grads for getting tossed a few extra pennies. They will not be urged to resent the for-profit colleges and the investors in the for-profit colleges - the real culprits in this overrated scam.

My advice? Pick an aisle seat close to an exit, and whatever you do, don't buy any more of their stale, dry, overpriced popcorn.

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?

Relaxed, Unmasked & Vaxxed to the Max

The sudden relaxation or abandonment of mask requirements in almost every single Democratic jurisdiction in the country this past week has all the orchestrated spontaneity of the mass Democratic crackdowns on the Occupy camps in 2011.

 Just as President Obama was conveniently out of the country at that time to keep his own hands clean, President Biden is conveniently out to lunch (if not yet completely out of his mind) regarding the evidence-free Semi-Official Cancellation of Covid.  The White House's position, even as the mostly avoidable US death toll from Covid is hovering near the shameful one million mark, is that the wearing of masks should now be up to local and state officials and individual discretion. The confusing new rules or guidelines are that if you're vaxxed, there is no need to be masked, despite the fact that you can still catch the virus. And if you're unvaxxed, you must still wear the mask. Maybe with a big scarlet UV sign on it?

 So hedging his bets, Biden is still recommending the masks be worn by everybody working or  learning in public schools. He certainly doesn't want the blood, or rather the infected respiratory droplets, of potentially millions of children, many of whom are not even partially vaxxed. on his hands. When the next outbreak or variant that they never saw coming emerges, his already-tiresome default reaction of co-opting his deceased son Beau as a means of comforting surviving family members of the victims of any number of state-sanctioned or state-enabled cruelties will have lost all its flaccid punch.

What with record inflation and the exhaustion of ginning up enthusiastic fear over the Russian invasion of Ukraine any minute now, Biden already has enough on his plate, even as most of his aspirational social policy proposals have conveniently been swept off the table. His party's contrived dilemma is the same as it ever was. How can they deliver better "messaging" about their accomplishments in lieu of actually delivering accomplishments? If only people weren't so gosh-darn fickle and attention span-deprived, they'd be expressing their gratitude, for example, for Biden's plan to allocate $5 billion in federal infrastructure aid for electric car-charging stations all over this great vast land of ours.

Even if you yourself can't afford one of these $40-50,000 electric cars, you can at least aspire to achieve access to one, despite the onerous student debt that Biden refuses to wipe out just like that, with one fell swoop of his executive pen. Barring that unicorny relief, you can still admire all the lucky electric car owners for having the environmental wokeness so sorely lacking in deplorable gas-guzzling drivers of 20-year-old rust-buckets held together with unsightly electrical tape. Furthermore,  just think how much easier it will be to ignore the lack of affordable housing in your neighborhood as you revel in the privilege of gazing upon the shiny charging station on the street where you live. Where you literally live, given the expiration of the eviction moratoriums since we've been informed that "we" have all learned to "live with" Covid. 

There are more important things to worry about. Shouldn't we all be joined together in unmasked vaxxed aghastitude at the shocking news that Donald Trump had clogged the White House toilet with incriminating documents? (forget the real shocker that there was apparently not only no working shredder in the place, but apparently only one toilet available to Trump for the flushing of documents in the whole White House). 

I mean, if you can't be satiated on Trump-hate as a healthy substitute for that 1.65-lb package of boneless skinless chicken breasts going for a shocking $20 at the local Stop N Shop, then what can you be satiated on? And especially since, now that masks are no longer required in supermarkets, you can even nibble on the free cheese and cracker samples as a meal substitute without even having to discreetly lower your mask to satiate yourself?

The thing we have to remember to remember at all times is that the good things that the Democrats do for us are being kept hidden. We therefore should keep prodding these overly modest and coy Democrats to be more boastful of these good hidden things, like the electric car charging stations that Biden wants to build.

 So says Paul Krugman, anyway, in his latest New York Times column celebrating Joe Biden's occult improvements to the Health Care Marketplace. How could we ever have missed his "Hidden Health Care Triumph?"  I felt so guilty myself that I almost broke out into a gaslit sweat when I was reading it. Then I remembered to remember that health care is not about the tens of millions of my fellow American citizens who either are uninsured or underinsured, but about the political prospects and fortunes of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Krugman:

In any case, whatever its intellectual merits, as a practical political matter Medicare for All isn’t coming to America any time soon. What’s actually at stake in the political arena are more incremental policy changes. Yet such changes can still have a huge effect on health care. And the partisan divide on health policy is as wide as ever.

In the opener of his piece, Krugman had poked fun at the usual diseased GOP fish in a barrel. This go-round it was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) who'd mal-informatively tweeted out that  “Over 70% of Americans who died with Covid, died on Medicare, and some people want #MedicareForAll?”

Now, where have we heard that fallacious argument against single payer health care before, falsely equating bad health outcomes with government-paid single payer systems? I soon enough remembered to remember. And wiping the beads of gaslight-sweat from my brow and my brain, I posted the following response:

"With all due respect for Medicare for All, you have a single-payer system in Italy — it doesn’t work there.” What Republican uttered those ridiculous words, which posited a link between the terrible death toll in Italy at the start of the global pandemic and the government paying for the care and treatment of its sick people? The answer is Joe Biden, who was scoffing at his "good friend" Bernie Sanders at the March 2020 presidential debate. Biden is such a good guy that he even called Mitch McConnell a good friend of his at this month's National Prayer Breakfast. He is such a good guy that when M4A activist Ady Barkan, who is dying of ALS, interviewed him later in the campaign prodding him to support single payer, Biden at least promised the next best thing: support for a public option. But once safely elected, Biden never uttered the phrase "public option" again. Granted, it is a good thing that more people are getting subsidies to go shopping for private insurance product before they get sick and try to (heaven forfend!) cheat. Actually, it's their insurance companies that are getting the subsidies, including billions from govt-funded COBRA premiums. As for the venal congress-critter from Kentucky ridiculously blaming Medicare for the higher Covid death rate among Medicare recipients, it was probably to deflect attention from the fact that at least 70% of Americans favor M4A, That includes at least a third of GOP voters, some of them his own constituents. 

Speaking of party cults and their hacks, and the media's nauseating regard for Joe Biden's long history of collusion bipartisanship, Times columnist Charles Blow this week purported to be surprised that Biden (he assumed him to be a "good and decent man") had actually bragged about his long friendship with Senate Minority Mitch McConnell, who himself is being praised by more than a few liberals for having the self-preserving courage to disagree with his own party's position that the January Sixth riot was simply "political discourse." 

Blow:

Last week at the National Prayer Breakfast, Biden said this of the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell:

“Mitch, I don’t want to hurt your reputation, but we really are friends. And that is not an epiphany we’re having here at the moment. We’ve always — you’ve always done exactly what you’ve said. You’re a man of word — of your word, and you’re a man of honor. Thank you for being my friend.”

Once I got The Golden Girls theme out of my sweaty brain, I submitted this comment:

It's no surprise that President Biden gushed all over McConnell at the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event which is not so much about prayer as it is about influence-peddling and pay-to-play. The only deity that they celebrate as one great big happy capitalistic family is the Market God.

They hide their corruption under the sacrament of bipartisanship. They insist against all reason that what citizens really want is not health care, a debt-free education, climate change reversal and living wages - but just that the movers and shakers in Washington just all get along together. Bonhomie among the elites is hazardous to our health. This is especially true when they agree, every single time, to fund the gruesome forever wars and surveillance state without so much as a pretend debate. Their constant litany of having God on their side as they bow their heads in prayer and wave their flags sounds more profane with every passing minute. Let's do away with the national prayer breakfast and implement a truth and reconciliation commission, run by a panel of citizens. Let's follow Aristotle's advice and select them by lot. They couldn't be any worse than the elected "reps" we're saddled with now.

Random Panel of Citizens

Brace Yourselves For a Bracing 2022

 I know it's early days yet, but my nomination for the most annoying phrase of 2022 is "bracing for."

In lieu of paying people to isolate and quarantine during the worst outbreak of Covid-19 yet, our leaders are instructing us to simply brace ourselves for the inevitable. People will simply have to sicken and die if capitalism is to survive. So take one for the team, Proles. Go back to work and school. Take a tip from Joe Biden, who reassured us just the other day that we have every reason to be "optimistic about 2020." After all, if you heard him say that, it means that you survived the First Plague Year and that you are still alive, even if just barely.

 Uncle Joe is adhering perfectly to the modern job description of US presidents. To wit: Always Campaign, Never Govern. Leave the governing and policy formation to the billionaire donor class and to the Pentagon and the CIA. 

So I say give the poor guy a break. Since he was effectively prevented from physically campaigning during the final year of this country's most recent money-soaked perpetual campaign, that's all the more reason for him to go full Proust and search for lost time. He has every reason to be retroactively hopeful about 2020, because his depressing promise to donors that nothing would fundamentally change under his watch is what paradoxically propelled him to his less than stellar victory over Donald Trump.  

Since that miracle occurred, can you really blame him for continuing to indulge in such magical-thinking episodes as insisting that unvaccinated young children will be safe in their unventilated school buildings at the very same time he claims that this is a pandemic of The Willfully Unvaccinated? If he admitted that the current outbreak of the Omicron variant is directly attributable to the parallel pandemic of windfall Wall Street profits and super-spreading corporate greed, not to mention his own failure to prepare and to protect the country, then his snow-job might lose what little magic it still retains. This is despite social media going nuts and describing him as a "bad-ass" for bravely allowing snow to fall upon his heavily guarded self as he alit from Air Force One during this week's blizzard. It's called bracing oneself for low approval ratings amongst multiple bracing catastrophes - in lieu of actually doing anything to help people.

If, Biden insinuates, you can't be optimistic about the fortunes of the weaponized oligarchy, then please just accept your fate so as to appease the mightiest of them all, The Almighty Guy in the Sky. “There’s a lot of reason to be hopeful in 2020. But for God’s sake, please take advantage of what is available,” Biden scolded.

The  other thing that "we" are all supposedly bracing for is the dreaded anniversary of the Capitol Riot, a/k/a the attempted Fascist Coup. They are doing their utmost to make January Sixth the most awesome holy day of national obligation to come around year after year after year since September Eleventh.

Joe Biden will mark the new solemn day of remembrance and fear with a campaign event cast as a  major speech to the Nation - not about improving people's lives, mind you - but about Speaking Truth to Power, carefully limited to Donald Trump's lies. He will not, for example  (as two sources dished to Reuters), touch the voting rights crisis with a ten foot pole.

Good Catholic that he is, Biden should know that January Sixth is also the Feast of the Epiphany, or what Christians used to mark as Twelfth Night back when there was still a long Yuletide season and people weren't forced back to work after only one or two legal days off for the holidays. Besides the name of the day marking the Three Kings' legendary homage to the infant Jesus after following the star of Bethlehem, "epiphany" also describes "a moment when you suddenly see or understand something in a very new or clear way."

And notwithstanding the ruling class's apparent failure to see the Capitol riot and attempted coup not only as a result of Donald Trump's corruption and incitement to violence but at least partly as a manifestation of the legitimate angst of the working class, said working class certainly has signaled its own long-delayed epiphany about how badly neoliberalism has screwed them over for the last 40-plus years. They are quitting their jobs in unprecedented numbers.

 The most recent Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) reveals that a record 4.5 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in November, an increase of more than 380,000 from October 2021. Most of those finally deciding to take this job and shove it were employed in the low-paying hospitality and service sectors, which now advertise the most job openings in the country. At the same time as "the Great Resignation," however, more than six million Americans have gotten new jobs, which ostensibly pay better wages and offer more benefits. After nearly half a century, labor is finally gaining the upper hand again.

No wonder Biden is nostalgic for 2020, when the pandemic and the ruling class's refusal to handle it has rightly weakened the ruling class and strengthened the resolve of the rest of us, shifting our priorities so inexorably that the erstwhile Movers and Shakers are bracing themselves for the Great Revolt following the Great Resignation.

Never ones to let such a serious crisis go to waste, though, they will no doubt pair the January Sixth anniversary with the Nine-Eleven Anniversary to justify the imposition of even more surveillance and repression upon the citizenry, which as a body are simply not going to take any more of it.

Biden can nonsensically call the slowly collapsing ruling order a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" till he's blue in the face, but his swirling, scapegoating blizzard of fear-mongering, alternating with the obligatory insipid platitudes, makes crystal clear to the vast majority of us just what their vile agenda truly is.

Ask yourselves this: why have more 700 alleged Capitol rioters been arrested, but the supposedly reviled and existentially threatening Instigator-in-Chief not only remains free, but continues to grow rich and powerful while holding his political rallies? Could it be because Trump is essentially just the oppositional wing of the ruling oligarchy, and vital to the liberal, "Democratic" party side, because he makes them look so good by comparison? 

Vigilantism and militia movements in service to the ruling class are not just the bailiwick of the right wing faction. As chillingly headlined in the Jan. 5th edition of the New York Times:

While the Justice Department has called the inquiry one of the largest in its history, traditional law enforcement officials have not been acting alone. Working with information from online sleuths who style themselves as “Sedition Hunters,” the authorities have made more than 700 arrests — with little sign of slowing down.

The government estimates that as many as 2,500 people who took part in the events of Jan. 6 could be charged with federal crimes. That includes more than 1,000 incidents that prosecutors believe could be assaults....

But a big question hangs over the prosecutions: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?

So far, the department has provided no public indication of the degree to which it might be pursuing a case against former President Donald J. Trump and the circle of his allies who helped inspire the chaos with their baseless claims of election fraud. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is scheduled to give a speech on Wednesday, one day before the anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, but is not expected to provide any signals about the direction of the department’s investigation. A spokeswoman said he would not address any specific cases or individuals.

It's all about surveilling, intimidating and controlling the masses of people. The rich and powerful make no secret of despising regular people, whom they find convenient to pit against one another by virtue of their alleged cultural differences and political allegiances. They have taken to admitting that their concern about the threat to democracy has nothing to do with the ongoing threat to the lives and livelihoods of actual people.

If the title ("Is Democracy Failing and Putting Our Economic System at Risk?) of a recent Brookings Institution (a neoliberal Democratic Party-aligned think tank) paper doesn't make what the elites are truly bracing for clear enough for mere mortals, then the lead paragraph, penned by a Harvard Business School poobah, certainly should:

"I think the decline of democracy is a mortal threat to the legitimacy and health of capitalism."

Since democracy and capitalism are defined as the exact same thing according to neoliberal ideology, the Demos, or people. are not actually part of this pathocratic equation, are they?

The Brookings Paper, by the way, was produced in conjunction with the neoconservative United States Democracy Center, whose own chilling mission statement is heavy on weaponized police protection of oligarchs to protect them from the Demos. Its board of advisers is a rogues' gallery of Bush-era Iraq War architects, surveillance privateers, military brass and GOP bigwigs who are now finding unabashed common cause with centrist Democrats. This should give absolute lie to the controlled media narrative of "divided government" and congressional gridlock. 

For as long as the bipartisan protect racket can embrace Trump as their main scapegoat, as long as they can delay holding him to account, then their increasingly undemocratic and repressive hold on power will persist.

Their problem is, they just aren't all that bright. 

War On Earth, Bad Vibes To Humans

 For one brief shining moment this past weekend, the New York Times broke out of its role as establishment mouthpiece and publicist for the powerful, and practiced some real journalism. 

"Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure In Deadly Airstrikes" was the banner headline of the two-part blockbuster written by Azmat Khan.  Of course, euphemizing the US government's decade-long campaign of drone terror and mass murder of civilians in the middle East as a tactical "failure" is the very essence of Timesianism.

Still, it's the body of the two-part piece, based upon a five-year-long investigation by the Times - including successful Freedom of Information lawsuits for Pentagon records, visits by reporters to the cratered, ruined physical sites of the atrocities, and interviews with survivors - that should be horrifying all who read it, and more than enough to call Congress back into session to start a full investigation and a full public airing of the smoking gun evidence of some of the worst war crimes in all of recorded history.

Khan writes, 

The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.

The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.

The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”

This was the promise: America’s “extraordinary technology” would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones.

Sadly, though, the timing of the Times in finally choosing to report what outlets like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism were writing about a decade ago was way, way off. Within 24 hours of publication, the war crimes blockbuster was knocked off the top of the digital front page by the utterly shocking news that Joe Manchin was finally done playing with the dead mouse known as the Build Back Better bill. It must be a bit of a relief that the elite movers and shakers and opinion-makers can ignore the mass drone slaughter so smoothly bragged about by Barack Obama, and instead direct all their news-cycle ire against the Democratic Party's latest designated Bad Cop. Manchin had the nerve not only to totally blindside the hapless and lackadaisical and totally complicit Biden, but to go on Fox News, of all places, to make the Big Reveal!

So Biden (who, to his credit, has reportedly greatly decreased the drone murders of innocents abroad) will react by seeming to reverse course and promising to deliver rapid Covid tests to every American household, without people having to go through a predatory insurance middleman after all! Not only that, he has also scored himself a brand new adorable  puppy named Commander.  Heartwarming story upon heartwarming story will make people forget all about their evictions, the resumption of their student loan payments and their lost paychecks due to the increasing number of ad hoc business closures resulting from the Fourth Wave of the pandemic.

Speaking of waves, unindicted war criminal Barack Obama was spotted cavorting in them, just as the big Times story broke, on his annual holiday vacation in Hawaii.

As the Times series on the drone slaughters and their coverups establishes - in case after case after gruesome case -  there has never been any accountability. Any accountability is reserved for the exposers of war crimes, like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale, the former drone operator who was sentenced last June to 45 months in prison for the crime of leaking documents on war crimes to the press - the same kind of documents that the Times now finally sees fit to print, to little or no reaction from either the political class or from the rest of the corporate media. I guess everybody's too busy tweeting about their "mild" Omicron test results while gaslighting the unvaxxed.

Here, meanwhile, is my published response to the Times war crimes story:

As Smedley Butler observed, war is a racket. And as long as members of Congress are among the racketeers, keeping their jobs by providing their districts with military bases, weapons and bomb-manufacturing plants and jobs, and all the countless other perks associated with global, institutionalized terrorism and death, these politicians will never hold their uniformed, hideously be-medaled partners in crime accountable for the atrocities.

What this country needs is another antiwar movement. Easier said than done, of course, given the end of the military draft and the transformation of fighting forces into flying predator and Reaper drones.

At the very least, we should be able to extend our newfound anti-racist "wokeness" to the essential racism that is inherent in all of this slaughter. As Judith Butler has observed, these casualties of war - demeaned as collateral damage and "mistakes that were made" by the generals - amount to deaths that are not deemed to be grievable. No surprise that the US has refused to become a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which is designed to bring justice to war criminals. In fact, Congress even passed a law that any US official arrested overseas on war crimes charges must be rescued by any means necessary. They don't even try to cloak the consciousness of their own guilt.

Revelations as published here should at least put pressure on the Biden administration to drop the charges against Julian Assange.

Well, since I wrote that comment a few days ago, Biden has announced that he is sending everybody in America a free nasal swab, calling out the troops to administer more shots, and showing off his new puppy. So let us all hold our collective breaths while we still have the breath to hold.

The Science of Omnicrap

 "When I was elected," Joe Biden schmoozed to the nation on Monday in an ass-covering attempt to be seen as addressing the variant of the Covid virus being dubbed Omicron, "I said I would always be honest with you. So today, I want to take a few moments to talk about the new Covid variant first identified last week in Southern Africa. It's called the Omnicron."

Since Omni is the Latin root word for all, and Cron is derived from Chron, or time, this wasn't just an ordinary Joe-gaffe.  Biden was simply and honestly signaling that he would continue the grand old presidential tradition of All Bullshit, All the Time. And boy oh boy, did he ever sling it with abandon from behind his Christmas joy-festooned podium on Monday morning.

Let the merry manure-raking begin:

"It is –- and to their credit, the scientific community in South Africa quickly notified the world of the emergence of this new variant.  This kind of transparency is to be encouraged and applauded because it increases our ability to respond quickly to any new threats.  And that’s exactly what we did." 

In the grand old tradition of punishing whistleblowers who embarrass the One Exceptional Nation, while at the same time feigning admiration for whistleblowers who go through proper channels, Biden quickly punished South Africa and adjacent nations on the continent by initiating a travel ban. Said travel ban being delayed by several days and not applying to American citizens vacationing or doing business in southern Africa, both the punitive factor and the bullshit factor are immediately apparent to everybody. But since the objective of the travel ban is pure political theatre - a face-saving gesture to appease the xenophobic right wing of the Duopoly - Biden is largely getting a pass on his stunt in the corporate media. He certainly did not see fit to mention that South Africa is ahead of the vaunted USA in studying the genomic sequencing of the Covid virus - despite the fact that its own population is not as vaccinated against the virus as it should be. This is largely because US-based pharmaceutical giants don't want to give up their patents and profits and distribute their product freely to the rest of the world.

And Biden also neglected to mention that the world's 20 richest countries have received 90 percent of the vaccines, and that six times more booster shots are being given every day in rich countries than first doses are being administered in poor countries. The World Health Organization has aptly called this blatant inequality a scandal, and its leader has called for a moratorium on boosters until the rest of the world has adeguate supplies of the vaccine.  

As reported in The New Republic, the Covid-19 vaccines developed using at least $18 billion of public funds are expected to bring in $100 billion to private companies this year. "And the United States has been jealously guarding the doses it purchased to the point where 15 million vaccine doses were simply thrown out over the last six months." 

Thus the necessity for Biden to openly and honestly wallow in his own omnicrap at Monday's presser:

"It (the  feeble travel ban gesture) gives us time.  It gives us time to take more (propagandistic)  actions, to move quicker (to get our spokespeople on cable and calm the investor class and the Market), to make sure people understand (to gaslight and blame powerless people) you have to get your vaccine. You have to get the shot.  You have to get the — get the booster if you’re -–

"And we’ll fight this variant with scientific and knowledgeable actions, and speed — not chaos and confusion.  And we have more tools today to fight the variant than we’ve ever had before — from vaccines to boosters, to vaccines for children five years and older, and much more."

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets and in the hills. But it will be a cold day in hell before we ever fight to get you the guaranteed single payer health care system you deserve as a basic human right. That is not a tool that the oligarchs who run the place would ever stock in their palatial workshops.

Biden made it abundantly clear on Monday that our neoliberal capitalistic form of government will continue to make the whole world safe from the threat of democracy:

"We do not yet believe that additional measures will be needed.  But so that we are prepared if needed, my team is already working with officials at Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson to develop contingency plans for vaccines or boosters if needed.

We’re throwing everything we can at this virus, tracking it from every angle.  And that’s what we have to keep doing.  That’s how we reopened our country.  That’s how we reopened our businesses.  That’s how we reopened our schools.  That’s how, even with a pandemic, we’ve generated a record job creation, a record economic growth in this country." 

Translation: it will be up to the pharmaceutical billionaire oligarchs making their windfall profits to dictate policy in the interests of themselves and their stockholders. Our elected congress-critters, so cheaply bribed into inaction, are not in the loop. Chemical panaceas that may or may not work will substitute for even short-lived lockdowns, and school and business closings. People don't need more stimulus checks, eviction moratoriums, hospital beds and social services. The oligarchy needs them to keep working at all those newly created jobs and to contribute relentlessly to the record growth of capitalism and profits for the few. Omnicron does not translate into Omnicare.

And forget about the rest of the world. Biden is Trumpily America-First to his very core. He wears his invisible MAGA hat proudly on his pate.

It was no surprise that Biden received no pushback on his priorities from the assembled corporate press corps in the room. A typical question from one reporter:

 "Mr. President, is this the new normal that Americans should expect: anticipating future potential variants?  Should we expect intermittent travel restrictions and potential drops in the stock market going forward?  Do you have any words of reassurance that this won’t become the new normal?"

In other words, the priorities are well-off people getting on airplanes and protecting their stock market investments - not whether ordinary people will needlessly die because they cannot afford to see a doctor when they get sick. Can Biden, for the millionth time, please reassure the nervous rich that nothing in their lives will fundamentally change just because of this pesky old virus? Why, of course he can!

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, to answer your first question first, the answer is: I expect this not to be the new normal. I expect the new normal to be everyone ends up getting vaccinated and the booster shot so we reduce the number of people who aren’t protected to such a low degree that we’re not seeing the spread of these viruses. 

The Same Old Abnormal will go on. The boosters themselves will be free, but universal health care will never be free, because we insist that everyday people should want nothing more than the freedom to shop and pay for whatever basic human right can be commodified for the enrichment of someone else.

 There will be no more lockdowns, because if people who have been shut out of the health care marketplace for years because of lack of money would only get their shots and their boosters, our convoluted logic goes, then there wouldn't be a need for lockdowns and stimulus checks. They must be the entrepreneurs of their own lives. Pandemic or no pandemic, there is no way that neoliberal capitalism is ever again going to pay people to stay home for their own protection. The magic shot is a fair shot at a good shake. It gives your arm the strength to climb up all those Ladders of Opportunity we have so thoughtfully erected for you. And if you were really the responsible entrepreneur of your own life that you should be, you'd even get extra booster shots in both arms to show your economic patriotism!

"We believe the vaccines will continue to provide a degree of protection against severe disease," Biden soothed in the meantime.

Nobody in the press corps asked him if there is a cure for the severe disease known as capitalism. Maybe the refreshing, increasing number of labor strikes in this country and around the world will give the oligarchy the shot in its bloated flabby arm it so sorely needs in order to stop the spread of its gross disease by-products to the rest of us. We need a little Christmas immunity from them, right this very minute!