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. 

 

Then As Farce

The People's Party, which made its national debut to much progressive fanfare a couple of years ago, is now ginning up enthusiasm for the presidential candidacy of YouTube personality and standup comic Jimmy Dore.

Why not? Ukraine elected a TV comedian as its own president, and Volodomyr Z. certainly has set establishment and media hearts a-thumping all across the A to Be duopoly back here in the States. Let's face it - after the electorate getting relentlessly regaled by matinee idol Barack Obama and tabloid charlatan Donald Trump, contemporary politicians almost have to be pre-existing celebrities in order to capture any public attention at all.

 Donald Trump won in the GOP primaries because he acted more like a Borsht Belt comic in the Don Rickles genre than the standard noxious cutout Republicans on the 2016 debate stage. Even if you logically thought the guy was a clear and present danger to the earth and all humanity, you couldn't help but appreciate the zingers he aimed at Jeb! Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and that whole free-market gang.

Hillary Clinton certainly was no match for him. All he had to do was juxtapose his boundary-free media persona against this bellicose and humorless former Goldwater Girl, and the victory was his. As long as a life-long grifter can make you laugh right along with him as he makes your grievances and your darkest unspoken impulses his very own - with no punishment and with such an outlandish reward for him - then at least you don't feel so all alone in the world... for whole minutes at a time.

Joe Biden, sadly, is certainly no entertainer.  He was able to beat Trump in 2020 largely because the pandemic kept him locked up in his basement most of the time. Today, with everybody insanely unmasking as the virus rages on, the Democratic Party is in a veritable frenzy of loud whispering about his lack of popularity with the masses. All of a sudden, they're discovering that he is incapable of telling a good story or selling their Narrative Du Jour. And these days, "stories" and acting ability are really the only qualifications that a potential president needs. So when, in a sort of desperate Hail Mary move, his handlers finally sent Joe to a pre-recorded late night comedy show to entertain the folks at home, he simply ended up parodying his own failure to even basically communicate, let alone regale.

"So there’s a lot of major things we’ve done," Biden garbled to Jimmy Kimmel. "But what we haven’t done is we haven’t been able to communicate it in a way that is ah um…make me say another way.”

Politicians like Obama used to say "Make me do it!" as a disingenuous way to gaslight citizens for their own failure to clamor loudly enough for such nice things as single payer health care and debt-free college.  And since even the sympathetic Kimmel could not make Joe Biden form a complete sentence, he gave up completely and just cut to commercial from the political commercial.

In the most delicate kind of tip-toeing way to describe Biden's mental lapses (a/k/a "gaffes") the New York Times is obliquely urging him to fade gracefully into the sunset and not seek re-election. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod displayed his own skills at the glib doubletalk that his boss was so famous for, when he unctuously told the newspaper from both sides of his mouth:

“Biden doesn’t get the credit he deserves for steering the country through the worst of the pandemic, passing historic legislation, pulling the NATO alliance together against Russian aggression and restoring decency and decorum to the White House, And part of the reason he doesn’t is performative. (My bold) He looks his age and isn’t as agile in front of a camera as he once was, and this has fed a narrative about competence that isn’t rooted in reality.”

Translation: sure, the guy is senile, but if you think so, its a mistake on your part and you are an awful, awful person, unlike concern trolls like me, David Axelrod.

And that detour from the ostensible topic of this post brings us back, on the long and winding road of political propaganda, to the nascent Jimmy Dore campaign for president. The main reason that I still watch Dore is for his "telephone interviews" with vocal impersonator Mike MacRae, who does a spot-on, hilarious David Axelrod as well as a perfect obstreperously incoherent Joe Biden.

Otherwise, Dore's shtick has been hit or miss for the last year or so, not least because of his rants about the pandemic, largely focused on medications that liberals don't like. There's also been a decidedly misogynistic slant to the show lately, emphasizing the looks and dress of certain female politicians and celebrities. His guest list, which used to include a wide variety of pundits, politicians, labor leaders and academics, has been largely diminished to a couple of fellow male white comic sidekicks allowed to chime in from time to time to bolster Dore's opinions.

 His interviewing style leaves a lot be desired as well, because these spots are all too often comprised of Dore beating a point to death, often bragging that he is the only guy to cover stories that put the establishment in a bad light, and then asking the guest to comment on the rant. When, for example, writer Chris Hedges appeared on the show last week, he was barely able to get a word in edgewise. More and more, the segments on the Dore show revolve around the latest mean Tweet that some liberal troll or media rival aimed at Jimmy and who was then severely "ratio'd" as a result.

I find myself tuning in less and less, and shutting it off as soon as Dore once again ventures into Covid rant territory, or Amber Heard or AOC territory,  amidst non-stop whining that YouTube is going to yank his channel away from him any day now.

But with a million YouTube subscribers and a nationwide standup tour, Dore certainly has his fans. And that brings me to what appears to be a hastily written and unedited email that I got yesterday from People's Party founder Nick Brana:

Millions lack food and health care and live paycheck to paycheck. Poverty wages now gutted by inflation. Eviction and homelessness sweep every city. Desperation so deep it drives people to opioid addiction and mass murder suicide. The looming fall of the dollar and depression. A dying empire lashing out for war with not one but two nuclear powers. The major left wing party in this country leading the charge for annihilation and censorship.

Thankfully, I and many others have recently found real hope and joy in the prospect that Jimmy Dore could run for president of the United States.

 

Jimmy has been considering a run for president with the People’s Party for the past several weeks. We’ve been discussing it with him and Stef and have developed a fifty state campaign and ballot access plan with organizers and leading ballot access attorneys. 

The crowds in Des Moines, Omaha and Kansas City erupted in cheers when Jimmy surprised everyone at his live stand up shows last month and said, “I’m thinking of running for president,” and took townhall style questions for the first time....

Jimmy would be the most popular comedian to ever run for president. He would be the first candidate with his own hugely popular online show — something that has only just now become possible due to the rise of the internet and independent media.

This missive goes on for almost the length of an interminable Jimmy Dore rant, so I'll give it a rest.

Despite the Dore candidacy being non-serious, disingenuous, and at worst, cult-like, it might even do some good. It would bring the whole class war cause of almost everything bad in this country right into the forefront. Since our whole society is tragically crumbling all around us anyway, what harm could a little more farce possibly do?

 But if he wants to get any traction at all, I think Dore should ditch the struggling People's Party, which is actually registered as a fundraising political action outfit. He should run as a Democrat to get even a slight chance of getting on a nationally televised primary debate stage and insulting all the wannabes waiting in the wings - such as the insufferable Pete Buttigieg and corrupt New York City Mayor Eric Adams, to name just two of the centrists under loud whispering consideration by party bigwigs. If a New Age outlier like Marianne Williamson could get a podium spot last time around, why not Jimmy Dore in 2024?

After all, the Democratic Party is all about the spectacle, as the January 6 Capitol Riot series now playing on the small screens of America has shown. Even if you think that Dore is funny or informative less than half the time, we can still use all the laughs we can get. And the comfortable and the powerful certainly deserve all the affliction that we can hurl at them.

I'm interested in hearing what readers think about all this.

The Unbearable Brightness of Democratic Being

 Another week, another New York Times article about elite Democratic Party angst. The gaslighting theme, as ever, is that voters are ungrateful wretches who refuse to hear the message about all the great things that Joe Biden and his party have accomplished.

The electorate just doesn't get it. After all, writes the Paper of Record with an apparent straight face, "many Democratic candidates are raising vast sums of money, a sign of voter engagement."

Actually, it's an unmistakable sign of the record engagement of wealthy donors who, as that famous Princeton study proved way back when, usually get whatever they want in the way of tax breaks, antisocial policies and investment opportunities (private gains via socialized losses.)

But still, the Democrats will go through the requisite motions. They'll most of all have us reminisce over those long-expired, long-exhausted Rescue Plan benefits. And Joe Biden, to prove how much he cares about you, is carefully considering limited and mean-tested student debt forgiveness. He will begin hitting the road with a vengeance to spread the feel-good message in order to, as the Times headline puts it, "brighten his presidency and the national mood."

One of his very first stops to help lift our spirits will be on Tuesday at a Lockheed weapons plant in Alabama.  This facility manufactures the thousands of anti-tank Javelin missiles that his administration is sending to unknown hands in Ukraine. So if your mood is not instantaneously brightened by the sight of the Commander in Chief surrounded by all those shiny phallic symbols of death, then you probably need a mental health intervention to strengthen your libido. For as Theodore Roosevelt himself famously thundered over a century ago in the lead-up to the War To End All Wars: "By war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life!"

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi virtue-signaled the importance of gender parity in equating killing with caring. She cares so much about human struggles, in fact, that she did both T.R., and Joe Biden one better, all but unilaterally declaring war on Russia on Sunday. "America stands firmly with Ukraine. We are here until victory is won," she orgasmically gushed upon being gifted the Order of Princess Olga medal from heartthrob Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Not for nothing is this powerful feminist icon royally described by corporate media as "third in line to the presidential succession" in her own country.

The peasants just don't get it. The Dems have to fight "the Russians"  over there so that they don't have to fight for you over here. Over There, Say a Prayer, and Beware, for the Yanks are coming and they won't stop till it's Over, Over There. Or, as the New York Times a tad less jingoistically puts the party's existential exasperation with the lower orders not getting with the Neo World Order:

How much time should they spend trying to show voters they grasp the pain of inflation, compared with efforts to remind them of low unemployment? Should they pursue ambitious policies that show Democrats are fighters, or is it enough to hope for more modest victories while emphasizing all that the party has passed already?

My published comment on the article:

 It seems that every time a prominent Democrat appears on the corporate news shows, it's to agitate for war and billions of dollars in weaponized "humanitarian" aid for the people of Ukraine, the latest designated pawns in the endless US wars for oil, for profit, for global real estate. War is an investment opportunity for the wealthy donors who fund both our major political parties.

But student loan forgiveness, continuation of subsidized Covid treatment for poor uninsured people, renewal of modest cash aid to children? Where is the profit in that? Of course, since they can't say that directly because it would hurt their re-election chances, they turn to the usual cynical platitudes. Their go-to refrain is that helping people in their everyday lives would unfairly benefit the "undeserving". Take your pick of who the undeserving are: if they aren't residents of "crime ridden communities" who'd only use the benefits to score drugs, then they are those ubiquitous children of millionaires champing at the bit to avoid paying their alleged student loans. As far as his devotion to the working stiff is concerned, Joe Biden has yet to cancel the lucrative government contracts with Amazon, which is trying to squash labor unions. So far, he is ignoring his "good friend" Bernie Sanders's appeal to rectify this oversight. Voters are noticing the political cynicism as well as the money-soaked corruption which exists all across the designated A-to-B political spectrum.

The Wee Hive Mind of the Ruling Class

Virginia voters last week denied former Clinton operative and ex-governor Terry McAuliffe  a second non-consecutive term. He'd apparently thought that lecturing Virginia parents that they have no say in school curricula, coupled with fear-mongering about all the Trumps under the bed, would cancel out his unappealing persona and platform, which included no economic benefits for struggling people.

The meaning (takeaway) of this rather predictable electoral outcome, according to the usual cabal of centrist scolds, is that "we" need a lot more austerian Terry McAuliffes in the nation's statehouses and in the hallowed, hollow halls of Congress. This illogical conclusion reinforces an essential truth about the media-political complex. They are either knowingly or unknowingly detached from reality. They see what they are paid to see.

A second essential truth to always bear in mind is that whenever they use the pronouns "we" and "us," they are not referring to you and me and the 330 million other citizens of this country. They mean the obscenely wealthy individuals and corporations running the joint, as well as the top nine or 10 percent of earners (the Professional-Managerial Class, or the PCM, aka the Clerisy) whose main function is to give service, succor and cover to the Upper One Percent in hopes of one day reaching the lofty One Percent themselves, while they simultaneously presume to interpret "reality" and enforce "norms" for the mere schlubs they aim to control. The bottom 90 or so percent of us, whose wealth just keeps getting sucked dry by the oligarchs and the PCM, are being set up as the lazy selfish scapegoats who must pay the price for all the capitalistic sins of the world. 

For example, as an instantly-notorious unsigned New York Times editorial published last week put it, the problem with progressives who want nice things like generous family leave, guaranteed medical care, subsidized housing and other luxuries, is that they are just too "coddled." This is quite the about-face for the Paper of Record, which only a few months ago was lauding Joe Biden's then-$3+ trillion Build Back Better package as the most sweeping social program since FDR. Well, Franklin Delano Biden, always the cutout hybrid between a sheepdog and a paper tiger for purposes of his election, has been duly cast back into the stubborn embers of neoliberalism. The real deals, according to the Times, are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are the actual heart and soul of the Democratic Party. That, of course, would be true if the Democratic Party actually had a heart and a soul.

Despite the fact that a vast majority of Not-We's support single payer health care, a living wage and student loan forgiveness, the Times, without one shred of evidence, claimed that most Americans hail from the center or center-right and oppose better living conditions for both themselves and their neighbors. Besides repeating the old canard that the taxes of hardworking Americans is the only way to make other (read: undeserving) people's lives better, the Grey Lady proved she was imbibing some really high-priced corporate powder when she snorted:

Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution. There were plenty of other candidates doing that. He captured the nomination — and the presidency — because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence. “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R.,” Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, told The Times after Tuesday’s drubbing. “They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

Never mind that as a former CIA operative whose agency has fomented plenty of global chaos in the 75 regime-changing, dirty tricks-playing years of its existence, Spanberger and her cohort believe that some brands of chaos are more preferable than other kinds of chaos, like the mental, physical and emotional chaos you experience by being unable to afford a visit to the doctor when you get sick.

Nothing defines just who the designated "we" are better than the aptly named COP 26  U.N. confab in Glasgow.  Although it stands for Conference of the Parties, the real function of this ostensible attempt to reverse and ameliorate global climate change and catastrophe has been to erect a preening, scolding venue for the same ruling and owning class experts, whose thousands of tonnes of carbon spewed in flying to the event in their private jets, and whose endless wars and relentless resource extractions are the prime cause of the planetary emergency in the first place. They have lectured their fellow oligarchs only if they happen to be from Russia, China and other places that "we" don't much like. They did party a lot, of course, and acted like the authoritarian "good cops" that they are by putting the onus on their victims. They are the drug pushers who blame the world's addiction to fossil fuels on the addicts that they themselves created through the magic of advertising, and whom they now try to shame to death.

Former President Barack Obama, fresh from cutting down hundreds of trees and destroying the iconic Women's Garden in Chicago's Jackson Park to make room for a $500 million monument to himself, flew in to Scotland by private jet to tell the world's young people that if they want to survive, they're just going to have to rev up their activism.  Far be it for Obama to tell the polluting corporations who funded his campaigns and who continue pay him for speaking gigs and other media ventures to cut out their criminal behavior. 

He was too busy rubbing their noses in his own B.S., insulting the Scots by calling it the Emerald Isle and and then quoting the English bard Shakespeare instead of revered national poet Robert Burns. Like many in his class, Obama has the preternatural ability to make his ignorance seem like genius.

Thank god that more and more people aren't buying into the Narrative any more. Just as general strikes forced FDR's New Deal legislation into existence during the last Great Depression, so too are general strikes going to force a change now, especially with Covid now reaching endemic status and inflation making a comeback. Both events have their roots in the beginning of neoliberalism and globalism, a melding of public and private interests (public expense for private profit) nearly 50 years ago. 

The question is what form this inevitable change will take. If the Dems have their way, it will be a return to Trumpism or something even worse. Just think of the surge in MSNBC and CNN's now-moribund ratings and Times subscriptions if they can only create that magical glow of Trump once again!

So now might be the time for the Squad to quit the Democratic Party altogether - that is, if they hope to remain relevant to the "Not-Wee" majority. Because we are the We who matter, and we are still the many. The rich are not quite as influential as they imagine themselves to be, given the careless Thought(less) Leaders that they are. They are mere mortals who do not equal the vast sum of their hoarded wealth.

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

          Wi’ bickerin brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee

          Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

          Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

          An’ fellow-mortal!

-- Robert Burns, from To A Mouse.

Biden's Rescue: Mean, Meandering, Moronic

Joe Biden's idea of bigness and boldness is inexorably and neoliberally shrinking.

Those $2,000 checks going out to every American on Day One? Once Donald Trump had belatedly approved a second round of checks after Christmas, bringing the total amount of the two rounds issued during his administration to $1800, the amount of the third round was quietly reduced by Team Biden, lest people start getting too greedy and expecting more than their share.

 And now, lest people expect even more of their reduced share, Team Biden has agreed that this third reduced round of checks should be means-tested, with only those people making less than $50,000 entitled to get the full amount.

So despite all the laudatory media coverage (here and here for example) that has the Democrats finally - finally! - learning their lesson from the inadequate stimulus legislation of 2009 and the futility of negotiating in good faith with Republicans, Joe Biden just cannot help himself. He will continue negotiating with himself, a/k/a his own inner Republican.

The upshot is that we will be getting less cash pandemic aid from Biden than we did from Trump, given that the new president has shown zero enthusiasm for regular relief payments going out to people - not only for the duration of the pandemic, but for as long as the economic sequelae of the pandemic last. All indications are that these economic sequelae will last for years if not for entire lifetimes and even extend into future generations. Because those small businesses are never coming back. Those service jobs are never coming back.  Rents and home purchase prices are never coming down, because private equity vultures are seizing all that distressed property and artificially increasing the value, making shelter even more of a commodity and investment source of extractive income for the wealthy, rather than the basic human protection from the elements that it traditionally was. 

If there is one thing that the Democratic Party strives for, meanwhile, it is to be seen to be doing the right thing. Thus the careful, obfuscatory language of the New York Times lede about Biden's "rescue" package:

Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration barreled ahead on Wednesday with a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package, even as they signaled a limited williingness to scale back direct payments to Americans in hopes of attracting Republican support. Voting mostly across party lines, the House adopted a budget that included President Biden's sweeping pandemic aid plan, laying the groundwork for Democrats to push it through, if necessary, on a simple majority vote, without Republican support.

 That paragraph is, of course, pure doublespeak. At the same time that Team Biden is barreling ahead, they're magically pulling back. It's the old Michael Jackson political moonwalk trick all over again, just the way Barack Obama used to dance it out of both sides of his mouth. Maybe if the corporate media keeps calling Biden's crumbs for the masses his "sweeping pandemic aid" plan loudly enough and often enough, the public will get a mental picture of the army of brooms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice swooshing away all the cares and worries and suffering of an entire population in one gigantic fell swoop. Maybe the public will not notice that the Democratic plan is naught but a worn-out dust rag. And even if they do notice, maybe they'll nonetheless be abjectly grateful that Biden's crumbs certainly are more palatable than the jug of arsenic being proffered by those nasty old Republicans. 

Therefore, time is of the essence, and Biden wants to move quickly to prove his housekeeping skills, literally sweeping his original promise of $2,000 checks for every US resident right under the proverbial rug. 

“We can’t walk away from an additional $1,400 in direct checks, because people need it,” Mr. Biden told the House Democrats, according to the people, who detailed the conversation on the condition of anonymity because the discussion was intended to be private. “I’m not going to start my administration by breaking a promise to people."  

But, doing that old Michael Jackson routine again, Biden added in a sly whisper that he is perfectly okay with reducing the actual number of people included in his promise. Some needy people are more needy and deserving than others. All needy people are not created equal.

The Times uncritically adds, 

It was part of a two-track strategy that Mr. Biden and Democrats are employing to speed through the relief package: Show Republicans that they have the votes to pass an ambitious plan with only Democratic backing, but offer to negotiate some details in hopes of gaining Republican support.

Again, with the sports metaphor. The Biden Rescue Plan sounds like a hybrid athletic event which combines curling with speed-walking, with lots of brooms and little stones shaped like cartoon bombs and arm-flailing and frenetic expert commentary to keep the crowds riveted on all the slo-mo action.

So while you're nodding, nearly napping, suddenly there comes a tapping from the Senate chamber door, and who pops into the Times article but new Majority Leader Chuck Schumer,  alliteratively garbling :“We're going big and bold. We cannot dawdle, we cannot delay, we cannot dilute, because the troubles that this nation has and the opportunities that we can bring them are so large.” 

That just about sums it up, sports fans. What possible good are troubles if we cannot bring opportunities to them? 

Also - how many stimulus checks could Chuck Schumer shuck if a Chuck Schumer could cut checks?  

While you're pondering that, weak and weary, here's another choice bit of stimulus from Chuck to help sweep your blues away:

Team Biden's Left Derangement Syndrome

 If you persist in bugging him about climate change and social justice and health care, Joe Biden won't just stop at covering his ears and rescinding that gracious invite to the kiddie table. He'll have one of his lackeys publicly accuse you of being a terrorist.

Not even Donald Trump, refusing to concede the election while willfully ignoring 200,000 daily new cases of Covid-19, has rated that epithet from Team Biden. That is just how much the corporate Democratic Party despises the left.

 From the article "Is the Left Wing Overplaying Its Hand?" in Politico:

"They can  either continue to just beat the drums on the streets or they can start to leverage the relationship they have. It's up to them what strategy they adopt."

The left wing's publicly aggressive tactics could lead Biden to just tune them out altogether. "If all you do is escalate, then people eventually think that you're enemies and not friends and they're like, 'We don't negotiate with terrorists,'" said Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist who supports many of the left wing's goals. 

Morales Rocketto was referring to criticism of Biden by the Sunrise Movement for his selection of Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA), a recipient of oil industry largesse, for his administration, along with the Justice Democrats and other progressive groups slamming Biden's stuffing the White House with various cronies and lobbyists. Biden has also named his pal Bruce Reed, the architect of the infamous austerian Bowles Simpson "Catfood" Commission, to his staff - an ominous signal that cuts to social programs in the middle of a pandemic are very much on the grownups' table.

By mouthing her assurances that she shares progressive goals with the same groups that she also obliquely accuses of terrorism, Morales Rocketto is of course engaging in nothing but good old fashioned gaslighting.

You might be tempted to buy into her sincerity and working class bona fides, given her leadership position in the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She certainly sounds like she might be a former housekeeper, nanny or caregiver who rose through the ranks to organize, doesn't she? And her group certainly sounds like a labor union.

She's not, and it isn't. The Alliance is a Democratic Party-linked advocacy organization whose objective is putting a working class and community organizing gloss on the corporate party while herding real domestic workers to the polls. It also purports to help low-paid servants to "improve their skills" in such areas as preparing nutritious meals for the children of their wealthy employers. For $5 a month, anyone can join this club and be part of the "movement" and even sign up for medical and dental discounts and special deals on theme park tickets. 

Before embarking on her current dual roles of bashing progressives as domestic terrorists while purporting to champion domestic workers, Morales Rocketto was employed by Obama For America, Hillary For America, and the Democratic National Committee. She won a coveted spot on Time Magazine's "Next 100"" roster in 2019, even scoring a written tribute from Hillary Rodham Clinton herself.

And since she's friends with George Clooney and in her "most badass" accomplishment ever, once confronted Ted Cruz in an elevator while she works tirelessly raising millions of dollars to reunite parents and children at the border, could Team Biden have possibly picked a better surrogate with which to attack the left and tamp down all that rude talk of climate justice, health justice and social justice?

One thing they aren't considering: that the critics and the protesters and the agitators might not even want a seat at Biden's precious table. Maybe getting Hillary Clinton to write nice things about us is not on everybody's bucket list. And who but the most craven careerist would ever want to be to carved up and eaten alive by a gang of criminal goons?

The Democrats Are Parodies of Themselves

House Minority Whip Jim Clyburn has actually had the chutzpah to complain that his party's attempted co-optation of one of the biggest public uprisings of all time is being "hijacked" by the protesters themselves.

How dare these people who are getting killed and beaten up and terrorized by out-of-control police forces presume to demand that their oppressors be stripped of their money and their power out of some misguided wish to live in peace?

Demands for divesting even small towns of their military hardware are a "distraction," added Rep Karen Bass of California.

Plus, if the Dems recklessly do right by the citizens, what will the Republicans say and do? (What will the neighbors think?) The opinion of the bad neighbors on the other side of the shared fence is a top priority if the Dems have any hope of redecorating their chambers with new "moderate" seats this fall.

So Congressional Democrats did the only thing they know how to do whenever they're confronted with some actual democracy. First, they blamed Trump and their  Republican colleagues. Then they staged one those perennial stunts which substitutes for policy in the public interest. They donned traditional Kente cloths  and took a knee for precisely 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the same amount of time that it took for their hired police state knee to suffocate the life out of George Floyd. The sound of hundreds of creaking joints and the even creakier neoliberal rhetoric of "reform" as a cure for corruption reverberated throughout the media echo chamber.

It was a reminder that there will be no true reform of state-sanctioned brutality on their watch. They may have thought they were showing solidarity with George Floyd and other victims of the police state. But their arthritic knees only served to remind us who is controlling the knees, fists, grenade launchers, tear gas and bullets of the police.  They may also have thought they were displaying their pro-science cred during Covid-19 by social-distancing and wearing masks. But they were only flaunting how distanced they truly are from the masses of people, most of whom don't even have a couple of hundred bucks saved up for a household emergency. Their masked faces only reminded us that they are bandits and marauders who steal from the poor and give, give, and give to their oligarchic donors.

The sight of Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) grimacing in pain as though he were struggling to get off a toilet also reminds us how mentally constipated the whole lot of them are. 

They yack on and on about the need for "big structural change," as though centuries of institutional racism and class oppression sprang up all by themselves. They are loath to admit that they are the chief architects and developers and designers and agents and enablers of the Structure.

Donald Trump, the convenient villain of the theatrics, played his own part to perfection, accusing the corporate tools in the Democratic Party of radical leftism and thus giving them cover for their aggrieved stunt. The trouble is,  hardly anybody believes their reality show is even tenuously tethered to reality.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, however, is not playing his own assigned role with the glib finesse of a Barack Obama. As much as he panders to the "movement," he just cannot lie and disown the police state this late in his misbegotten career. He will continue throwing unaccountable billions at Cop World if he is re-elected. There will be no dismantling of police forces under his watch. He and Trump are on the same ideological page regarding state-sanctioned brutality, much as Obama admitted that he was the same page as Mitt Romney in 2012, regarding austerity and the "need" to cut Social Security and other public programs at the behest of Wall Street.

Because the worldwide protest movement is multiracial and multi-generational, the governing class's clinging to identity politics as a substitute for justice is more easily seen for what it is - a con. Leaders of both establishment parties can no longer fall back on the "divide and conquer" techniques traditionally used to keep us in line. Trump can't engender fears of a "race war," because we're all in this together. Liberal CEOs and corporations can no longer proclaim "solidarity" with the victims of the uniformed weaponized oppression that they've always relied upon to protect themselves and their own looted property and their gated mansions. Amazon's Jeff Bezos cannot get away with standing with black people, not after he just fired the black organizer of a walkout at his Staten Island facility, where underpaid workers were denied paid sick or family leave for Covid-19.

What really terrifies them is the prospect of a general labor strike in tandem with the anti-police demonstrations.

A new poll commissioned by Just Capital reveals that only 25 percent of Americans think that capitalism is good for society. Few people are anxious to return to work in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Most people are angry at the billionaires and corporations who haven't done right by their workers in the middle of this social, economic and health crisis.

Only one out of nine publicly traded corporations temporarily increased worker salaries during the crisis, while seven out of every ten CEOs maintained their obscene salaries, which on average are about 300 times that of the average American worker. The 10 percent of workers whose pay was raised during the first months of the pandemic have largely seen their salaries return to pre- Covid levels.

And the Stock Market continues to climb.

As the New York Times put it: "Investors shrugged."

 Michael Bloomberg, the godzillionaire former mayor who thus far this campaign season has shoveled at least $18 million to the copacetic Democratic Party, spoke for the entire oligarchic police state when he bragged while obliterating the Occupy movement in 2011: "I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world."

Meanwhile, Democrats in costume performing clumsy dance moves have introduced the usual"sweeping legislation" to reform the domestic occupying forces. This means that they will strive mightily to sweep the abuses right under the rug via the Bidenesque solution of "community policing" as code for continued militarization. We'll have to wait and see how the irate citizenry reacts to his own particular bragging about how he let law enforcement write his 1994 Crime Bill, much as the predatory health insurance industry was allowed to write the Affordable Care Act.

To avoid the defunding of corrupt and violent departments, the legislation calls for databases of police misconduct, the better to track it with.

 But without defining "last resort," it would also allow cops to use deadly force only as a last resort. Therefore, if a reckless officer thinks that somebody is looking at him funny and then shoots him, the codified Doctrine of the Last Resort will become the go-to defense in the unlikely event he or she faces criminal prosecution.

The national uptick in frightening "no-knock" SWAT raids, increasingly with the aid of dangerous flash grenades, tear gas and  battering rams affixed to tanks would be tamped down a smidgen by only banning such assaults at the federal level. States would somehow be "incentivized" to do the same.

One nifty proposal, put forth by Nancy Pelosi, is to redirect money to school policing and mental health, as though the two concepts were joined at the hip.

The legislative package also includes a federal ban on lynching. How much bolder and more sweeping could it possibly get?

People will be so impressed, they'll be rioting in the streets with joy after they tell their bosses to take their expired hazard pay and shove it.

#Russiagate Exhaustion

I got tired just watching Robert Mueller III totter up to the podium on Wednesday to wearily announce that just because he'd found no evidence that Trump is a crook doesn't mean that Trump is not a crook.

Heads, which had barely begun to heal from the initial release of Mueller's written report, exploded anew when the special prosecutor announced he would prefer not to testify before Congress. His report, he said, speaks for itself. He is so, so done with it all.

Ranking House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries summed up his party's dilemma all too well when he groused that "there is a difference between reading the book and seeing the movie on the big screen.”

It seems that Trump isn't the only American who doesn't read.  Polls have revealed for years that most US citizens don't read more than one or two books a year. And despite its best-seller status, "The Mueller Report" is pretty dry reading, even for die-hard readers.

Who has the time, anyway? Even an article in The Week about people not reading much any more was classified as a "speed read" in a probably futile effort to get more people to read it. 

If it's not on a screen, then it doesn't exist. And with so many shows to choose from, the recent bravura C-Span-streamed marathon reading of the report by an ensemble cast of Democrats attracted only a tiny number of eyeballs.

Politics is spectacle. Politicians see voters as a blob of consumers addicted to their various screens. The consent has been manufactured by the corporate media conglomerate, and the learned passivity is complete.

So the longer that our congress critters can keep the Mueller-centered suspense (and the #Russiagate franchise) alive, and the electorate barely awake, the better they think it will be for their ultimate goal, which is limited to winning elections and raising scads of money to do so.

Since Democrats are damned if they do impeach and damned if they don't, they might as well do the right thing as ordained by the Constitution. Otherwise, win or lose, they won't be treated kindly in the history books.

Oh, I forgot. People don't read actual books, not when there are rage-filled twitter feeds and Facebook flummery to keep them amused.

That's why corporate media outlets pounced with glee when Trump wrote one of his typically garbled tweets this morning. "Trump Tweets and Then Retracts, Statement that Russia Helped Him Get Elected" shrilled the New York Times in a particularly egregious example of "gotcha" churnalism.

Here's the original tweet that had media heads exploding in Toldja So! triumph: 

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · 3h

Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax...And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,.....

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

....say he fought back against this phony crime that didn’t exist, this horrendous false accusation, and he shouldn’t fight back, he should just sit back and take it. Could this be Obstruction? No, Mueller didn’t find Obstruction either. Presidential Harassment!

53.4K

7:57 AM - May 30, 2019

It's somewhat surprising that the Times isn't also reporting that Trump falsely claimed that Russia has literally disappeared off the face of the planet for the sole fact that it had nothing to do with getting him elected. But that would have entailed getting their fact-checker to refer to Google Earth in order to determine whether Russia is still there, and then writing a brand new outraged article about Trump's Eleven-Thousandth Lie.

It's exhausting. And it's futile.

Season Three, Episode 97: "Bill the Barr-barian"

Attorney General Bill Barr appeared before Congress, got lashed with a wet noodle by Democrats, and then shockingly refused to return for another lashing. It is so utterly contemptible, they're taking firm action by calling him a criminal liar and threatening to hold him in contempt of Congress, for which there is no penalty whatsoever.

Stop the presses - and turn up the volume to high in the media echo chamber, because Barr called Bob Mueller "snippy" for criticizing Barr's misleading spin of the Mueller report. Barr must resign, immediately! And that is so crazy, because Billybob used to be Besties and Trump has totally come between them and maybe even broken them up forever.

How are Democratic leaders cynical? Count the ways, if you have the patience and the disposable time.
Me? I take the Clintonoid wing of the party's sage advice and do my own counting in very tiny, pragmatic, progressive, incremental baby steps.
One week it's blasting Nancy Pelosi's stupid "Pay-Go" rule as a device to punish people and make them feel grateful about going poor and dying prematurely as long as they can believe they'll be able live longer once they're reincarnated and the nasty old Republicans have been tamed.
Another week, it's reminiscing about Barack Obama's serial scolding of these same sick and indebted people during his eight-year term, a function which he continues to perform today from any number of safe, neutral international locations when he's not raking in $400,000 speaking fees and inking $50 million Netflix deals to produce content so inspiring that it tames 140 million paying subscribers into believing in a better life tomorrow.
And then it's on to Joe Biden, whose son Hunter recently quit his gig on the board of a corrupt Ukraine gas company for appearance's sake. And ad infinitum. The work is never done, because these horrible people are always doing something horrible and giving us something to kvetch about.

Today, for a huge change, let's talk about the latest Trump drama. Because keeping our minds off the fact that the Democrats are wholly complicit in the attempted coup in Venezuela even as they hypocritically wail that "Russia is invading us" is of the utmost pragmatic importance to them and to their electoral prospects.

The essential truth of the matter is that the corporate Dems love the Trump drama. Hating Trump certainly trumps loving the people who voted for them, and it helps them pretend that their "Love. Not Hate!" campaign theme actually means something They pragmatically pretend to be plodding through the bestselling Mueller report to figure out how best to investigate the conclusions of a two-year investigation conducted by some of the allegedly finest prosecutorial minds in the country. You can never investigate investigations enough. It's the best stalling method ever devised by the ruling class in order to maintain the Status Quo.
Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is off the table because "Trump is not worth it." It almost makes you think that impeachment is an awards show and Trump already has enough TV time. He's already the center of attention. Why spoil him even more by making him the center of the center of the attention? Nobody manipulates Madam Speaker, not even Donald Trump!

To be fair to Pelosi, at long last she is serendipitously honoring the wishes of the electorate, for whom punishing Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors is the least of their quotidian worries. Polls show that two-thirds of voters are not in favor of impeachment - about the same percentage as those who are in favor of Medicare For All.

Meanwhile, stenographers in the corporate media cover for Democrats by keeping the liberal consumer hatred churning at a constant furious boil during Perpetual Presidential Campaign season and spinning Hunter Biden's corruption as a product of the nasty Republican opposition. Their most commonly used technique is to pretend that everything was, if not as perfect as we might like, at least more tasteful and palatable before Trump and his minions appeared out of nowhere to spoil everything and overturn every beloved norm in the book.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie even preposterously claims in the sub-head of his latest column that "In America, no one is above the law - except the president and everyone who does wrong in his name."

Say what? Just making a quick mental list in the recommended pragmatic, incremental baby steps, I don't seem to remember any BP executive going to jail over the criminal negligence and cover-up of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Maybe I forgot that Wall Street bankers lost their jobs and pensions and bonuses, if not their physical freedom, for bilking their customers and fraudulently foreclosing on millions of mortgagors. Did George W. Bush and Dick Cheney answer for their war crimes and torture at The Hague, and I was napping the whole time?

Bouie writes:

On Wednesday, when Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Mueller report, he addressed lawmakers more as if he were a member of President Trump’s legal team than as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Barr framed Trump’s actions as fully justifiable, even arguing that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course.”
Whether out of sycophantic loyalty or a deep-seated belief in executive impunity, Barr has used his position to insulate the president from legal scrutiny. He has done everything in his power to downplay the impact of the special counsel’s investigation.
He did not hesitate, for example, to frame Robert Mueller’s findings as an exoneration of the president, despite a report that said otherwise. By itself, this gave Trump the appearance of vindication, as major media outlets declared him innocent of “collusion.”

My published response:

When Trump bragged that he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and get away with it, he wasn't kidding. Barr is only paying it forward. He's protecting not only Trump, but the entire teflon-coated ruling class racket.

Toadying to power is the norm. The standard slime that we've come to expect gets new coatings of toxic sludge practically every single day. Those with the power to clean it all up don't have the will. They seem to have left their soap and scrub-brushes at home.

Republicans are in full aggrieved paranoid mode, with Trump sending email blasts to his fans, urging them to show their $olidarity against those "radical socialist witch-hunting Democrats."

Democratic leaders, for their part, continue to rail against his regime's crimes while waffling on impeachment, preferring to limit their agenda to "We're Not Trump" and thereby downplaying policies that would actually make regular people's lives better. They seem to fear that the "socialist" label will scare their donors away.

  Plus, if they did their Constitutional duty and impeached Trump in campaign season, all the fun and profit of the #Resistance would disappear in the wink of an eye. It's better for ratings to keep Trump around for awhile. Think of the billions of dollars in revenue for the media and the corporations, which are truly running this spectacular show.

Meanwhile it's the poor who get fined or thrown in jail, just for existing ("loitering" or "vagrancy").

And let's not forget the draconian imprisonments of the two brave whistle-blowers and muckrakers, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who are locked up for exposing the high crimes of the Bushies and other teflon-coated minions of the exceptional United States Imperium.