Biden's Speech: Control Vs Chaos

Joe Biden seems to have finally abandoned his Dark Brandon persona. On Wednesday, he debuted as the hapless Maxwell Smart vs the Dark Forces.

 He told the electorate that the only thing we have to fear is Chaos itself. Or in the worst case scenario, KAOS, which ranks right up there with the Armageddon SOS that he gave to some rich donors awhile back. 

 Would you believe that the most dastardly villain in all of American history has never been criminally charged for instigating a riot in the Capitol nearly two years ago? Nor has he been charged with any number of other crimes related to his attempted overturning of the 2020 election results. Because having Donald Trump rotting in a Club Fed somewhere instead of freely spinning his dark sticky web all over the World Order would rob the Democrats of their whole reason for existing. Without a hit show with which to titillate and scare the voters in the audience, they might even be forced to address some their own political malpractice. The relentless bipartisan robbing and exploitation of the poor to reward the rich is what created their Trump monster in the first place.

They don't want to touch the financial plights of the electorate with a ten-foot pole. They want people to forget about their rent being too damned high, and eggs costing $4 or $5 or $6 a dozen. With our very Democracy at stake, and KAOS knocking at the door, shelter and food should be the least of our worries. And why waste time fretting about catching COVID for the third or fourth time, with hundreds of Americans still dying from it every single day, when the much more lethal plague of Election Denialism is sweeping the country?

Biden apparently had no other choice but to ignore the poor and the struggling. Logically enough, he thus began his appeal for votes by bemoaning the recent shocking attack on an uber-wealthy member of the political aristocracy:

Good evening, everyone.

Just a few days ago, a little before 2:30 a.m. in the morning, a man smashed the back windows and broke into the home of the speaker of the House of Representatives, the third-highest-ranking official in America. He carried in his backpack zip ties, duct tape, rope and a hammer.

As he told the police, he had come looking for Nancy Pelosi to take her hostage, to interrogate her, to threaten to break her kneecaps. But she wasn’t there. Her husband, my friend Paul Pelosi, was home alone. The assailant tried to take Paul hostage. He woke him up, and he wanted to tie him up. The assailant ended up using a hammer to smash Paul’s skull. Thankfully, by the grace of God, Paul survived.

Biden evokes an image of Paul as an aging Macaulay Culkin, home all alone, forgotten and abandoned. Or at least that's the impression I got from his intro. I'd previously been thinking of Paul Pelosi as a latter-day Louis XVI, who in the alternate history version, is cruelly abandoned by Marie Antoinette to the mob at the very height of the French Revolution. What with Our Democracy supposedly in so much danger, the reported lack of security at the Pelosi manse is especially baffling. Then again, the Democratic Party also has been bankrolling extreme right-wingers in the midterms, under the weird theory that they're so nuts they could not possibly win against a centrist establishment Dem. Until, of course, they do.

OK, so now that Biden has completely convinced the peasants to be sympathetic to the person commonly - or should I say royally - described as being "second in line to the presidency", he will now convince them to be secondarily sympathetic with the various low-level, local election officials and other courtiers whose secondary lives also have been threatened by The Mob. It was an appeal to a more virtuous form of unthinking patriotism, or robotic nationalism:

 My fellow Americans, we’re facing a defining moment, an inflection point. We must with one overwhelming unified voice speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America. Whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans. No place, period. No place ever.

Biden did not go so far as to order federal troops to guard these threatened polling places, or to request that the United Nations send in monitors to validate the balloting and counting, as is done in other, less exceptional banana republics. Rather, he wants powerless regular people to "stand up" for the carefully selected elite candidates in both establishment parties and to protect the feckless Democrats by electing even more feckless Democrats.

 Standing up for ourselves? That can wait for another time, I reckon.

Biden hinted that despite the looming political apocalypse, he will indeed work with the far-right authoritarian Republicans and wannabe dictators after the elections:

I know there’s a lot at stake in these midterm elections, from our economy, to the safety of our streets, to our personal freedoms, to the future of health care and Social Security, Medicare. It’s all important. But we’ll have our differences, we’ll have our difference of opinion. And that’s what it’s supposed to be.

Ominous, because as someone who has called for cutting Social Security and Medicare for his entire half-century as an elected official, Biden intimates he'll be just as willing to wheel and deal with the GOP over "reforms" as he ever was - just as previous modern Democratic presidents have done when they've conveniently lost their congressional majorities in mid-term elections. "And that's what its supposed to be" could be interpreted as Biden's staunch devotion to bipartisan neoliberal tradition.

What is KAOS today will be magically transformed right back to Control tomorrow.

Your own everyday trials and tribulations  will have to wait until all the theatrical  plutocratic infighting, presented for the horrified entertainment of the public, is over and done with. And then its on to the next cliff-hanging episode in which they will have to punish you in order to save you. 

 

Bitter Little Blue Pills

Are you still feeling positively giddy and drunk on your Blue Wave cocktails on this Midterminal Morning After? Or are you already hung over and in dire need of a jolt of reality-based caffeine?

To borrow some of the cool media parlance currently in vogue, let's unpack the hidden meaning of the outcomes by taking a deep dive in a search of multiple takeaways of all the myriad things you need to know this morning.

On second thought, let's not. I am too hung over from reading the multiple media accounts of The Results to think as clearly as I would like.

Just a few muddled preliminary thoughts then:

--Many of the Democrats who lost their Senate seats were de facto Republicans who might have been punished by voters for pandering too much to Trump and for not being progressive enough. Here's looking at you, Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly. I have absolutely no facts to back up this supposition, but it's pleasant to think about anyway.

--On that note, although Florida's Democratic gubernatorial contender, Andrew Gillum, narrowly lost, Floridians still voted to re-enfranchise more than a million of the state's convicted felons, most of whom are black or brown people once brutally imprisoned on minor drug charges or other nonviolent crimes. If that isn't progressive, I don't know what is.

--Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R-Kochtopia) is finally gone. That is a mammoth blue wave in and of itself.

-- As far as the Dems controlling the lower house of Congress is concerned, I've already covered it in some previous posts. The new committee chairs will engage in a frenzy of subpoena-issuing to Trump's corrupt cabinet. Executive privilege will be invoked. Referrals will be made to the Trump-led Justice Department. Lather, rinse, repeat. The neoliberal Octogenarian Troika of Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn will make deals with the nasty Republicans in the interests of National Unity. The smattering of newly-elected "diverse" progressives will make fiery speeches on the House floor in an effort to get the cynical electorate herded back into compliance for Campaign 2020. Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump will seesaw from cooperation to bickering and back again to keep everybody off-balance and guessing and tuned in to the never-ending reality show that substitutes for representative democracy.

--We ordinary slobs have still got our work cut out for us, despite what the New York Times is breathlessly over-hyping as the End of One-Party Rule, equating the blue wave panacea for electoral dysfunction with that other over-hyped little blue pill for erectile dysfunction. Who are they trying to kid? 

It'll be the same as it ever was. And just in case you don't understand that fighting and resisting Trump is not the same thing as making people's lives better, the Times gnaws off the bottle cap of bitter blue pills for you to swallow:  

But after eight years in the minority, Democrats hoping to reclaim the White House in 2020 will also have to prove they are interested in governing — and temper the liberal ambitions of the party’s most ardent left-wingers....

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader who now hopes to be its next speaker, pledged to “work for solutions that bring us together, because we have all had enough of division.”

Get the picture? When the Democratic leaders say they're willing to work with Trump, they mean that they will enthusiastically join his mendacious fight against Single Payer health care. This is despite the fact that more than two-thirds of the electorate are in favor of it. The Democrats' worst enemy was never really Trump. It's always been the Left. So now that you have done your civic duty and voted and provided them with the fig leaf they've so desperately craved to legitimize their power, you are hereby expected to shut up and let the ruling class racketeers just all get along with one another as they always have done. Sew up your mouths and stop sowing such divisions (with much help from social media security state censors) while they sew up their deals.

 The one solution that has always brought them together is the appropriation of untold trillions of dollars to the profitable and privatized and unified and unaccountable corporate war and surveillance and incarceration apparatus. But since the viewers at home must still be kept entertained and engaged, there will also be plenty of anti-Trump theater on offer between the stealthy appropriations and backroom deals. The price of admission is high, and the tickets will not be refundable unless enough people make enough of a noise about how badly they've been cheated.

Problematics of Empire

If anyone gets hurt or killed by America's latest anonymous bomber(s), it probably won't be the liberal elites at whom the terror is directed. It'll be the public or private security guard, the personal assistant, the mail sorter in the corporate basement, or the federal workers who sort and deliver our mail.

It will be the servant class. I suppose the talking heads could always appeal to the bomber's sense of class decency but then again, if the guy or gal sending the pipe bombs doesn't even know that former CIA Director John Brennan (misspelled as "Brenan" on the package) works as a highly-paid consultant at NBC rather than at CNN, he or she probably also doesn't know that Donald Trump is scapegoating the "immigrant-loving" rich and famous precisely to feed the resentment of the less well-off. 

IThe cure for Trumpism, or at least a start to the cure for Trumpism, would indeed be encouraging social solidarity in the bottom 90% of Americans. During the time of Occupy, in 2011, a motley crew of libertarians, anarchists, antifas, liberals, progressives and socialists did join in common cause against the oligarchy for a few hopeful months.

This solidarity could not stand, and so the mainly Democratic mayors of major US cities joined together in their own grotesque solidarity, orchestrating a coordinated mass police shutdown of all the camps.

The ruling class racketeers have lived to gorge their appetites for another 
seven years. And since the politicians beholden to them have done absolutely nothing to ameliorate the abysmal living conditions and despair of an increasingly sick society, along came Trump.

But to hear the mainstream media explain it, Trump is simply exploiting the electoral divisions between red and blue states. While it is very possible and even likely that Trump is the direct inspiration for the Mad Bomber(s), the media are almost all concentrating on his hate-filled campaign rallies without putting his rise to power and his continuing popularity among a sizeable minority of the electorate into historical context.

Doing so might put some of the onus on the less rabidly right-wing half of the Duopoly, and that would never do, not when they are so frantically trying to divert voter fear and loathing in their blue corner.

Somewhat surprisingly, Democrats and their media sycophants are not yet pinning responsibility for the package bombs on the Russians. Perhaps, since even the Establishment-preening Politico has quietly warned liberals to start damping down their hopes for a Mueller indictment of Trump - because, they ruefully acknowledge, never has there been any evidence that Trump "colluded" with Putin to swing the election in his favor.

Meanwhile, leave to the New York Times's Charles Blow to try and redirect the fear solely at the corpus of Trump. While careful not finger Trump as the actual mastermind of the bomb delivery campaign, he writes:

But we can say without equivocation that Trump's stoking of fear and riling of anger is deeply problematic and indeed dangerous.

(We can also say without equivocation that the pundit class's overuse of the catch-all weasel word, "problematic," is indeed problematic.)

Blow continues, quoting Trump:

"Do you know how the caravan (from Honduras) started? Does everybody know what this means? I think the Democrats has something to do with it."

There is no proof that the caravan of Honduran immigrants traveling through Mexico toward the United States was instigated by the Democrats, and the claim is ridiculous on its face.

Well, yes and no. My published comment:

 "The White House" - no way was it Trump - has sent out a mass email pleading for national unity, as though his fascist rhetoric at his rallies has nothing to do with anything.

Talk about washing dirty hands.

And plenty of people have dirty hands, including the oligarchs and corporations who've benefited so handsomely from his tax cuts and assaults on democracy. But look out. Coupled with the dangerous fallout from Trump's incitements to violence is the plunge in the stock market, caused largely by his trade war.

 Capitalism on crack, combined with the crackpot playing at being president, simply is no longer sustainable. With Trump taking off the gloves in that inept and hateful way of his, the mask is coming right off the whole American system.

The refugee caravan from Honduras is the result of the 2009 military coup which ousted the democratically elected Manuel Zelaya, whom the US viewed a socialist troublemaker for instituting such dangerous policies as a national minimum wage, free light bulbs for poor families, and privileging subsistence farmers over multinational agribusinesses. The US then "legitimized" the coup by sending a group of GOP congressmen to monitor another election, "won" by a corrupt strongman with ties to organized crime.

Since then, Honduras has plunged further into poverty and violence. People are fleeing for their lives.

The US, with the history of genocide and slavery it has never reckoned with, now has Strongman Trump to reckon with.

Now, given the wrath apparent within the righteous Times commentariat during these last tense pre-Midterm weeks, it would have been problematic for me to name actual names - namely those of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton - who were, at best, the passive-aggressive backers of the coup, and at worst, its architects, with the usual ass-covering bipartisan help from those nasty old Republicans.  But I think that it is more important to engage semi-closed minds rather than enrage them, particularly in the aftermath of the assassination attempts on their heroes.

A post-coup Wikileaks dump revealed that Hillary did indeed actively campaign against restoring Zelaya to rightful power after the coup, in favor of a more oligarch-friendly right-wing puppet. She covered her ass by asserting that the coup was not really a coup, much as her recent insistence that Bill Clinton's abuse of a White House intern was not technically sexual abuse or abuse of power. 

 And although she did admit her State Department's involvement in the coup in the hard-cover edition of her "Hard Choices" memoir, this chapter was curiously missing in the paperback version, published in the run-up to her second presidential campaign. She scrubbed it, largely because Berta Caceres, the feminist labor activist heroine of the Honduran protest movement for democracy, was murdered by the more corporate-friendly regime supported by the Democratic administration. Also, Clinton had sent notorious neocon John Negroponte to do "advance work" for the State Department, only weeks before Zelaya was hauled out his house, wearing only his pajamas, in the middle of the night. 

Do you think that these omissions and excuses are just a wee bit problematic? Some Democratic Party operatives certainly thought so, because when confronted by reporters about Hillary's role in the violent coup, they chalked up the scrubbing to an unexpected paper shortage as the cheaper edition went to press.

No wonder that addressing climate change is way down there on the Democrats' legislative to-do list, should they win back Congress. The dirtier the water, the less visible is the blood on so many guilty, well-manicured hands.