A Fascist Pep Talk

In order to maintain its status as "the most lethal fighting force the world has ever known," America must keep waging its endless wars all around the world.

So pronounced "Defense" Secretary Lloyd C. Austiin III to a roomful of weapons manufacturers and venture capitalists and congressional hawks and Silicon Valley moguls and corporate media stars at the Reagan Library's annual security confab in Simi Valley, California over the weekend. He was the keynote speaker at the event, which also featured a cozy "fireside chat" by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and a panel discussion on defending the Monroe Doctrine led for some unknown reason by tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale. Karl Turdblossom "we create our own reality" Rove was also at the confab, as were the CEO of Boeing and executives from G.E. (pays no taxes) and Microsoft. It was a veritable Who's Who of Who Runs the World.

Since he was among friends, Austin made sure to lighten up the politics of death with a few folksy Ronald Reagan anecdotes, to much appreciative laughter. But he also made Senator Lindsay Graham very mad by suggestiing how civilian deaths in Gaza be slightly minimized. Anything less than calling for the total annihilation of two million Palestinians makes you a complete dove, groused Graham later on CNN.

Austin also toned down his bellicose rhetoric just long enough to brag that any Iraqis whose lives he saved balanced out all the Iraqi lives he helped to end in that illegal war. As a veteran expert in the type of urban warfare the Israelis are waging in Gaza, Austin is directly advising them how to paint a humanitarian face on atrocity by such gimmicks as drawing detailed evacuation maps for Palestinians trying to escape the carnage. Not that this will prevent all deaths of innocent children, of course, but at least they will be seen as trying. Austin also told the assembled overlords that he has even courageously warned the Israel government on how far is too far.

  Meanwhile, the US will continue providing billions of dollars in bombs and other hardware to Israel, with absolutely no strings attached. He just politely asked that they not kill anyl more civilians than are absolutely necessary, Because even if you win the war you can still lose strategically. You can erode all that legendary global good will.

There is apparently no downside in emphasizing the windfall war profits accruing from the mass death of populations that simply are not deemed to be grief-worthy  Austin sounded every inch the fascist demagogue in the bulk of his speech. Not only is he the first non-civilian US defense secretary ever to be appointed, but he came to the post directly from the Board of Directors of Raytheon - which is among the weapons manufacturers supplying both Ukraine and Israel.

Here are just a few chilling snippets from Austin's long, and long-winded, pep talk to the masters of war:  

You know, our competitors don’t have to operate under continuing resolutions. And so, doing so erodes both our security and our ability to compete.

Austin is actually whining about the requirement that Congress has to bother itself rubberstamping a trillion dollars in war appropriations every single year. As the biggest "most lethal fighting force the world has ever known," with US combat troops in 169 countries and some 750 military bases around the world, even to go through the motions of a democratic process before being able to killi people is too much. It gives such an unfair advantage to authoritarian leaders who hate us for our democracy. Waaahhhhhh!

You know, only one country on Earth can provide the kind of leadership that this moment demands. And only one country can consistently provide the powerful combination of innovation, ingenuity, and idealism—and of free minds, free enterprise, and free people.And that’s the United States of America.

[Applause]

Of course they applaud. For General Austin has just admitted the war is essentially a business enterprise. The moguls in the audience stay free by staying obscenely rich. Freedom's just another word for exploiting poor and working people, wherever on this small planet they happen to live.

We’re living through challenging times. That includes the major catonflicts facing our fellow democracies, Israel and Ukraine; bullying and coercion from an increasingly assertive China; and a worldwide battle between democracy and autocracy.

Ukraine's "democracy" is questionable, given that President Zelensky has outlawed independent reporting in his country. Nor can an apartheid state like Israel be considered a democracy; even before October 7th, Bibi Netanyahu was trying to abolish his country's judiciary. That Austin would then harp on China, with its grand total of one military base outside its borders,, being a "bully" is a pretty pathetic case of Freudian projection. He thinks it's a bully because its economy is booming. And thus, besides drawing his cartoon maps for Gaza evacuation, Austin and the rest of the military-industrial complex are hankering for war with China. Think of all the profits for the few, right before everybody gets nuked.

American leadership rallies our allies and partners to uphold our shared security. And it inspires ordinary people around the world to work together toward a brighter future.

Unfortunately for Austin and his cohort, the "brighter future" that ordinary people all over the world are working for is aimed squarely at stopping war. He has apparently drawn a map inside his head where the streets are not filled with anti-genocide protesters. Either that, or he simply wants to make his entitled audience feel confident that everyday people are so stupid as to be awed by such constant overdoses of weaponized palaver.

1.   But the troubles of our times will only grow worse without strong and steady American leadership to defend the rules-based international order that keeps us all safe.

Have you noticed that nobody ever defines this "rules-based international order" so frequently bandied about these days by the ruling class? By my count,  Austin himself uttered this ubiquitous knee-jerk mantra a total of four  times in just this one speech. What precisely are these rules, and who made them? Nobody, certainly has asked the inspired people looking for a brighter future in the future. But by nattering it often enough, perhaps they hope to cow us into just shutting up, lest we inadvertently break one of their mysterious rules. I'll hazard a wild guess, though, that censorship is a big fat part of it.

You know, in every generation, some Americans prefer isolation to engagement—and they try to pull up the drawbridge. They try to kick loose the cornerstone of American leadership. And they try to undermine the security architecture that has produced decades of prosperity without great-power war.

This was where Austin obliquely criticizes the antiwar, anti-genocide movement exploding all over the world. In so doing, he sugar-coats the near constant regime change wars and unilateral attacks by the US on less powerful countries as tantamount to "great prosperity for his audience. He barely avoided the Orwellian "war is peace" canard.

While bemoaning Vladimir Putin's cruelty and championing the Ukrainian troops- including the fascistic Azov battalion - as freedom fighters, Austin portrays the Hamas militants as terrorists and the Zionist slaughter of some 15,000 Palestinians as "self-defense."

Read the rest of the speech (linked in second paragraph above)  or watch it on Youtube if you have the time and the stomach. There are so many glowing references to Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden sprinkled throughout that you're liable to get these goofy old dementos mixed up if you aren't careful. Actually all the presidents in recent memory have sounded exactly like Lloyd Austin in their unrelenting grotesque mixture of good cheer and fear-fomenting.

New York Times Is A-Wastin'

 After enduring almost two weeks of "live updates" on the progress of Queen Elizabeth's corpse, we're now being subjected to the Paper of Record's gimmick of affixing time limits to most of its online articles. Before you click on a story, you're advised how many minutes it should take you to read it.

Taking Friday's digital homepage as an example, don't even bother clicking on a piece about Russian war crimes unless you have three minutes to spare out of your busy day. For those of you wanton enough to have an additional five minutes of time, you are then invited to take a gander at "the markets" having an anxiety attack about the return of trickle-down economics to the U.K.

But Donald Trump's legal woes? They are so rampant and the walls are closing in so fast, that you are allotted seven minutes, which is one whole minute more than the reading time that the Times devoted to the sudden death of celebrated writer Hilary Mantel. The trials and tribulations of actress Constance Wu, however, have been deemed deserving of more than double the time, at 15 minutes. Constance Wu times out at Number One on the Times time-sweepstakes homepage today.

Of course, the Gray Lady is only playing catch-up with myriad other click-bait sites that are starved both for eyeballs and for the lowering attention spans of reading-exhausted consumers of online content, piquantly known as "doom-scrollers" by the Times and other purveyors of doom and fear on the Internet.

Who gets to decide how much time it takes to read an article, anyway? I am forming a picture in my head of 10 or 12 Times employees assigned to the Daily Reading Test Desk. After everybody reports his or her time spent reading a piece, the results are then collated and averaged out and affixed right below the article, in lieu of a byline.

For a country sinking lower and lower in all kinds of metrics, ranging from democracy to human rights to education to health to life expectancy and beyond, a country where the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has just recommended anxiety screenings for all adults under age 65, the imposition of a reading-time challenge to our doom-scrolling habit seems a bit cruel, not to mention anxiety-inducing.

Then again, this is a country whose president just gratuitously announced the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, when at least 400 Americans are still dying from it every single day, and countless thousands or even millions more, world-wide, are suffering from long COVID. They love to count minutes. But mortality and morbidity? Who has the time for it?

Thus, in the grand scheme of things, my pet peeve with the timed-reading craze might seem silly. But it's all of a piece with the relentless rule of neoliberal capitalism. It's sending the subliminal message that you have only so much time to absorb news and information. You might be on an unpaid work break, and have to quickly decide which story you have time to read. Or you may be a deliberative reader who likes to savor and ponder and take your time over what you read, and who feels offended and judged. You may find the suggested reading times on articles to be an unnecessary distraction, or even a bad recurring dream of those timed school exams that you forgot to study for.

You may be so anxious trying to read the timed Times stories that you keep checking the clock after every paragraph, and then you waste more time when you can't find your place and you have to start all over again, checking and re-checking the clock and discovering that a whole half-hour has passed and you still have literally no idea of what you just read.

You may become so obsessed with timing yourself on the Times that you are failing to read carefully and critically and forgetting to question the anonymous sourcing of the story that claims Russian soldiers are raping children as young as four years old.

That seems to be the whole point, doesn't it? Abandon critical thinking and learn to swallow propaganda without a fuss, all the while competing in a race against time and against yourself, the only goal being to cross the finish line before the buzzer. You will feel smugly well-informed at the same time that you enjoy your status as an efficient user of precious time. You will get high for whole minutes at a time on the essential oil of stultifying neoliberal capitalism.

The suggested reading times that are now affixed to Times articles as important as climate change and the pandemic, and as inconsequential as the new cast of Saturday Night Live, seem to be all of a piece with the "surface reading" craze so trenchantly criticized by Robert T. Tally in his new pro-critique book, "For a Ruthless Campaign Against All That Exists."

His criticism is mostly leveled against academics who are choosing to ditch critical theory in college literature studies, in favor of faster, shallower reading of texts - that is, without delving too deeply and without questioning too much, and without running the risk of using one's own imagination to draw conclusions and form new interpretations  Tally writes:

"The critic's enemy is thus any who would attempt to limit that imagination, and in particular, who would undermine literature's capacity for or effectiveness in empowering the imagination. Critique therefore has a fundamentally political vocation: it is called to challenge the forces of the status quo, to oppose the tyranny of 'what is' and to seek out potential alternatives."

It goes for books and it should go for news outlets as well. The practice of the New York Times suddenly appending time limits to articles is a bit on the tyrannical side, wouldn't you say? Not only is the "Paper of Record" relentlessly broadcasting the ruling class's propaganda, it finds it necessary to wield an annoying supplementary cudgel to control and enforce our very ability to read, to know, and to think.

I don't care what they proclaim. There is just no way to fully comprehend a David Brooks or a Tom Friedman or a Paul Krugman column in just the four minutes allotted. For one thing, you'd never have time to click on all the embedded links to their sources to find out just which oligarchic think tank is paying that particular source. The rise in bile lasts at least four minutes before you're not even halfway through the essay.

Your manufactured ignorance as an anxious, hurry-up consumer of the digital word is their bliss. So resist! Take all the perusal time you need. Be self-indulgent, and reread whole paragraphs at your leisure, and at their peril. If needed, take a mental antacid break to ease any symptoms of neoliberal reflux disease, and then re-consume with abandon.

The only clock you'll ever need when reading the New York Times is the alarm kind in your brain that goes off only when you read slowly and carefully enough to sniff out the Gray Lady bullshit, whether it be of the fast-flowing or the constipated variety.

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 Horses' Asses of the Apocalypse

 It took a valiant effort, but Joe Biden managed to use practically every cliché in the book to try and explain away the horror of Haitian refugees getting whipped and prodded like cattle by the Horsemen of the Homeland Apocalypse (aka, the Border Patrol.)

 After assuring a reporter that he takes "full responsibility" for the cruel treatment of the migrants, Biden quickly cast the blame upon everyone and anyone but himself. He even seemed to blame the actual victims when he garbled: "To see people treated like they did, horses barely running them over and people being strapped. It was outrageous. I promise those people will pay.”

He is already seeing to it that one subset of "those people" will pay immediately, without so much as a court hearing on their asylum requests, by being shackled and herded onto gleaming airplanes, to be unceremoniously dumped into their ravaged native land, regardless of the fact that many have not lived in their native land for years and have no home to go back to.

Or, "those people" could mean the Homeland cowboys, who were legislated into being after 9/11 with the great enthusiasm and a very hearty thumbs-up from then-Senator Joe Biden himself. The president is now trying to pretend they are a bunch of outlaws who are not operating under the direct and explicit orders of the United States government. Biden is just sorry that they got caught doing the jobs that they were hired and trained to do, and acting like they were enjoying themselves.

Biden therefore announced that the Department of Homeland Security will be investigating itself and leveling "consequences" upon person or persons or scapegoats unknown. Some 20-year-old kids will be no doubt be perp-walked, much as the US Army grunts like Lindy England were, when all on their own under orders, they tortured Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Meanwhile, it seems like only last month when Biden promised "consequences" for the deaths of US troops in Afghanistan, and his  military minions promptly launched a Reaper drone attack against an innocent Afghan family, the designated "those people."  A mistake was made, but only because the US government got caught. Collateral damage happens. War is foggy, you see.

The worst thing about the atrocious treatment of the Haitian refugees for Biden, though, is that the photographic evidence of systemic US cruelty - rather than the cruelty itself - is an embarrassment to him personally. It makes him look bad, especially when the images were released just as he was belligerently touting American peace, love, democracy and freedom to the rest of the world at the United Nations' annual summit this week.

“It’s an embarrassment. It’s beyond an embarrassment. It’s dangerous, it’s wrong, it sends the wrong message around the world or sends the wrong message at home," he fumed, ending his spiel with the obligatory "It's not who we are!"

It's hard to emphasize enough just how craven and downright psychopathic this statement is. Biden is saying right out loud that he is more concerned with the optics of the situation than he is with the suffering of the potentially thousands of desperate human beings that he is deporting without so much as a court hearing. His spin doctor, Jen Psaki, had been equally callous the day before when she glibly announced that in the immediate future, Homeland cowboys will not be deployed in open spaces where they can be seen and photographed whipping people. Homeland Security has traditionally mounted their horses to go after migrants in areas with tall grass, where  crueltyis less likely to witnessed and documented. More discreet methods of detention and expulsion will be used for the Haitian asylum seekers, so as to avoid upsetting Joe Biden and his party and his donors.

Not that his erstwhile defenders and enablers were all that enchanted with Status Quo Joe before the refugees began arriving in Del Rio, Texas. The tide of elite opinion had already begun to turn against him when he ended their extremely lucrative two decade-long adventure in Afghanistan. His saber-rattling against China, meanwhile, is making the oligarchs nervous because of all the lucrative business deals and investments that they have there.

It's gotten so bad for Biden, in fact, that even the long media embargo on Hunter Biden's laptop scandal is finally beginning to be lifted. Joe Biden's own Justice Department also has implicated his national security adviser, the former Clinton campaign operative Jake Sullivan, in the criminal indictment of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussman and by extension, the entire #Russiagate franchise scam.

Perhaps worst of all for Biden, mainstream media outlets, including the Paper of Record, are even beginning to compare him to Donald Trump. 

Naturally, this orchestrated weakening of Joe Biden by the elites dovetails perfectly with their orchestrated weakening of his Build Back Better legislation, which they despise because it threatens to give people a pathetic modicum of relief from their elite-orchestrated hardships. Not for nothing has the establishment media long overpraised Biden's underdone agenda as a "sweeping" progressive undertaking, the likes of which have not been seen since the New Deal. They were hyping it with a frenzy, inspiring the desired paranoia in the wealthy pathocratic class. Now they're in the next phase, lowering our expectations and preparing the ground for the final collapse. 

To make the letdown complete, they've not forgotten to add the traditional Debt Ceiling manufactured crisis and countdown to Shutdown Armageddon to the orchestrated mix. They're reckoning that once again, people will be so abjectly grateful to their leaders for reaching a compromise at the last possible minute, ensuring that at least the woefully inadequate Social Security checks will still be going out, that they'll forget all about all the broken promises.

Meanwhile, we'll always have their clichés to tide us over. As reported by The Hill about the legislative negotiations:

A senior Democratic aide said the revenue framework will serve as a template for negotiations with moderate Democrats on the size and scope of the bill. (Nancy) Pelosi called it a "giant step forward."

Some rank and file Democrats complained they have absolutely no idea what this language even means for the "larger process." But recognizing the "mounting pressure to show movement," The Hill continues, "Biden stepped up and held meetings with moderates and progressives from both parties."

What, you expected him to step up and mount a horse and start whipping them into shape and finally doing right by the people who elected him, and them?

Notwithstanding that the phrase "moderates and progressives from both parties" is not only a disinformation embarrassment but an act of journalistic malpractice, let's remember that whips and chains are reserved only for the most desperate members of the human race. The elites have their frameworks and their templates and their arcane processes to propel them in their ever more gigantic steps forward to power and wealth at the expense of everyone else.

A Nine-Eleven State of Mind (lessness)

The official mantra being intoned ad infinitum throughout the world today is "Never forget."

But notwithstanding the surface appearance of soul-searching with all the maudlin remembrances by the mainstream media in the wake of the "official" end to the Afghanistan War, there's still quite a bit of selective memory at work to help keep the mythology of "we were attacked for no reason other than they hate us for our freedoms" alive. The common 20th anniversary critique still hinges mainly on the overreaction to the attack by our leaders, and not what caused the attacks in the first place: the abandonment by the CIA of its Al Qaeda creation and its valuable asset in the proxy war against the then-USSR - a disgruntled Saudi ex-royal named Osama bin Laden.

As you probably heard, the CIA has embarked on a marketing campaign to display its softer side through the magic of Woke-Washing. As long as they hire more women and ethnic groups to prove their diversity cred while not actually diverging from their core mission of relentless regime changes, dirty wars and other rogue activities, then it's all good.

The New York Times's Maureen Dowd, therefore, dutifully bashed the "toxic masculinity" and machismo of the Bush and Trump administrations as the root cause for post-9/11 insanity and war, while also owning that such female hawks as Condi Rice and Hillary Clinton were enablers of same. But Hillary was mentioned only insofar that as a senator, she had voted with the Bushies to invade Iraq. Left unmentioned by Dowd was her later outsize role, as Obama's secretary of state, in the war of aggression against Libya and its oil.

Dowd actually characterized the media-hyped nutritious sandwich filling that was Barack Obama a "respite" from GOP male supremacy.

My response to the Times:

The "respite" that was the Obama presidency is a matter of style rather than substance. Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations revealed in 2016 that his administration had dropped an average of 72 bombs a day, for a grand total of 26,171 in just that one year alone. Obama also vastly improved upon Bush's deadly record by expanding the secretive Special Ops campaigns to more than 70 percent of the entire globe, or 138 separate countries. So is it righteous to give Obama a pass for a "respite" just because he was the model of adult discretion and didn't wear his macho bellicosity on his sleeve like the oafish Bush and Trump? I think not, but telling the truth might destroy the carefully marketed mythology. Maureen Dowd does have a point about women leaders not being more peace-loving and kind than men. Who can ever forget Madeline Albright enthusing that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children during Clinton-era sanctions were "worth it?" And then there was Hillary Clinton laughingly bragging that "we came, we saw, he died" upon receiving news that Libyan president Gaddafi had just been sodomized to death with a bayonet. Libya, by the way, has become a modern slavery marketplace since Clinton played a major role in the "humanitarian intervention." The official "forever war" in Afghanistan may be over as far as US boots on the ground are concerned. Try telling that to the seven Afghan children killed by a US Reaper drone strike just the other week.

9/11/21:The Usual Suspects Perform

It could have been worse. George W. could have shown up and shared another piece of candy with Michelle while Bruce Springsteen crooned and strummed to the crowd in an act of anesthetized and sanitized remembrance.

People's Party Seeks Skilled People To Work Without Pay

Whenever an organization claims that one its core missions is to achieve a living wage and economic justice for all, but it then proceeds to advertise a whole slew of time-consuming, unsalaried professional jobs in media and graphic design, you can pretty much assume that it's the same old neoliberal bullshit dressed up in the usual shiny progressive veneer. As long as you're "passionate" about social and economic justice, the stilted pitch implies, the need to eat and pay rent becomes superfluous.

Such is the disillusioning case with Nick Brana's "Movement for a People's Party" PAC, which burst upon the scene last summer to much fanfare and special appearances and endorsements by the usual YouTube celebrities and everybody who's anybody on the progressive scene. Yours truly, usually a tad on the cynical side, was initially so impressed by all the earnest enthusiasm that I posted their entire five-hour streamed inaugural marathon right here on these pages, and also signed up for their email list.

 At first quite sporadic, these emails have begun arriving in my inbox at a faster clip in the past few weeks. All of them ask for a 10 dollar donation through a fundraising app. A reader of this blog was getting the same emails, so he emailed me, asking if I'd look into the group. 

My advice: donor beware. First of all, this is not a political party. It was incorporated in 2017 in the State of Michigan as a non-profit political action group called People For a Working Democracy. According to the most recent IRS filing available online, in 2020 it collected $75,000 in small donations in the last two months of the year. The group spent the bulk of this money on trademarked merchandise, legal fees, web services, a donation processing app, logo design, video conferencing fees and other business-related services. No donations were used for candidate recruitment and training, which was the stated goal and purpose of the People's Party PAC. To be fair, they were still setting up shop at the time. The real tell won't come until the 2022 filings, with donations and media presence largely expanded and when details like salaries and expenditures for candidates and local campaigns must be reported under law.

Let's talk more about the money. The recent MPP emails mostly come from Zeynab Day, just hired by Brana to be his PAC's executive director. Until this past February, Ms. Day had been employed by a different PAC called Brand New Congress (BNC), itself an offshoot of the Justice Democrats PAC, which is most famous for recruiting and training Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of The Squad.

According to a post on her Twitter account, Day was fired as BNC's communications director because of the abuse, inequity and rampant miscommunication among its Board of Directors, salaried workers and unpaid volunteers. She wanted to be transparent about it, but she didn't really communicate whether or not these nonspecific workplace issues and anonymous staff complaints had anything to do with conflicts between the salaried employees and the unpaid volunteers.

Before herself becoming a top salaried internal employee of Brand New Congress, Ms. Day had been listed by the Open Secrets website, which exposes the money in politics, as the group's top "vendor/recipient," collecting $96,693 for her consulting work for the PAC in 2020.

Anyway, let's get back to the job listings at the MPP PAC. Before you can even apply for an unpaid position, you must first read the section about being a good person who is always kind to her fellow workplace "beings."

Without the People's Party sternly admonishing its worker-peeps to "avoid perpetrating violence against one another, whether it be physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual," who knows what mayhem might otherwise ensue in the paid/unpaid workforce? Most potential bosses, after all, only brag that they are equal opportunity employers, not the referees in a boxing ring or wardens in a prison on the verge of an inmate riot.  I wonder if mass mayhem has been a problem in the past, or whether the MPP PAC staffers are only paranoid about being viewed as either bullying Bernie Bros, or their Bro-victims in waiting. Could they really be so terrified of having their very souls sucked out of their bodies by spiritual abusers? 

So just in case you do volunteer, only to later feel like the soul is getting sucked out of you so hard that you want to assault the "being" in the next cubicle, you will be duly and cordially invited to appear before the People's Party "Regenerative Culture Circle." This mental health opportunity applies to suckers and suckees alike.  You will have the free choice of offering testimony in front of the Full Circle, or you may engage privately with one special counselor in order to reach specific goals, ranging from Support to Prevention to Intervention to Redress to.... Transformation. 

If you want even more cult in your culture, let it also be known that the People's Party PAC will tolerate no criticism either of itself or of its paid or unpaid workers to people outside of the Circle of the organization. Job applicants are also admonished never to bring any of their violent tendencies outside of the healing safety of the cult party.

As we strive to grow the movement, we also look to minimize the risk of government repression. In a nonviolent and open setting like ours, it is unacceptable and unsafe to discuss or engage in actions that involve violence or property destruction. Governments have a long history of heightened repression to those actions.

To that end, the People's Party takes a tip from the same neoconservative US surveillance state which it purports to despise, and adds this nugget to its Volunteer Manifesto:

We affirm the need to balance transparency and security. Anyone bringing another individual to a demonstration or other action should provide the details necessary for risk assessment (tactic, tone, etc). However, it should be remembered that this is a public organizing space, that our ability to vet participants is limited, and that actions can be and have been compromised by excessive transparency.

Now that we've all gone perfectly clear, can we please, please, please finally check out those unsalaried jobs and their stringent requirements?

Your wish is my command, but let's keep this inside info just between us for now, okay? They want to get the word out, but not to get it out to the wrong people.

 Position title

Social Media Contributor - Twitter

Description

The People's Party is looking to recruit passionate people with significant social media experience who would like to contribute their time on a volunteer basis to build a new major political party.

About Us

Our aim is to represent the interests of the wide majority of the people and create a system to sustainably maximize well-being for ALL.

We believe we all deserve a system that honors everyone for the content of their character, not the color of their skin, the land where they happened to be born, or the numbers in their bank account. One that brings powerful law-breakers to justice. One that makes sure the planet and it's (sic) magnificent beings are cared for before any corporation exec’s profit margins. One where the power of our nation’s wealth serves all of us, not just failed banks or masters of war.

It is our goal to change hearts and minds, unify around a revolutionary progressive platform, and activate people to build a mass movement by organizing around progressive issues and initiatives with allied groups to network our movement, unions, and organizations into a coalition.

We are creating a culture of care, respect and healthy collaboration and teamwork. We embrace diversity and avoid perpetrating violence against one another, whether it be physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual. We aim to foster a compassionate environment that supports and uplifts people. With these principles and goals in mind, we commit ourselves to our community guidelines.

We are currently building the party state by state and working on our first slate of candidates.

Responsibilities

• Attend bi-weekly Media & Messaging Working Group meetings
• Attend Twitter Circle meetings
• Create social media posts
• Curate content
• Research
• Write social media plans
• Manage social media accounts
• Work with the Creative Arts Working Group to create visual content
• Respond to social media messages

Qualifications

• You are passionate about building a major new political party
• You recognize that the current two party duopoly cannot be reformed from within
• You have significant social media admin experience, either from a volunteer or paid position
• You have experience as a Instagram admin of or contributor to a large account
• You have experience working on a team
• You're a quick learner
• You think outside the box
• You agree to our community guidelines

The positions described here are volunteer positions, to be performed on a purely voluntary basis, with no payment or expectation of payment from the People’s Party or anyone else. Volunteers selected for these positions are not employees of or independent contractors with the People’s Party.

Apply Now

Other pay-less media jobs in the Passionate Peeps PAC are similarly pitched, with the same grandstanding, virtue-signaling, collective passion-generating rhetoric to get candidates all fired up and ready to volunteer for the ephemeral cause. Think outside the box even as you remain strictly confined within the Circle!    

If art is your shtick, but you don't think you have the talent of a Hunter Biden in order to justify selling your paintings for as much as $500,000 apiece to anonymous buyers, then you might as well work against The Man by joining the Peeps. Salivate over this opportunity if you dare, but please remember to drool nonviolently:

Responsibilities

• Attend Creative Arts Working Group meetings
• Help dream up and create graphics for our website, emails, social media, advertising, and more
• Work in a team environment

Qualifications

• You are passionate about building a major new political party
• You recognize that the current two party duopoly cannot be reformed from within
• You have graphic design experience
• You can provide examples of your relevant work
• You have the necessary software for the positive (for example Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, etc.)
• You have experience working on a team
• You're a quick learner
• You think outside the box
• You agree to our community guidelines

MPP, in its no-pay job postings, effectively acknowledges the truth that it is not - at least not yet - a real political party in any sense of the word, with no bylaws or formal platform beyond the nearly identical talking points and sloganeering of the Squad, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress and any number of other PACs,  progressive Democratic veal pens and the echo chamber microphones of hundreds of YouTube celebrities. Its creation of a top-down "mass movement" betrays its modeling and direct evolution from Nick Brana's Our Revolution fundraising PAC.

 Brana, the national outreach director of Sanders's first primary campaign, had found himself out of a job when his "Draft Bernie" campaign to lead a new party flopped after Hillary Clinton won the 2016 nomination - and Bernie not only stayed with the Democrats, he ignored Brana.  MPP seems to aspire for parity with the larger, much older and more established Working Families Party, which itself is also not an independent third party. It functions mainly to put progressive pressure on Democratic candidates before endorsing them in local, state and federal elections, thus giving liberal politicians the opportunity to appear on a second ballot line on Election Day. Politicians openly drool over these endorsements The most notorious recent example is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who courted the WFP endorsement in 2014 when progressive anti-corruption candidate Zephyr Teachout was threatening him with such a strong primary challenge that even the staid New York Times backed her upstart candidacy.

 Once Cuomo nonetheless shockingly won the WFP endorsement by gaslighting the Families party before going on to win the Democratic primary, he promptly thumbed his nose at the "third" party by suddenly losing all of his newfound progressivism. He made it a giant middle finger, just in case, by also launching his very own fourth party, which he cynically named The Women's Party. In the next election, when the WFP endorsed Cynthia Nixon over Cuomo in the primary, they still granted Cuomo the ballot line in the general in the interests of their own continuing viability.

The Trotskyites over at the World Socialist Website had the "pseudo-left" MPP pegged as "unserious" as soon as it streamed its inaugural convention, aptly noting that Brana had invited the libertarian former Minnesota governor, Jesse Ventura, to be a featured speaker. Ventura ostentatiously wore a Navy SEAL pin during his endorsement of the People's Party, perhaps to hammer home the point that anti-war activism is not, to put it charitably, high on their bucket list.

In fact, most of the featured speakers urged a nose-holding vote for Joe Biden, if only to defeat the unfriendlier Trumpian style of fascism. Only journalist Chris Hedges denounced both establishment parties and criticized Bernie Sanders as a sheepdog herding disaffected citizens into the Democratic fold. Another keynote speaker, firebrand Nina Turner, is now running for a House seat on the Democratic primary ticket. There is no more talk from her about forming a third party, of the People or otherwise.

Here's my take. The People's Party PAC is just one small moving part in the dysfunction, finger-pointing and backbiting currently roiling what Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs once derisively called "the professional left." If you tune in to one of the many progressive YouTube channels, you're more likely to hear endless discussions about the ugly feud between The Young Turks and journalist Aaron Mate than you are to learn about such policy matters as Medicare For All and the increasingly prevalent wildcat strikes which are getting far less attention than they deserve. Maybe it's because they're not properly registered as PACs or are otherwise drawing outside the lines of electoral politics.

As a former MPP volunteer described it last month on the "Rising" program, her experience with Brana's organization was not only depressing, it was chaotic. Instead of plotting direct actions or recruiting candidates, she said that staffers in her particular New York group ended up debating about whether white people should be allowed to use the N word. Apparently, the issue was considered rectified when, she asserted, all the black volunteers were summarily purged by PAC leaders from the group before they ever had a chance to appear before one of those creepy Circle tribunals.

    Notwithstanding the conservative-leaning "Rising's" own possible motives in airing the dirty linen in Brana's PAC, racial tensions among liberals and progressives do exist. So do class tensions. That's the secret that they don't want leaked out, especially to their enemies on the professional right, who will have an absolute field day with it. So the racism and racialism component in all the recent in-fighting in progressive groups should be openly discussed, not euphemized or suppressed. Above all, the race and "woke" angle's purpose and provenance should be recognized for what they are: a very powerful divide-and-conquer, gaslighting, guilt-inducing means of control by the ruling elites over the rest of us. This has been going on in America since at least the late 17th century, when the very concept of race was first manufactured, to become an article of faith and so very, very lucrative for the owning classes down through the generations.

It's capitalism itself which ultimately survives and thrives on the elites' controlling and exploitative ''divisiveness" narrative. It's reached the point that progressive groups find themselves conducting internal witch hunts and using authoritarian measures just to avoid being labeled as racists or sexists.

The gaslit end up becoming the gaslighters, huddling within their repressive circles and conducting secretive purges from within their own ranks to retain what little power they still have left.