Neoliberalism Stinks

I got a weird phone call on Saturday afternoon from a guy who said he had just left a "medicine delivery" at my front door. Since I don't take prescription drugs, I was puzzled. But in a brief burst of the same kind of wishful magical thinking that has taken the ruling class by storm, I thought that maybe some Good Samaritan had left me a bag of marijuana along with the thrice-weekly meal deliveries I've been getting from my county's "Project Resiliency" program.

So when I opened the door only to discover a beautiful Mothers Day bouquet from my son, I thought that I must be finally losing my hearing as well as my mind. Then I read the name of the florist on the attached card - "Meadow Scent."  My hearing was still more or less intact! Then I started to worry anew, because when I thrust my nose into the little red flowers and yellow tulip buds, I could not discern any meadow scent let alone any aroma whatsoever. Was my smell going? Was I exhibiting the first telltale symptom of Covid-19?

I suppressed that thought, and called my son on Face Time to thank him. Suddenly the room started to spin. But it was only my just-turned-two granddaughter gaining control of the phone so that I could converse with her dolls. Which I did.  For quite some time.

The next day, I got a "Happy Mothers Day" email from one of this blog's readers, in which I was cheerfully referred to an article about the "real" Lord of the Flies. Much to my edification and relief, it chronicled the adventures of a group of Tongan boys who, bored with their parochial school routine, ditched classes in favor of a nautical joy ride that culminated in their being marooned on a small Pacific island for more than a year. Contra the Hobbesian plot of the grim William Golding novel, these boys survived by dint of mutual aid, and cooperation. But when they were finally rescued, they were not completely celebrated for their resourcefulness and courage. They were briefly jailed for having stolen and wrecked the boat they used for their escape.

It's the kind of crazy reaction being leveled against the nurses who are fired for speaking out against the working conditions in our for-profit health care marketplaces, or for wearing unapproved protective gear as they work double overtime shifts saving the lives of pandemic victims.

It's why multiple generations of American high school students who are taught that history is nothing but a series of endless wars and cutthroat competition and who never learn the meaning of "civics" are forced to read "Lord of the  Flies" in English class.  I had to read it, my children had to read it. We all hated it. When my daughter was a sophomore, her reading assignment over the Christmas break was... you guessed it. The season of peace and joy was ruined by the feral antics of teenage boys and the murder of Piggy.

"All against all" has been drummed into most of us from our earliest, most susceptible formative years. It's just the way it is, people. 

So no wonder, as the British medical journal Lancet flatly reported in December 2009 on the passage of Obamacare :"Corporate influence renders the US government incapable of making policy on the basis of evidence and the public interest."

The structural social violence perpetrated against the citizenry was underway long before Donald Trump became its convenient scapegoat during this pandemic. Trump simply makes it easier for the de facto architects and enablers of a historically cruel system to look virtuous by comparison.

Now that tens of millions of American workers have lost their precarious employer-based health insurance, these anti-Trump architects and enablers are still adamantly opposed to Medicare For All. Their idea of a solution is to bail out and prop up the predatory insurance industry rather than treat patients who've already lost their jobs and livelihoods. To keep United Health Care and Blue Cross solvent, the government will shoulder hospitals' costs of Covid-19 treatment and only Covid-19 treatment - and perhaps increase Obamacare subsidies to those jobless people who were just kicked off their health insurance.

Barack Obama, in a "private" conference call with his government-in-exile last week, purported to be shocked and dismayed by Donald Trump's "chaotic" response to the pandemic:

"This election that's coming up on every level is so important because what we're going to be battling is not just a particular individual or a political party. What we're fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided and seeing others as an enemy - that has become a stronger impulse in American life. And by the way, we're seeing that internationally as well," Obama was cited as saying in the private call according to Yahoo News, which said it obtained a tape of the call on Friday.
"It's part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anaemic and spotty. It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset - of 'what's in it for me' and 'to heck with everybody else' - when that mindset is operationalised in our government.
"That's why, I, by the way, am going to be spending as much time as necessary and campaigning as hard as I can for Joe Biden," he said.

Obama's critique of the Trumpian "what's in it for me" Lord of the Flies ethic harkens uncomfortably back to his own personal ambitions. Chicago physician and social epidemiologist David Ansell recounts in The Death Gap a conversation he had with Obama at a 2003 fundraiser he co-hosted for him when he was running for the United States Senate:

In the living room of a modest single-family home in the neatly manicured South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, I asked the future president his position on national health care reform. His words presaged what came to be known as "Obamacare." 

"I'm a proponent of a single payer system," he responded. But he explained that the political power held by the health insurance companies was so formidable that opposing them would be political suicide.... Single payer will never get passed in the United States," he concluded.

Obama admitted that his political career trumped everything. This brand of raw selfish careerism is commonly lauded as being "realistic" or "pragmatic."

Here's some more classic Kabuki theater in which Hillary Clinton extracts a vague promise from a barely-there Joe Biden to use the pandemic to try to discuss better access to the possibility of universal health care. She ominously uses the same crisis rhetoric that former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel used to bail out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street - before proceeding to subsidize the health care industry through a bill which the insurance and pharmaceutical companies wrote.

These corporatist leaders still purport to be amazed that there exists what Ansell calls a "death gap" in America, most recently exposed by the disproportionately high Covid-19 mortality rate among black and brown people. Their contrived moment of discovery is similar to that evinced among the ruling elite when Hurricane Katrina inordinately harmed the poor people of New Orleans while those with the financial wherewithal managed to escape.

Since that disaster culminated not only in widespread death and damage and displacement, but in the complete for-profit privatization of the  city's school system, just imagine what the forced closings of our entire nation's public schools will do for predatory capitalism.  Now that the Covid-19 plague is also affecting children with a Kawasaki-type syndrome, we have to ask whether neoliberal politicians will use it as the perfect disaster capitalism excuse never to reopen them at all.

The writing certainly seems to be on the wall in New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo has convened a task force to set the education policies of the future. Ominously called "Reimagine Education," it will involve the branded expertise of billionaire and education privateer Bill Gates and will deliberately exclude teachers, parents, current school administrators and students. This is right in the wake of Cuomo cutting billions from the state's Medicaid program right in the middle of a pandemic:

The governor’s announcement of a partnership with the Gates Foundation was immediately met with forceful opposition from New York educators and parents who are critical of the foundation’s role in developing the Common Core academic standards and linking student test scores to teacher evaluations.
Teachers were also concerned that the governor was looking for ways to supplant some in-person teaching, with the state teachers union president, Andy Pallotta, saying that “remote learning will never replace the important personal connection between teachers and their students.”

How much would you like to wager that American students will continue to be taught Lord of the Flies with the aid of a robot teacher and Bill Gates's monopolistic software?  Topics of discussion might include whether Sartre was right, and hell really is other people, and the desirability of living in enforced quarantine as isolated ants who are nevertheless all digitally connected in service to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.  It sure beats the hell out of fear of the latest manufactured or hyped-up threat, such as murderer hornets.

With that depressingly dystopian thought, I think I'll go try to smell my flowers again. 

I only hope that enough of us wake up sooner rather than later to smell the coffee.

Where Late the Sweet Obamas Sang

When the Obamas appear at one of their many lucrative speaking gigs and tell other rich people that their new goal in life is to fill the whole world with "hundreds or thousands or millions" of Baracks and Michelles, please don't worry. They're not going for a kinder, gentler, neoliberal version of The Boys From Brazil. They don't actually want to replicate themselves as robotic pod people.

They don't want to literally clone themselves, for heaven's sake -- even though this method would probably be a lot cheaper than training vast new generations of wannabe Baracks and Michelles at their planned $500 million library in Chicago, and burning hundreds or thousands or millions of gallons of polluting jet fuel as they travel the world to inspire paying customers to murmur the right platitudes. Better for the rich to talk optimistically and nicely about the downtrodden than to insult them. It sure beats sharing the actual wealth with them. The very thought of redistribution makes offshore tax havens cringe.

  If Barack Obama knows how to train people in anything, it's in the properly mellifluous use of platitudes. He crooned to a Tokyo audience that he wants to teach young people how to "run in the relay race that is human progress." That's a nice way of saying that it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and competition - not empathy - is the key to success and happiness. On the other hand, the cult of the individual must always be tempered by "civil discourse" so as to give proper cover to predatory capitalists. Nice guy that he is, Obama even euphemized these predators and their unprosecuted crimes against humanity as "problems caused by old men."

As the glowing corporate media coverage of his post-presidency always interprets it, isn't Obama just so wonderfully discreet and even-tempered whenever he takes a jab at Donald J. Trump?

Now, to be fair, Obama also told the audience that if it turns out he's unable to create new legions of virtual Baracks and Michelles to save the world, he will at least inspire imitations: "or, the next group of people who could take that baton in that relay race that is human progress.”

(It's the Think System of the 21st century, as originally devised by that lovable old scammer himself, Professor Harold Hill the Music Man.)

But forget the feel-good musical comedy. We've got big trouble here in River City  The late Kate Wilhelm warned in her classic work of post-apocalyptic fiction, "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang," that while the rich might think they're special, keeping their dynasties alive and thriving while the rest of the world starves and burns might have a few drawbacks. From Wikipedia's plot summary:

The collapse of civilization around the worlds resulted from massive environmental changes and global disease, which was attributed to large-scale pollution. With a range of members privileged by virtue of education and monetary resources, one large family founds an isolated community in an attempt to survive the still developing global disasters. As the death toll rises, mainly to disease and nuclear warfare, they discover that the human population left on earth is universally infertile. From cloning experiments conducted through the study of mice, the scientists in the small community theorize that the infertility might be reversed after multiple generations of cloning, and the family begins cloning themselves in an effort to survive.

If you think that scenario is far-fetched, you can always turn to nonfiction. Naomi Klein writes in The Intercept of a small group of Ayn Randian plutocrats - Puertopians - aiming to re-colonize the storm-ravaged Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and turn it into a jumbo gated community and multi-trillion dollar closed market economy:  

As a breed, the Puertopians, in their flip-flops and surfer shorts, are a sort of slacker cousin to the Seasteaders, a movement of wealthy libertarians who have been plotting for years to escape the government’s grip by starting their own city-states on artificial islands. Anybody who doesn’t like being taxed or regulated will simply be able to, as the Seasteading manifesto states, “vote with your boat.

”For those harboring these Randian secessionist fantasies, Puerto Rico is a much lighter lift. When it comes to taxing and regulating the wealthy, its current government has surrendered with unmatched enthusiasm. And there’s no need to go to the trouble of building your own islands on elaborate floating platforms — as one Puerto Crypto session put it, Puerto Rico is poised to be transformed into a “crypto-island.”

Sure, unlike the empty city-states Seasteaders fantasize about, real-world Puerto Rico is densely habited with living, breathing Puerto Ricans. But FEMA and the governor’s office have been doing their best to take care of that too. Though there has been no reliable effort to track migration flows since Hurricane Maria, some 200,000 people have reportedly left the island, many of them with federal help.

Of course, this makes Barack and Michelle's million-clone neoliberal army seem downright beneficent. They sure beat a bunch of creepy wrinkled old Ayn Rand pod people.

Forget about Michelle Obama running against Trump in 2020, though. Unlike her hubby's rather narcissistic goal of millions of Obamas, she herself modestly aims for only "thousands of Mes" to do the hard work of market-based identity politics. As reported by Business Insider,

The former first lady has been meeting many younger leaders through her work with the Obama Foundation. She says it has given her a lot of optimism about their approach to leading the country.
"They're tired of watching us do the same old thing and expect different results," Obama, 54, said at Klick Health's Muse event in New York on Tuesday. "So I'm optimistic about the future. There are some bright young people out there doing some amazing things."
Those interactions have helped to solidify her plans, which aren't likely to involve running for office. "This is why I'm not going to run for president," she said. "Because I think it's a better investment to invest in creating thousands of mes."

The article doesn't state whether The Real Michelle was paid her reported customary fee of $200,000 for inspiring Klick Health, a consulting and marketing agency whose stated task is to help the world's top medical and pharmaceutical industries burnish their images and increase their profits through the use of Big Data, as well as to inspire patients to manage their own health care needs more "efficiently."

Something just klicked in my brain, and not in a pleasant way. But never mind all that. Back to Mrs. Obama.

While she apparently allows media coverage of certain carefully selected muse-ical corporate events such as Klick Fest, this was apparently not the case in Miami Beach last week, when a Pulitzer-winning Washington Post reporter was booted from an exclusive BET event headlining Michelle Obama. It seems that the "intimate" conference for wealthy African-American women was implicitly off the record, yet panelist Robin Givhan still had the nerve to write a rather fawning blog-post about Obama's appearance for her newspaper. 

A BET rep insisted Givhan was “invited as a guest (not working press) to moderate a fashion panel,” and her travel and hotel were paid for by BET.

“She was made aware that it was an intimate conversation in a sacred space of sisterhood and fellowship.”

After a prolonged ethics kerfuffle largely played out over Twitter, the National Association of Black Journalists has come out in support of Givhan:

The rules of journalism are clear: any decision to make an event off-the-record must be stated clearly upfront, and not after-the-fact. If an individual or entity desires to have a conversation that is off-the-record, that has to be made public. It can’t be assumed or hinted. BET’s statement of the event being ‘an intimate conversation in a sacred space of sisterhood and fellowship’ does not hold water in any newsroom. If the off-the-record declaration is not made, that means everything is on-the-record and available to be reported.

Here's my take on the controversy. Michelle Obama's scripted BET conversation with BFF Valerie Jarrett probably derives from a chapter in her upcoming memoir, Becoming Michelle Obama. It was also probably a dress rehearsal for the world-wide book tour. The publisher's hype is that this volume will be so thrillingly "intimate" and mesmerizing that its sales are expected to skyrocket into even more millions of copies than there will be Obama clones.  Since intimacy "as told by" the rich and famous is such a valuable commodity, Robin Givhan probably leaked a whole hunk of the book without even realizing it. 

But at least the sour note ended on a very sweet note. Journalism in the public, rather than the private, interest really does prevail sometimes. Not every reporter is a stenographer and celebrity-worshiper. It's enough to make you sing for joy.

$urvival of the Fittest

By Jay - Ottawa

Stiff fingers tap out the first sentence on my keyboard, but the spell checker redlines the word 'dystopia.'  Hmm…it IS a word and I DID spell it correctly.  Was the Microsoft programmer who worked on this feature clueless about Orwell's "1984," or was the programmer directed to send unpleasant concepts and their exemplars down the memory hole?

Cormac McCarthy is the next to get redlined.  Well, OK.  His first name is rare this side of Dublin.  Despite the laurels placed on McCarthy's brow late in life, few people other than English majors read his troubling novels "Blood Meridian" and "The Road."

Actually, "The Road" is not dystopian literature.  It is more often categorized as post-apocalyptic realism, a giant step beyond dystopia to where the entire globe has been despoiled.  You might, if you behave, be allowed an ice-cream sundae in a dystopia.  The best you can hope for in a post-apocalyptic world is rancid ice cream under stale whipped cream and a rotting cherry on top.

Chris Hedges, a very serious man, also writes about dystopias but under the category of nonfiction.  He describes realities so dismal and hopeless you wish they were fiction.

As if we didn't have enough gloom from the Dark School of fiction and nonfiction, we now discover their disciples multiplying like bats out of a cave.  The newest dystopian writers obtain better material just by looking around.  The latest dark spirit to connect the available dots of politics, economics, climate change and human nature is a French philosopher, Bruno Latour.

Latour writes as though he was able to plumb the minds of the super rich.  Forget their supposed attraction to capitalism and avarice.  Something else is afoot, a plot, an altruistic conspiracy.  It goes like this.  Billions of people are accustomed to a standard of living the globe cannot support.  Recycling and cutbacks in carbon use are absurdist diversions for the masses.  The Greens are kidding themselves, not to mention the rest of us, with their solar panels and low-flush toilets.  The Paris Agreement of last year, signed by 195 nations, is an empty gesture to assure their populations that something is being done to push climate change out of sight.  However, the elites know better; the globe is long past the tipping point of climate apocalypse.

Something several orders more severe than alternate energy development is needed, and immediately, to pull back hard from the Sixth Extinction.  The elites are fully aware of the stakes.  They also know that the billions of people who make up the modern world cannot be encouraged, or even forced, to scale down sharply to a lifestyle from the Middle Ages.

What's the alternative for elites who appreciate these facts and exercise power?  It is twofold: to become billionaires and to head for the hills after amassing everything needed for survival.  Big money––not asceticism, virtue and fairness for all––will buy the few tickets available for survival of the few.  Here's Latour explaining why we must have deregulation, welfare cutbacks, climate denial and income disparity:

"If this plausible fiction is correct, it enables us to grasp the 'deregulation' and the 'dismantling of the welfare state' of the 1980s, the 'climate change denial' of the 2000s, and, above all, the dizzying increase in inequality over the past forty years.  All these things are part of the same phenomenon: the elites were so thoroughly enlightened that they realized there would be no future for the world and that they needed to get rid of all the burdens of solidarity as fast as possible …; to construct a kind of golden fortress for the tiny percent of people who would manage to get on in life …; and, to hide the crass selfishness of this flight from the common world, to completely deny the existence of the threat [of] climate change."

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/05/the-new-climate/ 

It is we, the billions of nobodies, who are the grasshoppers in Aesop's fable.  We plague the earth with our great numbers and boundless appetites.  The monied elites are the farsighted ants.  There is a noble purpose behind the surface chaos over which they preside.  For the sake of the human gene pool, lifeboat ethics must prevail.  The elites are laboring to cull our species as efficiently as possible.  They must act fast and remain steadfast in their purpose.  Ultimately, the preservation of humanity depends on the billionaires, "the tiny percent," in their "golden fortresses."  Think of that next time you are tempted by selfishness to protest against their deconstruction of society as we know it.

* Those of you under 70 years of age are advised not to read this essay.