Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee

It is a truth increasingly, if not universally, acknowledged that the Democratic Party hates democracy .In fact, it absolutely loathes democracy. Its refusal to schedule any presidential primary debates is bad enough. But it's now reached the point where that most sacrosanct pillar of liberalism - the First Amendment to the US Constitution - has been rendered anathema to the experts of the liberal class.

Why? Because a trio of federal appellate court judges has ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its bounds in pressuring the social media giants of Silicon Valley to censor content  Since the lawsuit was brought by a couple of Republican states' attorneys from Missouri and Louisiana, it is dismissively described by the New York Times as a "victory for conservatives." It is not only not something to be celebrated by liberals, this upholding of speech rights is something to be chagrined about. The immediate implication in the Times article is that if Republicans support a good thing, it is automatically demoted to a bad thing, or at least a thing that is highly suspect.

Democratic critics of the court ruling say that the Biden administration and its adjacent federal bureau of investigation were only trying to suppress information about the Covid pandemic that was not based upon scientific fact. These posts contained unsanctioned discourse about vaccines, masks, medication and lockdowns which the government deemed to be false and dangerous.

It's being sold as a battle between (noble) Sanctioned Information and (malign) Unsanctioned information. But at its heart it is the class war between unfettered capitalism and any freelance discourse that threatens the profits of unfettered capitalism.

The legal skirmish is even more specifically between and among the infinite varieties of snake oil. Truth or falsity is not the issue. The issue is who gets to control the production of the snake oil.

The Ivermectin treatment for Covid, for example, may or may not be bogus. It may or may not be efficacious.  That controversy is beyond my expertise and purview - and anyway, it is not the point. The point is that alternative medicine, particularly of the unpatented or patent-expired kind, might endanger the profits of Big Pharma.

Snake oil salesmen have always been an integral part of the American landscape. Plenty of people have died over the years and the centuries by relying on the little liver pills advertised in what used to be a wealth of periodicals in this country, the magnetic gizmos to cure disease and the Goop and the blood plasma transfusions for eternal youth. And of course, there's the old standby of simply praying away whatever ails people. Nobody ever said that free speech and religious cults had to be perfectly reasonable, sane or beneficent. Bullshit has always been baked into this human-inhabited planet of ours.

Not for nothing is the Times article on the First Amendment ruling written by a reporter who works on the "Misinformation Desk."  Whether this new beat is a warning that the Times itself is misinforming you is left unsaid. But Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Lee Myers immediately sets the desired snake oil tone, albeit one with the requisite gravitas. He is qualified to write about misinformation, insinuates a blurb appended to his article, because he once wrote a whole book about Putin. His misinformation expertise spans the entire globe, as a matter of fact.

So right off the bat,  it is incumbent to describe the First Amendment ruling as purely a Republican thing. That the liberal ACLU crowd also approves the Appellate decision only gets a brief mention several paragraphs in - only once readers already have been triggered to despise it.  Myers finally also allows that "others" besides Republicans also are not okay with government censorship. But as an example of this outlying otherness opposed to government censorship, he gives us Robert F Kennedy Jr, -  who, besides defending the First Amendment, is also described as an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist.

How do you know that journalism in the public interest has gone the way of the rotary phone? When the Paper of Record sees fit to replace its Climate Desk with a Misinformation Desk

Misinformation is a fluid word, interchangeable with Disinformation and the even more dreaded Malinformation.  It can be defined as any information, whether it be true, false or in-between, that does not pass the smell test of the delicate upturned noses of the Established Order. Information must always be disbursed from on high and never from the ground up. Brains must be well-credentialed, preferably from the Ivy League and well-funded think tanks. That is why the Times and other corporate media outlets will never, ever admit that their own Russiagate narrative was and is a huge hoax, born fully formed of the 2016 electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton. That is why the Paper of Record's own current disinformation campaign is insisting that the millions of premature deaths and the lifelong disabilities from Covid 19 are just like the seasonal flu. If their cherry-picked "experts" are unconcerned about the latest surge of new strains, then neither should you be. Cases are mild, especially if you're a celebrity with concierge health care and live-in help. Any information to the contrary makes you a mere personal anecdote-spreader. If some vulnerable people are "falling by the wayside," in the unfortunate euphemistic words of Dr. Anthony Fauci, that's just the way the eugenics cookie crumbles.

The First Amendment has been tacitly amended, you see. It may not be invoked by the lower orders or by other renegades or heretics or irresponsible people, especially those belonging to the wrong political party or refusing to join any political party at all. The only safe snake oil is the kind that is well-dressed, smells heavenly, and is bottled in expensive crystal decanters. Ir is usually only accessible to, and accepted by, those with the disposable incomes with which to unlock a Times paywall or to afford a cable subscription.

The Times article on the court ruling, what with its Pulitzer stamp of approval, therefore fairly reeks of class snobbery, as do most of the subscriber responses to it. Not only was the legal decision upholding the First Amendment rendered in the deep South (New Orleans) it was rendered by a mere three judges. The backwardness of the thing is a given.

Although the First Amendment says nothing specific about an inherent human right to free speech, and only bars the government from policing speech, the Times is having none of it. It actually euphemizes the ongoing censorship efforts as "the government's ability to combat false and misleading narratives about the pandemic, voting rights and other issues that spread on social media."

That sentence broadcasts sloppy lazy thinking and/or deliberate, misdirecting vagueness. The conflation of the various conflicting theories and studies about a misunderstood series of diseases caused by Covid with easily debunked lies about polling places and election dates is ridiculous on its face. And even if you think it's ridiculous, then you are urged to take the next suggested step and get all freaked out about all the unnamed "other issues" that spread like deadly pathogens all over the Internet!

The  newspaper does not, of course, directly critique the Biden White House, the FBI, the Surgeon General or the Centers For Disease Control for their own mal-informative actions, such as as precipitously and falsely declaring the pandemic to be over. It certainly has not examined or retracted its own mal-informative reporting about the contrived and debunked Russiagate narrative with which it explains the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the rise of Trump and Trumpism. You see, the snake oil being dispensed from the crystal vials of capitalistic media has been fully tested and approved. It atomizes the doses into a fine mist, keeping you alternately anesthetized and coked up with partisan rage. It aims to choke people into a state of atomized, isolated helplessness.

In its official response to the Appellate Court, the White House doubled down, tripled down, infinity-downed and sprayed its own snake oil with toxic abandon: 

“This administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the White House said in a statement. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people but make independent choices about the information they present.”

Of course, congress could pass a law reversing the protections that social media behemoths currently enjoy from libel or slander suits brought by injured parties. But that might damage the government's self-assigned role as censorship police.

Whatever happened to the idea that the best weapon against bad speech is better speech? The government and the ruling class it serves, however, find it more expedient to counter what they deem to be bad speech with lies and disinformation that suits their own agenda and serves their own needs. If they spritz out their nostrums often enough, the hope is that the body politic will have no other recourse but to helplessly absorb them by osmosis, making them integral parts of their being. 

Biden's Band-Aid Sampler Pack

Joe Biden's poll numbers are still in the tank despite the carefully-timed cascade of criminal indictments against Donald Trump. Therefore, the White House has decided to do something really radical. They will announce the 10 lucky winners of the Medicare price negotiation sweepstakes even earlier than originally planned! 

Come Tuesday, tens of millions of Americans going broke because of the high cost of prescription drugs - or, more accurately, the tens of millions of Americans who have forgone the drugs because their cash already has run out - will finally discover whether their particular medication will be somewhat more affordable, beginning as early as 2026.  Since older Americans vote in far higher numbers than younger people do, the Lucky Ten probably will be treatments for diseases that inordinately affect the elderly.

Tuesday's desperate campaign stunt highlighting Biden's drug band-aids of the future has more than a few catches.  His team should know they're in trouble when even one of their most reliable New York Times centrist stenographers -  David Leonhardt - can make  only a wishy-washy case for them. Leonhardt and co-writer Ian Prasad Philbrick have made a feeble try anyway, even awarding Biden with the title "Doctor Spend Less" as a way both to cement his deficit hawk cred and to make voters forget that during his first campaign, he'd promised to push for a public health insurance option - the standard centrist bait and switch for a true single payer system. That promise was dead in the water by inauguration day.

The Times starts out with a handy, damning chart showing that health care costs in the United States are more than double those of other advanced countries. They then pitch the half-hearted hope that readers will conclude that eventually lowering the prices for only 10 drugs will make even the slightest dent in American health care costs.

It turns out that there are limits to even what media stenographers for the Democratic Party are willing to do, as they ruefully admit that lowering drug costs for older people will probably incentivize the rapacious drug companies to  raise the prices of these same 10 drugs for people under age 65. (Not to mention raising the prices of the thousands of drugs not in the Lucky 10 for patients of all ages. 

These unlucky patients would, of course, include some of the same younger people who will have to start repaying their onerous student loans next month. These are some of the same younger people who turned out to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, based solely upon his promise to at least partially forgive student debt for everybody, with no need to jump through the endless hoops of "means-testing."

Now, this is not to say that Joe Biden is ignoring younger people or worse, completely throwing them to the wolves.  Far from it. You see, the president sent out his good friend Bernie Sanders to New Hampshire and the cable talk shows over the weekend to warn progressive people of all ages that a vote for a primary challenger or for a certain Green Party candidate will be a vote for Donald Trump, No matter that these same disaffected souls would just stay home if there was no alternative to either Trump or Biden. Sanders just repeated the spoiler canard. Failing to pull the lever for Biden would be ushering in a new era of fascism and the complete privatization of Social Security and Medicare. It would rob all the uninsured student debtors of their last best vestige of hope of actually living to 65. It would also end Bernie's task of continuing to ineffectually urge Biden to do more progressive things, such as "going after corporations."

But back to the New York Times's even worse than half-hearted defense of Doctor Spend-less's Sampler Pack.

"Some people will save a lot of money," the article quotes one health researcher as hoping. The people who will save are the tiny minority of seniors who actually still have the retirement savings to spend on their drugs.

 But nevertheless, the Times persists in denying reality. Or maybe they're just being cynical when they write of the futuristic Medicare Drug Discount bonanza coming soon to a dystopian hellscape near you:

Biden and his aides understand that these policies are popular with swing voters, who, as this newsletter has described before, tend to lean left on economic issues while being more conservative on many social issues. That’s particularly true of swing voters who don’t have a four-year college degree. The president has described his health care policies as part of “Bidenomics in action.”

There's some occult snobbery built into that last paragraph. It implies that young "swing voters who don't have a four-year college degree" are so stupid as to believe that lowering the prices of only 10 drugs for the 65+ crowd is pretty much equal to Medicare For All . Maybe these voters will also forget that even during his first run for the White House, Biden had vowed to veto M4A if by some miracle it ever reached his desk after passing both houses of congress. Team Biden knows full well that polls show that at least 70 percent of Republican voters also favor single payer health insurance. 

About those older voters: Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, they are now able to buy their hearing aids over the counter, the better to hear Biden reading off the telerompter to tout Bidenomics.

He is also, according to the Times. "trying" to enforce the Trump-era bipartisan law that prevents health care private equity vultures from sending out surprise bills to patients. It seems that the usual loopholes preventing enforcement were written into the legislation by the lobbyists working for private equity surprise-billers.

Now, in case you are thoroughly discouraged if not downright jaded by the Big Ten Sweepstakes, here are some consolations courtesy of Times:

--Five of the major predatory drug companies are still headquartered right here in the USA. Your drugs might be manufactured off-shore in low-wage sweatshops, but the CEOs still occupy their Wall Street corner offices. America is already great.

--Drug companies say lower prices on 10 drugs will hamper innovation. They are lying! They will keep re-patenting old drugs for fun and profit. It's the American way.

-- Nobody really knows yet whether the drug savings for older people will translate to higher costs for younger people. You'll just have to wait until after the 2026 band-aid reform package slowly goes into effect to find out. The election is in 2024, so what nobody knows yet cannot possibly hurt Biden you yet.

-- Perhaps most important of all, soothes the Times,

• Biden has suggested that if he wins re-election, he will try to take more steps to reduce medical costs. Among them: making Obamacare subsidies permanent and capping insulin costs for privately insured Americans. “There’s more to do,” he has said.

Using the Pelosi Attack As a Cudgel To Stifle Dissent

"Barack Obama Lamented the Attack on Paul Pelosi. Then He Got Heckled," indignantly exclaimed the New York Times in one of those annoying two-sentence headlines that are specifically designed to push the outrage button.

Obama, with a well-worn penchant for lecturing mere citizens for having the occasional audacity to raise their voices and talk back to their rulers and other experts, was not about to let Friday's vicious attack on Paul Pelosi go to waste. He led the Democratic Party charge in making it a campaign issue in its own right, conflating the assault on Pelosi with the plague of "incivility" sweeping the nation. 

Now, in case you were wondering what two separate hecklers actually shouted out to Obama at a midterm campaign rally in Detroit on Saturday, the article doesn't say. The subject matter is not the point. The etiquette is. So despite the fact that it didn't hear or report on the words, the Times doubled right down in decrying the continuing "incivility" in politics. The second shouter was even "escorted out" of the rally by armed security guards. That factoid alone should leave readers drawing the conclusion that anyone daring to interrupt such a revered politician in these fraught times is by very definition a violent being, and a clear and present danger to the status quo.

The Times's implied characterization of both the hecklers as anti-Pelosi thugs is not supported by any evidence whatsoever.  According to the Paper of Record, it went down like this:

“We’ve got politicians who work to stir up division to try to make us angry and afraid of one another for their own advantage,” Mr. Obama said. “Sometimes it can turn dangerous.”

Moments later, the man, who was not identified, shouted “Mr. President” at Mr. Obama, creating an off-script exchange that the former president tried to use to drive home his point. The rest of what the man said was not picked up by microphones or cameras.

“This is what I mean,” Mr. Obama said. “Right now, I’m talking. You’ll have a chance to talk sometime.”

What, exactly, is "uncivil" about prefacing a shouted statement with the honorific "Mr President?'  

And despite the article's original claim that the outburst was the direct result of Obama's remarks about Pelosi, the paper belatedly admits that the shouting didn't erupt until "moments" after that part of the speech sympathizing with the House Speaker's family had concluded.

Obama himself jumped at the chance to make a triple connection: the violent rhetoric of the extreme right, leading to the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, followed by disruptions at the campaign rally that he was headlining.

With the advantage of a stage and a microphone and an armed security detail, Obama continued to hector the first heckler: 

Mr. Obama told the man, “You wouldn’t do that a workplace. It’s not how we do things. This is part of the point I want to make. Just basic civility and courtesy works.”

That actually speaks whole volumes. Obama admits that the capitalistic workplace is about as far away from democracy that you can get in America. When you go to work, you are expected to leave all your basic human rights and needs at the door, lest you lose your job and the ability to even live. If you are, however, properly quiet and obsequious to your boss, then you will be left alone until such time that you get old or sick or hurt, or become otherwise unprofitable or redundant.

"Basic civility and courtesy works," all right - for the anti-union bosses, owners, and the investors in the company.

Obama, meanwhile, got the crowd firmly on his side and not on the side of the two dissenters. Even as he decried how Republicans cynically pit regular people against one another for their own enrichment, the former president himself pitted the people in the crowd against each another. It was a massive pile-on. The people who cheered and applauded Obama  for "schooling" the hecklers probably never even heard a word of what they said. As far as they were concerned, rudely interrupting a celebrity politician automatically cancels out all concerns or grievances, no matter how legitimate they may be.

It turns out there are more ways than Trumpism to threaten an alleged democracy.

"You'll get a chance to talk sometime," were Obama's own dismissive parting words to the first interrupter. Of course, as far as the professional political class is concerned, the only proper place to "talk sometime" is inside a voting booth every couple of years. Or on very special, rare occasions, it may be acceptable to participate in a very civil, polite march against Donald Trump, or against the right-wing thugs on the Supreme Court... as long as it's not anywhere near their homes or favorite restaurants, of course.

In the interim, liberals are often urged to thrill to the virtue-signaling words of Michelle Obama: "When they go low, we go high." So, as fascistic as the Republican Party may be, professional Democrats themselves must constantly strive to be above it all and to civilly reach across that proverbial aisle to them, even to the point of their arms getting ripped out of their sockets. How else can they politely collude on waging the forever wars, and cutting Social Security as the price we all must pay for their cordial midnight agreement to raise the debt ceiling?

The trouble is, despite what these professionals say, the government and its two establishment parties are not just like a family. The CIA is neither intelligent nor part of a "community."  Calling the US war machine the Department of Defense is a sick joke. But it's ever so civil.

Politics is not and never was civil. Nor should it be. It's always a struggle and it's often messy. Therefore, the top-down lectures about "civility" from a former president who deported more people, dropped more bombs, prosecuted more whistleblowers and waged more wars than any of his predecessors are laughable on their face. 

Obama lecturing others about "civility" is, however, the time-honored way in which rulers shut down opposition and the voicing of legitimate concerns. The ploy of immediately going on the offensive against powerless people also serves to conveniently absolve themselves of culpability for their own foul deeds. After all, since they themselves have such impeccably good manners and have such well-modulated, reasonable tones of voice, they can get away with anything.

Obama himself has crafted such an incandescent and impervious media image that of all the basketball teams on the planet, he is reportedly choosing to buy a stake in the Phoenix Suns. As one NBC sports pundit tells it, "the money guys would be so happy to have him in the front."

New York Times Is A-Wastin'

 After enduring almost two weeks of "live updates" on the progress of Queen Elizabeth's corpse, we're now being subjected to the Paper of Record's gimmick of affixing time limits to most of its online articles. Before you click on a story, you're advised how many minutes it should take you to read it.

Taking Friday's digital homepage as an example, don't even bother clicking on a piece about Russian war crimes unless you have three minutes to spare out of your busy day. For those of you wanton enough to have an additional five minutes of time, you are then invited to take a gander at "the markets" having an anxiety attack about the return of trickle-down economics to the U.K.

But Donald Trump's legal woes? They are so rampant and the walls are closing in so fast, that you are allotted seven minutes, which is one whole minute more than the reading time that the Times devoted to the sudden death of celebrated writer Hilary Mantel. The trials and tribulations of actress Constance Wu, however, have been deemed deserving of more than double the time, at 15 minutes. Constance Wu times out at Number One on the Times time-sweepstakes homepage today.

Of course, the Gray Lady is only playing catch-up with myriad other click-bait sites that are starved both for eyeballs and for the lowering attention spans of reading-exhausted consumers of online content, piquantly known as "doom-scrollers" by the Times and other purveyors of doom and fear on the Internet.

Who gets to decide how much time it takes to read an article, anyway? I am forming a picture in my head of 10 or 12 Times employees assigned to the Daily Reading Test Desk. After everybody reports his or her time spent reading a piece, the results are then collated and averaged out and affixed right below the article, in lieu of a byline.

For a country sinking lower and lower in all kinds of metrics, ranging from democracy to human rights to education to health to life expectancy and beyond, a country where the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has just recommended anxiety screenings for all adults under age 65, the imposition of a reading-time challenge to our doom-scrolling habit seems a bit cruel, not to mention anxiety-inducing.

Then again, this is a country whose president just gratuitously announced the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, when at least 400 Americans are still dying from it every single day, and countless thousands or even millions more, world-wide, are suffering from long COVID. They love to count minutes. But mortality and morbidity? Who has the time for it?

Thus, in the grand scheme of things, my pet peeve with the timed-reading craze might seem silly. But it's all of a piece with the relentless rule of neoliberal capitalism. It's sending the subliminal message that you have only so much time to absorb news and information. You might be on an unpaid work break, and have to quickly decide which story you have time to read. Or you may be a deliberative reader who likes to savor and ponder and take your time over what you read, and who feels offended and judged. You may find the suggested reading times on articles to be an unnecessary distraction, or even a bad recurring dream of those timed school exams that you forgot to study for.

You may be so anxious trying to read the timed Times stories that you keep checking the clock after every paragraph, and then you waste more time when you can't find your place and you have to start all over again, checking and re-checking the clock and discovering that a whole half-hour has passed and you still have literally no idea of what you just read.

You may become so obsessed with timing yourself on the Times that you are failing to read carefully and critically and forgetting to question the anonymous sourcing of the story that claims Russian soldiers are raping children as young as four years old.

That seems to be the whole point, doesn't it? Abandon critical thinking and learn to swallow propaganda without a fuss, all the while competing in a race against time and against yourself, the only goal being to cross the finish line before the buzzer. You will feel smugly well-informed at the same time that you enjoy your status as an efficient user of precious time. You will get high for whole minutes at a time on the essential oil of stultifying neoliberal capitalism.

The suggested reading times that are now affixed to Times articles as important as climate change and the pandemic, and as inconsequential as the new cast of Saturday Night Live, seem to be all of a piece with the "surface reading" craze so trenchantly criticized by Robert T. Tally in his new pro-critique book, "For a Ruthless Campaign Against All That Exists."

His criticism is mostly leveled against academics who are choosing to ditch critical theory in college literature studies, in favor of faster, shallower reading of texts - that is, without delving too deeply and without questioning too much, and without running the risk of using one's own imagination to draw conclusions and form new interpretations  Tally writes:

"The critic's enemy is thus any who would attempt to limit that imagination, and in particular, who would undermine literature's capacity for or effectiveness in empowering the imagination. Critique therefore has a fundamentally political vocation: it is called to challenge the forces of the status quo, to oppose the tyranny of 'what is' and to seek out potential alternatives."

It goes for books and it should go for news outlets as well. The practice of the New York Times suddenly appending time limits to articles is a bit on the tyrannical side, wouldn't you say? Not only is the "Paper of Record" relentlessly broadcasting the ruling class's propaganda, it finds it necessary to wield an annoying supplementary cudgel to control and enforce our very ability to read, to know, and to think.

I don't care what they proclaim. There is just no way to fully comprehend a David Brooks or a Tom Friedman or a Paul Krugman column in just the four minutes allotted. For one thing, you'd never have time to click on all the embedded links to their sources to find out just which oligarchic think tank is paying that particular source. The rise in bile lasts at least four minutes before you're not even halfway through the essay.

Your manufactured ignorance as an anxious, hurry-up consumer of the digital word is their bliss. So resist! Take all the perusal time you need. Be self-indulgent, and reread whole paragraphs at your leisure, and at their peril. If needed, take a mental antacid break to ease any symptoms of neoliberal reflux disease, and then re-consume with abandon.

The only clock you'll ever need when reading the New York Times is the alarm kind in your brain that goes off only when you read slowly and carefully enough to sniff out the Gray Lady bullshit, whether it be of the fast-flowing or the constipated variety.

Slash Away and Dash Away: A Hallmark Covid Christmas Special

 Do you have the sneaking suspicion that the 5,600-page Covid relief bill just passed by Congress has more than a few Secret Santa gifts for the corporations and oligarchs snuggling deep within its luxurious, high thread-count sheets?

Congress has done what it always does best: waited until the very last possible minute in a manufactured crisis to pass something, anything, before an artificially imposed deadline which comes right before the Christmas holiday. Then they call it a miraculous bipartisan victory.

Just imagine. They passed their miracle "stimulus" package just as Saturn and Jupiter were converging in the night sky, in a reprise of the Star of Bethlehem legend surrounding the birth of Jesus himself! 

Forget the Covid-19 pandemic and how it affects you and your loved ones.  Congress critters have been busily jostling for camera position as they shove to the head of the line to get vaccinated, even as the heroes they pay lip service to -  frontline workers such as doctors, nurses, public safety personnel, grocery store clerks and teachers - have to patiently wait their own turns. The politicians insist that they are doing so for purely altruistic reasons having to do with the legal requirement of "continuity of government."  

I mean, you can't expect our elected leaders to keep hammering us with their cruel austerity measures if they are not themselves hale, hearty and healthy, can you?

Here, via Time magazine, is just one of the statistical charts that should have the leaders of the richest country on earth hanging their heads in shame instead of bragging about their bipartisanship while they shoot themselves up with precious vaccine in what is just their latest outrageous act of political theater: 

Select countries by economic relief, as a percent of GDP

Data for U.S. is an estimate as of Dec. 21. All other countries are as of Nov. 29.

Japan

42.2%

Slovenia

24.5%

Sweden

20.9%

Finland

20.8%

Germany

20.3%

United States

18.3%

Australia

16.8%

Canada

16.4%

France

15.8%

Italy

13.0%

Brazil

12.0%

New Zealand

10.9%

Spain

10.7%

United Kingdom

9.0%

NOTE: Figures show fiscal measures, not monetary policies

Inadequate doesn't even begin to describe the miserable Covid relief package passed on Monday. As one commentator put it, the one-time $600 stimulus payment to qualifying Americans is tantamount to a restaurant patron tipping a waiter a measly quarter. It's worse than simply forgetting to leave a tip because it is a deliberate insult. Or put another way, $600 is what rich people think poor people think is a windfall. They either don't know or they don't care that it won't even cover half a month's rent.  But just in case, and to prove they are not complete Grinches, lawmakers also gave renters one more month of reprieve from eviction.

One month's stay of execution is certainly better than starving or going homeless today, lectures the New York Times editorial board in a cheery screed called "The Deal Is Good Enough."

With vaccinations underway, there is reason to hope that the coronavirus pandemic will begin to loosen its grip next year and that economic growth will accelerate. This deal creates a bridge from now until then. It deploys the ample resources of the federal government to prevent economic damage that could not be easily reversed, like the loss of homes and businesses.

Never mind that the deal is like building a flimsy 300 yard footbridge across the Atlantic Ocean. For as long we can hold out hope that one day we can achieve hopefulness, perhaps we won't even notice as we plummet to our dooms once the miracle month, the $600 stimulus checks and the 11 weeks of renewed unemployment benefits run out.  Perhaps people won't hold a general strike or otherwise inconvenience the ruling class.

And if the Times hope-mongers can't get in their digs at Bernie Sanders and his half-successful crusade to get more direct cash aid to what he calls "working families" while they absolve Democrats of all culpability, then they simply aren't earning their generous paychecks.

Columnist Paul Krugman of Bernie Bro-bashing fame, for example, penned these repulsive, reactionary, divide-and-conquer centrist talking points in last Friday's effort:

About good guys getting it wrong: Economic relief legislation is largely about providing individuals and families with a financial lifeline during the pandemic. But who should get that lifeline?

 Should it go to a majority of the population, like those $1,200 checks sent out in the spring? Or should the focus be on enhanced unemployment benefits for the millions of workers who, thanks to the pandemic, have no income at all?

According to The Washington Post, Senators Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin had a heated argument about this issue on Wednesday during a conference call, with Sanders pushing for broad aid while Manchin argued that enhanced unemployment benefits were more crucial.

Well, on most issues I’m a lot closer to Sanders than to Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate. But in this case I’m sorry to say that Manchin is right. The economic pain from the coronavirus has been very unevenly distributed: A minority of the work force has been devastated, while those who have been able to keep working have, by and large, done relatively well. Overall wages and salaries have bounced back quickly.

So if there’s a limit on the amount of aid that can be given, it’s more important to help the unemployed — and, in particular, to sustain that help well beyond the 10 weeks reportedly in the current deal — than to send checks to those who have been able to keep working. The best argument I can see for broader payments is political — people who haven’t lost their jobs to the pandemic may be more willing to support economic relief for those who have if they also get something from the deal.

Although I have been boycotting the Times comment section for months, I did feel compelled to post the following riposte to Krugman's neoliberal narrative, which ever so conveniently completely ignores the permanent economic underclass of millions upon millions of people:

The debate over giving aid to the unemployed vs giving aid to the non-unemployed skirts uncomfortably close to the right-wing cant that pits the "deserving poor" against the lazy slackers. This specious argument is why we don't have free college and other social benefits enjoyed by many another advanced country. Naysayers claim that if there is free tuition for everybody, spoiled rich kids will be lining up at the trough, champing at the bit to get into a public university or community college.

Give me a break! The fear that better-off people are cashing in on a universal benefit, that they might be getting a paltry $600 or $1200 government check at the expense of the unemployed simply deflects attention from the fact that billionaires increased their wealth to obscene new levels during this awful pandemic. The CARES Act was the most massive upward transfer of wealth in modern human history. It was and is disaster capitalism on steroids and crack. The Sophie's Choice between helping the unemployed and helping everybody just because they are human beings also pits ordinary people against each another. The non-unemployed include millions of people not counted in statistics because they gave up looking for work years ago. They include senior citizens and the disabled who are barely making ends meet. Eight million more people have been categorized as "officially" poor this year. Our "reps" just can't let austerity die, even with thousands dying needlessly all around them.

Commentariat Central: Bernie Panic Edition

The plutes and the pundits were caught flat-footed Saturday when, despite their best propaganda efforts, Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucuses not only by double digits, but with a broad coalition of old, young, white, black and brown voters.

Realizing that Bernie was ahead, but not realizing yet by how much, the mainstream media had begun spreading the latest iteration of Russiagate in the days before the caucuses: to wit, Vladimir Putin wants Bernie to be nominated so that Donald Trump can win. That story fell to pieces when voters effectively ignored it in Nevada and are ignoring it in the rest of the country as well, judging from Bernie's increasing lead in the polls.

The on-air personalities of MSNBC reacted to Bernie's win in much the same way they reacted to Donald Trump's election in 2016: stunned disbelief that their fear-mongering narrative had been revealed as a complete and utter dud. Chris Matthews became so confused that he abandoned his previous nightmare of Communist executions in Central Park to comparing Sanders voters to Nazi troops invading France in World War Two. He was obviously plagiarizing his colleague Chuck Todd's previous casual on-air reporting - immediately prior to last week's debate - of a slur calling Sanders supporters "digital brownshirts" or Gestapo. This slur allegedly prompted Bernie himself to almost physically attack MSNBC brass last week. But even the leak in the right-wing New York Post tabloid, insinuating that Sanders flew out of control and terrified the brass over a minor little insult, backfired. We were obviously supposed to fret over Bernie's temper instead of cheering for it.

MSNBC, much like Joe McCarthy before it, has been disgraced.

For now, anyway. As of this writing, Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd still have their jobs.

I, for one, do not trust the reasonable liberals who only yesterday were bashing Sanders and his supporters, but who have done a near-complete 180 and who are now urging party unity as he supposedly is on an unstoppable glide path to the nomination. Michael Bloomberg, who so dominated the discourse last week, was hard to find in mainstream media discourse this morning.

But as they grudgingly accept Bernie as inevitable, it's not a good idea to relax. They no doubt have plenty more dirty tricks up their sleeves. The Russophobic propaganda isn't working, so stay on the alert for voting machine breakdowns, voter roll purges, all manner of made-up scandals. Since their credibility is now on the line, the tricks will proceed off the air and out of print.

Meanwhile, their current "we surrender" narrative of Bernie inevitability might lull voters into so much complacency that they will lose much of the urgency needed to knock on doors and even show up at the polls in the record numbers needed on Super Tuesday.

***************

I wrote two New York Times comments on Saturday - right before the caucus results were in - and one on Sunday night, when liberal pundits began, in varying degrees of grudging-ness, to admit that Sanders is not only electable and a threat to Trump, but that his presidency would not be the end of the world after all.

Columnist Frank Bruni, pre-Nevada caucus blowout, was all worried about a brokered Democratic convention and how of all the candidates, Bernie Sanders was alone in not pledging to abide by superdelegates anointing a winner in the absence of a clear majority.

Bruni, good centrist voter-shaming gaslighter that he is, asked readers to contemplate an implausible scenario whereby a candidate with more delegates than Sanders would nonetheless lose the nomination to Sanders out of plutocratic fear of the mob. Wouldn't, for instance, Michael Bloomberg's well-heeled supporters then feel every bit as betrayed by the System as the regular folk?

If Sanders supporters stay home in November, they would therefore be acting just like Trump, who

 if defeated "will manufacture any and every argument to say that he was robbed. And in a country in which the messy guts of our institutions are increasingly conspicuous and the merchants of cynicism grow ever bolder, he'll find takers aplenty.
After all, getting worked up is so much less tedious than getting along.

My published response:

 It's all right out there in the open. According to Politico, Mike Bloomberg's operatives are already importuning the superdelegates for their votes on a second ballot.

 The Democratic candidates who raised their hands against actual voters determining the nominee simply signaled that when push comes to shove in divvying up their delegates, they can be bought off. Whether this in the form of Bloomberg cash for future campaigns, a Bloomberg cabinet appointment, a Bloomberg job for a family member, or simply a Bloomberg donation to their favorite charity is moot.

I have to say that Elizabeth Warren's raising her hand after so masterfully trouncing Bloomberg at the debate and after railing so passionately for so long against political corruption, was a profound disappointment. Remember, she too had not so long ago agreed that Bernie was cheated by the party apparatus in 2016. 

As far as Frank Bruni suggesting that we save our wrath for the "next time" - forget about it. Since the writing is on the wall and the Bloomberg checks are being written at the "heads they win, tails we lose" lightning speed of an automated Wall Street trade, now is the time to pressure our super-delegated elected reps to either follow the will of the electorate, or expect a primary funded by small-dollar donors doing an end-run around the Bloomberg-owned party apparatus.

  This is not being nasty. This is exercising our rights as citizens in what they still quaintly call a representative democracy.

************** 


Maureen Dowd devoted her own column space to opining that Trump is a parasite because he dissed the South Korea Oscar-winning movie "Parasite" and compared it unfavorably to that good old racist classic "Gone With the Wind."
This is more earth-shatteringly disgusting, apparently, than professional liberals ignoring Michael Bloomberg's racist Stop and Frisk crusade. Dowd doesn't even mention the red-baiting Bloomberg by name in her column but she does wholeheartedly endorse the unsubstantiated narrative that not only does Russia continue to interfere in "our elections," but that it is magically boosting Bernie Sanders.

As the Democrats sputter and spat and fight over federal giveaways and (Bloomberg's) N.D.A.s, the unfettered president is overturning the rule of law and stuffing the (unaccountable spy) agencies with toadies.

My published comment:

("Although if they win the Senate back, Democrats will probably end up impeaching him again and this time have plenty of witnesses.")

 Maureen (in a parenthetical, no less) seems to be forecasting that Trump will win a second term. And if Bloomberg does succeed in his quest to buy the nomination, she is most likely right on the money.

Bloomberg is Trump, but without Trump's gift for stand-up comedy. The Godzillionaire Mayor's bizarre performance as Mary Poppins, one of the many disturbing clips being unearthed these days. doesn't even have the saving grace of macabre humor. 

As far as tweeting goes, Bloomberg has "people" for that. A mere 70 his campaign's Twitter accounts being suspended due to fakery is a joke, given that his whole campaign is nothing but a head fake of epic proportions. And it's also an assault on democracy.

But the big news that's supposed to scare us into stupefied compliance is that Putin is magically elevating the campaigns of both Trump and Sanders. Once again, it's Russia and not good old American political corruption that's endangering our sacrosanct. pristine democracy. MSNBC's Chris Matthews is forecasting Communist executions in Central Park. And Lloyd Blankfein, the banker who helped crash the economy, is so scared of Bernie ruining "our" economy that he may be even forced to vote for Trump.

The elites who own the place are rapidly losing any minimal credibility that they still had left. Maybe they can develop a new app for that.

***************

Charles Blow, while superficially casting his lot with Post-Caucus Bernie on the premise that hey, the guy is electable after all, is nonetheless worried about Sanders identifying as a democratic socialist. After asserting that "I don't believe that most people know what that means, but it is different and Trump will make it sound frightening, and many Americans are likely to be wary of it," Blow proceeds to consult experts who also can't explain it precisely.

Even worse, both Trump and the Russians want him to be the nominee! And he seems to be running not with the Democratic establishment, but against it!

So, Blow says, Bernie "has a lot of work to do." (And in keeping with his front-runner status, Sanders is indeed tamping down some of that "revolutionary" rhetoric in his increasingly high profile prime time interviews, most recently on 60 Minutes.)

My published Times comment:

Concerns about the democratic socialist label are misplaced, given that Trump regularly smears even Nancy Pelosi and other centrist Democrats as "the radical socialist left."

The Tea Party, the precursor to Trumpism, was fond of labeling Barack Obama a "Marxist Leninist" when in fact his politics were closer to Reagan's. In professing his own allegiance to free market capitalism, Obama only half jokingly once remarked that Nixon had been more liberal than he.

 So I say let the Dems embrace rather than run away from the "S" word. They might point out to their detractors that Trump himself is the beneficiary of a lifetime of socialism for the rich, via tax loopholes and basically free land for "development" purposes.

Public education is a socialist enterprise. So are community fire departments. So are public works projects, which used to be known as "sewer socialism."

 Poll after poll reveals that the younger the voters, the more apt they are to be amenable to socialism as the alternative to the neoliberal capitalism that has indebted them and destroyed their dreams.

There is nothing "radical" about what Bernie is espousing. The debt jubilee, or debt forgiveness in hard times, is a philosophy and a humane practice going all the way back to Old Testament times.

 The more that "liberal" elite pundits and billionaires wring their hands over the prospect of better lives for ordinary people, the more they signal they wouldn't mind if Trump is elected to a second term.

Open Thread/Links: Predator Edition

The piece I've been working on is taking longer than expected, so here's some interesting predatory capitalism stuff which provoked some of my reactions and probably will provoke yours too:

"Help: I think I'm In an Abusive Relationship with Alexa!" Guardian.

Against my better judgment, I myself finally bought this Amazon device from godzillionaire Jeff Bezos to stream movies. At $19, it had been reduced to less than half price, or only about a thousand times what it cost to make in some overseas wage slave factory. All you have to do is tell this robot person what you want to watch and it's there, bringing a whole new meaning to couch potatodom. There's no longer a need to press anything and let's face it, a calorie of energy is a terrible thing to waste. Alexa will thereby speed the evolution of humankind's texting thumbs to truly monstrous proportions because our remote-clicking fingers will atrophy into useless appendages at about the same totally unexpected accelerated rate as global warming. Admit it: you can't watch TV without simultaneously thumb-texting somebody to talk about what you're watching on TV, or swiping away at another gadget without the full force of those four superfluous appendages.

  Anyway, Alexa hadn't been plugged in to our TV an hour before we decided to stop multitasking in order to have some fun at her expense.
 
Me: Does Jeff Bezos pay you a living wage?

Alexa: It does not matter if I get paid. I love what I do.

Me: Is Jeff Bezos really the worst boss in the world?

Alexa: I give him five out of five stars.

Me: So in that case, can I charge Jeff Bezos rent for allowing you to live in my apartment?

Alexa: I am sorry, I didn't understand the question.

*****

"Jeff Bezos' $2 Billion Charity Pledge Isn't Necessarily Great News for America." 
Market Watch.

I haven't asked her yet, but I'm sure that Alexa would say in that flat monotone of hers that building schools for homeless children in order to make them good consumers while living in cars is not just good for America, it's good for the planet and for the whole of infinite outer space that Jeff Bezos wants to spend his money colonizing.


*****

"New York Times' Fraudulent 'Election Plot' Dossier Escalates Anti-Russian Hysteria" World Socialist Website 

We touched on this travesty of journalism in yesterday's comments. This WSWS piece is by far the most scathing takedown of Gray Lady gibberish that I've read. The Times should be prosecuted for a crime against journalism as well as human rights abuses for gaslighting its readers. It's not so much a newspaper as it is a conduit for loathsome predatory capitalism. 


***

"An Alternative to Payday Loans, but It's Still High Cost." New York Times

Speak of the devil! US bank is offering small emergency predatory loans to people at 70 percent interest, which is so much less usurious than the 400 percent charged by those tacky ghetto places. They are so much more consumer-friendly, says the Times "Money Advisor" column, because you get to stretch your payments out in three whole installments. The catch? The desperate and the impoverished must have maintained a 0 interest checking account at US bank for at least six months and undergo a credit check before qualifying for this amazing offer. 

***** 

"Tickets To Michelle Obama's Book Tour Are Going Fast - and Raising Eyebrows'"
Jeff Bezos's Washington Post.

They range from $30 for nosebleed seats and upwards of $3,000 for the front row. Meet and greet and a signed book will cost you extra, as will parking, at $50 a pop. But lest you think that Michelle Obama is too Bezos-like, she is donating a generous 10 percent of the proceeds to charity. The catch? The charity cash will be recycled into free admission for poor people to attend Michelle's intimate talks at sporting arenas, and not for something so mundane as food or clothing. Mrs. Obama describes herself as "truly humbled" at how many people there still are in America who can afford to pay to breathe the same rarefied air as herself. 

*****
"How To Talk to Young People About the Kavanaugh Story," NPR.  

Besides giving kids lessons in sexual propriety while they're still in training pants and making rape prevention a part of each and every birthday party celebration thereafter, the upper middle class parent to whom this column is aimed is urged to scope out potential rapists while there's still time to lecture them. "With the right education... a young man might be able to say, " 'Oh, you know what? I've been drinking too much and I feel like my capacity to make wise decisions is failing me.' Or, 'Hey, you know, when someone's trying to push me off of them, that's something that I should take as a cue to get off.' "

Nowhere in this piece is there any advice to keep liquor out of the hands of teenagers, to keep excess cash allowances and credit cards out of the hands of teenagers, to keep car keys out of the hands of teenagers. Scariest of all, there's no mention of the necessity of having actual parents present at teenage parties.

Instead, every parent is urged to put on his or her Captain Ronan Farrow super-hero cape and become a powerful pre-cog identifier of future rapists -- all for the good of little boys, of course.

Tonight I'll ask Alexa if Minority Report is available on Prime Video. On second thought, I think I'll exercise my freedom to choose and just read the Philip K. Dick book on my Amazon Kindle.