The Horror of Congressional Hunger Games

Just as the Biden administration prematurely announced the end of the public health emergency, just as pandemic-related Medicaid coverage and enhanced food assistance are abruptly being yanked away from millions of vulnerable people, our elected congressional "representatives" in the lower house last week found it necessary to twist the knife in even further.  

 One hundred nine Democrats joined 218 Republicans in passing a resolution "denouncing the horrors of socialism."

Even the democratic, pluralistic socialism practiced in the Scandinavian countries will inevitably devolve into vicious authoritarianism, the document insinuates, as it falsely and hysterically conflates the regimes of Stalin and Pol Pot with the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Among the Democrats, you might be surprised to learn that Ro Khanna of California broke ranks with the progressive caucus,  justifying his own condemnation of socialism by pleading that he is a "progressive capitalist." Fourteen other progressives decided to just play it safe and simply voted "present" in response to the GOP's red-baiting resolution.

 My own newly-elected Democratic rep, Pat Ryan, had just delivered a rousing floor speech blasting our local, private equity-owned utility for ripping off its customers .But since he'd only demanded the resignation of its CEO, and didn't actually call for taking the gas and electric company public, I wasn't too surprised when he also condemned the "horrors" that a government-run utility would inflict upon its victimized customers.

It's a dog-eat-dog world out here in America. It doesn't matter to either establishment party that more than a million of their constituents are dead of Covid, and that at least 500 of us still are being killed by it every single day. 

 The anti-socialist resolution justifies its inherent cruelty and cynicism by pointing to the puritanical principle of rugged individualism upon which this nation was founded:

Whereas the Father of the Constitution, President James Madison, wrote that it is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest; and

Whereas the United States of America was founded on the belief in the sanctity of the individual, to which the collectivistic system of socialism in all of its forms is fundamentally and necessarily opposed: Now, therefore, be it resolved 

 That Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.

The resolution, introduced by Florida Republican Maria Salazar, is no doubt also the result of socialist politicians winning a slew of recent elections in Central and South America  US-based corporations might be thwarted in their campaign to extract natural resources, such as oil, and exploit populations in the process. The actual and potential loss of predatory power, both at home and abroad, is really what the lords of global capital and their political servants find so horrific. 

But for all its paranoid craziness, this anti-social and anti-socialist proclamation should at least put paid to the notion that the Democratic Party is the lesser of two evils. In fact, too many Democrats want to be Republicans. Ro Khanna voted for the resolution because his bright future in the corporate California party depends on it.

The Covid pandemic has been both a curse and a blessing to the poor. While they have sickened and died in disproportionate numbers during the last three years, our government's temporary socialistic policies of guaranteed health care,  a trio of stimulus checks,  eviction protections and rent assistance, enhanced SNAP (supplemental nutrition) stipends, unemployment benefits, and child tax credits in the way of cold hard cash to families improved their lives so much that for the first time in their lives, millions of Americans discovered what it's like to live without financial precarity and hunger. It was socialism in action, and it has absolutely horrified Congress and the very wealthy and the very tax-averse people who fund the politicians and who nevertheless actually became even richer from the pandemic.

No wonder they're yanking benefits away from vulnerable people, whose version of getting back to  Normal means going without medical care and adequate food, and becoming even more prone to losing the roofs over their heads as evictions by private equity landlords have commenced in higher numbers than ever.

Just the enhanced SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits alone, set to abruptly stop in March in the 35 states that still disbursed them, had cut child poverty by 14 percent. About 42 million people will now see their monthly food allotments drop by at least $95 or as much as hundreds of dollars, depending upon household size and income. This austerity move, passed by Congress just before Christmas, with little fanfare or media coverage, comes at the worst possible time, becaise grocery prices are still increasing and food banks are strapped for donations.

Alice Reznikova, of the Union of Concerned Scientists warns of an approaching hunger cliff, a needless crisis directly caused by bipartisan congressional malfeasance:

In December, in a rush to prevent a government shutdown, but lawmakers pitted summer child nutrition programs against the still-needed continuation of pandemic expansion to SNAP dollars, which had offered low-income households additional SNAP dollars since April 2021. While we applaud the passing of hopefully permanent support to child nutrition programs, we called out Congress for presenting a false choice between alleviating food insecurity for all SNAP recipients during the continued national emergency… and alleviating food insecurity only for SNAP households with children, only during summers. 

But wait! It gets even more antisocially cynical, because at the same time that Congress allotted a measly $40 per month per needy child for a measly three months out of the year, it made the Hunger Games even more exciting by cutting out free school lunches for 30 million needy children for the other nine months of the year. That is because the income eligibility requirements relaxed due to the pandemic have now reverted to pre-Covid extreme poverty guidelines. As a result, previously enrolled families who once qualified for the program now find themselves deep in debt for their kids' school meals. 

As the New York Times reported in January, 

 It is difficult to estimate how many students are now going hungry. But school officials and nutrition advocates point to proxy measurements — debt owed by families who cannot afford a school meal, for example, or the number of applications for free and reduced-price meals — as evidence of unmet need.

  In a survey released this month by the School Nutrition Association, 96.3 percent of school districts reported that meal debt had increased. Median debt rose to $5,164 per district through November, already higher than the $3,400 median reported for the entire school year in
 the group’s 2019 survey. 

Older people and those on disability who have received enhanced SNAP benefits for the past three years now stand to lose an average of $300 a month in aid. Vulnerable recipients who relied on Instacart and other shopping services to purchase food, so as to avoid catching Covid, will not be able to afford to do so come March - not on a monthly food allotment of, in some cases,  only $18.

Meanwhile, the craven people who run the place are busily trying to make us forget about their own cruelty by creating yet another outside enemy for us to hate and fear. The latest deflection is a giant Chinese balloon, which Joe Biden bravely shot down over the weekend with a guided missile off the South Carolina coast, and whose remains are being heavily guarded by the Navy for our protection.

They really think we're idiots. So even if their xenophobic, saber-rattling propaganda doesn't work, they can at least try to starve us into submission and make us too weak to take to the streets in protest.

As centenarian Henry Kissinger ever so wisely instructed the ruling class: "Control oil, and you control nations. Control food, and you control the people."

Bleak House, USA (Mervyn Peake)

A Theory of the Covid-Exhausted Leisure Class

 Mere days before a leak of a Bank of America memo calling for more bad times and fewer jobs for Americans, President Joe Biden groveled before this same megabank's CEO, thanking him for accepting his phone calls and seeking his wisdom on the financial health of "his consumers."

"It's good to see you recovering, Mr. President," Brian Moynihan gushed in return, less than two days before a maskless Biden suffered a Covid relapse and had to return to isolated splendor.

Moynihan was one of the few tycoons speaking at the Thursday White House confab who were wise enough to appear remotely, so as to protect themselves from Biden's lurking microbes, while selling the New Normal of forcing people back to in-person work if they want to keep their jobs.

Notice how narrowly Biden restricted the conversation to bank customers, rather than to the financial well-being of everybody - especially the nation's older citizens, who are still getting seriously ill and dying from Covid in disproportionate numbers.. A new study by the UMass Gerontology Institute reveals that at least half of the American seniors living alone are so badly off that they can no longer afford even the basic necessities of life. One-fourth of married retirees also report having trouble paying for even the barest essentials. 

But rule by a gerontocracy controlled by an oligarchy does not mean that geriatric problems register even a blip on their radar.

To the contrary: it soon became apparent at the plutocratic bull session that the only financial needs to be discussed in the White House that day are of those making at least $100,000 a year,

Moynihan explained:

 "At Bank of America, we have, you know, 60 million consumers and 35 million Core Checking accounts for Americans. 

Number one, they’re spending more money.  Through the first 25 days of July 2022, they have spent 10 percent more than they spent in July of 2021, the first 25 days.  And that’s consistent with what we saw in the whole second quarter in earlier this year. The second key point I’d say, Mr. President, is their balances are much higher than they were in the pandemic.  

And so, if you look at people of, sort of, $100,000-income families in our client base, you’ll see that their balances go from three to five to seven times more than they were in the pandemic. 

 The problem for these beleaguered, flush-with-cash people, he added, is not only how to spend all that excess money, but how to be approvingly noticed while doing so. What fun is isolated splendor? What good is money and bling and merch if you cannot also revel in experiences outside of the four walls of your castle?

Now, just because Moynihan had enough smarts to not expose himself to the sick president does not mean that he can't garble his own words every bit as incoherently as the sick president himself. The banker continued,

They bought everything they could — they bought a lot of stuff when they were cooped up at home; they’re now out traveling and experiencing the world due to vaccines and — and the condition of the COVID pandemic.

You have to not only conspicuously consume, you also have to  conspicuously experience the world due to vaccines and the condition of the pandemic, which itself remains deliberately murky because capitalists like him have decreed that cases are no longer counted by the government in any systematic, science-based way. He would have us accept the notion that "the condition of the COVID pandemic" is that notwithstanding the evidence, it has been decreed, out of capitalist necessity,  to be over. He tries to divert attention away from the windfall profits enjoyed by the oligarchs since the pandemic began by pointing to an alleged seven-fold increase in bank deposits of his customers. He is buying into the canard that it was government largesse that made ordinary people suddenly so rich and that it is not corporate greed, but ordinary people, who have contributed to inflation.

 It was the airline industry, remember - not groveling government officials -  which effectively decreed to the CDC this spring that in the interest of profits for the few,  the isolation period of Covid patients must be reduced from 10 days to a meager five.

(CDC is the acronym for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its actual function right now might as well be the Centers for the Prevention of Disease Control. Or, given that oligarchs have enjoyed windfall profits during Covid, maybe even Centers for the Rapacious  Accumulation of Possessions - CRAP).

And that's where Tony Capuano, head honcho of the Marriott hotel chain, came in. Unlike Moynihan, he did not have the wisdom to physically stay away from the "recovered" president; he breathed the very same stale but rarefied air as Joe Biden. There is as of yet no word whether the hotel magnate has contracted the virus as a result of the administration's "let 'er rip" policy.

Capuano's words of wisdom: 

"Well, thank you, Mr. President, for the invitation today.  I think what we’ve learned over the last couple quarters is really the resilience of travel.  And when we look at our forward-booking data, we see real evidence of that resilience."  

 Capuano fulsomely praised the intrepid pioneers of the traveling and "experiencing" class for possessing such wonderful resilience to go along with all that surplus cash. 

It was social scientist Thorstein Veblen who observed more than a century ago, during the first Gilded Age, that it's not enough to be rich in isolation. In order for wealth to have meaning, it must be tastefully flaunted in public, spreading the message to the hoi polloi that wealth is a virtue and a mark of its possessors' good character. This nostrum is precisely why wealthy liberals are so averse to Donald Trump's crude tastelessness, from his outer-Borough speech patterns to, most recently, the gold-plated coffin for his first ex-wife, whose final resting place is a tax dodge of a cemetery plot at his New Jersey golf club. His fellow oligarchs are just fine with his actual policies, including a huge war budget and tax breaks for the wealthy, to name just two.

So in the modern version, for the pandemic-exhausted leisure class, "resilience" is a virtue to be both admired and emulated by the less fortunate. The courage to get out there and insanely but politely thumb your nose at a pestilential catastrophe is the new positive marker of moral character, a trait that we should all aspire to.

The not-so-subliminal message broadcast at last week's White House confab is that if the resilient wealthy can ignore the pandemic with such courage and fortitude, then so should the rest of us. Even if we're barely making it, we can learn to cope. Not so much to experience virtuous leisure - because that ranking connotes that the wealth was earned honestly and was not at all predatory - but to return to virtuous work in person....  preferably at lower wages, of course.

The Bank of America memo, written by one of the financial behemoth's economists, calls for increasing unemployment so as to depress wages  that, while rising somewhat in some niches, can still be considered stagnant. As The Intercept reported, 

The memo expresses distress about “a record tight labor market,” stating that “wage pressures are … going to be hard to reverse. While there may have been some one-off increases in some pockets of the labor market, the upward pressure extends to virtually every industry, income and skill level.

Therefore, the  BOA's CEO bragging to Biden about his customers having as much as seven times the money in their accounts that they did in the pandemic's early days was disingenuous at best, and a warning that the merely well-off are making too much money and got too much government aid at worst. For as hard as it may be to fathom, an estimated one-third of workers who make six-figure salaries actually do live paycheck to paycheck. The cost of living is getting crazy out there, when in some areas even $100,000 doesn't cover rent, gas, clothing and other bills. It's hard out there for the bourgeoisie, whether they be at the petit end or upper end of the top 10 or 20 or 30 percent.

Joe Biden's own crass political message is that the true underclass and the truly needy and  especially the struggling elderly will continue to be ignored on his watch.  This is especially cruel, for as the New York Times reported this past spring, 

Covid deaths, though always concentrated in older people, have in 2022 skewed toward older people more than they did at any point since vaccines became widely available.

That swing in the pandemic has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to protect older Americans, with health officials in recent weeks encouraging everyone 50 and older to get a second booster and introducing new models of distributing antiviral pills.

In much of the country, though, the booster campaign remains listless and disorganized, older people and their doctors said. Patients, many of whom struggle to drive or get online, have to maneuver through an often labyrinthine health care system to receive potentially lifesaving antivirals.

As a senior citizen himself, Biden has not let us forget that at age 79, even with the virus, he is still working hard every single day. Even when he's sick, he feels great, and so should you. He is only in isolation so that other hard-working patriotic "folks" won't also get sick. I don't know about you, but with this kind of neoliberal rhetoric I can absolutely see cuts to Social Security and Medicare looming on the horizon, even as the old "folks" are sickening and dying in such record numbers that the trust funds that we pay into all our working lives are undoubtedly a bit more solvent than they were before the pandemic.

Rather than give more help to struggling people who don't even have the money to get to a free vaccination site, our government tries to force them out of sight and out of mind.

So back to Tony Capuano, the hospitality industry tycoon, who recently bragged on TV that the much higher prices he is charging for his hotel rooms are "sustainable." Whether this is because the globe-trotting Leisure Class is so "resilient" was not mentioned. He did tell Joe Biden that were it not for Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo reversing the requirement that all incoming foreign travelers must show proof of vaccination, his coffers would not be so nearly full-to-bursting as they are now. Or, as he finessed his own word salad in the brave new spirit of Universal Leisure Class Resiliency,

"And then when we look on a global basis, the continued opening of borders, the easing of restrictions that restricted travel is having a massive impact on our global business."

Biden himself couldn't seem to stop fixating on the alleged trials and tribulations of the $100,000-plus crowd. He garbled hoarsely,

"One of the things that I find is — I look at and I take it very seriously the confidence level of the American people in the economy.  And they’re so down and they’re looking — there’s reason to be down, but I started thinking about it.  And, Brian, (he of the Bank of America) you and I talked about it just a little bit.

You know, the first year, we were able to, with the — with the Rescue Plan, we were able to send them a check for eight grand.  I mean, a check.  One — and beyond that, by the way; there was more than that.....But when you’re mak- — if you’re making 120 grand and you get a check for 8 grand, that’s a lot of money.  And so it helped save a lot of people, in terms of getting thrown out of their homes and rental housing and a whole range of things."

I don't know anybody who got a check for 8 grand, do you? Biden sent everybody $1400 after promising us two grand, because the evil Donald Trump had beat him to the punch and managed to send out an additional $600 before his first term expired. Some people have speculated that the rescue plan's direct cash aid for children might have caused Biden's brain to create its own magic 8-ball. And anyway, since this cash aid for kids was means-tested and limited to parents making below $75,000, it seems doubtful that his fantasy version of the Down and Outs got any of it.

Biden seems also  to have formed a muddled brain-picture of hordes of Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) denizens being evicted en masse from their McMansions and their luxury condos. And with the price of gas to fill their guzzling SUVs so high, and the long wait for $40,000 battery-powered cars and the dearth of charging stations, is it any wonder that Biden's folks are feeling so stressed out?

I'm curious about just how many people making those paltry low six figures ended up being evicted from their apartments. In yet another sign that Biden doesn't give a fig about truly poor people, the issue of affordable or government-subsidized housing, as well as the need for rent control laws to rein in greedy corporate landlords, was never as much as whispered about at the White House meeting. 

If you aren't solidly middle class or upper middle class, then you might as well not even exist as far as these captains of industry and their political henchmen are concerned.

Perhaps the worst part is that the meeting itself became so boring that, according to the official transcript, the White House press corps "exited" en masse before the bigwigs and various assorted government fawners even got finished garbling amongst themselves. 

Or maybe "exit" is just Leisure Class-speak for getting kicked out so that the thought leaders could freely talk about that secret Bank of America memo and discuss how to better punish the bottom 70 or 80 percent of us who irresponsibly lack the cash just to subsist, let alone wallow in our own resilient world-experiences.

Pathologizing the Unvaccinated

Forget the Covid-19 pandemic. The top public health official in the United States has just announced that the real disease is people: specifically, the estimated 47 percent of the population that, for whatever reason, remains unvaccinated. 

"This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated," said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who nonetheless calls for the reopening of all public schools this fall despite the fact that children under the age of 12 are still not allowed to receive the shots. Does this mean that she also considers kids to be a disease?

Even if one were to dismiss Walensky's appalling statement as merely a poor choice of words, the fact remains that words do matter. Pathologizing minorities and oppressed groups of people is a hallmark of cruel, totalitarian regimes. The Nazis in Germany referred to Jews as viruses and vermin before eradicating six million of them in death camps. The Hutus called the Tutsis cockroaches before the Rwanda genocide. Closer to home, it was common and socially acceptable little more than a century ago to label native Americans and Black people as subhuman, the better to kill, displace, and enslave them. And only few years ago, in a pre-woke New York Times article about mass immigration from France to England, Muslim refugees fleeing from American forever-wars were likened to rats trying to force their way through tunnels. They were a "festering" problem migrating from "squalid" unsanitary camps in order, the reader might infer, to infest cleaner climes. Even after Yours Truly wrote a critical comment and the Times revised the piece, they still used the term "illegal migrants" to describe the refugees. They still called human beings illegal, thus dehumanizing them. And the liberal reader commentariat dutifully followed suit.

For his own part, President Biden is strategically accusing the data-thieving Facebook monopoly of "killing people" by allowing misinformation about the Covid vaccines to be published on its platform. This is at the very same time that the White House admits flagging posts it doesn't like so that Facebook, its erstwhile partner in oligarchic governance, can patriotically remove them. Censorship, even if for a putative "good cause," is still censorship. The suppression of Covid public discourse is just a gateway drug, leading to even more censorship. 

Now, about those 150 million-plus Americans who remain unvaccinated or only partly vaccinated. Contrary to liberal urban legend, they aren't all white anti-mask Red state Trump supporters thumbing their noses at Science just to be ornery.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Black and Hispanic people have consistently lower vaccination rates across all 50 states, leaving them at massively elevated risk for severe illness and death, especially with the emergence of the more contagious Delta variant. This is in keeping with the historical lack of health care services to these communities. It's also keeping with the structural racism now finally being acknowledged by the Newly Woke. The CDC's own  recommendations for more racial and ethnic equity as regards vaccine availability make Dr. Wolensky's characterization of the unvaccinated as a walking pandemic in their own right sound all the more cruel.

The CDC reports demographic characteristics, including race/ethnicity, of people receiving COVID-19 vaccinations at the national level. As of July 4, 2021, CDC reported that race/ethnicity was known for 58% of people who had received at least one dose of the vaccine. Among this group, nearly two thirds were White (59%), 9% were Black, 16% were Hispanic, 6% were Asian, 1% were American Indian or Alaska Native, and <1% were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, while 8% reported multiple or other race. However, CDC data also show that recent vaccinations are reaching larger shares of Hispanic, Asian, and Black populations. Thirty-four percent of vaccines administered in the past 14 days have gone to Hispanic people, 6% to Asian people, and 12% to Black people These recent trends suggest a narrowing of racial gaps in vaccinations at the national level, particularly for Hispanic people, who have recently received a larger share of vaccinations compared to their share of the total population (34% vs. 17%).  While these data provide helpful insights at a national level, to date, CDC is not publicly reporting state-level data on the racial/ethnic composition of people vaccinated.

In California, for example, 29 percent of vaccinations have gone to Hispanic people, who account for 63 percent of cases, 48 percent of deaths and 40 percent of the population in the state. In New York, Black people have accounted for only 12 percent of vaccinations and 21 percent of Covid deaths.

Across the 40 states that provided racial and ethnic statistics, according to the KFF article, "the percent of White people who have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose (47%) was roughly 1.4 times higher than the rate for Black people (34%) and 1.2 times higher than the rate for Hispanic people (39%) as of July 6, 2021." (their bold.) As of July 6, less than half of Black and Hispanic people in the 40 reporting states had received even one dose of vaccine.

Shaming the unvaccinated or the inadequately vaccinated on social media or elsewhere will likely only make the politically-motivated holdouts all that more stubborn and more resentful than they already are when liberal "elites" lecture them and call them names.

Meanwhile, crushing poverty, the lack of transportation to get to a vaccine site, the inability to get time off from work, chronic health issues such as allergies, the logical assumption that previous infection with Covid grants them at least partial immunity are just some of the myriad reasons why millions of people have not gotten the shots.

Rather than shame or even pathologize the unvaccinated, as Dr. Walensky cluelessly has, why not give people the benefit of the doubt? Why not show a bit of empathy for a change? Why not ramp up community outreach, both at homes and workplaces? Why not just give people money rather than cut them off from their unemployment benefits and arbitrarily discontinue the national eviction moratorium?

As bad and irresponsible an actor that Facebook is, it is not, as Joe Biden claims, literally killing people. It's our profit-motivated, ever more consolidated health care "industry" and its structurally racist, classist, unequal delivery system that's literally killing people. Not for nothing do economists Anne Case and Angus Deacon (Deaths of Despair) call this industry "a cancer that has metastasized throughout the economy."

It should come as no surprise, then, that drug overdose deaths in the United States increased by 30 percent in 2020, the first pandemic year, making it the largest increase ever recorded

 Medicare For All might be cruelly off the table, and if you're poor you're bound to die a lot younger. But Uncle Joe wants you to know that the only thing you have to fear is Facebook disinformation and China beating America in the war for global oligarchic supremacy.

Plutocrats, Platitudes and Pitchforks

Even an unemployed whiz kid ex-mayor has to eat. Therefore, former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is charging some very big bucks for Folks to go online on July 16th to hear him yuk it up with Hillary Clinton.

Fifty dollars will only allow you to eavesdrop on At Home With Hillary and Pete. But if you fork over $2,500, you can then advance to Virtual Host status, and Hill and Pete will actually talk back to - or at least at - you. The duo's respective PACs (Onward Together for Clinton and Win The Era for Buttigieg) will then split the ticket sales.

Pete vows that he will use his share of the take to "replace the current politics and do away with the division and cruelty that have characterized the Trump era and also ensure we have strong leaders at every level of government."

To obtain access to the specific ways in which Pete will accomplish this task while not running for or holding any public office  and exerting no influence on public policy whatsoever, we are taken to his website, called (what else) Win the Era. Now, if that name sounds all too creepily similar to Barack Obama's first term Win the Future head-fake designed to make the foreclosed, the evicted and the downsized believe that austerity was good for them while the rich only got obscenely richer, then please just relax. "Future" is irritatingly gauzy, while "Era" is irritatingly grandiose. They are different, yet ever so unique forms of the same neoliberal jargon.  The use of the word "win" is practically required so as to hammer home the point that you must claw and compete at every stage of your life in order to become the entrepreneur of your own life.

Specifically, Pete wants to enlighten us to the fact that "so many unsustainable features of our old status quo were both exposed and exploited by Trump's  (Covid-19) crisis, the disempowerment of workers, the racial disparities in health care access, poor coordination with other countries and international bodies, the reduction of believing in science as a political preference.

"Now is our chance to elect leaders at every level of government who will build a better, more inclusive future for this country and the next generation," he grandly concludes with just the right touch of gauziness.

What kind of candidates would those be, you may ask?

For the answer to that question, please look no further than the designated  moderator for the online soiree, freshman congress-critter Lauren Underwood (IL-14). See how how carefully Pete advocates only for the people of the future, rather than for the currently existing desperate ones. He calls for access to health care for black and brown people, rather than guaranteed care that is free at the point of entry. Then notice that Underwood herself is not a proponent of Medicare for All, even right in the middle of the pandemic which is disproportionately sickening and killing black and brown people. Then notice the extremely high price of admission to At Home with Hillary and Pete.

The event is for rich people who don't want poor people to have nice things. I got my invite by total mistake!

Reactions from the woke hoi polloi to this roller coaster ride of hope deferred and access denied have been mixed. "Stop, stop, it's too much. The queen and the boy prince. This sparks joy!" gushed one invitee, while another person griped, "I really want to see them together (and Lauren Underwood, too) but I don't have $50 to shell out to a PAC."

Lauren Underwood, paradoxically enough, won her congressional seat in 2018 in part by virtue of the false accusation by Republican incumbent Randy Hultgren that she was for single payer health care. With her credentials as a registered nurse with advanced public health degrees, you'd forgive him for thinking that she would have seen enough pain and suffering and grim statistics on morbidity and mortality rampant in our cruel healthcare marketplace that like the majority of her profession, she would want to get rid of the whole rotten for-profit system.

But he and you would be thinking wrong, because she was never employed in a clinical care setting. Right after graduating Johns Hopkins, she went to work in the Obama administration to help implement the Affordable Care Act.

When Obama left office in 2017, Underwood became senior director of policy and regulatory affairs at Chicago's Next Level Health, a Medicaid managed care plan owned by Cheryl Whitaker, the wife of Obama's friend, foundation trustee and Harvard classmate Eric Whitaker. Her business came under scrutiny when it emerged that a miraculous algorithm was funneling her more than one third of the state's Medicaid patients who hadn't requested a particular plan. This influx was despite the fact that Next Health was designated the worst-managed care plan, under six different metrics, in the entire state of Illinois.

Next Level Health just announced that it will be closing this month. 

 "Insurance is a very capital-intensive business," Whitaker said in a statement to Crain's confirming the closure. "COVID-19 has exacerbated the difficulty of black-owned businesses to access capital. NextLevel Health's community-based approach combines a culturally sensitive lens and the recognition of social determinants of health to provide Medicaid members access to quality care that has the power to improve lives immediately and long term. We look forward to lending our expertise to community partners and other providers to holistically treat and heal our communities. Our work is not done."

With neoliberal Newspeak like that, maybe she can hustle up some capital by joining her former policy director on stage with Pete and Hill. 

Speaking of work not yet done, and millions of indigent patients not yet totally done in by the pandemic and other health problems caused by racialized capitalism, hubby Dr. Eric Whitaker's private equity firm will be buying three more Chicago-area hospitals this month. The future of these hospitals, right in the middle of a pandemic, is not yet clear. Whitaker already has a history of purchasing hospitals, declaring the least profitable of them bankrupt and then reselling the property at a tidy profit. His firm is currently being sued for fraud by a Chicago suburb that lost its hospital.

 "I'm an entrepreneur at heart," he once explained to a journalist.

Maybe we can become entrepreneurs too, and find a way to sneak into Hill and Pete's and Lauren's virtual soiree without paying, just to mess with their thick heads.

After all, with pitchforks showing up in the Hamptons to mess with such quarantined billionaire icons as Michael Bloomberg, anything is possible. Not to mention absolutely necessary if we have any hope at all of not so much winning the era but correcting the error of too much wealth in too few greedy, grasping hands.

We Have Met the Enemy....

What will kill us first - Covid-19, or the cancer on crack known as capitalism?

Judging from how the increasingly unpopular Donald Trump is so feverishly lumbering from virus hotspot to virus hotspot to hold his campaign rallies, you'd almost think that his main goal is not so much to win another term, but to be recognized as the bold Manspreader-in-Chief. He's a victor because he's a vector. Therefore, there is no need for masks - the ionized atmospheres in their dream palaces of worship and the fomentation of bilious hatred of The Other shall immunize them.

So, apparently, will threatening the nation's public health officials with actual bodily harm for trying to protect the country with testing and sound medical advice. And just to make sure that the pandemic sickens and kills as many more millions of disposable people as inhumanly possible, the White House also plans to officially transform the Centers For Disease Control in Atlanta into the Centers Fighting Disease Control.

Forget about purging the virus. As reported by Politico, Trump wants to purge the CDC of its career scientists and replace them with political appointees. The first step will be to "study" the agency's missteps - failings caused at least partially by his own cuts to its funding.

Politically, Trump aides have also been looking for a person or entity outside China to blame for the coronavirus response and have grown furious with the CDC, including its public health guidance and actions on testing, making it a prime target. But some wonder whether the wonky-sounding CDC, which the administration directly oversees, could be an effective fall guy on top of Trump’s efforts to blame the World Health Organization.

The CDC's  early missteps, including actual laboratory contamination of faulty test kits, causing lethal delays in tracking and control, have given the Trump administration ammunition for further demonizing the scientists and - by trickle-down extension - the state and local public health officials who have been forced to compete in the private market for everything from swabs to masks to ventilators.

 Not a few of them have begun taking early retirements when they haven't been fired outright. Not a few them report receiving credible threats from citizens, many of them emboldened by Trumpian rhetoric.

The world's sole remaining Superpower, the One Indispensable Nation, has become so "exceptional" that the European Union is initiating a ban on American travel to their continent because not only have we failed to contain the virus, the power elites are actively trying to spread it and make it worse through a too-hasty "reopening of the Economy" with the insane bipartisan demand that we all get back to work and consumption.

In just the past week alone, reported cases in the US have risen by nearly a third, with an "official" total of more than two million new cases. The cases have risen most precipitously in states in the South and West which have prematurely lifted their controls. Meanwhile, the Spreader-in-Chief bragged to reporters this week that he wasn't kidding when he said he had ordered testing to be cut back in order to artificially decrease the official caseload. What we aren't permitted to know will hurt us, but it will help him. Or so he thinks, given that he is tanking in the historically unreliable polls.

The US, despite its vast size and its vast wealth, is actually a pretty provincial place. It's as provincial as the small 19th century Norwegian town that is the setting of Henrik Ibsen's play "An Enemy of the People."

This "dramedy" is a miniature mirror of America's unhealthy "shoot the messenger" reaction to bad public health news.

Ibsen's protagonist, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, has just discovered that the water to be pumped to the town's new public baths has been contaminated by bacteria. As happened in Flint, Michigan, officials installed faulty pipes from a polluted source in their haste to turn a profit and boost the economy. Stockmann naively thinks that he will be lauded as an enlightened hero for warning the public of the danger just in the nick of time.. The local newspaper editor is at first fully on board with disseminating the truth, until the paper's printing press owner and the mayor (Stockmann's own brother) make him an offer he cannot refuse. 

The mayor threatens the doctor with dismissal from his public health post if he does not refrain from his whistle-blowing plan. He gaslights the editor, claiming that if the truth about the contamination is revealed, it will be the public and not the bath's owners who will forced to pay for repairs and bear the brunt of business losses and economic pain.

Not guilt-tripped, and in a last ditch effort to get the news out, Dr. Stockmann rents a hall. But his speech is delayed by officials, who admonish the crowd that the good doctor is a bit of a loon and a fraud and subversive and not adhering to the pragmatic virtue of "moderation" that the public should value even more than they value their own physical health.

They claim that Stockmann has public opinion against him - not least because they themselves are manufacturing both the public opinion and the public's consent to being eventually poisoned, both physically and cognitively.

The doctor tells the crowd that it wasn't just the poisoned water he had discovered, but the "discovery that all the sources of our moral life are poisoned and that the whole fabric of our civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood."

"The whole place is a pesthouse. The whole Bath establishment is a whited, poisoned sepulchre," he rages.

The crowd, duly insulted, boos. They form a mob and smash the windows of his house, after their leaders have graciously granted them their democratic right to vote and to officially declare  Stockmann "an enemy of the people."

He is summarily evicted and fired from his medical post. But he quixotically chooses to stay in town to start a school.

Anthony Fauci, the country's chief epidemiologist, is no Dr. Thomas Stockmann. He has not chosen to utter the scathing words against Trump that Stockkmann aimed against the whole political-media-ownership class: "I cherish the comforting conviction that these parasites - all these venerable relics of a dying school of thought - are most admirably paving the way for their own extinction; they need no doctor's help to hasten their end."

Fauci, who had achieved mystical anti-Trump Father of Our Country status in corporate media accounts, admitted recently that he had initially lied to the public about the efficacy of face masks  against the virus - so as to avoid a panicky run on scarce face masks as the catastrophe unfolded.

Millions of people have contracted this virus because government at all levels and from both oligarch-controlled political parties have failed abysmally. Now it's a feverish race to the bottom of the grave. 

The bright spot is that not everybody is zombified. They are out in the streets protesting state-sanctioned violence  and upending myriad monuments honoring slave-holders, warmongers and exterminators of indigent populations. People are refusing to drink either the poisoned water or the political kool-aid.

The great reckoning has finally arrived. We can only hope that it's not the kind of flash-before-your-eyes reckoning that people in books and movies get only when they're on their death-beds.

The Pandemic of Structural Violence

The Powers That Be are probably ruing the day they prematurely ended the pandemic lockdown. That is because they no longer have any legal grounds to order protesters off the streets and highways and back into their homes. All they have is tear gas and rubber bullets... and if comes to it, real bullets, tanks and drones.

The fully one-fourth of the national workforce that is now officially unemployed finally have the time for a brand new job. And that job is to vent their fury at the political officials who have made most people's lives a living hell long before the Coronavirus ever showed up to throw capitalism into such a state of disarray. 

The tipping point for many was the broad-daylight Memorial Day police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Just as Congress hasn't bothered to hide its own massive and criminal multitrillion-dollar giveaway to the rich under the cynically-named Cares Act, the officers didn't bother hiding their own public execution of Floyd from a crowd of distraught onlookers, their cell phone cameras whirring. Is the police knee pressing on Floyd's neck and squeezing the life out of the man really all that different from Nancy Pelosi's stiletto heel squeezing all hope of health care, guaranteed housing, food assistance and direct cash aid from hundreds of millions of American citizens?

It's considered chic for both liberals and never-Trump conservatives to foist most, if not all, of the blame for 100,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States on his administration, while they ostentatiously wring their hands over his dangerous tweeted medical advice. But it was New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who closed city hospitals and cut Medicaid funding before refusing to shut down the state for weeks after the virus had already started spreading like wildfire. It was Cuomo who absolved nursing homes of accountability before he sent elderly hospital patients to their deaths at these state-sanctioned warehouses for the disposable. It was Cuomo who appeared on the floor of the Stock Exchange the day after the Floyd killing to maniacally cheer the opening bell of profit and greed even as his constituents stand in line for hours for meager pickings from food banks. It was Cuomo who has refused to give relief to renters even as his legislature plans to bail out the state's landlords, using the tax money paid by New York's potential evictees.

Of course, they all mouth the necessary platitudes and they feebly call for justice for George Floyd even as their own hands are caked with decades' worth of dirt and blood.

If they immediately fire the bad cops and even charge them with murder when faced with incontrovertible evidence of their guilt, they think they can absolve themselves. But the fact is that the police are in essence mere servants of the oligarchs. They act as a buffer zone between the poor and the rich. The plutocracy draws its domestic armed forces not from within its own class, but from the ranks of the working poor, integrating them into its program of economic and political oppression. Police forces are the low-intensity (usually) military ops for the elites.

It's a class war and it's a race war, and it's all right out there in the open. Racist dog-whistles are quaint relics. The Trump-style bullhorn has officially evolved into the state-sponsored snuff film.

Of course, the political-media complex strives mightily to reframe their deliberate policies as a culture war, pitting various segments of the working class and underclass against one another. In Minneapolis, we see self-described rednecks with shaved heads guarding convenience stores against "looting" by black people. Pick a side, and it will take your mind off the real looting of the treasury and the commons by the billionaires and corporations. 

 Neighborhoods on the elite chopping block have been transformed into military Human Terrain Systems. CCTV at every intersection allows real instances of urban violence to supplement the fictional fare that Hollywood produces to frighten us into submission. If citizens can envision urban areas and housing projects as hotbeds of savagery, then citizens can also accept more police and more jails. It's an endless propaganda feedback loop, in which both the cognitively superior "liberal" elites and the fundamentalist right-wingers are manipulated into joining forces in their hatred of the "Other". One side calls them IQ-deficient gun-loving losers in need of a hand up rather than a handout. The other side calls them godless moochers and takers lolling about on their hammocks of dependency.

And the elites meanwhile moan and groan about why can't "we" just all get along, because "we" are all in this together. If you call them out, you're being "divisive."

Any day now, they will declare a victory in their valiant fight against racism by organizing a cocktail summit between the paranoid white "Karen" and the black bird-watcher whose upper middle class Central Park confrontation was the top story before the Minneapolis police execution spurred even Donald Trump to call for FBI intervention.

Meanwhile, here are your two pre-approved "lock em up" choices in the coming election. As Biden advised in a 1994 Senate speech touting his Jim Crow crime bill, "we shouldn't really care why they are sociopaths."

All we should care about is the sad truth that each contender for the highest office is a sociopath who is shamelessly courting the votes of the very same people they've spent their entire long careers demeaning, robbing, cheating and oppressing.

Neoliberalism Stinks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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