Biden's Latest Plan To Save the U.S. Hegemon

 The Biden administration's call for 16 years of non-means tested, guaranteed, fully funded public education for every American citizen certainly is laudable on its face.

It's the White House's rationale for extending schooling by four years - two for Pre-K and two for community college - that should be propelling our B.S. detectors into high alert.  Biden's proposed extension, along  with his plan for paid family medical leave and child care subsidies which would cap out-of-pocket costs for day care at seven percent of family income, is to ensure that parents can continue to work outside of the home. The "family" plan contains no subsidies that would actually help families spend more leisure time together instead of working till they drop. And it does not make the child tax credit increases permanent; it only extends them to 2025.

In an off-the-record press call with the media to preview Biden's speech before Congress tonight, administration officials were, in fact, selling the $1.9 trillion American Families Plan as a weapon in the US hegemon's arsenal for "competitiveness" with the rest of the civilized world. There was nary a word about enhancing American minds and bodies and spirits. It's all about both directly and indirectly subsidizing corporations and employers while preparing the work force of the future, literally from birth. 

 Senior Administration Official I couched it in typical neoliberal-speak:

The American Families Plan invests in our children and our families, helping families cover the expenses that so many struggle with now: lowering health insurance premiums; cutting child poverty; and producing a larger, more productive, and healthier workforce in the years ahead....

  It will make transformational investments from early childhood to higher education so that all children, young — so that all children and young people are able to learn and grown (sic) and gain the skills they need.... 

Skill Me Now

 The plan will also invest in our teachers, improving teacher training and support so that our schools become engines of growth at every level.  It will address teacher shortages, which have only gotten more critical in the context of the pandemic.  It’ll improve teacher preparation and strengthen pipelines for teachers of color. 

Translation of the above Senior Administration Official Neospeak:

-Children are cattle futures who need skills in order to guarantee oligarchic growth and profit for their future bosses and CEOs who "earn" at least 300 times the salary of the average worker. Children are not cast as curious sentient beings who need to be taught to think critically or to become immersed in art, literature, philosophy. These liberal arts are reserved for the children of the rich. -check.

  -Profits will still prevail over people, although some lucky people might have the chance to access more affordable care on the insurance marketplace by at least temporarily paying through only one nostril rather than through the entire nose. For right now, the Biden plan to get us through the pandemic is to continue to generously cut an average of $50 a month from predatory insurance premiums which often cost thousands. - check.

-Child poverty will pragmatically be cut (maybe) but never entirely eliminated in the richest country in the history of the planet. - check.  

-With just enough poverty being cut, some lucky children will magnanimously be allowed to  grow up into strong mature flesh in the low-income workforce of the future. How can the rich continue getting richer without able-bodied servants to fulfill their every need?  If the planter class in the antebellum south could attend to the physical needs of the enslaved for shelter and health care, then so too can our own enlightened elites at least minimally attend to the needs of the hired help - check.

-Schools, transformed in the last, lost decades into engines of capitalism, will continue to be treated as businesses geared more toward the growth of the plutonomy than toward the growth of human minds. And teachers and pupils alike will continue to be tested to ensure that the interests of capital are being properly advanced- check.

And now let's take a look at who and what are being left out of Joe Biden's investments in America's future.

For such a woke administration that so prides itself on its diversity and "inclusiveness," it's quite telling that the middle-aged and elderly of all races and genders are almost entirely excluded from Biden's definition of the American Family. There will be no expansion of Medicare, or a lowering of the eligibility age. There will be no increase in monthly Social Security benefits. There will no negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of drugs, which in the US are the highest in the world. There will be no deals to reimport cheaper drugs from Canada and other countries which do negotiate lower prices with manufacturers, and which do have single payer health insurance systems.

On the contrary: the Biden plan would continue to engorge the for-profit health insurance industry by giving billions in direct cash payments to United Healthcare, Blue Cross and other corporations under the "Affordable" Care Act. The White House will ensure that our health care system remains the most expensive in the world  while having some of the poorest results in terms of mortality and morbidity. That is really what "competitiveness" is all about.

Even right in the middle of a pandemic.

Meanwhile, there are the usual aspirational echoes of such Obama administration plans as taxing capital gains at a comparable rate to labor, closing the carried interest loophole and reforming the dynasty-friendly inheritance tax code. The $15 minimum wage would be strictly limited to daycare workers, to supplement Biden's recent executive order raising it to $15 for employees of federal contractors.

One reporter in the off-the-record press gaggle did press Senior Administration Official I (or was it II or III?) for more specifics, such as just when those extra four years of schooling might actually come to pass.

Well, when all the Senior Administration Officials got together to iron out the specifics, it turned out that there are so many wrinkles in so much gauze and gossamer that nobody really knows the answer, even if Congress does perform a miracle and actually pass the American Family Plan.

But since there is so much yardage (not to mention gaping holes) in the material, Senior Official One allowed that  "broadly speaking, this is a 10-year program — the American Families Plan.  That’s the window.  And you know, many of these things will become permanent.  They — they phase in at different times in different ways."

So, some are immediate.  Some, like paid leave, have a ramp-up.  Some have, you know, like pre-K — you know, a different share that is paid overtime on a sliding basis by states starting at a, you know, low end, the amount that states pay, and as time goes on, an expectation that they will pay more.

Are we all clear now? No wonder the reporter didn't follow up and inquire whether Senior Administration Official, given Biden's call for Republican input on the American Family Plan, was referring to the dreaded Overton Window. Spread the negotiations out, delay implementation for a decade, give the lobbyists all the time they need to re-rip the closed loopholes on taxation, and ultimately bow to the whims of the august Senate Parliamentarian (a/k/a the Pope-Queen of the United States), and Biden himself is buying all the time he needs to ensure that America's slide off the low end proceeds apace.

Read between the lines. Take the hype and the hope in his first ballyhooed speech to Congress with a grain of salt in your wounds.

Joe Biden Is As Depraved As Ever

So a president creepily calls an eight-year-old girl whom he just met "Baby," and then further demeans her by ordering her to stop worrying her pretty little head about ever catching Covid, and other children ever catching Covid, or even about her parents and other children's parents ever catching Covid. 

You're forgiven if you thought that I was talking about Donald Trump.

But since it was Joe Biden's exhibition of creepiness and mendacity and sexist disdain, delivered in that over-familiar grandfatherly way of his, the whole world is feeling ever so much better now. Or so the gushing corporate media informs us.

Video of Biden's comforting bald-faced lies to young Leyla Salas at a CNN town hall Tuesday night quickly garnered thousands of "likes" and countless glowing media reviews.   

Her mother Jessica addressed Biden:  "As we’ve been talking about coronavirus, which is very real and scary and it’s especially scary for children who may or may not understand. My children Leyla, 8, here and my son Mateo 7 at home often ask if they will catch COVID and if they do will they die. They are watching as others get the vaccine, and they would like to know when will kids be able to get the vaccine.”

Biden telegraphed the aggressive lie he was about to tell the child by prefacing it with the usual condescending flattery beloved of hucksters and politicians from time immemorial: "Leyla, beautiful name!"

With that obligatory gaslighting out of the way, Grandpa Joe got away with a whole series of whoppers.

“We haven’t even done tests on children as to whether or not certain vaccines work or not or what is needed. You’re the safest group of people in the whole world, number one. Number two, you’re not likely to be able to get exposed to something and spread it to mommy or daddy. And it’s not likely that mommy and daddy will be able to spread it to you either. So, I wouldn’t worry about it baby, I promise you. But I know it’s kind of worrisome.”

My own two-year-old granddaughter recently caught Covid from her Daddy, who caught it at work because his job does not allow him to work from home. The spreading of this virus occurs in thousands if not millions of other families every single day.

The whole point of Biden's act of shameless lying to a little child is to get the schools reopened so that Mommy and Daddy can get back to work and won't have to rely on paltry government relief checks while they inconvenience their bosses with their chronic absences from work. For the leader of a party which so prides itself on its devotion to "facts" and "science," Biden is certainly not living up to the standards of what the liberal class  calls the "reality-based community." Of course, when liberals criticize Trump and the Republicans for their own ignorance and stupidity, they're also willfully ignoring the truth that Trump and the Republicans are mainly feigning their own ignorance and stupidity as a sick way to impress a voting base that they, in turn, condescendingly assume are stupid and ignorant.

It's a vicious cycle and a closed feedback loop. The relentless performance of ignorance and stupidity at the very highest levels of the media-political complex does (unlike their wealth) have the effect of trickling down on the audience. This result is desirable for them, not so much for us. Think, for example, if Biden's reassuring lies make children and the adults who love them now think that they're so impervious that they don't have to wear masks any more.

Biden, a much more seasoned politician than Donald Trump could ever hope to be, is able to hide his disdain for people by flattery, cajolery and "harmless" teasing. He topped off his shameless lies to Leyla by joking, "Oh, you're getting old. You're in second grade!"

This avuncular joshing only serves to trivialize the girl's extremely rational and fact-based concerns. Maybe somebody can tell Biden that children have a pretty good sense of when they're being lied to and don't much care for good-natured and insincere teasing from adults that they don't know. There's something creepy about strangers feigning intimacy with your kids. I know it always made my maternal hackles rise. I suppose Leyla and her mom could be somewhat grateful that at least social distancing etiquette precluded Biden from grabbing their shoulders or - god forbid - sniffing their hair at the CNN town hall.

Biden's depraved idea that kids, working parents and teachers are somehow miraculously immune from Covid also was broadcast at his last debate with Trump, when in calling for schools to re-open, he preposterously said: "And by the way, all you teachers out there — not that many of you are going to die, so don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Come on."

This cavalier remark, coming as it did within the hailstorm of Trump's own preposterous lies, garnered zero pushback in the corporate media. It is apparently acceptable to Joe Biden that a certain percentage of educators do die from Covid in the interests of capitalism. This is the same kind of depraved thinking that makes a certain amount of civilian fatalities (euphemised as "collateral damage") acceptable in our endless wars of aggression.

Looking back over the transcript of that final debate with Trump, I'm reminded that Biden also framed the Black Lives Matter movement in a truly bizarre way, claiming that wealthy Black people get stopped by police as often as poor Black people do, and therefore we should not demonize any wealthy people.

"It's about having the ability to be free from violence as you're accumulating wealth," he actually said. It's not, apparently, about having the right to be free from violence as you're walking down the street and not making any money out of simply living.

That twisted, market-based neoliberal logic also was manifested at this week's CNN town hall with Biden's strange rationale for not forgiving $50,000 in student debt through executive action. Falsely claiming that he doesn't have that authority (although he does, he says, have the right to cancel $10,000 of a person's debt) he then went on to warn that Ivy League grads would only unfairly bilk the government on loan forgiveness largesse and thus steal funds from Pre-K programs.

 It's the same old, same old kind of means-testing rationale that dooms social programs for people who need help. Conservative politicians erect strawmen, such as Reagan's famous Cadillac welfare queen, to justify cuts to programs. This argument is also currently being made to reduce the amount of Covid relief, for fear that too many wealthy undeserving people and other cheats will score government aid.

It's a variation of "the whole class must be punished" if the culprit does not come forward. And since the culprit in our neoliberal oligarchic system is alternately an outright figment of the fevered reactionary imagination or the reigning principal of the school himself, the punishment and the beatings of the powerless by the powerful will continue. Until, perhaps, the powerless revolt.

Another example of Biden's twisted reasoning for not giving people nice things in order for them to even survive in a time of unprecedented crisis is his refusal to order single payer health care for the treatment of pandemic victims.

During the primary campaign, even in the face of polls showing at least 80 percent Democratic support for Medicare For All, Biden doubled down on his own opposition. That Italy was then reeling from a Covid outbreak and its hospitals were overwhelmed was all the proof Biden needed to conclude that Italy's single payer system does not work. He actually correlated universal health care and guaranteed coverage with the actual disease. He insisted that Italy's humane payment system had an adverse effect on the pandemic.

How is this fallacious nonsense any different from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blaming liberal wind turbines for his state's devastating winter weather crisis and humanitarian catastrophe?

Unlike Joe Biden, I am not a medical expert who, by the wave of a magic wand and shameless lying to a child, can make Covid go away. So I will not speculate whether he suffers from clinical dementia.  But judging from his half-century as a right-wing politician relentlessly trying (and often succeeding at it) to out-Reagan Ronald Reagan himself, I think it's safe to say that this man is as depraved as they come.

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:

Trump Fears Bernie, Not Biden

With the coronavirus spreading and the economy crashing, Donald Trump is said to be desperate for Joe Biden to hurry up and win the nomination over Bernie Sanders. 

But he is damned if he does get his wish, and he's damned if he doesn't.

First of all, Biden is so far to the right that he might as well be a Republican himself. Trump, who has vowed to cut Social Security and Medicare, will be hard pressed either to pay grudging homage to Biden's own long crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare, or he will forced to publicly defend FDR's New Deal from Biden's depredations. Neither tactic is likely to make him feel comfortable. Then again, he's always bragged that he thinks the avoidance of hypocrisy is for chumps. And it certainly would not be the first time he attacked an opponent from the fake-left. 

A Trump/Biden general election would play out more like the GOP primary which Trump thought he'd avoided as the incumbent president. So unless the campaign devolves into two old reactionaries arm-wrestling or holding push-up contests or trading ornery senile insults on the debate stage, this match-up would be quite the yawn if its only theme is "Corruption V. Corruption."  Turnout also likely would be quite low; the youth vote in particular, which has thus far failed to materialize for Bernie in the vast numbers predicted, would effectively be nonexistent in the general. 

In Michigan, where some of Bernie's poll numbers lag behind Biden's by more than 20 points on the eve of the primary, Biden has already beaten Trump to the punch in 2016 by endorsing, in a $200,000 paid speech, Republican Fred Upton in his ultimately successful congressional run. The Democratic establishment has studiously avoided confronting this inconvenient fact in its own desperate attempt to construct a millimeter of space between the two right-wing reprobates.

  There is no possible way that Trump would ever be able to successfully accuse his fellow racist, sexist, corrupted corporate tool of being a socialist, as he is wont to do with Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the "Opposition."  His supporters are not as stupid as they're made out to be by the liberal press.  The awful, uncomfortable truth is that Trump and Biden are more alike than they're different.

 To achieve the continued enthusiasm and rally turnout of human bodies to which he is accustomed, Trump would much prefer to stick to the tried and true (but false) GOP narrative of the "radical" Democratic Party - to which he himself belonged in the not so distant past. 

It's really hard to accuse Joe Biden of being soft on immigration when activist Latinos heckle him at nearly every event for his own cruel deportation record in the Obama administration. Biden was Obama's xenophobic point man in Latin America, strong-arming leaders in Mexico and elsewhere to keep Central American refugees far, far away from the US border.

So unlike the liberal donor class and the liberal punditocracy, Trump appears not to have written off Bernie Sanders quite yet. Unlike Biden, Bernie has an actual moral leg to stand on when he's standing up to Trump. 

It could be that, unlike the Democratic establishment, Trump pays some actual serious attention to other polls revealing that Bernie has an even better chance of beating him that Biden does.

Trump's America First Action Super PAC is certainly worried enough, or pretending to be worried enough, to have sent out the following S.O.S.  over the weekend:

I'm going to keep this email short and blunt.
We must move quickly before things take a turn for the worse.
Bernie Sanders is building a full-fledged army of socialist grassroots warriors to take down President Trump and Vice President Pence.
It's up to us to put an end to this.
STOP SANDERS - STAND WITH TRUMP!

In other words, despite tweets siding with progressives in accusing the Democrats and the media of slimingBernie, Trump is effectively campaigning for Joe Biden on the very eve of the all-important Michigan primary. Just as Hillary Clinton thought she was cleverly installing Trump in 2016 as the "pied piper" candidate who'd be as easy as pie to beat, so too is Trump going full Machiavellian with the bipartisan red-baiting of Sanders.

He wants Biden and he doesn't want Biden. He wants Bernie to be a foil to Biden and he wants to beat Bernie. In other words, he's trying to gaslight everybody into the desired state of confusion. He is the depraved human iteration of Doctor Doolittle's Pushmipullyu. He not only double-talks, he double-talks from every orifice.

I would also quibble a bit with the survival of the "grassroots socialist army" hinging upon Bernie's own electoral fortunes. The movement now has a life of its own and will notfold in the event that Sanders loses the nomination and fulfills his promise ( cringe-worthily reiterated on the Sunday talk shows) that he will campaign for his "good friend" Biden.

It turns out that the America First Action Super PAC might be even more of a head-fake than it it appears. They weren't asking for dollars - of which they have hundreds of millions aplenty from various corporations and oligarchs - but for a signature on a petition. AFA's founder, Randy Perkins. heads AshBritt Environmental, a disaster/defense contractor. Perkins has been accused by various public interest groups of skirting the law which forbids federal contractors from contributing to political parties. Other AFA contributors include mega-donor Sheldon Adelson as well as some of the shady characters associated with Rudy Giuliani and "Ukrainegate."

My conclusion? They want to beat Bernie to install Joe Biden to get Hunter Biden to get the ultimate Russiagate Revenge against the Democrats. And I also think Trump is afraid of Bernie and is mentally sending the Democratic bigwigs a dozen roses and a magnum of Dom Perignon by way of cheap secret thanks for orchestrating his victories.

Whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead is nuts. 

Correction: whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead forgot to notice that this is a Machiavellian Duopoly, whose oligarchic members must sometimes pretend to hate each other to maintain the increasingly fragile illusion that our elections are free, fair and democratic.

So many head-fakes, so little time. 

And this isn't even counting Hillary Clinton's not so stealthy comeback campaign.

Full-0f-Woe Super Wednesday

Look on the bright side, fellow progressives and socialists. Because as far as Joe Biden is concerned, his slew of primary wins hasn't even happened yet. He thinks that they will happen tomorrow, or on what he adorably dubbed Super Thursday. 

Wednesday's children and Sandernistas might be full of woe today, but just wait until tomorrow. Because while the fortune-telling nursery rhyme predicts that Thursday's child has far to go, Biden will only keep demonstrating how disturbingly far gone he truly is.

Godzillionaire Mike Bloomberg has dropped out. But as of this writing, Elizabeth Warren was still in, despite coming in third in her own home state of Massachusetts. Her top-secret Super PAC might soon make her an offer she can't refuse, however, and stop writing the checks that are keeping her campaign on life support. My prediction is that she will drop out and repeat what she did in 2016: refuse to endorse Bernie.

I hope I'm wrong, because in refusing to endorse Bernie she will be destroying her progressive brand and burying what is still left of her political career.

I think the original Democratic Party game plan was to keep Liz in the race all the way to the convention, just to siphon votes away from Sanders. I highly doubt that Barack Obama included her with the other candidates he obviously called after Biden's South Carolina win to make them the charm-offensive offers they couldn't refuse. She can't stand Biden, in particular his authorship of the bankruptcy bill favoring credit card companies and banks and punishing regular people, particularly women.

As Biden continues making what are still too kindly being called "gaffes," the media will get over its Super Tuesday group orgasm soon enough. At least Ronald Reagan had his rote acting skills to mask his own dementia most of the time. 

As far as the "shock" of Biden's wins is concerned, remember that until a few weeks ago, he was the front-runner for the better part of a year. He would have to literally stop campaigning and giving interviews from here to the convention to pull off a Reaganesque head-fake. His failure to even campaign in the states he won has itself been a winning strategy up to now. This is largely because the field was so thinly spread. And likely because enough voters were so spooked by the media's relentless fear-mongering and red-baiting that they pulled the lever for someone they think they know.

Now that it's just him and Bernie, Biden can no longer hide while he runs. For its own part, the Democratic Party is so bankrupt that it has made Joe its sacrificial lamb at the altar of the Trump Temple, just to keep an FDR-style liberal like Sanders out of the White House. 

When you think about it, this is really a form of elder abuse by the party leadership. It doesn't matter that Biden's vice president would be the real heir or heiress apparent for 2024 and probably already running things the minute Uncle Joe stumbles through the Oath of Office, should he miraculously beat Trump.

If the rumors are true and Biden names Stacey Abrams his running mate before the nomination, then Sanders will be free to follow suit and prematurely join forces with a firebrand like Nina Turner. 

Thankfully, Bernie did not mention that "Joe is a good friend of mine" in a speech to supporters on Tuesday night. But he did seem compelled to add that "Joe is a decent guy" before noting his vote for the Iraq War, his support for job-destroying trade deals and his career-long crusade to cut Medicare and Social Security. If that's decency, then I don't know what Bernie's definition of pathological cruelty is.

Stay tuned.

Biden Can Hide But He Can't Run

Status Quo Ante Uncle Joe's campaign has made the mistake of letting one pool reporter cover each of his big-dollar fundraisers in the interests of fairness and transparency.

On Monday night, Biden reportedly reassured a group of wealthy donors and lobbyists that he thinks quite well of the oligarchs whose interests they (and he) represent.

"Wall Street and significant bankers and people, they're all positive, they can be positive influences in the country. But they didn't build the country. The middle class built the country."

As for the Republican senators now so mysteriously in the thrall of Svengali Trump, Biden is cheerfully sanguine. Since he is essentially one of them, he is confident that he can jolt them out of their Trump hypnosis once he's back on the scene. Then they can relive the good old pre-Trump days of sedate racism, misogyny and generalized class war antics. All it will take, given that Biden has scrupulously avoided speaking to both the media and ordinary voters, is for the Democratic super-delegates to nominate him by acclaim at a brokered convention. Before that happens, though, the corporate media and his fellow candidates must be pressured into not attacking his debate performances as viciously as they will probably deserve to be attacked.

Meanwhile, Biden runs away from accountability, hiding behind closed doors as he dog-whistles to the Market:

"Here's the deal: we all know, and I don't think this is hyperbole, we all know in our gut this election is the most important election we've ever engaged in—and not just because I'm running," Biden said. "With Trump gone you're going to begin to see things change. Because these folks (his GOP pals) know better. They know this isn't what they're supposed to be doing."

Biden should just cut to the chase and admit that he's the candidate of the TINA (There Is No Alternative) Party. That acronym comes to us direct from the late British P.M. Margaret Thatcher, and it means that there is no alternative to cutthroat capitalism and a Hobbesian war of all against all.

That is why Biden and other "New Democrat" centrists of his ilk love to point to Trump as the only enemy that regular people should ever need to fight. It's better for the corporate wing of the party to sound the warning that Trump is the next Hitler who threatens to abolish democracy, cancel the election if he doesn't win, take over TV stations and newspapers, and send storm troopers into the streets to arrest well-heeled liberal #Resistance, Inc. freedom fighters. Oh, and threaten US standing in the world, as if increasing death rates in the US, crushing education debt, homelessness, police violence, gun violence and relentless coup attempts and bipartisan bombings abroad were not pre-existing reputation-killers enough.

We're instructed that it is up to political content-consumers ("we the people") to defeat Trump by electing a kinder, gentler, more discreet monster to regress the misery to those halcyon days of slow frog-boilings, in hopes that enough people will notice their pain less in the future than they are noticing it right now.

As long as we are still allowed to vote, then we should have nothing to complain about. Better to have dictatorship by the Market than dictatorship by a demagogue produced by the Market. 

To give you another example of how tainted Biden truly is, when I Googled "A.P. pool report" in hopes of getting a verbatim transcript of his Monday night remarks, what actually popped up on the front page were myriad reports of Biden's penchant for swimming naked in his pool in front of female Secret Service agents.

If that isn't bad enough, my search for the Biden pool report on the latest fundraiser also brought up the attempt in 2012 by his operatives to "edit" press accounts of his campaign appearances. This attempted censorship was on top of a separate controversial Obama White House directive to journalists to submit their stories for "quote approval" prior to publication. It was also on top of the the Obama administration's record war on whistleblowers and its spying on journalists.

So Trump's much-criticized verbal assault on the media as "enemy of the people" is not so much an anomaly as it is a direct extension of the no less frightening media suppression of free speech as practiced by the previous administration.

Biden is acting more like Candidate Hillary Clinton every day, hiding from the media as he sends out his various underlings to explain his unconvincing flip-flop over his Hyde Amendment support, to name just one recent controversy. You might remember that Hillary's campaign literally corralled the press behind ropes at public events in order to lessen the chances of them actually popping a non-scripted question at her. 

It is getting so desperately pathetic on the invisible Biden trail that his campaign actually tweeted out a picture of his special friendship bracelet memorializing his insipid good-buddy bond with Barack Obama. This image should make everybody just shut up and swoon, right? (Rather than, say, cackle or vomit.)

 Biden is not your normal phony candidate. He is an unabashed high-level factotum for the financialized economy, and a craven one at that. He tries to hide his naked history by ineptly draping himself with myriad spokeswomen and the first black president (who probably picked him as his running mate only to reassure conservative white voters that the first black conservative president didn't pose a threat to them.)

Biden keeps insisting that Trump is an anomaly who burst forth from the ether. He ignores the truth that the past four decades of transnational, labor-destroying, deregulated market neoliberalism - increased riches for the wealthy and increased poverty for everyone else - is the Petri dish that nourished Trump. And Biden himself provided a lot of those nutrients, what with his racist wars against drugs and welfare programs, not to mention his votes for corporate "trade" agreements like NAFTA and for the illegal Iraq War.

Trump is no anomaly, no creature from outer space.  He is a mutation. He is the birth-product of the tainted and inbred late-capitalist strain of Oligarchs Gone Wild.

And Joe Biden is among the fertility doctors whose depraved policies helped to create him.

"Doctor Moreau for President!" would make a good campaign slogan for Biden, don't you think?  

In fact, this picture of Biden posing in a flag-emblazoned laboratory setting with indicted blood-testing fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is the perfect campaign poster. It sends the message that while the anti-science Trump slashes and burns with a scowl on his face, Biden will always suck our blood with a jovial technocratic smile. The life-draining work of TINA will continue to be discreetly performed in the shadows of the gleaming laboratories of pseudo-democracy, just as Biden is conducting his fake presidential campaign right now.

Bring Back the Good Old Days of the Future!

The Biden Critic Who Came In From the Cold

What's a well-paid New York Times columnist who moonlights as a regular MSNBC contributor to do when, repulsed as she is by Creepy Uncle Joe, realizes that her career probably depends on at least passive-aggressively promoting Creepy Uncle Joe in the interests of her corporate sponsors?

If you're Michelle Goldberg, and you have previously opined that Biden should never run for president, then the first step in your rehabilitation is to write a chastened column about all the polls that show Joe Biden with a substantial lead. You then subtly denigrate the anti-Biden "online left". You provide no evidence to back up your claim that this group has little to no influence over the vast, silent majority of Democratic "moderates" for whom the defeat of Trump trumps everything else. Defeating Trump is more important than Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. Those nice things are for the "future" of the Democratic Party, not for the precarious present of the actual people and the planet they live on.

As horrible a candidate as Joe Biden is, after all, he could never be as horrible as Donald Trump.

Goldberg seems to want to have it both ways. She gives her reluctant tacit approval to the "electable" Biden, while still clinging tenuously to her faux-progressive feminist brand:

 I still think it’s a bad idea for the party to nominate a man who, among other things, voted to authorize the Iraq war and oversaw the televised humiliation of Anita Hill. But while it’s still very early, his poll numbers suggest that those of us who’d written Biden off could be the ones who are out of step with a lot of Democrats. (my bold).
The future of the Democratic Party is still with left-wing social media dynamos like Ocasio-Cortez. As Niall Ferguson and Eyck Freymann recently wrote in The Atlantic, she’s “often described as a radical, but the data show that her views are close to the median for her generation.” Right now, though, her generation is mostly in charge only online.

How odd that even though Goldberg had long ago dutifully joined the media chorus insisting that a Russian troll farm swayed an entire election by posting a few hundred cheesy ads online, the "Online Left" back home in the USA does not wield similar power and influence.

One explanation for this alleged lack of power and influence, she continues, is that MSNBC doesn't give lefty ideas as much coverage as Fox News gives to those in its own right-wing audience.

MSNBC (where I’m a contributor) doesn’t play a remotely similar role in mainstreaming fringe ideas. Polls tell us that Democratic voters don’t rely on it as their main news source the way Republican voters do with Fox, and it doesn’t take its cues from online left-wing subcultures. In fact, it often seems that Fox News pays more attention to progressive Twitter than MSNBC does, because the right-wing network loves to jeer at anything that looks like lefty overreach.

She doesn't mention that MSNBC also loves to regularly jeer at leftists, including but not limited to Bernie Sanders. The most infamous incident took place in March, when a different on-air contributor falsely claimed that Sanders had not mentioned gender or race until 23 minutes into his campaign announcement speech. (He had mentioned them immediately, and to this day, MSNBC has not issued a correction or apologized.)

She also doesn't name any "online left-wing subcultures," other than AOC's twitter account, or even explain what she means by this dismissive term. But by lumping them all together into one fringe-dwelling pot, she does manage to make them seem both suspect and scary. At most, she damns them with her very faint praise. They're not radical at all, but by golly, they're still fringe-dwellers despite the overwhelming support of more than 90 percent of registered Democrats for single payer health care.

I suspect that if Michelle Goldberg had mentioned the inconvenient truth that MSNBC is essentially a corporate Democratic Party propaganda mill and regularly lies by both commission and omission, she would no longer have her lucrative gig on MSNBC. Members of its revolving stable of occasional contributors get paid a reported average $85,000 to $100,000 a year to be available to rehash and promote their articles, their think tank research papers, and their Democratic Party consulting work. Their job is to agree with each other, and occasionally debate GOP operatives and politicians in the interest of "balance" and for shouting-over purposes. This keeps the audience glued to the screen in a simulacrum of mass indignation and righteous liberal solidarity. If it's not about the anti-Trump #Resistance, Inc., "the Russians," or the Mueller Report soap opera, then it does not exist.

Michelle Goldberg

Goldberg seems to have gotten the message that the time has now arrived for even the mildly restive liberal stable to get trotting in unison in the spectacle of the Horse Race, mainly by endlessly promoting that P.R. gimmick called "electability." (As I wrote last week, the electability gimmick was dreamed up in the 1980s by the Democratic Leadership Council to justify implementation of the undemocratic superdelegate system as a means to steer the party toward the right and keep it there permanently.)

Goldberg thus dutifully continues:

In his own horrific way, Trump seemed to expand the possibilities of American politics, making it seem as if the old rules of electability no longer applied. Many of us assumed that the expansion would go in both directions, since Trump’s rise represented such a catastrophic failure of the political center. But there are a lot of Democrats who don’t want a revolution, or even a protracted political fight. They just want things to be the way they were before Trump came along, when ordinary people didn’t have to think about Twitter at all.

My published comment: 

 The media promotion of Biden proceeds apace. Michelle Goldberg basically shrugs "what do I know?" as she pivots from finding Biden borderline-abhorrent to acknowledging that The Polls Speak.

 But what about those polls? What percentage of the people questioned were contacted by cell phone as opposed to landline? Few young people have landlines. "Biden leading by double digits!" is about as far as most people read. The polls then become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a magnet for the undecided voter.

Meanwhile,there are fewer stories about Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and other candidates. There are Zero stories about Tulsi Gabbard, whose opposition to the regime-change wars embraced by both establishment parties and mainstream media outlets makes her persona non grata in the "official narrative."

 Michelle Goldberg acknowledges that she is also a contributor on MSNBC, which exposes yet another problem of journalism. One corporate outlet or personality quotes another corporate outlet or personality, and ad infinitum until it all becomes "the conventional wisdom."

Beating Trump is now the be-all and end-all as news and political personalities and the "horse race" supersede deep discussions and reporting about the everyday problems of ordinary people.

 No wonder impeachment is "off the table." It would take attention away from the candidate whose main policy platform is "restoring America's soul." Whatever that even means.

 Who's up? Who's down? Who cares?

New Democrats Enter Their Golden Oldie Moldy Years

Stung by Richard Nixon's landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972 and then battered by Ronald Reagan's crushing of one-term Jimmy Carter in 1980, the Democratic Party decided it needed a "third way" approach to win back power. They would accomplish this by starting a movement they dubbed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). It arrived complete with 140 congress critters and governors and a set of neoliberal principles which purported to split the difference equally between the working class and the big business/corporate class.

First they would need to co-opt and then distort the egalitarian rhetoric and policies of FDR's New Deal by conflating representative democracy with consumer capitalism. This new definition wholeheartedly adopted Reagan's "government is the problem" dog-whistled means to demonize the poor and minorities while downplaying the cruel agenda with their own meaningless platitudes about acceptance and inclusivity.

The DLC Agenda would not be so crass as to openly pummel the poor and minorities while they were down, or call single Black mothers "Cadillac welfare queens."  It would instead offer the down-and-out a series of gentle shaming kicks and shoves in order to get them scrambling up invisible ladders of self-help and opportunity.

Joe Biden, the current alleged Democratic front-runner, was not only one of the original founding members of the DLC, he was also one of its very first presidential recruits. As Goldwater-style movement conservatism was gaining traction during the 1970s, Democratic leaders looked at this new rising star and realized how well he could co-opt his own working class background and put some of his down-home rhetoric into the service of the corporations. Biden was considered a natural to pander to the blue-collar white voters who had fled to the Republican Party in droves, thanks largely to Reagan's fear-mongering on race. That populist mystique still clings to him, despite the harsh reality of every reactionary thing he has accomplished politically in the last nearly half-century.

Say Uncle, Or Bust!

 Back in the 80s, the three most common "colorblind" euphemisms for the "N" word being utilized by Biden and both establishment political parties were Welfare, Drugs, and Crime.

Reagan himself not so subtly railed against welfare queens and "young bucks" on food stamps in such blatantly symbolic places as Mississippi. But the Democrats, who still needed the support of black and brown people in the South, had to be a tad more politically correct. 

Mere months after Reagan took office, DLC architect Al From recalls, the House's then-named New Democratic Caucus was absolutely thrilled when on April 9, 1981, the New York Times published, verbatim, his entire "movement manifesto" of economic principles.

This nearly 40-year-old document has become the Bible of every conservative Democratic administration since Clinton, seamlessly morphing into Obama acting as the other heel of the Bush Jr sandwich filling...  and just wait till next year - or so From's neoliberal centrist wing of the party hopes  - to get Joe Biden for dessert, the goofy guy whom conservative Democrats have been hankering for as their president since 1972, when he was still only a 29-year-old senator (D-Capitol One) from Delaware, LLC/USA.

The first DLC (later renamed the "New Democrats" in the age of Obama) principle, after they get the requisite gushing over the New Deal out of the way, is austerity, or deficit reduction, even when times are bad, as a guard against inflation. Inflation hasn't been a problem since the 70s, but once they get all ballooned up with their addictive hot air, the Inflationistas and Deficit Hawks never die. The difference is that when Republicans cycle into power, deficits don't matter when it comes to giving tax breaks to the rich. And when it's the Democrats' turn, all programs benefiting regular people must be "paid for" by cutting other programs benefiting regular people. Both parties always exempt the permanent war machine from any of their inflation fear-mongering.

A related founding principle, a/k/a shameless propaganda, of the DLC is that since "people" (the rich) demand austerity and spending cuts, the New Democrats must always try to placate (the rich and) Republicans as a show of their good faith. But to prove that they really also care about the working and poor people who actually vote them into office, the Democrats will quickly add that the wealthy should (it's just a suggestion) equally share the burden of sacrifice.

Here's the clunky concluding chunk of the first Official DLC Manifesto reprinted verbatim for your reading pleasure. I have bolded all the neoliberal keywords, which have survived for four decades to poison our minds and our spirits and our lives to this very day. These principles remain at the rotten core of the Joe Biden agenda. They were baked into his political psyche from the very beginning of his career... which, by the way, more or less coincided with the beginning of Donald Trump's own career:

In controlling Federal spending, we intend to abide by the following guidelines:

-We will seek out and eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse. We will provide the resources to prosecute those taking advantage of government benefits to which they are not entitled, whether wealthy tax evaders, illegal monopolies or participants in welfare fraud.

- We will promote the work ethic by encouraging recipients of government assistance to work and resisting cuts that would throw people out of work and onto welfare. 

- We will help those who cannot work, particularly the disabled, the sick and the elderly. A society cannot remain health and self-respecting while ignoring those who are poor and helpless through no fault of their own.

 - We will strengthen our defense force, in cooperation with our allies, to ensure world peace. We will increase military capability and readiness, eliminate Pentagon waste and renew the search for mutual arms control agreements.

- We will promote cooperation rather than conflict among the levels of government. We must recognize local strengths, local initiative and regional differences in the country as we decide the structure and number of Federal programs. We will not purposely add unnecessary tax and regulatory burdens to state and local governments.

 We will examine indirect spending through the tax code with the same critical eye we focus on direct spending. Wasteful and unfair tax loopholes will be closed.

- We will upgrade our efforts in the area of law enforcement to intercept the flow of illegal drugs across our borders, stem the tide of illegal immigration, introduce efficiencies into our criminal justice system, and work in partnership with state and local governments to combat crime. 

 - In short, we pledge to develop a lean Federal budget, which puts us on the path of balancing the budget and provides for the human needs of our people.

Translating the above into normal person-speak:

-- A poor single mother on food stamps is the same kind of villain as Donald Trump. We will demonize and even jail the poor mother while comparing her to Donald Trump, whom we never prosecuted or imprisoned. Not only that, we'll even promote him to our friends in corporate media as our Pied Piper GOP nominee, just to make DLC original founding member Hillary Clinton look better.

--The DLC, under Bill Clinton, soon got its dream fulfilled when millions of poor mothers got thrown off welfare in the 90s, only to be thrown into low-wage or non-existent jobs without the promised child care aid. At the same time, Donald Trump kept "losing" billions of dollars on paper, which allowed him to pay zero income taxes for possibly more than a decade, as he importuned crooked banks to fraudulently bankroll his real estate empire, which ultimately landed this self-made grifter his own hit TV show on NBC. So as you can see, the DLC's work ethic sermon of a manifesto worked exactly as intended. The New Dems helped to inspire Trump (a registered Democrat) to keep struggling against all odds. Even better, his ladder of opportunity turned out to be an elevator of opportunity!

--There are the deserving poor. and then there are the undeserving poor. The different groups of Poors must be divided, and taught to resent one another so that they will be less apt to resent the rich racketeers of the ruling class, including Donald Trump.  Ex-GOP Speaker Paul Ryan is unfairly often blamed by Democrats for coming up with this poor vs. poor crap all on his own. But, as self-avowed New Democrat Obama used to gently chide his Old GOP bro Mitt Romney: "You didn't succeed all on your own, Governor. You didn't build this all by yourself!"

- Calling Mr. Orwell. We will arm ourselves to the gills to promote world peace, love and understanding. We will impose sanctions on Iraq and the deaths of 500,000 children as a result will have been "worth it." Later in the War Is Peace endeavor, lethal Predator drone assassinations will  become therapeutic "surgical strikes," and the "externalities" of thousands of innocent dead will never be divulged and their names never revealed. 

--Regulations on capital and greed are bad. As a result, Bill Clinton and his bipartisan Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and other anti-graft legislation from the New Deal era. As a result of that repeal, the financial system crashed in 2008, just in time for Obama to win the White House and the Democrats to win the whole Congress and stuff the new ruling administration with the same deregulation-happy culprits, like Larry Summers, who caused the whole mess in the first place. And the regular people struggled on for eight more years until 2016, just in time for Trump and the Republicans to complete the inevitable cycle.

--Mexicans were bringing drugs across the border decades and decades ago! Blacks and Browns were committing all the crimes! Stop them, police them, jail them, and begin a new Jim Crow era and conduct a virtual slow genocide -  but be sure to call your institutional bigoted practices "efficiencies." Then slap a slick "War on Drugs" label on it so you don't sound racist. Decades later, act all shocked and appalled when Donald Trump unleashes his racist rhetoric and tragically rips the whole happy-face mask right off your long-standing official DLC manifesto.

As Al From wrote in 2013's "The New Democrats and the Return to Power," the original 1981 manifesto was the absolute catalyst for "vibrant economic growth in the private sector of the economy.... It was the right first battle for us to take on. It left a good impression and gave us running room for later reform efforts.... It allowed us to establish our new themes without fear of being crushed by the old bulls.... That the New York Times chose to print it in full was icing on the cake."

This manifesto set the Democrats on their relentless, 40-year trajectory to the right, moving the GOP even further to the right as a result.

From adds that as disappointed as DLC conservatives were when, in 1984, Biden "had the good sense to put a stop to our nonsense" of trying to oust Reagan challenger Walter Mondale and replace him with the reactionary Biden, they were confident that the younger man's zealous contributions to their right-wing platform would ultimately prevail. "Developing a winning message" was their ultimate goal then, and it's their ever more feeble ultimate goal now.

Their 1986 midterm message was "Defending America," which according to From, sent the Reaganites into conniption fits of jealousy for out-flanking them from the right.

From also brags that it was the core DLC membership who, in 1981, came up with the anti-democratic superdelegate system to ensure that the right-wing faction of the party would always prevail against any potential lefty upstarts.

This is also when the whole "electability" canard that the pundits can't stop talking about these days first took shape. "If the elected officials whose outlooks were moderated by actually having to be elected took a bigger role in the conventions, making them superdelegates would give them that role." he wrote.

Remember, the "reform" that bars superdelegates from voting in the first ballot at a contested convention is tailor-made so that a vast field of contenders, none of them with a clear majority, will cancel each other out, ensuring that only the conservative party machine will have the final say and coronation privileges. 

From actually credits Hillary Clinton with spreading the New Democrat ideology far and wide throughout the world during her stint as Obama's secretary of state. He doesn't mention the subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarianism in the same countries that Hillary so ingeniously inspired.

And in his own introduction to From's book, written just three years before Donald Trump was elected, Bill Clinton gushes that despite all the pain and destruction and death that it wrought, he is still a true believer in the DLC message of mass austerity, endless war, the continuous growth of capitalism, the expansion of globalism, "reform" of welfare and the fight against "crime". There is nary a word about the climate catastrophe.

Joe Biden himself is not putting the climate catastrophe anywhere near the top of his DLC-inspired agenda. Forget the U.N. report revealing that millions of plant and animal species will go extinct because of the crisis. Not content to be a do-nothing vice president, in 2011 he proclaimed that he was "the new sheriff in town" who would ruthlessly cut all the "waste, fraud and abuse" displayed by living beings protected by the big, bad guvmint. He was the anointed Anti-Waste Czar, whose first accomplishment would be to strike pictures and stories about endangered species from government websites.

War is not only Peace, but Public Ignorance is Strength, and therefore Biden announced:

Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?

And I bet you didn't know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I'm sure it's a wonderful species, but we can't afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom. It's just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.

This kind of waste is just unacceptable. Particularly at a time when we’re facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it's a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody.

That’s why President Obama asked me to head up the Campaign to Cut Waste—a new effort to root out wasteful spending at every agency and department in The Federal Government.

Fast forward to 2019, and his fellow well-protected old New Dems Bill and Hillary Clinton have also sadly devolved into aging (if not quite extinct) vaudevillians, touring cities and speaking to half-empty auditoriums, where ticket prices have been drastically reduced for lack of interest. Hillary just confided to one friendly interviewer that the biggest thing the next Democratic president has to fear is not the climate catastrophe, but (drum-roll, please) - Vladimir Putin!

The crowds are roaring. But probably not in the adulatory fashion that the Clintons would prefer.