The Mangling Munching Manchin Machine

(Say three times fast)

Just like clockwork, the Democrats are out in coordinated force, blaming sexism and xenophobia as the core occult reasons for the opposition to party operative Neera Tanden's confirmation to the Biden cabinet.

Granted, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is full of noxious hot air when he points to the "incivility" of Tanden's thousands of vitriolic deleted tweets, aimed both at Republicans and progressive Democrats in the Bernie Sanders wing, as his reason for not voting for her to lead the Office of Management and Budget.  In tandem with that nonsense, he apparently believes that it is the very height of civility to deny his own constituents, living in one of the poorest areas of the country, a rise in the minimum wage to 15 lousy bucks.

So while Republicans (and Manchin) are crying their crocodile tears and claiming they are victims of Tanden's Mean Girl Syndrome (because they only want unity!), the Democrats are perfectly willing to forgo legitimate criticism of her corruption in order to defend her. When you have identity politics to fall back on, the sky is the absolute limit when it comes to glossing over such inconvenient facts as Tanden's call to attack Libya to get at its oil, her past efforts to destroy Social Security and Medicare, her red-baiting of any and all critics of neoliberalism and Hillary Clinton, her leadership of a Democratic slush fund disguised as a think tank (Center For American Progress, or CAP) , her acceptance of corporate bribes from billionaires and corporations to run said slush-tank, her physical assault of a former employee, and her destruction of a blog run out of CAP offices once employees began to unionize.

This is the woman that Joe Biden cynically proposes to control the purse strings of our country and to manage our lives in the process. It is a scary scenario, to put it mildly.

So it is all the more disheartening when even progressive stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leap on the Identity Politics bandwagon in order to defend the bullying Tanden against that traitorous bullying misogynistic villain Joe Manchin. AOC actually helps to ridiculously lump Tanden in with two other more liberal endangered Biden nominees, Hispanic Xavier Becerra and Native American Deb Haaland, as a way to further paper over Tanden's despicable career.

We are supposed to believe that just because Indian-American Neera Tanden once survived on food stamps and lived in public housing, she will suddenly divert from career script and champion poor people. In an absolute subversion of the mantra of Martin Luther King Jr., we are asked to judge Tanden based solely upon the color of her skin and the configuration of her XX chromosomes, rather than upon the content of her truly rotten character.

The glossy veneer barely disguising all kinds of corruption and the record inequality which is carefully engineered and maintained by the political class and its partners in consolidated media is a very flimsy substitute for legislation in the public interest, run by true public servants rather than by the career-climbing servants of the oligarchy.

Witness, just as the latest example of this performance art, Monday night's candlelight vigil spectacular starring Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to mark the 500,000 American deaths from Covid-19. Media reviewers have glowingly called their tasteful tableau such a powerful and refreshing step up from Donald Trump's own criminal callousness.

Because there's nothing like a shiny solemn candlelight vigil to substitute for a single payer health care system, regular Covid relief checks, and student debt forgiveness, right? 

Because things that help ordinary people are treated by the permanent ruling class as veritable plagues against free market capitalism. The body politic, to our leaders, is itself nothing but a Mean Girl calling them nasty names and hurting their feelings, when all they want is Unity and Civility. Harrumph!

Mangling Joe Manchin, meanwhile, dutifully plays his own designated role as the bad cop/useful idiot who prevents the noble and empathetic Joe Biden from completing his incremental agenda. Not formally defecting to the Republican side of the duopoly is simply a clever bargaining chip on Manchin's part, of course. He can dangle the threat of defection over their heads for the duration of his tenure, in the process giving his co-conspirators all the cover they need to implement their occult austerian agenda as they hide beneath their candle-lit masks of beneficence.

Just as the Tea Party Republicans once thwarted Barack Obama's hideous "Grand Bargain" with former House Speaker John Boehner to cut Medicare and Social Security, so too are right-wingers thwarting Neera Tanden's big career move to chief crook and budget-slasher. Sometimes you just have to pick your crooks and decide which bad guys you want to root for, to give you the slightest serendipitous bit of respite from the munching maw of neoliberalism.

Mangling Manchin may end up accomplishing some good in spite of his horrid old self. Then again, he could make a deal with Biden, who might agree to trash his minimum wage promise in exchange for Manchin changing his mind on Tanden.

As the New York Times frames the saga in its own extended mangled metaphor of an article, the White House is still "giving her confirmation a shot" while Tanden herself is "committed to rolling up her sleeves." Ouch.

It is so essential to remain vigilant as we're relentlessly regaled by these never-ending vigils, produced so carefully for our relief and stupefaction.

Resisting Neoliberal Mollification

  It's probably just a coincidence, but almost as soon as I signed up for Biden Transition updates, I started getting spammed by something called the Ozy Daily Dose. At first, assuming that they were just the latest snake oil come-ons from Dr. Oz, I trashed them. But late last week, one particular email slugged The Power Brokers of the Biden Era so piqued my interest that I threw caution to the winds and I opened it.

"They may not be in the White House" Ozy teasingly dished. "but that doesn’t matter. While Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks dominated headlines this past week, the truth is that most Washington policymaking happens behind the scenes long before it lands in front of the federal agencies or on the Resolute Desk. Today we explore the Biden power brokers who may not be obvious from the outside but will play crucial roles across the country — and the world — for the incoming president." 

I was duly dosed with a list of five names (including two couples) who will be operating as a kind of deep state cabinet pulling all the strings at Joe Biden's White House. In apparent order of importance, these alleged top-secret enforcers are Barack and Michelle Obama, former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and.... Kim Kardashian.

Kim Kardashian?!?

Yes, gentle readers, The Daily Dose is pure claptrap. But it is claptrap conceived by two Goldman Sachs alum-chums and spread like a social disease thanks to the lavish financing of billionaire Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs and other investors. It is not your ordinary spam. It is undiluted neoliberal propaganda filet of prime spam in a gold-plated can.

Before I get any further into the oligarchic power behind Ozy, their rationale for choosing the Obamas as Number One power brokers is interesting, to say the least:

The cachet they have, both with the Black community and Democrats in general, will be key in mollifying the base even as Biden potentially faces a struggle to get legislation passed through a closely divided Congress — whether or not Democrats nab the Senate with a Georgia double.

In other words, Barack and Michelle are the designated drugs with which to anesthetize people as they're being sliced and diced into even tinier little pieces by neoliberal capitalism's relentless scalpel. Barack, in particular, is preternaturally adept at mollifying people. As he himself blandly acknowledges in the latest volume of his auto-mythography, he was able to mollify untold thousands of people with his drones. He had to mollify them in order to save them, before they ruined their own lives with all the bad choices they were making.

"In places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men...had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them — send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads.

"And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead."

 If only Kim Kardashian had just a hundredth of the influence that the chill and chilling Barack Obama has, we might actually stand a chance to survive the Great Mollification that the oligarchy is prescribing for us. Kim just wants to release a few carefully selected people from prison from time to time and co-opt the racial justice movement to burnish her own brand, without caring at all that her fellow neoliberals are co-opting her at the same time to put the gloss of sex and celebrity on their reign of economic terror.

The Ozy Media Empire is there to help them achieve their goal of anesthetizing the public and tamping down social movements against the most extreme wealth disparities in human history.  Not for nothing is their target audience the "millennials" who are gravitating to socialism in ever increasing numbers because a government owned and operated by billionaires has nothing to offer people but a whole lifetime of debt and precarity. And not for nothing is Ozy's "power broker" listicle sponsored by Noom, a Dr. Oz-like diet and lifestyle app accused in a class action lawsuit of bilking its customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ozy is literally almost everywhere. Ozy is to media as Amazon is to commerce. From Forbes:

In addition to offering daily content through their digital platform, OZY currently powers three primetime television shows on PBS and the BBC, with a growing slate of programming in development. Their podcast, The Thread, is entering its third season, while their annual OZY Fest steps into its fourth year, merging live music and curated conversations with leaders across industries. OZY currently services 3 million subscribers, with a loyal audience of over 40 million followers.

 (Now, those numbers are fudged at an even greater rate than Donald Trump inflated his own inauguration numbers. Since I am unwillingly on their email list, I am counted a subscriber. They could have gotten my name and address from the Biden team. But they could just have easily gotten it from the email list of the New York Times, with whom they partner. When they talk about the corporate media being consolidated, they certainly ain't kidding!)

Although they're as scammy as Dr. Oz and aim to be as quirkily cool as Ozzie Osbourne, the name of this media megalith actually comes from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem Ozymandias. 

Since the poem is about a "colossal wreck" of a bygone pathological narcissist whose legless and armless monument is now crumbling in the desert, you might be tempted to think that the Ozy honchos are either being archly self-referential, or that they're too ignorant to realize Shelley was insulting oligarchs. 

But co-founder Carlos Watson puts his own interpretation on the poem. Shelley, it seems, simply didn't know what he was writing about. Watson says:

 The poem is commonly read as a warning against outsized egos and the impermanence of power. But we choose to read it differently. To us, it's a call to think big while remaining humble. Admittedly, ours is an unconventional interpretation – because that's who we are. In a world littered with conformity, we like to see things differently.

To that perverted end, Watson cobbles together such humble  trendsetters as Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and George W. Bush to help his audience feel that they, too, are part of a progressive plutocratic movement where capitalism just keeps right on expanding. He can rewrite history and misinterpret literature and shrill his Ode to the West Wing all he wants, but we, the "pestilence-stricken multitudes," don't have to listen to him no matter how insistently he fills our email folders with his globs of gourmet spam.

Rolling Stone aptly called the most recent Ozy confab "a neoliberal nightmare." Sadly, the last two Ozyfests in Central Park (closed to the public for the for-profit occasion) had to be cancelled, in 2019 because of a capitalism-engendered record heat wave and this year because of the capitalism-enhanced Covid-19 pandemic.

To combat neoliberalism in all its insidious and odious forms, we can take heart from Percy Bysshe Shelley's immortal words of nonviolent resistance in The Masque of Anarchy: 

Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!

Democratic Health Care Plan Is a Gift to Predatory Insurers

There's an old saying in vampire lore that if you don't want to get bitten, then don't let the bloodsuckers in.

The Democrats just invited another vampire in.

 The "task force" created by presumptive nominee Joe Biden and his good friend Bernie Sanders in order to coat the party's corporate agenda with that all-important "unity gloss" has just released its aspirational agenda to much media fanfare.

"It's the clearest sign yet that the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party are trying to unite far more than they did in 2016," gushed the New York Times article lauding the "six takeaways" that prove beyond any doubt that progressives are the big winners of some very tasty crumbs and should be properly bedazzled by comity in high places.

This narrative is being spun despite the fact that Medicare For All has officially been declared D.O.A. right in the middle of the pandemic.  Even if the Democrats achieve another super-majority in 2021, the best of all possible worlds will stop at a public option, lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60, and maybe throwing in some dental and hearing aid coverage for the lucky winners.

The Task Force's answer to the abjectly failed United States policy of tying people's health insurance to their employment is to raise US health care costs to astronomical new levels by subsidizing the private insurance policies of the tens of millions of workers thrown out of their jobs by Covid-19. The insurance companies, which have already posted record profits this year because people are too afraid of catching the virus to seek medical care, and because hospitals have cancelled elective surgeries and other costly procedures, stand to become even richer during a Biden administration.

Now, about the Dems inviting the vampire in. Covered by the usual dark cloak of subterfuge, the blood-sucking anti-Single Payer insurance lobby managed to get its own seat at the Task Force's health policy table - which, just like a spider, is comprised of eight members.

The invitee was one Chris Jennings, a fellow of the corporate think tank ominously known as the Bipartisan Policy Center.  BPP's current head honcho and co-founder is notorious insurance industry lobbyist Tom Daschle. Jennings, a veteran of the both the Clinton and Obama administrations, also runs his own boutique consulting firm which advises for-profit health care systems and their various "stakeholders."

If the Dems have anything to say about it, these ravenous profiteers will never actually see the sharp end of the stake themselves.

Jennings' website brags that "he has consistently worked to develop administrative, legislative, and private sector policies/interventions to ensure better stewardship of and a greater return on investment on the nation’s nearly $3 trillion investment in health care."

It's therefore perfectly natural that the health care section of the Biden-Sanders Task Force would precede its prescriptions with showering praise on the Affordable Care Act. If it were not for Trump and those nasty old Republicans, we would be even closer to the ultimate goal of affordable, for-profit health care for everybody!

"Democrats will always fight to save Americans’ lives by making it easier and more affordable to go to the doctor, get prescription medicines, and access preventive testing and treatments. Our policy agenda is designed to produce real results for the American people—not hollow platitudes," the eight members in thrall to the Bipartisan Policy Lobby assure us in platitudes that are not hollow at all, but filled to the absolute brim with wads and gobs of the usual neoliberal stuffing.

How do you substitute "access" for guaranteed care that is free at the point of entry? Let us count the ways. The apparent task of the Task Force is to use the word Access over and over again in hopes of numbing us to the word's nothingness as effectively as the Trump administration is openly striving to numb us to the daily nightmare of millions of people succumbing to Covid-19.

For people who risk losing their insurance coverage if they lose their jobs in this pandemic, Democrats believe the federal government should pick up 100 percent of the tab for COBRA insurance, which keeps people on their employer-sponsored plans. For those who are still unemployed or do not have access to employer-sponsored health care when their COBRA eligibility period expires and are eligible for premium-free coverage, we will take action to automatically roll them over to other coverage options, so they do not experience any gap in health care. We will also re-open the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, even outside of the normal open enrollment season, and expand subsidies to make it easier for people to buy coverage.

Even in the midst of a pandemic, we must never lose our status as consumers of health care product. Even on our death-beds and even to our dying breaths, we must never forget the neoliberal mantra of "but how am I going to pay for that?"

Democrats will also make available on the marketplace a platinum-level, federally administered health insurance option with low fees and no deductibles, so that everyone will have access to this high-quality, low-cost plan. Low-income Americans will be automatically enrolled in this federally-administered option at zero cost to them. We will keep these emergency measures in place until the pandemic ends and unemployment falls significantly. And should the United States find itself in another pandemic or severe economic downturn in the future, these protections will again be made automatically available, so Americans are never again left to fend for themselves in times of crisis.

So  even if you manage to recover from Covid-19 but later come down with cancer or another life-endangering disease, you will immediately revert back to desperate "but how am I going to pay for that!" mode. Platinum is expensive and insurance executives and private equity moguls have to profit so as to afford their yachts and jets.

As if to bipartisanly prove that Republicans have no corner on the prevarication market, the Democratic Task Masters of the Universe proffer this nonsense:

Democrats believe we need to protect, strengthen, and build upon our bedrock health care programs, including the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Affairs system. Private insurers need real competition to ensure they have incentive to provide affordable, quality coverage to every American. 

 Notwithstanding that the public option, rather than advocacy for Single Payer, is negotiating from a starting point of weakness, such a plan would in no way give private insurers the incentive to do right by Americans. Just the opposite, in fact : a public option would absolve private insurers from paying for coverage for the sickest among us. This might reduce premiums for a time, but it would do nothing to drive down costs. The public option would be just one more subsidy for Aetna, Blue Cross and United Health, given that the bulk of their paying customers would now be in the healthy, low-risk pool.

To be fair, there are indeed faint echoes of Bernie Sanders's voice here and there within the Task Force report. An example that might have come straight out of his campaign stump speech:

Too many Americans struggle to afford the prescription drugs they need to get or stay healthy. No American should find themselves foregoing or rationing medications because they can’t afford to pay—especially when taxpayers’ money underwrites the research and development of many prescription drugs in the first place. Democrats will take aggressive action to ensure that Americans do not pay more for prescription drugs than people in other advanced economies. We will empower Medicare to at last be able to negotiate prescription drug prices for all public and private purchasers—for families and businesses, as well as older Americans—no matter where they get their coverage. We will also ensure and enforce that the price of brand-name and outlier generic drugs cannot rise faster than the inflation rate. We will cap out-of-pocket drug costs for seniors, and ensure that effective treatments for chronic health conditions are available at little or no cost. 

But again, the emphasis is on purchasing power, not on the right to receive health care. We'll still pay through the nose, but the rate at which we pay through the nose will be slowed down a tad under Democrats. Freedom's just another word for capitalism having nothing left to lose, what with a whole dying world to keep on exploiting. 

It's a good thing that copyright laws do not apply to book titles. Mary Trump's ballyhooed "Too Much Is Never Enough" takedown of her Uncle Donald is already the veritable motto of bloodsucking capitalism itself.

Trump is just the symptom. Cutting him out in November might ease the pain for a minute, but the cure for what ails us will never come from a neoliberal restoration of corporate Democrats.

Bernie Sanders claiming that Joe Biden "wants to be the most progressive president ince FDR" is like the Nobel Committee giving Droner-in-Chief Barack Obama its Peace Prize. It's not only purely aspirational, it's downright delusional.

Neoliberalism Stinks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Austerians At the Gate

The neoliberal deficit hawks are already sharpening their talons in anticipation of the dessert to follow their multi-trillion dollar CARES feast at the Chateau Fed. But since our fine upstanding plutocrats and overlords must never be seen as the gluttons and exploiters and predators that they truly are, they have already made the "tough choice" of forgoing the Baked Alaska in favor of eating the wait staff themselves for dessert

In case you still hadn't heard, "we" are all in this together. And therefore, it is you who will pay. You, the designated wait staff of America, were in proximity to the table, were you not? And after all, you're (maybe) getting those $1200 stimulus tips.

Before it begins to dawn on you that this isn't a fair outcome, and that those promises of a better life after you're dead are palling, the media-political complex is only too happy to gaslight you.

They're playing their usual divide-and-conquer games to keep your attention safely diverted from the reality that they want to eat you. This week's spectacle is an endless loop of astroturfed Tea Party throwbacks blocking hospital entrances and traffic and even accosting the doctors and nurses who are trying to take away their freedom to bear arms and spread their germs and get back to work serving the plutocrats.

Pick a side, any side. It'll take your mind off mourning for your relatives and friends if only you can simply learn to direct all your anger at the people the Overlords have carefully selected for you to hate.

If you're getting tired of hating Trump, now you can hate the orchestrated mobs of Confederate flag-carrying patriots. Conversely, if you're getting tired of helplessly hating Dr.Anthony Fauci and the health experts telling you to socially distance and cover your faces, now you can direct your wrath at all the scary nurses and orderlies, the designated co-opted darlings of the liberal elite.  Celebrities are even staging virtual concerts and fundraisers for these "front line warriors" and doing nothing at all for you.

But back to those plutocratic plans for your not so distant future.

The plans are ugly, but thanks to the propaganda skills of the New York Times, they are presented seriously and with as much obfuscation as they can muster. As I hinted at the beginning of this piece, somebody has to pay for all the gastric pain that will afflict the currently non-existent Unborn as mysteriously as the coronavirus is afflicting millions of people right now. All of our children and grandchildren, whether they be rich or poor, will eventually all be as #All In This Together as millionaires and bus drivers are in it now.

Veteran Timesman and maitre d' to the oligarchy Carl Hulse solemnly explains:

Just last month, Congress allocated and President Trump signed into law a series of bills that spent an estimated $2.6 trillion — the equivalent of twice the annual discretionary federal budget. And that does not take into account the certainty of much more spending on the way, including the $250 billion currently teed up to replenish a small-businesses aid program and hundreds of billions of dollars more sought for hospitals, states and cities. Something will eventually have to give. (my bold).

Hulse immediately turns to Maya McGuineas, the D.C. queen of the austerians and one of the lizard brains behind the Bowles-Simpson "Catfood Commission" tapped by Barack Obama in 2010 to cut the deficit by having the trillion-dollar war industry "share the sacrifice" with struggling Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid recipients.

A brand new "eye-popping" report by her lobbying organization, the Wall Street-financed Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget, reveals that as a result of the pandemic and the bailouts of the already-rich, the annual federal budget deficit will quadruple. And even though the cost of federal government borrowing is zero and the money need never actually be paid back, the wait staff will have to pay it back. The little people must be disciplined to accept their punishment both now and forever.

Taxing the rich would "crater the economy" Hulse uncritically quotes Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania as saying. And since the Social Security trust fund is dwindling and Medicare is "broke," the beast of old and sick people will have to be starved so that the rich may live.

And quoting another CRFD board member:

“Once we get beyond this disaster, some very hard choices will have to be made, or you will have a federal government that is simply crippled in terms of being able to respond to crisis — whether it is a coronavirus or a natural disaster or a military conflict or economic downturn,” warned Mr. (Senator Kent) Conrad.

This, of course, makes no sense. Punishing the poor and the sick will not enhance our oligarchy of a government's ability to respond better to future emergencies. It will do the exact opposite. As the neoliberal politics of the last 40 years have demonstrated only too well, it is public program-destroying austerity that cripples the ability to respond to a crisis. Thanks to austerity, there is even a shortage of cheap cotton swabs with which to test for Covid-19. Thanks to austerity, hospitals have closed. Thanks to austerity, nurses have resorted to wearing garbage bags as protective gear and even being fired if they complain. Thanks to austerity, celebrities donate money to deliver pizza to the nurses as a substitute for safe working conditions and universal guaranteed health care for all.

But Hulse is sympathetic to the lie. These poor politicians currently have no choice but to spend with abandon. Because it's an election year!

"There is no choice now, but there are tough decisions ahead," he concludes in a piece posing as a straight news article.

You might remember Carl Hulse as the Times server-scribe who was honored by, among others, Pete Peterson/CRFB acolyte and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at the infamous Georgetown house party thrown last summer by Times columnist Maureen Dowd. It's a small world and a big club, etc.

But take heart, Times readers. Because right below Hulse's plutocratic propaganda was printed a fiery oppositional op-ed by none other than Bernie Sanders. He boldly ripped the gluttonous austerians a brand new one -

Should we really continue along the path of greed and unfettered capitalism, in which three people own more wealth than the bottom half of the nation, and tens of millions live in economic desperation — struggling to put food on the table, pay for housing and education and put a few dollars aside for retirement? Or should we go forward in a very new direction?In the course of my presidential campaign, I sought to follow in the footsteps of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, in the 1930s and 40s, understood that in a truly free society, economic rights must be considered human rights. That was true 80 years ago and it remains true today.

Now I will do everything in my power to bring this country together to help Joe Biden defeat the most dangerous president in modern American history. And I will continue to make the vigorous case that we must address the inequalities that contributed to the rise of Donald Trump, whose cruelty and incompetence have cost American lives during this pandemic.

Oh. I guess Bernie forgot that Joe Biden was a big loud vocal supporter of Maya McGuineas's Catfood Commission and had even publicly blamed the Republicans in a speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention for squelching its efforts to cut Social Security, raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67 and reduce corporate tax rates. He bragged on many occasions that he was willing to make the "tough choices" that even too many members of his own party were not.

So, my published response to Bernie's op-ed:

(Sanders writes) "If there is any silver lining in the horrible pandemic and economic collapse we’re experiencing, it is that many in our country are now beginning to rethink the basic assumptions underlying the American value system."

I'm curious whether Joe Biden, whom Bernie urges us all to "come together" to support to overturn Trump, is among those beginning to rethink those basic assumptions underlying the value system whose noxious end-product is Trumpism.

 If not, a President Biden will only enable the subsequent rise to power of somebody a lot smarter and more dangerous than Trump.

  Last I heard, Biden only goes so far as lowering the Medicare age to 60. If we're lucky, that negotiating starting point might end up with Republicans grudgingly agreeing to not raise the age to 67 as Barack Obama himself suggested back in 2011 as part of his own ill fated "Grand Bargain" with the GOP.

  Biden has spent the last nearly half century of his political career trying to cut Social Security and Medicare and calling such cruelty "tough choices." He recently vowed to veto M4A if by some miracle it ever passed Congress and arrived at his desk.

I'll consider voting for Biden if he copies this excellent op-ed by Bernie Sanders word for word and then signs his own name to it.

The keyword there is "consider." I might think about it seriously if he signed the editorial in blood, but given his history of serial lying, probably not even then.

Peak Death, Peak Greed

If the dueling headlines Global Stocks Rise To Record Levels and US Coronavirus Death Rate Doubles In Five Days aren't enough to wake people up to the grotesque reality that "No, Virginia, we're not all in this together," then nothing ever will.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, considered one the country's more prominent liberal public influencers, merely ascribes the horrendous political response to the pandemic to "learned helplessness" while marveling that not only did the  CARES bill contain barely minimal relief for regular people, but that the dastardly Donald Trump actually signed it into law.

He depressingly concludes:

We know what we should be doing in terms of economic policy, and Congress passed a relief bill that, while flawed, was better than I expected. But right now it looks as if our response to the economic emergency will fall far short.

My published comment:

Let's hope we become so adept at sewing our own face masks out of old pillowcases that once this plague abates, the streets will fill with millions of homemade yellow vests waging a long overdue battle against the plague of neoliberal capitalism.

  The same free marketeers who've claimed government is the problem for the past 40 years are first in line to cash in on a multi-trillion dollar slush fund created by the CARES package. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still waiting for those insulting $1200 "stimulus" checks that won't even cover a month's rent.

 Private equity stands to make another record killing. snatching up even more distressed property, destroying livelihoods and raising rents. While the rich enjoy full mortgage freezes for the duration, the have-nots are only granted a temporary stay on evictions.

 The rich only feign concern once infected homeless people threaten their own health. In Vegas, the casino hotels stand empty while the evicted homeless are sleeping on parking lot concrete. And the casino known as Wall Street soars.

 This crisis is not a matter of politicians' "learned helplessness." It's a matter of deliberate, greed-fueled sadism The only way they govern, in fact, is by crisis. They then claim that rewarding themselves and punishing the rest of us is the only way to "solve" - that is, to feed upon - the crisis.

  For the cannibalistic oligarchs, this pandemic has got to be the biggest, fattest, juiciest steak they've ever been served.

The link inserted above on private equity is a how-to guide for the greedy, published by the National Law Review. Venture capitalists are advised to move fast, stress their connections to other greedsters, and take advantage of the fact that normally prickly-stickly banks are so overwhelmed with requests for bailout cash that they'll overlook any potential grift. And best of all, the loans made to "small business" applicants from the private equity/vulture capital biz might never even have to be paid back at all! Anybody can be an elite deadbeat like Donald Trump, as long as that anybody is already a member of the One Percent.

Not for nothing is Trump himself touting an unproven malaria drug cure for the coronavirus. He has, after all, his own "small" financial stake in the drug's manufacturer. He therefore fits the purposely vague definition of the beleaguered "small business" owner being given the bloodsucking chance of a lifetime in the CARES package.

As the National Law Review so discreetly advises hungry vampires: "Our sources tell us that the thought was that this initial round of relief should be for 'Main street, not Wall Street.' However, that perception didn’t consider all the small companies that are owned, in part or whole, by PE or VC but that are not “Wall Street” types.  Our sources note that people in the Administration and on the Hill are aware of this and that it might be addressed in future actions."

So act now while manufactured chaos and crisis rule the day and before the already terrorized little people find out they've been sucked dry in their sleep.

Doctor Mengele Rising

The only way that Donald Trump and his kleptocratic cronies can make their America great again is to make their servants work for them again. This is notwithstanding the corrupt political duopoly's relative pittance of $1,200 checks and a few extra months of guaranteed enhanced unemployment benefits. These are nothing but the shiny little baubles they twirl before us in order to mask the multi-trillion dollar permanent slush fund that they've allocated for themselves.

Democracy is not only a myth, it has officially been declared a dead myth. This is especially true when more than a few "experts" and media propagandists have openly asserted that if people have to die so that they and their Plutonomy may live, so be it.

As they plunder the wealth of a nation and a globe in their orgy of disaster capitalism overkill, all remaining shreds of their propaganda masks are getting ripped off their smirking faces at the speed of the avoidable death rate directly attributable to the orchestrated dearth of the cheap face masks essential to protect human beings from infection by COVID-19.

The value they place on money over human life has always been a given. It's just that, until now, they've been fairly subtle about it, succeeding, through their political lackeys,  at convincing enough people that this is still a democracy because we are allowed to vote every two and four years.

With their own lives at stake even as they rob and plunder in full public view,  they're caught between the rock and the hard place of both despising us and needing us. Their contempt has only served to once again display the abject fear they so nakedly exhibited when Bernie Sanders had briefly appeared to be beating Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Much to their chagrin, the coronavirus is now more threatening to their continuing rule than a million Bernie Sanders could ever be. They can't cheat the virus, red-bait the virus, lie the virus out of existence, or make fun of the virus's odd little spikes the way that they made fun of Bernie's Brooklyn accent, wispy hair and flailing arms.

It seems like only yesterday that  MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah went on the air to complain that "Bernie makes my skin crawl." Fast forward a couple of months, and she's got herself an enemy that actually infiltrates your skin and has the potential to drown you to a painful death as your lungs fill up with fluid.

Not that she and her fellow plutocrats had to worry about Bernie, who just caved by not showing up for the final vote for the aforementioned corporate coup and slush fund bailout of the despised billionaire class.

Matt Stoller@matthewstoller·1h Love all the Bernie stans arguing that for practical reasons he *had* to compromise and do what Schumer wanted. I don’t remember such charitable feelings when Elizabeth Warren organized her Medicare for All plan. Weird double standard.

So how ironic that the non-wealthy service sector - which runs the gamut from nurses and teachers and child care workers to sanitation truck drivers and delivery people and grocery clerks - turns out to be more indispensable than the corporate media borg and the leagues of scolding neoliberal Thought Leaders and lecturing elite technocrats!

When Donald Trump says he wants America's churches packed by Easter, what he really means is that he wants the service sector back on the job by Easter so that the oligarchs can enjoy the glorious Slush Fund Resurrection of their wealth and power in ungodly comfort as they feast at the altar of Mammon. Who's going to make all the beds and manicure all the lawns at Trump's properties, maintaining him and his class in the comfort to which they have become accustomed?  We certainly cannot expect Melania to load her own dishwasher or Ivanka to do her own hair and makeup.

Or as Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacecic so bluntly puts it, "Healthy workers below about the age of 55... we'll gradually bring those people back and  see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don't know.... Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you'll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose."

To make matters even worse, with the Hamptons and Martha's Vineyard now full to bursting with off-season wealthy New York City refugees, Flyover Country is actually warning rich potential virus-carriers to stay the hell away. Several upstate New York counties, for example, have informally banned them from entry. These well-heeled refugees find themselves being treated uncomfortably similarly to the "illegal" migrants they have either caged or enslaved at sub-minimum wages, as the need and their whimsy dictates.

Despite the pyrrhic Senate victory which officially turned the Republic into a formal rather than de facto neofeudal oligarchy, the class war is getting turned right on its ear. Now it's the poor who have established gated communities to keep out the rich. The poor all over the world are refusing in ever increasing numbers to return to work and to risk their lives for abysmally low remuneration and no benefits.

We are rightly outraged by pundits and politicians glibly discounting both the working class and the indigent as expendable, and treating our health and survival as secondary in importance to the economic growth that benefits only the few. We purport to be astounded that in Italy, elderly pandemic victims are being denied ventilators in favor of giving younger victims a fighting chance at survival..

Italy has single payer health care, which gave Joe Biden the perfect hook to decry Medicare For All at the recent debate with Bernie Sanders. He didn't mention that the outsourcing of manufacturing of medical equipment in the "free trade" deals he has spent his entire political life championing is what has led to the global shortage of life-saving supplies to fight the virus. The health care systems offering free treatment at the point of entry have nothing to do with the virus's morbidity and mortality rates.

Biden campaign adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, for example, has long advocated for letting old people die when they are no longer useful to society and to the bottom line.

In a controversial 2014 Atlantic piece, the self-described "medical ethicist" and leading Obama administration health official wrote:

But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic....

 Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. This has become so pervasive that it now defines a cultural type: what I call the American immortal.

I reject this aspiration. I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive. For many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop.

Emanuel apparently has not advised his own client, the 77-year-old cognitively declining Joe Biden, that he is already two years past "the pretty good age to stop."  But perhaps instead, he has suggested that Biden be kept out of the public eye as much and as long as possible to stop all the public speculation about his cognitive decline.

(For more on Emanuel's neoliberal ethic, please read "Medicare, Doctor Mengele, and You.")

To mangle both the Mengele metaphor and the late great George Carlin: not only is it a big club that you ain't in, they want to club you over the head with it. 

While they're wielding their weapons, let's wield ours with a massive general strike. Let's stop making their beds, mowing their lawns, tutoring their pre-Ivies, paying their rents, building their mansions, cooking and delivering their food, fighting their wars, and manipulating their balance sheets to effectuate their tax evasions.

As soon as this pandemic ends, and it will end, we must don our yellow vests. We might not win, but at least it will feel good trying. At least we can make them feel moderately uncomfortable about killing people in new record numbers.

Compassion, Neoliberal Style

By all accounts, homelessness in California is a humanitarian crisis as well as a shameful example of deliberate political inaction. Deaths of those living on the streets are occurring at the rate of three a day and expected to increase even more next year as the result of the paralysis of the political class, beholden as they are to the needs of their ultra-wealthy donors and "not in my back yard" (Nimby) constituents.

The New York Times is on the case - but not by espousing the need for more public housing and affordable rents. Instead, the Paper of Record is running a concern-trolling piece about "compassion fatigue."  It seems that both ordinary Californians and burnt-out social workers are suffering an epidemic of "secondary trauma" just by having to  deal with and look at homeless people.

It all started with a letter from a Chicago reader named Ayanna, who asked the Times:

What detaches a person so far from human suffering/poverty/homelessness that they see people who are stricken with one or all three as a public nuisance?We can’t depend on the altruism of the wealthy to help solve the housing crisis. Housing policies must be equitable, inclusive and be pushed forth with the belief that shelter is a human right.”

But rather than contact local, state and federal officials to press them on why the housing crisis has gotten so out of hand, the Times asked a homelessness researcher from the University of Southern California about why ordinary people aren't more compassionate toward the homeless.

Well, according to Professor Benjamin Henwood, people are just sick and tired of witnessing misery. So if you, too, feel disgusted at the sight of homeless people, you need to be easier on yourself. You can help the homeless and develop empathy simply by taking a little time every day to think about them and try not stigmatize them so much. At the same time you should indulge in a little self-care and learn not to beat yourself up for having such callous feelings about people you see living on the streets.

As Henwood said:

While there’s not a lot of research on how best to address it, there are plenty of best practices that in different ways emphasize being kind to yourself. Of course, there may also be collective compassion fatigue, which can occur when the public is invested in trying to help address homelessness but don’t see the problem getting better.

"Best practices" in the neoliberal buzzword that obfuscates how policies and programs ostensibly designed to help the poor usually end up benefiting the rich investors in privatized programs that used to be under the sole purview of public agencies. Poverty is not a crisis, it is a business.  For example, it might be "best practices" for the wealthy donor class to suggest that slightly more privileged California residents put up homeless people in their backyards for a spell to qualify for a temporary property tax break or small stipend. It would not, however, be "best practiccs" to tax the wealthy in order to build a million subsidized housing units to permanently shelter the chronically unhoused.

So if the problem of homelessness rears its ugly head and offends the eyes of a country full of eyewitnesses, another "best practice" is to ever so subtly put the onus on the homeless people themselves. The Times interview with Henwood continues:

Q -We are often quick to reach into our pockets when disaster hits, like after an earthquake or wildfire, but do you think people are more reluctant to pitch in when it comes to helping the homeless?

 A- Homelessness is instead attributed to poor decision making or the fault of the person experiencing homelessness who we conclude are somehow to blame and not deserving of help or relief.

Notice the use of the passive voice. Henwood doesn't say who, exactly, blames the poor for their own plights. But he does passive-aggressively put the discredited message out there. The planting of a tainted theory with the caveat that it's tainted is still a plant.  Could it be that he doesn't want to bite the hands that fund his research at wealth-soaked USC? If he went so far as to clamor for  a wealth tax to build housing for the homeless, it might damage his research funding as much as it might damage the career trajectory of the Times reporter who limits her own inquiries to middle class attitudes about the homeless as a way to avoid directly addressing this humanitarian catastrophe. As I previously wrote in a piece about godzillionaire Bill Gates's method of helping the poor, our ruling class would rather spend their money studying problems than see any little smidgen of their excess cash going into the pockets of the poor. Therefore, the powerful are very fond of glibly ascribing the poverty caused by private equity and obscene wealth inequality to the drug addiction and mental illness of their targets. 

In other words, it's a way of stereotyping homeless people. Even well-meaning researchers send the message that a person is living on the streets for no other reason than addiction or mental illness. They never address the distinct  possibility that the drugs and the mental problems are the direct results of evictions and job losses caused by the financial meltdown of 2008, with fully 94 percent of all the recovered wealth going directly to the top one percent. They never talk about taxing the rich.

Another common liberal trope is to paint the slightly better off, but still- struggling general public as ignorant bigots, further relieving politicians and their deep pocketed donors of any and all culpability. It's the same trope that allows them to blast Donald Trump for the cruel rhetoric that accompanies his cruel policies as they themselves utter all the right liberal platitudes while doing absolutely nothing to rectify dire situations.

 Another word for this "best practice" is virtue-signaling.

It's the tired old ploy that just allowed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other centrist Democrats to wring their hands over Trump's food stamp cuts - without introducing any legislation to help the up to a million poor people now facing the loss of meals and home heating assistance.

The Times article about compassion fatigue syndrome hopelessly and cynically concludes with this smarmy little bit of stigma-fighting as a substitute for what the rest of the world is doing - striking, marching, rioting - to fight the cruelties of neoliberal capitalism.

What can we do to combat the stigma?

We haven’t studied and don’t know a lot about fighting stigma related to homelessness. In other fields we’ve looked at stigma related to, for example, serious mental illness and found that there are several approaches including disseminating information (e.g. people with serious mental illness are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crimes) and exposing the public to people who have disclosed having a mental illness.

These can be targeted anti-stigma campaigns or part of a much larger media campaign. More recently, there have been media campaigns that appear to be addressing stigma related to homelessness, but it isn’t clear whether the message “anyone can become homeless” impacts stigma since while this may be true, we also know that certain groups, including African-Americans, are more likely to become homeless in the United States.