Maudlin Tears of the Pathocrats

 Fresh from his World War III-mongering junket to Asia, highlighted by his provocative vow to militarily defend Taiwan in the event of aggression by China, Joe Biden again wondered aloud why there is so damned much gun violence back in The Homeland.

He wondered anew why this violent nation of ours can't stand up to the "gun lobby -" as if it hasn't rewarded and enabled gun manufacturers and their Wall Street investors more and more with every passing year. He and other politicians in both our ruling class parties performed another round of quickly evaporating maudlin tears, this one for the Texas children killed in Tuesday's mass shooting. One of the two right wings continues to mindlessly champion the rights of the "responsible" gun owners, and the other one addresses the pathology of 331 million US citizens owning almost half a billion firearms among them as a malady needing only a few "common-sense" gauze pads to make the whole boo-boo disappear. As if properly registering one's weapon and proving one's mental health bona fides were themselves more than conscience-salving band-aids for the root cause of increasing shootings: unfettered predatory capitalistic rule by a relative handful of oligarchs, leading to depression, anxiety, poverty, no health care in a pandemic, and violent acting-out on a record scale. 

Biden recently kvetched in an "off the record" interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that he despairs of ever "uniting" this country. His agenda has nothing to do with uniting Democrats with Republicans, not least because most voters in the US don't belong to either elite party. Rather he aims to unite Americans around common propaganda, for the ultimate benefit of the security state and its plutocratic profiteers.

The late Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci observed during the rise of fascism, prior to World War II, that hegemons can only maintain power through the repression and oppression of their people while simultaneously orchestrating people's tacit consent to be repressed and oppressed - whether through government propaganda, news organs, or other influence campaigns. The fact that Biden's own ill-conceived "Disinformation Board" was so deservedly short-lived is not that right-wing factions waged a "disinformation campaign" against it. It was because too many people across the spectrum were wise to the fact that they were being played, as in the ongoing elite suppression of our unsanctioned speech.

Biden and his fellow elites are upset that their domestic propaganda, their bellicosity, and their ham-fisted attempts at censorship ("unifying the country") of non-elite views are such failures. They are grasping at all manner of "outside" enemies to try and divert our attention away from their own pathologies. And in that process, they are endangering all of us.

  The USA may have the military might, but as far as any follow-up Marshall Plan to preserve and enhance its global hegemony is concerned, things have gotten very topsy-turvy indeed. Rather than a Berlin airlift, it is that same post-war Europe, which America has treated as its vassal state for nearly 80 years, which is now flying baby formula to our shores.  Biden was so busy globe-trotting and selling the next world war that he apparently hadn't known there even was a shortage, and that American infants have been in danger of starving en masse for at least the past six months.

It's also the height of irony that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg simultaneously defended and blamed the oligopolistic system responsible for the domestic baby formula shortage, even as our neoliberal government was finally forced to intervene and aid the same oligopoly which it has deemed to be the most virtuous and common-sense source of life for our babies.  Even more supremely ironic, perhaps, is that Buttigieg's late father was one of the world's premier Gramsci scholars who translated his prison writings into English for the enlightenment of any American who cares to read them, and be inspired by them.

So when Biden and his fellow politicians claim to care so deeply about "our beautiful children," do not believe them for one instant. All they care about is getting re-elected. And even if they lose, they win.... through their corporate-funded think tanks, their closed-door fundraisers, their nepotistic corruption, their TV gigs, their forever-wars. 

As John Mearsheimer lays out in "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" hegemons can only achieve and maintain their superpower global hegemonic status if they are already regional hegemons. And the iron grip that the US has had on Central and South America and the Caribbean now appears to be finally loosening. Several of these nations are boycotting this year's Summit of the Americas, because current host Joe Biden is not inviting leftist countries Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba to participate.

ABC-Disney, one of the very few state- and corporate-sanctioned sources of information and manufactured consent still remaining, is very worried that a more unified and recalcitrant southern hemisphere might put a damper on the global hegemony and wars that it so handsomely profits from:

A hollow summit would undermine efforts by the U.S. to reassert its influence in Latin America when China is making inroads and concerns grow that democracy is backsliding in the region....

 The uncertainty is a sign of chaotic planning for the summit, which is scheduled to take place in a little more than two weeks in Los Angeles. Normally, gatherings for heads of state are organized long in advance, with clear agendas and guest lists.

“There’s no excuse that they didn’t have enough time,” said Ryan Berg, a senior fellow in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is our chance to set a regional agenda. It’s a great opportunity. And I’m afraid we’re not going to take it.”

And that is such a damned shame, just when Biden was thinking of easing the economic sanctions on starving Venezuelans and their babies by graciously allowing Chevron back into Venezuela to exploit its starving people and their babies. That is the same Chevron, remember, which bypassed the US judicial system and tried, convicted and imprisoned environmental lawyer Steven Donziger for the affront of having won  a major pollution case against the oil giant when it committed fraud and pollution in Ecuador.

Biden and his bipartisan corporate cohort have brought a whole new meaning to Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.  People the whole world over are noticing not only their systemic ingrained evil, but also their essential stupidity.

What with climate disasters, societal collapses and insane wars, that essential stupidity can be a cause for either optimism or pessimism. Either the stupidly powerful destroy themselves, or their stupidity is so powerful that it translates into longevity. 

Unfortunately, when the powerfully stupid and the stupidly powerful talk about loving children, they're mainly talking abut their own offspring, and their offspring after them. 

$it-Down $tunt

It's an election year, and the Democrats need a new fundraising peg. So what better way to represent their constituents than to abandon their soft leather chairs for a soft thick carpet in a camera-ready show of solidarity against all the poor slobs being swept up willy-nilly in the Homeland Security surveillance dragnet? We have to keep guns out of the hands of those "potential" terrorists, dontcha know. They're guilty until proven innocent.

To hear the mainstream media tell it, this pseudo-strike by a bunch of liberal millionaires in the House of Representatives is a courageous act of civil disobedience against the malign forces of the Sovereign State of Republicantia. Those GOPers are such demented sadists they won't even pass a bill keeping guns out of the hands of whatever "Others" the Deep State decides to put on its secret and deeply undemocratic No Fly List.

Therefore, led by Civil Rights icon John Lewis, the House Democrats one by one lowered their pampered butts to the House Floor, their suddenly reanimated spines creaking in protest. They had their selfie-taking cell phones courageously charged and ready to document every fraught moment. And when Top Speaker Cop Paul Ryan summarily banned C-span cameras from the premises, the congress critters defiantly clicked on their Face Time apps so as to be able to communicate their marathon struggle on live TV.

It would have been considered politically incorrect to say that this act of limousine liberal disobedience was "a shot heard round the world," but Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi did her best Ralph Waldo Emerson imitation nonetheless, gushing: "It was a discussion heard round the world!"

The New York Times, totally embedded, breathlessly reported on the revolutionary "insurrection":

As Paul Ryan left the speaker’s chair, Democrats shouted: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

There were scenes of chaos across the floor as Republicans tried to resume regular business. At one point, Democrats began singing “We Shall Overcome” — altering the lyrics to say “We shall pass a bill some day” — as Republicans shouted in outrage.

The only thing marring the civil disobedience verisimilitude has been the strange lack of riot cops, truncheons, tear gas and water cannons. The irony is that the same Democratic Party which orchestrated the 2011 crackdowns of the Occupy Wall Street camps don't perceive the irony of it all. They are not threatened by the Capitol Police: they're protected by them.

The irony is that their party convention next month has been labeled a National Security special event. Any protesters attempting to breach the fence protecting the official bigwig activists will be subject to bodily harm and arrest. The congress-critters conveniently passed a special law a couple of years ago (HR 347) protecting their pampered butts from just such a populist eventuality. Whenever the pols lurch forth from beneath their Dome, going out in public to raise money and make promises from afar to the proles, the Secret Service is legally allowed, by whatever means necessary, to keep any malcontents from getting too extremely loud or incredibly close.

Of course, there never were any Congressional sit-down strikes by Democrats protesting such sadistic austerian measures as food stamp cuts and the end of long-term unemployment insurance in the wake of the financial collapse.  There were no outbursts of We Shall Overcome when it came time to appropriate a trillion-plus dollars for endless wars and their associated drones, bombs, guns and bullets.

As Glenn Greenwald reported in The Intercept this week, the mass shooting in Orlando has been the perfect excuse for hawkish Democrats like Senator Dianne Feinstein to double down on the brutal, violent and lucrative War on Terror while cynically hiding the real agenda under the wedge issue of domestic "gun control."

Here's what the millionaire civil rights sit-down strike is really all about:

Led by their propaganda outlet, Center for American Progress (CAP), Democrats now want to empower the Justice Department — without any judicial adjudication — to unilaterally bar citizens who have not been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime from purchasing guns.

Worse than the measure itself is the rancid rhetoric they are using. To justify this new list, Democrats, in unison, are actually arguing that the U.S. government must constrain people whom they are now calling “potential terrorists.” Just spend a moment pondering how creepy and Orwellian that phrase is in the context of government designations.

 What is a “potential terrorist”? Isn’t everyone that? And who wants the U.S. government empowered to unilaterally restrict what citizens can do based on predictions or guesses about what they might become or do in the future? Does anyone have any doubt that this will fall disproportionately on certain groups and types of people?

It's political theater designed to embarrass and provoke the Greater Evilists, who are so evil and beholden to the NRA that they're even willing to put guns in the hands of terrorists on watch-lists! It's even worse than the Democrats and Republicans joining together to sell billions of dollars' worth of arms to despots in places where they still chop people's heads off to teach them a lesson. The Dems' championship of the "No Fly, No Buy" legislation might prevent a death or two, but it's essentially a tainted band-aid with the adhesive removed.  It's also a blatant display of racial and ethnic profiling, since it would mainly target Muslims and any other "Others" who are spotted wearing turbans, having darker skins and speaking with accents.  

We shouldn't be applauding these Democratic poseurs, who've wasted no time blasting out their buck-raking emails fast and furious, urging us to show "solidarity" with them by donating our dwindling dollars to their campaigns:

They snuck in phones, took to Facebook and Twitter -- they have shown determination and grit in the face of nonsensical obstruction.

I've met too many families who've suffered after losing someone to gun violence. I've seen their pain and their frustration. I've held them while they cried, and mourned with them in their loss.

So today, as this remarkable piece of activism continues to unfold, I am so proud of my fellow Democrats. I want them to know I'm by their side. If you are, too, add your name today:

Thank you,

Hillary

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 We should be calling them out for the hypocrites they truly are.

Gunfight at the Hokey Corral

Hillary Clinton loaded Gabby Giffords into her rifle, took aim at Bernie Sanders, and fired wildly. And she missed, very badly. Because judging from the latest polls, her Wells Fargo golden caravan of a campaign is edging dangerously close to Deadwood territory.

Besides being grotesque and slimy, Clinton's use of shooting victim and gun control activist Gabby Giffords to typecast Bernie as a latter-day Gabby Hayes is downright persnickety, given Giffords' own pro-Second Amendment legislative record as a rootin tootin Blue Dog Conserva-Dem from Arizona.

From Politico:

 Former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords will endorse Hillary Clinton, a person familiar with her plans confirmed.
The backing of Giffords, who became a leading advocate for gun control after being shot by a would-be assassin in 2011, comes amid stepped-up efforts by the former secretary of state to portray her opponent in the Democratic primary, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, as soft on guns.
"He often says, 'Well look, I'm from Vermont and oh, it's different, it's not like being in New York City,'" Clinton said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, noting that his Vermont colleague Sen. Patrick Leahy had voted differently. "I think that the excuses and efforts by Senator Sanders to avoid responsibility for this vote — which the NRA hailed as the most important in 20 years — points up a clear difference, and it's a difference that Democratic voters in our primary can take into account."

Hillary, who as hawkish Secretary of State personally brokered a multi-billion dollar arms deal with the fanatical autocrats of the misogynistic, heheading-happy, hospital-bombing House of Saud without so much as a background check, apparently forgot to ask her pal Gabby about her vote to overturn Washington DC's ban on personal possession of assault weapons, as well as her signing of a Supreme Court amicus brief upholding the right of Beltway denizens to arm themselves with military-grade weaponry. Giffords also voted to allow interstate conceal-carry reciprocity, and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up to NRA-sponsored legislation that teaches little kids, through coloring books and fun games, how to shoot responsibly.

When Gabby Giffords upheld the Second Amendment rights of her constituents, she was simply being a "pro-gun pragmatist."

 But according to Hillary's bizarre 2016 playbook, when Bernie defended small Vermont gun store owners from potential liability stemming from subsequent criminal activity of the purchaser or any subsequent owner or thief, he became a cheerleader for mass mayhem.

The Sanders campaign has "fired back" (the media are certainly going metaphor-happy over the Great Gun Debate, aren't they?), noting that Hillary Clinton herself as been all over the map, both pro and con, on gun legislation. Her manipulation of Gabby Giffords shows what a desperado she has become. Bernie, no longer restrictable as the curmudgeonly colorful sidekick of the Beltway Imaginarium, is outshining Hillary the Tough and Inevitable on the political stage.

The slimy Crabby Gabby Hayes paintballs being lobbed at him apparently are not sticking.The Clinton Posse can no longer type-cast him as a wild-haired, ornery old codger, consarn it!