Ain't Democracy Grand?

I was so relieved to learn that Democratic Party investors were so relieved when Joe Biden finally quit The Race. The poor things had been suffering a painful mass outbreak of Donation Constipation, having deliberately withheld their financial effluvia from his campaign receptacle.

Intestinal fortitude does have its limits. So it was good to know that all that bottled-up goodness was freely flowing again this morning to and through the throne of Kamala Harris.

Yes, fellow citizens, it is indeed a coronation in all but name. This is despite the Power Behind the Throne (Barack Obama) suggesting that the coronation be accorded a simulacrum of Democracy via an open convention with actual votes cast by various appointed delegates.

 This is disingenuous.  the fact us that Obama handpicked Harris years ago, when he told  a group of anal-retentive Donor-investors in 2013 that she was the best-looking attorney general in the country. He put her name and her face right up there in lights. She got even more star status when he subsequently apologized for coming off like such a sexist pig. 

This pre-coronation drama came in the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, Obama's bailout of the banks, and the subsequent foreclosure fraud stampede - led by the very same banks that caused the catastrophe in the first place.

I doubt that Donald Trump will ever confront Harris's still-unexplained failure to prosecute Steve Mnuchin, his own former Treasury Secretary. when she had a golden opportunity to do so. You might remember that Mnuchin was the head  of the corrupt OneWest bank when investigators handed over to Harris a batch of about a thousand "fraudclosure" documents which illegally forced underwater mortgagors out of their homes.

Kamala Harris was a newly-seated Senator when that legislative body was mulling Mnuchin's conformation. But just as her political colleagues are protectively and prematurely circling the wagons around her now, so they were in 2017. As then reported by The Intercept, not one of her fellow senators brought up the leaked memo proving that Mnuchin had been in it up to his eyeballs. It might have implicated Harris, who already was being groomed for a  presidential future based entirely upon the identity politics agenda marketed by the party instead of an actual platform to make people's lives better. Even vocal anti-Mnuchin Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, themselves presidential contenders, refused to comment on Harris's refusal to bring Mnuchin to account.

Once we get past the nonstop accolades to the patriotism and selflessness of Genocide Joe by the very same hypocrites who pushed him out once their own cover-up of his mental health was exposed for all the world to see, it'll be interesting to watch, from a bemused distance of course, the next steps of the lockstep Duopoly.

One thing is for certain. With the mythology of democracy exposed as a sham to even to those denialists who didn't or wouldn't believe that billionaire donors are the de facto puppet masters and rulers, perhaps more people will simply refuse to engage in electoral politics to the exclusion of, say, taking to the streets and the corporate boardrooms to "make our voices heard." A mass strike would be nice, although I suspect the misery levels will have to rise a bit higher for that to occur. 

It's telling that Joe the Patriot literally put "the good of the Party" before the good of the country as the basis for his decision to end his candidacy.  It's also telling that despite his decision, he will continue to pretend to run things for the next whole half-year remaining to him as president. An embittered deluded commander in chief can still do a lot of damage in six months. Unless, of course, he is being operated by remote control. And let's hope that the Party at least is giving him a decent bribe parting gift. Maybe a pardon in perpetuity for Hunter. The least they can do is have one of their billionaire donors secretly pay off all those home equity loans he's taken out over the years.

As Simone Weil wrote in "On the Abolition of All Political Parties," the only reason for preserving anything is its inherent goodness.

 "The evils of political parties are all too evident; therefore, the problem that should be examined is this: do they contain enough good to compensate for their evils and make their preservation desirable?"

Joe Biden aw the writing on the Teleprompter. He is too decrepit to any longer "generate the collective passions" in the electorate for his own club/cult to retain its power - the ultimate aim of any cult or club. The good of the all-mighty entity called a country is purely secondary. 

And the good of the earth and all the living things inhabiting it? As far as they're concerned, the planet might as well be in the toilet.

Why Is Kamala Harris Canoodling With Austerians?

Vice President Kamala Harris is taking a fair amount of heat this week for partnering with notorious horndog Bill Clinton, of all people, for a discussion on women's issues during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Clinton has been serving a long stint in the media doghouse ever since the #MeToo movement gained momentum during the Reign of Trump Terror, and scandals ranging from the Monica Lewinsky saga to Clinton's association with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein started getting re-examined with fresh sets of woke eyes. Harris's marquee role at the Clintons' annual "Global University Initiative"  is therefore being widely lambasted as a ham-handed effort to both salvage Bill's tattered reputation and to unofficially re-cement the entire Clinton clan's role as major players in both the Biden administration and the Democratic Party.

As one editorial puts it, the very idea of Kamala Harris and Bill Clinton getting together to discuss "empowering women and girls of the world" is a bad joke, especially since the former president still considers himself a victim of the women and girls he has abused through the years. It's really hard to woke a comatose horndog, but Harris plans to give it the old college try anyway at her alma mater, Howard University.

What's being ignored in the critical coverage of this gabfest is that the occult purpose of the Clinton Global Initiative University is the imposition of crushing austerity on the women and girls (and men and boys) of the world.  Not for nothing does major funding for this week's confab with Kamala Harris come from the Peter J. Peterson Foundation. Begun by the late Wall Street billionaire and deficit hawk sponsor of Barack Obama's so-called Cat Food Commission and its efforts to cut Medicare and Social Security, his think tank continues to spread the thoroughly debunked claim that government spending for the greater social good is bad for economic growth - a/k/a the unfettered growth of predatory capitalism.

Kamala Harris's participation in this oligarchic enterprise, which is now desperately trying to cloak itself in the masks of feminism and diversity, should disabuse us of the notion that the Biden administration is the most progressive one since FDR. With most of the relief measures in the "rescue" legislation - expanded unemployment insurance, modest food stamp increases and tax credits with direct cash disbursements to needy families with children - set to expire within the year, it should be obvious that their placement of a band-aid on the festering societal wound that they themselves created more than 40 years ago is mainly designed to placate an increasingly restive population.

The Clinton Global Initiative University continues to press for austerity, and it does so by infiltrating the nation's colleges and universities with the specious message that the economic pain of indebted students is due not to debt peonage imposed by greedy lenders, but by greedy older people depriving them, the young future leaders and budding entrepreneurs of America, of the success that they deserve.

"It's Up To Us," the students are instructed, to become politically engaged enough to willingly join the oligarchs in the austerity program. "Get Involved! Join the Movement!" the Clinton website urges, boasting that 131,000 college kids already have signed the pledge to become deficit hawks.

Among the solutions that the Clintons' Campus Crusade For Austerity urges the young people to clamor for is privatizing Medicare with a "premium support program," and raising the Social Security retirement age. It also suggests replacing the income tax with a "progressive consumption tax" - which many critics say is actually regressive, given that poor people must spend most of their incomes on necessities. 

Therefore, immediately after being empowered by Bill Clinton and Kamala Harris at Friday's CGIU "plenary session," participating students will meet privately in an "Office Hours" chat with Hilary Allen, the program director for It's Up To Us, along with "special guests" from media monolith Verizon, another co-sponsor of the conference. According to her bio on the Clinton Foundation website, Allen was inspired to become a "radical moderate" by billionaire Daniel Lubetzky,  founder of KIND snacks, who proved to her that as long as the KIND label is slapped on predatory capitalism, who cares about the actual hidden ingredients?

To that end, Hillary Clinton herself will join the fun, leading yet another plenary session conversation with the theme of kindness promotion, which is mainly achieved by Chelsea Clinton's "Too Small To Fail" initiative to combat poverty by reading to children in laundromats.

As for Kamala Harris, hopefully she will have soaked up so much kindness and empathy by canoodling with the Clintons that her upcoming junkets to Central American countries so devastated by neoliberal US plunder that record numbers of refugees are crossing the Mexico-US border, will convince those political bosses to keep their subjects from ever even reaching Mexico in the first place. This act of American empathy will be accomplished by billions of dollars in kind bribery cash to be paid directly to the political bosses.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, in other words, rumors of the death of the Neoliberal Project and its relentless imposition of austerity and pain on the suffering masses of the world have been greatly exaggerated, Rescue Plan or no Rescue Plan.

And stateside, at least 30 million retired, sick, poor or disabled people have yet to receive their $1400 "stimulus checks." It seems that Congress unkindly forgot to appropriate the funds for the Social Security Administration to compile a list of beneficiaries for the IRS. You know... the desperate people that the Clinton Foundation and its corporate sponsors want you to believe are stealing our futures.