Roadkill-R-Us

 You may have noticed that Joe Biden, after signaling left (or at least perceived by his tailgating fans to be signaling left) has suddenly swerved sharply to the right.

And what do you know - he's ended up precisely where's he's been stolidly parked for the entire half-century journey of his long political career: deep in the heart of Neoliberalville. His oft-quoted campaign promise last year to a group of wealthy donors ("Nothing will fundamentally change") has been proven more correct with every passing day. Still, his string of recent concessions to his donors and congressional Republicans stings all the more in the wake of his vague overtures to progressives and the passage this spring of his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

His pulsating left-turn blinker light had way too many of these same progressives pretty much blinkered for the first hundred or so days of his administration. The narrative that Biden is the best thing to come along since FDR is getting increasingly frayed, if not yet completely tattered. He rips the rosy media narrative a new one practically every single day, his most recent pronouncement being that he will not fight the expiration of federal unemployment benefits come September, when most kids head back to their physical schools and their parents must therefore head back to their physical jobs, whether or not those physical jobs still exist. (I hear McDonald's franchises are offering signing bonuses, so what could possibly be your excuse for not being an economy-boosting team player?)

Biden's left turn signal was either draining all the energy and confidence from the oligarchic battery of overlords, or he himself was just getting tired of the relentlessly tinny refrain of Happy Days Are Here Again. It was finally time to disabuse his newfound acolytes of the notion and the narrative  that he was a blind St. Paul who'd seen the social democratic light and finally come to progressive Jesus in his enlightened dotage. 

 Biden's "sudden" right turn to Republican appeasement cut his followers right off. They're still so stunned by the ensuing pileup of about-faces and disappointments that they can't even believe that they're trapped in the wreckage. The adrenaline rush of the new UFO craze and the frenzied finger-pointing debates over that alleged Wuhan lab leak are, as the manufacturers of consent seem to hope, at least temporarily masking the pain of no minimum wage increase, no single payer health coverage, no new or recurring stimulus checks, no federal guaranteed jobs program, no student debt forgiveness. And the icing on the cake is Senate Parliamentarian (a/k/a America's unelected and unaccountable Pope-Queen) Elizabeth MacDonough's edict that the Dems will only be allowed one more reconciliation bill this year, dashing their ever so sincere hopes to usher in a new New Deal. And then there are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to complete the bad cop triad.

Funnily enough, neither Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris - really no establishment Democrat that I know of - is directly challenging this latest directive. Harris, who as president of the Senate, does have the power to overrule or even fire MacDonough, is apparently otherwise occupied in Central America, trying to convince subsistence coffee growers that a new Internet app showing them worldwide market prices for their product will make them forget all about migrating to the U.S. An internet app is actually supposed to help them more than, say, being allowed to sell their coffee directly to consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere. Don't they know that the freedom of the Free Market doesn't apply to them?

Meanwhile, according to yet another "soul-searching" effort by Democratic party operatives to discover why they barely hung on by a thread in the 2020 elections, the problem was that they recklessly assumed that black and brown voters are both progressive and anti-police. The study's authors, while decrying the notion of categorizing people into voting blocs, nonetheless assert that since there are more conservative black and brown people than there are progressive black and brown people, they must attempt more outreach to this supposed bloc of law-and-order black and brown people. The Dems have to do much, much more to fight against the GOP misinformation that slanderously insists that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a radical left-winger. Democratic candidates have to do more to convince the electorate of their own conservative and pro-war bona fides if they have a prayer of clinging to their razor-thin majorities in the 2022 congressional elections. They have to double or even triple the dosage of their fact-checking designer drugs to combat the epic epidemic of "disinformation." 

There is nothing in the report about making people's lives better. It's all about what sort of propaganda will work best to convince people that the Democrats are better than those nasty, lying Republicans.

"Our hopes for 2020 were just too high," the report summary concludes, after also blaming the pandemic, bad polling, and too much talk of wearing masks and not enough talk of "reopening the economy" for their party's bare squeaker of a victory over Trumpism. 

It's the whimper being heard round the world of Martha's Vineyard, or wherever the neoliberal elites are out to brunch these days. 

Do I even need to mention that the report was funded by, among other oligarchic influence-peddlers, the late billionaire Pete Peterson's Third Way think tank? At least the Times, in its synopsis of the "most thorough soul-searching by either party so far this year" is finally referring to this outfit as solidly "centrist" as opposed to its previous disinformative placement as "center-left."  I'll be even happier when they start properly referring to Third Way as fascist or reactionary. But with their star reporters balking at paying higher News Guild dues, rather than show solidarity with low-wage journalists at other outlets, I'm not holding my breath.

I don't know about other readers, but every time I hear the term "centrist," this grisly image immediately comes to mind:

Photo credit: Tom Garcia

Roadkill is tossed to the side, the double yellow line of centrism extending beyond the infinite horizon of What Is Pragmatically Possible and Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good.

 The  Republicans, of course, would simply have tossed the corpse into the ditch after running over it a few more times just for sport. The Democrats at least recognize the Roadkill by cynically adorning it with the cheery bright balloon of hope.

A popular modern interpretation of folksinger Loudon Wainwright III's own song about roadkill is that centrists themselves stink like skunks for all their wishy-washiness and devotion to a bipartisan duopoly which enriches the wealthy and powerful via their governing style of gridlock and manufactured paralysis.  Wainwright wrote the ditty in 1972, at the barely noticeable beginnings of the  Neoliberal Era, and also at about the same time that Joe Biden was winning his first election.

Wainwright said he was inspired by merely encountering a literal stinky dead skunk in the middle of the road. Those must have been different times for sure, not least because six major corporations did not yet own and control practically everything we see and hear.

Fifty years later, the ruling elites blame us for lacking enough personal responsibility for our own lives when we fall under the wheels of all their speeding luxury cars. You "shoulda looked left and you shoulda looked right" before ever presuming to cross the road outside of the narrowly defined pedestrian lines. That's because your safety as a cooperative wage slave is their biggest concern.

Can't get a job or earn a living wage or been bankrupted by medical bills even though you're insured? Then you should have been an entrepreneur or at least increased your skills at your own debt-heavy expense while saving enough money for retirement.

The only traffic signal the movers and shakers seem to know is a giant middle finger aimed at their rear view mirrors, against all the unpragmatic people who simply refuse to stay in their own lanes any longer.

Why Is Kamala Harris Canoodling With Austerians?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America Has a Pope-Queen

 My first reaction upon learning that an obscure Senate parliamentarian named Elizabeth MacDonough had not only single-handedly nixed passage of a $15 minimum wage through the budget reconciliation process, but that Joe Biden "respected" her ruling, was one of absolute chagrin.  Here I was, along with millions of others, so hopelessly addicted to binge-watching The Crown on Netflix, that we didn't even realize we'd had our very own Queen Elizabeth this whole time. She'd been discreetly presiding over the Sceptered Isle of the Senate for the entire past decade!

Granted, she has been pretty easy to miss, given that she only speaks publicly once a year, and that speech is to an arcane youth group. This is not fair. The least she could do is deliver an annual Christmas address to the nation, if not ink a Netflix deal or at bare minimum, go on The View.

 So much for us vanquishing King George in the American Revolution. Admittedly, we in the United States have always craved a monarch, making Hollywood celebrities and rock stars our sloppy seconds. This inbred authoritarian longing also helps explain the fascination many of us in the Colonies have with vapid exiled multimillionaires Prince Harry and Meghan, who are set to regale royalty fans with their own two-hour Oprah tell-all next week. 

But since Harry's granny, Elizabeth II, is only a constitutional monarch, a figurehead with no real power, I think it's high time that Her Majesty's subjects erupt in jealousy for our possession of an all-American monarch who has even more power than our semi-democratically elected president. This unelected and secretive and unaccountable official is able, with the dismissive wave of her little royal finger, to order millions of her subjects to survive - with a stiff upper lip, of course - on $7.25 an hour. 

Joe Biden himself is such a stiff that he would never dream of demanding to know, along with millions of outraged minimum wage reform proponents, who just died and made her Queen.

Born-again self-proclaimed progressive, cosmetic/gender diversity booster, and good Catholic that he is, Biden has actually gone way beyond royalty deference and effectively elevated Elizabeth MacDonough to the status of Pope. Thanks to a Vatican ruling by one of the previous popes in Rome who declared himself infallible, every subsequent pope is deemed to be infallible. The Pope has a direct line to and from God himself. Nobody must ever question what the Pope says, no matter how bizarre or how cruel. When, for example, the Pope forbids Catholic women to use birth control and outlaws remarriage after divorce, and bans abortion even in cases of rape or incest, there are no grounds for appeal. 

Catholics don't like it much, but what can they do besides leaving the church or opening themselves up to excommunication? Biden says he doesn't like Queen-Pope Elizabeth's decision either, but he views it as so infallible that he dare not try to reverse it. 

For their own part, senior Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have also followed suit and pragmatically abandoned all hope for fear of entering the hell of party and donor retribution. Senators Ron Wyden and Bernie Sanders renounced their own workaround bill, which would have penalized major corporations for failure to pay employees at least $15 an hour, for the very plausible reason that major corporations would easily have found their own workarounds to the odious requirement of paying workers a decent wage. 

Therefore, with Biden's abject surrender to Elizabeth of the Senate, not even the Supreme Court can be prevailed upon to overrule the Parliamentarian and declare her de facto unitary powers to be unconstitutional. Not that the Court ever would, of course, entertain such a thing. The reactionary majority would likely reimpose slavery if they could, guided by their own cynical reliance on the glorified pantheon of slave-holding "originalist" writers of the Constitution. This infallible document is either to be literally interpreted as a Bible, or conveniently ignored whenever the bottom line of capitalism is threatened, or twisted into a subversive parody of itself when, for example, assault rifle profiteers and sociopaths can legally define themselves as well-ordered militias.

Joe Biden, reactionary originalist stiff that he also is, claims that his hands are tied on the parliamentary minimum wage defeat. His overruling or firing of Pope-Queen Elizabeth would be a mortal sin, punishable by condemnation by his financial backers, who also own and control the Democratic Party.

So, although theoretically his hands are not tied - because both Catholic dogma and his own electoral mandate do acknowledge the concept of free will - Joe Biden is afraid of catching hell from the oligarchs he serves, the pantheon of demi-gods presiding at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable who adamantly oppose a $15 minimum wage - which, by the way, should not be confused with a living wage, now estimated to be about $24 an hour at the bare survival minimum.

He did promise these movers and shakers that "nothing would fundamentally change" when he became the figurehead president. The infallibility of capitalism will never be challenged by him, loyal courtier that he is.

As he goes about the business of having no power, it turns out that even with his hands tied, he is still capable of dropping bombs on Syria without the approval of anybody, not even the Pope-Queen herself. Congress, however, theoretically does have the power to stop the bomb-dropping. But once again, the rule of adhering maniacally to the Constitution whenever it's convenient and blandly ignoring it whenever it's not, especially applies when it comes to the unitary executive's power to wage war and kill people whenever the mood hits him, or whenever the de facto kings in the profit-driven "defense" industry (the Pentagon) order him to.

Biden press secretary Jen Psaki, meanwhile, soothes that Biden will spend the next few days... or weeks (or months, or years) figuring out "the best path forward."  Whenever people are being denied nice things, politicians can always fall back on evoking the Bible. Joe Biden, even with his hands tied by a tangle of silly string of his own making, is made to sound as though he is a saint, forever and always seeking the way, the truth and the light.

While Joe Biden is bound, the rest of us gag.

Oligarchic Gaslight In America's Twilight

If the billionaires who own the place want their failing state to turn an even bigger profit for them, their first task is to ensure that the superfluous population keeps fighting among themselves instead of punching up at them, their real oligarchic enemy.  

Only in America could the worst pandemic in modern human history vie for media attention with the tragedy of "divided government" and a supposed mass outbreak of violence and verbal vitriol among ordinary people fighting with each other over masks and political parties that don't care about them. If people weren't supposedly fighting each other all the time, they might stop and remember that three out of every four of them, both conservative and liberal, want the government to provide and finance their health care. And then, if people started making demands to benefit one and benefit all, the media would finally be forced to cover and report on what people really want.

To prevent that from ever happening, we're instead being fed competing stereotypical culture war narratives aimed at deflecting our attention away from the cruelty emanating from the highest of high places and directing our ire toward a whole panoply of Others. Fox News viewers get a cartoon picture of snobbish "woke" latte-sipping socialists and their hired Antifa thugs, while MSNBC fans learn to abhor supposed hordes of racist anti-mask cultists who always vote against their own interests. 

If you don't think that this hand-wringing narrative of Divided Regular Americans is all part of the plan and the "fix," look no further than two articles in Tuesday's New York Times. Regarding the tactics and aims of the ruling oligarchy, they are case studies in both self-contradiction and gaslighting.

The first, concerning "Biden's Economic Plan For the Virus," casts the oligarchs as deeply concerned and caring souls who only want the best for each and every one of us. They care so very much, in fact. that part of their propaganda is aimed at us with actual bullet points:

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris yesterday outlined their plan to help restore the economy while battling the coronavirus, calling on Congress to act immediately and insisting on the need for bipartisan cooperation.

Biden and Harris spoke from Wilmington, Del., immediately after meeting via Zoom with business and labor leaders. In his remarks, the president-elect described that conversation as "very encouraging," painting it as an example of his campaign message - national unity - in action.

He said that both the C.E.O.s and the union bosses had agreed that the government must act boldly to bring the economy back up to speed. “I wish you could’ve heard — corporate leaders and labor leaders singing the same hymnal here,” he said.

That touchy-feely propaganda about a meeting (to which the public was not invited) of a new era of rich and poor being all in this together is directly contradicted by the article in the same issue called "In Georgia, Private Equity Is Investing in Divided Government." Centering around a pair of runoff elections early next year which will determine the Senate majority, it bluntly asserts that without manufactured gridlock, the rich cannot possibly get richer at the expense of everyone else. The fix is in. Despite what their lackey Joe Biden tells us,  the ruling oligarchy doesn't even remotely want to fix what they themselves have broken. And Biden knows it:

Government gridlock protects private equity’s business model, ensuring that major changes proposed by Democrats, like Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act, won’t become law, Mr. Valadez said. (Richard Valdez of the nonprofit Americans For Financial Reform.) Mr. Biden got the most direct contributions associated with private equity in 2020, but Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas and Susan Collins of Maine were the next-biggest recipients, reflecting the sector’s preference for divided government.

Still, the Times must go through the motions of providing fair and balanced propaganda, evidenced by its Dealbook subsidiary's hosting of a concern-trolling online summit starring such oligarchic luminaries as tech mogul Bill Gates, who has no qualms about departing from his own area of expertise to pontificate about vaccine confidence. They're saving Elizabeth Warren for the end of the long day, when people are beginning to get fatigued and tuning out, to prod her about how her mild anti-corruption bill would hurt Wall Street, pretending that it actually has a chance of passing, not to mention ever being enforced if it does get passed after the requisite watering down. They want assurances from Warren that Joe Biden will treat them well, pretending (yet again) that there is a slight chance he will not treat them well while wagging the occasional scolding finger at them for appearance's sake.

Given his administration appointments so far, they haven't got a worry in the world which they have plundered to near-extinction.

Pick Your Fascism

Since the pandemic is transforming the traditional Election Day into Election Season with early mail-in balloting, the Establishment's' Get Out the Vote campaign is more strident than ever.

These last few weeks of Decision 2020 feel like being swept along in a turgid stream of elite consciousness. As hard as we try to swim against the tide of the Most Consequential Election in the history of humanity, the more they try to drown us with their voter-shaming - when they're not mentally electrocuting us with their jolts of nuclear-powered gaslight.

I didn't know whether to gulp for air or melt down into an abject puddle when the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Harry and Meghan) deigned to inform me, from the rustic grounds of their $14 million California estate, that I am allowed to "make my voice heard." 

I must use my voice to check a box to prove that I matter, Meghan nattered.

Voting will prove that I hate hatred enough to elect one of their own in order maintain "our values." And here I was, too lazy and ignorant to even realize that the magical festival of Quadrannius has finally arrived! It is that special time that comes only once every four years, when the oligarchs and celebrities go all noblesse oblige  to wake up the citizens from the cynicism and the apathy that their bitter pills have created. If we do not give them the degree of legitimacy with which to feed us even more of their bitter pills for the next four years, then they'll end up looking like the quacks they are instead of the healers they want to resemble.

To press the point home, Harry was not above playing  the guilt-tripping, gaslighting card. Give 'em hell, Harry! He reminded us with his Voice that we regular people are even more important and privileged than he is. Because as a royal personage, he has been dreadfully disenfranchised for his whole adult life!

Bertram Gross  warned 40 years ago of the "Friendly Fascism" that was taking over this country and the rest of the advanced free world. Although the parts of the book dealing with the then-bugaboos of Soviet communism and "stagflation" are dated, he was remarkably prescient about the slow, boiling-frog-death of representative democracy via an insidious corporate/oligarchic coup.

The "F" word has finally come out of the elite closet with the victory of Donald Trump. But that is only because he is an "unfriendly" fascist who rules with a sneer and a scowl instead of with the simper and the smile which has been fooling some of the people most of the time, or at least most of the people some of the time, as the frog-water simmered. Whenever the bath threatened to boil over and wake up the comatose frogs, friendly-looking presidents like Barack Obama added the requisite dose of cool charm to augment the glow of the gaslight.

Donald Trump, of course, is only adding salt to the water and gasoline to the fire. He is riling people up when they should be narcotized. He is not using what Gross called Triplespeak: the political propaganda technique comprised of "myth, jargon and confidential straight talk."

Gross wrote:

"Unlike Orwell's doublethink and newspeak, triplespeak is not part of any overall plan. It merely develops as a logical outcome of the Establishment;s maturation, an essential element of the tightening of oligarchic control."

Without myths like American exceptionalism, democracy  and the founding pioneer spirit, rulers cannot maintain order and support at the lower and middle levels of the Establishment. Jargon is required to justify the power and secrecy and violence of the military/surveillance state. Straight talk is the ploy used by elites to explain why secrecy is needed in the first place, or blather about the brutal hard truth of why social programs must be cut.

Trump, the damaged epitome of immaturity, rails against the surveillance state when it is used by his fellow elites against him. He calls vaunted military heroes "chumps and losers," while the more proper pols glorify their deaths as "the ultimate sacrifice." He directly foments violence, dispensing with all the obfuscatory jargon about human rights and morality which masks the friendly fascism his peers have striven so mightily to perfect.

And therefore, establishment media outlets are manically selling Wokeness in a valiant effort to arouse us just long enough to care about electing Joe Biden - before they put us (along with the street protests they are so eagerly covering) to sleep again, once the danger to their legitimacy passes.

Why else would celebrities and political elites be co-opting the police murder of Breonna Taylor, who lingered in obscurity until the televised murder of George Floyd made her the newest symbol of the moment? Why would the liberal establishment be able to so blithely ignore Obama's drone murders and mass deportations and police crackdowns on the Occupy movement, but now decry Trump's xenophobia and flouting of the Constitution?

It's all about the language, of course. Trump does not, as Gross's friendlier fascists do, "take over the symbols of opposition groups" and make them his own.  As the opposite of Trump's nihilistic shtick, Bertram Gross shares the secret ingredients of the friendly fascist recipe:

"Peace, equality, black power, women's rights, the Constitution, for example,are prominent in the sloganry justifying increased armament, oligarchic wealth, institutionalized white and male supremacy, and the subversion of constitutional rights."

The reason that I hope Joe Biden wins (although, with the luxury of living in a non-battleground state, I don't plan to vote for either him or Trump), is that he is often so miserably inept himself at putting a friendly face on the fascism that long preceded Trump. His campaign has had to walk back his constant stream of "gaffes" almost as often as Trump's handlers have to do damage control on his. Biden wouldn't ever be able to fool enough the people enough of the time, no matter how hard Bernie Sanders and MSNBC try to prop him, and more importantly, the Democratic Party, up.

Biden's immediate reaction, for example, to the no-bill grand jury exoneration of the Louisville SWAT team that gunned down Breonna Taylor was to warn protesters against destroying property.

And as the media very well knows, Trump can never be goaded into saying he'd accept a peaceful transition to power if he loses. Such an admission runs counter to every narcissistic fiber of his damaged being.  We'll probably be hearing Republican disclaimers of his face-saving threats from now until January and beyond, should he lose to Biden.

The first canned battle of these two snarling, smirking geriatric right-wingers will, at least, be an entertaining ratings bonanza of epic WWF proportions.

May our voices of derision finally be heard by the voter-shaming concern trolls. May our feet plod to the polls (or the mailbox) before they race right back to the streets, no matter which of these reactionary characters mounts to an ever more discredited platform of power.

Black and Blue In America

Culture wars which pit various factions of the poor and working classes against one other are almost always created by and waged for the ultimate benefit of the oppressive oligarchy.

That is why the Movement For a People's Party, whose 4+-hour streamed convention on Sunday was trending at #2 on Twitter, is receiving so little media coverage. It's the bloody and sometimes lethal street battles between social justice protesters and right-wing militias in a few US cities that are gobbling up all the headlines. 

It's as though a story about the burgeoning solidarity among regular people must not be allowed to take attention away from the professional marketing of fear. The increasing numbers of people who are refusing to succumb to fear and hatred of the "other," and who are also taking steps to politically organize themselves outside the confines of the two-party system strikes fear into the heart of the ruling class.

If all we hear about are Trump's tweets, and tut-tutting punditry about Black on Black violence, Black on White Violence, White on Black Violence, White on White Violence, Antifa and QAnon Violence, the propaganda about Russian Interference in Our Democracy, it just sucks us into their divide-and-conquer program and deflects our attention away from the real war, the violent class war of the Rich against the rest of us.

It tries to transform our fear of Covid-19 into fear of the Other. It tries to redirect our rational anger about the failure of the corrupt political duopoly, to both prevent disease outbreaks and to ameliorate the devastating social and economic effects of the pandemic, onto one or the other of the senile presidential candidates. The ruling "donor" class, through its political operatives, has made the conscious choice to abandon tens of millions of vulnerable people to needless suffering and death, while Wall Street posts record gains.

So, who are you going to vote for, Trump or Biden? Which side are you on - Black Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter? By presenting us with such limited choices and bemoaning the "divisiveness" without exploring the longstanding, underlying causes of it, maybe the Duopoly can lull us or scare us into thinking that we have no choice at all. And that it's all our fault.

For starters, one thing we should keep in mind is that protest-busting cops function as the hired weaponized buffer zone between citizens and the ruling class. The fact that America's municipal police forces have been become increasingly militarized in recent decades, with even small town departments now heavily fortified with tanks, drones and grenade launchers, is testament to the essential brutality of thst real war, the class war of the rich versus the rest of us. The oligarchic forces, be they Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, DEA, ICE, National Guard, Homeland Security, Border Patrol or cops on the beat, are mainly comprised of working class people from the same distressed communities where "civilian" jobs have been destroyed by the cruel ravages of neoliberal capitalism and its corporation-serving "free trade" deals. All you need to achieve the  American Dream of a secure job and a decent wage is a gun, a uniform, and a pension -which may or may not be there for you once Wall Street gets done fiddling with it.

Donald Trump does not, of course,  give one single damn about either police officers or about the marginalized assault rifle-toting vigilantes acting in his name and upon his inflammatory tweeted instructions. Nor do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris give one solitary damn about the Black victims of the police violence and privatized prison gulags which they have funded and championed and overseen their entire political lives. Cops, vigilantes and protesters: they are but interchangeable pawns and props and scapegoats in the cynical power game.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose $50 billion-plus personal fortune makes him one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, did in fact boast that "I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world."

This man, an honored prime time speaker at the Democratic National Convention a few weeks ago, had launched his own ill-fated run for the presidency last year by apologizing for using this private army to racially profile ("stop and frisk") Black and Brown men in record, relentless numbers for the crime of merely existing. His neofascist policy, eventually declared unconstitutional, was what really "inflamed tensions" between communities and the private army acting at the behest of Bloomberg and the other lords of capital. These armed forces were not a few "bad apples," These were regimented troops under strict orders to fill a quota imposed by a racist billionaire mayor and even funded by some of the same corporations now trying to make a cynical buck off the Black Lives Matter movement.

It was unsurprising, therefore, when the New York City police union blasted Bloomberg for the fake apology he offered in the standard venue beloved of any pandering Democratic politician worth his salt - a Black church.

“Mayor Bloomberg could have saved himself this apology if he had just listened to the police officers on the street,” said the union’s president, Patrick Lynch. “We said in the early 2000s that the quota-driven emphasis on street stops was polluting the relationship between cops and our communities. His administration’s misguided policy inspired an anti-police movement that has made cops the target of hatred and violence, and stripped away many of the tools we had used to keep New Yorkers safe.”

That's all well and good. But I'm waiting for that magical day when the cops in riot gear being deployed all across America to quash the biggest protest movement in US history finally do the right thing. I hope they do what Tsar Nicholas II's own private army did during the March 1917 mass demonstrations against that particular authoritarian regime. I'm waiting for them to mutiny, to put down their arms and their tear gas canisters, and to take the side of the protesters.

How long can it humanly take before sheriff's deputies and city marshals get disgusted enough to side with their own neighbors and refuse to serve millions of landlords' warrants on all the renters facing eviction this year because Congress has refused to offer emergency relief to them?

Matthew Desmond writes in the New York Times that

Marshals that carry out evictions are full of suicide stories: the early morning rap on the door followed by a single gunshot from inside the apartment, the blunt sound of giving up. From 2005 to 2010, years when housing costs were soaring across the country, suicides attributed to eviction and foreclosure doubled.

A survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control has revealed that the stress of the pandemic caused one out of every four young adults to seriously contemplate killing themselves within the past 30 days. Unpaid caregivers, essential workers, and Black and Brown people also reported harboring suicidal thoughts at rates far above average. Recommendations by study researchers include the government giving more financial support to individuals and localities in order to reduce mental stress and racial disparities in health care.

In Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, published last fall just before the Covid-19 outbreak, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton write that paradoxically enough, it is the for-profit US healthcare system itself which is the leading cause of these deaths by suicide, and drug and alcohol abuse. The costs of our privatized, for-profit healthcare system are "like a tribute that Americans have to pay to a foreign power," similar to the unconscionable reparations Germans were made to pay after World War I. 

The obscene amount of money that impoverished Germans had to pay to the victors was proportionately far less than Americans have to pay for medical care today, the authors write.  Even if our system were delivering results, which it is not, the cost would still debilitate the economy. Although avuncular billionaire Warren Buffett compared our health care system to a tapeworm, Case and Deaton aptly describe  it "as more like a cancer that has metastisized throughout the economy."

Couple that with suicide-inducing evictions and egregious rent hikes, and you've got yourself a state that has gone far beyond failed.

Just as our health insurance premiums and deductibles and "surprise" medical bills sent out by private equity-owned hospitals are tributes imposed by the oligarchy on those whom they've effectively colonized, so too are rents.

Political economist Thomas Piketty in his book Capital and Ideology also compares the victims of contemporary predatory capitalism to the colonized subjects of an imperialistic foreign power: 

"In other words, the rest of the world labored to increase the consumption and standard of living of the colonial powers, even as it became increasingly indebted to those powers. The situation is like that of the worker who must devote a large portion of his salary to pay rent to his landlord, which the landlord then uses to buy the rest of the building while leading a life of luxury compared to the family of the workers, which has only hhis wages to live on. This comparison may shock some readers (which I think would be healthy) but one must realize that the purpose of property is to increase the owner's ability to consume and accumulate in the future."

Lacking even a wage with which to pay the tribute of rent, or a basic guaranteed income or health care in the middle of a pandemic, people are realizing that their choice is not limited to Trump and Biden, or choosing between protesters and cops.  The choice is between succumbing to despair and taking to the streets. Or starting a third political party. Or joining a revolution that's overdue by about 250 years.

Bring Out Your Canceled Dead

Two more iconic American corpses have bitten the dust this week. Environmentalist John Muir, father of the national park system and founder of the Sierra Club, and  Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, are the latest high-profile casualties of the Cancel Culture Craze that is sweeping the nation as virulently as Covid-19.

The Sierra Club officially disowned Muir because he was a racist prone to uttering the N word. Planned Parenthood of New York is removing Sanger's name from its clinic because she was an avowed eugenicist who was also notorious for canoodling with the KKK back in the day.

The Cancel Culture Club (CCC) has more than one criterion for membership.

President Woodrow Wilson, for example, was canceled earlier this summer because he was both a racist who uttered the N word and a eugenicist who wanted to cull Blacks, Browns, Asians, Poor White Trash and just about everyone that his entitled class deemed unworthy of inclusion in American society. The recent wokeness by Princeton University regarding its erstwhile hero makes Joe Biden's  own recent claim that Donald Trump is the first racist president all the more baffling.

"The way he deals with people based on the colour of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” the former vice president said. “No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed. They’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”

Given his authorship of the Crime Bill, which has jailed Black people so disproportionately as to cause their incarceration numbers to exceed the number of slaves prior to the Civil War, and given his friendship with such white supremacist politicians as Jesse Helms and James Eastland, you almost wonder whether Biden is miffed because Trump demotes him to a sloppy second in the racist presidential sweepstakes.

To be fair, though, Biden is likely just being his same old befuddled self. But it is certainly strange that the establishment media is not questioning Biden's cognitive status as vociferously as it is hounding Trump over his.  What president hasn't been racist? Even FDR made a deal with Southern Democrats to bar Black workers from the Social Security program in order to get it passed in Congress. Even Barack Obama, our first Black president, referred to Black protesters reacting to the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore as "thugs" as he passive-aggressively oversaw the worsening of the economic plights of Black communities during his eight-year stay in the White House. This doesn't even factor in the de facto racism of record deportations and droning dark-skinned people to death in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and other "tribal" areas. Come on, man.

Donald Trump, for his own part, reacted to Biden's racism accusations in his usual modest fashion:

“I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible of exception of Abraham Lincoln. Nobody has even been close.”

Abe Lincoln, for his own part, was also reputed to regularly utter the N word in conversation. He also seriously considered deporting newly freed slaves back to Africa or relocating them to a special colony in Panama, telling a quintet of Black leaders he invited to the White House just before his death that he believed "the African race suffered greatly by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence." 

Well, at least he didn't use the term "shithole countries" as Trump so racistly did.

Conservative and liberal pundit-apologists alike love to make excuses for their beloved figures whenever they're caught behaving or talking badly, whether pre- or postmortem: "It's complicated." Or its close relative: "It was a different time."

But back to Margaret Sanger. Historian Edwin Black writes in "War Against the Weak" that Planned Parenthood has always been open about her history in the eugenics movement, which swept the nation in the early 20th more virulently than Cancel Culture is in the 21st. It was only when Nazi Germany co-opted its pseudo-scientific cant and exterminated six million Jews that  the "progressive" eugenicists of the USA decided that it was probably best to shut up about culling undesirables.

When the pre-woke New York Times reviewed Black's book in 2003, though, it was dismissive of his "muckraking" on the rich and powerful proponents of the eugenics movement. Even though the Rockefeller Foundation funded three eugenics laboratories in Nazi Germany, reviewer Daniel Kevles wrote, it was unfair to claim that Hitler was inspired by such well-meaning American plutocrats, who really, really hated Nazism. Plus, it is patently unfair to single out the wealthy in the U.S. as the only ones desirous of a master race. The middle class was fully on board with eugenics, too. It was the zeitgeist, stupid! Mistakes were made. They meant well. Nobody could ever have predicted....

Meet the new Zeitgeist, a/k/a Cancel Culture, during the reign of President Hitler Trump.

So I'm curious. If you're going to cancel Margaret Sanger, then shouldn't you also cancel Andrew Carnegie, whose vast fortune provided the seed money for the Cold Spring Harbor eugenics research laboratory on Long Island? You might want to change the name of Carnegie Hall, Carnegie-Mellon University, the Carnegie Art Museum, and the Carnegie Foundation for Peace (Since the latter is a think tank funded by the "defense" industry for purposes of never-ending war and surveillance, its disbandment might not be such a bad idea.)

The aforementioned Rockefellers were also gung-ho eugenicists. Does that mean that we should change the name of Rockefeller Center and cancel the continued streaming of 30 Rock reruns, and boycott NBC? (again, not a bad idea, given that its executives reportedly are keeping The Apprentice  outtakes of Donald Trump uttering the N word under lock and key.)

To prove their sincerity, the newly woke should cancel Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford by changing the name of his iconic car company right this very minute. But why stop there? Then we should get rid of Ford's overpaid CEO and investors, and let the workers take over ownership and production - once there's a vaccine, that is.

 Above all, we should cancel the whole idea of forcing people to go back to work before it is safe for them to do so. 

It has now reached the farcical point that the mere questioning of Cancel Culture will get you canceled.

Writers are so afraid of being called racist or misogynistic that they're shutting up and self-censoring to avoid giving offense and possibly losing their livelihoods along with their reputations. There is a distinct McCarthyesque stench to the self-righteous Cancel Culture Club.

Just as the original McCarthy era architects destroyed the New Deal and solidified social and economic inequalities by inventing the Communist threat, so too are a new generation of reactionary neoliberals and neocons engaging in Virtue Signalling Gone Wild as the whole capitalistic framework of oppression and legalized corruption collapses around them - a collapse hastened by Covid-19. Against all reason, the Cancelers are of the same breed (sorry, eugenicists!) as those promulgating the various manifestations of Russiagate. They need to constantly manufacture outside enemies to hide the fact that they are the enemy.

The hard right side of the ruling oligarchy, exemplified by Trump, decries the tearing down of  Confederate statues and the disrespect shown by "terroristic" citizens of their militarized domestic police forces. The centrist, or soft-right, side, exemplified by Joe Biden's corporate Democrats and Lincoln Project Republicans, points the finger of racism at Trump while they themselves tacitly reinforce endemic racism through, among other things, refusing to entertain any discussion of Medicare For All during a pandemic which is disproportionately killing Black and Brown people. They reinforce global racism by giving Trump even more money that he wants or needs in order to continue oppressing and assaulting people both at home and abroad with tear gas, bombs, drones, and mob-style looting and intimidation.

With any luck, and with a lot of help from the activists and rabble rousers now out on the streets, the bickering oligarchs will cancel each other out before Covid-19 and climate change cancel out the rest of humanity.

Donald Trump's Death Wish

No, he doesn't want to literally die, despite months of going maskless in public and a whole sedentary lifetime's worth of poor eating habits. Trump reminds me of a reanimated Megatherium, the giant bipedal ground sloth the size of an elephant that plodded the earth for more than a million years mindlessly gobbling up whole forests before it was finally hunted to extinction by the smarter, smaller animals known as humans. Trump the sloth has become woke enough to lumber forth from his Coronavirus hibernation cave to deflect the blame for the country's collapse in some new directions - as in, Portland, Oregon and maybe even a city near you.

 At the rate we're going, Homo sapiens will lucky to survive as earth's dominant species for even one more decade. And for everybody regretting how old they're getting and how they won't be around to see how it all ends, please do not give up hope yet. Try to hang on just a bit longer.

Donald Trump, for his own clumsy part, is  grasping at straws in an orgy of hope for his own political survival. Perhaps experiencing a primordial genetic memory of the Pleistocene's mass extinction event, our MAGA-therium president has taken to playing Charles Bronson in the 1974 mega-hit Death Wish. In Trump's mind, the cinematic thugs and muggers of the 70s are disguised as peaceful protesters demonstrating against police brutality and other capitalistic depredations, like evictions and starvation wages.

Bronson had portrayed Paul Kersey, an architect who goes on a revenge nationwide killing spree after his wife is murdered and his daughter raped by a trio of home invaders. The film roughly coincided with Trump's own rise to power in a near-bankrupt New York City, which was experiencing its own crime wave at the time. As chronicled in the book "Fear City," it was Wall Street's bond vigilantes who at the dawn of the neoliberal era, led the charge for cuts to social programs, public services and the destruction of labor unions. The corrupt New York political machine welcomed Trump, the brash young tycoon, with open arms because of his magnetic power to draw other movers and shakers to the Big Apple and to make all that creative destruction such good, grisly tabloid fun.

His niece Mary Trump writes of the media's essential role in exploiting Trumpism in "Too Much And Never Enough":

"In the 1970s, after my grandfather had already been preferring and promoting Donald for years, the New York media picked up the baton and began disseminating Donald's unsubstantiated hype. In the 1980s, the banks joined in when they began to fund his ventures. Their willingness (and then their need) to foster his increasingly unfounded claims to success hung on their hopes of recouping their losses."

The exploitative Death Wish vigilante film was a blockbuster nationwide hit, grossing more than $20 million for its producers and distributors, and spawning eight sequels as well as a more blatantly racist, alt-right 2018 remake starring Bruce Willis - who bears a startling resemblance to Trump himself on the DVD cover:

 Vincent Canby's New York Times review of the original movie was scathing:

(Director)Paul Kersey describes his actions in the film as “the good old American custom of self‐defense” (as once practiced against the Indians?) and the movie clearly agrees. In other words, there's nothing wrong with this country today that giving guns to all the right people wouldn't cure. Who are the right people? White middle‐class maniacs. For anyone with two brain cells to rub together that might be a tough question, but not for “Death Wish.”...

 It was, however, a stroke of genius to cast Charles Bronson in the unlikely role of an upper middle‐class New York liberal who sees the light. Almost any other actor I can think of would probably look very sheepish under the circumstances. Not Bronson, who seems no more capable of intellectual activity than a very old, very tired circus bear. It's enough that he is able to walk around on his hind legs and occasionally, shoot a gun.

Trump is certainly no Charles Bronson. Despite his resemblance to a tired old circus bear (or an extinct circus Megatherium) our aged sloth-president is cravenly proxifying his vigilantism by sending camouflaged Border Patrol/ICE thugs to Portland (and later maybe to Detroit, Chicago and New York City) in his stead, to kidnap citizens off the streets when not actually assaulting them with deadly weapons.

Since the 1974 film resonated so strongly with the white suburban audience  that Trump relies upon to win re-election, he perhaps hopes that the paranoid American mindset has not gone completely extinct in this New Age of Wokeness. Maybe he can make liberals see the light after all. Because, how fast can human beings really evolve from fear and loathing of The Other into solidarity utopia?

Canby's Death Wish review can be read as a preternatural forecast of the Trump White House itself:

It's a tackily made melodrama but it so cannily orchestrates the audience's responses that it can appeal to law‐and‐order fanatics, sadists, muggers, club women, fathers, older sisters, masochists, policemen, politicians, and, it seems, a number of film critics. Impartially. Its message, simply put, is: KILL. TRY IT. YOU'LL LIKE IT.

Donald Trump thus tackily invited the courtier establishment media into his inner sanctum to offer his own self-review of the Remake, the Sequel, the never-ending nostalgia for the 70s and bleeding heart liberalism turned on its head:

“I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”

 The president portrayed the nation’s cities as out of control. “Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left,” Mr. Trump said. He added: “If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

That, of course, is being unfair to Joe Biden, who for most of his adult life has acted out his own inner Charles Bronson to Oscar-worthy perfection. He arrived in the U.S. Senate in 1973, just before that the influential Death Wish movie was released to packed audiences throughout the country. His Bronsonian zeitgest has lasted through all eight sequels and all of the nearly 50 years of his political career. His 1993 Senate floor rant promoting the crime bill even included Hollywood imagery of "My wife, my daughter" being victimized by sociopathic predators.

With Biden's history of attacking Republicans from the right on their law and order bona fides, you can sort of understand Trump's recent one-upmanship, both in words and terrifying authoritarian actions.

As the New York Times reported last year (when the bumbling Biden's chances for the nomination seemed tenuous):

In 1989, with the violent crime rate continuing to rise as it had since the 1970s, Mr. Biden lamented that the Republican president, George H. W. Bush, was not doing enough to put “violent thugs” in prison. In 1993, he warned of “predators on our streets.” And in a 1994 Senate floor speech, he likened himself to another Republican president: “Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, ‘Law and order,’ the Democratic match or response was, ‘Law and order with justice’ — whatever that meant. And I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up.’”

Fast forward to 2020, and Biden boasts that he has narrowed his vice presidential beauty contest to four lucky Black finalists as he fights to end "systemic racism." He lumps Black women into one monolithic group that has "supported me my entire political career. I've been loyal to them and they've been loyal to me."

No wonder that MAGA-therian Man, under constant siege for hiding behind his own harem of work-wives and for demanding and getting loyalty from his sycophantic underlings, is going nuts. His remaining brain cells must be rubbing themselves together into a frenzy.

I Am Being Treated So Unfairly!

As is usual during these internecine oligarchic battles, the average Joes and Janes of Exceptional America end up being the collateral damage as we await the extinction of the corrupt two-party system and fight against our assigned status as aliens in our own land.

Trump Fears Bernie, Not Biden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead is nuts. 

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

So many head-fakes, so little time. 

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

Judge Judy and the Class War Election

You know you're in trouble when 10 percent of American college graduates think that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court. You know you're in super-supreme trouble when the wildly popular TV judge is campaigning for her pal Michael Bloomberg, who recently purchased the Democratic Party.

To paraphrase a real Supreme Court Justice, you can have free and fair elections with one person and one vote, or you can have Democratic Party super duper delegates possessing weighted votes. But you cannot possibly have both.

Of course, Justice Louis Brandeis was a lot more sweeping in his denunciation of oligarchic fascism. Though a permanent part of the American fabric, iron rule by the rich has more or less succeeded in hiding itself when every two and four years, regular people are super-duped into believing that they have an actual say. When Brandeis championed FDR's New Deal in 1933, he bluntly proclaimed: "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

In an extraordinary burst of brazenness, the ruling aristocrats of the erstwhile People's Party have revealed in the New York Times that they will override the expected plurality of primary votes for Bernie Sanders, and will anoint their own nominee this July to pretend-challenge Donald Trump. Even if Sanders falls only one vote short of the 1,991 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, he will be soundly defeated on the second ballot of a brokered convention.

The superdelegates as much as admit that would rather see a second term of Donald Trump than acquiesce to stitching up even a few of the gaping holes in the social safety net that they've helped the mean old Republicans to rip to shreds over the last four decades of neoliberal capitalism.

The oligarchs who run the Democratic Party would rather see you die than have Sanders impose even a few minor taxes on their obscene wealth.

 Bloomberg surrogate  Judy Sheindlin, the highest-paid woman on television, recently spoke on behalf of her entire privileged class when she seethed: "America doesn't need a revolution. It's the most perfect country in the world and those people that are trying to change it don't have a chance because I'll fight them to the death!"

"Those people" are nurses, teachers, and a majority of young Blacks and Latinos.

Sheindlin, star of the long running courtroom TV series, has made a fortune exploiting and berating the mainly poor litigants who appear on her show. They are paid extremely modest appearance fees ranging from $100 to $500 for the privilege of being insulted. For her part, Judge Judy rakes in nearly $1 million per day of filming.

Her popular show is thus a microcosm of extreme wealth disparity and capitalist oppression and the class war, but with just the right liberal sheen to make it acceptable. She always gives credit to contestants who can demonstrate to her satisfaction that they are pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. But woe betide the single mom on public assistance who dares to claim in Judge Judy's court that she takes care of her children. "You don't support your children. I support your children!" is her common retort. "What an America!"

 But try, just for a moment, to empathize with Judge Judy. She is probably more scared than most members of the  more discreet oligarchy. Because if Bernie Sanders were elected president with a new progressive congress on his coattails,  and the country's poverty rate started going down with enactment of guaranteed health care, a government jobs program, living wage laws, debt forgiveness, and affordable housing stock, then the incidence of poor people resorting to suing other poor people in small claims courts just to survive for another month might also start decreasing. And then Judge Judy's blockbuster ratings might begin to suffer. 

Well, not quite. Her reruns, which she personally owns, will air into perpetuity or whenever humanity finally wipes itself out. Meanwhile, as she dished to fellow plutotainer and George Bush BFF Ellen De Generes, she's rebranding herself as "Judy Justice."

As it is, 10 million people tune in every single day to watch Judge Judy bravely wage the class war, Her fans feel better knowing that at least they're not as "dumb and dumber" as the contestants on her show.

 Sheindlin has much the same right-wing populist appeal as Donald Trump. But while his shtick is making his fans believe that everybody can get rich by being a jerk, her shtick is that no matter how much of a jerk and a loser you may happen to be, the best therapy in the world is to sit on your couch and identify with a well-educated multimillionaire insult comic with a preturnatural gift  for grinding the lesser people into pulp. The fact that a fair proportion of her supporting cast are deadbeat dads, bad girlfriends, drunk apartment-trashing college kids and small time grifters makes you feel better about your own oppression at the hands of the winner-take-all oligarchy. And a lot less guilty about laughing at the expense of your poor-shamed fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, as Sheindlin gushed to the plutocratic ladies of The View, the main qualifications for the presidency are being smart, rich and successful - as opposed to being smart, empathetic and egalitarian.

It is testament to their own pathological selfishness and desperation that plutocrats like Mike Bloomberg and Judge Judy are now personally and directly and very meanly waging the permanent class war as political candidates and surrogates rather than relying on the usual subterfuge of preaching the politics of I feel your pain" and "choice" and "personal responsibility." They're finally telling voters that not only do their votes not count, but that their very lives and livelihoods don't count either. 

They're the owners, and you're the commodities and consumers. Casting your lot with a democratic socialist is so way beyond the pale that it makes them blanch.

The liberal aristocracy's unabashed ownership of the "Democratic" Party is the height of irony. The whining of the anti-Bernie plutocrats also proves that although obscene wealth can buy power, it cannot buy self-awareness. Money destroys self-awareness and human empathy when it becomes the whole rationale for the existence of those possessing it.

Why else would party leaders and owners brazenly admit that they are willing to destroy their own organization in order to keep their individual wealth and to keep amassing it  even if it ends up killing them along with everybody else on the planet?

Judge Judy, of course, is not the only one suffering from misguided plutocratic angst. There are thousands of them.  Former Senator Chris Dodd's own living nightmare is the prospect of a Sanders For President bumper sticker being forcibly affixed to one of his luxury cars.  It's almost as terrifying as Chris Matthews' nightmare of Bernie Bros executing him in Central Park.

Dodd, one of the 90-odd antisocial superdelegates interviewed by the New York Times, whined right out loud: "People are worried. How can you spend four or five months hoping you don't have to put a bumper sticker of that guy on your car?"

He can't even utter the name of Bernie Sanders. "Those people" and "that guy" are as far as they can go when telegraphing racism and classism.

The Times did not see fit to mention in its article that fresh off a stint representing the Hollywood film industry, Dodd now spends his valuable time lobbying against Medicare For All and Wall Street casino regulation. 

Corporations are people are worried, my friend.

The other irony - besides that of the uber-wealthy naming their private political club "the Democratic Party" - is that slamming the door shut on a Bernie Sanders nomination also opens the door a crack for the rest of us. If the oligarchs are perfectly willing to destroy their party for the sake of their own personal gain, a viable replacement, or true People's Party is there for the organizing. 

"Any Blue Will Do" voter-shaming, gaslighting propaganda will not work, even if a cheated Bernie Sanders exhorts his followers to defeat Donald Trump by getting behind Joe Biden or even the consolation prize of a severely compromised Elizabeth Warren. It certainly didn't work in 2016 when the coronation of Hillary Clinton was effectuated a lot more subtly and secretly than the blatant attempted destruction of the Sanders movement

The main thing to remember is that democratic socialism, or social democracy, or socialism will never emerge from electoral politics. And it will never emerge without relentless struggles against those who aim to control us and beat us into submission and even actual death. The powerful forces that aim to destroy Bernie Sanders - and us - have the military, the corporate media propagandists, the police and surveillance states at their exclusive disposal.

Judge Judy is right. It's a fight to the death. And it always has been, through most of American history, from the enslavement of kidnapped Africans to the extermination of Indians, to the endless wars for profit abroad. But now is one of those rare times that the ruling class not only feels threatened, it readily admits that it feels threatened.  

And every once in a while, the people do win. The eight-hour day, the abolition of slavery, the end of child labor,  the New Deal, the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s, the Great Society - and all  were bottom-up victories that came under oligarchic attack from the very moments of their inception.

The oligarchs hate us, of course. But more importantly, they fear us. So we should carpe diem while they're so mindlessly obsessed with carping all the way to the bank. Let's make Chris Dodd's worst nightmare a living reality.