You Are Expendable

 Of course, you already knew that. But now that the political apparatchik ostensibly in charge of national "disease control" has admitted that the running of the "economy" is more important than controlling diseases, all the platitudes in the world aren't going to do the overlord class a damned bit of good any more.

Just weeks after President Biden warned of a winter of pain and death from the COVID-19 pandemic, his administration has not just stopped at abruptly shortening by half the time that infected "asymptomatic" or exposed people must isolate. They can now return to work without the benefit of testing to determine whether they are sick and/or pose a risk to others. A winter of pain and death, no matter how annoying or scary it may sound, must never stand in the way of capitalism, or what the officials are euphemizing  as "everyday life."

Their convoluted logic is that since the Omicron variant of the disease itself is spreading so quickly, then people have to get over it even more quickly. You're in a race against your own bodily functions and response to viruses! You are, after all, an entrepreneur of your own health. Vax early, vax often. Be sure to hate and fear the unvaxxed and unboosted as you go responsibly about your own assigned task of wellness. 

These affected workers, the politicians and paid-for health experts tacitly acknowledge, do not come from the ranks of the Clerisy, or from the Professional-Managerial Class, who may continue to work safely and remotely from their homes if that is their preference. Those being precipitously forced back to work are from the service economy: the flight attendants, the teachers, the nurses, the cleaners, the food servers, the retail staffers - just about anybody, really, that the upper classes deem to be essential to their own comfort and well-being.

A flight is a terrible thing to cancel. Children, too, must continue to learn to compete in improperly ventilated buildings, even though more of them are getting hospitalized from the Omicron variant, and the under-fives are not even yet eligible for the vaccine.

The new recommendations “balance what we know about the spread of the virus and the protection provided by vaccination and booster doses,” inanely remarked Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control. “These updates ensure people can safely continue their daily lives.”

Walensky did not offer one shred of evidence that halving the isolation time without follow-up testing ensures that people can be safe. She didn't mention that vaccinated people can still infect others if they have a breakthrough case. She didn't mention that the airline industry put pressure on the CDC to ease restrictions affecting their bottom line. So much for all the virtue-signaling talk from enlightened liberals about following The Science ™. She is unabashedly engaging in magical thinking at best, or cynically flouting her brand-new credentials from the Dr. Oz School of Charlatanry at worst.

As for Biden, he seems to have just given up, pivoting from waging a war on COVID to pleading that COVID is not really his problem. Here he is, via the New York Times, taking a page straight out of the Republican playbook of bashing centralized federal solutions to problems and crises, and championing states' rights instead:

In a conference call with governors on Monday, President Biden spoke of cooperation at various levels of government. Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas, praised the president’s plan to give away 500 million rapid at-home tests, but said that federal efforts to stanch the infections must yield to state remedies.

 “Look, there is no federal solution,” Mr. Biden replied. “This gets solved at the state level.”

"Ultimately it gets down to where the rubber meets the road, and that’s where the patient is in need of help or preventing the need for help,” he added.

The best translation I can come up with for that glob of gibberish is that Biden is throwing tens of millions of Americans right under the neoliberal wheels of the bus that go round and round. And it will be up to the roadkill patients themselves to get help. Or, if they are irresponsibly unvaxxed or unboosted, they are not to expect any help at all from the government. And that includes scoring those free at-home tests that Biden may or may not provide.

Medical ethicists may be aghast and appalled at the ignorance and cruelty on full display at the very highest levels of the Bipartisan Party (h/t Gary Shteyngart), but CEOs and corporate boards and investors are ecstatic about the recent Expendability Directive, especially if they themselves have the luxury of working remotely and not having to risk being infected by the forced labor pool. 

As one Ivy League health expert cherry-picked by the Times put it about the lack of testing at the end of the new truncated isolation periods: "Given the tests are not widely available it's a reasonable approach."

He may as well have said that given the lack of food, allowing people to starve to death is also a reasonable approach. It's all about the enlightened laws of Cause and Effect. 

And just as "everyday life" is their code for working till you drop, the constant litany of Follow the Science™  turns out to be nothing but plutocratic code for their true and everlasting mantra: Follow the Money.

The Grotesque Meanness of Exceptional USA

Now that they've passed the all important milestone of announcing that yes, Virginia, there will indeed be deep cuts in their own social welfare legislation to satisfy their needy corporate owners, the Democrats are regaling us with much hand-wringing over just how miserable they can make us without coming off like the mean jerks that many of them are.

The current narrative has them babbling over whether 'tis better for their re-election chances to give some of the people the least possible amount of bare-bones relief most of the time, or whether 'tis better to give all of the people slightly more bare bones relief for the shortest time possible.  

To means-test new social programs or not to means-test them? That is the manufactured question.

Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the Democrats' current chief of the Bad Cop police, is all for means-testing stuff like universal subsidized pre-school, lest the One Exceptional Nation turn into an "entitlement society" for everyone who is not already filthy rich by virtue (or vice) of being the entitled scion of a coal mining dynasty who in turn sired a pharmaceutical baroness who nearly sextupled the price of life-saving EpiPens that prevent susceptible people from succumbing to anaphylactic shock if they're exposed to something as innocuous as a peanut  or a strawberry.

To counter that pathological Manchean meanness, House Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal is mulling a scheme which would give most people - even high earners - subsidized child care and direct cash aid, and dental care when they get old. To placate Manchin and other professional greedsters, though, these and other "sweeping" universal relief programs would only last for a couple of years, or at least until after the 2022 midterms. Because even if (when) the Republicans take back Congress, the Democratic calculus goes, it will be hard for even permanent de facto President Mitch McConnell to yank these goodies away from constituents. The programs will be so popular, even with diehard Trump loyalists. that the pitchforks will be out for the GOP rather than for the designated Marxist Commies of the corporate DNC. Or at least that's the hope.

Both parties have traditionally been loath to just give people money with no strings attached, money which doesn't go through a middleman like a corporate employer airily promising to create new jobs in return for tax-free sweetheart deals involving public land in "opportunity zones", or the property developer who pockets millions of dollars in public money to build luxury housing for the rich while setting aside a few "affordable" units and inviting thousands of poor people to compete for a slim chance to win a lease on one of them.

The halcyon days of stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, eviction moratoria, and cost-free medical care for Covid are long over. All that direct cash aid lifted people out of poverty, big-time. All that guaranteed housing security and freedom from wage slavery at precarious jobs lifted a weight off people they barely knew they'd been suffocating under until it was gone.  

This peace of mind and happiness on such a grand scale simply will not do. The State of Exception that was the Covid pandemic has been declared officially over, despite the fact that it is far from over. If it isn't quite over, the elites of the ruling class scold, it's all the fault of the willfully unvaccinated spreading their germs and their Trumpian ideologies to the righteous liberals who had so responsibly gotten their own jabs many months ago. No matter that a good percentage of people who have not been vaccinated are uninsured and live in poor or rural areas and have not enjoyed he privilege of "accessing" any kind of health care at all for themselves for entire decades, and who therefore don't trust the medical-industrial complex all that much. No matter that many, if not most, of the unvaccinated do not have paid time off to deal with the side effects of the shots. Why else would low-paid workers wait until the last possible minute to finally get vaccinated - that is, when they were threatened with the loss of those jobs?

Capitalism's response to Covid is not only a shameful public health scandal in the richest country on the planet, it has devolved into a closed political and culture war feedback loop of Maskers vs Anti-Maskers, Vaxxed vs Unvaxxed - with the central battlefield becoming the already-embattled and newly reopened public school system.

If America did not already have a public school system, you can rest assured that Congress would be fighting over means-testing all the potential pupils. But since America already does have a public school system, they've had to settle for dismantling and/or defunding it. 

Public education is largely though not exclusively funded through property taxation, ensuring that rich neighborhoods have the best schools. Meanwhile, private equity vultures and other investors place bets on "charter schools" in poorer neighborhoods and treat kids like regimented cattle futures. The word "public" has become increasingly selective and exclusionary.

Meanness is baked right in to the DNA of the ruling elites. But to deflect our attention from this universal truth, these same ruling elites are in a veritable sanctimonious frenzy of pitting people against one another. It's a Hobbesian war of all against all on crack and steroids. So it's no surprise that a Korean series called Squid Game is the most popular thing on Netflix right now. You can never get enough bare survival drama, especially if you're at least flush with enough spare cash to be able to afford to watch other people compete to simply live other day from within the comfort of your own home.

And not for nothing is the economic war on the poor and working class being waged in tandem with the war on women newly surged by the grotesque cabal of black-robed Puritan fundamentalists on the Supreme Court. The Texas abortion ban is nothing if not an anti-Enlightenment evolutionary throwback.

So what better time than Indigenous Peoples Day (formerly known as Columbus Day) and the season of Halloween than to acknowledge that the eternal Witch Hunt has always been an integral weapon in the class war of the rich against the rest of us?

As Marxist critic and feminist Silvia Federici observes, 

What has remained unacknowledged is that, like the slave trade and the extermination of the indigenous populations in the New World, the witch hunt stands at a crossroad of a cluster of social processes that paved the way for the rise of the modern capitalist world...

The African slaves, the expropriated peasants of Africa and Latin America, and the massacred native population of North America become the kin of the sixteenth and seventeenth century European witches who, like them, saw their common lands taken away, experienced the hunger produced by the move to cash crops, and saw their resistance persecuted as a sign of a diabolical pact.

To extrapolate from Federici's thesis, then, what's the difference between "the woman burned at the stake for raising her pitchfork against the tax collector," and the women of Texas now being denied their reproductive rights by the paid moralizers of the oligarchy?

These right wing functionaries and pathocrats could not care less about the "right to life". What they do care about is controlling the bodies, minds and spirits of the dispossessed. Whether it's by forcing a woman to carry an unwanted and largely unaffordable pregnancy to term, and then refusing government help to the family while forcing women back to low-paid jobs right in the middle of a pandemic, it's all the same old story of oppression. 

Even the "good" rulers of the Democratic Party punish the poor of all genders by forcing them to jump through myriad bureaucratic hoops and to abjectly grovel for every last morsel of grudging relief. The poor must be controlled, punished and surveilled, whether it be from a place of liberal kindness or conservative callousness. If programs like government-subsidized child care were guaranteed for both the rich and the poor, there could be no shame, no punishment and no continued surveillance. And there would, perhaps, not be as much resentment among people and silo-ing of political interest groups trucking in outrage. Solidarity might actually stand a chance!

As the New York Times has just reported, the United States spends only $500 per year per toddler for nursery care, compared to an average of $14,000 in other advanced countries. America is indeed the One Exceptional Nation. If the ruling elites bearing their meager time-limited gifts can't make us sweat and ruthlessly compete against one another as we kiss their rings, then what possible good is their largesse?

To take just one recent example of their stingily charitable mindset, the federal government's multibillion dollar Emergency Rental Assistance Program was designed not so much as a tenant relief program as it was a landlord bailout program. In most states, all back rent awarded goes not to the tenant but directly to the landlord, who is not even legally required to accept the funds. In New York state alone, two thirds of the funds provisionally approved after lengthy delays are not yet disbursed, simply because landlords are not cooperating. They apparently relish the physical power they have over tenants, by way of evictions and extreme rent increases, more than they value getting their past-due rent money into their bank accounts.

As Bryce Covert writes in The New Republic:

Having children is the single greatest predictor of whether someone will face eviction. It can be difficult to make rent and support a family, especially for women of color, who on average are paid less than white women, and single mothers living on one paycheck. Landlords—eager for an excuse to rid themselves of tenants whose children might cause noise complaints or property damage, or for whom lead hazards have to be abated or child services called—are often all too happy to begin eviction proceedings.

When you consider that the vast majority of tenants who are behind in their rent, both in New York and nationally, are single women with children, the simultaneous imposition of draconian anti-abortion laws makes the essential witch-hunt aspect of neoliberal capitalism all that more grotesque.

Gargoyles of the Oligarchy: High Relief For Me, But Not For Thee

The Milk of Human Cruelty

If you thought the kidnapping and imprisonment of 3,000 children by ICE thugs was cruel and inhuman, then get a load of this: 

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.

Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.

It gets worse. As the New York Times reports, not only did the American delegation refuse to introduce the resolution, it threatened every single country intending to support it with economic sanctions for failure to privilege the profits of infant formula manufacturers over the health of babies.

When the unnamed US delegates' attempt to destroy the resolution (through removal of language touting the benefits of breastfeeding over bottle feeding) failed, they got downright nasty. They effectively tried turning nursing mothers and babies into enemy combatants in Donald Trump's global trade war.

Ecuador, which originally had been slated to introduce the resolution, was the first to get the Tony Soprano treatment. Not only would it lose money, it would lose military assistance from the United States. It was an offer that Ecuador couldn't refuse, and so it immediately caved. Other nations, mostly in Africa, which hosts at least one American military base in each country of that continent, also refused to go against the world's sole remaining Superpower. Ditto for many countries in Latin America. They fell like dominoes under the onslaught of the Orange Scare.

But despair not! Because this story of attempted blackmail and extortion does have a somewhat happy ending:

 In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.

 "We’re not trying to be a hero here, but we feel that it is wrong when a big country tries to push around some very small countries, especially on an issue that is really important for the rest of the world,” said the delegate, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

He said the United States did not directly pressure Moscow to back away from the measure. Nevertheless, the American delegation sought to wear down the other participants through procedural maneuvers in a series of meetings that stretched on for two days, an unexpectedly long period.

In the end, the United States was largely unsuccessful. The final resolution preserved most of the original wording, though American negotiators did get language removed that called on the W.H.O. to provide technical support to member states seeking to halt “inappropriate promotion of foods for infants and young children.”

The United States also insisted that the words “evidence-based” accompany references to long-established initiatives that promote breast-feeding, which critics described as a ploy that could be used to undermine programs that provide parents with feeding advice and support.

Perhaps the Russians stepping in and saving the day is why there hasn't been very much news coverage and media-manufactured outrage about the Trump administration's latest attempt to cull the world of disposable people.

 The outrage is definitely justified. Because by proactively performing the extermination ritual early, as soon after birth as is inhumanely possible, the Trump regime wants nothing less than to prevent kids from ever having the health and the strength to toddle across our precious borders.

So the positive interference by Russia simply does not compute in the corporate media hive-mind. Election-meddling and democracy-destroying and (alleged) Novichok-poisoning Russians acting in a humane manner? If it's not a fluke, then they have to have ulterior motives. They just have to. 

 Besides, the Democrats are way too busy exposing the "right to life" hypocrisy of the Republicans as Trump announces his next anti-abortion Supreme Court justice to fret overly much about global injustices. Even the plight of the imprisoned 3,000 Central American children is beginning to fade from the Official Narrative thanks to the latest conservative judge becoming the greatest threat to democracy this country has ever seen.

Even if he is ever directly confronted over his deranged horror of breast milk, Donald Trump will no doubt do what Donald Trump does best: fly in the face of all fact, and declare the Resolution passage to be a win.* Not only is it a victory against "evidence-based" science which proves that breast milk is rich in antibodies, it is a victory for infant formula manufacturers in particular and the junk food advertising industry in general. Thanks to pressure from Trump, countries which want to warn their citizens about the health dangers of foods laden down with salt and sugar will no longer get technical support and financial resources from W.H.O.

Donald Trump is trying to make the world safe for Nestle, Similac... and Doritos. And, it should be fairly obvious, he wants to quit W.H.O. itself, if not utterly destroy it.

Nestle will continue marketing its powdered infant formula in countries with untreated drinking water. It will continue extracting water for its bottling empire even from areas in the United States which are going dry from climate change. And in perhaps the cruelest extraction of all, it will continue removing potable groundwater from the lead-poisoned Flint, Michigan area. And government officials will continue refusing to supply clean bottled water to the lead-poisoned residents of Flint.

For its own Make America Great Again part, the Trump administration unabashedly would rather see an estimated 800,000 children die every year around the world for lack of breastfeeding than see one dollar lost to unfettered capital. They'd rather that the global corporations already gifted with recent tax cuts to such an obscene state of record corpulence also get to suck up the estimated $300 billion saved in annual health costs through the breastfeeding of babies.

The Trump Collective's war against infant nutrition gives a whole new grotesque meaning to the balloon facsimile of a Baby Trump which is set to float above London this week in protest of his visit. The Baby-in-Chief literally wants to snatch food from the mouths of babes.

Not that the liberal #Resistance isn't also complicit in the relentless "herd-culling" all over the world. The poor are scapegoated for being too many and therefore responsible for their own plights. Overpopulation is regularly tsk-tsked by elites as being the main threat to our endangered planet, while the plunder and predation and pollution by oil companies and other extractors (including the Pentagon) are given a relative free pass. 

The Trump administration is only the latest and clankiest link in the long chain of capitalistic cruelty.

Philosopher Etienne Balibar observed that this institutional cruelty seeks both to "eliminate human beings, and to remove the humanity from human beings."

This dual cruelty is now right out in the open under Trump.

The first type, which Balibar calls ultraobjective cruelty, treats people as things or useless remnants. The second - ultrasubjective cruelty - treats people as evil incarnate, devils or dangerous animals which threaten us and must be eliminated at all costs. The intended targets are simultaneously portrayed as both subhuman and superhuman.

 Racism is at the root of this cruelty, Balibar asserted, and it, too, is manifested in two main ways. First there are the outright murders (an estimated three per day in the US by domestic law enforcement) and the maltreatment of immigrants by the unaccountable ICE police force. Second are the usually invisible social and economic exclusions meted out on a daily basis to groups which have been designated as superfluous: the poor, the young, the old, the darker-hued, the disabled, the sick.

So it's absolutely a straight line from Trump's exclusion of black and brown families from his father's New York City rental empire to his current exclusions, both actual and attempted, of black and brown people from what he's called "shit hole countries". Capitalism under Trump is even trying to exclude people from something so basically life-protecting and universal as human breast milk. 

"So cruelty is not just one form of extreme violence," Balibar said. "It is violence that can oscillate in unmediated fashion, between ultra-naturalistic, anonymous forms and an impulse toward suicide and criminal compulsion."

Trump has fetishized hate and fear to such an extent that he doesn't even seem to care if he destroys whole countries, including his own, in the process. He would rather America died than have it contaminated by nonexistent bogeymen. And with an approval rating hovering around the 40-45% range, he is definitely not alone in his thought processes.

Tellingly, none of the American thugs and blackmailers present at the United Nations conference has been identified by name. The delegates and lobbyists prefer to remain anonymous for the protection of their own cruelty and violence. And the participants who recounted the threats and blackmail to the media also prefer to remain anonymous for fear of further retaliation from the Trump administration.

As the New York Times reported, 

Although lobbyists from the baby food industry attended the meetings in Geneva, health advocates said they saw no direct evidence that they played a role in Washington’s strong-arm tactics. The $70 billion industry, which is dominated by a handful of American and European companies, has seen sales flatten in wealthy countries in recent years, as more women embrace breast-feeding. Over all, global sales are expected to rise by 4 percent in 2018, according to Euromonitor, with most of that growth occurring in developing nations.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

* Trump considered the Times revelations about his reps' shilling for powdered formula moguls at the UN health meeting to be confrontational enough to merit his tweeting displeasure:

The failing NY Times Fake News story today about breast feeding must be called out. The U.S. strongly supports breast feeding but we don’t believe women should be denied access to formula. Many women need this option because of malnutrition and poverty.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2018

What an ignorant doofus. Breastfeeding ability does not correlate with poverty, nor do women need "access to formula" because of alleged malnutrition, although an adequate diet certainly helps. If they can't afford food, how can they possibly afford pricey formula? I suppose what Trump and his oligarchic buddies are aiming for are strong-arm deals with despots in poor countries. It would go something like this: you guys pass a law requiring women to bottle-feed, and we'll help you loot your treasury in exchange for whole shiploads full of the powder substitute we can't sell enough of in the United States. The only women still having babies are affluent enough and educated enough to reject the powdery crap in favor of the healthy natural stuff their own bodies produce.

So since the oligarchs and the media they own can't fool all the people all of the time, they'll settle for fooling some of the most vulnerable and poorest people on earth. Trump's whole career has been based on the marketing of lies for his own gain, so why wouldn't he lie about breastfeeding too?

Pssst... and he really doesn't like women very much. The sight of a breastfeeding mother probably makes him feel very jealous as well as insecure. Leave to Trump to broadcast his misogyny by making women feel insecure and doubtful about their unique ability to nurture another human being.

The brilliant people who'll be flying the Trump baby replica over London this week couldn't have chosen a better time for their stunt.