An Auspicious Start To the New Year

As I write this, Kevin McCarthy just lost the fifth vote in his quest for the speakership of the House of Representatives. Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was spotted strategizing with the very same jerk (Paul Gosar, R-AZ) who was censured last year for posting a cartoon of himself slashing her. Always a quick study, AOC apparently has let bygones be bygones, and is heeding the maxim of Rahm Emanuel, uttered in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown: "You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste."

Or as she laughingly put it, “I think in chaos anything is possible, especially in this era.” 

 All of this chaos and intrigue is unfairly taking the spotlight off the fabulous fabulist who is being shunned by the cool kids in both establishment cliques. Not only is incoming freshman George Santos too stupid to lie and commit fraud skillfully, he has actually admitted to being a fraudster and a liar. This kind of ex post facto honesty simply will not do at Hallowed Halls High School.

Congressional Chaos also makes it easier for the mainstream media to continue ignoring the revelations in the so-called Twitter Files, which essentially prove that the FBI and CIA are engaged up to their eyeballs in the censorship of political speech. The latest scoop from Matt Taibbi is that BMOC (Big Man on Campus) Adam Schiff  personally called for banning a journalist skeptical of his beloved, discredited #RussiaGate franchise.

If you want to learn about this scandal, and other recent revelations of government/corporate censorship and attempted censorship, your only choice is to peruse such right-wing media outlets as Fox News and the New York Post. That is because liberal establishment outlets aren't touching these stories, thereby practicing censorship by omission.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden's own main concern is that the speakership voting chaos is a terrible cosmetic problem for the entire political class hierarchy. And he should know, because despite his own lies about his mediocre academic record, he'd managed to skip the Lower House altogether, matriculating straight to the Senate a whole half-century ago.  

Biden did manage to let some truth escape by admitting that the  keeping up of appearances is the only glue holding the ruling establishment together. The ongoing intramural junior varsity squabble would normally be beneath his notice, were it not for the gawking spectators in the global stands. The lack of decorum and cohesion is terribly embarrassing to him, personally, even as he strives to rise above it all by taking his former frat buddy Mitch McConnell on a joyride aboard Air Force One as a way to brag about doing bipartisan things. This would be the same Mitch McConnell who hazed the whole country by almost single-handedly packing the Supreme Court with far-right ideologues. 

Speaking at the White House on Wednesday before traveling to Kentucky for an event to highlight last year's bipartisan infrastructure law with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Biden said of Republicans, “I hope they get their act together.” Biden said that “the rest of the world is looking” at the chaotic scenes on the House floor but that his focus was on “getting things done.”

One of the things Biden is not getting done is returning the millions of dollars of campaign cash donated by indicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. And anyway, "getting things done" iis just bipartisan-speak for reducing social benefits to everyday people while funding the US hegemon's endless wars and corporate welfare packages and paranoid surveillance activities.

Therefore chaos at the very highest levels of government should instill just a wee smidgen of hope in the rest of us. Oppression delayed is oppression denied, even if it's only for one more day, until somebody gets bribed, and caves, and then it's trumpeted as a victory for democracy.

Happy New Year, fellow Sardonickists!

Amtrak Joe To the Working Class: Drop Dead

Perhaps even more stunning than the Biden administration's announcement that it will side with the railroad barons over the workers being denied sick leave is its cavalier assumption that any blowback from congressional Democrats and their constituents will be minimal to non-existent. 

In ramming the White House-brokered contract through Congress despite it being voted down by the railroad rank-and-file, Joe Biden tries to have it both ways, posturing as the most pro-labor president in history but nonetheless putting the profits of the owners and investors above the health and well-being of union members.  His mild criticism of the greed of the owners and investors was not only unaccompanied by any demand that Congress provide paid sick days and guaranteed family time to the workers - it also came with the standard "divide and conquer" rhetoric. If the railroad workers do strike, he claimed, it will ruin Christmas for all the other hard-working families in the United States. Therefore, the railroad workers must sacrifice their own health and safety to ensure the health and safety of everybody else. Of course, his occult meaning is that the health and safety of corporate profits take precedence over all else.

He is not too subtly directing us to direct our ire at our fellow working class victims instead of right where it belongs: at the oligarchs and at craven politicians like him.

His actual mealy-mouthed words:

“As a proud pro-labor President, I am reluctant to override the ratification procedures and the views of those who voted against the agreement. But in this case — where the economic impact of a shutdown would hurt millions of other working people and families — I believe Congress must use its powers to adopt this deal.”

The New York Times itself gave loyal cover to Biden by dutifully framing the issue around the damage to the "economy" that a strike would do, and the dire trickle-down effects on everyday Americans, should this group of other everyday Americans persist in putting their own basic human rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness above the needs of their capitalist overlords.

 Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress vowed on Tuesday to pass legislation averting a nationwide rail strike, saying they agreed with President Biden that a work stoppage during the holidays next month would disrupt shipping and deal a devastating blow to the nation’s economy.

The rare bipartisan promise to act came as some of the nation’s largest business groups warned of dire consequences from a rail shutdown. Mr. Biden, who had promised to be the most pro-union president in the country’s history, said the federal government must short-circuit collective bargaining in this case for the good of the country as a whole.

Much to the apparent shock of all concerned, though, worker solidarity has raised its righteous head, not only in the more than 1,000 comments posted by a surprisingly outraged Times readership, but from criticism from all across the allegedly "polarized" electorate, very much siding with the rail workers over the corrupt political duopoly, the CEOs, and magnate Warren Buffett. As a result, the Times later revised the article, adding a hastily tacked-on promise from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

Late Tuesday, facing substantial frustration among progressives who demanded that the offer include paid leave, Ms. Pelosi said she would also bring up a separate proposal to add seven days of paid sick leave to the agreement. It is unclear whether Republicans in the Senate would agree to such an addition, but the plan to hold a vote illustrated the degree of discontent among pro-union liberals about the agreement Mr. Biden had struck.

Beware, however, of that cagey "separate proposal" language. As we have seen too many times before, Pelosi's shtick is to urge her caucus to first vote for the corporation-friendly legislation as the necessary prelude for any progressive add-ons. And then all it takes is for one useful idiot like Joe Manchin to break his promise to vote for the separate package. Oops.

The Democrats also persist in pushing the "greater evil" narrative of how much more cruel the slim Republican House majority would be to workers when they take office in January. Therefore, their tired old twisted logic goes, it is kinder to deny them their sick days and leisure time now, lest the GOP do something really awful, like reducing their wages on top of forcing them to be on-call around the clock.

According to Politico, even Senator Bernie Sanders has reserved his own ire for the railroad industry,, carefully refraining from criticizing his good friend Joe Biden for so cravenly doing the industry's bidding.

The most that Sanders or any other senator can do is slightly delay the enshrinement of this contract into law.

Congress and the Democrats will do nothing, even as Republicans like Marco Rubio gleefully attack them from the left for betraying the working class.

So it's up to us to shock the Democrats out of the complacency they're currently enjoying for the feat of not losing as badly to the GOP as had been forecast. Call your congress-critters, and express solidarity with the men and women whose very bodies are so shackled to their stressful jobs that the term "wage slave" is not hyperbolic when it comes to describing them.

It's long past time that the ruling class and their political servants and their media lackeys stop viewing us as mere consumers, whether it be of cheap electronics or of their own platitude-layered cruelty and cowardice.

That propaganda fabric wore thin a long time ago. Since the Emperor has no clothes, we should stop pretending that he does. I hope the railroad workers do go out on strike, and then we'll see how fast these naked overlords cave. A general strike might not be such a bad idea either.

Biden's Speech: Control Vs Chaos

Joe Biden seems to have finally abandoned his Dark Brandon persona. On Wednesday, he debuted as the hapless Maxwell Smart vs the Dark Forces.

 He told the electorate that the only thing we have to fear is Chaos itself. Or in the worst case scenario, KAOS, which ranks right up there with the Armageddon SOS that he gave to some rich donors awhile back. 

 Would you believe that the most dastardly villain in all of American history has never been criminally charged for instigating a riot in the Capitol nearly two years ago? Nor has he been charged with any number of other crimes related to his attempted overturning of the 2020 election results. Because having Donald Trump rotting in a Club Fed somewhere instead of freely spinning his dark sticky web all over the World Order would rob the Democrats of their whole reason for existing. Without a hit show with which to titillate and scare the voters in the audience, they might even be forced to address some their own political malpractice. The relentless bipartisan robbing and exploitation of the poor to reward the rich is what created their Trump monster in the first place.

They don't want to touch the financial plights of the electorate with a ten-foot pole. They want people to forget about their rent being too damned high, and eggs costing $4 or $5 or $6 a dozen. With our very Democracy at stake, and KAOS knocking at the door, shelter and food should be the least of our worries. And why waste time fretting about catching COVID for the third or fourth time, with hundreds of Americans still dying from it every single day, when the much more lethal plague of Election Denialism is sweeping the country?

Biden apparently had no other choice but to ignore the poor and the struggling. Logically enough, he thus began his appeal for votes by bemoaning the recent shocking attack on an uber-wealthy member of the political aristocracy:

Good evening, everyone.

Just a few days ago, a little before 2:30 a.m. in the morning, a man smashed the back windows and broke into the home of the speaker of the House of Representatives, the third-highest-ranking official in America. He carried in his backpack zip ties, duct tape, rope and a hammer.

As he told the police, he had come looking for Nancy Pelosi to take her hostage, to interrogate her, to threaten to break her kneecaps. But she wasn’t there. Her husband, my friend Paul Pelosi, was home alone. The assailant tried to take Paul hostage. He woke him up, and he wanted to tie him up. The assailant ended up using a hammer to smash Paul’s skull. Thankfully, by the grace of God, Paul survived.

Biden evokes an image of Paul as an aging Macaulay Culkin, home all alone, forgotten and abandoned. Or at least that's the impression I got from his intro. I'd previously been thinking of Paul Pelosi as a latter-day Louis XVI, who in the alternate history version, is cruelly abandoned by Marie Antoinette to the mob at the very height of the French Revolution. What with Our Democracy supposedly in so much danger, the reported lack of security at the Pelosi manse is especially baffling. Then again, the Democratic Party also has been bankrolling extreme right-wingers in the midterms, under the weird theory that they're so nuts they could not possibly win against a centrist establishment Dem. Until, of course, they do.

OK, so now that Biden has completely convinced the peasants to be sympathetic to the person commonly - or should I say royally - described as being "second in line to the presidency", he will now convince them to be secondarily sympathetic with the various low-level, local election officials and other courtiers whose secondary lives also have been threatened by The Mob. It was an appeal to a more virtuous form of unthinking patriotism, or robotic nationalism:

 My fellow Americans, we’re facing a defining moment, an inflection point. We must with one overwhelming unified voice speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America. Whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans. No place, period. No place ever.

Biden did not go so far as to order federal troops to guard these threatened polling places, or to request that the United Nations send in monitors to validate the balloting and counting, as is done in other, less exceptional banana republics. Rather, he wants powerless regular people to "stand up" for the carefully selected elite candidates in both establishment parties and to protect the feckless Democrats by electing even more feckless Democrats.

 Standing up for ourselves? That can wait for another time, I reckon.

Biden hinted that despite the looming political apocalypse, he will indeed work with the far-right authoritarian Republicans and wannabe dictators after the elections:

I know there’s a lot at stake in these midterm elections, from our economy, to the safety of our streets, to our personal freedoms, to the future of health care and Social Security, Medicare. It’s all important. But we’ll have our differences, we’ll have our difference of opinion. And that’s what it’s supposed to be.

Ominous, because as someone who has called for cutting Social Security and Medicare for his entire half-century as an elected official, Biden intimates he'll be just as willing to wheel and deal with the GOP over "reforms" as he ever was - just as previous modern Democratic presidents have done when they've conveniently lost their congressional majorities in mid-term elections. "And that's what its supposed to be" could be interpreted as Biden's staunch devotion to bipartisan neoliberal tradition.

What is KAOS today will be magically transformed right back to Control tomorrow.

Your own everyday trials and tribulations  will have to wait until all the theatrical  plutocratic infighting, presented for the horrified entertainment of the public, is over and done with. And then its on to the next cliff-hanging episode in which they will have to punish you in order to save you. 

 

Uncle Joe's Folksy Foolery

The New York Times did a deep dive into its thesaurus over the weekend, and came up burbling more euphemisms and excuses for Joe Biden's serial lying habit than I ever thought could be contained in just one little "think-piece."

Such infamous whoppers as Biden claiming personal involvement and even arrests in civil rights protests, his house once almost burning to the ground after a lightning strike, his going to college on a full scholarship and graduating at the top of his law school class, his theft of a British politician's hard-luck life story all get explained away by the Times and its sources. The lies are magically transformed into "embellishments," "exaggerations," "folksiness," "yarn-spinning," "grandfatherly," and "relatable story-telling."

Biden's apologists both inside and outside of the White House bizarrely cast his serial prevarications as proof of what a decent, honest man he truly is. What in lesser mortals might be diagnosed as a profound character flaw or a personality disorder becomes empathy gone wild in the president of the United States. Biden tells his self-aggrandizing lies purely out of selfless concern for, and solidarity with, the common man.

 “President Biden has brought honesty and integrity back to the Oval Office,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman. “Like he promised, he gives the American people the truth right from the shoulder and takes pride in being straight with the country about his agenda and his values; including by sharing life experiences that have shaped his outlook and that hardworking people relate to.”

The Times then reverts to formula, covering its own journalistic ass by allowing a contrarian ethicist to briefly weigh in and to actually utter the words "lies" and "falsehoods" as they pertain to Biden. However, this pseudo-balancing act comes only after several paragraphs of defensive bathos,  and only after the obligatory observation that Donald Trump is the undisputed grand champion of presidential lying. He set the bar conveniently low for Biden and for all presidents. Truth and lies - and their importance - now might as well be included in the doctrine of Unitary Executive Power, in which US presidents redefine not only the Constitution, but reality itself, bequeathing their pathologies to their successors and enshrining them as the "new normal" - or, if you will, Normalcy, which Calvin Coolidge effectively decreed would replace the word "normality" in the dictionary. 

Meanwhile, assuming that the Times is wrong, and that you actually do care about Biden's lies as well as about the possible blowback from his bellicose rhetoric, how can you tell when he is, in fact, lying?  Could he possibly be as much a chronic liar as, say, the stereotypical teenager?

Probably not, but there are a few "tells" to help those of you who think that Uncle Joe's folksy warning last week (to a roomful of billionaires with deep donor pockets) about the coming Armageddon could indicate a disturbing cross between Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried Wolf. 

Whenever Biden moves his mouth, and intersperses a remark or an anecdote or a doomsday warning with the phrases "This is the God's honest truth," "I give you my word as a Biden, " No Joke!," "This Is Not Hyperbole" or "No Lie!" grab the salt shaker off the table pronto, and take it with the requisite grain or two.

The context and the settings in which he says stuff are also important clues. For example, if he reminisces about growing up among Puerto Ricans during a visit to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, your confabulation-detector should start buzzing right away.

This also applies to the luxury setting last week in which he recklessly sounded the alarm about nuclear Armageddon.  According to the press pool report of the private event, Biden meandered through his standard talking points before concluding with Putin:

We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. Weve got a guy I know fairly well, he said of Putin. Hes not joking (my bold) when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is you might say significantly underperforming. I don't think there's any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon. I didnt realize how much serious damage the previous administration did to our foreign policy.

Pool listened to the remarks from a staircase next to the room where the event was taking place and could not see much. Looked like there were large art pieces on every wall around the room. We were ushered out at 7:53 as Sen. Peters took the mic. We came in as James Murdoch was introducing the president. There was a lectern set up but the President moved to the middle of the room.

So... is Biden's assertion that Putin is not "joking" a tacit acknowledgment that it takes a liar to know a liar? What's more, Putin did not so much directly threaten nuclear war in a speech last week as he observed that the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of World War II. Whether this should be interpreted as a veiled threat is up for debate.

It's telling that the press were crammed into a stairwell during the glitzy fundraiser and thus could see neither Biden's facial expression nor those of his audience. Were these wealthy people looking fidgety and bored as the president droned on and on with his standard stump speech? Did Biden sense this, and think he could get them to write bigger checks if he put a little unscripted folksy nuclear fear into the mix?

After all, thanks to the Citizens United ruling, unlimited dollars are weighted votes with a lot more power than the standard human vote. And billionaires are a pretty paranoid bunch to begin with. Just look as Jeff Bezos thinking he can escape the global catastrophes that obscene wealth has wrought by colonizing Mars. Just think about Mark Zuckerberg urging everyone to don one of his reality-denying headsets and join him in an alternate cartoon Metaverse. 

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them. – Elena Gorokhova

Biden's Dicey Cancer Moonshot

In vowing to "end cancer as we know it" within 25 years, President Biden expressed hope that his utopian medical vision will finally unite and rally all Americans. That's because the country's second leading cause of death affects Democrats and Republicans in roughly equal numbers. Are there any other kind of people besides Democrats and Republicans?

Biden and the courtiers of the corporate press are hoping you won't notice that his "public/private" Cancer Moonshot Initiative effectively puts the immediate interests of capitalist predators above the interests of the cancer patients of the future. Why else would he appoint the vice president of a troubled research lab called Ginkgo Bioworks to run the new research bureau (ARPA-H) at the National Institutes For Health (NIH)? Could it be because Master of the Universe and philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates owns a major stake in Ginkgo as well as enjoying a longstanding major financial "partnership" with the NIH itself? So far, nobody's saying. 

Actually, Gates was one of the first investors in Ginkgo, before Harry Sloan, a former CEO of MGM, took the youngish company public last year with one of those shady SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) public offerings - whereupon smaller, subsequent investors (not Gates, of course) lost a lot of money and are now suing the firm for fraud in a class-action lawsuit. The plaintiff calls it "a colossal scam" and the company "a Frankenstein mash-up of the worst frauds in the past 20 years." If you didn't read or hear about this particular scandal in any mainstream media account of the Biden announcement, it's because the mainstream media didn't mention it. As we all know, if reliable mainstream media sources don't mention something, then it must not exist. At least Google searches haven't suppressed it, yet.

Sloan himself sits on the Board of Directors at Gingko. Not a bad gig for a guy who got his start in Hollywood doing entertainment law.

As a matter of fact, Joe Biden's praise of his own cancer initiative and his choice to lead it are eerily reminiscent of the time he got scammed into praising Elizabeth Holmes and her Theranos lab. You may remember that Holmes hoodwinked politicians and deep-pocketed investors alike with her outlandish claim she'd invented an i-Pod sized device that could analyze just one single drop of blood and diagnose a whole panoply of diseases. Here's what Biden gushed at his Kennedy Center event on Monday:

Imagine a simple blood test during an annual physical that could detect cancer early, where the chance of a cure are best.

Imagine getting a simple shot instead of a grueling chemo or getting a pill from a local pharmacy instead of invasive treatments and long hospital stays.

Imagine treatments beyond cancer. Bold approaches to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity, something Vice President Harris is laser — laser-focused on.

Imagine if more than 800 rural hospitals weren't at risk of closure  because they are "underperforming." Imagine if a recent study hadn't shown that cancer patients living in 160 poor counties weren't dying at 20 times the rate of those in better-off counties. Imagine if there was government-run single payer health insurance. Imagine if Joe Biden hadn't forgotten to implement a public health insurance option the minute he was elected president. Imagine if nobody called you a divisive unicorn whenever you called for a better, more equitable world.

  Meanwhile, I didn't mean to imply that Dr. Renee Wegrzyn herself is an unqualified fraudster like Elizabeth Holmes. In fact, her credentials seem impeccable - a Ph.D. in applied biology as well as previous revolving-door stints at DARPA, the government's Defense Advanced Research Agency and the Intelligence Advanced Research  Projects Agency Activity in the field of biosecurity. It's her current employer and its shadowy funding and shadowy research that deserve more scrutiny. Not that DARPA doesn't deserve a lot more scrutiny itself, come to think of it. 

Gingko's website does have a very Frankenstein-ish vibe, bragging that its aim is to "keep biology weird" by doing things like manufacturing its own cells and DNA. I can see why Bill Gates, who's been described as a "bio-predator" by author and activist Vandana Shiva for his crusade to data-mine plant DNA and alter seeds and patent them, thereby putting small subsistence farmers of the world out of business, is into proprietary human genetic engineering. It's just a hop, skip and a jump from the plant to the animal kingdom and all the glorious patents to be had by those in the know.

Coincidentally, US Bancorp of Delaware (Biden's home state) just  purchased almost 250,000 shares of Ginkgo stock.

But even the MIT Technology Review people have their doubts about the company and its CEO, Jason Kelly, who actually does sound like a clone of Elizabeth Holmes. Reporter Antonio Regolado writes,

Given Kelly’s spiel, it is surprising that 13 years after it was founded, Ginkgo can’t name a single significant product that is manufactured and sold using its organisms. To the company’s fans, that’s no problem. They say Ginkgo embodies the biggest trends in DNA science and surely will become the Intel, Microsoft, or Amazon of biology. Kelly has compared Ginkgo to all three. To skeptics, however, Ginkgo is a company with modest scientific achievements and little revenue, and its greatest talents lie in winning glowing press coverage and raising money.

Thanks a lot, Biden!

Tellingly, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was absent from the elite scrum at the Cancer Moonshot fest at the Kennedy Center. She recently launched an investigation and issued a scathing report on the "SPAC Hack" empire from which Gingko has achieved its dubious $15 billion valuation based upon zero accomplishments. Warren is sponsoring legislation which would sew up the loopholes that allow SPACs to make outlandish claims that enrich people like Bill Gates while bilking "everyday investors."